On the Lam
by Johanna Kranold Stein
Edited by Melanie Stein
CONTENTS
PART 1: BREAKFAST REPRIEVE ......................................................... 5
On the Lam ............................................................................ 7
Spy Story ...............................................................................21
Uncle Albert .........................................................................25
Letters from Prison .............................................................29
Tales from Childhood .........................................................41
Thoughts about Grass ........................................................59
Two Houses .........................................................................65
Giant’s Rest ..........................................................................69
Mr. Mabra .............................................................................71
PART 2: ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE DOLE .....................................75
100 Words or Less ...............................................................77
Viola.......................................................................................83
My Career as a Communist Bigamist................................87
PART 3: I YELL MY TUNE .................................................................95
Musicology And The Manic Experience (1992) .............97
Emotional Regrowth: Musical Maturation from
Infancy to Adulthood in Eight Months (1971) ...... 111
Voice Alterations and Schizophrenia (1995) ................ 117
Thought Disorder, Artistic Media, and Progress in
Therapy: A Case Study (1970) ................................... 127
PART 4: MEDICINE IS NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE ........................ 137
Your Internal Medicine Committee ............................... 139
STOP! I Withdraw Permission ....................................... 143
PART 5: THIRTY PLACES TO MASSAGE ........................................ 151
Cyrus and the Midlife Crisis ............................................ 153
Princess Christina Bonaparte .......................................... 161
PART 6: HOW I BECAME A SERIOUS WRITER.............................. 175
First Hundred Dollars Takes It ...................................... 177
Back Alley Garden ............................................................ 181
Triage (take out?) .............................................................. 183
Sweat (take out?) ............................................................... 185
Your Pet Bonsai ................................................................ 187
You May Call Me Princess for Short ............................. 191
You Can’t Miss It .............................................................. 197
The Poison Pen Collection.............................................. 201
No Civil Servant Left Behind ......................................... 209
The Writing Life ............................................................... 215
Selected Program Notes .................................................. 217
PART 7: IN NO APPARENT DISTRESS ........................................... 229
Second Childhood ............................................................ 231
OBITUARY ........................................................................................ 235
APPENDIX I PRONUNCIATION GUIDE ........................................ 237
APPENDIX II SCHIZOPHRENIA, HYSTERIA AND PSYCHIATRIC
MUSICOLOGY .................................................................................. 238
APPENDIX III PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS ........................... 244
APPENDIX IV FAMILY NOTES ...................................................... 247
Family Tree ...................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Canoeing the Peconic ..... Error! Bookmark not defined.
PART 1: BREAKFAST REPRIEVE
7
On the Lam
I
When I was five Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and set
about getting rid of political opposition. High on his hit list was
my father, who was captured by the Gestapo and sent to jail in
Berlin. My mother followed to try to get him out, and we kids
became refugees, sent to a safe place to stay. My brother and I,
surrounded by our big sisters, were suitably unhappy, but secretly
I thought of it as my chance at breakfast reprieve.
When my father was successful and we lived on an estate, I was
reared by servants under the executive direction of my mother,
8
and she and I did not always agree. For example, my mother
believed that to grow up healthy, strong, and morally admirable,
children must have for breakfast a large slice of bitter rye bread
transparently greased with butter, and an apple. My brother ate it,
but he was a kid who ate anything. I hated it. I was born almost as
hard-headed as my mother, and my mornings were dedicated to
not eating breakfast. Our two maids, both named Frieda, moved
me and my breakfast from room to room ahead of their daily
cleaning. The Friedas were kind, and tried to encourage me by
cutting it up in little bits so I could see progress, and saying, “Now
eat just one little bite for Uncle Emil,” or Uncle Albert, or Aunt
Annemarie, but they would run out of relatives before I ran out of
breakfast. Sometimes they felt so sorry for me that they cheated,
saying, “Now you eat a bite, and I’ll eat a bite, and we won’t tell!”
and when I really got lucky they would sneak the plate out to the
kitchen and throw it out.
So my parents went to Berlin, and we kids went to summer
camp. Camp hardly differed from summer on the estate except we
had to wear clothes. My mother believed that maximum exposure
to sunshine was essential to children’s health, and back home in
the enclosed estate my brother and I had been exposed to it, head
to foot. Our one attempt to break free didn’t get far, as people
reported naked children walking down the road sooner than we
were missed. Except for wearing clothes, camp life was similar, as
servant-like staff herded us through meals, baths, and bedtime.
That winter all five of us, together with a housekeeper, moved
into an unheated loaner house in a summer mountain resort on
the Czech border. The idea was that if necessary we could just
walk into Czechoslovakia and safety. I rather liked it there. Our
housekeeper substituted curdled milk for the breakfast I hated,
and put just a few tolerable chunks of that damned rye bread on it.
I roomed with my big sisters, and not with my teasing, aggressive
brother. He and I had been reared like twins, although he was
eighteen months older, and won all disputes. The only flies in this
ointment were the housekeeper’s enthusiasm for calisthenics, and
9
rice pudding for dessert. She had us, the children of hollowchested intellectuals, stumbling out of bed on ice-cold mornings
to do calisthenics. But she left the cream on the soured milk and
sugared it, and the rice pudding was optional.
My father was released and exiled, meaning he had to leave the
country and not come back. In those days, exile was a prestigious
sentence reserved for leaders. The Germans exiled their Kaiser
after World War I, and he had to live in Belgium; Stalin exiled
Trotsky to Mexico. Hitler exiled my father, who went to England.
His money had to stay in Germany, and so did we. I turned six
and started school.
Our little summer resort town’s school was small, and I loved
it. In deep snow we used short skis to get there. The teacher liked
children, and we drew, colored, cut out, and practiced numbers. I
was clumsy, as usual, but the teacher taught me to tell left from
right by the finger-sucking callous on my left hand. I could feel for
it, and get my pencil and scissors in my other hand and did well
enough.
The snow thawed, and, with adolescent zest, the youngest of
my big sisters, Candy, climbed out the window at night to paint
anti-Nazi slogans on sidewalks, endangering us all. My mother
came from Berlin and took charge. She exported that sister to an
English boarding school, sent my two older half-sisters to
vocational training schools, and brought my brother and me to
Berlin to assume serious studies. It was 1934; Hitler was busy
purging his National Socialist, or Nazi, party of those
disappointed by the absence of socialism in its program, and
didn’t have time to worry about Jews yet. Although my mother
was Jewish, absent my politically-hot father, we were okay for a
while.
10
II
The Berlin idea of first grade could not have differed more from
our little mountain school. No more skiing to school, no more
kindly teachers who liked little kids, no more coloring or cutting
out or reciting numbers. No more fun.
In Berlin I was assigned to the upper level of a universitypreparatory class of fifty or sixty girls, meaning that my parents
were university educated, and would likely have enough money to
send me some day to a university. Upper level was for children
who could read before starting school, and were therefore ready
for weekly dictation exercises.
Berlin school was a cheerless, serious, full-time job. Classes
occupied mornings, homework afternoons and evenings. Every
week we had exams, and were seated, back to front, according to
our previous week’s score. I was never quite the best; that was a
girl twice my size with ten times my confidence, who more often
than not had a higher score and thus sat behind me. She was calm
and pleasant, never said a mean word, but I was a bundle of
undersized nerves. Her very presence tortured me, showing me
11
and the world my inadequacy at being best, as was expected of
me, and I hated her. She was even good at “Beautiful Writing,”
my weekly downfall. Once a week we had to dip pens in inkwells
and copy something in the old German script Hitler had invoked
to make us more distinctively German, different from all the other
western countries using Latin script. This was really hard for me; I
would get ink all over my fingers, and often, my face and my
clothes. Sometimes I peeked, and my successful competitor’s
letters proceeded across the page in evenly curved strokes and
curls, unlike my assortment of smudges, blots, and sprays. I still
have trouble writing in ink. Most people put the caps of their pens
on the ends of their pens and then write. I still can’t manage that.
The cap overbalances my pen, and there I go, making a mess. The
invention of the ball point pen has helped reduce smudging, but I
still write funny in ink, and much prefer a pencil. Not a fine,
precise accountant’s pencil, or worse yet, a superfine artist’s 4H.
No, I need a soft 2B whose blurring hides the details of my
awkward script.
In my family’s view my failure to stay consistently in the back
row, week in, week out, already threatened my preordained career
as an intellectual. Bad enough that I tended to put wrong shoes on
wrong feet, was considered too small to start school a year early
like my brother and sisters; worse that I got caught reading fairy
tales instead of essays on social revolution; now flunking Beautiful
Writing forever defined me as family idiot. In other respects life
was not so bad; the mountain-town housekeeper’s compromise
breakfast followed us to Berlin, and I was no longer obliged to
share a room with my mean big brother, alternately his shadow or
his unwilling smaller twin.
It turned out that my idiot reputation entailed hidden benefits.
My mother felt sorry for me, and began treating me with the
special pity and indulgence reserved for idiots, somewhat in the
Russian fashion. For example, idiot status got me out of learning
English grammar. Sooner or later we were expecting to go to
England, and every morning during the walk to school, my
12
mother practiced boring English grammar with my smart brother,
while I was left to walk behind, pleasantly daydreaming. In the
same vein she sometimes treated me as a soothsayer, confiding
secrets to me and asking me strange questions. Thus only I knew
that in spite of our affluence, she secretly set aside a little
housekeeping money for the Zionists, and kept it in a blue star-ofDavid can she hid under her pillow.
Along with my unique idiot status came my identity as my
mother’s Jewish child. When my brother had chicken pox he got
nothing special, but when it was my chicken pox turn my mother
bought me an illustrated book of old testament stories, and told
me that I was a Jew. She did not consider her other children
particularly Jewish, just me. Once she took me out for a walk by
myself, an unheard of privilege for a fifth and youngest child, and
showed me the great green copper dome of Berlin’s main
synagogue, explaining that this was the church for Jews. Of course
she showed it to me at quite a distance, and said that as
revolutionary atheists we didn’t go there, but she wanted me to
know what it was.
III
Back to university-preparatory first-grade schooling. Several times
a week we had gym, meaning lessons in military drill and practice
of Heil Hitlering at the exact 30 degree angle above horizontal
required for parades and assemblies. Old TV series featuring
Hitler’s Germany show arms at what looks like 45° or maybe even
60, but we were coached 30. I secretly enjoyed military drill,
marching, executing right turns, left turns, and about-faces. It
seemed like a dance, and a reprieve from the confinement of my
school desk. With my finger-sucking callous guiding me, left and
right, I secretly took pride in doing it well. Of course I knew
enough to keep quiet about that at home.
13
In January of 1933 Hitler had been elected chancellor, but
there was still a parliament limiting his powers. So he busied
himself eliminating his political opposition. In February he had his
people set fire to the Reichstag, the building in which parliament
met, and blamed the fire on the communists, whom he had
arrested, thus invalidating their votes. In the next few months he
imprisoned the general leadership of the social democratic party,
his other large opponent. By 1934 he had removed most of his
opposition, and what was left of the parliament ordained him the
all-powerful Leader. Next he purged his own party of its internal
dissenters, and finally, after running out of other groups to
prosecute and invalidate, he turned to Jews, homosexuals, and
gypsies. In 1935 my mother had to give up weekend visits to my
father in England. The black-shirted SS (Schutzstaffel, meaning
guard squad) — came to search and question more often. They
usually came at night, when their black uniforms looked more
impressive. Black is a color that can easily look rather shabby in
broad daylight.
We moved every few months to delay the SS visits for a while,
and for us that meant changing schools. However, when teachers
at a new school held us up to other children’s ridicule, we were
put back into the first school, which was not yet suffering that
much Nazi zeal, although it was a much longer walk. Clearly it was
getting to be time to go.
In preparing to leave the country, step one was trips to
department stores. With three older sisters, I had never had
clothes bought new for me, let alone been taken to an actual store
to buy clothes. Once one of my sisters made me a dress as a
school project, and once my aunt made me another, and both
were landmark occasions in my otherwise routinely handed-down
wardrobe.
Off we went to a huge department store to buy everything
from coats to stockings to shoes to sweaters to sweat suits, rain
coats and boots, and warm winter underwear, and each article had
to be tried on to make sure it was at least one or two sizes too
14
large, to grow into. I soon wore out, and then felt sick. To my
brother’s delight, I threw up. The clerks didn’t get mad at me, but
reassured my apologetic mother that they understood, it was quite
all right, and they could deal with it. And they did; special men in
uniforms appeared as if by magic, efficiently spread some sawdust
or kitty litter compound, and swept all away, right in front of my
fascinated gaze. No sooner had they finished than I did it again,
and my brother and I were treated to a repeat performance. It
certainly was a restful change from being dragged from
department to department to buy clothes I could not, foreseeably,
wear.
IV
Our multiple, future clothes bought, we now had to make them
look used. At that time people leaving Germany were allowed to
take with them no more than the equivalent of about 40 current
dollars (if my inflation adjustment is nearly correct), in money or
new clothes, or whatever, so everything had to be worn once. We
had to walk around the apartment scuffing and wrinkling just a
little, while taking care to preserve their next-to-new condition to
make them useful nearly forever.
One evening we were told to keep our school clothes on, that
we were going to a friend’s home for dinner. There we were fed
and told to sleep in our friends’ beds until time to go home.
Around midnight we were woken up, dressed, driven to the train
station, put on the train, and into a compartment.
We had gone along, led here and shoved there, stupid with
sleep, and only became aware of our surroundings after the train
left the station. We found ourselves sitting on a bench in third
class, just my mother, my brother, and me. She explained that we
would be on this train for ten hours, all the way to Holland, to
Rotterdam, and there we would board a ship that would take us to
England.
15
It wasn’t our first train ride; we had gone by train twice before,
but on those occasions we had been made to sit quietly in the
overstuffed seats of first-class compartments, surrounded by
intimidating sisters and servants. Polite endurance, no fun. Third
class was much better; just wood benches with room to sit up, lie
down, swing legs, and fidget all around. And we were to sit up all
night! Cool!
Two pleasant ladies perhaps in their thirties sat on the bench
across the aisle. It turned out they had no children and, no doubt
to their eventual regret, took an interest in us. They asked about
our schooling, our likes and dislikes, and so on. Our poor, tired
mother had retreated into a corner and sat with her eyes closed,
perhaps sad about leaving Germany, and anxious about leaving it
successfully, while my brother and I, who had never been asked
our opinions about anything in our lives, emptied out our sevenand nine-year-old heads. We talked and talked. Finally toward
dawn we mercifully trickled dry and fell asleep. We slept through
the border crossing, woke up to sunny farmland, and soon arrived
at the amazingly beautiful Rotterdam station. Unlike the German
train stations we had seen, Rotterdam’s was light and sunny,
covered only by a high glass dome. Our mother was cheerful. We
were out.
We took our luggage to the docks and stashed it on our ship, a
little freighter that took just a few passengers, and that would take
us across the channel to London that night. Our mother treated us
to a rooftop open-air restaurant lunch, and as on our birthdays, we
were allowed to order our favorite dishes: my brother’s, believe it
or not, was spinach with butter and slices of egg on top, and mine,
chicken noodle soup. I still remember that marvelous soup; the
restaurant was generous with meat and noodles, unlike our cook
and housekeepers, who had skimped even when we were rich, on
orders of my chronically thrifty mother.
In the afternoon we returned to the ship and climbed into the
bunk beds of our little cabin. The ship slowly put-putted out of
the harbor, leaped into the stormy Channel, and rocked us to
16
sleep. Next morning our father met us at the dock, and we got
reacquainted during a short train ride to London. After spending a
couple of days in a friend’s loaner apartment, we were sent to
boarding school. English law limited immigrants’ working to parttime, temporary jobs and house cleaning work and our intellectual
parents sure didn’t know how to clean a house. Consequently my
father, turned part-time professor, and my art-history scholar
mother had only a room with shared bath and a hot plate. There
was neither space for us, nor servants to look after us. In any case,
English upper-class custom dictated that children be reared in
boarding schools, and wealthy English socialists, friends of my
father’s, readily contradicted their socialist philosophy and
preserved our fellow upper class status by paying our way to
private boarding schools.
V
Our school, formerly located in Germany, had catered to the
children of affluent liberal intellectuals in Germany, and when
Hitler gained power, its administrators obtained parents’
permission, and moved, lock, stock, and children, to southern
England. Most parents signed up, glad to send their children to
safety. The teachers were mixed, half speaking German, half only
English, and the children were even more mixed. Some were
German speaking, Jewish or not, and some spoke French;
together we spoke a mix of languages, a lingo we called the
“schönste Slanguage,” that is, “the most beautiful slang.”
My brother and I were separated, since the school assigned him
to live and attend classes at a cottage for older boys that was some
distance away, while I was housed and schooled with the youngest
children. Without my brother’s familiar bossing and parentallyordered servants’ strict discipline, I was frightened and begged to
leave, but after a while, freedom grew on me. This school offered
food that they thought children would like, turned kids loose on it,
17
and no one watched who ate what. For the first time in my life I
got really hungry. I ate and ate, grew a foot, and outgrew much of
the wardrobe bought and pre-wrinkled with such care in Berlin. I
rode a bike, played games, learned to print in English by copying
nursery rhymes, and left Beautiful Writing and academic
competition behind. It was a happy year.
And then it was 1936, and time to move again. We were going
to America, where my father would be a professor, teaching at a
college in Alabama. My parents gathered us up, my big sister
joined us from her boarding school, the Quakers gave me some
clothes and paid our fare, we found Alabama on a map, and we
were off.
Our journey began with a two-hour boat-train ride, London to
Southampton, the port large enough to accommodate ocean
liners, and that was some train ride. My father, brother, and I
stood in the narrow corridor outside the closed door of our
compartment, trying not to hear the tearful howls of my big sister.
Now sixteen, as soon as the train got moving, my sister loudly
asserted her right and need to stay in England. She wanted to
marry a young family friend several years older than she, and she
had to marry him so that her passionate love would rescue him
from his lifelong homosexuality. Whenever she stopped to draw
breath my mother, enclosed with her to shield my father from her
tantrum, could be heard murmuring soothingly, only triggering
renewed spates of my sister’s loud, weeping protests. She
screamed and cried all the way to Southampton, and only shut up
in time to get on the boat. Then she sulked in silence halfway
across the Atlantic.
The train pulled us onto the dock alongside the ship, but the
ship was much too large to be seen from the train. We just saw a
short bridge over a few feet of dirty water, to a large, dim hole in
its side. We followed the other passengers, with tickets, luggage
and papers in hand. Someone led us down to our little third-class
cabin, and while my parents and unforgiving sister settled in for a
week’s stay, my brother and I began timidly to explore. Following
18
our noses, we found the upper class dog kennels almost next
door, and we soon made friends with our yapping fellow travelers.
As the ship got going we began watching its progress from our
designated third class deck. Soon we worked our way higher and
higher, until we reached the social class-demarking velvet ropes
barring entrance to the upper class decks. By the time we were out
of sight of land we ducked under the ropes, perhaps sufficiently
disguised in our upper-class clothes to escape challenge. We
toured the ship, played shuffle board and ping pong, and watched
a family of porpoises leaping and playing tirelessly in front of the
bow.
A couple of days into the trip a mighty storm blew up. Sailors
locked all doors to the open upper decks and hung floor-to-ceiling
nets around the third class deck to prevent people falling
overboard. We loved the storm, we liked watching the horizon
appear and disappear, back and forth, and giggled and played ping
pong until we hit every last ball over the side. In short, we made
general pests of ourselves, taking advantage of the absence of our
parents and sister who were flaked out in bunks and deck chairs,
seasick. The ship turned south, and when the weather cleared and
turned hot, we escaped our stifling cabin below the water line and
snuck up to sleep on sofas in the airy first-class lounge.
Arrival in New York meant more herding, leading, and
shoving, through immigration lines and onto an overnight train
south to Alabama. A kind porter showed us how to convert the
Pullman seats to beds and gave us pillows. In the morning we
looked out at southern farms, so different from German farms:
crops seemed straggly and cattle were so small we thought they
might be pigs. Our porter was our guide, and pointed and
explained in what we thought was his strange dialect. He spoke
Black Southern.
We arrived, someone from the college met us, drove us across
the little town to the campus, unloaded us at our bungalow, and
we moved in and began trying to adapt.
19
None of us were fully aware that we had never before lived
together as a family, or at least, lived without the social distance of
intervening layers of servants and large physical spaces. Most of us
had had little or no contact at all in the last three years. Close up,
we barely knew one another. And there we were, all five of us in
our little house, with neither space nor servants. It was war.
21
Spy Story
A friend recently asked me what I was doing when World War II
began, and I thought, when did World War II begin? Historians
talk about the military invasions and takeovers of the 1930’s —
the Japanese in Manchuria and China, the Italians in Abyssinia, the
Germans in the Spanish Civil War, in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Most Europeans think of the invasion of Poland in 1939, while
Americans tend to think of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941,
as the time that war became worldwide and began to involve,
internationally speaking, everybody who was anybody.
For me, World War II began in 1932, when I was four and my
brother was a sophisticated five and a half. We were living in
Silesia, a state on the German-Polish border. The land sits on coal
mines, and changes hands in every war, and for that reason is
inhabited alternately by indignant Germans and discontented
Poles, or by resentful Poles and bitter Germans. When I was born,
Silesia was uneasily German, and ripe for early Nazi picking. They
picked, and the changes of war soon involved everyone in my little
world.
My father was the governor. From a child’s point of view that
meant that we lived in a government-owned mansion set in an
enclosed park. Our mother was CEO of a host of specialists,
cook, maids, gardener, ironer, and so on, that maintained us and
the establishment. It included a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, and
the car, the chauffeur, his wife and his child lived in a garagecottage on the grounds.
From post-toddler time on, we kids usually were just turned
loose on the estate. My role was evading our mother’s overfeeding strategies, and following my brother around. We would
visit the cook for snacks not on the maternal approved food list,
or head for the basement for a chat in the laundry department.
Summers we spent out in the park, pretending to live the fantasies
22
and stories we read about life in days of yore. We could read;
when we were perhaps three and four, our school-going big
sisters, tired of our pestering to be read to, must have taught us.
We read and read, from Grimm to Robin Hood to the adventures
of Till Eulenspiegel, and we played knights and robbers and police
and war. We heard our parents discussing current events and had
some vague ideas about political goings on, without understanding
their significance for us.
The war, which had us living in hiding for the next three years,
began when our chauffeur told my parents that he and his wife
and child had been threatened, and that the Nazis had ordered
him to quit his job immediately, move out, and join the Nazi
party. He was very sorry, but for the welfare of his wife and child
he had to go. My parents sadly said yes, they understood. “There’s
something else,” he said. “The car is to go with me. You are still
governor, and they will send another car and chauffeur.”
My father called the household together to tell us. “We will get
another car and chauffeur. Now, this is important. The new
chauffeur will be a Nazi spy. He will drive us around, but he will
really be here to spy on us, to find out information against us, and
report it to his Nazi bosses. Most likely he will hang around the
house and gardens even when there is no need to drive us. We will
have to be careful not to say anything at all about our family or
politics in front of him. If he asks anything, just say you don’t
know.”
A spy! My brother and I were enthralled. A spy, a spy! A real,
live spy! How could we be so lucky? Forgotten were our life-long
chauffeur, his little boy, my parents’ sadness, and the servants’
fear. We lived in thrilled anticipation of our very own spy, right
here. What do real spies do? How do they spy? My brother began
plotting strategies for counterespionage, that is, to spy on the spy.
Our spy arrived, driving a blue sedan that did not have room
for all of us. Unlike our old chauffeur, who wore regular clothes,
our spy wore a blue military-style uniform with pants like riding
breeches, and boots. It was summer, and the uniform coat must
23
have been hot; he soon put it away and wore an ordinary shirt
with his military pants held up by suspenders. I suppose an adult
might have described our spy as young, barely past teenage, stocky
and strong, and behind superficial bravado, insecure and lonely.
He wasn’t used to a governor’s mansion, and had what the
servants called “peasant manners.” He didn’t blow his nose with a
handkerchief, he spat on the ground, and he urinated openly in
the garden. The other servants — maids, laundresses, gardeners
— who kept one another company, withdrew into polite silence in
his presence, and he was uncomfortable with them. Mostly he just
walked around the gardens. We watched.
When we got tired of peeking at him and went to get
acquainted, he welcomed our company. He wanted to be friends,
and asked to be on a first-name basis with us. His questions to us
were few and simple. “What’s that? A gooseberry bush? And that?
Is it a love apple?” he asked, pointing to tomatoes in the vegetable
garden. He said they were poisonous, and no one should eat them.
“You are going in to take a bath? You took one only yesterday.
You will get sick.” We had many more questions for him than he
had for us. “You don’t live here, like our old chauffeur,” we said.
“Where do you go at night?” “I go home to my parents. But first I
go to a meeting. I have to see important people.” “You mean with
our father?” “No, with other people. We are Nazis,” he said
proudly. “Why do you pee like that? Why don’t you to go to the
toilet like we do?” we wanted to know. “You see I am on duty, I
am on duty all the time.” “Where is your handkerchief?” “I don’t
have one.” “How do you like it here? Will you play with us? What
games can you play? Can you play robbers and police? Why do
you wear those pants? Are you going to ride a horse? Are you in
the army? What do your parents do? Why do they do that? Why
don’t you have a handkerchief? Would you like mine? Did you eat
lunch? Was it a good lunch? When you go home, do you tell your
parents about us? Would they like us? Will they come and visit
us?” And on and on and on. We were our poor young spy’s
constant companions, following his every step, talking to him
24
incessantly. He hardly had a minute free for spying. I wonder what
he reported to his Nazi boss.
25
Uncle Albert
My father and his younger brother, Albert, were always very close.
Albert never married, and in his forties, the years when I knew
him, my parents were his only significant others. To be sure, he
had many friends, and he was godfather to several of their
children — everybody’s uncle. A permanent housekeeper came in
daily to look after him, and although they had a pleasant working
relationship, basically he lived alone. In personal habits Uncle
Albert was conservative. He wore dark, pinstriped suits complete
with vests, white shirts, and ties, in any weather. His chin always
seemed freshly shaven, and his small mustache was trimmed of
each millimeter that it grew. A razor-sharp part disciplined his
cowlick and divided his hair smoothly on the left, in a style that
was said to be the standard German army officer’s haircut.
In the first World War Uncle Albert had indeed been an officer
in the German cavalry, an identity that he never quite lost,
however much he joked about it in talking to us children. He
spent the war, he told us, sitting on a horse. He and his horse were
26
stationed in a supervisory role behind the front lines, where he
was not very much concerned with protecting himself from
enemy fire. What he feared more was collision with other cavalry
officers and their horses. A broken knee from horse-to-horse
collisions, he said, was an ever-present danger for cavalry officers.
The risk was especially acute in cavalry parades, which required
horses to be ridden lined up and close together.
So Officer Albert — I don’t know his rank — spent four
boring years astride a horse, surveying whatever warfare was going
on in front of him. Naturally everything he saw, he saw over,
between and around his horse’s ears. After a while he began to
notice that his horse’s ears moved. He almost forgot to look at the
war; he became more and more engrossed in watching his horse’s
ears. His horse, he observed, could turn his ears forward,
backward, to the sides, singly and together. When feeling mean, as
when poked excessively by an officer’s sharp spurs, he could
flatten them right down. He could twitch them in any position.
Pretty soon Uncle Albert thought, maybe I can do that. If the
horse can do it, maybe I can learn to do it too, and he began trying
to feel the position of his ears. Uncle Albert said he spent much of
the rest of the war working on moving his ears, in imitation of his
horse. Three years of practice eventually made him a virtuoso of
ear waggle. Fifteen years after the war ended, Uncle Albert was
still able to move his ears on demand: up and down, back and
forth, stick out a bit, withdraw a little, one at a time or both
together, and we could never get enough of watching him
perform.
We lived in a nearby town, but I don’t remember Uncle Albert
visiting us. Occasionally we were taken to visit him, never at his
apartment, always at his job. Basically, his job was his life. He was
editor-in-chief of the Breslauer Zeitung, the second or third largest
newspaper in Germany, and he was proud of it. When we visited
he would show us all around the working newspaper. As chief he
had a beautiful high corner office, whose tall windows overlooked
the old city of Breslau. We began the tour with the view of
27
rooftops, trees, and famous old buildings from his office. From
there we worked our way down, through large rooms with many
desks and their busy occupants and a few partitioned-off offices.
The next level down were men sitting at large machines. I don’t
remember what they were called or the explanation of their
function, but assume it had something to do with typesetting.
From there we went on down to the basement, to the press room,
my favorite part of the tour.
The press room was one and a half stories tall, smelled a little
oily, and accommodated a single inhabitant, a huge, complicated
machine that had a great roll of blank paper at one end. The
monster machine was quiet while we walked all around it, and
when we had been herded well back of a safety barrier, Uncle
Albert would push the big green ON button. With an incredibly
noisy sigh and grind and clatter the machine began to function,
each component apparently working somewhat independently of
its neighbors. Nevertheless, the motions seemed to be
coordinated, as we caught glimpses of paper here and there,
moving along, always in the same general direction. Finally, at the
far end, the machine dropped out a neatly assembled, folded,
ready-for-delivery day’s newspaper. I am told, and indeed I saw in
the movie, The Paper, which featured a newspaper press, that this
part of newspaper production has remained essentially unchanged
in the 65 or so years that have elapsed since Uncle Albert
controlled the ON and OFF buttons for our visits.
Uncle Albert and his editorial policies were staunchly Social
Democrat, i.e. socialist. In 1933 Hitler’s Nazis managed to form a
majority coalition in the Reichstag, the German parliament, and
right away they moved to ensure lasting power by taking control
of the police and the Gestapo (the acronym for the secret police,
i.e. the German version of our FBI). Hitler set the police and the
Gestapo to work nationwide implementing mass arrests of his
political opponents. Albert thought, rightly, that sooner or later
they would come to arrest him, and he had a special fountain pen
built with a button that could spray some kind of gas at arresting
28
officers. It would emit a toxic cloud to distract the police,
permitting him to get away. How he planned to run anywhere
from his fifth floor corner office, and where he might run to, was
obscure. Fifteen years after getting off his horse and becoming an
intellectual, it was not even clear that he was in shape to run
anywhere. As it turned out these questions were moot. The day he
was arrested he left the pen in his other suit.
29
Letters from Prison
Albert was arrested in June, 1933, and after a short stay in the
local jail was transferred to a concentration camp, which at that
time was not the horror setting of later years. The Nazis were just
beginning to figure out what to do with their suddenly burgeoning
prison population, and regulations were largely those of the liberal
Weimar Social Democratic republic. Much like United States
penitentiaries of that era, prisoners could receive mail, but were
allowed to write to only one correspondent. Uncle Albert chose
my mother as his prison correspondent. He wrote her regularly
and reliably, and somehow, in her travels and subsequent moves,
perhaps accidentally, she saved the letters. Two generations later
my nephew, a history enthusiast who doesn’t read German, found
the collection. He xeroxed the lot and sent them to me. They
show some careful restriction to mundane matters, in order to
avoid the interference of the censor. My nephew was
disappointed.
Nevertheless, Uncle Albert’s letters are not without value. They
offer a view of prison life in a time when all German life was
undergoing the fluctuations and changes of becoming a Nazi state.
To find a context for the letters I looked up Erv Goffman’s
book, Asylums, particularly his chapters on Total Institutions –
prisons, monasteries, mental hospitals, etc. – and their effects on
inmates. Accordingly I added some commentary after significant
letters. The occasional remarks in brackets within the letters are
mine. Salutations and closes are so similar that I omitted most of
them.
Uncle Albert had an income, comprised of his World War I
officer’s pension and, I believe, unemployment compensation.
Prisoners arrested on political grounds who lost their professional
incomes thereby were considered involuntarily unemployed and
accordingly were paid quite good compensation.
30
August 13, 1933
My dear Sophie,
Last Thursday I was suddenly transferred to the Breslau
concentration camp and the same evening brought to Concentration
Camp Esterwegen-Hümmling near Osnabrück. Please give the
address to Uncle Adolf in Hanover.
Adolf was part of Uncle Albert’s paternal family of influential
Nationalists. In the early thirties Hitler depended on his coalition
with the Nationalist party, and Albert hopes the Hanover relatives
will bring pressure to obtain his release.
August 20, 1933
I still don’t know the reason for my imprisonment, although
tomorrow I will have been in prison for eight weeks.
Now I have all sorts of requests for a package. Nothing
perishable, nothing to smoke!
I. From my apartment: My light-colored summer suit pants and
two pairs of long socks; also the blue-gray hat and the dark blue
dress shirt. My thick dress socks. A cotton shirt. Handkerchiefs.
II. Newly bought: pocket mirror and nail file. 3-4 razor blades.
Nail brush. ½ pound sugar, 1 small can of butter, 10 envelopes, 10
sheets of paper, 6 postcards, 6 12-penny stamps, 2 bars of mocha
chocolate, 1 hard sausage, toilet paper, 1 tube shaving cream,
marmalade, 3 lemons.
I am quite all right. The work is still hard on me, but I am
getting used to it. Construction is almost finished, and the camp will
soon be more habitable. Naturally I miss a lot of things, particularly
reading and mental stimulation, but under the circumstances I
actually can’t complain. I can adjust to this kind of life and in
general it is orderly and decent in camp. Certainly I have found
enough old acquaintances here. If this doesn’t last too long, I’m sure I
will hold out. It is similar to being at the front as a young soldier,
when we had to dig trenches. It is true that I am 17-18 years older
now and a war veteran but I hope to make it this time again. So you
needn’t worry about my personal well-being.
31
Superficially Uncle Albert’s shopping list seems absurd,
including as it does things that hardly seem essential to life.
However, as Goffman pointed out, losing one’s life-style can be
felt as a threat to one’s identity. The inmate’s identity is offended
even further when he is forced to engage in activities that are not
compatible with his conception of himself.
On a deeper level, then, the shopping list items are needed to
help Uncle Albert hold on to his concept of himself in the face of
all he has lost. With them, he is still, at least, a man who eats
butter and marmalade and chocolate and wears dress shirts.
From now on all letters are stamped “Seen” and initialed,
taking away even the appearance of privacy.
October 19, 1933 postcard
I was suddenly moved to Concentration Camp LichtenbergPretin. Please send some food and some more underwear. A tube of
toothpaste and a toothbrush. Further, my warm winter slippers.
Chocolate, bonbons, and from now on also smoking materials, as we
are now allowed to smoke. Tobacco and a new pipe.
Goffman states that in all total institutions – prisons,
monasteries, mental hospitals, etc. – systematic humiliation of
inmates is designed to demoralize them, making them manageable
by relatively few staff or guards. Although Uncle Albert is now
allowed to smoke and asks for smoking things, his shopping lists
never include matches. Prisoners presumably have to ask a guard
for a match which, presumably, the guard can bestow or refuse. A
further mortification is the withholding of information by those in
charge, so that the individual who previously decided on many of
his own actions is now subject to others’ decisions and has no say
in his fate.
32
November 20, 1933
Dear Albert,
It’s been 9 days since I visited you but I’ve had no news of you.
The powers of attorney we were expecting have not arrived. So we are
very worried about you. What’s wrong? Are you seriously ill so you
weren’t able to see to it that the powers of attorney would be sent? I
have still not paid your life insurance. As I have already paid out
over 60 Mark for you, and as next week your rent is due, it would
be good if the power of attorney finally came.
Did you get the food package from Adolf? And the one with
warm clothes from Emmy Kahn? She’s an acquaintance from
Hanover whose husband died and would like to send warm clothes to
you and maybe your comrades.
No good news from Hedwig. She writes: “We’re thinking of you
with such good wishes for you and yours, and I can’t tell you how sad
it makes me to stand aside and not be able to do anything. We’re
living just with our nose out of water, and we’re glad of every week
that goes safely by.” That doesn’t sound good. I don’t know what is
to be done. What safe outcome do you imagine?
With us nothing has changed. Hermann works every day in the
state library for a couple of hours and I write endless, useless
correspondence and seek work but without elan or conviction. We
have good news about the children; they are healthy. Have you gotten
the nice letters from the children in the meantime?
We have considered which address you should use when you are
released. I think it would be best if you gave Uncle Dölle as your
home address. I have located a few room and board places for 120
M. Of course, you must say that Uncle Dölle is only your temporary
mailing address, and that you will register in Berlin as soon as you
have rented a place. That way no difficulties can arise.
33
Did you get over your cold? If only we had news of you.
Your Sophie
Many heartfelt greetings!
Hermann1
The collection includes a single letter from my mother to Uncle
Albert in which she wrote all about current political and social
reality. It appears that the poor censor looked at this letter, gave
up on blacking it all out, and just sent it back to her. It provides
the only clue to everything my uncle so carefully did not say in his
correspondence.
December 2, 1933
I don’t know if I will be released before Christmas….
It is not allowed to have other letters included in your letter. They
count as separate letters, and since I can only receive one per month,
it can happen that I don’t get any letter.
The new government decided to cope with its prison
overpopulation arbitrarily, by just letting many prisoners go for
Christmas. Uncle Albert’s repetitions of rules, of shopping lists,
and problems created when my mother followed the spirit more
than the exact letter of the rules, indicate fear that he would not be
included among those released.
December 23, 1933
The great discharge from prison is over but didn’t touch me. I am
still here and now I guess that’s that. So I must and I will accept it,
even though it is hard.
Please don’t forget to renew the subscription to the Frankfurter
Zeitung.
P.S. Just now several more releases were announced, among them
five Breslauers. But not me.
After his release from prison, Hermann spent several months in Berlin
keeping a low profile before beginning his exile in England.
1
34
December 27, 1933.
You will have noticed by now that I wasn’t released. I was given
special permission to write a New Year’s letter.
The releases were much more numerous than we expected, and
now there are just a little over one third of us left. The more painful
that I was not part of it. To be frank, I really don’t understand it,
because there was nothing specific against me. I would be very grateful
if you went to see the commissioner Dr. Langenfeldt in Breslau on
your return trip.
Have you ordered the Frankfurter Zeitung?
When Uncle Albert missed out on the December prisoner
release, he seems to feel entitled to compensatory favors. His
letters take on a different tone, more as though he is instructing an
employee. For example, he writes, please renew my newspaper in
one letter, and in the next, asks, Did you?
Goffman calls such behavior shamelessness, reflecting the
demoralization of inmates, much of whose self concept has been
taken away.
January 21, 1934
We are allowed from now on 2 letters per month to write and
receive.
February 6, 1934
Too bad you didn’t come on Sunday, but quite right that you
saved yourself the trip, since your work is so exhausting. You have
been through so much in the last year that you desperately need the
rest.
Would you mind writing again to Fritz Voigt in Oppenau-beiBreslau, to see if he can again approach the Breslau Fire Chief
Kaiser about my case? … Mrs. Kaiser as you know was our
childhood playmate. Maybe that would work.
35
February 12, 1934
Well, now, what happened to the food package?…
In this next package I ask for the usual, and one dose of
vegetable laxative. Further: prunes and stuff for smoking. But only a
little chocolate and bonbons. I think they didn’t agree with me. But
lots of condensed milk and also some sugar. Then, a little bottle of
cologne 4711. [War is hell!] I also need a new pad of letter writing
paper, shoe polish, brown shoe laces, razor blades. I thank you for all
your love and kindness.
March 8, 1934
Meanwhile have you heard anything from my former colleague
Walter Ludwig, who was released from here the first half of
February? He wanted to get in touch with you after talking to Dr.
Langsfeld in Breslau, to let you know the recommendations about
next steps to take. He [Walter] told me that if I had not been
released by the end of February, then you should again go to Dr.
Langsfeld in Breslau. Were you perhaps in Breslau on the last
visiting day when you didn’t come?
My health is not good….
This letter is repetitious and markedly less well organized than
the preceding letters. In it Albert casually asks his sister-in-law to
take a 400-mile round trip in his behalf. It’s a wonder she didn’t
crown him with a bottle of 4711, quite a fancy cologne. I think she
was aware of all the privations and humiliations he endured
without complaint, and felt so sorry for him that she tolerated his
behavior without criticism.
April 9, 1934
The payment for insurance is again due, 30.60 M for the second
quarter of 1934. You know the address.
In view of later developments in Nazi Germany it now seems
ridiculous that Albert is maintaining his life insurance, but the
letter shows that he continues to believe in the German
36
bureaucracy, and that he will get out of prison if only the right file
gets to the right official.
June 24, 1934
Many thanks for your dear letter which showed me how much
trouble you have again taken for me…. What you are reporting is
still quite vague, but allows hope. About Hildegard [an aunt or
cousin, known as a gutsy, practical member of the Hanover family], I
was quite moved. I hadn’t seen her in more than 30 years and only
recall her as a young girl of 10-12 years. Altogether we wrote to each
other for two years. Please tell her my best thanks and how much her
sympathy moved me, and say heartiest regards. That she got
acquainted with Margarete [wife of fellow prisoner] is a funny
coincidence.
Also many thanks for the English books, I can only work in
them a little as my time for that is quite restricted…. Hanne writes
very nicely already. And I am glad that Candida is well and happy.
July 28, 1934
It is very nice of Hildegard that she concerns herself with my case.
Many thanks for her.
August 17, 1934
I thank you for your renewed efforts which perhaps may be timely
and may this time turn out well. I am not as optimistic as you, but
hope also that this time it works. If I only knew why I alone of all
the Breslauers have to wait so long. What kind of answer did
Hildegard get?
August 6th was Julius’s [younger half-brother, a Nazi] birthday.
This time I did not write and did not send a greeting. For the first
time in my life. But I thought I would keep quiet this time.
As soon as she learned of Uncle Albert’s imprisonment Aunt
Hildegard, known for practical, no-nonsense interventions in
family situations, but whom Albert had almost forgotten,
37
mobilized the Hanover relations in no uncertain terms. The rich
and famous family powers almost immediately intervened, and
Uncle Albert was released at the end of August.
When he was released from prison Uncle Albert moved in with
us, my mother, my brother, and me. The rest of the family had
scattered, some to schools, some to England. Albert slept in an
alcove just off the living room, a space probably meant to be a
small den or office. He seemed older, more nervous, quieter, less
interested in us than the Uncle we had known two years before.
Of course we hadn’t known him very well; in his view our names
were “the children,” and in ours he had just been a well-dressed,
pleasant chief of his newspaper empire, seen briefly perhaps twice
a year, who indulged our requests to wiggle his ears. That was all.
Uncle Albert never talked about his imprisonment and the
impact of its nearly overwhelming privations and intrusions on his
life, but sometimes its effect surfaced. Once we got home from
school a little early and found him nervously taking his bedding
apart, shaking everything out, inspecting it. Normally our
housekeeper made up the beds. We asked, What are you doing?
Looking for bedbugs, he said. It’s important to look for bedbugs.
What are bedbugs? we asked. The question made him more
nervous, and he just looked harder.
Pretty soon Uncle Albert’s life with us settled into a steady
routine. He slept until twelve or one in the afternoon, searched his
bed, and then groomed and dressed himself as meticulously as
ever, suit, vest, tie, calf-high socks fastened by means of little
garter belts. He moved to the dining room to eat a lengthy,
thoughtful breakfast of rolls, butter, his favorite smelly cheese,
and tea. Then the maid cleared that off and he read the Frankfurter
Zeitung cover to cover, while my brother and I did our everlasting
homework all afternoon. My mother worked in an office all day
(and past our bedtime).
In the winter of 1934-35, five afternoons a week, Uncle Albert
ate his breakfast and read his newspaper along one side of the
table, while my brother and I worked on the other. You might
38
think we became well acquainted, even warmly friendly under the
circumstances. We did not. Aloofly depressed and preoccupied, he
seldom spoke to us, and we rarely bothered him.
Hitler’s influence on German society expanded to invade more
and more of our daily lives. In school we marched in military drill.
We learned to write in the distinctive, archaic German script
Hitler substituted for the Latin script used by our parents and
most of Europe. On Sundays every household was required to eat
a simple dinner cooked in a single pot, and a uniformed Nazi went
door to door inspecting kitchens and collecting the 50 cents
families were supposed to save by eating stew. Sometimes Hitler
made a speech in the park near our apartment, and we heard the
roar of the crowd. Swastika flags flew everywhere.
In 1935 Hitler, now in total control of the government, got
around to Jews. All non-Jewish kids had to join the Hitler Youth,
a militarized, uniformed version of boy and girl scouts. Jews were
not allowed to join, but half Jews were offered a choice.
Occasionally half Jewish children who didn’t understand joined,
only to find themselves grossly mistreated. At the school near our
house Nazi teachers picked on us, and we had to walk a long way
to another school that still tolerated Jewish children. My mother
began preparing to move to England, taking us shopping for
warm clothes a size too large.
In the evenings, after we went to bed, my mother and Uncle
Albert sometimes talked about current events and their
implications. My brother and I shared a bedroom, and before
falling asleep, we often eavesdropped on their discussions. They
commiserated about the present goings on and talked in sympathy
about the loss of their past lives, but whenever their talk moved to
the future, they argued. My mother’s dialogue would move among
contentions such as, Why do you think I sent you English books
in prison? So you would refresh and practice your English, of
course. You know that sooner or later we have to move to
England. Circumstances here have not improved; in fact, things
keep getting worse. Very soon life will be too dangerous here, and
39
we will have to leave. Of course we want you to come with us.
You can teach, you can lecture, you can work as a journalist; surely
you can earn enough to support yourself. It will not be safe in
Germany. Please, do come with us.
And Uncle Albert countered, clinging to his belief in the
German properly regulated law-and-order system, even in the face
of his year’s experience of being governed, from the pettiest
details of his imprisonment to the fact of the imprisonment itself,
by political or capricious, arbitrary lawless bureaucratic whim. No,
he persisted. No. This is my home, my fatherland, be it right or
wrong. Now it is wrong, so very wrong. Nevertheless, I was an
army officer, and it is my duty to stay. Someone has to stay to
rebuild Germany when this is over. Don’t worry about me. I have
my pension and compensation. I will fit in and be respectable.
This is a phase that will run its course, and when people come to
realize how wrong the Nazis are, society will reorganize itself
properly. Hitler can’t kill all of us, he didn’t even keep most of us
in prison. You are Jewish, and you had better go, but I will wait it
out. No, I will not go.
However briefly Uncle Albert was once a revolutionary, at
heart he was a conformist. He hated Hitler and all he stood for,
but he was born a Prussian officer and a gentleman, and a
Prussian officer and gentleman he would die.
We left, and Uncle Albert returned to Breslau, where he felt at
home. He rented an apartment, took his furniture and belongings
out of storage, renewed the services of his housekeeper, and
settled in. During the war he participated in an underground
conduit that managed to send messages in and out of the country
by way of Switzerland. He died of lung cancer just as the war was
ending in Europe.
41
Tales from Childhood
When I look back on my life, I sometimes think that it progressed
through a series of small and large challenges and problems. My
personal universe was not always generous and kind.
First there was the date of my birth. My father, a squeamish,
non-practicing doctor, and his best friend, a doctor who was not
squeamish, would get together for an evening of schnapps and
talk, and ended the party by dealing with any medical problems in
the family. We would be woken up to have our throats inspected,
inflamed eardrums lanced, and so on. The night I was born they
decided I was overdue and that a Caesarian was in order, and so
off to the hospital to get me out. I turned out to be quite small.
How interesting, they said, and debated eight and a half months
versus nine and didn’t look at the clock. Next day my father
picked one of the dates, before or after that midnight, for my civil
birth certificate, and forgot and put the other date on the police
form. Germany was nothing if not officious, and identity was
ascertained, certified, duplicated, and guaranteed. My contradicted
date of birth followed me through four schools in two countries.
United States Immigration picked one, and determined the date of
my birth when I was nine.
My parents brought me home from the hospital and showed
me to my eighteen-month-old brother, who said, “Throw it
away,” and tried to carry out that idea so persistently that I was
kept locked away until I outgrew his ability to pick me up. My
father was rich, and governor of a state, and like many wealthy
people my parents delegated child rearing to servants. Much of the
time my brother and I were left unsupervised, and the best
solution seemed to be to lock me up. I graduated to the safety of a
play pen, but when I was two, and released more or less to his
custody, my brother grabbed me and broke my arm. I evaded
further destruction until I was four, when he did it again, and then
42
I solved the problem. My forearm in its plaster of Paris cast
functioned as a sledge hammer; every time my brother came
within reach I hit him with it. For two months he lived in terror,
and he never broke any part of me again.
Another problem was dolls. Due to my father’s position
people came to curry favor, and brought gifts for the generic
children. My brother got things like toy swords, and I, the generic
girl, got girl dolls. We were coached to thank all givers, but those
blank-faced dolls really made me mad. I would scowl and mutter
“kill, kill,” and take them to our nursery-play room, grab them by
the heels, and smash their heads against a wall. My brother did
have a tender side. He kept a doll hospital and when I smashed
them, he carefully picked up my victims, bandaged and taped
them back together, and gently put them to bed in his hospital.
Not that I lacked a maternal, tender side; I just hated those
dolls. I looked after stuffed animals, and once was said to have
brought in a bucket of earthworms from the garden to be my pets.
I was washing them in the bathtub when a maid saw me and
intervened.
Mostly being left to cope unsupervised with my assigned role
of pseudo-twinship with my bigger, smarter, older brother
probably exacerbated my natural self-assertiveness. Somebody had
to look out for me, and absent anyone else on the job, it was up to
me. The issue came up even before I beat up my brother with my
plaster of Paris arm. When I was maybe three going on four my
mother noticed that I was small, cute, and had blonde ringlets, and
took me along as a prop when she went to lecture to a large
women’s group. She told me to sit in my small chair on the stage,
and then she stood in front and talked. And talked. And talked.
Finally she stopped for breath, and I stepped to her side and
announced loud and clear that she had talked enough, and now it
was my turn to speak. It broke up the meeting, and ended my
stage career. It does not pay to upstage the star.
My self-concept was set: I was small, loud, and self assertive,
traits that sometimes paid off later in life. I asked for what I
43
wanted and, often as not, asking paid off. For example, when the
University put on an expensive concert series whose ticket price
was out of sight, I went to the administrator of the concerts and
asked for a free ticket. He sputtered, turned purple in rage, and
roared, “That’s the trouble with you goddam communists, you
always want something for nothing! Here’s your ticket, and don’t
do that again!” The concerts were great.
My family celebrated two Christian holidays in their fashion. That
is, my wealthy, Prussian aristocratic, social revolutionist atheist
father and my Polish-Austrian-Bavarian, Jewish revolutionist
atheist mother devised their own rituals for these occasions.
At Easter we had an Easter egg hunt. The Easter Bunny hid
colored eggs during the night, and Easter morning all five of us,
big sisters, my brother and I, cheered on by our parents’ “warmer”
and “colder” feedback, collected them. Sometimes we found an
old egg or two my parents had forgotten about the year before.
Then we all ate Easter eggs for breakfast. They weren’t very good,
hard boiled and dry, but they beat the slab of sour rye bread and
apple breakfast I was usually stuck with, and the hunt was exciting.
The Easter Bunny also left good children gifts. My teenage sisters
got dresses, and my brother and I each got a toy and a chocolate
rabbit. Chocolate was a rare treat at our house. Saint Nicholas
only put oranges and nuts in our shoes; Santa Claus didn’t do us
much better, and, with our chocolate hopes fixed on the Easter
Bunny, we even stopped squabbling for a week.
One Easter the Easter Bunny left me a big brown bunny,
heavier than usual. Happily I figured it to be solid chocolate, and
not the hollow kind that collapses right after you eat the ears. “It’s
mine, and you didn’t get one,” I gleefully told my brother. More
experienced in Easter Bunny gift variants, he tried to tell me it
wasn’t chocolate, but I thought he was just trying to trick me into
giving him some. I licked the outside and got nothing, so I
decided that the chocolate must be under the bunny-look coating,
44
and took a big bite. I chewed and swallowed, and bit again and
swallowed, and no matter how bad it tasted, I was hell bent on
both finding chocolate, and proving my big brother wrong.
Finally, foaming at the mouth and blowing bubbles, I tearfully
admitted it was soap. How could the Easter Bunny disguise soap
as chocolate? Was that Bunny dumb enough to think children
would like soap?
Christmas was another baffling occasion. On Christmas Eve
the servants set up a big Christmas tree and clamped small candle
holders to its branches. Then the maids took my brother and me
off to the nursery, bathed us, dressed us in our best clothes, and
led us back to join our big sisters and parents at the tree. The
candles had been lit, the lights turned off, and the tree was
mysterious and beautiful. The servants were called in and we all
joined hands in a large, egalitarian circle around the tree to sing
songs of Christmas and revolution: Oh, Christmas Tree, the
Marseillaise, Silent Night, and the Internationale. Santa Claus came
in and handed out gifts to everybody. And then lights were turned
on, candles were snuffed out, servants were dismissed, and the
usual social class distinctions settled back into place.
Getting lost was another problem for me. Like many
governors’ families we lived in a mansion so large that we only
lived in the first floor. Even so, I used to get lost in it. My brother,
with his eighteen-month head start, knew his way around the
house and estate pretty well, and most of the time I just trailed
after him without paying attention to our route, but when he
began school I was on my own. Sooner or later I would take a
wrong turn and land in strange territory. So many rooms, half of
them unfamiliar: family dining room, state dining room, living
room, reception room, various studies and bedrooms, sewing
room, nursery, multiple terraces, kitchen, and more. My brother
was pretty mean, but I missed his guidance getting from nursery
to lunch and from sandbox to bathroom.
The next spring my brother turned six and was supposed to
learn to swim. The lessons were given on the big river that ran
45
past the other side of town, and on Saturday afternoons we were
loaded into the car, with a suitable delegation of maids, and driven
to a dock on the river. My brother was stripped to a swim suit,
and a harness was strapped tightly around his belly and chest. A
loop on its back held a large hook at the end of a line that was
fastened to a fishing pole. Then my poor fat brother, goose
bumps and all, was lowered over the side of the dock six or eight
feet down into black, bottomless water. The teacher held the
fishing rod so my brother’s arms, legs, and belly were immersed,
and the lesson began. “One! Two! Three!” yelled the teacher, and
my brother flailed out arms and legs and tried to keep his face out
of water. “No! No!” bawled the coach. “Exactly on my count!
One! Two! Three!” And on, until my brother was reeled back onto
the dock, blue and shivering, and was wrapped in towels and
rubbed dry.
True, my brother exploited his superiority in size and
experience to tease, belittle, torture, beat and lead me into trouble,
but he was also my constant companion, and seeing him so
nakedly awkward, frightened, and mistreated made me feel sorry
for him. Being too delicate, thin, and small for either school or
swimming kept me safe that year, and a touch of pity and kindness
crept into my teasing and defensive relationship to him.
The fall I turned five the National Socialists, called Nazis for
short, took over the local state government by force. One day my
father came home mid-morning looking upset. He said the Nazis
had forced him out of his office. He had just been reelected, but
they said that didn’t matter, he was out. They gave us a short time
to pack up and go. My parents sat together looking glum for a
long time, and for once my brother and I were quiet and stopped
quarreling.
A small town that had been under my father’s jurisdiction
elected him mayor, and we prepared to move there. In a scene
that was to be repeated through the next few years my mother and
46
the servants packed up. The grand-scale-of-living things, the state
dining and reception room furniture, the china for fifty, the
library, all was packed, indexed, and labeled for retrieval in the
future. Equipment essential for family living was sent to the
apartment we would occupy in the new town. As I watched my
world being taken apart and familiar servants leaving, I ran from
room to room in confusion and panic, looking for my mother to
take charge and put life back in place. She went on packing, and I
cried.
When all was packed we took a short train ride to the new
town. My parents and sisters complained about the new
apartment, but I found that it suited me. The mansion had been
something like a dark museum, filled with fine furniture and
precious heirlooms, and I was clumsy and forever in trouble for
knocking into something. The apartment was more open and
sunny, and its furnishings were not so many, and not so valuable. I
could get around in it without collisions and scoldings. With only
one or two servants, family life flourished, and I felt that maybe I
belonged in it.
We had only been there for a few months, however, when
Hitler ordered my father’s arrest. The police apologized,
continued calling him “Mayor,” and made him comfortable in a
large prison cell furnished like a bed-sitting room, but did not
allow him to come home. We were welcome to visit, and we
walked over to have tea and cake with him every afternoon. My
brother and sister went to school, and for a couple of months our
lives re-stabilized.
In March Hitler gained absolute power and the next day the
chief of police told my father that the Gestapo were coming for
him, and turned him loose to catch the train to Berlin, and hide
there. When we came for afternoon tea he was gone. The next day
we saw his picture on the front page, standing between the
Gestapo agents who had arrested him at the Berlin station. He
was imprisoned, and not in a tea-and-cake, family-visits jail.
47
The town let us stay on through the spring, while my mother
worried and worked out arrangements for us. In June she said,
“Now they’ve got Albert, too,” and we knew she meant that our
uncle had also gone to prison. Again my mother and a servant
sorted, packed up, listed, indexed, and stored the remaining
household. My oldest sisters came home from boarding school,
and the five of us were sent by ourselves to a summer camp while
my mother went to Berlin to work for my father’s release.
Germany had been such a strict law-and-order society, that my
mother believed that my father had to face charges, and attorneys
could present an effective legal defense. She only found out
gradually that charges and legalities had nothing to do with who
was in prison and who got out.
In the mansion I had led a rather isolated, constricted life. My
teenage sisters were absorbed in their own pursuits; my socializing
was restricted to my big brother, my territory to the bounds of the
mansion and walled estate. Whenever my brother and I came to
our parents’ attention it was usually due to rule infractions, and we
were scolded and sometimes spanked. By the time I was five I had
begun to relate to authority adults with a hasty mental search for
possible accusations and suitable excuses with which to fend off
scoldings and beatings. The other adults in my universe were
servants, pleasant, distant, and inferior. Once I was taken to a
children’s party at a house nearby, and when I lost sight of my
brother I was overwhelmed by panic. The chauffeur was sent for
to take me home. Altogether, I was poorly prepared for the big
wide world of summer camp.
Led by our oldest sister we arrived at the camp, which was a
terrifying swarm of children of all ages and sizes managed by a
handful of adult strangers. They sorted us into age groups, and I
hardly ever saw my brother and sisters after that. Chances are my
brother took the opportunity to dump me; after all, my tagging
after him must have been an embarrassment. Two factors helped
me to survive: one was the length of summer camp in Germany,
which was defined by the end of school in early summer and its
48
resumption in late summer. It only lasted about six weeks. The
other factor was my size. I was a frail, small, frightened five year
old, and bigger kids looked after me, steering me through camp
routines, taking me along with them, and helping me avoid adult
authorities.
At the end of summer my mother gathered us up and took us to a
small resort town on the Czechoslovakian border, where a friend
owned a large summer home he lent us for the fall and winter. It
was unheated, but its location offered the chance of walking right
into Czechoslovakia and safety, if that became necessary. We slept
in icy bedrooms, snuggled into mountains of featherbeds, and
spent our days in the large, warm country kitchen, heated by its
stove. My oldest sister was not intellectually gifted and was
destined for vocational training rather than academic high school.
She was assigned to help the housekeeper who was in charge of
the rest of us, while the next two sisters and my brother went to
the local schools. She didn’t mind, and I liked staying in the
pleasant, warm kitchen, watching her peeling potatoes and other
vegetables. She had always made a pet of me, letting me sit on the
back of her skis for the downhill runs when she came home for
Christmas. Separated from my imposed twinship-for-convenience
with my bigger, smarter, evil brother, and spoiled by my favorite
sister, I experienced a few months of relative content.
My father got out of prison, and my parents came to take us on
a skiing holiday over Christmas. I was measured for my first pair
of skis and got a beautiful white, fluffy snowsuit, and looked
forward to my downhill lesson. The family ski outing entailed
much preparatory discussion of snow, wax, slope, ski length, and
boots, and I waited my turn, getting colder and colder. After a
while someone noticed that I had turned blue, my mother took
me home, I spent the rest of the holiday soaking my frostbitten
feet, we moved away from snow, and I have never yet skied.
49
In the spring my mother reorganized us. My father had been
exiled and had moved to England. My mother sent my oldest
sisters to vocational boarding schools, my third sister to an
academic boarding school in England, and took my brother, me,
and the housekeeper to Berlin. I was six, and began serious
academic university preparatory training. School all morning,
homework all afternoon and evening, five days a week, and it was
a struggle. After awhile my skeleton rebelled. My head listed to
one side, I was told, and my mother took me to physical therapy
to straighten it. I welcomed the prospect of relief from superschooling and happily skipped alongside her.
Physical therapy turned out to be a spectacle of pain and
desperation. Children with severely disfigured spinal structures,
mostly hunchbacks, were being treated, and the first part of
treatment seemed pretty standard for all of us. First our chins
were encased in a leather strap, and then we were hung by it on a
30° board, so that our whole weight was held by the leather chin
strap. We had to hang there for twenty minutes. Children’s
appointments were staggered, and there was always a group of us
hanging by our chins on these boards, while others were being
massaged, in apparent attempts to rub and squeeze their
hunchbacks out of existence. Finally they were measured, and an
enthusiastic report of progress was given to their mothers. I felt
deep pity for these misshapen children. The psychic burden of
their affliction must have been terrible, because they endured the
agony of hanging by their chins with Spartan, blank faces and not
a word of protest, while I whined and cried and carried on and
said I couldn’t bear the pain in my chin, and my mother tried to
line the chin strap with ever-increasing wads of cotton balls. At
the end of a hundred years of torture my chin strap would be
unhooked, and I went for my massage. Only I had no hunchback
to massage, so I was merely measured, my mother was given
encouraging misinformation about the angle of my head, and it
was over until the next time. Three times a week I was hung by
my chin, until my mother had been sufficiently impressed about
50
my progress, and I graduated. Whatever it was, it straightened out,
and doesn’t show up in childhood photos. Back to the everlasting
homework.
Vacation time finally came around, and my brother and I were
sent to stay on a large farm and estate in the country outside
Berlin. The friends of my parents who owned it were rich, dressed
up in fine clothes every day, and did no farming; a hired manager
directed a squad of farm helpers to do it. The owners lived a life
of leisure, and ate fancier food than the rather tasteless plain
German diet I was used to. Dinner began with tomato bouillon,
which I liked, or a red wine soup that looked beautiful but tasted
bitter, and had some white squishy islands floating in it. These
people were my hosts and made no attempt at parenting, but were
kind and pretty much let me do as I pleased. I learned to ride a
bicycle, and I followed the farm crews around and watched them
work. Sometimes they lifted me to lie on top of the broad backs
of the gentle, gigantic farm horses who pulled huge wagonloads.
Best of all, my hosts had a phonograph and records, and after I
heard one Mozart piece and fell in love, they let me play it as
much as I liked.
Soon after we came there my brother came down with a
serious infection and was sent home for intensive care. Out of his
shadow I was a little lonely, but after a while I relaxed and enjoyed
myself.
Too soon the harvest was underway and school was starting,
and I went home to face academic challenges once more. To
postpone nighttime SS visits for a time, we had moved to a
different part of Berlin, and had to go to a new school. For the
first time I experienced actual dislike. The new teacher was a
devout Nazi, and at daily Heil Hitlering practice her eyes lit up
with joy. I guess she had an idea of whose child I was, because she
treated me with a frigid contempt that made the other girls look at
me strangely. When my mother caught on, she moved us back to
our first Berlin school, whose principal and teachers tolerated full
and half Jews with no difficulty. It was a relief from the burden of
51
hatred, even if we had to walk more than a half hour to and from
school, through busy parts of Berlin. We learned about traffic
signals and crossing busy streets, and super bladder control.
University-preparatory schooling did not allow toileting, and kids
who failed and wet themselves were immediately demoted to the
second academic level, which constituted a lower social class. In
Berlin at that time, young working class kids just went in the
street, but aristocrats like us were disciplined from head to foot,
guts, bladders, and all.
Halfway through the second grade we left Germany, and I was
relieved of the burden of intensive university-preparatory
schooling for an intellectual career that strained my talents. No
more marching, Heil Hitlering, and competitive examinations; no
more everlasting homework. My oldest sisters had finished their
schooling, and decided against coming with us, as did my Uncle
Albert, who had lived with us after getting out of concentration
camp. We never saw any of them again.
After a one-day reunion with my father in London my brother and
I were sent to a boarding school for refugee children in southeast
England. My brother was tall and academically advanced, and was
assigned to a big boys’ dormitory and classes located elsewhere on
the grounds. I was small and placed in the youngest group with
five boys. We shared half of the second floor of a large cottage;
slightly older boys shared the other half, and pubescent girls lived
downstairs. Two live-in teacher-nannies were in charge of us: a
friendly English-speaking young lady, and an older, nervous
German woman. They had private rooms, one at each end of our
floor. I was a difficult child, an undersized, over-disciplined,
fearful bundle of nerves who had never related to anyone on a
permanent basis other than my mean brother, whom I now
seldom saw. Without the strictly scheduled regime, multiple rules,
and punishments I was used to I must have resembled an inflated
balloon turned loose. The English nanny tolerated me pleasantly,
52
but the German lady sometimes hit me when my hyperactivity
annoyed her too much.
I got used to boarding school life, and often enjoyed it. We had
easy-going, non-competitive schooling in the mornings learning to
read and write English, and we played group games outside, rain
or shine, in the afternoons. Inside I often watched the older boys
play chess and card games. I had never known or played with
children other than my brother, and these children were nice. I
still showed tracks of my and my brother’s mean competitiveness,
but was beginning to learn to play better.
One day the nanny who didn’t like me took all the children
away, and left me alone in an empty house. When the other
children came back talking about the wonderful party she had
given them, and suddenly got quiet and didn’t answer my
questions about it, I realized that I had been left out on purpose.
While I was certainly not universally loved as an adult I rarely
encountered such personal dislike; as a child I didn’t know what to
do with it.
Soon I was moved away from that nanny to live downstairs
with the older girls, to their annoyance. I had grown tall enough
that year, but was still a very young eight years old, and an uneasy
misfit among eleven- and twelve-year-olds. However, the family
friend who had driven us from London the fall before came to
bring us back, and said we were going to America. In London
with our parents we clamored to return to boarding school. We
had not always liked it so much, but at least it was familiar. No, we
were told, we’re going to America.
Two hours on a train and six days on a huge ship brought us to
America. After driving through busy streets on a cab ride to the
railroad station, we squeezed into Pullman compartments, and
slept. In the morning we had our first look at the distinctive
Alabama farmland, red dirt sculpted smooth by wind and rain, and
a little scrawny cotton.
53
“Talladega!” the porter shouted, and we got out into the hot
southern sun. Someone loaded us and our baggage into a car and
drove us to a white bungalow set back of the dirt road that
separated us from the college campus. Our place was bordered on
one side by a field of alfalfa, and on the other by the large brick
home of the college president. The college lent us dormitory
furniture to use until our belongings came from Germany, and we
tried to settle in.
With minimal furniture our house looked pretty large. There
was a long living room, a study for my father, a dining room,
kitchen, and bathroom, and a bedroom for my parents. Two
rooms upstairs were too hot to use now, we were told, and we
kids slept on cots on the large, screened sleeping porches at the
back of the house.
A few basics had been stocked in the kitchen, and we were told
about the ice box and its drain pan, the screen doors and
windows, how to close up the house in the daytime and open it up
at night, and how to heat up hot water for our weekly baths. And
there we were, camping out together with little idea about what
would be next. Certainly little trace of our pre-Hitler lives in
Europe.
In the morning my father and brother walked into town to buy
groceries for the day, and the next morning my father and I went.
On the way to town we passed what we learned was Talladega
Creek, a navy blue little river that carried sewage and dye from
two cotton mills making denim down to a bigger river, which
carried them, now diluted with red mud, on to a large enough
river for catching catfish. My father showed us the wads of cotton
lint and dust trapped in the factories’ windows, and told us that
the poor whites who worked there would die young from
breathing it. We were glad to get back up the hill to our clean,
college part of town.
My father had told us that he would be teaching at a Negro
college, and that we would go to the Negro schools the college ran
for local children. When we started school we hardly noticed the
54
gamut of skin color and hair textures of classmates and teachers;
our problem was that nobody spoke the British English we had
learned at boarding school. For a spoken language, we had to start
over.
Soon two room-sized crates came from Germany and brought us
furniture, paintings, curtains, dishes, pots, heirlooms, featherbeds,
everything needed in a household. My mother still had the packing
lists she had indexed so carefully when the grand-scale household
was put in storage four years before, and now she had written
Uncle Albert back in Germany exactly what to have packed up
and sent, right down to the exact curtains, the leather-bound Karl
Marx’s Das Kapital, and the sculpture of George Bernard Shaw
that my father kept on his desk. In our Alabama bungalow she
recreated a mini-version of our former grandeur.
The crew the college sent to unpack the furniture and put it in
place didn’t see it like that. They shook their heads over the
massive pieces, the sideboards built to hold china and silver for 50
guests, the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the lesser state dining table
and chairs, and my parents’ six-foot desks. “This here stuff jes too
big,” they said. “You all ain’ gon’ get none of this out when you
house burn down,” they warned my parents. Learning that the
Talladega Fire Department only came to the white part of town
was our introduction to Jim Crow.
A department store gave my mother her second lesson in the
Jim Crow rules that would govern our lives. When she wrote her
address for delivering purchases “Talladega College,” the white
clerk stared at her, crossed out the “Mrs.” my mother had written
in front of her name, and told her not to touch any more clothes
she might not buy. The college address identified us as Negro, and
Negroes didn’t have titles like Miss or Mrs. and were not allowed
to try on clothes before deciding to buy.
I was almost nine and didn’t care about skin color. My job was
adapting to school in a different language and culture. The teacher
55
said my spelling was bad when I wrote words like color and center
and spelled them c-o-l-o-u-r and c-e-n-t-r-e, that is, in British
English. She told me if I didn’t know how to spell a word I should
look it up in the dictionary. I argued, if I can’t spell it, how can I
find it? Especially English words. German is almost entirely
spelled phonetically, and if you hear a word you can spell it. Not
in English, and certainly not in southern black English.
But money talks, and told me to learn American spelling and
forget about British English. At the end of each grading period my
father doled out an extra weekly allowance for every A on report
cards and docked an allowance for every F. My big sister held out,
semester after semester, sacrificing her dollar to not carving up the
required frog and flunking college biology, but I wanted my gradeschool level dimes, and never mind right and wrong. When
arguing about English spelling earned me all non-paying C’s, I
shut up, memorized American spelling, and eventually even
earned an extra mid-semester dime by winning the school spelling
bee.
The rest of school was easy. Lacking knowledge of U.S.
geography placed me in the fifth grade, which was otherwise the
level of the second grade in Germany. I was determined to fit in
and make friends, and I chanted arithmetic the American flashcard way and kept quiet about doing sums in my head German
school style. Our grade school housed two grades in a room,
about a dozen children per grade, and our teacher switched from
teaching the other side of the room, that is, sixth grade, to us. I
tended to answer when she asked the sixth grade about long
division or European geography, but my classmates soon quashed
me into conforming silence. I used the time to practice American
writing. As usual I was clumsy. I had all but flunked Beautiful
Writing of Hitler’s revitalized old German script, learned fairly
neat printing in England, and now I worked at American writing.
Not very well, but report cards praised my efforts enough for my
father to part with dimes.
56
Some of school was interesting. The college community was
surrounded on three sides by farms, and from time to time some
of my classmates had to skip school to help pick crops at home.
Our teacher had informed herself and taught us about farming
methods I would never have learned in Berlin grade-school
academia: contour plowing to prevent soil erosion, crop rotation
to make things grow better, and locating an outhouse pit in
relation to the well to prevent drinking water contamination.
Talladega College was an early outpost of black power, and we
sang the Negro National Anthem every morning and learned
about slavery. The principal of the school took us in small groups
for reading class every week to learn stories by O. Henry, Mark
Twain, and Richard Wright, and in music class we sang spirituals
along with the standard repertoire of English folk songs.
At home my mother converted herself from art historian,
political lecturer, and mansion CEO to housewife. She learned to
shop on Saturdays, and she got grocery clerks to tell her how to
cook southern American foods new to her, kale and eggplant and
rabbits. Her big sister, our gentle, housewifely Aunt Regine, who
was still in Germany, patiently gave her a weekly correspondence
course in European cooking.
While my mother’s cooking was a work in progress, in other
matters she was inventive and adaptable. An ice man pulled his
mule and wagon to all the faculty homes’ back doors every week
to bring new chunks for our ice boxes, and when she saw a farmer
delivering produce to the back of a grocery store one Saturday she
had an idea. She followed the farmer and opened a dialogue with
him, and pretty soon Mr. Jenkins and his mule and wagon brought
us butter, eggs, and vegetables every Saturday afternoon. When
one of us was sick she paid a teenage boy to shoot down a pigeon
with his BB gun so she could fix a close approximation of the
squab stew that had been our cure-all in Germany.
57
59
Thoughts about Grass
Grass is nearly universal. When I looked it up, I found out just
how extensive the stuff is. Rice is grass. Sky-high bamboo is grass.
Wheat and rye and oats are grass, corn is grass, sugarcane is grass,
and peat is grass. We build houses with grass and heat them with
grass, we eat grass, we make booze with grass; in fact, there’s not
much we can do without using grass. Pot and hash are often called
grass, but are not; if you want to get high on grass, you have to
drink whiskey, rum, or North Ca’lina white lightening, down south
simply called homebrew. And, from golf courses and lawn tennis,
to the all-American front yard, we turf with grass.
As a small child I knew nothing of such matters, but one
summer when I was seven my mother sent me to stay on a farm,
and I experienced grass. The farm grew grass. This grass was
about as tall as I was, and there was a whole field of it, ready for
harvest, to be cut and called hay. It was to be stored in stacks,
ready to feed the farm’s cows and horses through the coming
winter. A crew of laborers cut it down with big scythes, the kind
60
carried by Father Time at New Year’s. With rhythmic sweeps they
cut neat sheaves of grass, each man cutting a row, and then they
all sharpened their scythes with stones they took from their
pockets, and started the next set of rows. Sharpening all together
like that made an excruciating noise, worse than chalk scraping on
a dozen imaginary blackboards. When the whole field was cut they
raked the sheaves into bundles and threw them into a large wagon
drawn by two giant horses, the kind we sometimes see in beer
commercials. They threw the hay way up high in the wagon, and
to my delight, threw me on top to ride back to the farmyard.
We moved to England, supposedly the place where the
American residential lawn originated. In 1930’s northwest
London, where politically hep German Jews and other anti-Nazis
lived, I didn’t see front lawns. Flower beds, yes, lawns, no. Even in
Agatha Christie’s rural village where her heroine, Miss Marple,
solved mysteries, she grew flowers, not grass. To be sure, in
between villages fields of grass could be found in the English
countryside, but they were used for grazing sheep.
So my family did not get acquainted with residential lawns until
I was nine, when we settled into a bungalow in Alabama. Our
house was provided by the small college where my father taught.
It was on a street of houses that the college maintained for faculty
members with kids, the only middle-class family housing anywhere
near campus. The houses had been built one by one as the college
grew and the faculty expanded, and no two were quite alike, but
they did all have social-class-defining lawns, front and back, in
accordance with the American standard. Working class houses had
smaller, dirt yards, swept clean.
We arrived at the college in September, but were too busy
organizing ourselves into our small house to pay attention to our
surroundings. The moving men shook their heads over our large
European furniture, and said “You never get this out when your
house burn down.” “Burn down?” we asked, and were told that
southern fire departments didn’t come to the black part of town.
61
The college was black, our part of town was black, and we were
now black.
Learning southern black middle class language and social
customs was not easy for my parents. We were still getting settled
when, to my mother’s amazement, two strange well-dressed ladies
came for an afternoon visit. Uninvited and unexpected, they
found my mother in the cheap cotton swimsuit that hid few
details of her middle-aged figure, and that she wore for her
unaccustomed do-it-yourself housework in the colonially steamy
Alabama climate. They knocked, they came in, they sat on the
couch and introduced themselves. They, too, were faculty wives,
they said, and they had dropped in to get acquainted. When my
mother asked, “Dropped in? What is dropped in?” they explained
the southern custom of afternoon “dropping in,” for informal
visits among housewives. Among European upper classes people
never ever dropped in. They were invited for specific times and
dates, and occasionally notices were sent announcing what was
called an “at home,” times when close friends might come over
for shorter, more informal visits, but unexpected visiting did not
happen. My mother’s tale of her dropping-in experience, her
astounded surprise and nearly total lack of physical camouflage,
provided much merriment at that night’s supper.
My mother tried to make up for her failure as involuntary
drop-in hostess by inviting the faculty wives to a formal afternoon
tea, only to encounter further strange customs. She served cake,
and each guest left a bit on her plate, and she thought cake was
another failure, until we found out that this was required to show
polite absence of greed. Then she observed her guests
unobtrusively dropping her monogrammed silver teaspoons into
their handbags. Hastily, but assertively, she asked, “Do you need a
clean spoon? Come, give me that one, and I will get you another,”
and only one or two spoons actually went missing. Later she
learned that such thefts were not considered stealing; rather, they
were called “taking,” and were the customary method of acquiring
souvenirs commemorating attendance at grand occasions. My
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mother didn’t adapt to “dropping in” by wearing underwear and
house dresses on hot afternoons, but she did get cheap spoons at
the dime store and made subsequent occasions a little less grand.
Our first spring in Alabama my parents began looking around
their strange new world, and what they found was lawns. Every
house on faculty row had lawns, and my parents were impressed
to see our neighbors’ constant lawn mowing. Grass grew well in
the humid climate, and spring, summer, and fall, every weekend
my father’s colleagues pushed their lawnmowers back and forth,
back and forth, front yard and back. Every Saturday, faculty men
mowed. Some walked their mowers in long ovals, perimeter to
final central tuft; others preferred rows, and my parents watched
their weekly performance. They began discussing it, speculating
about its possible effects and function. Back in Germany grass just
grew, and if it got too tall, was cut down much the way I had seen
hay cut on the farm. To their European eyes weekly lawn mowing
seemed bizarre, pointless, and boring. They concluded that all this
lawn mowing was an empty-minded activity which necessarily
proceeded from empty minds. Those who spent their time
mowing grass could not know much to teach anyone. Maybe they
just read the textbooks to their classes. No wonder his students
came to class chewing gum. How else could they expect to stay
awake?
The sociology professor on the corner was the champion
mower of them all. He had an especially large front, side, and back
yard, all of it one big lawn that he assiduously kept perfectly
manicured, and my father, an economist, concluded that sociology
was a field without much content. When I grew up I made a
conscious effort to rid my thinking of my parents’ snobbery. I
signed up for Introductory Sociology, thinking if my parents
despised it, there must be something to it. It happened that the
course was taught by a handsome man whose perfect grooming at
first glance rather reminded me of my father’s colleague’s perfect
lawns, but I tried to put that out of my mind, determined to listen
and learn. Learn what? The perfectly groomed teacher hardly said
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anything. He specialized in an elaborate complex, repetitive,
patterned throat clearing routine, hour after hour after deadly
hour, and I concluded that at least in this instance, my father was
right. Years later, when the NIMH [National Institute of Mental
Health] sociology department lured my research assistance away
from clinical psychology with a nice raise, I still found the field
somewhat porous in identity. Possibly due to their somewhat
amorphous discipline, I found these sociologists to be an openminded, friendly lot. In addition to efforts to evolve their
discipline, they provided an organizational home for valuable
scientific oddballs. They housed, for example, a human geneticist
carrying out the identical twin studies that redefined Downs
syndrome, and a social anthropologist who studied the behavior
of research psychiatrists.
Back to our Alabama lawn. It just grew, front and back. Every
so often the college was embarrassed and sent someone over to
cut the grass in front of the house; after all, it was college
property, right on campus, in public view. Our back yard was left
to our own devices. A driveway marked out by college-campus
style privet hedges bordered one side of our house, and
ornamental shrubs bordered the other side, and my father let them
grow as tall and wild as they liked. They shielded the back yard
from public view, and so that grass simply grew. In the Alabama
climate of heat and daily summer showers it grew very well. By the
end of summer, all but a small trodden down area next to the
backdoor was covered with three to four foot-high grass.
Now my father was an intellectual who had read nearly
everything about anything, including, it turned out, management
of the tall grass prairie. He knew just what to do. In September on
a day when the wind was just right, he poured kerosene along the
back fence and set it on fire, and then, while my brother and I
stood by with buckets of water, he did the same at the edge of the
trodden-down area. He explained that it was a back fire, and sure
enough, the two fires burned toward each other rapidly and
efficiently. They met in the middle with a great big whoosh, and
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died. Boundary trees and shrubs were unaffected. All that was left
was a flat, smoky yard covered in black ashes.
No doubt our lawn-mowing neighbors, never mind the college
grounds maintenance staff, covertly watched these proceedings
with at least as much horror as my parents had felt watching their
weekly mowing rituals. They never said anything, but out of our
hearing I’m sure they had a lot to talk about. Finally, a month or
two later, someone approached my father with a comment about
our spoiled back yard. Oh, it’s quite all right, my father reassured
him, and took him back to see. By that time fall rains had washed
the ashes into the earth, and the yard was a carpet of tender little
green shoots of new grass. It couldn’t have looked better.
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Two Houses
My early life was spent in two quite different structures bridged by
some common lifestyle features.
When I was born we were rich, from a combination of
inherited and state-owned wealth. We lived in a state-owned
manor far too large for us; some of its rooms, like the state dining
room and the formal reception area behind the enormous front
door were used rarely. There were spaces that were never used,
such as the no-man’s land of the second floor, which separated us
from the servants’ suite on the third floor.
The first floor, where we lived, included two terraces. The
small one next to my father’s study was private, used only for oneor two-person sitting. Servants went there early in the morning to
clean; later in the day children might be summoned, one at a time,
for parental counseling on conduct and life course.
The large terrace was a grand affair bounded bilaterally by
broad stairs curving down to garden paths. It was used for
informal summer receptions and teas. Maids were in unobtrusive
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evidence, serving and clearing off. For large terrace occasions we
children were washed off, shined up, and presented en masse, to
be fussed over briefly until graciously dismissed.
History, that is, the Nazis, ejected us from the manor, inducing
varieties of homelessness in borrowed quarters, apartments,
rooms, and boarding schools before emigration reunited and
transplanted us to a bungalow in Alabama. At strategic points the
bungalow’s framework was supported by piles of bricks keeping
its floor joists clear of termite territory and incidentally providing a
semi-sheltered area for domesticated, and occasionally wild, life.
In Alabama, dogs and cats customarily live under the house. We
settled into the hot, sleepy South of Depression days.
Every fall Alabama has a rainy season. Usually it rains for three
weeks, stops for breath, and rains for three weeks more. Each year
the piles of bricks supporting the house would settle differently
into the red Alabama mud. Six weeks of rain, and doors that
scraped the floor one year, gapped the next. When the sun
reappeared an occasional snake curled up for a nap at the back
door, and sometimes a litter of skunks took up residence under
the house, to the consternation of the family cat.
Aristocracy dies hard. Our money had been left behind, but
our furniture followed us, and our way of life was not lost. Our
mother learned to cook and clean, children were pressed into
sous-chef duties, we played ping pong on the state dining table,
but standards were preserved. Afternoon tea was served to guests
on the screened back porch, and children, appearing tolerably neat
and clean, were presented, briefly questioned, and graciously
banished, much as before.
In his study that listed a little this way one year, and that way
the next, my father still wrote correspondence, and marked
important letters with the family coat of arms. In a ceremony that
never failed to fascinate us he would open the special kit, and set
up and light its little oil lamp wick to melt a ruby pool of dribbled
wax onto the envelope flap. With the heavy seal and a sigh of
satisfaction he would stamp it with his crest.
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69
Giant’s Rest
One Saturday afternoon, when the housework was done and I was
tired, I sat down to take a break and turned on the TV. Idly,
through half-closed eyes I watched it, and what I saw was some
kind of race. Beat-up cars were running around a track, bashing
fenders and bumpers and racing on. Once in a while the camera
gave a bird’s eye view of the setting, the bleachers, the track, the
horizon. Which I suddenly recognized! I sat up, waiting for
another look. Sure enough, there it was, unmistakably,
unforgettably, Giant’s Rest. The race track had been built over the
familiar farmland.
We lived in a sleepy southern valley bounded on one side by a
chain of foothills of the Appalachian mountains called Giant’s
Rest. The Indians who lived there before us handed down a
legend about a princess and her suitor who died of thwarted love,
and slept there forever, that is, our valley, Princess Talladega, and
her mountain suitor, Giant’s Rest. His hills rose in peaks forming
a horizon resembling a man supine; first, a low hill formed his
head, then twin peaks rose to mimic hands folded over chest and
belly, a lesser peak ran down to his knees, and on down to a small
hill for his feet.
Our grade school was long and low, two grades to a room, all
rooms in a row, facing the same way. On spring afternoons when
it was too hot to teach or learn, we were kept occupied with art;
that is, we drew, painted, and collaged the view from our
windows, our valley and its horizon, Giant’s Rest. In May and
September we drew and painted Giant’s Rest. I can still draw its
silhouette in my sleep.
We were told to draw or paint what we saw, but we knew
better. We did not draw the dusty windows, some tilted open and
some straight, the dirt roads, the red, erosion-sculpted fields with
their scrawny cotton plants backed by dark hillsides, haze, and a
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drifting, lazy buzzard. As surely as we knew our own Black
unacceptability we revised our world to resemble that of our
White storybooks. We drew, painted, and collaged gently rolling
fields forever fresh and green or neatly furrowed in rich brown,
folding into one another to frame the dark green mountain ridge
and its backing of blue sky iced with fleecy white clouds and pretty
little birds.
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Mr. Mabra
I finally achieved the age of thirteen, the official beginning of
adolescence. Thirteen is the dividing line that separates childhood
from imitation adult status. Thirteen-year-old adolescents think
themselves entitled to argue, at least about petty details of their
governance by parents and teachers. In another year or two they
will be convinced of their intellectual superiority and capacity for
able-bodied adult functioning.
For me being thirteen marked the beginning of high school,
and the reign of Mr. Mabra. Mr. Mabra did very nearly everything:
teach, coach, and run a variety of businesses. I suppose most small
towns run by means of a hyper functioning Mr. Mabra who does
whatever needs doing. When death or other misadventure
eventually removes such a one, another heretofore dormant talent
soon steps up to fill the vacancy. Many years later I traded
memories with a fellow DC Youth Orchestra parent, and learned
that the black community in Tuskegee, her home town, had had a
similar self-designated community do-it-all.
In the small black community surrounding Talladega College
where my father taught, Mr. Mabra was the quiet super performer.
To be sure, Talladega had a president, a dean, and professors, but
Mr. Mabra did practically everything else. He taught us, meaning
our class of a dozen teenagers, ninth grade algebra, tenth grade
biology and geometry, and he taught chemistry and physics to
juniors and seniors. For all of us, Mr. Mabra was a special treat.
Mr. Mabra did not make jokes or kid around with us, or go to
verbal lengths to praise or justify the fields he taught. He was
always good-humoredly but earnestly focused on the subject at
hand, and really wanted to teach it to us. He showed us
geometry’s circles, triangles, and arcs energetically, and with such
contagious enthusiasm that we lapped it up, and never thought of
disputing its applicability to our basically rural lives.
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I reached the height of my Mabra student career in tenth grade
biology. To teach us about mammalian innards, Mr. Mabra
trapped some ferocious, ten-inch rats in his chicken yard, and
brought them to school caged in an old aquarium with a lid
strapped on top. He anesthetized them by dexterously opening a
slit in the lid, dropping in a couple of cotton balls soaked in ether,
and quickly re-closing it, and we waited in suspense. Those were
some mean-looking rats, but they soon lay down and passed out.
When clearly non-responsive to pushing and poking, he lifted
them out by their tails and tied them down in dissecting trays.
Finally he handed out scalpels and surgical scissors, and we began
operating on our unconscious victims. My lab partner and I cut
open our rat’s chest and belly, and watched its live, mean rat’s
heart beating. Infinitely more interesting than cutting up preserved
frog bodies like they did in richer schools.
Mr. Mabra just as enthusiastically taught chemistry and physics
to juniors and seniors, but I can’t imagine how, in those classes, he
might have surpassed chicken yard rat surgery.
Along with teaching four years of math and science Mr. Mabra
coached the high school’s football and basketball teams. On the
side he ran the parking concession for Talladega College’s football
games, and crowned Miss Talladega at the annual Homecoming
contest with black society’s other school for intellectuals, Fisk
University.
In addition to his chicken yard, Mr. Mabra ran two other
businesses essential to Talladega’s social-economic life, the town’s
beauty parlor, and its shoe repair shop. Sometimes after school my
mother would send me down the road with shoes needing heels,
and I could watch in fascination while Mr. Mabra fixed, polished,
and shined the shoes on the revolving tools of his lathe or taught
an apprentice who was learning how. Just as in school, his energy
and interest never waned, he never joked, and he praised but
never snubbed or ridiculed those he taught.
While even in those early days Talladega College’s students
were deep into the black power movement, Mr. Mabra never
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showed an interest in that or any other political matter. When the
Boy Scouts of America finally gave in to political pressure and
allowed black boys to join but not to wear scout uniforms, Mr.
Mabra made no public comment. He just quietly rounded up half
a dozen little boys, gave them imitation-scout scarves to wear, and
organized cub scout activities for them.
To my regret I moved north, and never had a chance to take
Mr. Mabra’s chemistry and physics classes, or to watch his
progress in the fledgling scouting project.
PART 2: ONE STEP AHEAD OF
THE DOLE
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100 Words or Less
In the fall the local newspaper announced a new feature, called
Life Is Short. The feature would pay $100 for and publish little
pieces giving insight into personal lives in 100 words or less. Well,
now, I said to myself, maybe I can do that. After all, I can write
short. Anyone who survived the scourge of comparative
musicology 241 can write short.
The course ran for two miserable, hard-working semesters. It
was taught by a little elderly professor with a benevolent face, tufts
of gray hair growing out of his ears, a nervous habit of fingering
the skin of his Adam’s apple, and a strong German accent.
Reputedly the ultimate Bach scholar who knew most everything
else besides, he was also known to be the most sadistic, meanest
son-of-a-bitch who ever stepped into a classroom.
In the course we were supposed to look at samples of music
from here and there, sooner or later, and discuss them. Meaning
that the professor would ask, “Now, vhat haf ve here? How is zis
organized?” And some bright light would offer an answer. “How
could you say zat? Do you sink ze composer liffed foreffer and
wrote it tzweihundert years later, from his grafe?” And another
fine student would offer a different opinion. “You don’t look?
You haf eyes but you don’t see. Look like you sink maybe you can
see vhat’s there.” You might think we learned from the experience
of students one and two, but sometimes even a third student,
eager to make points, opened his mouth and had his ego shredded
in response. I kept quiet.
Following each class we retired to the local coffee joint to
console one another, repair our quivering self concepts, and hatch
a plot for revenge. The professor began each meeting of the
seminar by asking if we had any questions, and we set our
combined intellects to work figuring out a question that would
floor him.
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So the next meeting began with our great question. Our
professor walked around the room fingering his Adam’s apple in
thought, while we held our collective breaths. Finally he spoke
with a cute little smile, and said, “Again you are trying to trick
me.” And discussed the ins and outs of our question. Never, not
once, did we fool him. In fact, the routine became a prime source
of our respect for him. He always thought his way through and all
around a question before answering. He was a mean son of a
bitch, but a damn good one.
Two or three times a semester our professor assigned papers of
stupendous difficulty. For example: In the first movement of this
symphony, describe each phrase, and its function in the whole
movement. Or, describe the setting of that renaissance mass, its
relation to the text, and its historical significance. Please, no more
than ten pages, preferably shorter. I want short papers.
Dissertation style of course, you are graduate students.
Our professor went on to tell us how he graded papers.
Throwing them down the stairs had worked fairly well, he said,
since the longest ones tended to land on the top steps, to flunk,
while the shortest flew better to land on bottom steps and got A’s.
But that excluded content. He tried assigning points to various
portions: is this there, ten points; it isn’t, zero; but again, that
didn’t leave room for individual differences. After all, however
unlikely, he said, a student may write a valid opinion that differs
from my own. Finally he settled on his current method: he timed
himself reading each paper and writing comments and corrections
he thought necessary. One-hour papers got an A, two hours a B,
and so on. That allowed for brevity plus content.
We knocked ourselves out, but our first papers came back
covered with inked criticisms and low marks. B’s, plain, plus, or
minus. We were appalled. This was our major; we were the cream
of the crop, and we were accustomed to getting some variety of
well-deserved A’s. Music is a highly competitive, overpopulated
field, and B students were barely tolerated, while C’s were told to
move on to lesser music schools. Nowadays students insist on a
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detailed percentage justifying their grades, but at that time the
opinions of professors, enthroned next to god, were not
negotiable. Even worse, we thought he might be right, we
deserved those B’s. In shame, we asked what we were doing
wrong, was our approach to the subject mistaken, did we miss
something basic? The bastard comforted us. Be happy with your
B’s, he said, smiling gently. With your experience and training you
could be flunking! You are doing all right. B’s are fine! Keep
working, you will learn.
But he complained: Your papers were much too long. Not
because you had so much to say; what you said wasn’t so bad, but
you wrote so many words to say it. You don’t know how to write.
Well, I have to read it, so I better teach you how to write it. And
then, in the accent that had not changed in his twenty years in
America, he unselfconsciously taught us what freshman English
instructors had failed to impart: how to write well in English.
First and foremost, he said, use active verbs. Avoid the passive
voice; it stops motion. It makes pauses; it is boring. An active verb
drives communication forward. The right verb can replace several
adjectives and enable your prose to travel straight on to make a
point. Write a sentence, and then ask yourself, what has this
sentence contributed? Is it going anywhere? Avoid any form of
the verbs to be and to have; they don’t say anything. Don’t use
words that don’t contribute information. For example, avoid the
word very. It says nothing. If something is very good, it’s good;
very bad, it’s bad. To get out of the very habit, try substituting
damn. Write “damn good” or “damn bad”, and you’ll see. No
footnotes, no parentheses. Footnotes and parentheses don’t
enhance the text, they interrupt it. Material either belongs in the
text, or it doesn’t; say it, or forget it.
Unlike our freshman comp instructors, our professor had, not
an axe, but a guillotine blade over our heads. We listened. We
worked and reworked. We described music in terms we had never
seen used in that context. Soon our themes unfolded, soared,
halted, floated, stumbled, and stuttered; counterpoint opened,
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crowded, imitated, inverted, wove, or threaded; harmonies
launched, defined, pushed, petered, stabilized, softened, confused,
asserted, and more. Roget’s Thesaurus became our bible. I
suppose we really laid it on thick and overdid it, giving our teacher
some amusement, but, by very damn, we stayed in the ten page
limit. Some of us even got A’s.
And that is how I learned to write short.
So when the newspaper offered $100 and publication of pieces
giving insight into personal lives in 100 words or less, I began
ruminating, chewing over possible insights, sending mental
dipsticks into my life, a little taste here, a measurement there.
After a while a stray memory surfaced, producing an “Aha!”
response. I wrote 99 words and looked them over. Tolerably
honest, but too bizarre, who would believe it? I threw them out.
A month went by, and here came another one, polished to 97
words. It went:
“I was not a happy child. Youngest and least talented of my
parents’ progeny, patronizing tolerance was the best I could
expect at home. When my parents died my first thought was
“good riddance!” and then, to my surprise, I really missed them.
Looking for the reason, I began sorting through my mind the
beliefs and prejudices by which they had rejected me, and looked
some more. Further down, I found good stuff. It hasn’t been so
easy, getting rid of the noxious, snobbish layers but keeping the
good; fifty years later, I’m still working on it.”
I quite liked that one, but the newspaper didn’t. You write well,
they said. Unfortunately, there are so many submissions, and we
can’t accept them all. Please try again. Or words to that effect, no
doubt the standard rejection letter. I looked over my failure, and
decided it was a sterner dose of insight than was wanted.
Another month and here came a third effort:
“I went to college on next to no money. Usually persuaded
some agency to spring for tuition and fees; lived in a co-op,
sharing work, expenses, skim milk, and peanut butter. We
acquired degrees, professions, and incomes, but never forgot life
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one step ahead of the dole. Recently an old college friend visited,
and watched me fix dinner. ‘I’m so glad you did that!’ she
exclaimed when she saw me scrape the last bits of tuna out of the
can. ‘I was worried that you might waste some.’ Not me.”
Better, I thought; some people might recognize themselves in
it. Off it went, first class email.
And won! Well, was accepted. A long form about copyright
came for my signature. Email told me a photographer would come
out to take my picture, to be printed alongside my piece. Maybe I
should get a haircut.
A month went by, no photographer, and therefore some
uncertainty. I emailed, Is this real? If so, when can I start
bragging? Answer: it’s real, but publication date is uncertain. Don’t
brag until you hear from the photographer.
Photographer came. I’m bragging.
There is a some post-coital sadness. Having won, I miss trying.
Viola
On weekend afternoons when I was young my parents used to ask
friends to come for tea, cake, and conversation. For these
occasions we children would be rounded up, washed off, and
presented for a brief obligatory encounter before escaping back to
our usual unsupervised lives. When I was three or four a young
man brought his violin, and suggested playing for us. While he
tuned up my big brother muttered “Enough, let’s go,” and faded
away, but I stayed, fascinated by the sound of discords slipping
into open fifths. The guest played a few simple tunes, and I
sopped it up. I had fallen in love.
In the succeeding weeks I begged and clamored for a violin
and finally one day my mother handed me a package, saying,
“Here is your violin.” Thrilled, I opened it and found a clumsy toy
replica strung with rubber bands. I threw it away, and never spoke
of it again. Eventually my parents made it clear that they thought
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music a kind of trade not suitable to our intellectual and cultural
position in society.
Time passed, I grew up, went to college, began thinking for
myself and, over strenuous familial objections, studied music. In a
large university, music school is a small world by itself, and my
school was divided geographically into even smaller sections.
Students preparing to teach music in elementary and high schools
had their own building in one corner of campus, pianists and
singers had another, and six blocks from either, the school’s music
historians, theoreticians, musicologists, and string players were
crammed into an auditorium’s backstage and adjacent bell tower.
20,000 students attended the university, but in my little village
everybody knew everybody, by reputation if not in person.
String players were particularly short of space, and used any
vacant square yard to set up and practice, from stair wells to
elevators, and basements to bathrooms. A fine violinist’s practice
hour in the ladies’ room coincided with a free period in my class
schedule, and I would go to listen to her playing the same phrases
over and over and over again. Word got around that I was crazy
about violin playing, and a violin grad student offered me free
lessons if I got an instrument and promised to practice an hour a
day. He wanted to try teaching beginning violin to an adult who
already knew music. I grabbed the chance.
I borrowed a cheap violin outfit and lessons began. In a few
minutes my teacher showed me how to hold the violin, give up
my death grip on the bow, and play the easiest scales. I was
adequately, but not overwhelmingly, talented, but I practiced
faithfully, repeating motions over and over until my hands could
do them without thought. After awhile I could play a few easy
pieces.
Near the end of that semester a violin professor looked me up.
“I hear you’ve been learning violin,” he said. “I am starting a pops
orchestra, and you will play viola. You have a week to learn to
read the music and play it. I think you can do it,” he said.
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“Rehearsals start Monday,” and he gave me instrument, case, bow,
music, and told me when and where to show up.
If that sounds autocratic, it was. Professional music schools
were like that. Teachers told you their expectations, they might
encourage you and help you to meet them, and then you did, or
you went. Music is a structured, demanding, competitive and
highly overpopulated profession, and if you wouldn’t or couldn’t,
there was always someone else who could and would. “You will
play viola,” said the professor, and a week later, I did. Sort of. He
paired me with a kind, experienced desk mate who marked the
easiest notes on the music, and every time a printed note matched
his mark I put bow to string and played. The rest of the time I
held my bow just above the strings and did no harm. I practiced;
gradually I played more notes than I faked. My violinist friend
from the ladies’ room gave me occasional lessons and I moved up
to the symphony orchestra.
As I gained experience I began to understand the benefits of
playing viola. Groups of orchestral instruments are organized like
church choirs, and violas play the equivalent of tenor. They sit in
the middle of the orchestra, and can hear all the instruments; their
music is often simple enough to leave their minds free to consider
how various parts interact and fit into the musical structure.
Composers and musicologists play viola. Like Bach and
Beethoven, the more I played it, the better I liked it.
One day the viola professor climbed down to my practice spot
in the basement and offered me formal coursework at reduced
tuition. I didn’t ask why, just filled out the forms, and set to work.
I skipped lunch for a month to buy a better viola, practiced three
hours a day, six days a week, and worked through the four-year
level, realizing my childhood fantasy, and playing Bach and
Haydn.
It was my last year of school, and what I learned gave me a
lifetime of fun. Amateur groups always need violas to play the
filler notes and taradiddles, and I was in demand. Wherever I
lived, town or suburbs, I could look up an amateur orchestra,
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offer my services, and be accepted. Once I was asked to audition,
but when I pointed out that a symphony orchestra with three
violas would look better with any fourth who shows up for
concerts dressed right and holding the instrument, I was asked to
join.
Over the years I played symphonies, chamber music, operas,
and musicals. Practicing the harder bits made me play better and
better, and I moved up to string quartets. Composers do their
more complex work writing quartets and in them each member
has nearly equal responsibility. Unlike in orchestra, violas can’t
hide bad playing under the bleating of a brass section, and I got up
half an hour early to practice before going to work. Many people
love to hear string quartets, but I never did. Played in reverently
darkened halls, their slow second movements used to put me right
to sleep. It all changed when I began playing them. Keeping pace
in fast movements made me breathlessly excited, and slow second
movements enabled me to play all their notes and never lose my
place.
87
My Career as a Communist Bigamist
I. Student Days
Around the beginning of the McCarthy era — the years in which
so many educated people in America were persecuted to feed the
insatiable narcissism of one senator — I was a music student at
the University of Michigan. In the early 1950’s I was accused of
being a communist or fellow traveler, meaning someone whose
political views followed those of communists, who in turn
followed the published policies of Stalinist Russia The
investigation that resulted was, strictly speaking, not my first.
In the spring of 1942, when the United States began fighting
World War II against Germany, I was living with my family in
Talladega, a sleepy rural county seat in the foothills of the
southern Appalachians. My parents had qualified and applied for
88
citizenship a year before but weren’t sworn in, as the Birmingham,
Alabama’s Immigration and Naturalization office was waiting for a
sufficient number of candidates to make a proper ceremony of the
occasion. Qualifying 1930’s immigrants were few and far between
in northern Alabama, and my parents were told to be patient, as it
would be quite a while. It was; twelve years later I became a
naturalized United States citizen.
So in 1942 we were enemy aliens, and the Birmingham FBI
office investigated our potential for spying on the war effort in
Talladega, whose industry was limited to two cotton mills making
denim. Two tall young white men wearing suits came and
interviewed my mother, who was more tactful with the young and
ignorant than the rest of us, who were banished to the back yard.
At stake was how we were to spend the war years: teaching and
going to school at Talladega, or being interned in a camp, like the
luckless Japanese Americans. The FBI stayed about an hour, asked
what political party my parents belonged to in Germany, was that
for or against the Nazis, looked over the house, took away my
brother’s toy chemistry set, and that was the end of my first
investigation.
My second investigation was, as I said, early on in the
McCarthy era. A fellow student who was working his way through
school by supplying names of suspect Communists to the FBI
picked me out of the student directory. Perhaps he chose
potentially un-American oddity names like Kranold. Two years
after the event, he accused me of having attended a meeting with
Paul Robeson, the famous singer, actor, and communist
sympathizer.
Mr. Robeson had indeed been in Ann Arbor, and I was told of
the meeting by friends who asked me to go. At the time my
prevailing concern was a four-year piano requirement I was trying
to pass off in one year, and I was stingy with my time. Is he
singing or talking? I asked. If singing, how could I resist hearing
that marvelous bass baritone; if talking, I had a sonata to learn.
The answer was talking, and I went to school.
89
As before, two somewhat identical well-dressed young white
men came to interview me. They asked about my political
opinions and activities, and I had nothing much to report.
Eventually they got around to their primary concern: the meeting
with Paul Robeson two years before. I remembered the occasion,
said I didn’t go, and explained that since he wasn’t going to sing, I
went to school to practice the piano for three hours. Could I
prove it? Well, maybe I could.
In those days Michigan’s music school was much underfunded, and student practice rooms were in short supply. The
music buildings were locked and guarded in the evening. You had
to sign up for a practice room in advance, and when you came to
use it, a guard at the door checked you in, and later, out. These
daily sheets were kept in case you signed up for a room but didn’t
use it, in which case you would be banned for awhile.
Music school and practice space was divided among three
buildings, each with an evening guard, all dental school students.
The jobs required little other than signing students in and out on
the hour, and they were handed down from one dental school
class to another. Just behind the door of each building was a desk
set up with a practice drill and a lamp to light up fine work. We
would take an hourly cigarette break with our dentist guard, who
was practicing anything from tooth cleaning to root canals. Now
and then when the state of our teeth matched a class project, we
had faculty-supervised free dental care.
I explained the sign-in-sign-out system to the FBI, and they
actually went to the Music School to check out my alibi. My dental
guard had, of course, graduated and been replaced, and I had
passed the piano requirement and moved on to the strings
building, but for whatever reason — perhaps inertia — clerks had
kept those practice-room sign-in sheets in chronological order. I
was proved innocent. The FBI guys actually called and told me,
and were a little embarrassed about the whole thing.
Another couple of years went by, and I was still not a citizen,
so I put in an application. This third investigation was brief; a red-
90
faced Texan nearing retirement came out from the Detroit INS,
turned purple, and hollered “all y’all ought to go right back where
you came from,” when I wouldn’t sign to bear arms in defense of
the U.S. After a few go-rounds about pacifism, he calmed down
enough to concede that the Supreme Court had given immigrants
that choice. A fellow student and a professor testified that I would
be a loyal American, and I was in. Well, almost.
Gathering enough immigrants for a ceremony wasn’t hard in
Ann Arbor; between displaced persons who came just after the
war and European atomic scientists, the ranks were soon full. The
local Daughters of the Revolution prepared coffee and
sandwiches, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce printed up
red, white, and blue Bills of Rights. We were herded into the
courtroom, and stood up for the judge. He asked a few routine
questions: had we broken any laws — a few people admitted to
parking tickets, were we willing to relinquish our former
citizenship, did we have bad debts. Then he studied our records.
In the middle of the alphabet he stopped. What about this? He
asked. This Miss Kranold? She was suspected. She didn’t sign to
bear arms. Step up here, young lady, I think you don’t qualify. He
had me sit in the witness chair, take the whole and nothing but the
truth oath, and began to question me.
Territoriality saved me. An FBI man moved up to the bench,
introduced himself in a quiet murmur, and told the judge sotto
voce that the FBI had investigated and passed me, and that the
judge had no right to question me further. He was joined by an
immigration official who muttered likewise. They directed me
back to my place in the crowd and the judge did a lot of throatclearing. He introduced the Republican candidates for local office,
instructed us about never using the fifth amendment, and swore
us in. The Junior Chamber of Commerce handed out its Bills of
Rights, we ate the DAR sandwiches, and it was over. For then.
91
II. The Working World
In 1954 music school practice schedules had helped me beat the
Paul Robeson fellow-traveler guilt-by-association rap. I passed
FBI and INS interrogations, and became a citizen of the United
States. Finished my master’s thesis on the opera Boris Godunov,
survived the orals, learned the viola. Resolved ambivalence about
marriage versus learning the viola d’amore in favor of marriage.
That didn’t work out, and I found myself out in the real world, or
semblance thereof, in Washington, D.C., expecting a baby and
needing a job.
Washington did not appear in desperate need for my services at
grand pay. The city was aswarm with bi- and tri-lingual
unemployed workers; musicologists were of course oversupplied
here, as everywhere. Other music school graduates were working
in factories and hotels, and teaching French and German. In
Washington the Library of Congress occasionally offered a
minimum-wage job to a musicologist able to catalog in several
languages.
Fortunately I had supported my study of Boris Godunov and
allied scholastic sins by working for the well-heeled psychology
department, where I learned to speak psychology and elementary
statistics. I dressed up my vita with somewhat stretched work
experience in psychology and statistics and courses in research
methodology — and who was to know that those methods
focused on eighteenth-century footnotes in gothic print in which
competing theoreticians discredited one another — and sent it to
a former boss’s former colleague, now working at the National
Institute of Mental Health. Believing that I must be one of the
forgotten, faceless assistants from his Michigan sojourn, he
circulated my credentials, and I got a job assisting a clinical
psychologist in studies of schizophrenia. I swallowed the bitter pill
of giving up 7% of my meager pay to eventual retirement, and
went to work.
92
A few months of correlating shaky data later I was a semipermanent civil servant, and forms were filled out to get me a
raise. Nothing happened. Months came, months went, I was still
correlating and testing, no raise. My boss went to see who was
who at NIH Personnel, and was told that it didn’t matter what
papers he filled out and whom he called, no one at Personnel was
going to get caught with their name on promotion papers of a
foreign-born person, who had not even been investigated.
Investigated? By whom, for what? Not by McCarthy, who had
finally gone too far, accusing the army of treason, and
antagonizing Eisenhower. McCarthy had been censured and
discredited, and his liver was about to do him in. Nevertheless,
two years later, NIH Personnel unshakably believed that their
work must be McCarthy-proof.
Moreover, Eisenhower had divided civil service work into two
categories, sensitive and non-sensitive. The work of some
agencies, for example Defense, was deemed sensitive, and its jobs
required investigation and security clearance. The work of others,
published and open to public and foreign view, was declared nonsensitive, not subject to any kind of security clearance. Nonsensitive was the entire Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, which included all of the National Institutes of Health.
Its staff required no clearance. End of story?
Now each federal agency had done its own McCarthyist
investigating, but when an agency’s need for investigations
vanished, its staff didn’t. Each newly-decreed non-sensitive agency
still had its own on-site investigative staff; that staff had a boss
whose rank depended on having a staff to boss; that boss, in turn,
had a boss whose job and rank were defined by the bosses he
bossed. None of these people were folding up their tents and
stealing away. As with all featherbedding jobs, their bottom line
was to look busy, and investigate somebody. Naturally, they
picked on the foreign-born, including me.
I was summoned downtown to Health, Education, and Welfare
headquarters for investigation number four. As before, two white
93
men in suits, call them A and B, were on the job. A, the younger
one, asked questions; B listened. A asked about my job, my
country of origin, and various points in between, repetitiously, and
unpleasantly. Finally he left the room, and after a few minutes’
silence B, the older man, spoke. He talked gently, confidingly;
offered me a cigarette, and said we would just relax until A came
back. After awhile he mildly suggested, Well, now, why not tell me
all about it? All about what? I asked. And finally, two hours into
the interrogation, it came out: Tell me about your husbands. My
husband? He’s in New York.
Mr. A came back. I guess he was listening at the door, because
he went right on where B left off. Your husband in New York?
What about your husband down here? Don’t you know it’s illegal
to be married to two men at the same time? That’s bigamy; in the
civil service it’s called moral turpitude. We can’t have such moral
turpitude people working for the Institute for Mental Health. Why
are you married to two men? I was sorely tempted: It’s more
exciting with two of them; They take turns; What’s it to you? and
None of your business came to mind. But I really needed the job,
and I chickened out. Only one husband. His profession is actor,
and he has two names, his real name, and a stage name. We are
divorced. He lives in New York and visits once in a blue moon.
Go see him, and you will find both names on his mail box, but
only one person. My guys thought that over, and then dismissed
me; clearly they considered me a spoil-sport.
McCarthy died of his liver, and with his descent into nearanonymity the thrill and glamour of investigating died down. No
bigamy, no moral turpitude, and no Paul Robeson. Also, no raise.
I switched to a job in the sociology of mental illness, just down
the hall from clinical psychology. The sociologists said by damn
they were going to get me that raise. Their work was in high
regard, and they had more organizational clout than clinical
psychology, which had failed to unravel cause and cure of
schizophrenia. The powers that be were giving sociologists a
chance.
94
My new, cloutful boss was equally thwarted in getting me the
raise, but he didn’t accept the bland, anonymous refusals of
Personnel, who were still reiterating that my investigation was
incomplete. Sure enough, I was getting letters from old school
friends across the country saying they had been interviewed, some
twice, about my possible fellow-traveler tendencies. Cloutful boss
went straight to the Surgeon General and complained. The
Surgeon General sent for my dossier. He found the abated moral
turpitude charge. Next was a completed security investigation,
which found nothing derogatory. The investigators thereupon
began again from the beginning and were half-way through a
complete repetition when the Surgeon General issued a cease-anddesist order. I got a raise.
You might think that he also dispensed with the investigative
staff of his agency, but in fact, he did not. A year later I applied
for a job at the Voice of America, who sent me a detailed lifehistory form to fill out and submit for their investigation. It turned
out that choosing classical music to play over the air to the Soviet
bloc required sensitive clearance. In my life I had moved around
quite a lot and had held a great variety of schlock jobs, details of
which were hazy in my memory. Inspiration struck; I phoned,
found my old investigators still on the job at Health, Education,
and Welfare. I explained my problem. Why, sure, said investigator
B, no problem. Within days I received a photocopy of all my old
addresses and occupations, from soda jerk to library stacks to
psychiatric attendant to art school model, with his best wishes for
the Voice of America job. I was clear.
PART 3: I YELL MY TUNE
97
Musicology And The Manic1 Experience
(1992)
Music consists of configurations of sounds that become
meaningful patterns in the brain, in the process called perception.
In psychotic states, that process is abnormal. Psychotic patients
perceive certain musical structures with patterned errors which are
diagnosis-specific and which, like the psychoses, override all
known variables in demography and psychosocial history.
The error specific to mania is in the perception of tempo.2 In
my study, manics made consistent mistakes in imitating the beat of
short samples of recorded music. Their errors were confirmed by
their descriptions of tempi, and they were confirmed by
correspondingly erroneous estimates of time elapsed during the
playing of such samples. Both of these errors are related to the
absolute speed of the tempo of samples, and to no other
characteristic of the music.
The tempo errors manics made were very large in slow music.
They decreased in size as tempo increased, and in a fast tempo
range, error size approached zero. Then tempi still faster than that
range again produced errors. Zero errors occurred in tempi
somewhere between 120 to 200 beats per minute. Manic
individuals perceived tempi in a specific, narrow range correctly,
and tempi outside that range erroneously. The correctly perceived
range of tempi appeared to be a kind of personal optimum tempo.
Tempo also determined manic patients’ preferences in music.
Regardless of all other musical variables and considerations, the
Mania refers to a the manic phase in bipolar disorder (formerly known
as manic-depression). It features extreme euphoria, irritability, or both.
1
Tempo refers to how fast or slow the beat of a piece of music is. An
Italian term, the plural is tempi.
2
98
farther the tempo of a sample was from the personal optimum
tempo, the more the music irritated and annoyed these patients;
the closer a sample was to the correctly perceived tempo, the
more the patients relaxed and liked it.
The absolute speed of an individual’s correct tempo range
probably reflects clinical severity of mania. Hypomanic
outpatients1 had relatively slower optimum tempi, around 120
beats per minute, and patients with the fastest optimum tempi
were in seclusion. One or two died of manic exhaustion.
Manics also experienced short samples of music in a slow
tempo as lasting much longer than samples of a comparable
length of time which used a faster tempo. For example, a patient
clinically in stage III mania estimated that a slow-tempo 30-second
sample lasted ten minutes, and a fast-tempo 30-second sample
lasted two minutes.
Equally important is the fact that manics made no other errors
in perception of music. For example, they had no trouble — no
perceptual errors, no generalized dislike — with emotionality in
music, not even in dissonance structures that are designed
specifically to intensify and emphasize emotionality.
These errors are specifically and uniquely characteristic of
actively ill manics. No other psychotic patients made these errors,
and manics made them only while they were clinically manic.
Between manic episodes, that is, when they were euthymic, their
perceptions were correct, and their preferences were individual,
varied, and unremarkable.
Another characteristic of mania is that manics don’t sleep
much. There used to be an idea that manics don’t need sleep, now
being replaced by the observation that they don’t sleep. One of
the first symptoms of the onset of a manic episode is apt to be
shortened sleep. Manics sometimes sleep so little that they die of
Hypomania means a mania which is not severe. An outpatient is
someone who is able to function well enough not to have to be
hospitalized, but who is still receiving treatment at the hospital.
1
99
exhaustion. Sleep deprivation by itself has been shown to produce
symptoms of distractibility, short, indiscriminate interactions with
others, and paranoid ideation in normal subjects, and there is no
reason to think the effect is any different in manics.
In summary, manics perceive accurately the rate of emotional
events paced only at their own optimum tempo, and perceive
erroneously and with discomfort events proceeding at other rates.
They perceive time elapsed during events at non-optimum rates of
speed with much distortion. But they perceive everything else,
including emotionality, accurately. They sleep very little. When
they are not manic, their perception and sleep pattern are normal.
Taking these findings into account, I am going to trace the
experience of the first manic episode of a hypothetical patient. For
grammatical simplicity, a male patient.
Until this time, our man’s perceptions have been correct, that
is, they have been continually confirmed by all manner of life
experiences. He has every reason to believe his perceptions, to
expect them to continue to be reliable, to base his behavior and
his planning on them, and to trust his emotional responses to
them.
Then, in a gradual onset spread over a week or two or more,
his pace increases, which he readily sees, and his perceptions
become erroneous, which he does not see. In reality his universe
continues at its usual pace, but he perceives it to be slower and
slower. Other people seem to move like sloths. He is different
from them, and he perceives the difference to be even larger than
it is. Their snail’s pace annoys and irritates him, and he becomes
critical and angry, or it amuses him, and he laughs and makes
jokes about it. Competitors appear hopelessly slow, and he sees
that he can easily outrun them, and thinks therefore that he can
outachieve them. He appears to himself as not only faster, but
better — smarter, more talented, more competent than he used to
be. Eagerly he applies his new-found talents to life’s problems,
and he is apt to start up a variety of great ideas and new
enterprises. Or he becomes concerned about the increasing
100
difference between himself and those he loves; he feels
misunderstood and alienated, and becomes upset. Or the seeming
unresponsiveness of those around him to his new state of affairs
becomes more and more irritating, and he argues and fights with
them.
So the manic can experience irritation, anger, amusement,
laughter, alienation, depression, elation, grandiosity, often all of
these. The responses themselves come and go at a fast pace. From
the point of view of his own fast pace and his perception of the
superslow pace of everybody else all these reactions make sense,
that is, they appear to be normally responsive to the rather strange
circumstances in which he finds himself. The more severe his
mania, the faster his speed, the more erroneous his perception, the
stranger these circumstances and his experiences are apt to be, and
the crazier his responses will appear to the rest of us.
Then his situation gets out of hand. He is faster, but he is no
smarter than he ever was, and his speed leaves him no time for
critical reflection and for making adjustments and revisions to
meet exigencies as they arise. Schemes fail and plans fall apart.
Cumulative sleep deprivation produces its known consequences,
and he is distractible, irritable, indiscriminate, and paranoid. He
has trouble sticking with one topic for more than a few seconds or
minutes and has trouble discriminating between friend and foe.
He becomes confused, suspicious, and blaming, more consistently
irritable, agitated, and hostile or depressed.
Meanwhile people in his universe try to deal with his
extraordinary speed, his foolish enterprises, and his swiftly
changing activities, moods, and affects, and then his failures. They
reason and plead or argue with him, trying to show him that he is
wrong, sick, incompetent, and when that fails they take more
punitive measures to pressure him into conforming. They ignore
him and live around rather than with him, they discuss him in his
presence, speaking of him in the third person, and they take away
his privileges, his money, his credit cards, his children. Finally,
101
often by force with the help of the police, they take him to a
mental hospital.
On arrival at the hospital he may exhibit almost any assortment
of the moods and affects already listed. He may present as angry
and irritable, assertive, elated, euphoric, cynical, depressed,
laughing, joking, labile, suspicious, fearful, paranoid, agitated,
upset, crying, overconfident, indignant, grandiose — any and all of
these, often in rapid succession. And he is likely to feel betrayed
and upset about the way he got there.
At the hospital he is examined, and this is what he hears:
“What . . . is . . . your . . . name?” he is asked. “Who . . . is . . .
president? What . . . is . . . the . . . date?” The slow questions seem
pointless, boring, silly, absurd or insulting, asked by an idiot.
“Subtract . . . 7 . . . from . . . 100. What . . . does . . . this . . . phrase
. . . mean, . . . ‘Strike . . . while . . . the . . . iron . . . is . . . hot?’ “ All
done in slow motion. And finally, “What . . . caused . . . you . . . to
. . . come . . . to . . . the . . . hospital?” And he tries to explain what
has happened to him. He talks and talks, and when thoughts rush
ahead of speech, he skips words and becomes incoherent, and
frustrated by his failure to make himself understood. He gets more
annoyed, more alienated, more depressed, exasperated, or,
mercifully, more amused. Or he gets bored and starts trying to
make things more interesting. Frequently such patients simply
don’t bother with the stupid questions they are asked and talk
about things that interest them, or laugh at the examiner and make
jokes at his expense. Of course the examiner knows none of this.
He sees an excited patient exhibiting various affects in response to
no discernible external stimuli, who is only marginally cooperative,
perhaps unintelligible, and whose excitement and irritability can be
frightening. These patients tend to get diagnoses like
schizophreniform psychosis or some kind of toxic psychosis,
whatever substance is in vogue. If they are working class or poor
or black sooner or later — often in a second hospitalization —
they are thought chronic or paranoid schizophrenic.
102
Except for speed of functioning, which is readily visible, and
the error in perception of speed and time elapsed, which is not so
visible, manic psychopathology can be quite individual in nature
and in severity. Some people, like the first case I will describe,
experience socially acceptable, elated hypomania which gets
bothersome at times, but which stops short of psychiatric
intervention. Others, like the second case, exhibit primarily
agitated depression, experience repeated hospitalizations, physical
restraint, seclusion, and, if disadavantaged or unlucky, treatment
with massive doses of neuroleptics. What I want to emphasize
here is the essential normality of manics, which becomes apparent
when you take into account the strange circumstances created by
their speed and sleeplessness.
The first case is that of Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist,
who was never a “case” as such. However, there is some evidence
in his autobiographic anecdotes and in a recent biography that he
was hypomanic at times.
An instance one might think symptomatic occurred in high
school. His physics teacher kept him after class and said,
“Feynman, you talk too much and you make too much noise.
You’re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there
in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you
know everything that’s in this book, you can talk again.” 1
Another scientist described him: “… he is always sizzling with
new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful, and
hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration
eclipses it. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a
sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest
brain-wave and proceeds to expound on it with the most lavish
1
Richard P. Feynman, Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman! (1986), 71.
103
sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not
dull.” 1
Gleick’s biography of Feynman included these descriptions of
his life during the five years he was a professor at Cornell: “He
never settled into any house or apartment…. Often he would stay
nights or weeks with married friends until these arrangements
became sexually volatile…. He dated undergraduates, paid
prostitutes in whorehouses … and slept with the young wives of
several of his friends among the physics graduate students.” 2
And, “Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was
… arrested for a rapid sequence of traffice violations. The justice
of the peace announced that the fine he handed down was a
personal record.” 3
And, “Feynman had a tendency to vanish with the end of the
school year, leaving behind a vacuum populated by uncorrected
papers, ungraded tests, unwritten letters of recommendation….
[The head of the department wrote him,] ‘Your sudden departure
from Ithaca without completing the grades in your courses,
especially those involving seniors who may thus be prevented
from graduating, has caused the Department considerable
embarrassment.’ Feynman would jot some grades — round
numbers, none higher than 85.” 4
And another physicist wrote that “Wheeler decided to hold the
meeting at a … country club where Texas oil-millionaires go….
We all grumbled at the high prices and the extravagant ugliness of
our rooms…. Dick … said, ‘To hell with it. I am not going to
1
Richard P. Feynman, What do you care what other people think? (1989), 98.
James Gleick, Genius (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 277.
Ibid., 266. [Editor’s note: This incident did occur during the Cornell
years, but the town in question was Albuquerque.]
2
3
4
Gleick, Genius, 262.
104
sleep in this place,’ picked up his suitcase, and walked off alone
into the woods.” 1
Feynman was never diagnosed manic, and came to psychiatric
attention only once, at his preinduction physical, when he argued
and argued with the psychiatrists examining him to show them
how absurd, stupid, and annoying and insulting their questions
were. Finally one asked, “How much do you value life?” and
Feynman answered, “Sixty-four,” to ridicule the mystified the
doctor. Two psychiatrists found him 4F, something he could not
understand. He felt that he had conducted himself entirely
rationally in the interviews, unlike the psychiatrists. Even though
he did not want to be drafted and thought the psychiatrists
absurd, he nevertheless felt misunderstood, hurt, and rejected.2
Now Feynman was white, extremely intelligent, had a Ph.D.
from Princeton, had been on the senior staff designing the atom
bomb at Los Alamos, and eventually shared a Nobel Prize in
theoretical physics. When he went too far he paid his way out, or
he was rescued by peers or superiors. If you think of these
incidents and imagine them in a life less famous, less white, less
well educated, with less professional backup, it is not so hard to
imagine such a person occasionally landing in an institution.
Interestingly, in graduate school Feynman checked his time
sense by counting slowly and steadily without looking at a clock,
trying to count off a minute. When he got to 60, he looked, and
only 48 seconds had gone by. Many repetitions produced the same
result, and he concluded that 48 seemed to be his constant rate,3
and you see that is rather on the fast side. It is suggestive; whether
it means anything I don’t know.
1
Feynman, What do you care, 99.
2
Feynman, Surely you’re joking, 138-145.
3
Feynman, What do you care, 55-59.
105
The second case I want to talk about is a man whose version of
mania was a paranoid, agitated, depressed psychosis.
Mr. L was a six foot two, bearded, 21 year old single African
American man referred to me in the mid 1970’s when he left the
hospital ward. He was said to be a college boy home for a
semester break who had had a spectacularly bad PCP1 trip. He had
tried to break out of the ward, and ten men were required to
restrain and seclude him. I was pretty busy at the time, but as all
that seemed to be needed was to take him gradually down from
3600 mg of Thorazine2 a day to nothing and then discharge him, I
took the case. And five years later I did discharge him.
As I was interested in perceptual abnormalities of psychoses
secondary to minimal brain damage, including brain toxicities, I
tested Mr. L. I got mixed results, mild errors of mania, and mild
errors indicating a little brain dysfunction. Mr. L denied having
used PCP, and he was loaded with Thorazine. So it was hard to be
sure what was right and wrong in his head. For sure he was not
schizophrenic.
It was my custom to withdraw neuroleptics slowly to avoid
creating unnecessary withdrawal reactions and secondary anxiety,
and although Mr. L looked like a snowed pussy cat, I went even
slower on account of his potential for violence. By the time Mr. L
was down to zero a couple of months had gone by, mother had
come in to offer a history, and Mr. L had begun talking about
recent events. Continuing problems were in evidence, and we
began psychotherapy.
History: Mr. L was the second of three children of divorced
parents who had been raised by his mother and by her parents,
“In some users, PCP (phencyclidine or angel dust) may cause acute
anxiety and a feeling of impending doom; in others, paranoia and violent
hostility; and in some, a psychosis indistinguishable from schizophrenia.
(www.drugs.com).”
2 An antipsychotic drug with sedative and other effects. Normally the
maximum dosage is 1200 mg/day.
1
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who lived down the street. Two years older was a sister. When Mr.
L was still in high school, sister died of cardiac arrest following
sudden kidney failure. A brother was two years younger, and was
in the Navy. Sister had been the brains of the family, and had just
started college when she died. Mr. L and his sister were very close.
All through childhood she would come home from school and
show him her schoolwork. He was not as bright, but he was
determined, and he always worked away and persisted until he
could do it, too.
When he was small Mr. L had been father’s favorite, meaning
father used to take him around to bars, and drinking buddies
would make a fuss over him. Then father became more alcoholic,
and when Mr. L was going on five father moved out. Then he
would call and arrange to take Mr. L out, and the boy would get all
ready and wait and wait. After a while mother stopped telling Mr.
L that father was coming to spare him the disappointment. From
then on father was out of the picture. Eventually he hit bottom,
reformed, and became a professional live-in alcoholism counselor
nearby, but took no further interest in his family. In the course of
therapy Mr. L tried to reestablish a relationship with him and
brought him to therapy once, but father was clearly there
unwillingly and Mr. L gave up the effort.
Mr. L did not have an unhappy childhood. Mother paid much
attention to the children, as did her parents and other relatives,
and they were a loving and supportive family. Grandfather was a
kindly pushover, and grandmother was matriarch of the block, a
benevolent but strict ruler.
In high school Mr. L and his sister secretly got into drugs,
smoked a lot of pot, used hash, tried a little LSD. One day Mr. L
came home and found that his sister had been taken to the
hospital by ambulance. He rushed to the hospital, thinking it
might be related to their secret drug use; when he got there she
was already dead. He felt terrible, isolated himself for awhile, did
not join the family in open grief, but got generally quieter.
Somewhat reluctantly he took over sister’s role as the family’s
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college-bound upward mobility member. Mother thought his SAT
score wonderful, but he knew it was mediocre, and he feared
competing with better-educated, smarter blacks and with whites.
So he applied only to the lesser black colleges, and wound up
going to school in Missouri — where what he mostly did was
party and smoke dope. On the verge of flunking out after a few
semesters he hid his shame and came home, telling his family that
he thought he should earn some money before resuming school.
He got a job as a guard at Lorton, where drugs were even more
plentifully available. That’s when he began feeling first excited,
then sleepless, depressed, alienated, guilty, and very upset. The
worse he felt, the more pot he used, and it is of course possible
that he got hold of some with PCP sprayed on. Finally he went to
his grandfather, the kindest, and also physically the smallest
member of the family, and grandfather brought him to the
hospital. When grandfather left him behind on the ward, and the
door between them was locked, he was panic-stricken, and tried to
break down the ward door to get out.
Treatment. Therapy was proceeding, various issues were
worked through. Mr. L cried and grieved for his sister. We talked
about his fear of white society and of the entire territory across
the Anacostia River, where he had been very rarely, and only in a
group of black kids, and then he felt able to go into town. He got
a job, began volunteer teaching, and then he resumed college at
the University of the District of Columbia. In addition to
unstructured talking we worked from a diary he kept for therapy,
and from chains of associates related to that. Here are some
samples:
“My mind runs to evil, then back to good. It’s like a tennis
match and I’m the ball. I get tired…. It’s like running a race with
no beginning and no end.”
“I hate it here on earth. I’m tired of living. But obviously it’s
not time for me to die…. I can’t understand why my mind wants
to run from truth.”
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“I got laid off. I’m so happy…. I know I should’ve went to
school full time and worked part time, I’d have something
positive. That job was killing me…. Fucking punks.”
“I’m tired as hell…. But for some odd reason I can’t go to
sleep…. I also visited my grandparents. They give me inspiration
and are my backbone. Especially my grandmother. When I was
little she used to beat me. I caught more beatings from her than
anyone else. Now she teaches me how to deal with myself.”
“When I get to heaven I’m going to sleep for a hundred years,
wake up, drink some wine, smoke some dope, make love to my
woman, and go back to sleep.”
“At times I feel myself feeling keyed up like a robot. I attribute
that for not having any pussy in so long.”
And you see, you get examples of both, healthy, competent
self-expression, mixed with symptoms of insomniac, agitated
depression.
Here is an example of diary writing, followed by a chain of
associates, leading to therapeutic work:
A diary entry went, “A voice inside keeps saying I am to talk to
the President, fuck the devil, and cursing God, and words I just
can’t put down in writing…. Sometimes the voice keeps saying
‘We’re going to rape you when we get upstairs.’ ”
I asked for a chain of associates, and got “Fuck you, President
Lincoln, President Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter. Rape
means I’d participate in homosexual intercourse anal and oral,
taking the passive role.” That last was pretty specific, so I inquired
about it, and the following story emerged: when Mr. L was five or
six an older cousin shared his bed, and that boy bullied him into
submitting to anal intercourse. At the time Mr. L didn’t know just
what this was, but he did know it hurt and he didn’t want it, and
after a few nights he figured out how to put a stop to it. He wet
the bed, and that did it, case closed. You can see that this was a
sturdy little boy who figured out solutions for himself and did not
allow himself to be victimized.
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Only as an adult, when he knew the right names and values to
attach to the event, did it really worry him, and then he wondered
if it meant that he was homosexual. For a while he engaged in
what I called defensive sexual occupational therapy. For example
in his diary he then said, “… a visit from a girl I’ve been knowing
all of my life. We made love almost every day for three weeks. It
helped my masculine ego and got me back together with the
women. I also was screwing this girl at work on the job, which
was really a fantasy. Screwing in an executive’s office. It was a
trip.”
And there were more serious plans and fantasies. “I think I’m
going to graduate school for history. I’ll be a dull quiet refined
history professor. Living in a small city in Africa teaching history.
I’ll probably be single but I plan to adopt some children and raise
them . . they’ll know their African and American roots. They’ll be
able to say with pride that they’re black…. I’ll sit on the porch of
my house in the country and rock.”
Interspersed with constructive work were further episodes of
sleeplessness, hand-wringing, weeping, agitated depression and
hospitalization. From the second episode on, Mr. L was stabilized
on lithium, but then he would hang around Howard University
parties, start having a great old time, stop taking lithium, get into
arguments at home, feel guilty, feel misunderstood and alienated. I
would get anxious phone calls from mother, and pretty soon his
little old grandfather would bring him into my office, crying,
wringing his hands, wiping his eyes on his shirttail, unable to sit
still, and I would have to take him to the ward, talk him into a
seclusion room, and fill out a mess of forms while the nursing
assistants, who always geared up for battle when they heard he
was coming, put their watches and glasses and ties back on. I got
mighty tired of this routine.
Finally, in therapeutic desperation, I consulted the social
worker across the hall, and took her advice. I told the patient that
before I saw him again he had to call a family meeting in my
office, meaning he had to bring everybody, three generations. The
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first time only he and mother showed up, and I refused to meet
with them and insisted on everybody. The next week he came
with grandparents, mother, and little brother. I laid out the
problem: Mr. L had medicine that could control his illness, but he
kept not taking it, and then he preyed on his family, worrying
them, arguing with them, upsetting everybody, and finally
grandfather has to bring him to the hospital. I said I could not
understand how they could tolerate this behavior over and over. I
was fed up, and grandfather was getting too old for this job. When
were they going to get tired of it?
Mr. L had told me that grandmother was the neighborhood
matriarch, and he wasn’t kidding. Everyone else sort of sat there
murmuring The poor boy, or Well what can we do about it Mrs.
Stein, and then grandmother took a deep breath and spoke. She
not only straightened out Mr. L, she straightened out her husband,
and gave him firm instructions never to overprotect the boy again,
then she told mother a thing or two, proceeded to her younger
grandson, home on leave from the Navy, and then told me what
was what. By this time grandfather was smiling proudly, mother
was trying not to giggle, and the two boys were frankly holding
each other up.
Mr. L never skipped another lithium dose and had no more
hospitalizations. The last time I saw him he had started on his
Ph.D., and he and his girlfriend were about to buy their first
house.
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Emotional Regrowth:
Musical Maturation from Infancy to
Adulthood in Eight Months (1971)
Mr. K was an upper middle-class man in his thirties who had been
hospitalized for several years, during which time he had several
psychotherapists. Two years before he was referred to me he tried
to cut his throat; he was given psychotropic drugs and
psychotherapy, but he could make little use of either, and he
withdrew and regressed. When I first saw him he was dirty and
had picked and burned sores all over himself; his teeth were black,
he didn’t wear glasses, so he couldn’t read; he was fat from a kind
of baby formula he mixed up, half coffee or tea and half milk and
sugar. He rarely left his ward, and skipped most meals and some
psychotherapy hours. He spoke little, in one of two intonations:
In a soft, flexible baritone chant, which showed previous voice
training, he sadly volunteered incapacities and hopelessness; when
asked questions, he used a weak falsetto yell to protest, project,
and deny.
I worked with Mr. K twenty minutes a day, five days a week. In
the first months of treatment I moved him out of his easy chair
toward the studio a step at a time, by pushing gently at his
shoulder with one hand. Whenever he moved in the right
direction I took my hand off; if he stood still or moved in the
wrong direction I put my hand back. The baby formula
diminished vocal resonance, and in the fifth week I began
dumping it as fast as he fixed it; I dumped as many as eight cups
in one session. In two weeks the formula had disappeared, and
then I began interfering with self-destructive gestures by moving
his hands away from sores. All this made Mr. K pretty angry, and
besides throwing furniture around and swatting at me, he soon
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began hollering. I praised each shout, and asked him to repeat it
louder and lower in pitch; since I disregarded the content, he
would holler more angrily, but he would respond to the
instruction, and then I praised him again. In four months a general
metamorphosis had begun: he was cleaner, thinner, more athletic,
his sores were healing, he ate meals, wore his glasses, brushed two
years’ dirt off his teeth, went to psychotherapy, hollered in a full,
powerful baritone which was easily heard in surrounding
buildings, and he came to appointments. He was also an
obnoxious bully, teasing, criticizing, and cursing, but physically
assaultive only to me. He was sensitive to the slightest loss, and
could terminate appointments with me only by staging a dramatic
rejection of me a few minutes after I announced that the daily
minimum had been achieved. Days when his psychiatrist was away
he tried to hit me, but days when I was away he imagined that
someone else was me, and hollered awhile at a puzzled aide. The
pressures I mentioned I applied only within the sessions, and the
psychiatrist and nursing staff, who lived through the racket with
difficulty, were permissively supportive and accepting of Mr. K.
This difference in attitudes, I feel, allowed Mr. K to respond to
the stimulus, and change at his own pace.
Once in my studio, Mr. K sometimes played the phonograph.
When his voice was restored, I required him to choose and play a
record in each session, and after a week’s fuss he complied. At
first he played records that he had liked before his illness – the
violin concerto literature, especially the Mendelssohn concerto,
nineteenth-century music in general, and the twentieth-century
concert repertoire, which he thought he ought to like and support.
He found that he could not stand any of these, and felt satisfied
only with Mozart’s chamber music. This, I think, is somewhat
analogous to a child’s taste in music. Satisfactory music was
simple, played by few instruments, built in short, repetitive units
which were balanced, and had to sound every beat at a fast,
reliable pace. Of course there is more to Mozart’s chamber music
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than that, but Mr. K did not pay attention to musical detail at this
time.
In the sixth month Mr. K rummaged and tried out four or five
records in the first ten minutes of each session before settling on
one. The music he liked now included such things as Corelli,
Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no. 8, first allegro; Haydn, Symphony No. 94 in
G Major, first and fourth movements.
His pace decelerated, and in the next weeks he tried out two to
four records a day, and found one or two of them satisfactory. His
taste had grown to include rhythmic differentiation and
complexity – things like syncopation, imbalanced phrase structure,
some suspense with held-over beats, and some melodic
expressiveness, and he tolerated more varied instrumentation. In
addition to the works he had chosen before, he now also liked the
Bach Brandenburg Concerto #2 in F Major, third movement; Griffes,
Poem for Flute and Orchestra; and Beethoven, Sonata No. 7 in C Minor
for violin and piano, op. 30, no. 2, first movement. He added a
questionable category – things he tried and retried, but found
problematical or felt uncertain about. Some of the music he had
rejected earlier he now thought possible or questionable – music
which moved deliberately through dissonances, or had long
suspenseful passages. He still rejected music which moved to
strong climaxes or wallowed slowly in sound textures. I think Mr.
K’s willingness to be undecided and changeable about some music
is the single most important predictor to recovery; it indicates a
degree of differentiation and a long thought process, unlike the
rigid, global, and immediate judgments characteristic of psychotic
thinking.
In the seventh month I added another rule: Mr. K had to keep
quiet and listen deliberately to his choices. There followed a
month of inconsistent, mixed choices, despair and frustration. He
vacillated back and forth between the two previous levels,
sometimes playing one record a session, sometimes playing four
or five; whatever he played, he was dissatisfied with. In terms of a
developmental model, I see this period roughly analogous to
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adolescence, with its backing and forthing between the tastes of
childhood and adulthood, and overriding dissatisfaction with
both. He was even more obnoxious in his behavior, but took time
out once to discuss with me professionally and courteously his
treatment, how he was doing, and when he might expect to finish.
He also offered to control his assaultiveness, and we were able to
dispense with a male aide for the appointments.
In the eight month Mr. K resumed consistent choosing, this
time with more deliberate method. He chose one or two records
and day, one he know he liked, and one he wanted to try out.
Liked by now were things on the order of Scarlatti, A., Concerto in
F minor, largo-allegro; and Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A major,
op. 92, first movement. He liked expressive motion through
dissonance, and to climax, provided it was rhythmically quite
predictable. He was uncertain, meaning by now that he liked or
questioned according to his prevailing mood, music in which
rhythmic motion was less consistent and slower, and phrasing was
less predictable, for example, the Brahms Sonata No. 2 for violin
and piano, first movement. Now he rejected consistently only the
more thick-textured modernistic experiments and Italian opera.
Mr. K was still experimenting, reaching toward more complex and
intense emotionality, but he was also rather settled in a taste
similar to but more conservative than his premorbid taste. I
stopped the treatment here, within a week or two of its expected
completion. Mr. K’s psychiatrist was going on a long vacation and
I did not want to spoil my work by inviting confusion of roles.
During these second four months Mr. K’s metamorphosis had
progressed: he wore clean clothes, sores and burns healed up,
fingernails grew out, and cussing was confined to the nicer fourletter words, used with occasional humor. He went swimming and
took another patient out to dinner. Shouting diminished, and he
asked some genuine questions.
For twenty minutes a day I had interfered only with those
behaviors which obstructed treatment – spending the time
elsewhere, killing himself in little ways, drowning out with talk the
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consequences of choices. I did not interfere with, interpret, or
comment on anything else. At first there were no other demands
in his life, but then when he sought interaction with others,
demands and stimuli increased rapidly in variety, complexity, and
quantity.
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Voice Alterations and Schizophrenia
(1995)
Long ago I wrote a theoretical paper about the esthetics of music
and the nature of schizophrenia. At the time I had a rather boring
job at the National Institute of Mental Health working on a study
of the schizophrenic identical quadruplets. That left some brains
free to think of other things, and some frustration to motivate me
— after all, I was a musician. I wrote the paper and sent it around
and Seymour Kety and his group — who, a few years later,
conducted the Danish adoption study — hired me to work on a
ward of fourteen chronic schizophrenic men. They had been
brought from large public hospitals for biochemical study. They
were very sick but they had to be managed without drugs. Some
were mute, some talked word salad, some talked to the empty air.
Some were incontinent, some masturbated openly in strange
rituals, some played with feces, and so on. I had a chance to get
well acquainted with these schizophrenics without the interference
of medication. Then a ward for biochemical studies of acute
depressions opened, and I was asked to work there also. This
ward admitted several patients whose illnesses began with
depressed mood, and I had a chance to observe the musical
behavior of patients with acute depression, mania, first-break
acute schizophrenia, brain damage, and myxedema. I wrote up
some of my observations, interventions, and results, and that was
published.
That paper got me a two-year research job at Chestnut Lodge
which, at that time, was a hospital for intensive psychoanalytic
psychotherapy of psychoses, especially schizophrenia. Did
anybody here read the book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden?
That is about Chestnut Lodge. Working there gave me an
opportunity to observe and try to treat some very rich psychotic
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patients. They were not very different from the public hospital
patients; the money went for much more psychiatric staff time. I
only had to pay attention to and think about six patients at a time,
and I could observe and record in great detail exactly what these
patients did in relation to music. Now, I did not have any formal
or experimental method; I just looked at musical behavior and
asked whatever interested me. Patients did something, I wrote it
down rather precisely, and then I asked them what they thought
about it. They answered; even mute patients talked a little about
their musical choices. When I listened to them speak, I noticed
that the speaking voices of some patients were pushed artificially
high, a few were too low, and speaking tone often sounded
pinched and monotonous. I tested their voices, much like a voice
teacher would, by getting them to sing up and down scales very
softly, and recording the results. When I found a difference
between their spoken intonations and their natural voices I asked
them about it, and usually they could say something about their
voices and their special intonations.
Time went on, and after a while I paid less attention to the
words patients said, and more to the tune of those words, and
then I recognized the tune. I had heard such sounds in school, in
the course on ethno-musicology, the study of music of many
different cultures. These patients’ unnaturally intoned,
monotonous speech resembled the chanting of quite primitive
people. In fact, they were not speaking at all, they were chanting,
and their speech could be written down fairly well in musical
notation. And while this chanting speech was self-expressive, it
was not communicative, in the sense of giving information. It
functioned rather like primitive chanting, counteracting fear,
helplessness, impotence, anxiety. I concluded that this vocally
altered chanting speech was a fairly common defensive choice in
[all] psychoses, and in that I was not quite right.
For the next twenty years, I worked at a huge public mental
hospital. When I first got there it had 7500 patients. I saw patients
of almost any demographic and psychiatric description in every
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clinical setting from admission to discharge. Several hundred
patients were sent to me for detailed opinions, and I obtained data
describing the speaking and singing voices of around 100.
At this point I want to stop a little for your music lesson. The
human voice usually has three pitch ranges. In English they are
called high, middle, and low registers. Each register has its own
tone quality, and the registers are separated from each other by
register breaks. Those are specific pitches on which the tone is
unsteady, or broken, as it shifts from one tone quality to another.
The pitch range and the registers are built into the voice.
Ordinarily the middle register is used for speech. There are some
normal deviations from that. For example, men with bass voices
tend to use somewhat higher pitches for speech, to avoid being so
conspicuous. Henry Kissinger comes to mind as a bass who does
not do that. In public speaking women often use the lower register
in an effort to get louder and be heard, and you hear me doing
that. Another register is available to all men and some women,
called falsetto, and that sounds feminine and is pitched above the
ordinary range. Men often use it to mimic women.
Voices also have several timbres, called full voice, half voice,
and voiceless whisper. Full voice is louder and has many more
overtones than half voice. Babies crying mostly use full voice, and
when they are cooing, they use half voice.
For each patient I tested, I recorded the compass or vocal
singing range (the top and bottom notes), the pitch of the register
breaks, the speaking pitches and timbres used, and any
peculiarities found. I asked patients what they thought of their
voices, whether they liked them, and if there had ever been any
marked change in the sound of their voices, and I wrote their
answers down. (By the way, are you aware that girls’ voices also
change in adolescence?) I also asked them some background
questions about their age, education, musical training and
experience, mainly to hear them speak about neutral subjects. I did
look to see if any demographic characteristic — race, sex, age,
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social-economic status, education, musical training and experience
— had a relationship to the voice data. None did.
Now, I will take more time out to discuss the diagnosis of
schizophrenia. I had read the psychiatric literature about the
psychoses; I had worked on research studies of schizophrenia, in
multiple births, in hospitals, in the U.S. Navy; and I had read
many patients’ charts, trying to understand the illness. I had spent
many hours in case conferences. In short, I had seen all of the
symptoms and characteristics that were used to support and
rationalize the diagnosis, starting with the schizophrenogenic
mother, and going forward through adolescent life crises and on
to Schneider’s first rank symptoms.
So I knew about the overuse of the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Careful analyses estimated that in the U.S. about 60% of patients
labeled schizophrenic really had schizophrenia. The other 40%
probably had other disorders. Especially in public mental hospitals
schizophrenia often meant any kind of crazy.
Of all of the descriptions of schizophrenia that I read, only a
few really seemed to fit the patients with whom I had become well
acquainted. These were the descriptions in the original
observations of Kraepelin and Bleuler, and then further, in the
work of Arieti.
Kraepelin and Bleuler described a group of psychoses that
involved specific alteration of thinking, feeling, and relating to the
external world, and had fundamental symptoms of disturbed
association and affectivity.1 Arieti went further, and defined the
alteration of thinking and abnormal association. He called it
paleological thinking, or schizophrenic illogical thinking, in which
identification and equation are based on similarities. Here is an
example from recent psychotherapy with one of my patients:
Following a year of psychotherapy a patient who had the usual
history of social and work failures and many hospitalizations was
getting along well in a group home. One day he came in appearing
1
The ability to feel emotions.
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quite withdrawn. Eventually he said he had been up all night and
he just did not know what to do. I asked what happened, and this
was his answer: “Artie — another patient in the group home —
made me fall. Artie stuck his feet out to make me fall. When I
moved in there I knew that some day I’d fall…. I’d fall. Well, it
happened. So I stayed up thinking about what to do, how to
survive. I guess I’ll just have to find a room somewhere to live. I
fall, I always fall. Artie apologized, but that makes no difference.”
And the patient sat turned away, hanging his head in despair.
So there, I think, is the essence of the schizophrenic thought
disorder, the illogical double meaning, or false equation, or
association by similarity, of the word “fall.” The patient tripped
and fell over Artie’s feet, and immediately thought that this fall
equals a fall from grace, which equals failure in living outside a
hospital, which means rejection, getting thrown out, and
homelessness. And he stayed up all night worrying about how to
survive.
It is my experience that this style of thinking is characteristic of
schizophrenia and no other disorder. I think that is extremely
important. All of the other symptoms and findings claimed for
schizophrenia are shared by other disorders in some way, but this
particular kind of thinking is not found in any other disease.
I reviewed my voice data for the hundred or so patients
diagnosed schizophrenic by others and who met the DSM
[Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criteria of
the moment. When I picked out only those patients in whose
charts or interviews I found evidence of this thought disorder, my
data fell into place and pattern. I had meaningful results. Then I
compared them with voice data I obtained from manics and from
patients with reactive psychotic states. The few voice alterations I
found in manics and reactively psychotic patients were not more
frequent, complex or severe than those of the ordinary clients of
speech therapists. That ruled out a general psychotic factor. In
other words, abnormalities in the speaking voices of manics and
reactive psychotics were within the range of normal deviants;
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those patients were actively psychotic but used their voices
normally or near-normally.
Severe or multiple complex alterations of speech intonation
were almost universal among schizophrenics, identified by the
Kraepelin-Bleuler-Arieti criteria, and were absent in the speech of
non-schizophrenic psychotics.
Most of the patients in all three groups were receiving
neuroleptic medications when they were tested. By inducing
involuntary laryngeal relaxation these drugs can decrease the
severity of voice alterations, but cannot increase their severity. So
these voice alterations persisted in spite of neuroleptics.
[Editor’s note: Three types of voice alterations were found
among the schizophrenic patients studied. In the first type,
displaced pitch, the patient’s speaking voice range was shifted up or
down in relation to the individual’s natural singing voice range
The second, narrowed pitch, refers to an unnaturally narrow
speaking range that spans at most a minor third. The third,
constricted timbre, comprises three sub-types: the full voice muted to
the softness one would find in half voice, the full voice choked to
an undertone level, and whisper. Many of the schizophrenic
subjects used two of these alterations on a consistent basis; some
used all three.]
In thinking about these alterations it is important to remember
that patients used them consistently, all the time. Nursing staff
who talked with these patients day after day for months,
sometimes years, knew that the patients sounded peculiar, but had
no idea that what they heard were alterations of normal voices,
and that the patients were physically capable of normal speech. It
is also important to realize that it is not easy to alter one’s
speaking voice to the extent these patients did. Try it, and you will
find out right away that changing your voice like that is not easy,
and keeping up the change all the time is very hard work.
Patients were willing to talk about their voices, and their
comments were instructive. In relation to pitch displacement, here
are some samples of what they said:
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A male patient who displaced his speaking pitch upward by
nearly an octave said, “My voice changed when I was 19 or 22,
well, it never really changed. Puberty was when I was thirteen. I
sang second tenor in college. Well, I know it’s really baritone, but
I don’t use that voice. My natural speaking voice can frighten
children.”
An alto who became overtly ill while she was studying music
said, “My voice lacks strength. People think I’m crying when I talk
but I don’t think so. I sang soprano, and when the parts got too
high I just faked it, just made my mouth go, no sound.”
A man who spoke only in falsetto said, “My voice never
changed. It’s high. When I was about twelve it began getting
heavier, but I didn’t let it. It don’t sound babyfied, I don’t want a
woman’s voice. Some people disguise their voice. I talk the same
all the time.”
A woman whose natural voice was lower than mine, but who
talked an octave higher, without the overtones of the adult voice,
said, “Two years ago I started yelling my tune louder. When I get
in a bad mood I yell my tune, it gets higher and higher. I got mad
and had to let my voice out and up. I learned myself my tune
when I was about fourteen or fifteen; it was a high class accent.”
Two of the patients I just quoted were in psychotherapy with
me, the man who didn’t let his voice get heavier, and the woman
who yelled her tune. In their psychotherapy I responded not to
the words they said, but to the voice in which they said them.
They would say something, and I would respond by saying
something about the intonation, what the intonation might be
about. For example, the woman who put her voice up by an
octave would say something and I would answer, “My voice says I
am a little innocent child,” and so on. I went very slowly in this, as
one would in revising any defenses. They responded, at their own
rate; bit by bit they began using natural speaking pitch. As they
did, spoken content became more realistic and communicative,
and then I began responding to the words they said, as in more
124
conventional psychotherapy. So it appears that pitch displacement
is at least partly voluntary, and can eventually change.
Patients’ comments about their pitch alterations and response
to treatment produced several interesting points. First, the patients
have given thought, even if disordered thought, to the pitch of
their voices, and are aware of them. Second, they tended to be
troubled by the adolescent voice change, something that happens
around the time that schizophrenics start feeling different from
others, somehow abnormal, and suspect that something may be
wrong with them. Third, they regard altering the pitch of their
voices as an adaptation to or requirement of their illness. Fourth,
altering the pitch of their voices is something that they themselves
do. In fact, they work at it.
The main clinical application of the data about schizophrenics’
voice alterations is that the words they say in an artificial
intonation are not directly communicative. In psychotherapy there
is little to be gained by answering the words or information those
strange voices speak. Learning to recognize false intonations is not
so hard, once you know what to look for, and finding out what a
patient’s natural voice may be can also be done by anyone with a
little training. All you need is an idea of the patient’s speaking
pitch, and an idea of the middle register pitch. To get the middle
register you just ask the patient to sing a scale very, very softly
with mouth wide open, and listening for the upper and lower
broken notes. These indicate the register breaks that define, or
bracket, the middle register. Or, if you have a music therapist or
someone else with musical training on the staff, ask them to do it.
I found another use for voice information. When I hear a
patient who speaks only in the half voice, sounding quite relaxed,
but saying things that show a high degree of anxiety, I think the
patient might be overmedicated. That means he is getting more
relaxation from medication than he feels he should have, a
situation that can create mistrust and more anxiety than the
patient began with. Paranoid patients, for example, often feel the
need to be anxiously watchful. They can become more, rather
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than less, frightened if they feel too relaxed early in their
treatment.
127
Thought Disorder, Artistic Media, and
Progress in Therapy: A Case Study1
(1970)
The present study concerns patterns of change in musical
productions, speech, writing, and social behavior of a patient who
was treated for catatonic schizophrenia primarily by means of
problem-solving work in music composition. I was the musician
and the psychotherapist.
John Doe was referred to me when he was in his fifties, after
months of socialization and psychotropic drugs made no change
in his clinical state. He was nearly mute, withdrawn, incontinent,
and skinny, and was said to have been the same for years before
hospitalization was precipitated by his mother’s death.
Psychological testing showed minimal, evasive responses; I.Q.
functioning was low, but potential I.Q. was high. He would
answer a few questions and it was known that he was a welleducated doctor’s son, and knew a little violin and piano. On the
ward he spent much time in bed, apparently hallucinating; when
he was up he was polite but preoccupied, usually with ritual
movements focusing on flatulence. He had a huge hydrocele2 for
which he refused treatment. He would speak in order to state
pleasantly and firmly that he was physically and mentally well, and
should not be hospitalized.
Shortened version. Drawings made by the patient, and their analysis,
were included in the original, mainly as an indicator of therapeutic
progress.
1
A pathological accumulation of fluid in a bodily cavity, especially in the
testes.
2
128
Mr. Doe would comply briefly with instructions. In December
I asked him to solve an evaluative composition problem on the
piano – to devise a tune of his own in 3/4 time, using the C major
scale, and beginning and ending with C on a strong beat.
About his solution he spoke: “Of course I know there must be
at least six other ways to do this, but somehow this seems to me
to be the only solution; it seems necessary to do it this way.” The
tune plods up the scale to the point where tension increases in
expectation of the leading tone1 and its pull to cadence;2 the
leading tone is omitted, creating a gap or discontinuity, and
bringing the music to a standstill. I told Mr. Doe that the necessity
of the gap in place of a leading tone was probably an indication of
thought disorder and proposed treatment. He said politely that he
was not ill. Soon after, he made two bizarre passive suicide
attempts.
I confronted Mr. Doe with the gaps in this thinking and
behavior and the parallel gap in his composition, mentioned that
in real life this gap might kill him, and that it necessitated rather
unsatisfactory music, and proposed treatment by means of
composition problems. He thought it over for a week, and
decided to try. We agreed to work on short composition problems
structured to stimulate more continuous music. Mr. Doe was not
willing to admit to an illness, but he was willing to recognize that
the musical version of the symptom was a musical hindrance.
The thought disorder that necessitated the musical gap is often
referred to as dissociative compartmentalization, and I have seen
similar music involving avoidance of leading-tone motion in the
compositions of other patients severely ill with catatonic and
paranoid schizophrenia. Obligatory avoidance of leading-tone
The seventh note of the scale, it gives a strong feeling of wanting to
arrive at the top (eighth) note of the scale. In solfege it is called ti and
leads up to do.
1
2
The sense of coming to rest at the end of a musical phrase.
129
motion usually indicates that the patient finds thought and
expression in which one thing leads to another prohibitively
anxiety arousing. It is a pervasive defense against the form of
events rather than against any specific content of events, and is
usually associated with a psychotic illness. Initial drawings, suicide
attempts and musical composition all resembled each other in
their failure to lead anywhere; all were more or less disjunct in
form.
We set to work, and in the first problems, I wrote a beginning
and Mr. Doe chose a few notes to follow. Gaps were large, and
then they became smaller.
By the third month Mr. Doe was writing tunes of his own.
They were narrow in range, and they turned in on themselves. The
dissociative gap now appeared in less conspicuous form,
separating the main tune from the leading tone, and reducing
leading-tone motion to a cliché amen.1 It still functioned to stop
the motion short.
In the fourth month I prohibited amen endings, and insisted
that tunes stop wherever a gap seemed necessary. The resulting
motion was halting, but went farther, in a wider range. Mr. Doe’s
behavior began changing in little bits. He told me his real name,
wanted me to notice his birthday, stayed out of bed, and signed up
every week for a discharge, so that a pretty young nursing assistant
would talk him out of it. Staff liked him; patients did not.
To escape the constriction and involution of chant-like
melodies, I set Mr. Doe to work at found-note composition in
which he shut his eyes, hit the piano at random several times, and
used those notes to generate tunes.
By the fifth month the results had a wider range, stronger
rhythmic discriminations, and tunes showed stronger pull leading
from note to note. In this month spoken sentences grew into
The amen cadence uses the chord progression IV - I. The melody
repeats the tonic note (do), as in a hymn that ends with A - men.
1
130
anecdotes, and finally, Mr. Doe’s behavior changed. He went
outdoors, and participated in sports without being told to.
Found notes became rigged notes and I wanted to stimulate
more spontaneous speech, so I began assigning free-associative
composition. I asked Mr. Doe for a chain of associates to define
the tunes he would write. At first, associates and their derivative
music were angelically censored, clean and sweet.
By the sixth month associates came more readily. Mr. Doe
wanted power, and he achieved it in quick melodic leaps and
strong rhythm. Around this time Mr. Doe began writing; he
looked out of his window at the street, and wrote about people
and cars passing by, going places.
In the fourth and fifth month of treatment Mr. Doe’s
interpersonal behavior and activity level had begun to change, and
in the sixth month these changes gained momentum and became
obvious. In psychotherapy he spoke in continuous narrative about
good aspects of his past life, and told connective lies to cover gaps
when presumably life was not good. He ventured far on the
hospital grounds, read the patient newspaper and then got himself
a job on it, and he signed up and participated in a pool
tournament. He began talking to people other than the therapist.
He became concerned about his physical health – probably a
somatized recognition that something was wrong with him – and
he asked the ward doctor for vitamins and an operation on his
hydrocele. Chains of associates showed only conventional
censoring, for example:
“Nothing, not prepared, can’t do anything satisfactory, phooey,
ishkabibble, plagiarized, piece, of music, Donnerwetter,1 Ich bin2
stymied, lousy melody, death, what to live for, medical school,
music, self-respect.”
1
A German expletive.
2
I am.
131
His writing was talented, beautifully spelled, but more
inhibited:
Therapy Hour
The office I am sitting in is strange to me. On the door
outside I believe it says ‘Olden Stinson, Surgeon’. A
spacious ashtray reposes on the floor, a calendar on the
wall, some flowers in a glass-container on the window sill.
Outside the inevitable birds arguing raucously over their
food. It is quite…. Occasionally I hear the P.A. system
outside calling someone. The floor is linoleum and stone,
and the walls are painted a soothing light green color. A
telephone sits in its place and I in mine, wondering what to
talk about in therapy.
Sentences are continuous; the style is mostly passive, and one
personal phrase of sardonic humor is preambled by long
impersonal description. Nothing indicates that the paragraph was
written to the therapist.
In the seventh month Mr. Doe had his operation, and staff
responded to his recent progress by planning his outpatiency. Mr.
Doe did not allow his incision to heal, and he made a third passive
suicide attempt by starving himself. Nurses who tried and failed to
feed him asked me to try; I talked about it, and he said if I was
going to be unpleasant he didn’t want therapy hours. Finally when
he was very weak and ill, he asked me a question: “I feel so lousy.
What’s the matter with me?” I said that was expected of people
who are starving to death. For the first time he perceived a
meaningful link between cause and effect; he decided not to die,
asked for food and drink, consumed them, and decided to resume
composition, all within twenty minutes. In music he wanted to try
working out some of the structure of problems himself.
132
Mr. Doe still did not let his incision heal, but in the ninth
month he again asked for help in connecting dissociated elements:
“I am nice to everyone, and everyone is nice to me. I’m not like
other patients who are often unpleasant. So how am I crazy?” It
was possible to trace cause and effect in his vengeful passiveaggressive suicide attempts, and active psychotherapy, meaning
interpretations, began at this point. Forthwith Mr. Doe made a
good physical recovery and resumed his life where he had left it in
the sixth month of treatment.
In the tenth month I introduced melodic variations and
alternative solutions to composition problems. At first Mr. Doe
wrote padded busy work, instead of alternatives and variants, but
then the concept took hold. In life-style he became more
autonomous; he worked on compositions outside of
appointments in order to gain more time for psychotherapy,
where he brought up past embarrassments and hurts for
alternative interpretation and perspective.
In the eleventh month of treatment I assigned variation
problems with alternative countermelodies, in other words,
counterpoint in two parts. Plain and fancy doublings of parts
which moved up and down together gradually gave way to some
interdependence. Parts were spaced well apart in pitch to make a
treble and a bass, and the dominant part was treble.
Counterpoint is an interactive musical texture which depends
on the interplay of two interdependent tunes. When one tune is
more independent than the other, it is heard as dominating the
texture. In psychotherapy Mr. Doe began talking about past
interpersonal relationships and problems. He renewed old
relationships with relatives, colored them with nostalgic halos, and
was disenchanted.
In the next month I assigned melodic writing in the bass; this
led to counterpoint in which the bass was the more independent,
and therefore dominant, part.
Mr. Doe’s psychotherapy then moved on to current
relationships and problems, and he began to explore his
133
relationship to me. He was prejudiced, and thought that people
who take their troubles to a Jew are crazy, and yet he was in
therapy with a Jew. He decided that he was recovering from a
severe mental illness. He attempted to replace me and was
rejected, and staff pressured him to seal over the conflict and
make outpatient1 plans. In anger he moved out of the hospital
without plans or resources. There followed a dramatic angry final
fling at psychosis with catatonic withdrawal, rehospitalization, and
catatonic frenzy. Drugs controlled the frenzy, the anger was
expressed directly, and the psychotic state remitted in two days.
Mr. Doe then resolved the transference conflict, outgrew me,
planned and entered a realistic outpatiency, and then terminated
intensive therapy. Composition therapy was essentially complete
in the twelfth month of treatment, with the achievement of
simultaneous interdependent, interactive parts dominated by bass.
So far I have withheld the patient’s history, as it seems
relatively unimportant in the study of his treatment process. A
brief overview will demonstrate that.
Mr. Doe was the second and youngest son in a well-to-do
immigrant doctor’s family, some of whom had schizoid and
borderline schizophrenic symptoms. As a boy he had problems
with eating, shyness, and enuresis; he specialized in smiling
compliance, was mildly indulged and got away with infractions for
which his brother was punished. In adolescence he was troubled
by conflicts about values, morality, and sex; he rejected religion,
and tried solutions from military school to Freud. At sixteen he
had an unspecified illness and was kept home for two years;
probably it was a first schizophrenic episode. He went on to
college and medical school, even though he wanted to be a writer,
but on the eve of his first clinical work he quit school, and then
there was a second illness. He was hospitalized for six weeks and
given electric shocks for depression without benefit, and then he
An outpatient lives outside the hospital, perhaps in a halfway house,
but continues to receive treatment in the hospital.
1
134
was kept at home, where he was now diagnosed schizophrenic.
Five years later there was a partial remission and a year of odd
jobs, followed by twenty-odd years of illness at home. His father
died, and his mother took care of him; they lived in increasing and
then complete isolation. Time rushed by timelessly, and when his
mother was dying he was found in the house, apathetic and
neglected. He had had warm early relationships to his
grandmother, childhood friends, and a highly intellectual family
maid. His mother was rather distant and formal, and his father
was a benevolent, admired authority figure. These relationships all
duly reappeared in transference form in the course of treatment;
mostly I was assigned the maid’s role, and under stress, that of the
grandmother.
There is nothing extraordinary about Mr. Doe’s history, except
that his back ward1 was at home instead of at an institution. The
course of psychotherapy in itself is not extraordinary either. What
was exceptional was that psychotherapy took place at all, that it
progressed so fast, and that it involved a consistent pattern of
time lags between stylistically parallel change in two artistic media
and in speech and behavior. This pattern is not unique to the
treatment of Mr. Doe. By now about a dozen patients with a great
variety of social, ethnic, national, economic, and personal
characteristics have been treated this way, and have progressed in
more or less the same pattern. The first such case was treated in
1960 and published in 1963. All of these patients presented with
prohibitive difficulties in talking meaningfully in psychotherapy,
were potentially very intelligent, were diagnosed psychotic, and
appeared socially isolated. One way or another they had refused
verbal treatment opportunities, and their refusals had proved
drug-proof and shock-proof. They were offered problem-solving
work in music and they did not refuse. Initially their musical
behaviors changed while their lives stood still. After some time
(months, for very ill patients, and weeks, for patients whose illness
1
A section of the hospital housing chronic, hopelessly ill patients.
135
had made less inroads on life), changes began to appear
spontaneously in speech and behavior. As treatment progressed,
the lag between musical and behavioral changes grew shorter and
shorter, and finally musical problem-solving, real-life events, and
verbal therapies became instantly interactive. At this point patients
would be perceived as functioning individuals, to be treated
henceforth by conventional verbal methods.
Mr. Doe’s case was chosen for presentation partly because of
the information contributed by his pictures, and partly because his
twenty years of sameness and isolation before treatment control
variables that might clutter up a study of treatment process.
Change in Mr. Doe was induced by means of musical problem
solving, was internalized, and then reappeared spontaneously in
stylistically analogous ways, first in visual art, and then in speech
and life-style. That Mr. Doe changed in response to a musical
input was demonstrated by means of twenty years without major
change at home, six months without major change in an active
ward milieu which included all the same therapies except the
musical input, and major change within a few months following
musical input.
At the conclusion of treatment, his life and music were
characterized by interaction which he dominated, however gently.
PART 4: MEDICINE IS NOT AN
EXACT SCIENCE
139
Your Internal Medicine Committee
A friend phoned from his hospital bed to complain. “I just had my knee
replaced, and of course that hurts. But now my belly is cramping. What’s that
all about? It’s not fair!” he cried.
“There, there,” I said. “Lie back on your pillows, and I will explain it to
you.”
Many mornings, in the hour of good dreams before you wake,
your internal medicine committee has its staff meeting. I say
“your” committee, but the phenomenon is not uniquely yours.
Everyone actively experiencing aging has a committee of their
own, and you have yours.
Before you were eligible for Social Security and Medicare, your
committee was rarely called together. For a long time it only met
once or twice a decade, just often enough to punctuate your life
course with an occasional crisis, whooping cough, pneumonia,
abscessed tooth, a broken bone, and such.
When you turned 65 your internal medicine committee got off
the golf course long enough to attend monthly meetings and work
out some scheduling conflicts. Since then, bit by bit, the time
between meetings shortened, slowly, but inexorably. Agendas got
more interesting, and attendance improved. By the time you were
70, meetings were held weekly in response to members’ increasing
demands for time on the agenda. You got even older and weekly
meetings proved insufficient. Now that you’ve passed 75,
meetings are held almost daily, and the agenda is busy, busy, busy.
Meetings of internal medicine committees resemble the
structure of Congressional committee meetings. Organ system
representatives and their more important anatomical subdivisions
sit along a semi-circular table. Crowded agendas may elicit
arguments, and representatives bring in assistants, briefed in
points of special anatomical features and ailments, to sit behind
their representatives, poised to lean forward to murmur reminders
140
and coachings into their bosses’ ears. The representative of the
below-the-waist division of musculoskeletal structures may, for
example, be backed up by an expert in the structure of the lumbar
spine, sitting side-by-side with the knee and hip person, but
leaning a little away from the podiatrist to minimize fellow
committee members’ perception of too close an association with
this more marginal discipline.
The ends of the table are a little roomier. One end
accommodates the nervous system representative, with his splay
of back-ups, cranial nerves, gait, and seizures. Obliquely behind,
almost but not quite reaching the front rank, is psychiatry, and its
popular subdivisions, psychosis, unhappiness, and senile
dementias, backed up by their universal catch-all, psychosomatics.
Oncology, with a crew of cancer specialists, is seated at the other
end of the table. The rest, gastroenterology, cardiology,
dermatology, and the other medical disciplines’ chairs and backups are dotted all along the central curve.
It’s a leaderless group that comes to consensus decisions
without excess acrimony. After all, they look to one another for
referrals and symptom trade-offs. They may compete in reaching
any one day’s decision, but do so with a show of respect, or at
least while avoiding overt snubbing of the lower classes, that is,
gynecology and podiatry.
Your committee met this morning before dawn, while you
were still enjoying the respite of your pain-drugged, dreamless
sleep, and took up the subject of your knee. “I think I am doing
enough,” modestly said the musculoskeletal representative, leaning
back to consult his knee man, who smilingly corroborated, “Yes,
just the right amount of pain, just over the drug threshold.”
“I would prefer some symptom diffusion,” said the neurologist
politely. “The knee will heal, slowly but surely, a cause for
optimism. How about a gastric distraction? Perhaps immunology
can suggest a drug reaction with vomiting? Or shall I pinch a
nerve in the cervical spine? To begin a chain reaction, with a
referral to my friend here,” and he kindly patted psychiatry on the
141
shoulder. “She can introduce the belief that he suffers from false
recollections of un-assuaged childhood hurts, and consequent
depression.”
Others thought this idea a bit much, and advised waiting for
some knee abatement before introducing the neurologist’s
proposed scenario. After further discussion the group returned the
problem to the musculoskeletal representative and considered
arthritis of the lumbar spine, exacerbated by the extra stress
induced by knee-motion avoidance, but postponed that as well,
and settled for the gastroenterologist’s suggestion of simple
constipation generated by pain medication.
The meeting closed in a climate of cooperation and friendly
well wishing. It had accomplished its agenda and met its goal,
namely, to exceed the aging pain baseline. When you get old
something always hurts, and it is your committee’s job to decide in
detail just where and how to hurt you next.
And that is why your belly hurts today. Be comforted; your
committee could have done worse!
143
STOP! I Withdraw Permission
I. Catching It
It all began when I was born with a bone missing in my lumbar
spine, that troublesome column of five backbones and inter-bone
spaces governing mammalian mobility and function from the
waist down. Like wisdom teeth and the appendix, the lumbar
spine may be an evolutionary failure in mammalian development.
Sooner or later nearly everybody has a problem with their five
normal vertebrae, and assigned to do the work of five, my four
eventually overgrew, pinching local nerve roots, and producing
pain and weakness. I first discovered, by time spent in doctors’
waiting rooms, that I needed doctors more than they needed me,
and second, by x-ray reports, that when doctors can’t link
symptoms to inter-bone spaces (because they look at an x-ray of
four bones and perceive five), they diagnose psychogenic disorder.
I worked my way up the neurosurgical hierarchy until I reached
doctors able to look at four bones, count four, and adapt
anatomical expectations to four. They lined up pinch-related
dysfunctions with extant bone spaces, and I was soon
anesthetized, scrubbed clean, and cut open. Nerve roots were
liberated and bones realigned with much benefit. But I was
warned: however rearranged, four vertebrae would still have to do
the job of five, and I was urged to develop muscles to help them
out.
I exercised faithfully. Three mornings a week I walked six
blocks to the District of Columbia’s year-round pool to swim back
and forth and back and forth. The deep end was reserved for
swimmers earnestly plowing high speed laps, and after I was
swamped by their bow wave a couple of times I fled to the
shallow end. It was occupied by a pleasant geriatric lot slowly
walking against water resistance while chatting companionably. I
144
took up a no-man’s aisle between water walkers and serious
swimmers, interpolating a little water walking with swimming.
Relationships were warmly friendly at the geriatric end of the pool
even though we might not have recognized one another fully
dressed and on the street. Months went by pleasantly enough.
The pool is run by the District of Columbia Department of
Recreation, which, like most of the DC government, functions
variably between well-intentioned inept to blatantly crooked. In
the mid-winter of my muscle-building year, Recreation decided to
get its only open pool repainted. The pool was closed, drained,
cleaned, dried, painted, refilled, and in two or three weeks’ time it
almost reopened. Almost, but not quite. The pool had been
painted with water-soluble paint.
A further contract was let, the tinted water was drained and the
remains of its new paint was scrubbed off. It was re-dried and
repainted with real pool paint. When the job was complete and the
pool refilled with clear water, the water walkers, I, and the serious
swimmers returned to our tacitly allotted territories and resumed
healthful morning pool exercise.
Three mornings a week I resumed swimming and occasional
water walking. At first I was a little stiff and tired, but that was to
be expected after the two-month layoff, and I thought in a week
or two I would regain fish-like aquatic dexterity. In fact, most of
me shaped up on schedule, all but my left arm. It cramped and
tingled all the way down into my palm. Crampily I swam back and
forth and thought about that. The arm wasn’t cramping on its
outer surface, where its big muscles are; it cramped on the inner
side. But the arm’s inner surface has much less muscle, and the
palm has hardly any. I looked in my medical dictionary’s muscle
picture; sure enough, no muscles in the palm. So how was I
getting a muscle cramp in my left palm? And how was a bilaterally
equal exercise causing cramp in only one arm? Dutifully plowing
back and forth I reflected. Not much muscle down the inside of
the arm, none in the palm; so what can cramp in that territory?
Circulation, that’s what, and lots of it. Another week and I gave up
145
on denial, took my cramping arm to my doctor, and recited my
symptom.
“Now, Johanna,” he said, sternly, “you are not medically
unsophisticated, and you know what this is,” and wrote the
referral to a cardiologist.
The cardiologist gave me a stress test. Not that he showed me
a picture of a rattler about to strike, or my ex-mother-in-law in a
similar pose. No, he meant walking on a treadmill to no place until
you can’t keep up, being injected with a radioactive drug to light
up cardiac function, and lying still for pictures.
The picture taking took a long time. At first I watched the
computer monitor, looking for order or pattern, but all I saw was
a succession of Milky Way constellations meaninglessly
reassembling themselves on the computer screen, and my mind
drifted to speculate on the future. My parents died of heart disease
in their early fifties. At sixty I had already outlived my genetic life
expectancy. Would there be a future? Probably not much.
It appeared that the cardiologist tended to agree with me. He
called me into his office as soon as the test was finished, and said,
“When you came in I was sure I was looking at a healthy woman
with anxiety but I was wrong. You already had a minor heart
attack, at the bottom of the apex where it doesn’t much matter,
but it’s a warning. Keep this bottle of nitroglycerine pills within
reach, day and night. When you feel the spasm in your left hand or
you get short of breath, put one under your tongue, and if the
symptom hasn’t stopped in five minutes, use a second one, and if
necessary a third. You may also have Prinzmetal’s variant of
angina, that’s the spasm that feels like a cramp in your hand.
“I have to transfer you to another cardiologist for an
angiogram, an injection of dye to light up your cardiac circulation,
and an angioplasty to open up any artery blockages it shows,” he
continued. “Your health insurance only covers emergencies at this
hospital. You can’t fix your heredity, but you can improve your
chances by sticking to these rules. Stop smoking. Keep this diet.
146
No coffee. And take it easy; those spasms appeared mainly when
you were exercising.”
What a lot to think about! I put the little nitroglycerine bottle in
my pocket and slowly drove home. Heated up the coffee, poured
a cup, lit a cigarette, and sat down to ruminate.
II. Ramifications of the Disease
So I had heart disease, and it hadn’t killed me, and now what?
Now I have to keep this little bottle of pills on me all the time;
now I have to quit smoking; now no more caffeine, no butter, no
eggs. In grad school three eggs, thickly buttered toast, coffee with
cream, and a cigarette got me up in the morning and put me to
bed at night. I sighed, put out my cigarette and dumped my
coffee. No chocolate, either; the diet sheet said chocolate is full of
caffeine.
Time to get organized. I made out a shopping list of new stuff:
decaffeinated coffee; Egg Beaters, those frozen cornstarched,
yellowed egg whites; margarine whose ads swear you can’t tell it
from butter. I reached for the cigarette pack and stopped because
I’m cutting down, and took list and prescriptions to the store.
Next morning I denied myself the pleasant wake-up cigarettecum- ruminating style of greeting the new day. At 7:30 my heart, I
now knew, made the cramp in my left hand, and I put the first of
my tiny nitroglycerine pills under my tongue and waited. Just as
the doctor predicted, one minute later it stung my tongue, and in
another minute it produced a warm frontal headache, and then the
cramp eased. “It works,” I said to the cats, who were watchfully
awaiting their breakfast, “There’s no denying it, it must be heart
disease, or the pill wouldn’t fix it.” Bravely I drank decaffeinated
coffee and ate disguised egg whites and toast with margarine
reminiscent of World War II when butter went to the military and
we massaged food coloring into packages of greasy white stuff.
Treated myself to 1/2 of a cigarette, the cutting-down
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compromise I had negotiated with myself the night before, and set
to work.
First I looked up my disease and medicines. I had already
retired but was still writing up data and explaining it for
psychiatric journals, and still had the two essential textbooks: the
Merck Manual, which describes all known diseases and their
treatment, and a barely outdated PDR, Physicians’ Desk
Reference, which lists all prescription drugs, their composition,
uses, doses, effects, and side effects. Research results were
informatively negative. In the Manual’s approximately 150 pages
on diseases of the heart, one inch of print mentioned my disease
just long enough to call it a rare variant. Fifteen years and three
editions later it gets two inches in 200 pages. The PDR gave it one
line in a one page description of one of my three medications. The
11 am spasm cramped my hand, and I took a pill and stopped
reading.
Next I called the doctor’s office on my insurance-approved list.
The receptionist scheduled me for the angiogram the following
week, and assured me it was a routine procedure. I would go
home the same day. It was to be done at Suburban Hospital and
my insurance approved. The cardiologist would meet with me a
week after that to discuss results and treatment, and she made an
appointment for that, too. I swallowed my fear and dislike of
Suburban Hospital and agreed to it all. The trouble with that
hospital is that it is located in an affluent suburb, and is therefore
preferred by affluent doctors who live expensively nearby, and
who are not eager to waste unbillable time driving to work at
downtown hospitals. Aware of this fact of medical life, the
hospital does not knock itself out in quest of excellence; it keeps
itself short of equipment, supplies, edible food, and staff. This is
just a simple, in-and-out procedure, I comforted myself. In and
out. I won’t be there long enough to be told there is no IV stand,
or served a baked potato with rotted brown mush under its skin.
Even at Suburban, inject some dye, take pictures, put in a stitch,
and go home. What could go wrong?
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I showed up at the right place and time, signed here, signed
there, was divested of all belongings, and lay down in submission
to medical advice. As usual my thoughts, a turnabout mixture of
dislike, suspicion, and abject fear, showed on my rubbery but
expressive face, and the doctor introduced himself and sought to
reassure me. He told me that he had been a resident at the
National Heart Institute where this technique was perfected, and
was experienced in it, and I tried to relax or at least simulate
relaxation and hide my anxiety. And, indeed, all went well,
meaning that I was pricked in the groin crease and was halflistening to the procedural doctor-nurse talk when my heart
notified me that it was 11 am, and time for the Prinzmetal’s
spasm. This time it was more severe than usual, and made me
short of breath. I asked for a nitroglycerine pill, and that was when
Suburban Hospital lived up to its reputation for incompetence. I
had asked for the pills commonly used to relieve angina. They
work by dilating cardiac blood vessels. And when injecting dye
into those very blood vessels in a cardiac surgical unit, there
weren’t any nitroglycerine pills on hand and no one seemed to
know where to get any. Anxiety, irritation or maybe sheer
cussedness made the symptoms worse, and I kept on asking for
the medicine. Finally someone found the tube of pills in my
clothes; by that time it took repeated doses to induce my
symptoms to subside.
III. The Plot Thickens
Like doctor 1, doctor 2 looked at my test and did not wait for an
appointment to tell me the results: my coronary artery must be
opened by means of angioplasty ASAP. However, Suburban
Hospital, where doctor 2 worked, lacked facilities for that, so he
referred me to doctor 3 at another hospital which, he said, met all
three criteria, staff, facilities, and the blessing of my health
insurance. I took my bad heart back home.
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So far, getting my heart treated had amounted to an unexciting
shopping venture, annoying but not harmful. Each shift, from one
doctor to another, and one hospital to another, took time to
arrange, redefining the concept ASAP in a relaxed, southern style.
Accordingly I continued my easy-going version of cardiac diet and
life-style conformity.
Then one morning while I was enjoying my disallowed
breakfast coffee with my banned post-breakfast cigarette, I inhaled
some oh-so-pleasant smoke and felt my heart contract. Finally I
understood what doctors 1 and 2 had told me too politely: I was
in imminent danger. It was stop smoking this minute or die the
next. I threw out the cigarette, and have never touched another.
After forty-four years of enjoyable smoking, stopping was easy.
Quit or die, and I quit.
Newly reformed, I ate margarine, egg whites, skinless chicken
breasts, drank coffee substitute, and phoned to complete
arrangements with doctor 3. A couple of weeks of waiting my
turn, and my heart would be fixed. I worked on the umpteenth
draft of an article and popped nitroglycerine pills in the precisely
timed cardiac spasm pattern of my strange disease.
The new hospital proved luxurious, compared to Suburban. I
was assigned a spacious room and a student nurse companion. A
cardiology resident, doctor 4, introduced herself, and said she
would assist doctor 3. She explained angioplasty to me: doctor 3
will go into the artery from my right groin, inject dye, and when
my heart’s blood vessels are lit up and visible on a monitor he will
push in a thin tube. When it arrives at my artery’s obstruction he
will inflate a little balloon at the head of the tube to push the
cholesterol clutter off to the sides, and blood will flow freely
through my heart again. Tube and balloon will be withdrawn, and
a stitch will close the entrance hole. It didn’t sound overly
promising, and I asked about using a laser to clean out the artery,
but she said they were trying it out on dogs, not yet on people. A
man in green pajamas hurried in, said, “I am Doctor 3,” ran
through the legal paragraph that begins “Medicine is not an exact
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science,” to warn me about risks, and ran out. Back home I saw
his recitation listed as “$35, doctor visit,” on the bill. My student
nurse and I played gin rummy.
At eleven o’clock my heart did its spasm, and I interrupted the
game to explain and take my pill. My student must have sounded
an alarm, as the room was suddenly full of people and machinery,
saying “Prinzmetals” to one another, hooking me up and plugging
me in. Pictures of my disease in vivo were still fairly rare, I
gathered, and I could see why. Except for a little while at 7 am, 11,
and 3:30 I produced normal EKG’s.
It was time for the angioplasty, and I was trundled off, put in
position, and hooked up to monitors, while doctors 3 and 4 set
out tools near my lower end. Tube went in, dye went in, just like
before, and then BAM! A huge pain gripped my chest. Not even a
ka-bam, with an introductory stutter or warning, just BAM! It
stopped just as suddenly, leaving my screams echoing in my ears. I
overheard doctor talk that went, “The goddam thing is made of
concrete; let’s try this.” And the all-eclipsing BAM again. This
time I hollered STOP, I WITHDRAW PERMISSION, and LET
ME OUT OF HERE!
Doctor 3 came into my view, and said, “See, when we try to get
into that artery we actually block it for a few seconds. So that
makes a little heart attack. Now you know what a heart attack feels
like.” I could see he was really interested in this phenomenon. I
was not. He disregarded my continuing sobbed objections and
went on, “the thing is, before your artery does that by itself and
kills you we have to get in there one way or another. We have a
thoracic surgical team standing by ready to go in to try to replace
the artery, but there’s one more method we think could work. Can
you stand it just one more time?” I agreed, and braced myself; it
hurt, and I hollered, but I was not so overwhelmed, and then the
pain stopped, and Doctors 3 and 4 congratulated me and each
other. A large, good-looking man leaned a hundred of his 200
pounds on the incision for awhile, and when he was replaced by a
sandbag I was carted off to bed.
PART 5: THIRTY PLACES TO
MASSAGE
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Cyrus and the Midlife Crisis
Presenting Symptoms. Cyrus, nine-year-old neutered male cat, is
in trouble. A well-spoiled large half-Abyssinian male, he abruptly
changed his lifestyle without known precipitating cause. Formerly
the most affectionate and loving of animals whose chief
occupations were winding around the legs of visitors, posing for
photographs, and sleeping on beds, within a two-week onset
period he switched to life on the street, returning only for food
and bad-weather shelter. He ditched his cat collar, enlarged his
territory, and fought to defend it, sustaining head wounds, missing
patches of fur, and a permanently tattered ear. A silent cat who
used to speak only when stepped on, he has developed a variety of
demanding meows to announce wants and needs. He has given up
sleeping on beds altogether; when bad weather forces him
indoors, he sleeps on the living room floor. Tentative diagnosis:
midlife crisis.
Nature of the Disorder. Midlife crisis, a.k.a. the male
menopause, is not well described in the medical literature
weighing down my bookcase. The Merck Manual, which offers
information about symptoms, causes, treatments, and outcomes
of all known diseases, doesn’t list it, nor does the Dorland Medical
Dictionary, never mind the psychiatric part of the Diagnostic
Statistical Manuals, editions II through IV. Phase of Life Problem
is as close as it gets.
Encyclopedias do offer information. They define midlife crisis
as a social, rather than a medical, disorder. One gathers views
from developmental psychologists and anthropologists, and finds
agreement. Midlife crisis, they say, occurs similarly in quite
different cultures, and is related to parenting. Men and women
repress impulses incompatible with parenting while their children
are growing up; once the offspring are grown, their parents are
free to reclaim repressed aspects of themselves, and experience a
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greater openness to individuality. Implied in this construct is that
we allow the wide range of adolescent interests and behaviors to
reemerge in midlife, offering another opportunity to explore
alternative versions of ourselves.
A related element may be that the trace of sociopathy — the
irresponsible misbehavior coupled with thrill-seeking and
concomitant anxiety associated with being held accountable —
that may characterize normal adolescence, reemerges in midlife.
Persons in midlife crisis may feel, sometimes quite strongly, that
they deserve a more thrilling, adventurous style of life. Rewards
and approvals that resolved these feelings in earlier years no
longer appear adequate, and conflicts with the familiar may mount
until midlife crisis sufferers feel entitled to rebel and check out.
Another source suggests a version of the “bust loose” concept
that is more career-oriented. It defines middle age, occurring
between the ages of 40 to 60, as a period of adjustment between
the achievements of the past and the anticipated limitations of the
future. Rebellion may be triggered by the realization that less time
remains in the future than has been lived already. Middle-aged
individuals must take satisfaction in past accomplishments and
accept their upcoming, more restrictive future, or they might
despair and become unhappily focused on unattained objectives.
In the latter case, midlife rebellion functions to assuage anxiety
about foreseen limitations yet to come.
Is midlife crisis biological? The term is used more often to
describe a distinctively human male menopause or phenomenon,
with variable impact on the patient. The parallel between
adolescent irresponsibility and midlife abandonment of prior adult
commitments suggests a biological component, as does the
tendency of men in midlife crisis to seek new, generally younger,
mates. On the other hand, the disorder of humans may be
explored profitably by looking at parallel problems in animals.
They, at least, just exhibit symptoms without dragging in the
intricacies of, for example, relationships with mothers-in-law, or
infant breast-feeding experiences.
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The breeding of dairy cattle and their bulls may offer tangential
evidence of a biological component in midlife crisis. “Keep them
pregnant and home on the farm” is no joke to the standard milk
cow, who must be regularly and reliably impregnated to stay in
production. In modern dairy farming that means annual
impregnation by a vet. He gathers semen from a selected bull, and
works his way through a herd of cows, manually impregnating
each. That way the whole herd will eventually calve within a week,
and he can deliver the calves with logistic efficiency.
However scientific, the process still starts with a contribution
by a bull, who needs the stimulus of a willing cow to make his
donation. It appears that bulls who were initially excited sexual
participants eventually showed a puzzling lack of interest in repeat
performances with familiar cows. An attempt to disguise the
previously attractive cow — presenting her in a somewhat varied
setting, or with a new hide pattern painted on, or wearing a
flowered hat — made no difference; bulls were simply uninspired
by the same old cows. They were thought knackered out and
impotent, until they accidentally encountered a strange but willing
cow, when they went right into action with every sign of their
former enthusiasm, establishing the “New-Cow Principle” of midlife revitalization.
History. Cyrus was a pleasant, thoughtful, quiet baby who was
unusually sensitive. “No, no,” corrected most undesirable
behaviors; a louder scolding for major infractions induced hurt
withdrawal to sit in a corner. He devised a fast-food method,
sitting on feet that entered the kitchen and not getting off until
they turned toward the source of cat food. He cried piteously
when I practiced the viola until he realized that it hurt me more
than it hurt him, when he began comforting me. He handled
comings and goings through his cat door for outside toileting
without problem. Neutering was done at puberty, and he
recuperated at home in twenty-four hours without signs of
reactive disturbance.
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Cyrus grew into a fearless venturesome adolescent. The shy,
sweet kitten was replaced by a young cat who dragged full-grown
pigeons around the alley. He absconded for three days, came
home without apology, and collapsed for long, exhausted sleep.
Big, strong, and sleek, he was soon top cat of the alley. In the
following year he matured into somnolent, responsible adulthood.
Differential Diagnosis. Post-parenting self-exploration and
sexual reinvigoration are eliminated by history. Foresight limited
to his next dinner is inconsistent with reaction to anticipated
future career failure. Unimpaired muscle strength argues against
geriatric nutritional deficiencies; two adults and gravity are still
needed to get Cyrus into the cat carrier for a trip to the vet.
Memory defects of pre-senile dementias are ruled out, as Cyrus
finds his way home at meal times, remembers house rules,
locations of hot air registers, and his food dish. The specific
diagnosis, midlife crisis, is therefore confirmed, and narrowed to
re-enactment of irresponsible thrill-seeking, adventurous
adolescence. A hereditary component is possible; mother is a
stable pedigreed housecat, but father is a street dude, condition
and whereabouts unknown.
Treatment options:
1. Psychotherapy. While it is not too hard to get a cat to lie
down on the therapeutic couch, possibilities of
verbalization seem too limited.
2. Pharmacological treatment. This method, even if there
were a pill tailored to the disorder, has the prohibitive
problem of uncertain dosing, also known as finding the
supposedly swallowed pill in a corner.
3. Improved nutrition. According to The Cat Owner’s
Veterinary Handbook, cats from the age of nine, the human
equivalent of 52, are classified medically as elderly, needing
a senior diet. However, variation in onset of human aging
argues for a comparable margin of error in cats, and so far,
Cyrus does not exhibit symptoms of aging. If pseudoadolescent behavior proceeds to reactive denial of geriatric
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impairments, and other treatment options fail, inception of
a special diet may be considered.
4. Parenting. As Cyrus’ symptomatic behavior is pseudoadolescent rather than the real thing, methods of teenage
parenting may limit permanent damage to the midlife crisis
patient’s health and ego. Sympathetic tolerance of nonlethal deviant behavior (no matter how provoking), kind
patching up of wounds, tactful silence about their selfinflictive nature, combined with consistent minimal
enforcement of reasonable rules may offer time for the
patient to re-outgrow crisis behavior, and keep available a
safe haven when street life disappoints.
5. Massage therapy. A book, Massage Your Cat, by Jane
Buckle, prescribes a thirty-site feline massage. Ms. Buckle
is a nurse who has also published a book of canine
massage and two books on aroma therapy. While her
repertoire suggests a renaissance multiplicity of expertise
and perhaps mastery of none, the idea seems worth a try.
Examples of the benefit of massage abound. A geriatric
cat, Newsy Bernet, has become addicted to nightly insulin
injection by its accompanying full body massage. Even
more remarkable is the massage practiced in south China
restaurants that cook and serve poisonous snakes. The
masseur grabs the frightened, angry, struggling, twisting
snake just behind the head with one hand, and with the
other hand begins to stroke it, neck on down, slowly and
quietly. The snake gradually relaxes until it hangs limp,
sleepily compliant with its fate.
I began Cyrus’ treatment on a recent home appearance with a long
stroking, front, back, right side up, and upside down. He tolerated
the procedure well, and returned for another treatment the next
day. That much benefit argued for a lengthy course of daily
massages, which is being carried out. A problem not yet solved by
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the masseuse, who is too cheap to buy the book, is finding thirty
places to massage. So far, only twenty massage sites have been
isolated.
Progress. After three treatments a visitor received nearly the full
love-me-or-never-walk-again leg-circumwinding, and demanding
meowing stopped. Following the fifth treatment Cyrus took a nap
on a bed, and after a week Cyrus was a gracious host at the
beginning of a party, welcoming the first two guests, and posing
for pictures. However, when the room became crowded and noisy
he left for the evening. On the other hand, an upsurge of bringing
home live-mouse tributes, heretofore treated as antisocial
behavior, may represent concomitant backsliding. He does, at
least, respond to firm guidance, as for example, the repeated order
to “take that mouse outside!”
Prognosis has improved, from guarded to a tentative favorable
rating. While the tattered ear is permanently disfiguring, Cyrus
may recover his premorbid somnolent poise in six to eight weeks
of parenting and massage therapies, combined with favorable badweather conditions. Lasting post-recovery adjustment, however,
may include occasional self-limited excursions into risky behavior
that stops short of injury. Final evaluation of treatment success
must wait for the spring thaw.
Outcome. Cyrus continued responding favorably to daily
massage. Adding all four feet stroked individually, top and
bottom, brought the total massage sites to twenty-eight.
Lovability, after advancing through an intermediate phase in
which Cyrus brought home game from baby mice to teenage rats,
moved forward to clinical recovery. Spring weather did not trigger
regression to adolescent sociopathy. Subsequent changes argued
for the sociological view that midlife crisis is a developmental
stage in adult male life that demarks the end of young adulthood
with a pseudo-adolescent acting-out phase preceding geriatric
decline, perhaps best defined as a male menopause. Post-crisis
Cyrus demonstrates adaptations to increasing age, now ten years
(equivalent to 60 human years). Cyrus sleeps more, and on
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awakening walks stiffly for a few steps before resuming his normal
pantherish stroll. He no longer greets all visitors at the door with
demonstrations of lovability, only going into that act when it
doesn’t interrupt his daytime naps. He sleeps very well, after
choosing among two beds and the couch.
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Princess Christina Bonaparte
Year 1
I needed a new junior cat. Shiloh, my schizophrenic top cat who
spent much of her fourteen-year life span in retreat in a cardboard
box, had finally retreated from life itself. Some psychologists
might contend that Shiloh’s name was inappropriate and
predestined her for a socially withdrawn life. Named Louise,
Shiloh might not have spent her days in a box. When I took
Shiloh in, I looked for girls’ names in the back of the governmentissue dictionary on my government-issue desk, but found only a
list of junior colleges. Of those, Shiloh, Tennessee, seemed the
most euphonious. Predestined or not, Shiloh-not-Louise’s story
described the common life course of schizophrenia. As a baby she
was intelligent and gregarious. She figured out how to open
hinged and folding closet doors and bureau drawers. She sat next
to me when I talked on the phone; when I stopped talking to
listen, she talked, sure that I was conversing with her. Except for
an unusually strong attachment to her night-night, a piece of dirty
clothes line she carried around, her childhood was
psychopathologically unremarkable. In adolescence she gradually
withdrew from interaction, and as an adult, she mostly lived in a
box.
Before she died Shiloh prepared Cyrus, her junior, for the top
cat slot by teaching him to open and clear out bottom bureau
drawers, but she ran out of steam before conducting the closet
and cabinet-door opening class. Lovable, extroverted five-year-old
Cyrus assumed the senior cat post only partly prepared for his
new responsibilities. Lucky for me: during Shiloh’s reign, on the
occasions that I came home to my high crime area house to find
closets, cabinets, and drawers standing open, I never knew
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whether Shiloh or a burglar had had a great day. Both left doors
open in their wake.
So big, strong five-year-old Cyrus was promoted to boss cat,
but had no kitten to boss. I began reading giveaway ads and asking
around.
Animal shelters had plenty of adoptable kittens, but rejected
my applications due to an irreconcilable difference of opinion. It
was my contention that the bit of woods behind my house
constituted an unlimited, lifetime kitty litter box. Shelters found
that unacceptable, and preferred sending their surplus kittens to
euthanasia than to a home with a built-in cat door offering access
to those woods. My house failed their home-inspection tests.
Private adoptions, as in “Cute kittens free to good homes”
announcements were scarce. When I got Shiloh, adoptable kittens
had been dime a dozen, but since then wide availability of young
female cats’ surgical birth control at cost had diminished the
adoptable kitten population. Animal shelters had pretty well
cornered the kitten market. I started looking for a young cat.
Responding to an ad for a one-year-old half Siamese giveaway
cat I found a beautiful, well-loved brother and sister pair in need
of homes. Their owners had been assigned to work in California
for six months, and all their carefully planned arrangements for
foster cat care had fallen through.
There stood the cats looking me over while I looked at them,
trying to choose one. I sat on the floor to shmooze; one purred in
my lap, and her brother lay on his back next to me, hoping for a
belly rub. They were equally charming. How could I take one and
leave the other to a humane society fate? I went home, determined
to harden my heart and keep looking for a kitten. I cried. Two
hours later I offered to take both for foster care. The delighted
owners promised to take them back by Christmas, to send money
for food and shots, and I believed them. No one else I knew did.
All my friends chortled, “Yeah, right, those cats’ owners will be
back by Christmas, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
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We put the cats into their carriers and strapped them into the
back seat facing each other to minimize anxious yowling on the
way home. I have read that not only does misery love company,
but that company, that is, perception of membership in a group,
can diminish the anxiety generated by misery. It worked. The cats
looked at each other, and sharing their scary adventure muted
their objections and pleas for rescue. On arrival I shut them
together in the spare room, and gave them night-night pieces of
old blanket, food, water, and kitty litter. They had been kitty-litter
apartment cats, and would need retraining to indoor-outdoor
status.
When they felt confident enough to come out of hiding to
greet me when I came into their room, I left their door open to
the rest of the house. Another few days later, I began moving their
kitty litter, a couple of feet a day, toward the cat door, and then on
out and into the yard. Cyrus demonstrated the cat door. In two
weeks they learned about responsible freedom, toileting in the
woods, how to teeter along the split-rail fence, and how to tease
my neighbors’ securely fenced-in super-tame dogs. Neither boss
nor underlings, they ate together with Cyrus from a common
plate, and slept together with him at night, born egalitarians.
My visitors soon found their favorite daytime nap sites. One
took to the top of the hot water heater; the other yearned for
clean, unfolded laundry, a commodity I tend to have plenty of. At
night they followed Cyrus into my bed, leaving an elongated Sshaped channel in it for me. One night I asserted my freedom to
stretch out in bed by closing my bedroom door, only to hear a
polite but persistent trio on its other side, informing me of my
mistake. Never mind stretching, nobody was getting any sleep at
that rate, and pretty soon I caved, apologized, and opened the
door. We all assumed our usual positions and were soon fast
asleep.
Contrary to my friends’ warnings, the cats’ owners returned on
schedule. They found a ground floor apartment affording access
to a park, and took their now indoor-outdoor cats back. Cyrus was
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again an only cat, with neither companion cats nor a junior cat to
boss. I explained the facts of life to him, namely, that mama cats
don’t have kittens in winter months, and promised him a kitten in
May. The stage was set, and he and I awaited spring, and a new
kitten.
Year 2
At this time I must introduce an intervening variable, my
wonderful neighbors. For health reasons I had sacrificed my
comfortable but vertical townhouse to buy a flat-on-the-ground
one-story repossessed Freddie Mac wreck. Superficially it had
been given verisimilitude of habitability by means of new roof
tiling, carpeting, and spray paint. A really incompetent inspector
protected by a suit-proof contract overlooked rotted roof decking
under the tiles, an electrical system spray-painted into mortal
dysfunction, and broken asbestos floor tiles, never mind unstable
exterior walls. I bought it, in blissful ignorance of its defects.
Shiloh, Cyrus, and I moved in and the house was rebuilt around
us, slab to roof. Friends and relations, confining remarks about my
mental status to occasional mutterings of “out of her mind” with
suitable head shaking, rose to the occasion with labor, gifts, and
technical advice. The carpenter and the plumber all but moved in,
and a lumber yard gave me a contractor’s discount for materials.
In spite of all that, it was the neighbors living across the street
who made my foolish venture doable and bearable. They plowed
flower beds, picked up mail, mowed weeds, supplied me with
homegrown vegetables, consoled me when things went wrong,
and cheered me up when reality testing threatened to overwhelm
my optimism. I owed them a debt I could never repay.
The house became habitable, the foster cats had gone home,
flowers and veggies began to grow, and soon it was spring, time to
honor my promise and find Cyrus a junior cat. I was reading catgive-away ads when my angel neighbor came to the door with a
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small cat tucked under one arm. “This is Princess,” she said. “She
got dumped on me by someone who’s moving into an apartment
house that doesn’t allow pets. She’s two years old, has had a litter
of kittens, has been spayed and is all ready for a new home. I
know you have been wanting a young cat, and here she is,” and
she handed over Princess. It was a gift that, in Mafia language, I
could not refuse.
As I had done when the foster cats first moved in, I shut
Princess, a night-night old blanket, a litter box, food, and water,
into my office, the spare room no longer being spare. I left her
alone, just visiting her with fresh food and a little attention each
day, for a week. Finally she came out of her corner to make
friends when I came in, and in another day or two I left the door
open so that she could come out.
Reputedly Princess was a two-year old mother, but that was
hard to believe, because she was tiny. She weighed in at six-and-ahalf pounds. Lower parts were white, upper gray. She had a comic
little asymmetrical gray goatee and mustache, and gray and white,
asymmetrically splotched little body. And then there was the tail.
Oh my god, what is that, I asked her, and she tried to hide it.
There in plain sight, attached to her asymmetrically gray- and
white-splotched little bitty rear end, was a striped tail clearly
belonging to a striped cat three or four times her size. It was huge,
two inches thick, and as long as the whole rest of her. The name
Princess was absurd. If any cat looked chronically proletarian, she
did.
Most cats are appealing to all but the cat-phobic. They are
flexible and graceful, fold themselves into little hedgehog balls to
sleep, their heads reach for the petting hand and, unlike children
who are cross and misbehave when hungry, cats aim to please to
obtain food. Not Princess. She whined. She whined to be fed,
whined to go out, whined to come in, and she flinched from a
proffered petting hand. When I first let her out of my office she
promptly found an open window and jumped out. Good, I
thought, she has run away, and it’s not my fault; after a suitable
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interval of not finding her I can look for the smart, lovable,
beautiful kitten of Cyrus’ and my dreams.
As I found out long ago, things in my life all too frequently
don’t go quite as I plan and hope. In this case, Princess. About 5
am the night she jumped out of a window and disappeared, I was
awakened by a persistent cat’s yowling. It was drizzly and chilly
but, conscience-stricken, I went out to see what was what. There
was Princess, wet and whining, sitting on the roof just above my
open bedroom window, ignoring my ambivalent little cat-coaxing
motions. What the hell, I told her in disgust, you got yourself up
there and you can damn well get yourself down; I’m going back to
bed, and good luck.
When I got up in the morning, she was sitting in the kitchen,
whining for breakfast, declaring that she was now my cat, and
there was nothing I could do about it.
Year 2.5
I considered Princess’s potential for adaptation to a Stein housecat
career. Took her on my lap for further assessment, and she purred
loudly, pathetically grateful for even minimal affection. When
young she had been caged at a pet store, bought, named Princess,
and then, probably when she was no longer a new toy, forgotten,
neglected, abused, and starved. Given adequate food for a week
she gained a pound, one-seventh of her total body weight. She
was afraid of people, and stayed mostly out on the deck or under
it, ready to run and hide from human contact. In the house she
begged for food, and stole it from the dinner table and kitchen
counters. Nominally she had had a home; in reality she was a
street-smart orphan, a homeless waif.
Princess reminded me a little of myself, when I, aged three or
four, was an undernourished waif who dreamed herself an
alternate identity better than her poor little rich girl reality. In
those days I renamed myself Princess Christina. But the name
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Christina, even without the Princess title, was a bad fit for my tiny
proletarian. What about its diminutive, Chrissie? Like the name
she was used to, Chrissie had a lot of s sounds. She could learn it,
I thought; renamed and taught good manners, she just might rise
to middle class junior house cat status.
Renaming went smoothly, but teaching good manners was not
as easy. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s experiments in animal
conditioning not only trained chickens to play basketball, they also
showed that a once-learned behavior is difficult to stop just by
punishing it. Reconditioning is required, and can best be done by
watching for and rewarding desired behavior, while withholding
reward for undesired behavior. Sporadically rewarding behaviors
such as gambling and betting on horses have been found to be
most addictive and resistant to change, and Chrissie’s
opportunistic food thefts fit into that category. In her former life
of neglect, she never knew when a foray would garner good stuff,
but it did so often enough to keep her alive. Chrissie’s criminal
eating habits could not be revised just by putting food on a plate
on the floor, even though she was fattening up nicely on it.
I compromised with the recommendations of B.F. When
Chrissie tried to steal food by jumping onto the forbidden dining
table and kitchen counters, I picked her up, restrained her, and
said emphatic no-no-no’s loudly, right into her face. Cats don’t
like that; close face-to-face contact offends their dignity. Most cats
won’t even make eye contact except in fighting postures. When
Chrissie came indoors from her headquarters on the deck she
jumped to the top of a bookcase, a strategically located spot from
which she could overlook dining table and kitchen counters for
food snatching opportunities. The bookcase location proved just
as convenient for me to catch Chrissie in the posture of criminal
intent in time to grab her, offend her, and remove the potential
reward by covering the food. Our routine, hers and mine,
complicated dinner table setting for a while, but in a month or two
Chrissie got the message. Not reliably enough to leave meat
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thawing unwrapped on a counter, but good enough to prevent the
most flagrant thefts.
Next on the retraining agenda was the junior cat status.
Chrissie wasn’t having it. In her view Cyrus was tolerable if he
knew his place, namely, distant junior cat. His 17 pound weight
and far superior size and strength had nothing to do with it. Even
the egalitarian co-cat philosophy of my earlier foster cats was not
in Chrissie’s vocabulary. In Chrissie’s view, Cyrus might stay only
if he was sufficiently subservient, ate second, and did not
approach within four yards of her. Chrissie absolutely knew that
she was born to rule.
Because I hate washing dishes, I served cat food on fresh
twelve-inch paper plates twice a day. Shiloh and young Cyrus ate
off them together; Cyrus and the foster cats ate together. When
Chrissie came out of isolation and I called the cats to eat, both
came and sat in mid-kitchen, happily expectant, while I put down
the common plate as usual. Pause. After a polite minute Cyrus
stepped up to eat, leaving space for Chrissie on the other side of
the plate. Chrissie didn’t move. She just sat there for another
minute, dumbfounded, and then, walking stiffly to show her
affront, sat under the dining table, ruminating about life’s
injustices. Only when Cyrus finished eating and left the kitchen,
did Chrissie come out, whine perfunctorily, march around in a
little circle to restore her sense of superiority, and condescend to
eat.
Chrissie soon developed a repertoire of ridiculous aggressive
behaviors meant to demonstrate her destiny to command. When
Cyrus entered a room where Chrissie sat, she greeted him with
threat-to-combat growling, hissing, and defensive fighting
postures. He would look her over, curiously assessing the pseudothreat. Whereupon she would yowl and flee to one of her safe
spots. Like John Le Carré’s spies, Chrissie established safe houses,
under extra folding chairs stored in a corner, under chests and
bookcases, all too low for access by Cyrus. Outdoors she took
refuge under a low shrub or under the car, or, if neither was at
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hand, performed her trademark standing five-foot high jump to a
window sill, a jump that Cyrus was much too fat to follow. Now
and then, if Chrissie didn’t move fast enough, a screeching
skirmish might take place. Although fur was generally not lost in
these fights, Cyrus would be told to go outside for a while to cool
off, even though he was not the precipitant. As the responsible
senior cat he was expected to ignore such temptations. In
consequence, overt quarrels seldom happened in bad weather.
Year 3
I researched the problem of Chrissie’s co-cat adaptation in books
on cat care, cat behavior, and methods of intervention in cats’
social adjustment. They agreed that some cats had difficulty
adapting from one-cat to two-cat households, and that the process
could take a long time, occasionally even as much as a year. The
authors were not acquainted with Chrissie.
After a second year, you might think that Chrissie would have
become accustomed to her new place in the firmament, that is,
junior cat. Not so. Although her little body rounded out until the
enormity of her borrowed tail diminished from preposterous to
merely absurd, she did not accept junior cat status. Twice a day
she came to eat but not share, and twice a day she sat and fumed
while Cyrus ate first. She continued to provoke him and, after
gaining his attention, flee to her nearest safe haven.
Nor was Cyrus the only object of Chrissie’s compulsion to
boss; she took charge of me as well. She considered me her
servant and personal doorman, and she trailed me around the
house, looking for situations needing her supervision. Whenever
she saw me preparing to work at my desk, for example, she
claimed its space by stretching out on it, casually shoving all work
paraphernalia, books, glasses, pencils, and papers out of her way,
preparing to oversee my activities. Mornings she performed her
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five-foot standing jump up onto my bedroom window just in time
to give my shower her close attention.
Chrissie thought the self-activated cat door beneath her notice.
She liked to approach the back door, strutting in the ballerina
prance that she thought sufficiently upscale, tail proudly erect,
analogous to the social class-defining swagger stick carried by
colonial British officers, to demand to be let out, and a few
minutes later, back in. When she felt that her assertiveness needed
more exercise she repeated the performance every five minutes.
On longer excursions down the block she engaged strange cats in
duels. All of them were larger than Chrissie and they lacked Cyrus’
good-natured tolerance; not infrequently she came home with
bloody scabs on face and shoulders, but apparently satisfied with
her night’s work.
Another year, and it seemed that Chrissie would never be a
candidate for a shared, two-cat household. She needed an only cat
situation, and I began mentioning her availability at every chance
encounter and social gathering. I even wrote my then catless
cousins in London, who had seemed favorably inclined on a
recent visit, and reminded them that international adoptions were
all the fashion. Nothing doing.
Finally I invoked my white-elephant divestment method.
Contrary to other people’s practice of displaying perhaps surplus
gifts when the giver is coming to visit, I displayed mine when
people other than the giver were coming over. Absent the donor I
would put an unwanted gift on proud display, and sooner or later
a visitor might admire it and thereby become its recipient. You
like it, you got it, was my motto. From itchy mohair scarf to
Miranda the hamster, my method worked well. Of course people
did become rather thoughtful before they praised anything in my
house.
In search of a single-cat home for Chrissie, when company was
expected I would feed and pet her into decorative submission, and
work something praiseworthy about her into the conversation.
For example, I recounted how well she had learned proper cat
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table manners, how spotlessly clean she kept herself, or perhaps
how she neatly and unobtrusively dealt with hairballs, never made
a mess, didn’t bring in half-eaten mice leaving their innards for the
unguarded bare foot to step on, and never needed special medical
attention. It didn’t work; in fact, it proved to be my first major
failure in the gracious divestment line. We, that is, Cyrus, Chrissie,
and I, were stuck with one another.
Years 4 and 5
Cyrus and I had utterly failed to impose our lifestyle on Chrissie.
The converse was not true. Chrissie, absolutely convinced of the
righteousness of her cause, slowly, bit by bit, gained her point, and
imposed her view on us. Much of the time she now eats first, and
occasionally, when Cyrus attempts to walk past her toward the
food, she smacks his face. Where she used to sit under the car for
a safe retreat, on cold days she takes her nap sitting on top of it,
gazing triumphantly around her domain before turning over for a
further snooze. She has established superiority of nerve over the
neighborhood cats, and comes home from encounters without a
mark or a scar. She leads me into the kitchen at feeding time with
small, but imperious instructions; helpless, dependent whining has
gone. At bedtime she takes the most comfortable easy chair in the
house, and in the morning she invades my bedroom to take the
favored spot on my bed before Cyrus claims it. Chrissie has
shaped her world to suit herself, and Cyrus and I are mere
minions in it.
Postscript: Writing in the Morning vs. Writing in the
Evening
In the morning when I wake up and ruminate, reluctant to get out
of bed and face reality, I think of things to write. If I am in the
middle of a piece for the Writers’ Group, I think my way around
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in that; if not, I think of other great pieces to write. I think of
scientific papers I collected data for and never wrote; I think of
editorial pieces that never made the Poison Pen collection. The
trouble is, when I wake up there is no secretary to dictate my great
thoughts to. Once I even bought a little hand-held tape recorder
to dictate great morning thoughts to, planning to be my own
secretary and transcribe them later in the day, when the muse had
fled from the onslaught of trivia and obligations. I stuck in the
batteries, and made “Testing, testing, one, two, three, four”
recordings, instructions in hand. In the morning I had forgotten
how to record half-awake thoughts and by the time I had pushed
wrong and right buttons, great thoughts were gone, and that was
the end of it. Didn’t get past the original Testing, testing, one, two,
three, four. Meaning to learn and practice recording I put it away;
years later it must have shown up when I was packing up to move,
moving being the all-time clean-out and divest occasion, and the
little recorder probably landed in a Salvation Army-dedicated box.
I did install a scratch pad and pencil on my night table, to be used
to scribble occasional, oft-forgotten, shopping items and chores.
“Buy Critter Crunch” it would say, or “Check water softener salt,”
or “Order anti-flea stuff.” Sometimes I use it to write great
thoughts, apt wordings, and excellent turns of phrase. Wednesday
is trash night in my neighborhood because the trash truck collects
it at 5 on Thursday mornings. Wednesday is also cleanup,
straighten up, and put away day, because my cleaning lady comes
on Thursdays. Unassigned debris must vanish from view on
Wednesdays, or it will never be seen again. My cleaning lady works
hard and well; she leaves everything orderly and eat-off clean.
Anything cluttering up a level surface in her path she tidies away
neatly, but where her “away” might be is a mystery. I can’t ask her,
the basis of our excellent working relationship being the lack of a
common language. We can’t criticize each other, and we never
quarrel or even disagree, a state of affairs I take pains to avoid
disturbing. You might say that my household runs by my not
learning Spanish. Today is Wednesday, and therefore the week’s
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debris and trivia must be evaluated, stored, or discarded. Time to
clear off my night-stand notes, transfer their lists to longer lists or
sort them, file them, or throw them out. In case it illustrates the
superiority of first-thing in the morning writing I am submitting a
piece of night-stand scribble for your judgement. It is a paragraph
from last week’s story describing little cat Princess Chrissie
Bonaparte’s autocratic way of obtaining doorperson service. First,
the version I read last week: “Chrissie thought the self-activated
cat door beneath her notice. She liked to approach the back door,
strutting in the ballerina prance that she thought sufficiently
upscale, tail proudly erect, analogous to the social-class defining
swagger stick carried by colonial British officers, to demand to be
let out, and a few minutes later, back in. When she felt that her
assertiveness needed more exercise, she repeated the performance
every five minutes.” Compare to the paragraph I had scribbled
first thing one morning: “Chrissie, in a gait that was an amalgam
of prance and bounce, her impossible tail held high in pride,
approached the back door, and glared over her shoulder if her
demands were not immediately met. ‘Out!’ she ordered, and ‘In!’
she commanded. She liked coming in on demand so much that
she would rush out through the hated cat door, run around the
outside of the house, and be miraculously in position to demand
‘In!’ over and over again.” Which one is better? The “swagger
stick” analogy seems a stretch, but having found the term after
lengthy free-associative searching of remembered old movies, I
was reluctant to let it go. Should I have? How about her walk,
“strutting in ballerina prance that she thought sufficiently upscale,
tail proudly erect,” versus “gait that was an amalgam of prance
and bounce, her impossible tail held high in pride?”
PART 6: HOW I BECAME A
SERIOUS WRITER
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First Hundred Dollars Takes It
It all began when my neighbor bought a Siamese kitten, named
her something like Cho Li Ko, and within a week decided that one
of her children was allergic to cats. Unwilling to part with the
kitten altogether, she asked me to take it in a conditional adoption.
Her condition was that her children could come over and play
with the kitten, and my condition was that I could rename her. So
Cho Li moved in, small, cute, gregarious, and renamed Henrietta.
The children would knock on my door. “Can Henrietta come out
to play?” And Henrietta obliged. They romped around the yard,
jumping and chasing, until all were worn out. The kids went
home, and Henrietta came in and collapsed.
Henrietta grew up petite and dainty, went into heat, announced
her condition, and scanned the suitors who responded. My
favorite was a teenager’s yellow tom who answered to “Hey Man,”
but Henrietta fell in love with an unidentified beetle-browed gray
Persian. We called him Milhaus.
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It turned out that Henrietta was just crazy about sex. No
shamed hiding in the bushes, no struggle, no coital screams;
Henrietta mated on the patio, just outside the sliding glass doors.
Smiling complacently, she would get right into position for each
mating — and there were plenty of them. For four days Henrietta
enjoyed love. Occasionally she came inside to catch up on food
and a snooze. Then, with a Mona Lisa smile, she went back out to
resume patio romance. By Day Three poor Milhaus was looking
thin and tattered, and I set out food for him, too.
Two months later Henrietta gave birth. Milhaus’ contributions
were not skimpy, and she had five or six babies, all fuzzily gray
like their dad, but also blue-eyed and cheerful, a happy-go-lucky
crew. When they were toilet trained, weaned, and starting to zip
up and down trees, their graduation day loomed. But graduate to
what? The Humane Society? I thought and thought and thought.
And then, while idly watching TV, my light bulb turned on,
inspiration struck, and the “Aha Reaction” set in. “Aha!” I said.
“If those TV guys can write bilge to sell toothpaste, by damn, I
can learn to write bilge to sell kittens!” Well, not sell, but at least
give away.
I began with “Cute kittens free to good homes.” No good; our
weekly paper had twenty versions of that in its give-away cat
column. “Cute half-Siamese half Persian kittens to good homes,”
likewise flunked out. Finally, a review of those toothpaste ads
came to my aid, and I wrote, “Siamese-Persian kittens; intelligent
and personable. Neutral gray will suit any decor.” And “PersianSiamese kittens, a smart, happy, charming breed. Beautiful gray
with blue jewel eyes.”
The ads surpassed my wildest fantasies. They appeared near the
bottom of the “Cute kittens to good homes” column, but the day
the paper hit the streets the phone rang and rang. “Can I have a
boy?” “Can we have a matched pair?” And best of all, “Do you
have any left?” Within three days Henrietta had an empty nest,
and resumed her favorite activities, emptying waste baskets, taking
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pins out of my pin cushion, and going out to play with my
neighbors’ children.
Fired up by success, I next turned my talents to getting rid of
my clunker, the car that had left me in mid-left turn on Mass Ave
with the gear shift in my hand connected to nothing. “Neat old
Rambler wants t.l.c. First hundred dollars takes it.” Gone. I
progressed to my neighbor’s old Chevy that ran like a truck: “a
real family workhorse.” Next was a loser of a Maverick: “Oneyear-old Ford Maverick, all birth defects fixed,” sold it in a day.
And then it was time to unload my beloved twenty-one-year-old
Plymouth. It took a week of trial and rejection before I got the
solution: “1973 Plymouth; pampered family pet.” But my
masterpiece was never published. The clerk taking the ad call
bought the car.
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Back Alley Garden
Tired of a long commute, I bought a renovated townhouse on the
affordable fringe of Capitol Hill. It was a small house with a large
yard, and I looked forward to gardening in 100-year-old topsoil.
Furniture, books, and pictures soon found places in their new
setting, and then I looked at the yard. All the way to the back alley,
it was empty, desolate. A little crab grass, an occasional thistle, and
that was all. Forget topsoil; I was faced with clay tromped into a
hundred years of trash. I sighed.
Armed with chisel and hammer, I spent my first summer there
clearing out the tracks of history. The top layer mixed builder’s
screws, nails, bits of lumber, and empty soda cans with the benthandled teaspoons and syringes of former shooting gallery days.
On down I uncovered a stratum of oyster shells, and below that
the leavings of an old smithy, horseshoes, bits of harness leather,
and charcoal ashes.
Deep enough, I thought, and moved on to stage two. Carfuls
of manure from the Lincoln Memorial stables and black gold from
the Takoma Park rotted leaf dump improved the clay, and I
planted shrubs and flowers and dwarf fruit trees. And then one
day I noticed something new behind the cherry. Four new tires
mounted on Volvo rims were stashed under the little tree.
Somewhere a Volvo had no feet.
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Triage (take out?)
Of my German grandfather I have only a photograph and an
anecdote, and from these I built an image. He was born sometime
in mid-nineteenth century, and he died years before my birth,
perhaps along with the second German Reich, in 1918 or so. His
photograph shows a large, square-faced, determined and
unsmiling man in mid-life, wearing the Prussian uniform. I
imagine him as an army doctor under Bismarck, sternly telling
goldbricking dogfaces to chew willow bark, or calmly directing the
blood and gore that was post-battle triage in those days.
The anecdote concerns his friendship with Roentgen, the
inventor of X-rays. In a medical practice uncomplicated by
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informed consent considerations, Grandfather eagerly tried out
the new rays on his hapless patients. He was a dedicated doctor.
Belying the photograph’s resolute austerity was my father’s
love for and great wish to please his father. My father was a man
so revolted by blood and guts that he would leave the house to
avoid risking a glimpse of the drawing of a chicken. This
squeamish intellectual nevertheless dissected bodies, wiped out
pus, sewed up wounds, and stemmed hemorrhages; in short, he
did all that medical school and army doctoring required, for the
love of his father. Surreptitiously my father studied economics,
while sending home his doctorly photograph and letters attesting
to happy progress in the disgusting art of medicine. Grandfather
was fooled.
Not fooled were the members of the army medical
administration. Understanding the kind of medical talent they had
drafted, they set my father to doctoring a campful of Russian
POW’s, the prisoners on whom they wasted the least resources.
They hoped that prisoners who failed to die on the field of glory
would be eased into early death by the ministrations of my father.
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Sweat (take out?)
Everybody had a mustache of sweat. It was the way people
looked, the human condition: dark brown eyes, tightly curled hair,
and a mustache of sweat. Nobody wiped it off; if you did, the little
beads returned before your handkerchief was back in your pocket.
Exertion made sweat run down your temples in drops that tickled
your cheeks; real work produced rivulets that stung your eyes, and
this was the sweat you kept wiped away. Not wiping sweat off
your forehead and eyes was a sure sign of the self-neglect of
abysmal, hopeless poverty or mental incapacity. In adolescence
one boy in our class became schizophrenic, meaning that he got
too quiet, and then he began listening to and answering unheard
voices. That was all right; he had been a sweet boy, and in grade
school we all liked him. When he got disturbed we just kept him
in the back of the class and our teachers left him alone. But after a
year or two he stopped wiping sweat out of his eyes, and we
steered clear of him. Soon after that he was taken to the state
hospital. We heard he killed his uncle.
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Your Pet Bonsai
Many people think that keeping a pet bonsai means buying a
beautifully sculpted, glazed and fired little Japanese pot preplanted
with a traditional tiny Japanese tree. They buy one, put it on
display in their living rooms, speak to it kindly, set it on a plate or
tray to catch drips, and water it along with their other house
plants. Then they watch it die, and conclude that bonsais are just
not in their repertoire.
Enjoying a pet bonsai is actually simple and only a little
complicated. The simple part is staying away from the little glazed
dishes and their cute little plants. They aren’t meant for living
rooms; they require an outdoor site and a continuous drip
watering system whose tubes twist around the bonsai’s trunk at its
base. The word ‘bonsai’ means ‘little tree,’ and so bonsais, just like
big trees, must live, damply and drippily outside and go through
normal seasons.
To keep and nurture a little tree, it helps to understand the
facts of life about all trees. Big or little, trees need roots to take up
water and food from their surrounding soil, trunks and branches
to carry that to their leaves, and leaves to use some water and
excrete the rest. For any size tree to survive, the parts of the tree
must be in balance. Too few roots, and pretty soon the tree will
die. Too few leaves, and after a longer while the tree will die. Keep
removing every leaf a tree starts to grow, and in a few months
even that hardiest of trash trees, the ailanthus, succumbs. Wound
the trunk sufficiently and eventually the tree dies.
In nature, volume and spread of a tree’s root system
approximate volume and spread of its leaf canopy, so that what
you see above its trunk and main branches is the equivalent of
what you would find if you washed all the dirt off its roots. It’s a
principle you can apply to moving trees and shrubs any time of
year. Garden books tell you that the only safe time to move them
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is in late fall when they have no leaves and their roots have gone
to sleep for the winter. Not necessarily; as long as you apply the
root-leaf balance principle strictly you can move small trees and
shrubs anytime you like.
To move a shrub or small tree any time, you can dig it up, and
plop it into its new location, so the base of its trunk is exactly at
the soil level it was before moving. Then you cover the roots with
soil to exactly the same depth they were used to. If the soil settles
when you water it, just add more until you match the soil level of
the base of the trunk.
Next you must remove almost all of your relocatee’s leaves, to
compensate for the roots you inevitably damaged when you
moved them. It’s the little, delicate white hairs at the ends of roots
that sop up the tree’s water and nutrients, and they are vulnerable.
Moving them necessarily damages some of them, and so you must
remove at least an equal quantity of the tree’s leaves. Taking off all
but two or three leaves per branch preserves the root-leaf balance
and gives the roots time to rest and recover. Then, when the roots
resume functioning, the tree will grow new leaves. Root-to-canopy
balance is preserved and the tree lives.
Bonsais are little trees kept small by limiting and confining their
roots and canopies. Just as in big trees and shrubs, the roots must
equal the functioning leaves. To understand a bonsai you must
look at the little tree whose roots are crammed together in a dish
and covered only by a thin envelope of soil, and imagine how its
roots would appear if they were allowed to spread out, in a mirror
image of the spread of the canopy of leaves.
The walls of the bonsai’s pot prevent the roots from reaching
out to find water and food for itself, and, like any other pet, it
depends on you to provide its nurturance. Bonsais need watering
any day the sky doesn’t rain on them, and they appreciate monthly
feedings of diluted tree food. Choosing plants and trees that have
small leaves and confining their roots in large dishes helps them
survive.
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A thin moss cover for your bonsai’s soil can act as a waterconserving mulch. It can be found in damp soil under large trees,
dug, washed off, and transplanted onto a bonsai’s soil. A few flat
rocks can help conserve moisture as well.
Once every two or three years a pet bonsai will need new soil
to nourish it, and repotting is the mudpie fun of bonsai growing.
It’s a lovely, relaxing outdoor job for a sunny spring morning.
Begin by lifting your little tree out of its dish and into a pan of
water to dissolve and wash off its old soil. Use a blunt table knife,
the kind served with fish, and poke among the roots to wash and
gently untangle them, keeping them under water all the time.
When one pan of water becomes too muddy to see the roots, lift
the tree directly into a second pan of water for more washing.
Then, when you can see the roots under water, use sharp scissors
to cut out one or two of the largest roots. They no longer sop up
the tree’s nutrients, and only serve to anchor it in its coating of
soil. It’s the little white threads of roots at the ends of large ones
that do the nourishing job.
Place a small piece of screening over the drain hole in the
bonsai’s dish to keep soil from escaping, and add a layer of new
potting soil. Replant your little tree, poking and shaking potting
soil down among the roots. Spray the roots and soil with water
from an old Windex bottle while you work; add a little soil, spray
and poke it into place, add a little more soil and spray, and so on
until the roots are covered to the same level as before. Set the dish
in a shallow pan of water to keep the roots moist while you thin
out the tree’s canopy, pulling off leaves or perhaps cutting out a
few twigs or small branches. That will reduce the demand the little
tree’s leaves will make on its roots, and will sometimes improve its
silhouette. Take your pet out of its bath, and set it in windsheltered shade to recover.
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You May Call Me Princess for Short
“What’s Henry Ford’s name in Chinese?” a patient once asked me.
It was a test; he wanted to find out if I was bright enough to be
his therapist. I subsequently found out some interesting things
about Chinese and Korean names.
A few years ago, a misbehaving heart and a couple of strokes
made my life more precarious, if medically more interesting, and it
seemed unwise for me to continue living alone. My daughter was
long grown and had her own household. Accordingly I revised the
floor plan and reconfigured walls and plumbing to create wellseparated bedrooms with their own baths. I survived the in-house
renovation with my mind fairly intact, and began renting to a
series of students, many of whom were Asian. And that is how I
became acquainted with problems of translation and
transliteration of their names.
In naming their children, east Asian parents are apt to think of
philosophically or historically significant names, or names whose
written configurations have a particular pattern of meanings.
Unlike us, they seldom choose their children’s names by the way
they sound. Now if these children grow up and opt for further
study in America, they are told that while their family names are
fixed, the names their parents so carefully picked out for them are
not useful in America. Americans can’t pronounce them, and
certainly won’t appreciate their real significance. So east Asians
headed for United States graduate schools are instructed to take
common American names as pseudonyms. For those who feel
somewhat ambivalent about their original names, choosing an
American name offers a chance to reinvent themselves, to take on
an added identity.
I have had three Asian student tenants in recent years, and each
had a distinctive name story. The first was a South Korean
minister, Kim Young Jin. East Asian family names, which in
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themselves often have philosophical-historical meanings, are more
important and are always written first, and given names are written
after. Young Jin was working toward a doctorate in comparative
theology, and did his research in the summer. He spent the
northern winters, that is, the southern summers, in his steady job,
proselytizing Christianity among Bolivian Indians in the high
Andes. So he needed a Spanish pseudonym that converted to
English, and chose Andrés/Andrew. He was a dignified man in
his forties, married and a father, and no one would ever have
thought of calling him Andy.
Young Jin a.k.a. Andrew was followed by a young business
administration student, Li Yuanyuan. The surname Li, I am told,
derives from an emperor Li, who had many wives, each of whom
had children. Each of these children was given a province — an
area somewhere between a county and a state in size and scope —
to rule, and there they proliferated. It is the innumerable
descendants of these Li’s, all therefore presumably of noble birth,
who are found in China at a rate even higher than Cohens and
Kahns (a name meaning Chief) are found among Jews. Currently
there are at least 50 million Chinese whose family name is Li, and
all take pride in it.
I am told that Yuanyuan has no very deep significance; rather,
Yuan designates roundness of shape and life, and Yuanyuan is an
endearment version. Now my tenant really wanted to be a hotshot
in the American banking, high finance and investment
community; he did not want to be a beloved ball. In America he
took the rather tough-sounding name, Rick. Not Richard, Rick.
Now Yuanyuan a.k.a. Rick was really a very nice young man, a
secret pussycat, and after two years I was indeed sorry to see him
graduate and move on.
Between Asian tenants I had a brief interlude tenant called
Abdoulaziz Ben Djoumoi, who was from a small French-speaking
country in Africa. Even he, who had been reared speaking French
and writing Arabic, found his name an excessive mouthful for
everyday American life. He worked and established a bank
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account as just Abdoul. The only problem with that version of his
name cropped up the time we went bargain hunting for a winter
coat for him. In a great big store I lost track of him. I looked and
looked all through winter coat territory, and finally gave up and
hollered, “Abdoul!” Five male voices answered.
My current tenant is named Liu Chang Lin. Liu, he tells me, is
the name of a special grass that was fed to a long-ago emperor’s
dragon, and it also connotes the region where that grass grows, an
especially beautiful place. Thus the name Liu, like the surname Li,
is gladly shared by another 50 million or so Chinese. When he
came to the United States, an American professor in his field,
public administration, told him to use the American name Johnny,
thinking it sounded something like Chang Lin and would be easy
for Chang Lin to remember and recognize.
The contingent of Chinese graduate students arriving together
at the university discussed the matter. Their decision was
unanimous: absolutely not. Chang Lin was a fine name, and Chang
Lin must keep it. The name Chang in Mandarin implies prosperity,
and Lin identifies all of the sons of his family in his generation.
Well, most of the other students also had Chinese names that had
special significance and which they also liked very much and
always used among themselves. If Judy and Lisa tolerated their
temporary American name revisions, what was so bad about
Johnny? Turns out that back in China they had all seen The
Godfather, misheard the name “Giovanni” as “Johnny” and
concluded that the name Johnny is typical of members of the
Mafia. They were sure that poor Chang Lin, a.k.a. Johnny, might
be mistaken for a Mafioso, hunted down, arrested and imprisoned,
and never see China and his wife and son again. Chang Lin kept
his name.
As the fifth and last child of my parents, I myself presented a
name problem. Namesake names of beloved ancestors and long
dreamed of idyllic names had been used up on my sisters and
brother. Plenty of names to go around for the first four, who had
two or three given names apiece; none left over for me. A search
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of the family tree located a suitably deceased, distant cousin or
aunt Johanna. Problem solved, more or less.
A benefit of my single-given-name status was that I got away
with a lot more than the others, because I lacked enough names
for a proper parental chewing out. An effective scolding used all
of a perpetrator’s given names, as for example, “John Henry Karl,
what did you think you were you doing!” Or, “Barbara Anna
Francesca, stop slurping your soup!” or similar sentiments. With
only one name, a scolding just didn’t have time to work up a
proper head of steam. “Johanna, stop slurping,” sounds almost
casual, like advice rather than an order. The need for many
syllables providing the opportunity to work up real emphasis may
be the explanation for the persistence of the Russian practice of
calling people by given name plus patronymic. Even in expressing
positive emotions, the patronymic adds a certain sureness of
feeling. For example, “I love you, Anton,” seems a declaration
that sounds more sentimental than committed, but “I love you,
Anton Nikolaievich,” has legal implications.
When I was small, no one really used my name. In my
permanent baby-of-the family position my name was probably
versions of “Hey,” “You,” “she,” and “her,” “little girl,” or, my
sisters being much older than my brother and me, “the girl.”
When I was small but just big enough to think about such things,
I felt that my one-name condition symbolized my low status in the
family pecking order. When it came to social power, I felt
overlooked. My books of fairy tales taught me all about redress of
parental/step-parental insult, and I began building a grand fantasy
identity for myself. “I am a changeling,” I proudly announced. “I
was placed in this family in secret, for my protection. In reality I
am a princess of the royal blood. Someday I will return to my
kingdom and live happily ever after. In the meantime, you should
all know my real name. It is Princess Christina. You may call me
Princess for short.” While the chances are quite good that neither
my family, nor the servants who were doing much of the childrearing, heard me, let alone paid any attention, the fantasy
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impressed me so much that once in a while in adulthood I would
remember it. Offer me a same-pay job with the promise of nearinstant promotion, forgotten as soon as I began work? Never
mind. I was Princess Christina.
When we immigrated my father offered to change my name on
the immigration papers. I asked to what, and he said to Joan, in
English Johanna is Joan. Well, I had never really felt at one with
Johanna, but I didn’t feel like a Joan either; after all, I had my
secret identity, Princess Christina. Absent an immediate clamor
for Joan, the subject was forgotten. I have sometimes wondered
what kind of life I might have had as a Joan. Would I have
married Stein, for example? What had separated him from others
was that at first meeting he learned to spell my name. Would he
have been interested in a no-spelling challenge Joan? Would
better-bet, more solid-citizen husband prospects with equal talents
and brains, but affording a wonderful mother-in-law, have been
attracted to Joan? I’ll never know.
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You Can’t Miss It
I find that people who work at their jobs, day in, week out, year
after year, don’t know where their jobs are. They go to work every
day without knowing their destination. I base this conclusion on
the staff of many businesses who have been unable to tell me their
locations in terms no more specific than “It’s right there” or “You
can’t miss it.”
Take, for example, the location of the post office nearest my
home. Off and on for seven years, I have asked neighbors who’ve
lived here longer than I have about the closest post office. The
best information I got involved a nine-mile round trip, and when
driving there and back I would grumble to myself, “There has to
be a post office closer than that. After all, this isn’t Wyoming,
where once you get out of Cheyenne you are out of reach of
government-sponsored Western Civilization functions like post
offices.”
Sometimes a neighbor mentioned a near-by post office.
“Where is it?” I would ask. “Oh, it’s right over there. Where it’s
always been. Just go up Kennilworth, and it’s right there.” Some
say, “Just go down Kennilworth and it’s right there.” Kennilworth
is the main drag that goes five miles north to the Beltway, and
fifteen miles south to the Wilson Bridge, and that leaves a lot of
room for right there’s.
Last Thursday I decided to finally find the phantom post
office. Nothing would stop me, for I was absolutely determined to
find it, go there, and mail my returns and exchanges. Because I
hate to go shopping I buy nearly everything by mail order, and
since I am also hard to please, I return and exchange half to a
third of what I order. I don’t go shopping, but I do make a lot of
trips to a post office. I decided to start by phoning a neighbor
who has lived here for forty years. She must know where it is, I
thought, and if I can figure out the right questions to ask her,
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she’ll tell me. She is a pleasant, generous person, and ordinarily
likes helping out her fellow human beings.
I thought about Socrates and began my inquiry. “Where on
Kennilworth is that post office? You told me to go up
Kennilworth and I’d see it, but I never have.” “Well, you can’t just
see it,” she said in tolerant tones, “you have to turn on that little
side street.” “What little side street?” I asked. “A little side street.
It’s there, all right. Always been there. Before East-West
Highway.” “How much before?” I said. “I don’t know, I’ll ask my
sister-in-law.” “You want the post office?” said her sister-in-law.
“Well, sure. It’s right up Kennilworth. You know the SevenEleven?” “No.” She helpfully explained, “You have to turn in on
that little street. Honey, she wants to know how to get to the post
office.” Honey came on the line. “Oh, you mean the Bladensburg
Post Office,” he said, sounding knowledgeable. “It’s up a ways.
You have to cross the Route 450 overpass, and then you’re almost
there. It’s on that little street, you know the one. Can’t miss it.”
“Can’t miss it” is the kind of navigational loser that, for
example, once had a friend and me waking up in our sleeping bags
on the lawn of the Bay City Sewage Works instead of the intended
camp grounds, but at least I had a name. I called the Postal
Service 800 number, waited through propaganda no one believes,
such as “Priority Mail is delivered overnight,” and “Parcel Post
gets there in three days,” reached Customer Service, and asked the
location of the Bladensburg post office near my home. The
person who answered asked my zip code, and said “That area is
covered by the Hyattsville post office. They’re in charge, and they
will know where you should go. Call this number.”
I called Hyattsville and asked my question. That person said, “I
don’t know where it is. You sure there is one?” “Yes, my
neighbors use it, but they can’t remember the name of the street.”
“Well, I think you need to call,” and she recited another number,
“and they’ll tell you.”
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I called the new number and found out that it belongs to an
intermediate mail sorting facility that picks out Hyattsville zip
codes from the others.
Was I tempted to give up and take my usual nine-mile trek to
the post office? Of course I was, but hard-headedness kept me on
the trail. After all, I had a name, “Bladensburg,” and I looked in
the Federal pages of the telephone book. Sure enough, under
“Postal Service, Maryland, Bladensburg,” I found an address and a
phone number. The address was not on Kennilworth Street, but
on Tilden Street, which I thought I had seen intersecting
Kennilworth. I looked on my map, but, as usual, the place I
wanted was on the crease.
I called the phone number and asked if this was the
Bladensburg post office. “Sure is,” she said. “Can I help you?” I
asked for the exact location. “Oh, my, now, let’s see. We’re right
near the Seven-Eleven. We’re on Kennilworth.” “I never saw a
post office on Kennilworth,” I said, “Are you sure?” “Well, yes,
no, we’re not right on Kennilworth. You have to turn off a little
bit. It’s sort of a little strip there, and you can see the Seven
Eleven up Kennilworth. Just turn before you get to the Seven
Eleven, and look for the U.S. flag, and you’re there.”
At that point my neighbor called me. “Did you ever find that
post office?” she said. “I think so,” I said. “I think I turn off on
Tilden Street and find a flag pole, and I’m going there now.” She
offered to come with me, but I thanked her and said I was sure I
could make it now that I had the name of the street.
I loaded my packages — returning snow boots that pinched
the toes, warm pants an inch short, and a winter jacket with a twoway zipper that didn’t zip, and sending my grandson a green mask
that promised to make him look like a praying mantis, and see
how the world looks through praying mantis eyes — warmed up
the car, and set off. Found the street and, sure enough, one block
off of Kennilworth, there was a block-shaped brick building with
a US flag on a standing pole in front. I parked the car at the side
of the building. The rear of the building had a sign, “Police
200
Office;” a sidewalk led around to a glass door entrance at the front
of the building. Carrying bundled packages, I went in. No
counters, no display of pretty stamps they don’t have, no posters
advertising the Post Office’s services. Just a pleasant woman
behind a desk. I asked about the post office.
“You’re in the wrong building, Sweetie,” she said with a warm
smile. I’m used to Sweetie, it’s the universal name for toddlers and
old ladies. “It’s across from the Police Office. Want me to drive
you over?” I thanked her, said I had my car and would be ok.
Back in the parking lot, I looked across the street from the
Police Station, and saw a row of small townhouses, no flag. I
looked further down the street. In the next block was another
block-shaped brick building with, and I squinted, yes, lettering in
the contours of U.S. Post Office on the front. Back in the car,
across the intervening street into the next block, and sure enough,
there it was, the Bladensburg Post Office, with a smaller pole and
a dirty, tired flag. Got my bundle, went in, presented my packages,
and said “Plain parcel post, no frills, rock bottom rates, please.”
“Did you pack these yourself? Anything perishable in them?
Fragile? No? How about Priority Mail? It’s only ten cents more.
Certificate of delivery?” “No, no thank you, just rock bottom,
cheapest, plain parcel post.” I paid, got a receipt, and was done.
Not quite, I thought.
“If someone calls and wants to know where you are, you might
say that you are on Tilden Street, two blocks east of Kennilworth
Avenue.”
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The Poison Pen Collection
Over the years, I have spouted reactions to this or that item that I
had read here or there. Now that I am mostly retired, I have time
to put those mean words on paper. Below are a few of the letters
to editors I have sent in the past year. Very, very few were
printed.1
Safe Mail
To: The Washington Post
The President and Attorney General often warn us that we
must expect further terrorist attacks. To prevent such future
disasters, personal parcel post is checked. I buy much household
and personal stuff by mail order, and receive many packages. Since
October, two of my packages have been marked “SCAN
BEFORE DELIVERING.” One contained samples of knitting
yarn, the other a child’s book. Not marked for scanning were, for
example, a sewing machine, two sets of knives, a child’s bank, a
kite, a refrigerator door handle, and a weather station. Whatever
our future, for now we’re safe at zip code 20785!
As pointed out in Princess Christina Bonaparte, behaviors that get
reinforced with small rewards cause the strongest addictions.
1
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Mean Miss Manners
To: Miss Manners
In your column in The Washington Post, March 3, your solution
to the problem of neighbors of the hot-tub host who complained
of people with physical disabilities, unaware that a co-hot-tub
guest was paraplegic, was to make the complainers go home in
tears instead of the paraplegic guest’s wife going home in tears.
That’s not good manners, that’s mean.
Alternatively, as soon as the neighbors start their complaint,
the host or the paraplegic guest should interrupt, saying “I
disagree with you, and not just because my guest is/I am
paraplegic,” and firmly change the subject to discussion of the
neighborhood, hot tub temperature, or the weather. Nobody goes
home in tears, and the bad neighbors, who are still going to be
living next door, get a tactful way of changing their evil ways.
Treatment, not Criminalization
A recent Dear Abby column featured the following letter and
reply:
Dear Abby,
A few years ago, I noticed some porn in my mom and
stepdad’s room. I didn’t mention it to anyone. Later, my older
sister accused my stepdad of window-peeping, but no on e
believed her. Last summer, I noticed him outside my window
when I woke up one morning. I didn’t say anything because I
didn’t want to cause a problem.
I have never liked my stepdad. He is verbally abusive. You
wouldn’t believe what I hear every single day.
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I share a bathroom with one of my sisters. Last year when it
was remodeled, we noticed a gap between the floor and the
basement. (We covered it with towels when we were in there.)
Last week, I noticed what looked like a piece of wood in the
gap, so I decided to give it a closer look. It looked like the lens of
a camera. When I took a flashlight into the basement and checked
it out, I found a cable running through the room and got close
enough to see it said “camera” on the back. It faced the toilet.
I don’t know who to tell, or if I should. My sister deserves the
right to know – but who else would believe me? I’m just a stupid
14-year-old girl. If I tell my mom, she will kick my stepdad out,
and I’ll have to go and live with my dad. I’ll have to change
schools. I’ll lose my boyfriend, my friends, my life. Mom could
lose the house because my stepdad mainly brings in all the money.
I should have said something when I saw the porn. I feel like
this is all my fault. If I don’t say anything and it keeps on, it could
get worse – and I’d probably commit suicide from the stress. And
what if my friends come over? Please help me – this is so
important.
Desperate in Indiana
Dear Desperate,
You are not “stupid”; you are a very bright young lady. None
of this is your fault. You and your sister are the victims in this
nasty business.
Your mother should have believed your sister when she
complained about the peeping. That she did not is deplorable.
What I want you to do will take courage, but please do it anyway.
If you follow my advice, people will have to believe you.
Buy a disposable flash camera. Use it to take pictures of the
gap in the floor of your bathroom. Then take it into the basement
and photograph the camera and the cable. When the pictures are
developed, make sure to get several sets of prints. Mail one set to
your father. Show one set to your mother, and tell her what you
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have told me. If she does not protect you immediately, give the
third set to a trusted teacher at your school.
Your stepfather is sick and does not belong in a house with
young women. Ideally, the police should be notified. If he has
been looking into your windows, the chances are that he has been
peeping into other windows in the neighborhood. The problems
with “Peeping Toms” is their behavior can escalate. That’s why
you should not remain silent any longer.
My response:
The advice you gave “Desperate in Indiana” will only teach her
to
continue
her
helpless-female-victim-in-need-of-rescue
orientation. That’s not necessary, and it’s likely to destroy a family
whose deviant member could be treated.
The first time she or her sister saw their stepfather at the
window, she should have opened the window and told him in no
uncertain terms, “Get away from there, and never do that again!”
And when they found a hole in the bathroom floor, they should
have told both parents, “There’s a gap in the bathroom floor.
How can we fix it?” and repair it. Finally, when they found the
camera, they should have dismantled it immediately, cable, rig, and
all, destroyed the film, trashed the camera, and left a note in its
place, stating that you will not permit any repetition of that, and to
get help for the problem. Then those girls should go and get
themselves part-time jobs and pool their earnings so they will not
feel they must put up with their stepfather’s misbehavior because
he supports them. And lastly all the girls together should confront
him and tell him to get the help he needs.
Sexual deviants have a disorder in need of treatment, not
criminalization, and girls need to learn to look after themselves,
and not solve problems by waiting for rescue or considering
suicide.
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Yak, Yak
To: The Washington Post Magazine
Dear Mr. Merida and Mr. Fletcher:
Your article about Clarence Thomas quotes his response about
his lack of asking questions during Supreme Court presentation of
oral arguments. You quoted him saying, “I think it’s much to do
about nothing. People yak, yak, yak.”
Mr. Thomas’s comment disrespects equally his fellow Justices,
the Court, its procedures, and the attorneys and their clients who
bring cases to the Court. His lack of curiosity about cases
presented to the Court suggests that his decisions are made before
he hears them. At that rate, why should the Court hear cases at all?
Why bother? Why dress up nine people in black robes to sit in a
court room where they have no genuine function? Why even have
a Supreme Court?
I think that we should bother. We should have a Supreme
Court in which Justices hear cases and oral argument and ask
questions to obtain information about cases and related issues
before they make decisions about them. In my view, Justice
Thomas’s dismissive answer should disqualify him from further
service on the Supreme Court.
Corruption in Prince Georges County
To: The Washington Post, 3/10/02
Your article, “Privilege and Privation” (Washington Post Magazine
3/10/02) is a complaint, and its message is: Prince Georges
County life has this, this, and this defect, and that’s a problem of
the black middle class.
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I think you are overlooking some important characteristics: 1)
Much of the Prince Georges County government is corrupt, and
2) the PG County black and white middle class tolerates that.
The PG County population tolerates our crooked, terrorist
police force. We allow our taxes to pay off multiple million-dollar
suits against the brutal police, while giving promotions and money
awards to the very individual cops being sued. In fact, our police
paid off millions on behalf of an aggressive, lying, crooked cop the
same day he received an award and was promoted.
We allow our public, salaried, elected officials to be on the
take. County money subsidized the giant ball park, whose owner
gives the County Executive a special luxury box for ball games. All
of our local elected council members receive free tickets to ball
games and other freebies, basically, at our expense.
We allow our big newspaper, The Washington Post, to publish a
Prince Georges County weekly that hardly, rarely touches on these
subjects, and hides much of the above information in little bits
tucked in here and there in its Metro Section.
We allow many county administrative employees much
freedom to attend to their jobs, or not, as they please, without
protest. Many of our county’s salaried employees function best
when finding ways of not doing their jobs. I moved here six years
ago and spent much time on the phone and in personal visits to
offices inducing county staff to do essentially what they are paid
to do, from clearing out a public right of way, to paving a street
where a building permit was improperly granted, to closing down
an openly functioning chop shop,1 and on and on. The only way
to obtain needed, appropriate services long overdue is to make
such a pest of oneself that public servants finally do their job in
preference to discussing their chronicled failures to do so one
more time.
1
A shop that takes apart stolen automobiles to sell for parts.
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Polite tolerance and looking the other way seem to me a
problem of the black and white middle class. Maybe in omitting
this kind of information, your article contributes to that.
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No Civil Servant Left Behind
Back when I was an underpaid civil servant employed to treat the
illness of a handful of chronic schizophrenic men, I took a fleeting
interest in awards. I thought it might be nice to get one. My
enthusiasm waned when the hospital’s dietician received an award
for saving money on patients’ food. Toward the end of each
month patients were given sandwiches of something labeled Mix
#2, rumored to be a hash of foods leftover from the earlier,
higher budget weeks of the month. Whatever its origin, patients
didn’t eat much of it, a further saving. Word went around that the
invention of Mix #2 earned the dietician her award, and I gave up
on an award for me. Nothing I could imagine could surpass Mix
#2.
By judiciously changing jobs without altering clinical functions,
my career flourished and I rose in the ranks until I supervised
some people. One of them was doing fine work, and responded to
a little more training by doing it even better. Not as stingy as some
of my previous overlords, I filled out forms to get him a raise,
which Personnel promptly refused. Like personnel departments
everywhere, they didn’t much like doing the paperwork of giving
raises unless it was a raise to one of their own.
I consulted a friendly personneller from another agency about
the problem of getting my guy his deserved raise, and he
suggested a foolproof method. Accordingly I filled out a different
set of forms and nominated my underling again, but this time for
an award. I wrote all about his previous work, how well he had
responded to additional training by taking on increased clinical
responsibility, how pleased everyone was with his contributions to
patient treatment, and so on. In fact, I praised him so well that he
got not just an award, but a ceremony on stage with a certificate
suitable for framing handed over with a speech by the
superintendent, and commemorative photographs. Then I rewrote
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the papers requesting his raise. A fuming, outwitted Personnel
Department did the paperwork, and never forgave me. I didn’t get
an award for many more years, and when I did, it was very quietly.
That was long ago, and life in the civil service award-giving lane
has greatly accelerated. Nowadays our feds work miraculously
well, according to the report published in The Washington Post
Business Section on May 17. It showed the distribution of civil
servants’ efficiency awards in the year 2002, the most recent year
for which the information was available. Excluded from public
information were awards to CIA, NSA, FBI, Secret Service, DEA,
ATFE (Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and White
House and Congressional staffs, in order to keep our country
safer.
Of the main, non-secret 1,600,000 civil service work force,
62% were awarded by cash or its equivalent in extra time off.
That’s 992,000 awards, and of those almost 2900 got more than
$10,000. Commerce, the Navy, what’s left of the Treasury after
subtracting Alcohol, Tobacco, etc., the Secret Service, and the
Army each gave more than 200 of their workers more than
$10,000, and Defense only lagged a little behind, enriching 183 of
its staff. Agencies more concerned with human welfare, such as
Social Security, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Agriculture,
although spreading their awards almost as widely, were stingier,
and gave out hundreds rather than thousands.
Such wide-spread hyperfunctioning boggles the mind. The
Social Security Administration, for example, aroused my curiosity.
Over the years Social Security has attained fame or notoriety
among social workers for refusing to acknowledge mail whose
delivery was not certified and authenticated by a signed return
receipt. Nevertheless the agency awarded 79% of its staff for
extraordinarily efficient job performance. I guess the 21% who
were not so lucky might be working in the mailroom, effectively
preventing the superperforming 79% from being overloaded by
too many mailed-in claims. If so, you might even think of the
unawarded 21% as award enablers for the awarded majority,
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helping them process a tolerable number of claims efficiently by
throwing surplus incoming mail away.
The Post ran further analyses on who got what. Higher-paid
workers were more likely to be rewarded, and among these the
best paid got the $10,000 - plus awards. A few even got $25,000.
In contrast, members of the civil service’s underclass, the corps of
clerical workers earning $40,000 a year and less, rarely got much,
more often nothing at all.
Three agencies, the National Science Foundation, the
Department of Energy, and the General Services Administration,
gave awards to more than 90% of their employees. Like the
children living in Lake Wobegon, I suppose everyone working
there is above average, and the higher-paid echelons are even
more above average than their clerical masses. Far fewer Lake
Woebegon types were employed by Veterans Affairs and
Agriculture; only 51 and 53% working there received anything.
Among the agencies staffed by more than 90% Überworkers,
the Department of Energy stands out from the rest. 94% got
awards, 103 got more than $10,000 each, and the median size of
awards doled out to almost everybody was more than $2000. Just
how 6% managed to get through the year without an award
challenges the imagination. Were these fictitious employees, kept
on the rolls to justify some marginal supervisory positions?
Supervisors must supervise at least three minions. If some
underlings were more hypothetical than real, did they have actual
empty desks and chairs, or did they haunt the agency only from
boxes on the table of organization? Did Energy’s Personnel
Department hire a cohort of award-proof staffers with
instructions to show up and do nothing? Perhaps ex-football
linemen, instructed to sit on papers concerning the relationship of
Energy to Haliburton in order to keep them out of Congressional
hands.
The mystery was solved in another Business Section piece
which reported that some years ago, in the Energy Policy and
Conservation Act, Congress charged the Department of Energy
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with upgrading energy efficiency standards for much commercial
equipment, including water heaters for restaurants, apartment
buildings, and so on, and with producing tests to reflect the
improved energy efficiency, use, and operating costs.
In 2001 the Department of Energy fixed up a new rule
increasing the energy efficiency required of commercial water
heaters, to become effective in October, 2003. Manufacturers
didn’t object and said they had the technology, but they needed a
rule about testing water heater efficiency to show compliance.
The testing rule did not appear. A department official said that
“regulatory priorities shifted,” and the rule was not made. That
gave rise to manufacturers applying to DOE for waivers of the
new rule, company by company. Then DOE processed and
granted case-by-case waivers efficiently. Excuse me, highly
efficiently.
DOE’s superperformance didn’t do what was needed even
more efficiently with respect to residential water heaters. Absent a
newer test in 2001, a company that created a more efficient line of
heaters asked DOE for a waiver allowing it to use a 1998
efficiency test. The request is still waiting for an answer, and the
company is still perforce using a 1992 test. Buy a better heater,
and you find a 1992 vintage test result pasted on its side. Possibly
the unawarded 6% of Energy’s staff, presumably a core nonfunctioning management pod, is in charge of that as well.
Briefly, I was appalled by the contrast between evident nonfunctioning and inflated rate of super efficiency awarding. I
suppose one could argue for the value of DOE’s non-responding
compared with that of Mix #2, but that misses the most
important component, lawyers. Washington is full of lawyers, and
even more fly into town for frequent sallies into the world of
advocacy suing. In school Civics class we were taught how laws
are enacted: someone gets an idea, writes it up, recruits a few
members of Congress to sponsor it, and they send it to the right
committee. If all goes well it is rewritten, passed, presented to
Senate and House, amended, conferenced, passed, sent to the
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President, and signed into law. We were taught that then the
appropriate agency of the executive branch of government puts
that law into effect. We were not taught about the function of
lawyers.
From laws protecting the handicapped to the law requiring
stricter energy-use efficiency standards, what happens next is
nothing. The now hyper-frequently, hyper-munificently awarded
civil servants go right on doing whatever they had been hyperdoing, demonstrating superlative resistance to change. Not until a
lawsuit winds its way through layers of courts to obtain a court
order does the agency write new regulations, and not until a
further suit claiming damages due to the regulations’ nonenforcement, does the new law take effect. There’s a whole new
round of awards waiting in the wings of DOE’s regulatory future.
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The Writing Life
Certain magazines include letters-to-the-editor sections, and a few
reward contributors of letters they publish by awarding a free
year’s subscription. One of my ventures has been writing letters in
the hope of attracting such an award.
A friend who feels indebted to me buys me gift magazine
subscriptions. One, a magazine called Strings, makes the offer I
described. It is a good magazine, with interesting articles about the
many features and phases of playing string instruments, from
violin to guitar to double bass to harp, string jazz to classics to
renaissance fiddling, and I enjoy reading it.
When, in the course of my viola playing, I encountered
problems I did not fully understand, I made note of them for
letter-to-the-editor possibilities. Then I wrote them up, sent them
in, and often as not, garnered free subscriptions, which I gave to
friends. They made fine gifts. I tried to write my contributions in
late summer, so that a possible freebie could be given for
Christmas.
All went well for two or three years, a letter per year, and then
it stopped. I may have run out of interesting problems, or the
magazine’s staff recognized my name and called a halt. My letters
stopped attracting free subs and went unacknowledged. I still
receive the magazine, which has improved over the years, and I
still enjoy and learn from it, but for the present my letter-writing
on string instrument-related matters is on hold. I need a new
venue.
My subscription-donating friend also gives me the New Yorker,
and I checked on their letters page with no joy. The letters the
New Yorker likes to publish, like many of its articles, tend to go
on and on, well past my natural staying power, and they seem to
go unrewarded.
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Along came the PBS show, “America’s Test Kitchen,” and we
began watching it. At the end of each show the MC talks up his
parallel magazine, Cook’s Illustrated, and his internet line which
invites post-broadcast comments. I looked it up and entered a
comment on the show I had just seen. After each cooking project,
the show’s expert cook and the MC would taste the result, and
issue a unison “Mmmm!” of appreciation. I sent in a couple of
criticisms, including a suggestion that they vary their Mmmm
reactions to make them more plausible. After all, I said internetically, their Mmmms had become so standardized that we were
joining in week after week. Our Mmmms matched their chorused
Mmmms perfectly, even though we had cooked and tasted nothing.
I watched for an effect of that trial-run feedback. Sure enough,
their appreciative Mmmms began to vary. MC and cook were still
tasting and Mmmming, but with enough deviations so that we
could no longer predict and join the chorus.
An offer of a free sample issue of Cook’s Illustrated came in the
mail and I signed up. The magazine offers several recipes, wellillustrated kitchen equipment reviews, handy cooking tips and
methods, and best of all, a couple of pages of readers’
contributions. I looked for the small print at the end of that
section, and sure enough, if they print your comment or question,
you get a year’s free subscription.
I’m working on it, from par-boiled, iced broccolette appetizers,
to lard in pie crust, to removing tea stains from white cups. Wish
me luck!
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Selected Program Notes
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Symphony #3 in F Major
Brahms grew up in Hamburg, a north German seaport, the son of
a professional double bass player. He was trained in violin, cello,
piano, and composition, and at thirteen he began writing
arrangements for his father’s orchestra and playing the piano at
theaters and dances. In his teens he played in bars and taverns,
and there he learned the tunes and complex rhythms of Hungarian
folk music from refugees awaiting passage to America following
the failed revolutions of 1848. Soon he began teaching piano,
accompanying others, and occasionally playing recitals which
included some of his own early works.
At twenty Brahms went on concert tour accompanying
Remény, a famous Hungarian violinist, who introduced him to the
haute-monde of European music — the great violinist Joachim,
Franz Liszt, and Robert and Clara Schumann. Remény taught
Brahms the Hungarian gypsy customs of expressive accelerating
and slowing of tempo in performance, and the use of rubato, the
brief suspension of tempo that adds emphasis to the expected
notes when they arrive.
The Schumanns befriended young Brahms, and Schumann
arranged publication of Brahms’ early works and wrote a highly
favorable review that launched Brahms’ career. Brahms felt deeply
indebted to them, visited Robert Schumann in the asylum
following his breakdown until his death three years later, and
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corrected the orchestration of Schumann’s symphonies. When
Clara Schumann became too old to continue playing concerts and
teaching, Brahms provided for her until her death in 1896.
In his twenties Brahms continued concertizing and
accompanying, began conducting choral groups, and worked more
intensively on composing. He wrote his first piano concerto, the
German Requiem and many smaller works. At 30 he moved to
Vienna to conduct a symphony concert series, and settled there;
by the time he was 40 he was living very well on royalties from his
popular smaller works, and on concert fees from performances of
the larger ones. He was a generous, friendly man who supported,
in addition to Clara Schumann, his father’s widow (his
stepmother) and her son from another marriage. He had many
friends but never married, and remained somewhat aloof, not very
close to anyone.
As a composer Brahms went his own way, often contrary to
prevailing fashion. He taught himself musical forms of the
renaissance and baroque eras and used them, fusing them with
techniques of his own time along with stylistic elements of
Hungarian and gypsy folk music to create a distinctive orchestral
texture unlike any other composer’s work. He wrote sustained
melodies built from short fragments, and supported them with a
strong bass, in a method derived from baroque music. These outer
lines he liked to spread well apart in pitch, leaving plenty of room
in the middle for a restless background of chords broken into
smooth patters of cross rhythms, descendants of the folk rhythms
he once heard in Hamburg taverns. His wide pitch range is most
evident in the final chords of movements, where notes are often
spaced as much as five octaves apart for a satisfying, but quiet
close. Brahms tended to set his music for distinct families of
instruments, with less intermingling of groups than was the
practice of his day. Thus a theme may appear in woodwinds (flute,
oboes, clarinets, bassoons), and then, separately, in the string
instruments, or it might appear in woodwinds with distinct string
accompaniment, and vice versa.
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Brahms spent winters in Vienna and summered in German
resorts, where he worked on his compositions. Usually he tried
out bits and pieces of larger works in varied forms and
instrumental guises, but in 1883 he wrote his third symphony all at
once. On the way to a summer resort he thought of the basic plan
of the symphony, and found it so interesting he interrupted the
journey, rented a place where he happened to be, worked out a
draft, and then spent the rest of the summer there writing the final
version.
In the third symphony Brahms used classical forms that
allowed him the freedom of episodic writing within their
conventional outlines. The symphony has the customary four
separate movements, which are tied together by means of a
harmonic theme This three-chord sequence opens the first
movement, appears in various forms here and there, and
reappears at the end to close the work.
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka
(1804-1857)
Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla
Glinka had little formal instruction in music other than piano
lessons and a chance, as a young man, to learn orchestration by
conducting his uncle’s serf orchestra which was able to play the
classical repertoire. As a child he soaked up the folk music,
religious chants, and dissonant church bells of northern Russia,
and as a young adult he visited the Caucasus and learned Russia’s
near-Eastern native music. The lack of conventional Western
training left him free to dispense with some of its constraints and
to draw instead on folk music styles, which he used especially
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effectively for lively individual characterizations in his operas, A
Life for the Tsar and Russlan and Ludmilla. Thus he adapted the style
of Russian folk and religious music — its strong, often syncopated
rhythms, its dissonances, and its unusual modal and whole-tone
scale patterns — to develop the distinctive basics of the Russian
school of composition. In the 1840’s Glinka’s operas were not
successful, as Russian aristocratic taste clung to the work of
western Europeans. But Russian musicians worshiped Glinka. He
taught Balakirev, who, with Glinka’s sister Ludmilla, encouraged
and taught the next generation. This new crop of composers, the
“Russian Five,” brought Glinka’s ideas to fruition.
Glinka’s operas continued to influence Russian composers for
the next hundred years, and their stylistic tracks can be found in
the music of Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, and even in that of
Stravinsky and Prokofiev.
Scott Joplin
(1868-1917)
Rags
Joplin achieved fame in his time for not one, but two innovations.
In 1890 he was an itinerant musician — pianist, singer, guitarist,
mandolinist, lead cornetist, and music teacher. While leading a
band at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 he heard ragtime, so called
because it pitted a melody with syncopated halts in rhythmic flow
(that is, ragged melody) against a steady, marching 4/4 bass. Joplin
went to college to study classical composition, and then wrote rags
with sturdy, more integrated accompaniments than his
contemporaries’ thumping chords, and became King of Ragtime.
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Joplin’s second innovation was the sheet music publication
contract giving composers royalties. Composers of that time had
been selling their work to publishers outright for $25 or less. In
1899 Joplin contracted for publication of Maple Leaf Rag at a
royalty of 1¢ per copy sold. In five years it sold over half a million
copies. Today that $5,000 translates to, roughly, $8,500,000 (give
or take half a million). Joplin used the money to produce his three
failed operas, Guest of Honor, Treemonisha, and If.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)
The Symphonic Music
At the age of eight little Wolfgang, obliged to keep quiet while his
father convalesced from a serious illness, wrote his first two
symphonies for something to do. He was already able to imagine
in detail the sounds he wrote without trying them out on an
instrument, a skill that enabled him to produce quantities of music
at an incredible pace. He usually thought up one movement of a
sonata while writing out the preceding movement; in symphonic
writing he worked out the next movement in his head while
writing the orchestration of the last one.
Symphony #14 in A major, K. 114
At fourteen young Mozart was a busy boy. He wrote five
symphonies, went to Rome to study composition and
counterpoint — the construction of an interplay of simultaneous,
distinct but related themes — from the most demanding teacher
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of the time, returned home, and wrote eight more symphonies the
year he turned fifteen. Symphony #14, K. 114 is the first of these
eight. It conforms to the four-movement pattern that had evolved
in the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (son of Johann
Sebastian) and Haydn. Orchestral crescendo and diminuendo —
gradually increasing loudness or softness — were just being
developed elsewhere in Europe, but Mozart had not heard them,
and passages in this symphony are either loud or soft, with little
gradation in between.
A few individual traits appear in this symphony, noteworthy
because of their importance in Mozart’s mature style. One was
expressive dissonance. On tour the Mozarts often stayed in
musicians’ boarding houses, and in a letter home Wolfgang
described his experience there: “… above us is a violinist, below
us another, next door a singing teacher who gives lessons, and in
the last room opposite ours, an oboist. Merry conditions for
composing! You get so many ideas!” Young Mozart was
fascinated by these happenstance cacophonies and crowded
textures; he explored and played with them, and eventually tried
writing the first atonal music. Expressive, accented dissonances
appear first in the delicately accompanied melody of the opening,
then in a dramatic harmonic progression forming the climax of
the first movement, and finally in the quiet duet of first and
second violins in the mid-section of the dance movement.
Symphony #25 in G Minor, K. 183
Young Mozart, just turning seventeen and home between jobhunting trips with his father, composed several symphonies,
probably for his steady job as concertmaster of the Archbishop of
Salzburg’s court orchestra. At the time Mozart was not quite the
silly boy so entertainingly depicted in “Amadeus”. To be sure, he
wrote jokes and riddles to his sister, sent kisses to the family dog,
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and played occasional pranks, but he took his music very seriously.
He studied the works of Bach and Handel, experimented with
variations, fugues, and dissonance, and took much pride in his
work.
Symphony #25 marks the beginning of Mozart’s mature style.
Within the framework of conventional formal outlines he already
used some of the expressive dissonances, chromatic harmonies,
and rather closely spaced textures that later earned him the
famous criticism, “too many notes, my dear Mozart, too many
notes.” He used the oboe, whose sound can cut through such
textures, for melody, and the unusual combination of four horns
for harmonic support. At the time his style was thought
objectionably avant-garde. But Mozart, convinced of the quality of
his music, contended that his style used “just the right number” of
notes, and now our ears agree with him.
Symphony #39 in E-flat Major, K. 543
In the 1780’s Mozart, now in his late twenties and early thirties,
took a more serious interest in his work. In 1782 he wrote string
quartets and dedicated them to Haydn, who, he said, showed him
how to write in four equal parts. In 1783 he borrowed all of the
music by Handel and J.S. Bach he could carry from friends with
good music libraries, took them home, and studied them until he
felt that he could apply their methods and principles to the
creation of the music he wanted to write for himself. In a letter to
his father he wrote wistfully that he wished for time to think about
methods, to try things out, and to consider his results.
Finally, at 32, he took the big step; he stopped the busy work
of writing to fulfill commissions, and took six weeks off for
himself. The result was three symphonies, numbers 39, 40, and 41,
all different from one another.
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The introduction of the E-flat Symphony, number 39, uses the
halting rhythmic pattern of French opera overtures, signifying that
a serious work is to follow. The key of E-flat facilitates the use of
French horn and, in fact, the main theme of the movement is
presented at its outset in violins and then horns. Throughout the
symphony Mozart assigned much of the expressive work to wind
instruments; heretofore symphonic orchestrations relegated their
few wind parts to the occasional rhythmic toot and some
sustained harmonic reinforcement.
Unusual thematic treatments also distinguish the E-flat
Symphony from its predecessors. In the first movement a brief
little fragment gradually comes to life, reappearing as transition,
then the subject of thematic development, and finally as the close
of the movement. Outstanding as well is the fourth movement,
which transforms its seemingly innocuous little-ditty first theme
into its second theme and its closing theme, and then develops it
in stretto, in which instrumental groups imitate each other in such
close succession that they overlap, and thematic entrances pile up,
one almost on top of another, in a melodic-rhythmic complexity
of excitement.
Mozart wrote it all down in two weeks. Apparently it was not
performed in his lifetime.
Mozart and Salieri
The story that a jealous Salieri poisoned Mozart is untrue. Both
men were successful composers in their lifetimes but differed in
musical heritage and personality. Salieri grew up in an era of
accompanied melody; Mozart edited and reorchestrated Handel’s
often contrapuntal Messiah, and studied the [very contrapuntal]
works of J.S. Bach. Salieri pleased authorities, talked to them
tactfully, and his patrons treated him well; Mozart believed that
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the increasingly complex and dissonant music he wrote was better
than everybody’s except Haydn’s, and didn’t care. When the
emperor said to him “Too many notes,” Mozart answered,
“Exactly the right number,” a rejoinder unimaginable for Salieri.
Nevertheless, Salieri admired and praised Mozart’s work, and
Mozart respected Salieri and valued his good opinion.
Gossip about a conflict began when Emperor Joseph II
appointed Salieri his court music director, a job Mozart had hinted
at but never applied for. A generation later the Russian playwright
Pushkin heard something about it and, stuck out in the country
for three months avoiding a cholera scare, wrote a play, Mozart and
Salieri. It wasn’t successful, but in 1898 Rimsky-Korsakov used it
to compose an opera. Eighty years later Peter Schaffer rewrote the
opera as a musical play, and then Milos Forman recast the play as
the movie, Amadeus. The story gained picturesque fictions with
each reworking. None are true.
Jacques Offenbach
(1819-1880)
Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld
Jacob Eberst, a.k.a. Jacques Offenbach, the son of a German
cantor, was a Parisian cellist. He concertized with Liszt and
Rubinstein, and for a steady living he played and conducted in
theater pit orchestras. He wrote a few pieces with little success —
until the 1850’s. Then, while Verdi and Wagner began writing
their very long, very serious musical tragedies, Offenbach began to
display a late-blooming genius for irreverent musical comedy. He
rented a small theater and produced a satirical romp of an operetta
he called Orpheus in Hell (in German Orpheus in der Unterwelt, in turn
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translated into “Underworld”). One of its hit numbers was a cancan danced, not by chorus girls, but by the gods on Mount
Olympus.
Orpheus in Hell was a great hit, but musically somewhat limited.
Political satire requires simple tunes and thin orchestrations that
let the clever words come through loud and clear. Later,
Offenbach’s tunes were arranged and enriched by others, and Carl
Binder put together the overture we hear today.
Richard Wagner
(1813-1883)
The Meistersinger, Prelude to Act I
Wagner had hardly any formal instruction in music. In his teens he
attended a concert of Beethoven’s music; he was fascinated, and
then and there decided on his life’s work. He sat down in the
Leipzig public library for the next several years and copied out
Beethoven’s symphonies and late string quartets, note for note,
thinking about each note until he felt that he really, exactly
understood it. At eighteen, when he finished, he felt that his
musical training was complete. It was, and he got jobs as
conductor and music director, and began composing overtures
and incidental music for the theater. At twenty he wrote his first
opera and began his second, which was performed. Next he wrote
The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, operas that are still part of the
standard repertoire. Unlike other composers he did not write draft
piano versions or sketches; he just sat and thought, and then
wrote fully orchestrated scores from scratch, so neatly that his
manuscripts resemble print.
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Wagner’s early operas proceeded in conventional arias, duets,
and choruses, but while writing them he began thinking about his
idea of a symphonic opera, in which separate numbers are
replaced by ever-evolving thematic variations and developments.
He assigned the voice a near-instrumental part, speech-singing
through the orchestral music to tell a story that provided the
dramatic-emotional context for the music. He enlarged and
enriched the orchestra, adding woodwind and brass instruments,
and then he placed them mainly under the stage, so that their
muted sound arrived at the audience’s ears together with that of
the singers on stage. Wagner worked out the realization of his idea
for the next 25 years, in the twenty-hour, four-night symphonic
opera, The Ring of the Nibelungen.
Wagner took two time outs from The Ring: in the 1850’s, for a
torrid love affair and the composition of Tristan und Isolde, and in
the 1860’s, for the relationship to his true love and life
companion, Cosima Liszt, the birth of their two children, and the
composition of Die Meistersinger. It was a happy time of life, and
the opera is a cheerful change from epics of redemption by lovedeath to the story of ordinary people in a song competition. The
prelude is a real overture, rather than the thematic exposition of a
symphonic opera. It uses the full brass and woodwind ensembles
of Wagner operas, but structures their parts with a lighter touch,
for easier listening.
PART 7: IN NO APPARENT
DISTRESS
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Second Childhood
Regression began at the age of 73, when I fell down. Falling down
is not so unusual for me; poor coordination, difficulty telling right
from left, and absent-mindedness have had me stumbling all
through my life. I have had much practice falling down, and am so
used to it that the process is somewhat relaxed. Beyond the odd
bruise or two these occasions are usually more annoying than
catastrophic.
So, one night I fell down. As usual, I lay still and reoriented
myself — middle of the night, returning to bed, left foot trapped
under right foot, lying on bedroom floor. Checked myself out: not
much pain, bruise on left shoulder, everything else functioning;
pick myself up, tend to business. Not quite.
Since I was lying on my left leg, that was the last item on the
check list, and it flunked. A weight-bearing structural component,
that leg, and it couldn’t bear weight, none at all. A clear case of
911, and I hollered for help.
Stretcher loading was agony, but as soon as I lay still all pain
ceased. I even laughed at the ambulance’s absence of shock
absorbers, as we bumped along the familiar roads to the local
hospital. Howled with pain while dumped from stretcher to
Emergency Room’s gurney, but again, as soon as I lay still I was
fine, or as fine as people get who are unexpectedly not in their
beds at three o’clock in the morning. Medically, I was NAD, that
is, in No Apparent Distress, and a passing doctor coat said, “Just
give her a walker and send her home.”
X-rays ended home-sending talk. At daybreak a young doctor
coat introduced himself as Dr. X, physician’s assistant, and said he
would be my doctor. A while later a tall doctor coat approached,
and said, “I am Dr. Y, and I will be your doctor. You have broken
the top of your left femur, and you will be admitted to the
hospital.” Around 9 am — doctors’ and bankers’ office hours’
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time — a man in a suit introduced himself as Dr. Z, orthopedist.
He said, “You have fractures of the left pelvic bones. You will be
admitted to the hospital as soon as there is a free bed. The
hospital is full, and you will have to wait here for quite a while.
The nurses will treat you for pain, and make you as comfortable as
possible,” and he gave instructions. He was the real thing, my
doctor, my medical father figure.
Kind nurses gave me a pillow, a blanket, and dope, and I
relaxed into instant regression. A plate of food was placed on my
stomach; I couldn’t see it, but it didn’t smell of liver, so I dipped
my fingers in and tasted. Pretty good, and I ate several fingerfuls
of lunch, and took a nap. I was a good baby.
Pleasant tripped-out hours later I was loaded onto a stretcher
— ow, ow, ow, I cried — and put to bed. Nurses gave me shots,
dinner, tucked me in, and I nestled down in my new foster home.
I was content, and with occasional ow-ing excursions to this and
that scan, at peace.
After a week a managerial social worker managing Managed
Care called a halt to my infantile bliss. “You can’t stay here,” she
said. “Tomorrow you will move to a rehab center. You don’t
qualify for the one in town, and I don’t know about the one in
Bowie, so you go to Laurel. But I don’t know anyone in Laurel, I
said. Well, all right, I’ll see about Bowie, but Laurel is a great place.
My former adult self told me that Laurel is not a great place.
Next morning at dawn a crisply alert professional woke me,
saying she was from the rehab hospital in town. You qualify for
us, she said, sign here, and snapped me up. Following morning
feeding and doping and rewrapping I was loaded into an
ambulance — ow, ow, ow! — and driven off. Arrived at my new
orphanage I was unloaded onto their gurney — more ow’s, given
a physical, briefly interviewed by a doctor who asked the odd
question or two about my former life, and then said, “Would you
like a chance to talk about sex?” How absurd for a baby, I
thought, but sleepily polite said only, “No, thank you.” Unloaded
into bed — ow, ow, ow — I once more retreated from reality.
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Rehab began the next morning, bringing regression to a halt. A
motherly young therapist called me Sweetie, the universal name
for toddlers, and made me turn over — ow, ow, ow — and sit up
— not so bad — and wash readily accessible body parts, while she
patiently wrung out washcloths, applied towels, and praised my
smallest achievements. I basked in her praise.
My therapist put me back into my cocoon, accompanied by
suitable ow’s, but stated firmly that the next day I would sit in a
wheelchair and in two days I would take a shower. “No!” I
announced in true toddler’s indignation. Of course she was right;
next day I was put into a stroller and taken to start little plants in
pots, that is, to play in dirt. I enjoyed it very much. There was a
group of us, but we played alongside each other, without
interaction. Peer conversation was still a week in my future.
Visitors came, clothes came, and I greeted all in dopey, happy
denial. The impact of this injury on my life was dim and unreal;
after all, I fell down often without lasting effect, and whenever I
held still, I was a happy camper.
Fortunately, friends ignored what I said, and arranged my life
for me. One brought my mail and check book and said, “Pay your
bills!” Another moved into my house, and took over pet feeding,
home management, and trash disposal. He ignored my protests,
and arranged to stay for months to help me.
Inexorably I matured. I learned to stand, and then to walk in
little steps. Toilet training proceeded apace. My stroller, to which I
initially reacted with, “What do I need that for?” became my
transportation and my easy chair.
Physical illness struck, but I was only allowed a three-day sickrole retreat before pushing, shoving, and insisting on maturation
resumed. Reluctant and sometimes whining, I progressed. I
matured into group membership, I learned individuals’ names and
stories, and concern for others was reborn.
I began taking responsibilities, cleaning up, sorting, putting
away clothes, arranging my own shower. No sooner did I achieve
this level of functioning, however, than I metamorphosed into an
234
obnoxious, ungrateful teenager, sitting up late in my stroller,
watching TV anytime of day or night, ignoring my current
pseudo-mother nurse’s guidance, griping about the food, the
shower, the exercises, even the single-honk kleenexes all hospitals
seem to provide. A young psychologist came to offer me
treatment, and I answered him without grace. Time to go, and I
graduated. Went home, with walker and stroller, a querulous lame
shadow of my former self.
Appendix
Regression to infancy and re-maturation doesn’t come cheap. Not
counting specialized tests, testers, test interpreters, consultants,
evaluations and evaluators, and a heap of unbelievably overpriced
medicines, the infant-re-growth cost was $142,845. Here is how it
breaks down, in approximate developmental stages:
Cocoon (well, really, half a cocoon), no window
$122,540
Surrogate mothers, a.k.a. nurses
9,164
Father figure doctor
1,488
Specialized surrogate mother for learning to
bathe and dress
Stroller
Playing alongside others in group
Learning to walk
Walker
Potty chair
Real doctor, for illness
Playing in interactive group
Psychologist, declined
640
2,796
512
3,030
187
59
379
1,960
90
OBITUARY
236
JOHANNA KRANOLD STEIN (July 7, 2006)
Johanna Kranold Stein died on Friday at her home in Ithaca. Her
life ended peacefully after a precipitous decline related to lung
cancer and heart disease.
Born in 1927, Johanna spent her early years in a mansion in
southeast Germany. Johanna always pronounced her name the
German way, with the J sounding like a Y, and the first A
sounding like the A in "father." Her mother, Sophie Steinhaus,
whose first language was Yiddish, was an art historian and
revolutionary, affectionately known as Red Sophie. Johanna's
father, Hermann Kranold, was an economist active in the Social
Democratic resistance to fascism. He was arrested on the day the
Reichstag was burned in 1933, but his uncle Max Planck, the
Nobel prize winning physicist, was able to arrange an exile.
After several years of temporary teaching positions in London,
Hermann secured a permanent position at Talladega College in
Alabama, the best black college of the time. Steamer tickets and
clothing were contributed by the AFSC (Quakers).
In Alabama Sophie had to learn to cook! So her sister Regine
taught her to cook through letters. Regine was among the last
Jewish refugees to escape to Britain. Sophie's brother Emil was
not as fortunate. He and his wife fled the Nazis and went into
hiding in France, but were discovered and deported to a death
camp shortly before the end of the war.
In Talladega Johanna spoke the "schönster slanguage," a mishmash of German and English, with her family. She attended
school in the black part of town, where she sang the Negro
National anthem every morning, learned American history from
the African American point of view, and learned to jitterbug.
When Johanna was 14, her parents died of heart disease.
Eventually she settled in Ann Arbor, living in the first generation
of cooperative university housing. She earned a Bachelor's and
Master's in comparative musicology. These, combined with work
237
experience caring for the mentally ill, led Johanna to develop the
field of psychiatric musicology, which she practiced in the
Washington, D.C., area, at NIH, Chestnut Lodge and St.
Elizabeth's Hospital. Her articles have been published in the
standard psychiatric journals.
Psychiatric musicology is not to be confused with music
therapy. Certain mental illnesses can look alike clinically but
respond to different medications and treatment methods. Johanna
discovered that they can be differentiated by the perceptual errors
patients make when they listen to specific configurations of music.
Another diagnostic tool devised by Johanna involves detecting
distortions in the patient's speaking voice.
Johanna also pioneered novel treatment methods for certain
chronic schizophrenic patients. She took satisfaction from slowly
helping some patients get to the point of making life choices and
resuming functioning in society after as many as twenty years of
disability.
Back surgery at the age of 58 brought an early retirement; heart
trouble began the following year. Johanna was an active member
of the Bowie Senior Writers' Group. As long as her health
permitted, she was an amateur violist. During the last 14 years, she
wrote program notes for the McLean Symphony.
In August 2005, Johanna moved to Ithaca to be near her
daughter Melanie Emile Stein, son-in-law Detlef Smilgies, and
grandchildren Max and Mauro. She will be deeply missed.
In lieu of flowers, it was Johanna's wish that donations be
made in her name to the two organizations that made it possible
for her to immigrate and remain in this country: Talladega College
and the American Friends Service Committee.
238
APPENDIX I
SCHIZOPHRENIA, HYSTERIA AND
PSYCHIATRIC MUSICOLOGY
by Melanie Stein
Johanna discovered ways of using musical analysis to diagnose and
treat severe mental illnesses. She named this interdisciplinary field
psychiatric musicology. As far as I know, Johanna has so far been its
only practitioner. But she made some fascinating discoveries. I
will try to explain, in non-technical language, some of what I have
understood of them. These ideas are taken from papers that were
written in a style that was too technical for inclusion in Part 3. A
more complete and rigorous treatment may be found in the
references listed in Appendix II. Many of these are available at
<web address, web address continued>.
Johanna worked with patients with various psychoses, such as
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and certain kinds of hysteria and
depression. It can be difficult to differentiate among these
illnesses, but a correct diagnosis is important for choosing
appropriate medication and treatment.
Just as a psychotic individual’s illness causes him to
misperceive the world around him, Johanna found that it also
causes him to misperceive music. She discovered that each
psychosis is associated with a characteristic type of misperception
of music. This discovery led to the development of diagnostic
239
tools that can be used even when the patient talks only nonsense,
or when the patient doesn’t talk at all.
She also worked out treatment techniques. She used targeted
work with music so the patient could become aware of perceptual
difficulties and begin to revise them within a musical context. This
can be less frightening to the patient than it would be to confront
them in an interpersonal context. Johanna was thus able to help a
number of patients get unstuck and start to progress in their talk
therapy.
The ideal way of working was in teamwork with the patient’s
psychotherapist and the staff on the ward or outpatient clinic. A
patient in psychiatric musicology therapy with Johanna would visit
her at least once a week for many months, and sometimes years.
Therapy with Johanna involved very specific musical goals and
tasks, but did not require prior musical training on the part of the
patient. She often had the patient choose and listen to recordings,
as Mr. K did in “Emotional Regrowth: Musical Maturation from
Infancy to Adulthood in Eight Months”.
Occasionally she worked with patients who had played an
instrument before becoming ill. In this case playing the instrument
might form part of treatment, as a way of discovering, and
working on, misperceptions and distortions of the musical
structures problematic to the individual. For example there was a
patient who was a saxophonist. She arranged Schubert’s Unfinished
Symphony as a duet for viola and saxophone, and they gradually
worked their way through it as part of the patient’s treatment.
Many of Johanna’s patients had schizophrenia, often the
hardest to treat of all mental illnesses, and she did not always meet
with success. And I should stress, as she always did, that the
methods of psychiatric musicology were developed to diagnose
and treat psychoses, not neuroses.
In this Appendix, I will try to give the reader an idea of the
musical features that are misperceived in two psychoses,
schizophrenia and hysterical disorders; but first, I will describe the
240
musicological diagnostic procedure Johanna used. For
grammatical simplicity I will refer to the patient as a him.
In the procedure, Johanna would play a number of carefully
selected snippets, or excerpts, of recorded music (one to two
minutes each) and ask the patient to describe or imitate what he
heard. She would write down his musical, verbal and non-verbal
reactions to each excerpt. The procedure she followed for
detecting tempo misperceptions is described in “Musicology And
The Manic Experience”.
The type of music she used to detect schizophrenia had
intense, slowly resolving dissonances. Tonal music always has
some dissonances. We say that a dissonance resolves to a
consonance. To give an example, suppose a piece of music is in
the key of C major. A G7 chord is a dissonance, which resolves to
a C chord, a consonance. As long as the dissonance lasts, we feel a
certain tension, which is released when the dissonance is resolved.
One of the excerpts Johanna used to detect schizophrenia was
taken from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, measures 1-17. This excerpt
features string instruments (violin, viola and cello) and soprano
and alto singers. If you are able to listen to a library or mp3
recording of the beginning of this piece, it will be much easier to
understand what follows. Measures 1-17 correspond to the first
one and a half to two minutes of the piece, depending on the
performance tempo chosen by the conductor.
There are two aspects of this excerpt that are problematic for
schizophrenics. First, it has many slowly resolving dissonances in a
very slow tempo. One prolonged dissonance leads to another, and
another, again and again. The tension-and-release feelings created
in the listener are especially strong. Second, it is contrapuntal.
Counterpoint is “an interplay of simultaneous interdependent
themes which move through rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic
disagreement and accord. Different themes used at the same time,
or the same theme disaligned in time and pitch, can produce
counterpoint. Three Blind Mice [sung as a round], is simple
241
counterpoint.” (Stein 1977b) Row, row, row your boat, another round,
is a second well-known example.
A for-instance of non-contrapuntal music is a melody
accompanied by a strummed guitar or by a piano playing chords
or arpeggios. Another example is when two singers move along in
parallel thirds. In this case the singer doing the “harmony part” is
not independent of the singer doing the “melody part”, since he
goes up and down whenever the “melody part” goes up and
down, with exactly, or nearly exactly, the same rhythm. The voices
are not independent, so there is no counterpoint. Pop music that
you hear on the radio is non-contrapuntal. A Bach fugue is very
contrapuntal. So is Dixieland jazz.
Johanna found that the counterpoint in the Pergolesi sample
seemed to heighten the anxiety schizophrenics feel when listening
to the dissonance-consonance patterns. In imitating and
responding to musical excerpts with many slowly resolving
dissonances, schizophrenics displayed misperceptions and
discomfort. Here are some examples of their responses: “It kept
getting higher and higher.” “There was no singing.” “I don’t want
to hear that (turned phonograph off in first phrase).” And my
personal favorite (in response to the Pergolesi): “There must be
something better. They weren’t professionals. It has no tempo, I
couldn’t follow; notes are flying all over everywhere. If you keep
your notes modified they won’t do that. How are you going to
control that?” (Stein 1977b)
Johanna found a connection between the illness and the
musical symptoms she observed: “Slow dissonances used to create
and release intense musical tension can resemble the social
structures of emotionality, and their harmonic contradictions and
ambiguous expectations can resemble emotional conflicts and
ambivalences…. The musical phenomenon has a clear relationship
to what is widely recognized as a, or even the, basic problem in
schizophrenia, namely the altering of perceptions and thought
processes in relation to affectively significant matters.” (Stein
1977b)
242
~
Patients with hysterical psychosis had trouble perceiving a
different musical configuration. Johanna chose three types of
excerpts to detect this illness: first, a melody written for a bass
voice or instrument that sounds very prominent in comparison
with the other voices or intruments, i.e. a bass melody that sticks
out. Second, a soprano or treble instrument melody that sticks
out. Third, a section of music having simultaneous bass and treble
melodies that stick out. Here is an example of a misperception by
a hysterical patient: In an excerpt with a prominent soprano line
and some inconspicuous orchestral accompaniment, the patient
did not report hearing the soprano. In fact the patient had not
heard the soprano – the illness had blocked the voice out
completely.
Hysterical patients usually had trouble with either bass or
treble, but a few had trouble with both. They reacted to these
excerpts with acute distress and histrionic symptoms, and they
“described or imitated the music … with large, conspicuous
errors, … in that they obliterated or greatly exaggerated height of
pitch and loudness…. They responded to the sensitized pitch
range with phobic anxiety, and often spoke of it in far-fetched
personifications, e.g. calling groups of instruments in bass or
treble male or female persons.” (Stein 1978)
Johanna described hysterical disorder as “an illness that
[combines a] generalized dislike of people … with some of the
hypersensitivity to emotionality [seen in] schizophrenia, and
focuses both [of these] on one gender, most especially one gender
in inter-gender interaction.” (Stein 1993b)
She noted that “hysterical disorders … can occur equally in
males and females, … and patients of either gender can react with
phobia to males or females. Any combination of patient gender
and sexual orientation is therefore possible; that is, hysterical
males might be effeminate or masculine, homosexual or
243
heterosexual, with or without misogyny, and so on. Patients’
phobic reactions suggest that the disorder is related to life
experiences, and may respond to psychotherapeutic
intervention…. Psychotherapy, a type of affective interaction, may
in itself exacerbate symptoms when the gender of the therapist
matches the gender-locus of the patient’s phobic reaction; the
effect is likely to be most disruptive when that happens in an
inter-gender therapist-patient combination [i.e. female-female or
male-male].” (Stein 1978)
With the help of the diagnostic tool she developed for
hysterical disorders, Johanna was able to correct the diagnosis of a
number of patients who had been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic.
Psychiatric musicology does not require sophisticated technology.
The only materials Johanna needed with most patients were a
collection of recordings of classical music, a phonograph, music
manuscript paper, a watch with a second hand and a metronome.
Finding the patient’s register breaks and speaking range (as
outlined in “Voice Alterations and Schizophrenia”) can be done
with a piano, any musical instrument the therapist is comfortable
with, or even a pitch pipe.
244
APPENDIX II
PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS
1963a. with M.R. Yarrow, P. Blank, O.W. Quinn and F.G.
Youmans. “Social psychological characteristics of old age.” In
Human Aging, edited by J. Birren, et al., Public Health Service
Publication #986.
1963b. with O.W. Quinn. “Social interaction patterns of the
quadruplets.” In The Genain quadruplets, edited by D. Rosenthal.
New York: Basic Books, Inc.
1963c. Music therapy treatment techniques. American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry 33: 521-528.
1963d. Problem cases in individual music therapy. Bulletin of the
National Association for Music Therapy: 9-12.
1964. with Rasmussen. Admission rates, career contingencies, and
visibility of schizophrenia in the Navy. Unpublished
monograph.
1965. The music therapist’s role in work with severely disturbed
patients. Journal of Music Therapy, 53-55.
1968. Emotional regrowth: musical maturation from infancy to
adulthood in eight months. Paper presented at the Medical
Society of St. Elizabeths Hospital.
1970. Thought disorder, artistic media, and progress in therapy: a
case study. Paper presented at the National Association for
Music Therapy Annual Conference, East Lansing, Michigan.
1971a. Emotional regrowth: musical maturation from infancy to
adulthood in eight months. Newsletter of the National Association for
Music Therapy, Mid-Atlantic Region.
1971b. with S.V. Thompson. Crazy music: theory. Psychotherapy 8:
137-145.
1973. Musicology for music therapists: the Lomax study. Journal of
Music Therapy: 46-51.
1974. with J.A. Euper. Advances in music therapy. In Current
psychiatric therapies, edited by J. Masserman 14: 107-113.
1975. Review of Psychogenic voice disorders, by A.E. Aronson, Journal
of Music Therapy: 96-98.
1977a. Tempo errors and mania. American Journal of Psychiatry 134:
454-456.
1977b. Schizophrenic perception of music. Unpublished.
1978. Altered Perception in Hysterical Disorders. Unpublished.
1983. Factors in the future of public mental hospitals. CME
(Continuing Medical Education) Newsletter of St. Elizabeths Hospital,
May.
1985a. Harvard-Mass General Course on Treatment Resistance, I
and II. CME Newsletter of St. Elizabeths Hospital, September and
October.
1985b. Birth of the outpatient commitment. CME Newsletter of St.
Elizabeths Hospital, December.
1986. Darth Vader and psychotherapy. CME Newsletter of St.
Elizabeths Hospital, November.
1988. Manic tempo misperceptions. Biological Psychiatry 24, 366-368
and 492.
1989a. Schizophrenic diagnostic continuum summary. CME
Newsletter of St. Elizabeths Hospital, May.
1989b. OD. CME Newsletter of St. Elizabeths Hospital.
246
1989c. Mania and nondominant hemisphere function. Perceptual
and Motor Skills 69: 975-978.
1991. Statistics, or I’ve been reading more and enjoying it less.
CME Newsletter of St. Elizabeths Hospital.
1992a. Darth Vader, and the psychotherapy of schizophrenia.
Unpublished staff lecture, DCIMH (District of Columbia
Institute for Mental Health).
1992b. Musicology and the Manic Experience. Unpublished staff
lecture, DCIMH.
1993a. Vocal alterations in schizophrenic speech. Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, 181: 59-62.
1993b. Hysterical Disorders. Unpublished staff lecture DCIMH.
1994a. Commonly-used neuroleptics; commonly-used antimanics
and antidepressants. Unpublished staff lecture, DCIMH.
1994b. with Ross J. Baldessarini. Clinical equivalence tables of
neuroleptics and antidepressants. Unpublished tables for staff
use, DCIMH.
EDITOR’S NOTE
This project has given me the opportunity to reflect on what my
mother meant to me; publishing her work is my way of celebrating
her life.
I would like to thank
Detlef Smilgies, for his unflagging encouragement and practical
assistance,
Max Stein, for giving me a deadline, and
Mauro Stein, for making me take some breaks.
If my mother had lived to see her work published, I’m sure she
would have thanked the Bowie Senior Writers’ Group, whose
camaraderie and moral and technical support helped her blossom
as an amatuer writer.
(back cover)
The moving men shook their heads over our large European
furniture, and said “You never get this out when your house burn
down.” “Burn down?” we asked, and were told that southern fire
departments didn’t come to the black part of town. The college
was black, our part of town was black, and we were now black.
from Thoughts about Grass
Mr. L had told me that grandmother was the neighborhood
matriarch, and he wasn’t kidding. Everyone else sort of sat there
murmuring The poor boy, or Well what can we do about it Mrs.
Stein, and then grandmother took a deep breath and spoke. She
not only straightened out Mr. L, she straightened out her husband,
and gave him firm instructions never to overprotect the boy again,
then she told mother a thing or two, proceeded to her younger
grandson, home on leave from the Navy, and then told me what
was what. By this time grandfather was smiling proudly, mother
was trying not to giggle, and the two boys were frankly holding
each other up.
Mr. L never skipped another lithium dose and had no more
hospitalizations. The last time I saw him he had started on his
Ph.D., and he and his girlfriend were about to buy their first
house.
from Musicology and the Manic Experience