What a background for a priest-to-be, you say. You say charitably, Well, at least you changed, became a priest, and ran the hospice here. I didn’t change. Does anyone really change? I am still a spiteful man. The Lord puts up with all types. Look at his disciples. A sorry crew, mostly office seekers and social climbers. They could all have come from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Down there in the world I had no use for my fellow priests or parishioners. I had use for the bottle. As one alcoholic to another, I’m sure I’m not telling you a secret — the secret of all alcoholics — when I tell you that the bottle enabled me to enjoy my spite. I despised TV, stereo-V, yet I watched it by the hour. Do you know how I spent my evenings? Not exactly like St. Francis praising Brother Night. Watching reruns of Dallas, which I despised, despised every minute of it, despising myself, having six drinks and enjoying my spite. At every commercial I’d jump up and have a stiff drink — to stand Dallas and my fellow priests.
You’re shaking your head: But you did run the hospice, you’re saying, didn’t you, and did a good job, before they took it away from you. You took in the dying and the unwanted, like Mother Teresa.
Don’t kid yourself. I don’t know about Mother Teresa, but I did it because I liked it, not for love of the wretched. Didn’t your mentor Dr. Freud say that we all have our own peculiar ways of gratifying ourselves? Don’t knock it. Yes, I took in the dying. Do you want to know why? Because dying people were the only people I could stand. They were my kind. Do you know the one thing dying people can’t stand? It’s not the fact they’re going to die. It’s other people, the undying, so-called healthy people. Their loved ones. And after a while of course their loved ones can’t stand the sight of them, haven’t a word to say to them, and they can’t stand the sight of their loved ones. They liked me because I liked them and they knew it. You can’t fool children and you can’t fool dying people. We were in the same boat. They knew I was a drunk, a failed priest. Dying people, suffering people, don’t lie. They tell the truth. Death makes honest men of all of us. Everyone else lies. Everyone else is dying too and spending their entire lives lying to themselves. I’ll tell you a peculiar thing: It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying. The best thing I ever did for the living was, in a few cases, to make it possible for them to speak with truth and love to their dying father or mother — which of course no one ever does.
In the end, all they would send me out here were AIDS patients — God knows what they did with the others — because not even the Qualitarian Centers wanted to handle them. Now of course they’ve started the quarantine, so they can’t come here. Do you think I’m setting up as another St. Francis or Mother Teresa kissing lepers’ sores? Certainly not. I liked them. They knew it. They told the absolute truth. So did I. I was at home with them. Did I try to convert them? Certainly not. Religion was never mentioned. Only if they asked. I knew I belonged with them, because I didn’t have to drink. When they died or got quarantined, I came up here.
Germany. Let me tell you what happened to me. Well, my father of course was in a transport of delight. First, France: Notre Dame! Chartres! Mont-Saint-Michel! Then Germany: the Rhine! Beethoven! Das Rheingold! Heidelberg!
Well, he was half right, I thought. Right about Germany, wrong about France. Let me make a confession. I did not like the French. It took me years to discover their virtues. It was a prejudice, I admit, but for a fact France in the 1930s was fairly putrid and mean-spirited. Even I could tell. We stayed with my mother’s cousins in Lyons. Our cousin was in the dyeing business. I recognized them on the spot. They were like my mother’s family in Thibodaux. They knew nothing, cared about nothing except business and eating and politics — the latter with a passion which I could not quite fathom. They had their political party and favorite newspaper, which represented their views. I gathered there were many such parties and newspapers all over France, because our cousins spoke of them at length and with venomous passion. They only came alive in their hatreds. The French hated each other’s guts. Only later did I realize that our cousins were what Flaubert called the bourgeoisie.
The Germans were a different cup of tea. I liked them. Dr. Jäger and his friends were charming and cultivated. They were accomplished amateur musicians. They invited my father to join their chamber-music group, welcomed him as Der Herr Musik Professor from New Orleans. I remember them playing Brahms and Schubert quintets, my father at the piano — and not doing badly. So happy he had tears in his eyes!
There were many distinguished German and Austrian psychiatrists in Tübingen that summer. It was some sort of meeting or convention — I can remember the exact name, isn’t that strange? — the Reich Commission for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Constitutional Disorders. They were not Nazis, quite the contrary, had in fact been famous as psychiatrists and eugenicists in the old Weimar Republic. I remember them well! There was Dr. Werner Heyde from the University of Würzburg and director of the famous psychiatric clinic there — which had been famous for its humane care of the insane going back to the sixteenth century. Dr. Heyde, I remember, even mentioned Cervantes’s description of the mental hospital in Seville, also noted for its humane treatment of patients. There was Dr. Karl Brandt, a great admirer of Albert Schweitzer, who had even planned at one time to work with him in Lambaréné. There was Dr. Max de Crinis, a charming Austrian, a very cultivated man, yet full of high spirits, who, I see I don’t have to tell you, is still well known for his work on the social difficulties of children — he was even decorated by the West German government in 1950, came to Washington later, and participated in the White House conference on youth. And Dr. Carl Schneider, professor of psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg, successor to Dr. Kraepelin, founder, as you know, of modern psychiatry, and author of a pioneer work on schizophrenia — I see you recognize the name. And Dr. Paul Nitsche, director of the famous Sonnenstein hospital in Saxony, who, I learned later, wrote the best textbook on prison psychoses. And finally Dr. C. G. Jung, whom everybody admired and was supposed to come but couldn’t — he was busy working as editor of the Journal for Psychotherapy with his co-editor, Dr. M. H. Goering, brother of Marshal Hermann Goering.
There was much lively discussion in Dr. Jäger’s house after the meetings, laughter, music, jokes, drinking, horseplay, and some real arguments. They were excited about a book, a small book I had never heard of, not by your Dr. Freud, but by a couple of fellows I never heard of, Drs. Hoche and Binding. I still have the copy Dr. Jäger gave me. It was called The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. I couldn’t follow the heated argument very well, but it seemed to be between those who believed in the elimination of people who were useless, useless to anyone, to themselves, the state, and those who believed in euthanasia only for those who suffered from hopeless diseases or defects like mongolism, severe epilepsy, encephalitis, progressive neurological diseases, mental defectives, arteriosclerosis, hopeless schizophrenics, and so on. Dr. Jäger took the more humane side. Dr. Brandt, I recall, as much as he admired Dr. Schweitzer, maintained that “reverence for nation” preceded “reverence for life.” Their arguments made considerable sense to me.
I must confess to you that I didn’t warm up to those fellows, distinguished as they were. But I must also confess that I was not repelled by their theories and practice of eugenics — why prolong the life of the genetically unfit or the hopelessly ill? But I did admire German science — after all, it had been the best around for a hundred years — and in fact I was thinking of staying in Germany and going to the university at Tübingen and later to medical school. My father was all for it. And after all, none of these guys were Nazis, far from it — they joked about the louts. They might speak of Goethe but never of Hitler. And the little book they were excited about had been written in 1920, before anyone had heard of Hitler. Why didn’t I like them better? Because they, like my father, were professors of a certain sort, and though they were certainly more successful than he, they had the Heidelberg smell about them, the romantic stink of The Student Prince. They even recited Schiller and Rilke, and sang student drinking songs—Trink, trink, trink—one of them even had saber scars on his cheek from student dueling and was very proud of them. Of course, my poor father was out of his mind with delight. Imagine: Saber scars! Musik!