5 minute read
Et Cetera
Robin Hirsch (1956-61) owner of the Cornelia Street Café in New York for more than 41 years shares a story from a memoir in progress, called THE WHOLE WORLD PASSES THROUGH: Stories from the Cornelia Street Café and includes recollections of two very eminent Paulines who have died recently, Oliver Sacks (1946-51) and Jonathan Miller (1947-53).
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It’s Thursday, the last day of the week for ordering. I’ve run around downstairs checking paper goods, cleaning supplies, beer, wine, liquor. I come upstairs. It’s lunchtime. It’s May. The sun is shining. The doors are open. It’s busy.
A man is sitting at a table in the side room. I am vaguely aware that he is watching me through the archway. I look up and he beckons me over. “Are you an actor?” he asks.
“Occasionally,” I reply. “Did you do something at the Murphy Center about ten years ago?” “I did a couple of things there.” “Did you do something with Oliver Sacks?” “The neurologist? Yes, I did. Were you there?” “I was. I remember it very well. You did a piece about a Touretter.”
I did, indeed; a couple of plays inspired by Sacks’ case histories. One was A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter, which seemed to have emerged almost fullblown some nine years after Pinter had read Awakenings. The other was a monologue by Peter Barnes called Drummer, which had been inspired by a case history of “Witty Ticcy Ray,” who suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome, an affliction of the brain which causes sudden quite violent and scatological eruptions even in the middle of genteel conversation.
We managed to get hold of Sacks. He agreed to come on the night and to talk or at least respond to questions afterwards. Could he bring a friend? Of course. I directed the Pinter, which is a deliberative, almost elegiac meditation on a woman slowly emerging after twenty-nine years in a coma. Drummer is a very different kettle of fish. It’s short, it’s abrupt, it’s funny, it’s violent. It’s also a piece that is quite close to me.
As a child growing up in London after the war I had developed fits which never totally left me and which were occasioned by unlikely things that happened at home – my parents smoking, for example. I would begin to tremble and shake and eventually I’d rush to my room to try and block out all kinds of intrusions – my father’s violence, my parents’ unhappiness, early pre-conscious memories of the Blitz during which I was born, the shadow of a history from which my parents had escaped but about which they were silent, who knows what else. These fits were a terrible and mysterious companion of my adolescence, which years of Freudian therapy did nothing to resolve. They made me feel intensely crazy, alien, and alone, and therapy served only to magnify those feelings. Finally in Drummer I’d found a kindred spirit whose tics and twitches I could inhabit and exfoliate.
On the night, out front in the audience amid the generalized hubbub I hear a sudden shout, and then another. The hubbub subsides and what we all then listen to, audience and actor alike, is a series of inchoate staccato outbursts of the kind that I am preparing to deliver. Slowly it dawns on me that Sacks must have arrived and that the friend he had said he was bringing with him must be a Touretter – the genuine article as opposed to the fake that I was preparing to become.
I don’t think I have ever been as nervous before a performance as I now became. The lights went out, and, in the darkness and the dreadful interrupted silence, I stumbled out towards the drum set. Now there were two Touretters in the house, the real one and a bogus one people had paid money to see. The lights came up. I picked up my drumsticks and in a strangulated voice began to speak.
I twitched, I shouted, I banged my drums. And every so often out in the audience someone unseen twitched and shouted with me. Together we built to a climax and then finally it was over.
After a break Sacks, a large, rumpled, and surprisingly shy man sat on the stage and responded with some hesitation and considerable thoughtfulness to questions from the audience. He introduced his friend the Touretter, and, inevitably, in that small theatre, with so much revelation and such cloistered intimacy, a three-way conversation ensued.
There was a party afterwards. Sacks, I learned, had gone to the same school, St Paul’s as I in London, though some ten years earlier. He and Jonathan Miller had been friends there. Both had become doctors, though Miller had achieved enormous and very early fame as a comedian. Oddly, though Sacks had none of the manic performance energy that Miller brought so brilliantly to bear in Beyond the Fringe, there was, it seemed to me, a certain attunement to a kind of human, or perhaps, more accurately, divine, comedy in the shy neurologist, an understanding.
As with so many things in the performing life it was a one-night affair. Magical but written on the wind. I never saw Sacks again, though I kept up with some of his writing and the memory of that evening never left me, and lingered perhaps even for others.
“So, yes,” I said to my interrogator, “I did indeed play a Touretter. You were there?”
“I was indeed,” he said. “I am the Touretter,” and he barked and leaned over and punched me in the chest.
“You are the Touretter?” “Yes. Oliver brought me with him.”
I said, “I’ve written a book, a memoir, since we last met. It has nothing to do with Tourette’s, or acting, or the café. It’s about growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. That’s the disease I suffer from. If there’s a copy downstairs I’d like to give it to you.”
I found one. He told me his name and on the flyleaf I wrote:
“For Lowell Handler, who does a pretty good imitation of me. With admiration, Robin Hirsch.”
I handed it to Lowell. He leaned over and punched me in the chest. I punched him back.
Then I returned to my inventory.
