14. John the Touretter
1 Over the ensuing years, true to its Humean metaphor, Oliver’s piece went through a whole series of alternative titles—“The Man with a Thousand Faces,” “The Man with the Iridescent Mind,” “The Man Who Was Simultaneously Everything and Nothing,” and “The Man with the Faceted World” (the “Faceted” in that last of course being a pun on Luria’s “Shattered”)—none of which, as things turned out, would ever see the light of publication.
2 Lake Jefferson, in Sullivan County, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, was one of Oliver’s favorite swimming holes.
3 Henry Meige and E. Feindel, Les tics et leur traitement, trans. S.A.K. Wilson (New York: William Wood and Company, 1907), 4, 5, 10, 21, 17.
4 Oliver would finally manage to slide a reference to John into a radically condensed version of his “Humean and Human Being” essay, recast under the title “The Possessed,” that he would include in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a few years later, recasting him as “a grey-haired woman in her sixties” he claims to have happened upon one day, “frantically” resonating her way down a city block, “convulsively” imitating everyone and everything in sight.
5 In the event, for reasons that will become clear, I never did call on John. But I did subsequently produce a Talk of the Town piece for The New Yorker, entitled “MOMA When It’s Jerking,” April 10, 1995, 34.SB