A Safe Place
ALTHOUGH ARTHUR COMPLAINS CONSTANTLY about living in New York City (“Mountains and streams mean more to me than bridges and buildings,” he says), he is the only one of my four friends who is still there. Arthur often seems to me, in fact—as in his grumbling about New York—a quintessential New Yorker: eccentric, outspoken, and, with strangers as with friends, exceptionally direct, gregarious, and generous. He kibbitzes with virtually everyone he meets—the doormen and elevator operators in his building, waiters and delivery people; and when we go for walks—with his trim salt-and-pepper beard, a black beret aslant on his head, bright red sweatpants, and earphones clamped tight to the sides of his head—he looks like a wandering poet recently escaped from a Woody Allen movie. He says exactly what he thinks most of the time, mixing outrageously blunt comments, Brooklyn slang, and Yiddish expressions with sophisticated and learned speculations—and despite his leave-me-alone demeanor, he does not hesitate to act decisively in crises, large and small.
When, on one of our walks, a car skids to a stop in the middle of Eighth Avenue, near Columbus Circle, bringing five lanes of traffic to a horn-blaring halt, Arthur, without hesitating, walks straight into traffic, talks to the two women in the stalled car, its hazard lights now blinking, and begins to help. When a truck, coming around the corner, bears down on us—I’ve followed Arthur intothe street—Arthur turns and, like a traffic cop, puts up a hand to stop the truck. To me, in a smiling aside, even as he turns back to the two women: “I don’t want anyone killing my friend Neugie before he finishes his book.”
Arthur and his wife Paulette, senior partner in a New York City law firm, live in a two-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue, directly across from Central Park. The apartment is handsomely furnished—uncluttered, open, and airy, with bright light pouring in through high windows, and Arthur and I are sitting in his book-lined study, and talking about friendship. Arthur still maintains friendships with at least a half-dozen guys he has known since about the third grade of elementary school, and, like me, he remains close with many others with whom we went to Erasmus and Columbia.
“Maybe it’s because I need these friendships,” he says, “but who knows why I do? I’ll tell you this, though—it gives me great pleasure. The pleasure you get from reading books, I get from watching you, seeing how you evolved, seeing who you’ve become, seeing what you’re hoping to be. I get the same pleasure from Phil and from Jerry, and from all the guys I know. Because I love people—I love being with them and I always have. I’m fascinated by people, and getting to know people always satisfied a tremendous curiosity and craving. Even in high school, when I didn’t know I was honing any professional career, I enjoyed playing with and marrying myself to the different kinds of involvements I had with different people.
“So when I went into private practice and was doing fifty to sixty hours a week of individual therapy, I was a very happy guy. I’d be seeing, on any day, six or seven different types of people—maybe there were two or three overlaps, maybe three Jewish lawyers—and I was different with each person. I was talking about different things. I was learning about the ways different minds work, and I was engaged in trying to help people deal. I’d go in at eight, I’d leave at seven or seven-thirty at night, and it went like lightning. It was a gift, a no-brainer—like Willie Mays playing center field. I did what I loved, and I made a living doing what I would have done for pleasure.”
Sitting in his study—he has shown me, earlier, his shelves of books about Buddhism, and by and about the Dalai Lama (“These belief systems contain a much healthier approach to life, for me, than the systems I was raised in, and I resonate to them.”)—Arthur is less the outspoken, kibbitzing New Yorker, and more the relaxed, easygoing guy I’ve known for nearly half a century—more the man I imagine he is when he is working one-on-one with his patients, the guy I loved to take long walks with when we were teenagers, and to talk with about whatever came to mind: our friends and our family, our doubts and our dreams and our insecurities and our hopes.
He is, as ever, brilliant and canny (he graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia; was voted Most Likely to Succeed when we graduated, nearly thirteen hundred of us, from Erasmus), yet he is also thoughtful, direct, warm, and down-to-earth in his observations. When I ask a question, he rarely answers immediately, but will close his eyes, lean backward, and then, once he starts talking, pause frequently before he chooses words or phrases.
On this afternoon, however, he is the one who asks the questions.
“Okay,” he says. “So tell me something, Neugie. Where does medicine come in? Where does friendship fit in with medicine in this book of yours, and what do they have to do with our growing up in Brooklyn—with what we’ve been talking about?”
Although I have not begun the actual writing of the book, I say (it is early summer of 2000, a week after my return from Norway), what I have begun to see—to speculate about and believe, if provisionally—seems fairly basic, and it’s this: that the things people want from their doctors, and that they are, in recent years, getting less of, have much in common with what they want from friendship.
“Ah, you are a smart fellow, Neugie,” he says. Then: “Why are you smart?” he asks. “Because I agree with you!”
We laugh, after which Arthur talks about his work as a psychologist, and although I am hearing his words, my mind is floating free, and I am thinking that this—being here with him and talking in the way we do—is one of the great and unexpected dividends from my surgery. The comfort and sheer pleasure these conversations bring, and the ways the five of us have become closer with one another—this has been an unexpected and precious gift.
Rich and Phil went to elementary school, high school, and medical school together, but lost touch through the years. Now, though, when Rich visits his children and their families in Denver, he spends time with Phil; and Phil is planning a trip to New York in September, when he, Jerry, Arthur, and I will hang out together. I say something about this—about how much more we’ve all been in touch with one another since my surgery, and about how much I’ve been enjoying our talks.
“It’s our thing,” Arthur says quickly. “Sure. I call it psychological davaning. It’s what we do, but this kind of Talmudic self-absorbed, self-reflective, looking-at-yourself-as-an-object, commenting-on-yourself stuff—this wasn’t, for example, Ronald Reagan’s thing. I was just reading a biography of this man—president twice, governor of California, head of a lot of organizations, well respected, yet I don’t think he did as much of this in a lifetime as we do in a day. And you know what? There are lots of very smart people who don’t davan the way we do, and his way of living is a reasonable way to live, and there’s only a certain percentage of us who will do what we do and get something from it and grow from it. I talk about what’s inside me. You talk about what’s inside you. These are my ideas. These are yours. This kind of self-revelation and self-reflection is different from going fishing together, but I’ll tell you this—it’s much more fun for me to do this than to go fishing, or even to a Knicks game.
“Now remember—I come at most things from the point of view of trust, and the way we get on with one another, and the work I do when it’s effective is a function of trust, and I think trust is something very, very, very hard to come by,” Arthur says. “I mean, how can you have it in today’s medicine? It’s my belief that it usually takes years of reliability, consistency, authenticity, maturity, and empathically resonant dialogue for patients to begin to trust therapists so that they will take some risks they wouldn’t otherwise take.
“Look. At my best—in my snappiest suit and with my smartest verbiage, I could never engender trust, real trust, fundamental trust, in ten sessions. The idea that people can do that in a managed-care setting is just not comprehensible to me.
“There are times—when I was in the army, for instance—you see people six or ten times, and you do what you can do. But having seen many people for between one year and five or six years, I know the difference. When I work with somebody over a long period of time, I get to know that person so well I can feel that person’s pain—and I do, and, like that person, I find myself up late at night sometimes, trying to think and feel my way through the pain. And it’s the same in medicine, though I didn’t used to think so. I’ve seen studies saying that across the board somewhere between sixty to seventy percent of what a doctor bases his treatment on is the report from the patient. But if there’s no trust, how good is the report?
“Let’s say I have some funny pains in my chest and go to the physician who’s been treating me for twenty years. Now he knows I’ve never said this before, so he’ll take it more seriously than a guy who’s seeing me for the first or second time, doesn’t know if I’m a whiner, or if I’m just having some gas—and that’s where trust comes in. You trusted the cardiologist and the surgeon because they were an extension of Jerry, and you trusted Jerry.
“But trust is also a function of time, and of age.” Arthur goes to his bookcase, and comes back with a book. “I think part of growing older,” he says, “is that we’ve given up illusions of control—of what we can and can’t control. And that makes life easy—with our children, with everything. As certain responsibilities—raising our kids chief among them—start to slip away, we begin to use time and to think about it differently, and there is something peculiar and wonderful, I think, when time becomes our ally. But read this—it’s from a speech Adlai Stevenson gave to a class of college graduates.”
I read:
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.* The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws—all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages—are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all.
What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions —a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love—the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for the things you cannot see.
Arthur and I talk about how time, age, and experience, whether in psychology, psychiatry, or medicine, relate to clinical judgment.* “Let’s take depression,” he says. “Somebody comes to me depressed, and what I can do is make a judgment, probably within a couple of sessions, as to whether that person is a candidate for a psychopharmacological agent that, maybe within three to six weeks, will be helpful. Secondly, I can assure him, based on my clinical experience, that virtually everyone who has been placed on antidepressants, over time—and when he gets the mixture right—will feel better. I can assure him of that because it has been my clinical experience. Third, I can tell him that if he takes the medicine, it will make it easier for him, without the pain and depression, to talk about some of the things that have led to the depressed feelings.
“So now, with that out of the way, I can begin a relationship with him where I learn about how he became the person he is—how the kind of family he grew up in, and the way he chose to deal with his childhood home, led him to feel less about himself—to have thoughts he’s ashamed of—and I can help point out how that was happening, and is still happening, and he can begin to look at himself somewhat differently. And maybe three or four years from now he’ll have a thirty to sixty percent better feeling about himself that will make the rest of his life better.”
In a World Health Organization study that covers the period from 1990 to 2020 (actual data plus projections), unipolar depression (also called major, or clinical, depression) is second, behind ischemic heart disease, in the rank order of the global burden of disease (a measure of health status that quantifies not merely the number of deaths but also the impact of premature death and disability on a population).* In addition, of the ten leading causes of disability worldwide, five are psychiatric conditions (depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder). Moreover, I say to Arthur, his field—psychology and psychiatry—has proven at least as effective in diagnosing and treating these conditions, and in enabling recovery from them, as medical disciplines have been in the diagnosis and treatment of, for example, neurological, infectious, and heart diseases.*
Arthur says that even though he knows this is so, he cannot shake the belief that psychotherapy is more of an art than a science, and less of a science than medicine is. And this belief, we agree, derives, at least in part, from the reverence with which, when we were growing up, we were taught to regard physicians.
“My first experience with a physician was, literally, with the man next door to us, who was an old-timer even then, probably in his seventies,” Arthur says. “And he would always cure me! Not hard to do given that I was getting sore throats and minor stuff. But he would also take time to affirm things—like how well I could tell time at whatever age I could tell time.
“So there he was—a safe, concerned, benign person who I thought was omniscient. And in my case he was omnipotent too—he could do things that made me better— and so I came into my adulthood assuming that doctors possessed all kinds of secrets, and knew everything, and this intimidated me. I think I was afraid to go into medicine, in fact, because then I’d have to see if I could know everything.
“But his presence also drew me, which is partly why I ended up in psychology, which is a healing field. And you know, when I was in Florida during my mother’s final illness a few years ago, and I was getting into the elevator in the hospital and there was this promo poster for the head of the cardiac surgery unit, with all his credentials—he was bar mitzvahed in 1952, he played quarterback for Tulane, he did his residency at Harvard, he’s done six thousand angioplasties—I said ‘Whoa!’ because this was so at odds with the model I’d had in my head, which was the doctor-as-teacher— a wise, caring, rabbinical practitioner, and not somebody in Nike sneakers who’s on the front page of the Yearbook. All this advertising in subways and newspapers—these are not the doctors I knew.
“But if not an M.D., why a psychologist, right?—and this had to do with my wanting to understand myself better. I started out in Yale Law School, you know, and made a decision after three days there to get out—that being in an adversary profession was not for me. Probably because it would have put me in touch with my anger, which I was afraid of, though I didn’t realize it then. Law school—and being a lawyer—that seemed like a life where I’d be fighting under the boards for rebounds again and again, and I didn’t want to do that.
“Now in my home I never heard, ‘You should make a lot of money—go out and become rich.’ And I never heard it in my friends’ homes. Once, when somebody asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, thinking I was very clever, I said I was going to make a lot of money. And my mother got upset, and my father spoke to me and said this wasn’t the way one should move toward a vocation. So it was my assumption always that I would do something that would be of service, would save me from mediocrity—that enormous fear of being ‘average’—and make me into a professional: a teacher, doctor, lawyer, engineer—and that the money would follow, and it would be enough for me to be able to live a good and decent life.
“But from a psychoanalytic point of view, since as a young person I was very competitive and ambitious, I think I was also ashamed of the competitiveness, and when I got into Yale and realized I was entering into a profession where I would be making a living from the competitiveness, I said ‘Stop!’—and then I thought about how much I loved being involved with people, and recalled that in my second year of college I took a psychology course I loved, and that I had decided then to go into psychology, and it was like ‘Whoa—I can play basketball and get paid for it!’ and so, at twenty-one, I left Yale—I measure my time there in hours and not days—went back to Columbia, and to CCNY, and took the necessary undergrad courses.
“After that, I went to Clark University, in Worcester—the place where Freud gave his lectures when he was in America—but I didn’t like the way they looked at psychology there, so I came back and went to Columbia for my doctorate, and I never looked back or second-guessed myself again. If I had to make a decision today for a new life, I can’t imagine doing anything else.
“And this was always connected to the idea of being a professional—and my idea of a professional was a guy who was a .320 batter year after year, a regular sixteen-to-nineteen game winner, a man who routinely pulled down fifteen rebounds a game. One of the things I took enormous pride in during my years as a shrink was that I almost never did not get to my office and do my day’s work. It’s like Ripkin and Lou Gehrig being out there, game after game—something about consistency, the doing of the work and not letting minor colds or sore throats interfere.
“Now I was blessed with good health, I didn’t have horrific accidents—though I once did a whole day of therapy with cotton swabs sticking out of my nose after it was cauterized for a nosebleed—nothing that compromised me in terms of getting to the office. Because the notion of consistency and reliability is something I associate with the idea of a professional, and this is bound up with a certain measured, thoughtful way of going about one’s life—of a consistent availability to the people one serves. When people are exploring and risking themselves, consistency is very, very important.”
I say that Phil says Arthur is really just doing the same thing in his sixties that he was doing when we were teenagers—being on call to his friends, listening to our problems, talking with us, giving advice, getting us through.
When, for example, after my move to New York, I am upset about the deterioration of a relationship, Arthur assures me I have given the relationship every chance, that I have been generous and open—a mensch—and that there are no issues I am blind to in the situation, or in myself. It is his judgment—both personal and professional—that I should get out. He also speculates, briefly, about what he thinks may be going on in the woman, in terms of what psychologists call “projective identification.” “But look,” he says then. “Let me put it another way: if we were walking along Flatbush Avenue and you told the guys what you were going through, they would say to you, ‘Neugie, she’s busting your balls.’”
When I remind Arthur about how helpful he’s been to me, he shrugs off my gratitude, says he is a lot less sure of things—of what he truly knows— than I might think, and he talks about his clinical experience and its relation to the education of therapists.
“My most energizing experience—my highest level of gratification—comes from my involvement with people,” he says. “Now, in my field there are three variables in the treatment process. There’s a patient, there’s a therapist, and there’s a treatment modality. If one of the three isn’t appropriate—wrong patient for the right modality and the right therapist, right patient for the wrong therapist, et cetera, psychotherapy will not be a success. And in my field we have done far too little scientific investigation of the match—of the integration of proper therapist—by age, life experience, psychotherapeutic skills—with patient. And the failures in my field—what you and Robert have experienced in spades—or a high percentage of them certainly, are a function of our inability to put together the three variables in a way that’s synergistic.
“My sense of things is that it’s different in medicine—for Rich, let’s say—and that in your prototypical heart arrhythmia situation you’re pretty sure you’re as good as the next guy in town. But I don’t know if people in psychology or psychiatry can feel the same way. Or maybe this is just my fantasy about doctors—that here is somebody who’s sure of things, and that there are answers, and that if only I studied harder, had been smarter, I would have gotten it.” Arthur smiles. “It’s like believing WASPs don’t sweat.”
Like our physician friends, Arthur laments the premium that has been put on speed. “At least since the mid-eighties,” he says, “more and more people were saying to me, ‘Look, I really don’t want to spend four years here, Doc. Listen less, tell me what to do, and help me make things okay’ And on top of the pressure coming from the patient, managed-care people are saying, ‘You get six sessions for a buck-and-a-half and then you gotta pay the guy’s regular fee,’ so they want it even faster. Maybe in a medical situation there’s a quick resolution, but not always in my work.
“Because the work I do is very private, and depends upon confidentiality—a place where people can talk about their most private thoughts, feelings, fears, experiences—and it seems to me that in a cultural way, unfortunately, there are almost no sacred private areas anymore. Everything—like those ads for doctors and hospitals—is for public consumption, and I don’t really know what that means. It is what it is, I guess, but it certainly is not good for the doctor-patient relationship.”
Vietnam was for Arthur what Nigeria was for Jerry. “It changed my life forever,” he says. “And it changed it forever even before I got there. Because I was a young man who did everything the way his mother and father wanted him to: I wore a white shirt to school, I went to the right college, I was a doctor, I married a Jewish girl, I had a piano and a nice house, I had a lovely daughter, things were all working out terrifically, and all of a sudden I was one of two people chosen in the entire U.S.A. in my specialty to be sent to Vietnam.
“So this was the first time I fully understood that life was neither good nor fair—that you can do everything right and the way you’re supposed to, and still get fucked. Now that’s a big thing to take in at any point in your life, and I should have been weaned from it earlier, but I was twenty-eight years old and it hit me like a ton. I mean, if being a good boy was not going to pay off, why should I marry a Jewish girl? Why should I be polite to my Aunt Sophie?
“I did my clinical internship at Walter Reed General Hospital—this was just before I was chief of psychology at Fort Monmouth—and the head of psychology at Walter Reed became the head psychologist in the army. Now, for reasons I absolutely to this day cannot fathom, he said to himself, ‘This guy Rudy, out of the two hundred fifty or three hundred psychologists in the army, will be somebody who I think will do a good job in Vietnam.’
“And I know this, because I said to him, ‘Why’d you pick me? You have a lot of psychologists who want to go there and get medals and ribbons so they can build up a career in the army’ And he said, ‘Because I believe in this war and I believe in you.’ So I became one of only two people who did my work in Vietnam, and it was truly transformative—and traumatic.
“I was with a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital—the 98th Medical Detachment, 8th Field Hospital—and I was chief of the Psychology Section, and even on the boat going over there I knew that I was alone in a way I had never understood aloneness before. I couldn’t be bailed out by people who loved me. I was an interchangeable number, replaceable by some guy who was at that moment sitting down to dinner with his wife in Topeka or Des Moines.
“The other thing I realized was how provincial my vision of America had been. I’d grown up in an insulated parochial convent of middle-class Jewish kids, and most Americans viewed the world differently from the way I did. From that point on—in Vietnam, and for the next six or seven years—I began to realize that no matter how much you are loved or cared for, and no matter how much people want for you, you are ultimately alone—whether in your dying, in a serious illness, in childbirth, in the pain that comes from failure with your child.
“I saw the kinds of things I never wanted to see—ghastly stuff: people burned up, people being carried out of helicopters with pieces of metal sticking out of them, and it’s one thing to see that in an ER, but another thing when you know the metal was put there on purpose. You go down to the psychiatric unit and on one side there are American boys who’ve lost limbs and on the other side there are Vietnamese prisoners who’ve lost limbs. And they look at each other across the unit, and it’s okay. Now that they’ve been mutilated for the rest of their lives, no one’s killing anyone.
“Not only did I experience feelings about the potential for my own mutilation, but my feeling of insecurity—of being separated from everything that made me feel safe—was very intense because I also knew that the doctor I saw was as scared as I was, and was running from his own diarrhea, and that we could all be dead in the next millisecond. And I don’t know if I have ever felt secure since. But maybe security was an illusion. Maybe it was always an illusion.
“Vietnam is the one year of my life I can remember in complete detail because it was alien, and in an infinite number of ways, and I think the core of my experience there would ultimately translate into some of what I’ve been talking about—that life isn’t fair, that you can die in the next minute even if you’d done everything right, and that you’ve got to live in the present and not postpone or defer gratification the way we were trained to do.
“When I came back home after a year, I found myself having symptoms of the sort I was seeing in patients. They were coming out of nowhere, and they were frightening to me, and they were confusing. They made me feel that I really had to get my own stuff cleared up if I was ever going to be of use to anyone else, and this led to my analysis.
“I found myself intensely concerned about my health, and I had never thought about my health before. And when you begin thinking about your health, you find parts of your body you never knew existed. It’s like when you go through a terrible experience and you do fine, but then afterward you tremble and shake, you know?”
Arthur talks very quickly now—when he talks about his experiences in Vietnam, I have noticed, his words come faster than at any other time in our conversations—and says that the nature of his defensive structures was such—compartmentalized—that he had no clue for a year or two as to what was going on, or that the symptoms he was suffering from—with his health, with bodily obsessions, with driving a car—came under the heading of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I just thought I was probably screwed up and that I never realized just how neurotic I was, but that maybe I should speak with someone about it. Now we all have the same body parts, but the configurations make each of us different, and I began to see that there were few things that came to my doorstep as a therapist that I hadn’t experienced in my own way. Because I have felt sexual longing, fear, despair, helplessness, anger—because there were things I was frightened of and ashamed of, I could tap into that fear, anxiety, and depression for the people I worked with.
“So that the changes I worked through in myself came to help me in my work with others. No one was going to come to my office, especially if they came with issues relating to shame, embarrassment, vulnerability, or self-esteem, tell me something, and not have my internal reflexes not work for them. I understood. ‘Poor baby,’ I’d think, though I wouldn’t say that to them, of course. I’d maybe look poker-faced, but I believe that what I understood from my own life was informing the process with my patients all the time. At some level they knew they were not being judged—because I had been there, and worse, and in my chosen profession that was a gift to me.
“And there’s this too: that the reason I made a living was because the former custodians of these things—of healing—were representatives of the ministry. And ministry is informed by ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ and the Ten Commandments, and my Bible is different from their Bible and I didn’t judge, and I really tried to understand, and to give compassion, and with empathy, and with the best I could intelligently give to people to help them cope with the parts of themselves they were ashamed of, and had difficulty with—because I had been there too.”
“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences,” David Hume wrote nearly three hundred years ago, “than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.”*
When I think of us as young men, it occurs to me that the quality of human sympathy that Arthur has always given to his friends—a quality enhanced by his Vietnam experience, which made him indelibly sensitive to the vulnerability of others—he has also, for nearly forty years, been giving to his patients.
“This principle of sympathy is so powerful and insinuating a nature, that it enters into most of our sentiments and passions,” Hume explains, “and often takes place under the appearance of its contrary…The sentiments of others can never affect us, but by becoming, in some measure, our own; in which case they operate upon us, by opposing and encreasing our passions, in the very same manner, as if they had been originally deriv’d from our own temper and disposition.”
In a world where so much remains mysterious, even—especially!—in medicine and science (If we know so much about the genome, for example, why is it that 90 percent of DNA has no seeming purpose?), the quality of human sympathy—like the quality of mercy?—is one that, in joyous times or troubled times, and whether between friends or between doctor and patient, seems as rare as it is precious.
In the mid-sixties, in New York and California, I was active in the antiwar movement, organizing marches and protests, giving speeches, and writing articles in which, among other things, I encouraged those of us above draft age to commit civil disobedience in support of those of draft age who were refusing to serve. During these same years, Arthur was in the army, first at Walter Reed Hospital, and then at Fort Monmouth and in Vietnam. We corresponded regularly, talking about the usual—our families and friends, books and sports—and in our letters we also debated American policies and actions.
This, then, in one of Arthur’s letters—from Nha Trang, Vietnam, dated Monday, June 20, 1966, and written at a time when Arthur was living in a place where, he wrote, the temperature was “easily 110–130 consistently,” where he was separated from his wife and daughter, and where he was constantly fearful for his own life:
Little question in my own mind that Noog of all people should not be required to serve in Viet Nam theater—your efforts on behalf of a more sensible solution to this whole mess speak well for the legitimacy of your contentions in this regard—G-d knows, I’ve written Marcia [Arthur’s first wife] about this just yesterday—I empathize with the tremendous bind you’re in (may not be too clear above—I wrote that I particularly felt for you, Jay, because if you’re called upon to serve it would not only be a bitter separation experience, a frustrating personal experience, but perhaps most significantly, an activity in polar contrast to beliefs you’ve been committed to for several years now). Of course, this is all the Rude and if he were in the Pentagon he would have absolutely no compunction about crossing Noog off the list, if he were on the list…
After giving me detailed advice on what I should do to establish Conscientious Objector status before I was called to serve—the extreme fears he lived with in Vietnam seeming only to intensify his ability to empathize with and be helpful to others—and advising me not to “irrationally get hung up on hopes” but instead “to get to work,” this: “I’m scared shit so often—to a great degree quite unreasonably for thank G-d I’m safe as a human being in VN can be—that the anxiety just rolls off me.”
A few weeks later, shortly after the publication of my first novel, Big Man, a story set against the background of the basketball fixes of the early fifties, Arthur comes across a review in Time magazine and writes to tell me “how very very thrilling it was to see you—my buddy Noog—among the premier new novelists. I’m sorry that it had to be a Time publication but these are the burdens of the more public posture you have assumed. In any event, you must know how very exciting it was for me—in the wilderness—to see my boy Noogie looking at me.” He writes that he has not received his copy of the book yet, but hears from another Erasmus friend that “Yudi Rudy is among the cast of characters—mucho thanks—I’m sure, with due respect to the models, that this guy goes well to his left & is an outstanding court figure!!!
“Life is routine here—work challenging with much sadness always,” he continues, “—but I can help—I see that now—I am useful and at least feel that way (my use being relevance to my patients, rather than the organization I work for)—and this provides some meaning for me in the midst of the madness I see around.”
Two months later I write him a letter in which I set forth what I see as reasonable arguments about why and how we should get out of Vietnam (a letter in which I also suggest, “Why not play the VC a game of stickball—the winner gets the country. Is this any less sensible than what’s going on?”).
On October 25, when his tour of duty is about half over, he writes back: “My response to your political letter—you’re right!” Then, after disagreeing with me, point by point, about several political issues I’ve raised, this: “But overall I agree that the whole thing makes no sense with the rights and wrongs so unclear.”
“By the way,” he adds, before signing off, “Phil was remarried last week.”*