My Friendship with Ralph Colp

Head in hands, I hardly know where to begin. I had wanted Ralph to go on meeting me once or twice a year for breakfast on the Upper East Side, catching up, Darwinizing over bacon and eggs and endless coffee as we did for decades. Ralph was more than a colleague and more than a friend. He was like a father, growing old with me as I belatedly grew up. We watched each other age. Once in my thirties, I thought I was undergoing a mid-life crisis and I despaired of being old. Ralph might have smiled to himself, but he urged me to read The Seasons of a Man’s Life by Daniel Levinson. I didn’t do that; now I must. I’d just been reading Stuart Miller’s Men and Friendship and I thought of sending Ralph a copy to thank him for being in my life. I wish I’d done that too.

Our letters were legion. Ralph’s first arrived in 1977, by coincidence months after my father’s death at age fifty-four in Chicago following

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a long fight with cancer. Ralph’s first book on Darwin’s illness, To Be an Invalid, had just come out, and he knew that I studied Darwin. My first article, about Darwin’s sons, was being published. Years later Ralph told me that Darwin had been his “client” since 1959. Ralph would rise early in the morning to “commune with Darwin” reclining on the analytic couch. In 1977, Ralph was fifty-three years old.

For years I kept Ralph’s first letter in my copy of his book. When I turned the pages, I would be reminded of one who believed in me, shared and approved my interest in Darwin, which my own father never did. A copy of my reply to Ralph’s first letter is filed away. It must have been ingenuous because 1977 was full of loss: soon after my father died I turned thirty and then my marriage ended. I was in England, in a new job, bewildered and alone. Ralph understood my need to restart my life because, even before we met, I was able to be as open with him about myself as about Darwin. Ralph valued everything I ever told him, never criticizing, never pulling back or fostering dependence. I never forgot—but nor did he ever have to tell me—that I was communing with one who understood the complexity of attachment. Within a few years Ralph’s neatly typed letters would come every few months, or as often as I wrote to him; some ran to a page or more. He commented generously about my research on the history of hysteria, about my love for my daughter born in 1984, and about my stints of counselling. (He even remembered my therapists’ names.) When heartache and separation floored me again, Ralph sent his most memorable advice: “Therapy will help you understand what holds you back from commitment.” He was on target as usual.

Always we would Darwinize together. Ralph would have a list of questions or a problem he couldn’t solve; he needed my help and would say so frankly. Never his client, I was ever his colleague—but somehow more. Over breakfast in New York, or dinner in London, or at a student bar in England, his agenda began with me; then we moved on to Darwin who had brought us together. I felt he cared as much for us both.

Ralph’s care for my daughter was touching. He had watched and listened to me become a father; he knew of my love for Jessica and of our joys and pains. In June 2000, she and I met Ralph for breakfast. It was Jess’s first trip to New York and she was thrilled with the city. He asked open questions about her life, her ambitions and opinions. She replied with wonted verve and glowed with pleasure as Ralph talked about the New York he grew up in. They both liked the same classic movies. Jess and I went down to one of Ralph’s old haunts, Radio City Music Hall, where the Art Deco interiors astonished her. “Ralph has been like a dad to me. I wish you could see him again,” I told Jess a few years later. “I know he is interested in you.” But they met only the once, and Jess will never know a grandfather—both of hers died before she was born. I will never know whether she and my father might have got along better than he and I did. But the memory of our first and last breakfast with Ralph will never fail. Afterwards I grasped his hand warmly as always, and then Jessie threw her arms around Ralph and kissed him on the cheek. He beamed; I beamed. It was purely spontaneous. At fifteen, she was still the girl I had watched growing up, untroubled by how to treat a grown-up she admired, even a New York psychiatrist standing by a busy thoroughfare. She had warmed to Ralph because she had felt his warmth, because they both loved New York, because Jess realized, if only vaguely, how important Ralph was to her dad. If I could today, I would embrace him myself. Even standing at the corner of East 79^th and 2^nd Avenue outside of his home.

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