Bloodletting

The blood and ink spread across Richard Selzer's pages tease, trouble, and delight the imagination. Start reading him, and he sticks to you like a leech—there is no end to the gory and sometimes disturbing pleasure that accompanies his delving into a human body. No end at all to the pleasure of his swelling orotund sentences that yield, always, new revelations about the art of surgery and of life itself. I began this particular reading of Selzer with two of his new books—then came a third from the recent past, followed, finally, by a resampling and a remembering of the essays and short stories. I had nearly forgotten Selzer's power over me.

Of the three books under consideration, Knife Song Korea, the new novel, will come last; but, were it possible, I'd take on the letters, published talks, and novel simultaneously. They beg to be considered all at once as companion pieces that give us glimpses into Selzer's life, his epistolary interests and practices, his compulsive reading habits, his complex, laborious composing process, his lifelong fascination with the body, and his witty melancholic, sometimes operatic, responses to his own quirks and vices. There is no end to the fascination.

Now eighty years of age, Selzer began writing forty years ago on a whim during a family vacation; he was still practicing surgery and teaching at the Yale Medical School. There are now thirteen books and a play, along with two other collaborations edited and compiled by his friend and correspondent Peter Josyph: Letters to a Best Friend and What One Man Said to Another. The selected letters from their personal correspondence during the years 1988–1992 was a period during which I also knew Selzer and corresponded with him. Our brief but meaningful friendship during that period livens my interest and informs my reading of the letters and published talks—engaging conversations between Selzer and Josyph.

Taken one at a time, the letters seem perfunctory. But collectively they reveal a brooding Selzer, a man continually doubting himself as a writer, doubting his decision to leave surgery; yet we also see a man capable of soaring to almost giddy heights, sustained by a tart tongue and a tendency to veer toward the dramatic. He is a man of many voices.

Selzer and Josyph seem to stabilize each other—Richard the older always encouraging Peter the younger, always praising (and justly so given Josyph's astute questioning in Said) the less-experienced writer, who is also a painter, playwright, actor, raconteur. Although we read in the letters not a word from Josyph, we see clearly his importance to Selzer as he worried and fretted over parts of books—Down from Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age, Imagine a Woman and Other Tales, and Raising the Dead; hundreds of speeches in America and Japan; his never-ending, multivolume diary; and the trials and tribulations of family, life at Yale, and the annoying world of publishing. Their correspondence calls to mind an obsolete word (still in vogue at Oxford) that George Steiner gives back to us in "The Uncommon Reader"—responsion: an answer, a response. Selzer's letters contain Josyph; they answer him in sustained conversation over a long period of time—their cumulative effect of value to both scholar and common reader.

Josyph's preface to Letters gives us an instructive peek at the two men working out their ideas about the epistolary art. After calling his friend Peter "the best letter writer I have ever known, without exception," Selzer explains his own practice: "I love the idea of talking to people in letters. I never take out a sheet of foolscap, say: 'Dear Peter' and think: 'I'm just going to get this off my chest...