by Jeffrey Meyers
After reading Igor’s flattering obituary I remembered his real character. He was a friend and, in the end, became intolerable. His gradual transformation from weirdness to madness was fearful and tragic. We first met when I was a graduate student at Berkeley and he was a young assistant professor. In those days there was very little contact between students and faculty, so I was pleasantly surprised when he invited me to go sailing. He did not provide foul-weather gear, the cold wind and waves splashed onto the boat, and I was thoroughly frozen right after we left the harbor. My discomfort was increased when he barked out incoherent commands that revealed his hopeless incompetence as a sailor. He resisted the sound advice of his wife Jane and had a little tantrum. But she pretended to follow his orders while trying to keep us from capsizing or colliding with another vessel. When we returned to the dock he showed me a very expensive custom-made cover for the boat, but he found it too difficult to put on and take off and soon abandoned it.
My eminent dissertation director had given me A’s, but absolutely no help, in both courses while I was writing my thesis. So it came as a tremendous shock when my thesis was rejected. The director refused to explain what happened and brusquely dismissed me by saying “I wash my hands of the whole thing.” Igor, who’d been on the defense committee, explained that the director, for reasons neither Igor nor I understood, had voted against me and refused to take any responsibility for his betrayal.
After two years of licking my wounds in Japan and Spain, I returned to America and completed a second thesis on colonial fiction. Igor wrote many letters supporting my applications for jobs (and later for grants) at universities where he had some influence. He was always eager to meet and praised the writing I sent him. Many years later he introduced me to the brilliant but notoriously irascible scholar Donald Greene. Rather surprisingly, Greene became my close friend, longtime correspondent and contributor to several books of original essays that I edited. I eventually wrote the life of Samuel Johnson (the subject of my first, disastrous dissertation) that Greene, though a prolific scholar, had planned but never completed. Igor gave me many of his books on Johnson and the eighteenth century, took my photograph for the dust wrapper, read my biography and wrote a good blurb for it. Later on, when he obtained copies of Kim Philby’s letters from Moscow, he gave them to me and I published them with a commentary in the Spectator. He was easy to tease. He asked me to identify the obscure source of “We are the dead” (quoted by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four) and I told him it came from John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”—“which every schoolboy knows!”
Igor had always been extremely kind and generous, but his mood suddenly and inexplicably changed. At first, his behavior seemed peculiar rather than menacing or mad. I felt compassion for him but didn’t understand what was wrong. He identified with his namesake, the sinister servant in Frankenstein, and became obsessed with time-traveling French science fiction, which he called “the only reality.” He recorded an imitation-robot message on his answering machine. Emphasizing his Harvard accent, he stormed through his house chanting “Fie, Fie, Fo Fum.” He spoke in hesitant sentences: “I have to . . . I have to go out . . . I have to go out to the doctor.” He wore short-sleeved white shirts with several pens tucked into his front pocket, protected by a white plastic shield. Unaware of other people’s feelings, he thought only of himself and became—like the model ships he put into bottles—hermetically enclosed in a strange world of his own.
He decorated his rooms with Eskimo art and said he was “intuit.” He knew nothing about food and wine and meals at his house were always inedible. On one occasion, after he advised me not to publish an essay, I replied, “Come to that, the sherry you served at luncheon was beastly.” He even served up an oleaginous concoction of molasses and cornmeal, which he called Indian pudding and I refused to eat. At teatime he said, with old-maidenly fastidiousness, “I daren’t take cake and jam’s too much trouble.”
Staying at or even visiting his house was a trial. When I tried to open an already broken kitchen blind, which fell into the sink, he blamed me for the damage and had another screaming fit. He kept the heat on all night during the hot summer, assuring me that the temperature was “just right,” and ignored my complaints about the suffocating atmosphere in the little-ease guest room.
He invited me for a swim in his pool on another hot day in August and I looked forward to cooling off after an hour’s drive south from an interview in Beverly Hills. On arrival I asked,
–Why did you cover the pool?
–I had my swim this morning and didn’t want the hot wind to blow leaves into it.
–What about my swim?
–I can’t strain the motor by opening the cover again. You’ll have to wait till next time—or next year.
–But I’m boiling.
–I can’t change the habits of a lifetime to satisfy the whims of a transient guest.
Increasingly remote from people, Igor became obsessively and pathetically attached to his dogs. Imitating Queen Elizabeth, he acquired two unruly Corgis. They began to bark at 5 A.M. and slid around the house like frantic ice-skaters, clacking their long nails on the smooth wooden floors. As we lounged beside the covered pool the Corgis dropped down next to us, began to bark and interrupted our conversation. I asked Igor to put the dogs inside the house so we could speak quietly. He replied, “Oh, they just want to be friendly and cuddly. They’re always like that. They’ll stop after a while.” But they continued to bark for another twenty minutes, and I had to break off our talk and leave the poolside to escape from them.
His next dog was even worse.
–Why do you keep this repulsive Dutch barge dog, which looks like a monstrous Chow?
–For companionship.
–Is he a good companion?
–No. He’s dysfunctional like me. That’s why I like him.
He let his huge dog shit twice a day on the neighbors’ carefully cultivated and expensively watered lawns, and ignored their increasingly furious complaints, accompanied by threats of violence and bodily harm. As an additional penalty clause, he had to wipe the ass of the long-haired dog after every excretion—though he still left disgusting spoors on the cushioned sofas. The retarded dog, who’d failed the obedience test in canine school, had an enormous appetite. To augment his food he jumped on the dining-room table while we were eating and pushed his snout into my plate. Igor only mildly rebuked him: “Now Griswold, you know quite well you mustn’t be naughty.” I volunteered to help Igor kill the dogs—by kosher or halal rituals–but he never accepted my offer.
Jane had four children: Igor and their three daughters, none of whom managed to produce an heir. Daphne had a severe breakdown and was confined to a mental asylum; Hermione was a lesbian; Imogen, once a teenaged beauty, had discouraged importunate suitors by blossoming out with pimples. Igor’s devoted wife secretly tamed his manic mood swings with lithium and anti-depressants. Fearful of a recurrence after a bout of cancer, he had his prostate gland entirely excised. He could no longer get an erection and showed me his air-tight penis pump, which was clinical enough to dishearten the most ardent satyr. Complaining of encroaching arthritis, he remarked, “Everything is stiff except my cock.” Hostile to sexual perversity, he planned to write an essay for Weak-Bladder Press on “Muff-Diving with Virginia Woolf, Fudge-Packing with Lytton.”
The strait-laced Igor never got over his embarrassment after being forced to hold hands and dance with the waiters in a comradely Greek taverna. Instead, he invited me to a sedate and expensive Japanese restaurant. When his two daughters turned up they were surly and hostile to me as well as to him. They hated his selfishness, his competition with them for maternal love, and his frequent academic moves that advanced his career but uprooted the family. But that was not the whole story. I noticed that they shuddered and pulled away when he first tried to greet them with an awkward kiss. They blamed him for Daphne’s insanity, and she screamed abuse at him when he visited her. I sensed that he might have sexually molested Daphne and driven her—like Virginia Woolf for the same reason—insane.
Jane told me about his compulsive behavior in thrift stores. When no one was looking he obsessively rearranged the books and put all the same colors together, which made the titles much harder to see and to sell. The store manager, answering customers’ complaints, explained that he didn’t want to provoke the harmless eccentric by calling the cops and was forced to tolerate his occasional intrusions. Despite these peculiarities, Igor continued to teach and acted like Mr. Magoo on acid. He brought the dogs to his classes to enliven his comatose pupils. Though he had an epileptic seizure in the classroom, the students failed to notice the difference in his demeanor.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, Igor became paranoid–fearful in thought, speech, gait and manner. “There be monsters,” he felt. “Go not there.” He complained about the food, drink, bed, cold and noise when staying in my house. I had to banish him from the premises after he burst into my bedroom while I was having sex with my girlfriend.
Igor was panic-stricken when asked to ring the starting bell for a sailing race at the yacht club. He felt he had to buy a new car after running over a harmless paper carton on the highway. Though I usually drove extra-carefully with him in the countryside, he was frightened that we were careening off the road and would fall over a steep cliff. Once on an impulse, I couldn’t resist swerving the car a bit till he became panic-stricken and began to shout. Jane warned me that he was now more dangerous than a real accident.
At times his mad impulses overcame his irrational fears. One day he took a tall extension ladder, climbed up the telephone pole next to his house, severed all the cables and cut off the local electricity for two days. He feebly explained to the outraged residents that he was only trying to untangle the twisted wires. He was lucky to avoid electrocution or crash down from the ladder. Treating him like the village idiot, the police arrested him and the court fined him for vandalism.
Despite his suspicion and caution, Igor was victimized by a cunning scam. He sold his boat at the last minute for $5,000 and was flying from Los Angeles to Boston to visit unsuspecting friends. Worried about carrying all the cash with him, he told Jane to deposit it in the airport branch of the bank. She gave the cash to the teller who turned around, put it into a counting machine and returned with a receipt for $3,000. When Jane protested, the teller showed her the mechanical receipt. The bank manager refused to search the teller or examine her purse. Igor could have cancelled his flight, returned to the police in Los Angeles and filed a theft report. But he had no proof that Jane had actually given the teller $5,000. So he bit the bullet, flew to Boston and lost $2,000.
Igor asked me to review two of his recent books and I was glad to repay his former kindness. I placed the favorable review in both American and English journals and thought he’d be pleased. He said he was going on holiday in Europe and, frightened of hot and swindling Mediterranean countries, traveled only to cool and safe Scandinavia. He insisted on seeing my reviews before they were published and, against my better judgment, I sent them as requested. He ordered me to include a few more flattering phrases and urge the university press to bring out his collected essays. This was both inappropriate and, since the review was already being printed, impossible. Instead of accepting my explanation, he screamed down the phone: “then God damn you and fuck you! I never want to have anything to do with you again!”
I had one last contact with Igor when cancer finally caught up with him and he summoned me to his deathbed. He bitterly observed, “There is only one disease and medicine blindly chases it like an animal through endless forests.” The attending doctor tried to reassure him by stating, “I’m not leaving.” Igor said, “but I am” and breathed his last.
Jeffrey Meyers has recently published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014), Robert Lowell in Love (2015) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018).