A moment’s repose in Queen’s Park brings to mind Louis MacNeice’s evocative poem, Autumn Journal:

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Cabinet Magazine Online – Vasectomania, and Other Cures for Sloth

The first Steinach operation was performed in 1918 by Steinach’s colleague Robert Lichtenstern on Anton W., a forty-three-year-old coachman who suffered from chronic fatigue: “The patient presented the appearance of an exhausted and prematurely old man,” Steinach reported in his book Rejuvenation Through Experimental Regeneration of the Aging Interstitial Gland (1920), which contained photographs of apparent metamorphosis.

“His weight was 108 pounds, his musculature was weak, and there was very little cushion of fat,” wrote Steinach in his report. “The skin was dull and conspicuously dry, the hair grey and had fallen out on top, scanty beard, lank hair growth on the trunk and extremities.” A year and a half after the operation, the coachman had put on thirty-five pounds. “The ex-patient now drags loads of up to 220 pounds with ease. His muscles have developed extraordinarily. The hair on his head is thicker and his beard more strongly developed. The head and face hair grow so quickly he has to have it cut and shaved twice as often as previously. … The skin appears soft, with fine down, pliable and moist. … This man with his smooth, unwrinkled face, his smart and upright bearing, gives the impression of a man at the height of his vitality.”

In case this transformation was attributed to suggestion, the operation was performed on Anton W. without his knowledge of its consequences and hoped-for effects. Nevertheless, other explanations are possible: the man’s progress might be ascribed to the near-famine and influenza epidemic that ravaged Vienna in the winter of 1918, but had eased up a year later.

In April 1923, the New York Times reported an “exodus to Vienna” of doctors who hoped to learn the secret of the Steinach operation. “The glamour of acquirement [of these surgical skills] at a great distance,” the Times observed, added to the “generous fee” doctors were able to charge back home. In the Roaring Twenties, thousands of Steinach operations were performed in the US and around the world, from Chile to India, and hundreds of books—most directed at lay readers—celebrated their supposed successes in optimistic patient histories and testimonials.

Fifty-six-year-old controller before (A) and after (B) the Steinach operation. From How to Restore Youth and Live Longer, by Serge Voronoff (1928).

On Yeats and Freud:

Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yeats were among the celebrity patients who were Steinached, an operation no more serious, according to another respected Viennese doctor who went under the knife, than having your hair cut. Freud had the operation in 1923, aged sixty-seven, in the hope that it would prevent the recurrence of the cancer of the jaw from which he suffered. He told Harry Benjamin this when the two men met in Vienna, and that he hoped it might improve his “sexuality, his general condition and his capacity for work.” In 1934, when Yeats was sixty-nine, he went to see Norman Haire in Harley Street for the snip. Not long afterwards, Haire invited a woman half Yeats’s age to dinner, so that Yeats could test out his newly regained sexual potency. It was apparently a success. Yeats spoke so often of the “second puberty” that he enjoyed, and the creative outpouring it engendered, that the Dublin press nicknamed him the “gland old man.” “It revived my creative power,” Yeats boasted, “it revived also sexual desire; and that in all likelihood will last me until I die.”

Recently read this short autobiographical piece by Julian Barnes, gleaned from the Arts & Letters. It occurs to me that not only is it a fine piece of prose, but also perhaps it’s just the thing, a comfy read if you will, for these rather bleak January evenings. I only wish I had a hearth to read it by. Enjoy.

ee cummings

Poem:

Buffalo Bill's
        defunct
               who used to
               ride a watersmooth-silver
                                        stallion
        and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                         Jesus
        he was a handsome man
                             and what i want to know is
        how do you like your blueeyed boy
        Mister Death

Commentary

Is it just that Buffalo Bill is dead, or is it that he is outdated? Certainly, he outlived the golden years of the Wild West – he died in 1917 (he was born in 1846). There is also the slight ambiguity as to whether it is Jesus or Buffalo Bill that is a handsome man. Indirectly we begin to wonder what Mister Death would have to say about the death of Jesus.

‘Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is…’

the ‘and’ puts us off kilter – it has the rhetorical jerkiness of a child.
Why, we must ask ourselves, is Buffalo Bill Death’s bue-eyed boy? Because he was a renowned killer? Buffalos, most famously, but men (and pigeons?), too?

Because he was a fine scalp for Mister Death, packing so much life into his 71 years?
Quite apart from the formal inventiveness and arresting language, the poem’s trio of protagonists are potent symbolically – somehow alluding to freedom, mortality, potency and defeat.

More prairie allusiveness from Kafka:

The Wish to be a Red Indian

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.