10 Auden and Luria

The Awakenings years, as one might think of them, running from roughly 1969 through 1975, around the hinge of Oliver’s fortieth birthday in 1973, were enormously consequential for Oliver psychologically, comprising not only the death of his mother but both the entrance into and then passage out from his life of two major father figures: W. H. Auden and A. R. Luria.

One afternoon, walking in the Village, Oliver and I get to talking about Auden—“Wystan” as Oliver would eventually call him, though for the longest time he remained, deferentially, “Mr. Auden”—in whose home on St. Marks Place Oliver was a frequent visitor in the late sixties, throughout the Awakenings drama, and in the years immediately thereafter. They’d been introduced by Orlan Fox, a close friend of Auden’s and a drug and motorcycle buddy of Oliver’s from his earliest days in New York.^SB

Oliver referred me to an essay he’d contributed to Stephen Spender’s volume of posthumous tributes to Auden, and a few days later sent me a more detailed letter, summarizing other aspects of his relationship with the great poet:

I met Wystan, first, at Orlan’s apartment—I don’t think you ever met Orlan Fox. (He was Wystan’s closest friend, I would think, for the latter, the last 15, years of Wystan’s life—and a fairly close friend of mine from the time we first met, in November ’65.) I am afraid I cannot quite date the meeting—(something to date it may occur to me)—it was either in ’67 or ’68.

I had seen Auden before—in June ’56, when he gave his first lecture, his Inaugural, as Professor of Poetry [at Oxford]. It was in this term that I had my first—and before the later sixties—my only sight of Auden.

I had certainly never seen him at close quarters before. I was petrified, mute, with fear and awe, that first time—I was fascinated by his furrowed, Jurassic face, I had never seen a face which so resembled a geological landscape—at the same time trying not to stare. I was fascinated by his memory and wit—which reminded me, strongly, of Eric’s¹ (indeed I never ceased to feel, here, an almost physiological resemblance between them). But, and here he differed sharply from Eric (and perhaps I felt there was something more akin to myself), the flow of wit, the gossip (he loved gossip!), might suddenly cease, if something deep chanced to be brought up. The memory, the wit, were prodigious, phenomenal; but what really moved me, what excited awe, was to see Wystan brooding, to see him suddenly silent, arrested by thought (I often saw this later, I loved to see him ponder; I saw it first, but forget the precise occasion, that evening at Orlan’s in ’67 or ’68). Eric doesn’t ponder—he’s quick as a flash. He’s as clever as Wystan—but he lacks (or disallows, or is disallowed) that strange depth. And Wystan himself had to struggle to find it—he often railed at “cleverness,” especially his own, how this would tempt one to clever instantaneous solutions, how it stood in the way of genuine thought; and how he himself, in his early work (so he thought) was often “clever,” but at the expense of genuine poetic depth. I do not remember—Orlan might—that I exchanged a single word with him that evening, other than saying “Pleased to meet you” and “Goodbye.” But Wystan noticed me—despite silence and shyness; he was himself often painfully shy, and knew very well how to be patient, to wait, for the shy …

It may have been a year or more before I ever met him alone—I’m inclined to put this sometime in ’69. He got me to speak of my Migraine, then in press, and was fascinated that I had given Groddeck so central a place.² He then brought out something he had translated, but never published—a work of Groddeck’s on massage (Groddeck’s father ran a sort of gymnasium-sanatorium), with unexpected insights on the somatopsychic effects of this, and the somatopsychic and psychosomatic in general …

It was in relation to this Body/Mind theme that I lost my own silence and shyness, and found myself talking, for the first time, quite freely, with him. In particular—[since] he was endlessly, though tactfully curious—[I remember] being “pumped” on clinical and personal experiences. I spoke freely of the clinical, reluctantly of the personal: Wystan himself seemed to equate them—and I saw then what perhaps I had only sensed in certain poems, how profoundly, even essentially, “clinical” he himself was … But not in a glib sense (though he was sometimes glib); in a deep sense, which combined mind and heart.

So, I met him as a friend of Orlan’s; and then, so to speak, as myself. Curiously—this is often the case with me—there seemed to be (until close to the end) more letters between us than actual meetings … and a sort of decorum was there for—for years. He was always “Mr. Auden,” I was always “Dr. Sacks”—I am not sure that we used first names until ’71.

(I’m glad you liked the “Dear Mr. A” piece [in the Spender book]—your letter made me glance at it, for almost the first time in ten years.)

[…] I’m getting numb fingers, I think I must stop.

Love, Oliver

A few days later, this time at his City Island home, we continued our conversation about the poet. Oliver complained about a documentary that was recently made on Auden and in which the only section they used of their interview with him was of some comments on Auden’s obsessive chronological punctiliousness (how tea was always at four o’clock, and so forth).

“It’s true,” he said, “that my favorite was to visit him at teatime, which was always from four to five, on the dot. He was tremendously stereotypical in that sense, yes, but what happened between four and five was wild, was utterly spontaneous. I saw Auden bubbly, I saw him deep with anguish, I saw him motionless with wonder. Okay, I may not be good at anecdotes, but that which they used of me in that documentary I resent: likewise the first Auden biography, which was a string of anecdotes when in fact his life was one long thought,” continuing sotto voce, almost as an afterthought, “like mine.”

Oliver looked over at me (he needn’t worry, I looked back, the comment had registered), paused, and sighed deeply. “He and Gunn have stood for me for a fundamental virtue in the face of my own, of my mother’s primal accusations.”

He then went on to describe how Auden regularly described himself as a drunk but not an alcoholic (“When I asked him the difference,” Oliver recalled, “he insisted that an alcoholic undergoes a change in personality when he drinks, whereas a drunk can imbibe as much as he fancies and never changes, and he, he concluded, with immense satisfaction, was a drunk”); how early on they’d had spirited discussions about migraine, or “the megrims” as they both enjoyed referring to them—Oliver was just finishing his book at the time and sending it to press—and how when Auden subsequently reviewed the book (for The New York Review of Books, under the title “The Megrims”), it was really the first time Oliver felt “that someone of grand powers had taken public notice of me,” and how thrilling that was; how important Auden proved during the Awakenings days themselves as a sounding board, and “an avid one at that” (Auden’s eminent doctor father, George, had in fact been a medical officer in Birmingham in the late teens and early twenties and was one of the first to have described the rampaging spread of the encephalitis lethargica and in particular its effects on children); how Auden had urged Oliver to write up the stories of his patients but told him, “In so doing, however, you will have to go beyond the clinical: be metaphorical, be mythical, be whatever you need!”³

By 1972, however, Auden had resolved to decamp from his American home and return to Europe, though to Austria rather than England, and toward the end, Oliver and Orlan had converged on the St. Marks Place apartment to help him pack. “At one point,” Oliver recounted, “Wystan came over to me and suddenly commanded, ‘Take some books, no really, any you like.’ I was stunned by the gesture, and clearly stymied, so he just reached for two, his libretto for The Magic Flute and a much tattered, heavily annotated volume of Goethe’s letters—‘These are two of my favorites,’ he declared—thrusting them into my arms.”

A few days later, Orlan and Oliver accompanied Auden to the airport, several hours early (“Have I mentioned, he did have a thing about time”), where they indulged in a meandering conversation around themes of leave-taking (“After all, he had been here in America over thirty years, half his life”), and at one point “a complete stranger walked up to him, just like that, and declared, ‘You must be Mr. Auden … We have been honored to have had you in our country, sir. You’ll always be welcome back here as an honored guest, and a friend.’ They shook hands, Wystan was clearly touched, and the fellow concluded, ‘Goodbye, Mr. Auden, and God bless you for everything.’”

Auden’s penultimate collection, Epistle to a Godson (1972), included one poem recounting a visit to an “Old People’s Home” (“All are limitory, but each has her own / nuance of damage…”) and concluded with a major poem, “Talking to Myself,” the first from his transplanted home (“Spring this year in Austria started off benign, / the heavens lucid, the air stable…”), which he dedicated to Oliver.

The following year, in February, Oliver, back in England for the final edits on Awakenings, met up with Auden again when the latter happened to be visiting Oxford, and Oliver was able to give him a copy of the book’s galleys. “And a few days later, I got a letter from him”—Oliver bounded up and rifled through some folders (he clearly kept his correspondence with Auden close at hand) and retrieved the hand-scrawled letter (“Oh look, he sent it on February 21, which would have been his birthday”) and handed it to me.

Dear Oliver.

Thanks so much for your charming letter. Have read Awakenings and think it a masterpiece. I do congratulate …

While I was reading that note, Oliver continued rifling through the folder and laughed, pulling out his own response, or one of them anyway, dated March 31, in which he began by stammering at length and to great comic effect over his inability to remember for sure whether he’d already answered Auden’s original note (the two usually corresponded by hand, at Auden’s insistence, but that was why Oliver could no longer remember whether he had, he was horrified that he might not have, and now he was going to type his response, so that at least he’d have a copy, in case he forgot again), going on to thank “Wystan” profusely for its contents, he (Auden) being the first and only other person besides his publisher to whom he’d shown it, and there being “nobody whose favourable response could make me happier than your own.” He then went on to note his growing despair at the prospect of finding any real sympathy within medical circles “(especially the barren neurological ones to which I belong),” but expressing hope, nonetheless, that there may yet be “a mass of real, alive people outside of Medicine who will listen to me, and with whom I can enjoy the delight (the necessity) of real converse, what (if I remember correctly) Dr. Johnson called ‘a streaming of mind.’”

After I’d finished reading that letter and given it back to Oliver, he noted that “Later that spring Auden, back in Austria, had written to say that his heart ‘was acting up’ but that he hoped I’d come visit him in the house he was sharing with Chester Kallman, and I so had hoped to that summer, but one thing and another, I failed to make it, and he died on September 29. I’ve always regretted not having made it.” He sighed. “Oy, and aye.”

Meanwhile, time and again during our conversations about the Awakenings period, another name would also recur, that of Oliver’s great idol and master, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria (born in 1902).

“I had revered him—‘admired’ is too mild a word—for years,” Oliver recounted one evening over dinner. “I’d first encountered him, or rather his work, at Oxford, by way of his first major book, The Nature of Human Conflicts” (Luria’s doctoral thesis, published in the States in 1932, though in the Soviet Union only in 2002, and subtitled Or Emotion, Conflict, and Will: An Objective Study of Disorganization and Control of Human Behavior). “His was a liberated physiology—conflict, you have to understand, is a distinctly nonclassical notion, and he would, for example, describe Parkinsonism in terms of ‘intense conflict.’

“Most moving, perhaps, was a piece I read just out of medical school, an affectionate tale of identical twins with speech and intelligence disorders. I was moved by his preface, its fusion of science and poetry. The piece was called ‘The Regulatory Role of Speech’—a typically dry title, you wouldn’t think it contained such an enchanting tale.

“And amidst my desolate cynical despair after three numbing years of medical school, here was this obviously good man—one of the thirty-six Just Men, it seemed to me.

“Not that he had any particular reputation,” Oliver muttered, adding, under his breath, “then or now.

“Then I forgot him somehow”—this being another of Oliver’s so-called “lost continents,” lost, that is, in the penumbra of his gray decades—“set him aside. And it wasn’t until 1968 that I checked out all of the Lurias from the Einstein library—his dry texts and his so-called ‘romantics’—and devoured them all, once again encountering the greatness, the consistency, the beauty of his life’s work.

“So I revered him all over again, and then, panic-stricken one night, I gasped, ‘And what place will there be left for me?’ Which led to a peculiar rage where I actually destroyed three of his books.

“Around this time, I was going through something of an identity crisis. It was the beginning of the Awakenings project. Before that I’d been fucking around—the migraine book, face it, was just fucking around. But it now became possible to admire and employ Luria, to demonstrate him to my students as a new way of neurophysiology and neuropsychology.

“The thing is, he would grasp the character or nature of various things as a whole. A sentence of his that truly resonated for me was ‘The body is a unity of action’—since for others it’s just ‘a mass of tissues’—‘and that which is cut off from the unity of action is unbodied.’ You can see why I might subsequently have been especially drawn to that sentence. Another favorite word of his was ‘syndrome’—a natural running together—not like a world, rather like a cosmos. He was the first to understand syndromes in this fuller sense, in so doing becoming a geographer, an astronomer of the mind. Similarly, he was drawn to the qualitative, not the quantitative, as a result of which, with him, this enormously rich landscape emerges. In The Mind of a Mnemonist,⁴ for instance, a quantitative project became a qualitative landscape. Luria’s work is comparable to Piaget’s: It involves tests, but not tests that disintegrate, rather tests that aggregate, that somehow show the essential integration of character. One sees the person, whole, almost as a work of art. He had a method, I suppose, and yet there are descriptions of him where he sounds on his rounds like a magician.

“There was a great aesthetic feeling for truth in him as well, and for reality. He melts, at times, at the beauty of things. He had a feeling for the sublime—beyond the beautiful. Medicine, in general, pitches its work well below the sublime, but it needn’t have to. And Luria showed the way, though he would never have used a word like ‘sublime’—it would have embarrassed him.

“He was highly regarded in the Soviet Union, although there were periods when he was in disgrace: He was effectively excommunicated after his first book, not allowed to practice psychology for fifteen years; instead, he went to medical school and became a physician. During the war, his great clinical work brought him into contact with the constellation of the five great Soviet neurologists—this was truly a time of genius in Soviet medicine, in part, alas, on account of the great number of head injuries they were being forced to minister to, not unlike the way the Civil War here in America had brought out the likes of a Weir Mitchell. That whole group of Russian medical geniuses, though, also reminds me of the great Russian novelists—they were novelists who’d been shoved into science, but the novelist still shines through.

“Right after the war, Luria brought out four books in rapid succession, then another gap. After 1958 he was able to bring out the first of these volumes of ‘romantic science’—deeply felt yet passionately precise case histories. And through the rest of his life, his work was divided between these monumental overviews and the case histories.”

We wrapped up our meal (sometimes Oliver would get like that: lecture mode, as I would come to think of it, with me privileged to be a class of one) and ventured out for a walk, with Oliver resuming.

“In 1972, The Man with a Shattered World⁵ appeared, just around the time my own Awakenings was about to, and Mary-Kay, my Listener editor, said, ‘You’ve been yammering on and on about this guy for so long—okay, so review his book.’ Which I did, my review of Luria appearing in the same issue as Richard Gregory’s review of me.

“Practically by return mail I received two letters from Luria, one hot on the next, the envelopes festooned with stamps with images of paintings from the great Russian state collections—each letter rendered in his beautiful Victorian handwriting—one on the review, and the other on Awakenings. And it was a complete shock—like getting a communication from Freud (Luria was the only other person in this century who I’d mention along with Freud in the same breath). I ran around showing the letters to everyone—never had I encountered such a combined feeling of dearness and greatness, of clearness, strength, and kindness, such a cordial mind.

“I mean, his contemporary Nikolai Bernstein’s mind might have been more powerful, any sentence of his being laser-like, like Wittgenstein. Luria on the other hand is less of a light and more of a voice. And the voice can’t aberrate as much as the eye: Things either ring true, or they don’t. The musical part of one is not easily deceived, and while a prestidigitation of metaphor can dazzle and fool, there is a tone of voice that is a guarantee.”

With this last sentence, Oliver was suddenly brought up short. Crossing a street, we paused in mid-island, cars whizzing by on both sides. He stammered for a few moments, presently explaining, “Actually, that’s not quite right.”

What?

“My description of his first two letters. Back in 1973.”

We resumed walking. “The thing is, I don’t like to let things go to press without reviewing them. But that happened with my Listener piece about Luria where I had in one passage, in context, called him ‘cruel.’ When I saw it in type I fell ill and proceeded to feel ill for five years, until his death, which I was convinced it had caused.”

The mood of the evening had suddenly curdled as a result of this confession, and Oliver soon found his car and left for home.

A few days later, I received a packet with this note:

Here, before prevarication sets in, a copy of The Listener with my article on Luria, and Gregory’s on me (the circle would have been completed by Luria on Gregory!). Its publication date, June 28, was that of Awakenings. I came (even before it was published) deeply to regret the article, which I felt unfair, unappreciative, when not downright distorting. I spent the entire summer in an agony of guilt about it—it entirely engulfed the natural joy I might have had from [the release of] Awakenings—and not the least of Luria’s human qualities was delicately to help me out of this self-accusing hell.

Not only did the packet include the issue of The Listener in question but the photocopies of Luria’s first two handwritten letters as well.

Curiously, I couldn’t find the word “cruel” anywhere in Oliver’s article, which began by putting Luria in the context of two earlier giants of Russian psychology, Sechenov and Pavlov, the latter of whom he implied was Luria’s teacher. While celebrating Luria as “the most significant and fertile neuropsychologist alive,” one who “has raised neuropsychology to a subtlety and simplicity which could not have been imagined thirty years ago,” he went on to describe him, nonetheless, as a “divided man,” one part (the part responsible for such “monumental and systematic works” as Higher Cortical Functions in Man) “in absolute allegiance to Pavlov and Sechenov, to Descartes and Locke, to the notions that the human mind starts as a blank, a tabula rasa, which is then imprinted by experience with ‘images’ and ‘facts,’ and that thinking consists of nothing but analysis and synthesis, connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting, performing operations,” and so forth. This is the part of Luria, “marked by a certain impersonality and coldness of style,” that is most admired by professional neuropsychologists today, Oliver suggested. “The other part of him,” Oliver went on, however, which “strives to escape the domination of the atomic, the analytic, the abstract, the mechanical,” and is marked by “a lively sense of personal style and expresses itself naturally in the form of stories or biographies,” has grown more and more pronounced in Luria over the years, despite being seen as “unscientific and slightly embarrassing” by many of his more conventional colleagues. (Oliver dated the beginning of this second, “romantic” side in Luria to 1956, with the account of the twins he himself had so admired, then only just recently out of Oxford.) After which he went on to explicate both the Mnemonist and the Shattered World books as sterling instances of this second type.

Luria began his first note to Oliver (July 19, the longer of the two, consisting of two large pages of densely packed, exquisitely inked handwriting laid out in unfailingly parallel lines) by expressing his “deep thanks both for your attention to my work and your review, but first of all—for the fact that you studied a whole series of my publications. Please be sure how high I appreciate it!” However, he went on to say that “I really cannot agree with an over-evaluation of both my publications and my personality. I am one of Soviet scholars in psychology and by no means an outstanding one … my abilities are just medium, and the only what I have done was to study the brain basis for human conduct for a long time, ca. fifty years, that is true, and there is nothing of false modesty in this statement.” He then went on to insist that he had never been a student of Pavlov’s, only met him twice (under almost comically dismal circumstances), though he was a proud disciple of Lev Vygotsky (“the real genius of Soviet science, a scientist who died very early in 1934, being only 37 years old” whose seminal work “had nothing to do with Pavlovian psychology!”). Mainly though, he wanted to insist that there was not such a difference in substance, beyond that of style, between his own two sorts of writing, and that the science, and the allegiance to science, ran equivalently throughout. All expressed in the most collegial, albeit firm, of terms (and, needless to say, nothing to have gotten so bent out of shape about). Indeed, he concluded the first letter by saying that though his copy of Awakenings had not yet arrived, after having read Oliver’s piece describing “The Great Awakening” in an earlier Listener and Gregory’s review of the entire book in the more recent issue, he already felt confident in asserting that “I feel the Awakening is a great event.”^SB

An estimation he confirmed less than a week later (July 25), having since received and read the book “with great delight,” a phrase he returned to three times in the paragraphs that followed, while celebrating the evident revival of the great nineteenth-century tradition of clinical case studies, a tradition he had feared was going moribund—but no more!

(Incidentally, for my own part, I can think of no finer reflection of Luria’s temper and character than the fact that he—and he alone, as I can think of no one else who would have used the term, then or since—chose to characterize Oliver’s Awakenings saga as “delightful.” And he is right, for no matter how harrowing and unsettling and terrifying the particulars of the tale, it is also, in Oliver’s telling, precisely that.)

“I never met him,” Oliver told me on another occasion. “I was always wanting to and never quite making it. Although I regarded myself as the one and favorite son, I was in fact one of twenty or thirty, in half a dozen languages, with whom he kept up a voluminous correspondence. He always handwrote his letters—I imagined him using a quill. He would take in what everyone was doing and reflect it back in the kindest light.”

Oliver figures he eventually received upward of twenty to twenty-five such letters.^SB There was an exchange of four or five pairs of letters about the Leg book alone.

“Once,” Oliver recalled, “in the middle of an eighty-eight-page letter, I mentioned to him that I was thinking of writing a text ‘From Luria to Luria’” (in other words from Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century kabbalist from Safed in the Galilee to A. R. Luria, of twentieth-century Moscow). “He didn’t respond. The next time, I apologized for the length of the previous one but then went on to compose a further thirty-three pages of single-spaced type.”

Following a pause, Oliver continued, “In 1976, he had a massive heart attack—he suffered from angina—so that thereafter he regarded his days as numbered, a situation he viewed with great sadness. But in his last years he brought out five books, an autobiography, thirty scientific papers, all this while his correspondence kept expanding.

“His was a model of How to Die.

“At news of his death, in August 1977, I wept for three days.” (Oliver had received word of the death from a cousin who’d suffered a stroke, was aphasic, and was only able to tell him haltingly, over the phone.)

Oliver subsequently showed me a copy of the letter he’d thereupon sent Luria’s wife (“I have known other men of genius, but never one with such a beautiful and affectionate openness of heart, simplicity and modesty of spirit, and such humor and courage in the face of grave illness and other troubles. He was a most lovable and loved human being, as well as being a very great one”), telling me, “There had been an obituary in The New York Times, although none in The Times in London. So I instantly wrote one which they presently published. That one was dry-eyed, but then I spilled out a twenty-five-thousand-word memoir which I’ve since misplaced.

“I couldn’t believe it, in some ways still can’t. I often dream of him, endow him with a voice (though I knew what he looked like, I’d never actually heard him). I converse with him during my rounds. He suggests comparisons, makes associations, he has an eye for the singular. I’ve incorporated him. He’s never rough with me.

“He’s like an ego, not a superego.”

A few years later, in a letter to me of January 21, 1984, in answer to my question of which teachers he’d felt had been the most influential in his development, he returned, at length, once more to the subject of Luria:

Obviously human beings differ profoundly here, in all sorts of ways, at all sorts of levels. There are those who are profoundly influenced and influenceable, for better or worse; and those who while perfectly accessible and friendly pursue an essentially solitary track through their whole lives. You, say, are full of grateful memories of teachers … who were influences, inspirers, “awakeners” to you. So, for that matter, is Isabelle. I am (half) afraid, (half) ashamed, to say I am not … that I feel, at the deepest level, uninfluenced by anybody. Certainly, in my school and college days, what would usually be accounted one’s most “formative” or “impressionable” period, I cannot think of anyone that “meant” much to me—those whom I most liked, and am most grateful for, were those who allowed me to go my own way, and provided a sort of wisdom and support, an encouragement, an affirmation … though not an “inspiration.” There was nobody in my first forty years who was too important—even in this “permitting,” encouraging, affirming way … nobody, at least, whom I knew personally: only Luria, “out there.”

And then in 1973, around (or even on) my fortieth birthday, there came that first letter from Luria to me. The correspondence with Luria was different from anything I had ever known—it was the sole experience of a personal/scientific “intercourse” in my life. It was an enormous privilege; it was deeply “good” for me. I felt quite heartbroken, “orphaned,” when Luria died. And yet, affirming and encouraging as it was, in the highest degree, I do not know that it/he “influenced” me in any way. I think I would have “developed,” gone on in my own way, even if I had had no contact with him … But it fortified me, it gave me a certain strength and assurance—and, with this, lessened my insecurities, my paranoia … If I were to give a “follow-up” on the personal “story” I told in the British Medical Journal, which ended with Awakenings, [regarding my] unresolved relation to “Neurology,” as this was exemplified in the majority of my colleagues—“the profession”—this follow-up would accord Luria a central position.

Why should I care what the little idiots in “the neurological establishment” said or did, if a man like Luria was “on my side,” was “with” me? Grandiosity was not stimulated, but tempered, by this.

The first Duckworth edition of Awakenings, in England (1973), was dedicated “To the patients whose lives are here depicted,” a dedication that was reconceived for the 1976 Vintage edition in the United States:

To the memory of

Wystan Hugh Auden

‘Healing,’

Papa would tell me,

‘is not a science,

but the intuitive art

of wooing Nature.’

W.H.A. (from The Art of Healing)

But after 1977, every subsequent edition was dedicated, quite simply:

To the memory of W. H. Auden

and A. R. Luria