FROM Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement
To say that life is essentially meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact. For that reason—and unlike the assumption that an individual cannot make a difference to the world—it is not an assertion that can be refuted simply by pointing to facts about Henry Spira’s life. But if, when we face the end of our life, we can look back on it with the satisfaction and fulfillment that come from believing that we have spent our life doing something that was both worthwhile and interesting to do, then perhaps that is enough to show that we have found a way to make life meaningful. That has been Henry’s experience.
The best way in which I can describe how Henry has found his life meaningful is to explain how this book came to be written. I can’t recall exactly when I first told Henry that I would like to write a book about him, but the idea had been with me for many years. One sunny October day in 1992, we walked into Central Park, found a lawn with a view of the midtown skyline, and made ourselves comfortable on the grass. I pulled out a tape recorder and for an hour or two asked Henry questions about his life. I left him with the tape, which he said he would get typed up. Then I returned home to Melbourne, and my time was immediately swallowed up by other work. Something similar must have happened to Henry, because for a long time no typescript of the interview arrived. Given my other commitments, I was relieved that Henry, instead of urging me to get on with the promised biography, had himself apparently let it sink down his priority list.
The typescript finally arrived in 1994, but I was still too busy with other work to do anything with it. In 1995, I was selected by the Australian Greens to lead their senate ticket for my home state, Victoria, in the next federal election. When I saw Henry that year, he must have been thinking about his own mortality—he was sixty-seven then—because he asked me if I was still thinking of doing the book and, if so, what instructions I wanted put in his will about what should be done with the papers that, systematically filed and shelved, filled every room in his apartment from floor to ceiling. I said that in principle I was still interested, but if I were elected to the senate, I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it during my term of office, which would last six years. On the other hand, if I were not elected, I said, there was a good chance that I could find some time to work on the book rather soon.
The election was held in March 1996, and I was not elected. No doubt to remind myself that this disappointing result did have its positive side, I sketched out an itinerary for an overseas trip, built around invitations to speak in Europe in May and at a March for the Animals in Washington at the end of June. On April 21, I sent Henry a fax telling him that since I had not been elected, “I’m starting to think about what else to do with the rest of my life. The book about you is one possibility, some time in the next two or three years.” Could I stay with him for a few days in June, before my Washington commitment, so that we could talk about it?
That evening I had a message on my answering machine. It was unmistakably Henry’s voice, saying that he wanted to speak to me and would call again soon, but there was something very troubling about his tone. I reached for the phone to call him back, but before I could do so, it rang again.
“Peter?”
“Henry, how are you?” I asked.
“Lousy, actually.”
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“I’ve got an adenocarcinoma of the esophagus, grade three.”
“What does that mean, in layman’s terms?”
“Let me put it this way: If you could choose the kind of cancer you were going to have, you wouldn’t choose this one.”
I made some inadequate kind of response. Henry then said that while he’d really like me to do the book, he wasn’t sure that he was still going to be around in late June.
I was in New York six days later. Over the next five days, I slept on the sofa bed in Henry’s apartment, and we spent all our waking time together. Henry had lost a lot of weight and lacked the energy I was used to seeing in him. He had to be pushed hard to tell me about his illness, but eventually I learned that for years he had occasionally had to vomit after eating. In 1995, the problem had become worse. In September, he had had a barium examination. It revealed a suspicious obstruction in his esophagus. Henry had never concerned himself much with his own health, and for a time he tried to put off doing anything about it. By February, he finally had to accept that he could put it off no longer. On March 4, he was admitted to New York University Medical Center and was operated upon. The operation found a tumor in his esophagus. The surgeon cut out a large part of the esophagus and adjoining areas of his stomach. Henry spent the next ten days in the hospital before he was able to go home. Now, seven weeks after the operation, he was still weak and had trouble keeping any food down. The outlook was even worse: the cancer was invasive, and the pathology report showed that it had spread into some of his lymph nodes. His life expectancy was a matter of months. His doctor had recommended radiation and chemotherapy, but he was unable to give Henry any statistics to show that this would help. Henry checked out the literature himself and found that there was no evidence that radiation or chemotherapy offered any significant life-prolonging effect for the kind of cancer he had. What he did know was that it would make him feel very bad. He rejected his doctor’s recommendation. That wasn’t the only recommendation Henry rejected. His friends and acquaintances suggested an amazing number of unorthodox cures for cancer, ranging from special diets to having all his fillings removed. He didn’t try any of them. Instead, he began looking for a doctor who would help him die when he had had enough. Meanwhile, there was work to do.
During my time in New York, Henry and I worked hard on making this book possible. Before leaving Melbourne, I had reasoned that if Henry wasn’t going to be around much longer, it would be a good idea to record some interviews on videotape. I didn’t have any specific idea about what I might do with the tapes, but I wanted as much as possible of the Henry I knew to be preserved for posterity—not just the words he said, but the way he said them. So at my suggestion, Henry phoned Julie Akeret, an independent filmmaker who had once made a short film about me called In Defense of Animals. Julie came over with a cameraman she knew, and despite Henry’s weak condition, we taped several hours of interviews, which provided the outline for this book and many of the quotations used in it.1
Henry gave me the contact details for many people who had been important in his life. I called some of them from his apartment. Many—including his sister Renée, who lived only an hour away, on Long Island—had not been in touch with Henry for some time and had no idea how ill he was. Henry had not tried to hide the news, but he hadn’t felt like phoning and saying, “Hey, I’ve got cancer and will probably die in a month or two.”
The most remarkable thing about Henry during this period was the total absence of any sign of depression. Life had been good, he said; he had done what he wanted to do and had enjoyed it a lot. Why should he be depressed? The thing that really worried him about the cancer was that he would die a slow, lingering death. He was looking for a doctor who would help him to die sooner rather than later, and at home rather than in a hospital, where he feared losing control over his own life. While I was staying with him, he went to a doctor and came back to the apartment with a bottle of pills that the doctor had given him—officially for pain relief. Together we looked up the drug in a pharmacopoeia that Henry had. The bottle contained about four times the lethal dose. Henry’s relief was palpable. With that worry taken care of, he seemed remarkably untroubled by the fact that he was expecting to die soon.
Henry did not die in the time his doctors predicted. When I returned to New York in June, on my way back from Europe for the March for the Animals, he was markedly stronger than he had been at the end of April. He even went to Washington and spoke at the march, though he had always been a bit cynical about the value of spending too much energy on activities that lacked a specific goal. As this book goes to press, in March 1998, Henry is still very much alive and working hard on farm animal issues, targeting the fast-food chains McDonald’s, KFC, and Burger King. He is also watching the development of the Center for a Livable Future. I can’t help wondering if his strong sense that the biggest gains for animals still lie ahead has kept him going far longer than the nature of his cancer gave him any right to expect.
One mark of living well is to live so that you can accept death and feel satisfied with what you have done with your life. Henry’s life has lacked many of the things that most of us take for granted as essential to a good life. He has never married or had a long-term, live-in relationship. He has no children. His father and one of his sisters committed suicide, and his mother was mentally ill for much of her life. His relationship with Renée, the sole surviving member of his immediate family, is not close. His rent-controlled apartment, while spacious and well situated, is spartan. He doesn’t go to movies, to concerts, to the theater, or to fine restaurants. He hasn’t taken a vacation for twenty years. Yet at the age of sixty-eight he was able to contemplate his own imminent death with no major regrets about the way he had lived. What makes up for the absence of so much that, for most people, are the essentials of a good life?
In our 1992 interview, I tried to locate the source of Henry’s satisfaction:
PETER: So, looking back on what you’ve been doing for the last twenty to thirty years, what do you feel about it? What sort of a life has it been?
HENRY: Well, I think for one thing, I’ve totally enjoyed it. And I think that if I had a choice of what it is that I wanted to do, that’s what I would have wanted to do. And looking back, I think it was worth the effort, it was worth the energy, and I think that I pushed things along, as best I could.
PETER: Some people might say that you’ve sacrificed a lot of time and effort, while not doing very much for yourself.
HENRY: I’ve never felt that I’ve sacrificed for others. I just felt that I’m doing what I really want to do and what I want to do most. And I feel most alive when I’m doing it.
PETER: Is that a matter of personal temperament? What’s the secret of why you enjoy it?
HENRY: I don’t know why I enjoy it, but I think one can be a lot more effective if one really feels good about doing it, if one gets up in the morning just raring to pick up where one left off the night before—as opposed to doing it for others, doing it because it should be done, doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
PETER: What if someone said that you get your kicks out of sticking it into other people, like Frank Perdue? (A chicken mogul whom Henry attacked in one of his campaigns.)
HENRY: I don’t think I’ve ever stuck it into others just for the sake of sticking it in. I think we try to dialogue. I think the pleasure you really get is out of conceptualizing a campaign and moving it along. And you want to move it along the fastest way possible. The fastest way possible is to move it along with cooperation and collaboration. It’s only when you get forced into an adversarial position that you then try to do the best you can in that direction.
PETER: You couldn’t say that you really minded being in an adversarial position, could you?
HENRY: No, I think once you’re in it, one sort of thrives on it. But it’s basically that one is forced into it to begin with. I think I’m comfortable working either way; but I think the thing that you really get your satisfaction out of is conceptualizing a campaign that you know is absolutely going to work, and then seeing it work.
The real satisfaction, Henry told me on another occasion, is “not the fact that you made somebody else feel like gone-over garbage,” but the “creative high” that comes from getting all the pieces of the puzzle together, which gives him a sense that “lightning has struck.”
The idea that no matter how serious the cause for which you are working, you should still enjoy what you are doing is one that Henry has held for a long time. Among the radical thinkers he had read in his youth was the American anarchist Emma Goldman. Goldman liked dancing, a pastime that her more puritanical anarchist friends regarded as frivolous. It was not, they told her, an activity fit for a revolutionary. Goldman responded: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.” It was a line that had always struck a chord with Henry:
The point [Goldman] is making is, you’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing to be effective. What you’re doing is what you’ve absolutely got to be doing, not because you feel you’ve got to do it but, rather, because this is what your life is about. You feel good when you’re doing it.… I feel best when I’m doing something that’s going to make a difference. When I go, I want to look back and say, “I made this a better place for others.” But it’s not a sense of duty, rather this is what I want to do.… I feel best when I’m doing it well.
As for the more common idea that you enjoy yourself best by earning a lot of money and living it up, Henry rejects that position: “When I was working on the ships I had so much money I didn’t know where to put it. I stayed in some of the best places.… It was interesting for the experience, but I didn’t want the lifestyle. It didn’t give me a high.”
Although Henry emphasizes that he has chosen his life because he feels good about what he does, rather than because some sense of duty makes him feel that it is the right thing to do, there is no doubt that he is motivated by a strong sense of doing something worthwhile:
I guess basically one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?
While others may feel the same motivation, few manage to keep it going throughout an entire life. In a magazine interview in 1995, Henry was asked whether, in view of the size of the problems he is tackling, he ever gets tired of trying. He replied:
It’s crucial to have a long-term perspective. Looking back over the past twenty years, I see progress that we’ve helped achieve. And when a particular initiative causes much frustration, I keep looking at the big picture while pushing obstacles out of the way. And there’s nothing more energizing than making a difference.2
During my visit in April 1996, when Henry and I thought his life nearly over, I asked him to sum up what he thought he had achieved. He said:
I’ve pushed the idea that activism has to be results-oriented, that you can win victories, that you can fight city hall, and that if you don’t like to be pushed around and you don’t like to see others pushed around, you can have an impact.… It’s like this guy from the New York Times asked me what I’d like my epitaph to be. I said, “He pushed the peanut forward.” I try to move things on a little.3
I asked if he was satisfied with having achieved that.
I might have done some things differently, but on the whole, I’ve given it the best shot that I’ve got.… Looking back on my life, it’s been satisfying. I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to do. I’ve had an enormous amount of fun doing it, and if I were going to do it over again, I’d do it very similar to the way I have done it.
Henry Spira died peacefully in December 1998.