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to convince him it wasn't begging but an honor. He became bullish. "If
they want to give it to me, fine. But I won't apply." I believe he was put
out that he had to hustle up references. The people who revered his writ–
ing were the unknowns who kept giving him help with translations
(including young Cynthia Ozick) and, of course, the invaluable Hemleys.
One day I told him I had the opportunity to make good money as a
writer on the cutting edge of medicine and psychiatry. It would divert
me from serious literary writing, where I was getting beaten up with
rejections anyway. Singer urged me to take the job. He said he would
not recommend a literary pursuit to anyone. The pressure of money was
now much on his mind, even as his royalty streams grew by sheer num–
ber of books published.
I reluctantly seized my opportunity, or rather it seized me. I had little
contact with him then. Years passed. I ran three taped seminars for psy–
chiatrists on "Shakespeare and Psychiatry," which received a brief tout in
The New Yorker
as collector's items. I did another on Oostoyevsky. These
went over so well, all around, that I proposed one on Kafka, the ultimate
outsider, and thought of inviting Singer. He had bought into a high-rise
condo in Miami Beach, a building with pistol-packing rednecks as round–
the-clock guards. He now had a higher opinion of his own literary
stature, yet was not sure where he rightfully belonged on the world scene.
For the recording, I pitted Singer against Dr. Alexander Lowen, a
maverick psychiatrist. Lowen, an excellent communicator, wrote numer–
ous popular books on his neo-Reichian views. But, alas, Lowen's sharp
insights were less appreciated than they might have been ten to fifteen
years earlier. Singer sounded off on some of his own quandaries, such as
the increase in female promiscuity, which both obsessed and beguiled
him. For this was a man who kept writing instead of going forth to find
new emotional adventures in his life, though he yearned for them.
"Kafka believed every human being is on trial," he said, in a free-flow–
ing discussion. Kafka's character in
The Trial,
Josef K, has sex, he went
on, but does not love anybody. He is unable to commit himself, as if he
suffered from a stasis, or impotence, of the heart. What happened
to
his
ability to love? Is man becoming a beetle instead of being able to love? If
a modern writer says, "He loved the girl," Singer asked, what does he
mean? In
Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnikov loves Sonya, who prosti–
tutes herself to support her family, but has no overt sexual relations with
Raskolnikov, who loves and respects her for her inner qualities. The way
we love reveals our character, our inner qualities, just as our fingerprints
are different, he said. Modern money writers ignore all this. They write
of sex without revealing character. They remove the soul and the spirit
