During the ensuing weeks, I got clearance from The New Yorker, and permission from Oliver, to begin pursuing a profile, and one of our next meetings took place in the New York Botanical Garden, across (and under) the Bronx River Parkway from Beth Abraham. Oliver began by noting that he comes here three hundred days a year, evincing a love of the botanical that verges on the primordial if not the downright primeval (both in terms of what he loves—ferns, mosses, cycads: the more ancient the better—and in terms of the love itself, which he insisted went back to his earliest days in the backyard garden of his family home).
At one point, I mentioned that I was going to California the next week to deal with the upcoming release of my book on Robert Irwin by the University of California Press, and Oliver in turn suggested I might take advantage of the trip to visit with two of his closest friends from his medical-residency days in California during the early sixties (in San Francisco from September 1960 through July 1962, and then Los Angeles through October 1965): Bob Rodman and Thom Gunn.
Oliver explained how he and Rodman had first met around 1962 at UCLA as residents who shared a vivid common interest, a passion for landscape photography (“California aroused in me a photographer’s lyricism”). “And Bob,” he assured me, “has detailed memory for periods which I have entirely occluded—I have, or at any rate pretend to have, complete amnesia for the period from 1948 through 1966.”
They subsequently shared their writing with each other. And he regards Rodman’s daughter as his goddaughter. Rodman’s wife died in 1974, during the very time of Oliver’s leg calamity. Oliver suggested Bob turn his own anguish into art, which resulted in Bob’s book (“a very fine book”) Not Dying. “There is no doubt that by way of the intensity of shared feelings during those years, we encountered each other at a deeper, stricken level.”
As for Gunn, the eminent English transplant poet who I would subsequently be meeting in San Francisco, Oliver explained: “I met Thom through his poetry: his first collection, Fighting Terms, and then especially the next one, The Sense of Movement, which appealed to me enormously. Indeed, seeking him out was one of the things I’d had in mind when I first headed down to California from Canada.
“Let’s see, I arrived in September 1960 and we met some while after that. I saw much of him at the time. I did a lot of traveling on my motorbike, wrote many travel pieces—I was enchanted and verbose, and would show stuff to him. He would criticize some pieces in terms that at the time I found cruel: I approached him raw and vulnerable, as a student or acolyte, and his criticism perhaps made me retreat.
“Still, I’d see him on occasion, at intervals. We were reunited by my publication of Awakenings. He sent me a letter that at the time obsessed me: I kept it in my pocket or wallet for months. I wrote reply after reply, eventually well over two hundred pages, none of which I posted.”
What had Gunn said?
“Basically, he wrote that when he’d first encountered me in 1961 he’d thought me the cleverest man he’d ever met and yet he’d found something lacking, and precisely the most important—a sympathy, a humanity—something whose lack made him despair of all the rest. ‘I despaired of you,’ he wrote, ‘and now this. What happened? What changed?’”
I asked Oliver, What had?
“Well, that would require an autobiography, wouldn’t it?” Oliver hesitated, holding back, stammering, wondering, it seemed, how open he should be, should allow himself to be. I assured him that I would let him review anything I submitted prior to publication with regard to any eventual profile. He sighed deeply and went on.
“Well, and um … what had excited me in Thom Gunn’s poetry was its homoerotic lyricism, a romantic perverseness. The perverse transmuted into art. He gave a voice to things which I’d imagined singular and solitary, and this filled me with admiration. The other side of this being that he dealt with elements with which I had never come to terms in myself. And still haven’t.”
Another long, considered silence.
“At the time—I mean back in the early sixties—I’d been doing a good deal of writing about sex, often satirical portraits, and Thom found some of these (especially one about a mutual friend) cruel and hateful. Perhaps he was right. Indeed, I did a lot of writing about sex between twenty-two and twenty-eight, writing which had a certain power and perverseness. But this all stopped twenty years ago.”
Another pause. “The thing is, Thom depicted things with compassion which I depicted hatefully. I mean, there were some things he’d liked: a long lyrical piece on fetishism that he prized.
“Furthermore, both of us were English, but more, we were both Londoners, and still more, we are both specifically from Hampstead Heath—the same hillocks make up our mutual primal landscape. And I hold him very dear.”
Ever so tentatively, I tried to ease Oliver back into a conversation about his sexuality. “Closed book,” he snapped. “Has been for years. I have not been with anyone for over fifteen years now.” There followed a long pause as he hemmed and hawed. “Celibate. Celi … bate.” He loped over to a drooping sunflower, gently lifted its seedpod to his face, and began delicately palpating the pod, his hems and haws morphing into hums and awws.
“By the age of five,” he continued at length, conspicuously changing the subject, or so it seemed, “I had become quite fascinated with the sunflowers in my father’s backyard. I didn’t know the word for it then, but what intrigued me was the way the seeds in the pod tended to organize themselves in variations of prime numbers. Which in turn got me thrumming on the character of the primes themselves. And also burrowing into the notion of pi, which I’d eventually calculate to several hundred places. In my head.
“Funny,” he said. “Just the other day I was reading a book on freak calculators—a fascinating book, of course, but I’m afraid I disagree with the whole approach. The author fails to understand the crucial distinction between calculation and numerical contemplation. I was a calculator myself as a child, which is to say I could accomplish mental arithmetic of a high order—I was very good at long sequences of multiplication, at determining roots, and so forth (my father, too, could add long lines of figures at a glance)—but I was also fond of numerical contemplation: the sense of being at play, adrift in a Pythagorean landscape.
“So much of the literature deals with the exhibition of freaky aptitude, with exhibitionism. But there’s very little on the numerical temperament. For instance, Zacharias Dase, the number prodigy who was otherwise a dullard, could look at a handful of peas thrown on a table, it was said, and immediately say, ‘117,’ and it’s usually imagined that he counted out the peas very quickly—that he ‘counted’ them ‘at a glance.’ But the real question Dase raises is ‘What is a glance?’ Because I’m convinced he saw them immediately as 117 in his glance.”
Oliver released the sunflower stalk, which now bobbed, presently reverting to its droop.
“Or take the case of the Fin twins, whom I’ve met on several occasions over the years: The calendrical landscape simply lies before them and they wander through it as you would a park. For a numerically prodigious child, numbers can form a nursery country in which the figures are friends. And in my own case, such numerical contemplation proved the precursor of a similar engagement with the periodic table and then scientific wonder, generally.
“But it is exactly the notion of ‘freak show’ which should be disbanded. The Fin twins could tell me what day I last saw them on ten years ago. But they are numerical artists, not algorithmists. And theirs is an art which is all the more impressive for being of such a low order.”1
Oliver went on to describe a precipitous fall from the paradise of these early years. At age six, not long after the death of a beloved Hebrew teacher, he and his older brother Michael, upon the onset of the Battle of Britain in June 1940, were hastily bundled off to “that hideous boarding school in the country,” as he now characterized it. “The headmaster was an obsessive flagellist, his wife an unholy bitch, and the sixteen-year-old daughter a pathological snitch. The place was called Braefield, though Michael quickly took to calling it Dotheboys, after the Dickensian hellhole in Nicholas Nickleby, and does to this day; he committed vast passages of that book to memory and can recite them at the drop of a hat … We were beaten. I was beaten every day. When our parents finally came to visit, I rushed to my mother and clutched fiercely at her knees shrieking, ‘Never again! Never again! Never leave me like this again!’ But she patted me, assuring me things couldn’t be as bad as all that, and soon departed. It was the last strong emotion I ever expressed to her.”
What of his parents? What were they doing?
“Well, as a child, I imagined that they were utterly occupied in abandoning me. In fact, they were enormously busy, as I came to understand intellectually years later, though never completely emotionally.”
They were both doctors, frantically working through the Battle of Britain.
“My mother was a surgeon, so that she was busy cycling from one scene of devastation to another, operating under appalling conditions. This before the days of antibiotics, when surgical complications were a horror.
“But this separating of the children from their parents—a decision had been made: The Youth of the Empire would be safeguarded at all costs. Anyway, I believe in retrospect this was bad psychologically. It’ve been better to have faced the bombs with our families.”
How did his parents feel about it?
“My father doesn’t speak his feelings. Mother did, but only posthumously. She kept a journal during the fall of 1940, which I discovered after her death, in which she repeatedly expressed her distress, but the journal stopped after a few months. She was just too busy.
“We were beaten,” Oliver repeated, almost mantra-like, cringing at the memory. “I was beaten every day. We were black-and-blue but our parents didn’t see it, and for some reason, we didn’t complain. Everyone else complained—complained and was removed. We were the last two there. Finally, they just came and closed the place down.”
During the war, his aunt Helena Landau, his mother’s sister, had a forest school in Cheshire. “The Jewish Fresh Air School—the JFAS—whereas Jewishness is usually stale air.” The school where he and Michael were incarcerated was approximately forty miles out of London, hers another forty. Just as the school where he was kept was an infernal experience, hers represented for him a paradisal haven. Every child, he told me, had his or her own garden. He’d go there on holidays and other leaves from his hellhole.2
He had mentioned the uncle who saved him after the war by introducing him to the periodic table. Had he been saved in some sense by this aunt as well?
“Absolutely. She was almost the only good person, the only good reality during those years. She stood for reason, humor, affirmation.” He went on to talk at some length about this wonderful maiden aunt, Lennie, as she was universally known throughout the family. (“By age eighty-two, shortly before her death, she would have eighty-seven nieces and nephews and three hundred twenty grandnephews and grandnieces.”) She continued to play a major role in his life, standing for one pole of humane decency as against all sorts of other extremities of dereliction. For example, he wanted someday to write a book about homes versus institutions—her school representing an originary home, Braefield a primal institution. Likewise, he said, she stood in, in his mind, for a Judaism steeped in nature.
He paused. “In dying, her last words to me were: ‘Don’t ignore the minor prophets—Amos, Micah—don’t just stick to the big ones like Isaiah.’
“My own parents,” he now shifted gears slightly, “though not fanatically Orthodox, lived in a ghetto of their own making. My father to this day is always amazed when a goy turns out to be human.”
Oliver cited, for example, their bitter opposition to the marriage at age forty of his brother Marcus in Australia to a converted gentile! “They were repelled by a radical uncleanness.” Oliver interceded angrily and the marriage occurred (and survived). Just one instance of “an incredible streak of Jewish cruelty which years earlier had fallen on Uncle Benny, my father’s brother who I didn’t even know existed until my adulthood. He, too, had married a gentile, been hounded out of the family, moved to Portugal. The two brothers, estranged for fifty years! Finally, the woman died and during the years before Benny’s death, reconciliation of a sort finally occurred.”
This cruel Jewish streak “curiously stopped completely when it came to patients, who were all treated with equal humanity.” Both of his parents were involved, for instance, with the chronic-care homes of the Little Sisters of the Poor, as he himself would also be many years later.
He paused for a moment, taking in a bank of ferns. “My mother was sensitive but inhibited,” he said. “Lennie used to consider her a dedicated surgeon, overwhelmed into rigorous distance on account of being too sensitive. I don’t know.”
Their own relationship, his and his mother’s, was by Oliver’s account way too intense, too close. He was her youngest and a prodigy. She showered him with attention, often deeply affirming but at other times wildly inappropriate. Reading him D. H. Lawrence stories that were decidedly beyond his ken, for example. Or how one of the first buried memories to emerge during his psychoanalysis years later was how she used to bring home monstrosities from surgery—deformed embryos, fetuses in jars—this when he was ten, and then, when he was twelve, how she brought him along to perform the dissection of a child’s corpse.
A sudden bracing of resolve now seemed to sweep over him, as if he were only just then remembering my original prodding questions.
“When I was twenty-one and home for a visit from Oxford,” he said, “I accompanied my father one evening on his rounds. We were driving in the car and he asked me how things were going. Fine, I told him warily. Did I have any girlfriends? he inquired—now he was the one being wary. No. Why didn’t I have any girlfriends? I guessed I didn’t like girls … Silence for a few moments … Does that mean you like boys? Yes, Father, I replied, I am a homosexual, and please don’t tell Mother, not under any circumstances, it would break her heart and she would never understand.
“Not that I’d yet had any actual experiences.
“At any rate, the next morning my mother came tearing down the stairs, shrieking at me, hurling Deuteronomical curses, horrible judgmental accusations. This went on for an hour. Then she fell silent. She remained completely silent for three days, after which normalcy returned. And the subject was never mentioned again during her lifetime.”
He was silent for a long while, shuffling pebbles in the path about with the toes of his shoes. “At twenty-seven, in 1959, at the end of Oxford and medical school, I ran belatedly away from home, to Canada. Dishonestly so.”
How come “dishonestly”?
“I left with no intention of returning and without telling them so. My frequent letters were rich in botanical and geological detail, although empty of the personal. But soon I’d be in San Francisco, and then Los Angeles.”