* * *

  —

  I cannot think (acknowledge!) that I ever spoke of “poetic symmetry.” It doesn’t sound like my sort of phrase!! For myself, in some sense, I live for—for surprises, for constant disturbing newness—and renewal. My life is unfinished and untidy and asymmetrical in the extreme! […] I think symmetry is Death—whatever its beauty: it is mathematical beauty, conceptual beauty, the beauty of snow-crystals; the beauty of the lifeless, deathless, inorganic. […] I think Life is essentially asymmetrical and “odd”—and at the molecular no less than the “poetic” level. Is it not of great moment, here, that Pasteur, that most poetic of biologists, found all life-molecules to be asymmetrical? Not a nice racemic balance—not a symmetry of right and left. It is this which sets aside biochemistry from inorganic. I felt this as a sort of revelation when I found it: this “perverse” triumphant asymmetry in Nature, life insisting on asymmetry from the start, asymmetry a prime and prius of life: as, much earlier, in childhood, I had a special personal feeling for numbers, but—prime numbers, irreducible, individual, “asymmetric.” I thought of prime numbers as the first individuals, and, in a strange metaphor (though metaphor is the wrong word), I used to imagine a garden of primes, also a Community and Order of Primes. Sorry I am being superfluous and prolix, but I was stung by your calling me (not that you did exactly) an Apostle of Symmetry.

  * * *

  —

  Lamenting, Resenting—Love and Loss—Past and Present. Another personal resonance (what could be so different, and yet there may be something in common) has been a sense of Loss (and Estrangement) from my friend Jonathan Miller, whom I have known and loved for thirty-three years. I hope this is only partial and temporary—but, it is important that I recognize a certain reality (I could not bring it to consciousness, thought I was beset by it, until Shengold “delivered” it). The sadness and anger has especially to do with his current film-and-book, The Body in Question. He came to New York for a week and more, and talked with and filmed many of my patients; and we had countless discussions etc. on the issues he raises. I find these patients, some of them, in the film and some of the discussions; and clinical stories I told him in the book, and yet never a breath of acknowledgement anywhere (though acknowledgement is made to many others). I shared freely and unthinkingly—it never occurred to me to do otherwise: it is what I have always done in relation to him—what one does do in the Play-Space, the Love-Space, of friends. It had never occurred to me that in any sense he might see me as a rival, and ambivalently take, instead of “receiving” (although I felt something lacking in the filming in New York—a certain lack of personal access; a lack or withdrawal of his usual generosity and grace—that circle of the three Graces, giving-receiving-returning). For myself, I love to acknowledge, to say “Thank You.” It never occurs to me to—to appropriate: I lack (for better or worse) any sense of “property”—at least in the love-realms of Thought, Art, and Science. Indeed it is so precisely because I feel these realms are so free to all, so free of proprietorial or territorial sense, that they allow and form for me an exemption from neurosis, neurosis which so masochistically-unfreely centres round being “owned.” Art-Space, Thought-Space, Play-Space, for me, is incompatible with any sense of ownership or claim, and I am astounded when I find this is not so for everyone. […]

  This incredible business of capitalism in Science! […] (To quote wonderful Simone Weil, who as physicist-cum-saint, is peculiarly equipped to speak in these matters): “[…] The Spirit of truth can dwell in Science only on condition that the motive prompting the savant is the love of the object that forms the stuff of his investigations. That object is the universe in which we live. What can we find to love about it, if it isn’t its beauty?…The true definition of science is this: the study of the beauty of the world.”

  It is this love, this warmth, this beauty, which is missing—along with the sense of wonder and mystery. Why should Jonathan, who shows and has (in so many ways) so much love and warmth and beauty in him, write a book[*24] so loveless, cold, and ugly (well, not ugly, but lacking in beauty, lacking in the sense of himself: depersonalized, abstract). […]

  I find the door closed in Jonathan’s book; something inaccessible; he denies others entrance, as he denies himself entrance—the same cold, inhibitory, forbidding lack of access, and inner hospitality and generosity, as chilled me (and others) when we met him in June. I hope this is only something passing: that he has not—in this special sense—been “wrecked by success” (the success of the Image, in a depthless televisual world). In some sense, I think, he is gifted too much, with too much facility, and perhaps he knew success too early. He was polished and finished, perhaps, at thirty. Whereas you and I—we are very late developers, but we do develop, constantly, painfully, stammering and stumbling, hurt by experience, to an ever-deeper reality, searching for new ways to express that reality—and this, this development, this surprise, this incalculable capacity to hurt, be hurt, blunder and grow, is what makes us so alive, so creatively alive, and (as you are experiencing with such intensity now), so vulnerably so. But I think wounds, if they don’t kill, are the true path to life—at least, life past the animal, the lyrical, the pastoral level. Not that I despise any of these in the least: and to show I don’t, I enclose a postcard of the most peaceful, uncomplex, unconflicted, pastoral scene—it gives only the faintest idea of the wonderful, elegiac steeped light of the original.

  My love and best wishes for the New Year, to you both.[*25]

  Oliver

  To Lance Lee

  Poet, Playwright, and Novelist[*26]

  December 22, 1978

  11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

  Dear Lance,

  (As you have discovered) I am a very erratic letter-writer—capable, equally, of year-long silences and sudden 10,000-word effusions! […]

  Essentially, and if nothing else, I want to say how much I was moved and impressed by your review of Thom Gunn (and Ted Hughes)[*27]—and, specifically, how closely your interpretation of Thom’s “poetic” attitudes and development over the last twenty years corresponds with what I have seen, felt and known of his personal life. I don’t know whether this is “relevant” or interesting; a creator is to be judged by what he creates, not what he “is”—but there is a special beauty in the event of a close consonance, and this is something which is very important to me, because I am less interested in Art-as-such, than Art as an expression of a passionately experienced, investigated, attested, and articulated life: Art as a sort of (auto) biography. […]

  I think much of the “violence” etc. [in Gunn’s early poetry] was assumed (so to speak) for purposes of exploration—I don’t imply any pretense or duplicity, of course. Thom used to speak in many voices, and freely spoke and wrote, at this period, of “donning” identities, like clothes—“emblems to recall identity,” etc.—the savagery of the imagery in startling contrast to the extreme, sometimes almost excessive, formality, altho’ I don’t think the latter can entirely be seen as a defence against being carried-away, ego-dissolution, etc. It was also and equally the exactitude of the word-smith, the linkage of thoughts and words linked and knit as closely as chainmail (cf. “Byrnies”).[*28] I think I may have sabotaged my own thought here by ending up with “Byrnies”! Anyhow, he spoke in many voices, and some of these had peculiar (perhaps perverse) “romantic” resonances which, as you say, tended to give him a certain, intense, limited “appeal.” I have to say that (I think) there was/is much more to this (his early) erotic-violent “identity” than apparent at a first reading. In particular, the landscape of fairy tales and sagas, especially Norse myth, seem to me to suffuse many of these early poems, and his sensibility at that time. Auden, introducing a selection of G. K. Chesterton, cites G.K. on such “inscapes”:

  There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams;[*29] the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about.

  * * *

  —

  Thom liked—likes—to think of Beowulf, the Eddas, etc. He finds their atmosphere particularly congenial. Auden too was brought up on these, and, curiously (for a Jewish boy of good bourgeois antecedents!) my own imagery and desires etc. were largely formed by such Northern (and unclassical and unSemitic) myths and “landscapes” (no doubt, parenthetically, this is why I “chose” Norway to have my nearly-fatal accident in).

  Then, by degrees, and yet radically, Thom started to speak in his own voice, and not in (“other”) voices. As you poignantly remark, the emergence of such a genuine, “quiet” individuality, and being faithful to it, requires great courage—and may lose one many former readers who cared only for the donned identities. His own voice is that of “the Individual”; the other voices were those of playful identities being employed for “indirect communication”—or this is my own “interpretation.” Obviously I am making an explicit comparison between Kierkegaard’s early “polyonomy,” the countless partial-personalities, and pseudonyms, and the assumption of his own name, the finding of his full individuality, in his later works—but this may well be a tendentious comparison or projection.

  When Awakenings came out Thom wrote me a letter which obsessed me; he said that back in 1960–1, when we had last seen a lot of each other, I had seemed enormously gifted—“gifted with every gift except one, precisely the most important, call it sympathy or humanity, or what you will.” And that he had despaired, then, of me and my writing. But [he asked,] “What happened? What was most lacking in 1960–1 is now at the very heart of your sensibility and writing—was it ——, or ——, or ——, or” (Falling in love; drugs; analysis; yr patients etc)?

  I thought about this—for months—and said to him, finally, that I didn’t know, and/or couldn’t say, and could only explore or expose or explain in an autobiography, sometime.

  I wondered then, and am certain now, that when Thom saw a profound change in me, and questioned it; it was, in part, because he was making such a passage himself—and questioning it. And one of the significant “coincidences” of his current creative renewal, after 2 years of total inner as well as outer silence, is this: that he himself is composing an autobiography at this time.

  * * *

  —

  Incidentally, one of the best memories of 1974 I have was spending a day with Thom wandering around Hampstead Heath, having a beer at Jack Straw’s Castle, etc.—and finding that this was the actual landscape in which we had both grown up as boys, and that we both knew, had “discovered” all sorts of “secret” places and crannies associated with our having used Hampstead Heath, over and above its literal delights, as the backdrop for our dreamscapes, and “the strange flora and fauna of our own secret planet.”

  It was a very singular conjunction of literal and symbolic, past and present, etc., and paradoxical, in a way, that while I had travelled 6000 miles, in 1960, to meet Thom in his “adopted” Californian Home; I only really met him, in a sense, 14 years later, on his own (our own) indigenous Hampstead Heath, where we had both spent the secret, formative childhood years.

  Anyhow, my congratulations on a very fine review—and your dramaturgic activities—and I hope to see you, again, in 3–4 weeks, when I expect to be in LA.

  My very best wishes for the coming New Year,

  Best,

  Oliver

  To Helena Landau

  December 30, 1978

  [No Address Given]

  Dearest Len,

  We have all of us been hoping so intensely that this month would see your return to health; but, alas! this was not to be.

  My heart is torn when I hear of your weakness, your misery—and, now, your longing to die.

  You, who have always loved life, and been such a source of strength and life to so many, can face death, even choose it, with serenity and courage, mixed, of course, with the grief of all passing. We, I, can much less bear the thought of losing you. You have been as dear to me as anyone in this world.

  I shall hope against hope that you may weather this misery, and be restored again to the joy of full living. But if this is not to be, I must thank you—thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living—for being you—and bid you a final farewell in this life.

  God bless you; And if your time has come, receive you into the Long Home where there is no more parting.

  I am, dearest Len,

  Most lovingly, most sadly,

  Your nephew, ‘Bol’[*30]

  P.S. You know that I can be with you, in a few hours, if you wish—you have only to give the word. In the meantime, you are continually in my thoughts and my prayers—

  Jan 1/79: I phoned Hospital this morning—and though you were too weak to come to the phone, Staff Nurse told me you seemed to be rallying—the happiest news for the start of New Year. Do get well, and live—fight to get well, you can still have much good life before you yet.

  I dearly hope that this New Year sees a renewal of your energies, bodily and spiritual, a leaving-behind-you the deathly crisis of last year.

  So my best wishes for this New Year—may it see you healthy and happy once more![*31]

  To F. Robert Rodman

  January 5, 1979

  11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

  Dear Bob,

  I received your good letter with much pleasure. […]

  Your good letter made me feel what a bad letter I wrote you—I mean, bad-tempered, bad-mannered, and (I fear) bad-willed, and I will make this short in case any further badness comes out! It is a very bad time, this, with my aunt not exactly dying, but hovering around death, one which raises the (inexcusable) thoughts: “Why is she taking so long about it? Why can’t she get better—or die—something, NOW?” Thoughts she has been having herself, and which have caused her to turn towards my father—us—with piteous pleas that she be put out of her misery: bad time; dangerous time; I feel savage thoughts rising, and must be careful not to act on them. Not to project them. Not to express them. Looking back through what I wrote, I feel that whatever truth may have been contained, there was a vindictive note which was uncalled-for (doubtless imported from somewhere different): and I am ashamed of it. Fortunately, I have not expressed any vindictiveness to Jonathan himself, and perhaps I passed on a few toxic thoughts to you because I feel you have a large capacity to detoxify them.

  Again (and again and again and again!) I have to remember that others are—others. I have great difficulty, sometimes, distinguishing them from myself: or “projecting” myself into them, without knowing that I’m doing it. Jonathan is a man of extraordinary gifts—of heart as well as mind—but he is extremely different from myself (even though we sometimes enter the same play-area). I keep forgetting, or denying, this difference. I have no right to reproach him for—being himself, with all the virtues (and defects) of his brilliance. I am not brilliant myself, I don’t sparkle, glitter, I lack facets, but I have something different—a deep, concentrated, original force—and I must hold onto this, and remember it, and honour it, and express it, and not concern myself too much with what anyone else does, unless they also have an original force, whose workings and products I can admire…at a distance. […]

  Love,

  Oliver

  PS I am forgetting! I have been delighted by the Kierkegaard you sent me—many, many thanks for a most perfect and thoughtful gift. It found its way instantly to the very select few books I keep on my bedside table and established the illusion that it had always been there! It instantly became as familiar as an old friend, and I had no sense that I had just received it! Thank you again—

  To F. Robert Rodman

  August 18, 1979

  11 Central Parkway, Mt. Vernon, NY

  Dear Bob,

  It was very good, as always, talking to you last week—I am sorry that I let months elapse, and appreciated your occasional kindly calls in the interval, even though I didn’t respond to them. […]

  I thought of you last week, on waking from a fascinating dream (which bore on some things you had said about your running, and I about my swimming). I dreamt I was on the Moon—it was not clear how or why, nor did it seem to matter!—and taking my first Moon-Walk. At first, with the unprecedentedly altered gravity, and thus the unsuitability of my own gravity-sensors etc., I could not calibrate my own movements, alternated between absurd, wild overshootings and underestimates, etc., and had to take extraordinary pains to count, calculate, cautiously, consciously, to work out my own trajectories, as if I were a missile, or a lesson in ballistics—a tremendously difficult (and somehow absurd) trigonometrical exercise applied to “myself” (or, rather, this body which had become so altered, almost alienated, because of the alteration of gravity, and the inappropriacy of its customary, gravity-oriented responses).[*32] But—by degrees—I acquired skill: indeed became quite skillful, without, however, being able for a moment to relax my conscious cautious calculating and counting; thus I acquired competence, and skill, in the total absence of Ease or Grace, and it all felt very artificial and unnatural to me, and dichotomizing into a ballistic calculator (my “mind”) and a ballistic object (my “body”). And then, all of a sudden, I got the hang, I got the feel, of a wonderful new motion, a most free and joyous sort of leaping-walking, body and spirit completely joined in a most free and easy, natural-graceful motion. I said to myself in the dream, “Ballistics has become Ballet, Metrication Music,” and then I woke up—and wrote it all down!