Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  12. Cowichan

  With the establishment of Cowichan in June 1969, Fritz Perls had come full circle from lone wolf to kibbutznik. Fritz, who was so insistent upon having people “do their own thing,” established a center in which interdependence was essential and in which he, the prototypical Ayn Rand’s solitary hero, played paterfamilias to a community of others.

  Although The Gestalt Institute of Canada ranked as the fulfillment and culmination of his life’s work, he was not around very long to enjoy it. In December, six months after its founding, he was off on his annual European junket. He died the following March, before returning to his commune.

  Cowichan itself is a small hamlet, not more than a block or two long but sporting its own gasoline station. A couple of motels and hotels constitute its main attractions. One of these was purchased by Fritz for a down payment of $12,000. Although not exactly in the wilderness, it was nonetheless distinctly off the beaten track.

  To get there from San Francisco, you fly to Vancouver, on Canada’s West Coast, take a ferry to Victoria (on Vancouver Island), a half-hour bus ride from Victoria to Duncan, and are met in Duncan by a car from the Institute, which takes you on your final automobile-and-ferry jaunt to Cowichan. Down the road, a large sign announces “The Gestalt Institute of Canada.”

  The Institute had been an old fishing motel on Lake Cowichan and was best described as “ratty,” “charming,” “run-down,” or “funky”—depending on one’s attitude toward such places. There was the main house, which contained the dining room (which featured two long tables that the residents ate at), a kitchen, a living room, and a small vestibule where the one telephone was placed. The furniture was ancient, worn, and comfortable.

  There were two rows of clapboard living units equally as old as the main house, each unit containing a room or two with toilets. A new building that quickly went up between them served as the community meeting place. From the main house, one could view the lake and watch the barges go by, carrying the logs cut by neighboring lumbermen. Upon its two and a half acres were a woodshed, trees, and lawn. A couple of pigs being raised on the property kept getting loose and had to be chased and repenned.

  Fritz lived in one of the units beyond the new building, the Lord and Master of this rustic paradise.

  At Esalen, many observers picked up a mood of pathos and loneliness surrounding Fritz. Will Schutz was not the only person to observe his lack of ease at social gatherings. John Brinley, for instance, noticed that on New Year’s Eve, 1967, “when everybody else was celebrating, Fritz sat alone without a soul—not even staff—to keep him company.” No such signals were picked up in Cowichan, for this was Fritz’s turf—space in which he was surrounded by friends and admirers. No rivals existed who might divert the attention of those about.

  “When my husband and I went to see him in Canada,” said Ilana Rubenfeld, “and he walked down the lawn and saw us, he was like a king presiding over his kingdom. He walked up to us smiling from ear to ear and said, ‘This is my place.’ And he looked it. He looked so happy, for this was his place. He was the big boss. And although he encouraged community voting and letting people decide what they were to do, he had the last word. He really did.

  “That evening he took ten of us out for a big Chinese dinner and he asked for the check and he paid for it. We were all sitting there dumbfounded, our mouths agape. But he was in such a good space at the time that he just treated everybody to dinner.”

  Dick Price picked up the same regal impressions of Fritz at Cowichan: “I would see him walking in the morning at Cowichan like a King. He couldn’t do it at Esalen. He had other people to contend with. But here there was no question of having to compete with Virginia Satir or Bernie Gunther or Bill Schutz or anybody else coming down the pike. And he had great satisfaction in being able to do what he felt was right.”

  Stella Resnick, a strikingly attractive, dark-haired young psychologist, came to Cowichan to study with Fritz shortly after the Institute started. Half-coquette and half–Jewish mother, she was attracted by Fritz’s “commitment to himself rather than to anybody else, the sense that I’m more important to me than you are.” For her, it was important to learn to satisfy herself, in Fritz’s fashion, before she provided for others. Stella describes other facets of Fritz that were much in evidence at his new home: “Fritz was very happy at Cowichan and said that this was the happiest time of his life. He clowned around a lot. He used to enjoy sitting around, talking or playing chess, or pouring over his stamp collection in his room at night. He was very comfortable and felt loved and was very much in touch with his own love and caringness. He was so much less brittle than I had seen him before, at Esalen, and less lonely. He was being nourished and he was nourishing himself. This was very definitely his family.”

  The closest members of Fritz’s “family” consisted of Teddy Lyon, Barry Stevens, and Janet Lederman. Others contributed their share. There was John Stonefield, a young psychiatrist who helped Fritz out, and Gerry Rothstein, who came to Canada two months before Fritz left for Europe and became a director of the Institute after Fritz died. Along with these stalwarts, a bevy of credentialed people taking programs brought the resident population up to twenty-five to thirty-five at any given time.

  All the communitarians, except for Fritz and Teddy Lyon, paid a fee while they were in residence. Part was allocated for tuition, part for board, part for room, and part for miscellaneous projects and various shares of the maintenance. If the community decided that they wanted to allocate more money for some particular project or other, they might, for instance, decide to save money on food. Those who shopped and those who cooked would then meet and see how they might prepare meals more inexpensively. Responsibility for running the Institute was thus turned back to its participants, fostering self-respect and creative grappling with options and dilemmas rather than getting into blaming some authority when things didn’t satisfy them.

  To say that Fritz was at Cowichan for six months is misleading, for he lived in Canada as he lived elsewhere, taking periodic weekend or weekly trips to other places, spreading the Gestalt word and hyping his new center. He planned to continue his association with Esalen. Dick Price was to lead preliminary month-long workshops in Gesalt Therapy there. Fritz would come in during the final week and invite the most promising candidates back to Cowichan for more intensive training. The actual day-to-day management of the place was left to Teddy and Barry Stevens, his new secretary and a contemporary of Fritz’s, in consultation with the rest of the participants.

  I recall hearing Fritz at a lecture/demonstration he gave in New York, doing his best to arouse interest in the Institute.

  “Come to Cowichan for three months,” he said with the utmost belief and conviction. “In three months there I can cure any neurosis.”

  Cowichan revolved about shared work, Gestalt Therapy training sessions, and free-floating evening encounters in which appreciations and resentments were expressed. Fritz, Teddy, Barry, or week-long visitors like Esalen’s Janet Lederman, author of Anger and the Rocking Chair, led the Gestalt sessions along with those participating in the training program. And everything that happened there was grist for the therapeutic mill.

  “Fritz never believed in his therapeutic genius,” according to Janet. “That’s why he hungered for the recognition of others, why he wanted support. He found that support in the last few years and even gave up control of Cowichan. He felt it as too great a responsibility and left the management of it to others.”

  The contrast between Esalen Fritz, insisting upon imposing his philosophy at Big Sur, and Cowichan Fritz, allowing others to take over and mold the program, is not entirely accurate.

  Granted, Fritz was mellower by far at Cowichan than he ever was elsewhere. But at Cowichan he surrounded himself with and attracted people who basically shared all his ideas. Thus, when he left the managing to others, these others were “spontaneously” runn
ing the place along the lines he might have dictated himself. He gave up detail control but retained veto power. He was in a position, by fiat, to make whatever rules he wished, like the stated rule of “No children; no dogs” and the unstated rule of “No rivals.”

  Cowichan is a spot that evokes universally gentle reminiscences of Fritz. Janet recalls his little-boy excitement and glee as he anticipated a visit from Julian Silverman, an Esalen staffer and a beloved companion.

  “Is he here yet? . . . Is he here?” Fritz would ask every ten minutes. When Julian finally did arrive, he stopped his group so as to fondly embrace and greet him.

  Ilana remembers his childlike embarrassment.

  “We once got him a chess set. I’ll never forget when we handed it to him. He was like a kid. He tore open the wrapping and he went through the whole thing: ‘Aw, you shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have spent the money’—the whole trip. There were moments when he was just so simply human.”

  Stella Resnick recalled the affectionateness that radiated from this huggy, kissy, no longer sexual but “accepting” Ancient: “I wanted to be appreciated in a way my father never appreciated me. So Fritz was very important to me. He was the father that appreciated me. And what an impressive father to do so, both verbally and physically. He was constantly saying things to people about me, like how smart I was, how good I was, and what a jewel I was. And I loved that. I felt very nourished by his affectionateness.”

  Barry Stevens wrote her autobiographical Don’t Push the River during the time she spent at Cowichan. It is written in the same free-flowing stream of awareness whatever-wants-to-be-written-will-be-written style that characterized Garbage Pail.

  She recalls how he decided, one day, to learn to fix his own breakfast and told her, “with humility and awe—that he had boiled his eggs perfectly that morning, without a clock.”

  She noticed how he had cut down, enormously, on his restless and constant smoking, how he ceased courting approval outside of groups, how he trusted others more and allowed them to handle the financial matters that concerned the Institute.

  “Fritz is almost always a very warm and gentle old gentleman now. He spends more time chatting with people than he used to. He’s much more patient.”

  When she told Fritz what she noticed of the changes in his work—of the increased softness, the increased compassion, and the absence of bitterness and spite—he said, “without pride or boasting, simply as a fact: ‘Finally I am perfect. I have arrived. I can’t do any better.’”

  “For the first time in my life,” he confided in her, “I am at peace. Not fighting with the world.”

  Fritz, in his travels, always went “tourist” or “second class.” But when he embarked on his final visit to Europe that winter, he traveled, as befits a king, first-class. He seemed extremely tired as he prepared for that journey. Some attributed it to the energy he had expanded in founding Cowichan. Others thought he was somewhat under the weather or believed that, at seventy-six, old age was finally catching up to him. Teddy had a premonition that he might never return.

  He didn’t.

  13. The Journey’s End

  So let me be and die my way

  A clearing house for people

  A lonely bum who loves to joke

  And think and play, and is all there.

  —Fritz

  In the winter of 1969, a fatigued Fritz Perls went to Europe on what would be a farewell voyage to his usual haunts: the museums and opera houses of Vienna and Salzburg, Paris and Berlin.

  Fritz had little faith in the ability of his medical cohorts and was not one to visit them. Yet in London, prior to his reembarkation for America, he decided to have a consultation, for not only was he feeling weaker, he was running a fever as well. The diagnosis was Hong Kong flu, and Fritz was advised to drink plenty of fluids.

  On returning to the United States in late February 1970, Fritz did a workshop for Cumbres, a New Hampshire growth center, another four-day program for The Associates for Human Resources in Concord, Massachusetts, and began a third one at Frank and Ilana Rubenfeld’s home in New York. He planned to work his way across the country back to the Cowichan commune.

  It did not happen that way, for his “flu” worsened.

  By the time he got to Massachusetts, he was having bouts of nausea and diarrhea and was reduced to taking naps between sessions. In New York, he continued to deteriorate.

  “Here at the house something strange happened,” Ilana recalled. “All the lights went out during his work. And two hours later, it happened again. Somehow, the lights just going out and seeing the way he looked gave me the feeling ‘that was it,’ that I’d never see him again. Lights just don’t go on and off like that.”

  By the second day, the Rubenfelds were forced to cancel the remainder of the program, for Fritz felt too weak to continue. Laura was out on the West Coast doing workshops. Fritz went up to her empty apartment to rest, attended and visited by Frank, Ilana, and a few friends.

  After a few days he determined to fly on to Chicago, where Bob Shapiro and Jane Levenberg, two charter members of another human-potential center, Oasis, had arranged for him to give a public lecture and demonstration at the University of Illinois Medical School on Friday evening, March 6. It was another manifestation of the professional recognition that Fritz and Gestalt Therapy had started to receive, and he would not have willingly passed it up.

  He was met at O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, by Jane at three in the afternoon. Noticeably jaundiced, he immediately and uncharacteristically asked to see a doctor. Jane transported him to Bob Shapiro’s apartment, where he was to stay, and had a doctor friend come right up to see him.

  After the examination, as the physician started to give his diagnosis, Fritz interrupted.

  “I’ll tell you what it is. I have cancer of the pancreas.”

  “You might be right,” the doctor answered. “But it could also be hepatitis. That’s still possible. Rather than guess, I’d prefer to put you in the hospital.”

  “Okay,” said Fritz.

  A call was made and a room reserved at Weiss Memorial Hospital.

  Before leaving Bob’s place, Fritz said, “I think I want to talk to Laura.”

  Bob phoned her at Elaine Kempner’s home, where her workshop was being held, introduced himself, and put Fritz on the phone.

  “Laura, this is Fritz. I don’t have good news. I am sick.”

  Her unspoken assumption must have been: “Why are you calling me? You must want me to come.”

  She answered: “Well, I can’t come right now. I’m doing a workshop. Where are you?”

  “Shapiro’s. But that’s all right. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Well, I’ll come Monday.”

  “I just wanted you to know,” he repeated and hung up.

  “I don’t vant her to come,” he shouted at no one in particular.

  “So what the hell did you call her for?” asked Bob.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re crazy. But you’re entitled to be crazy. You’re sick.”

  At 6:40, Jane Levenberg and another acquaintance, Bill Swartley, drove Fritz to the hospital. Bob Shapiro went over to the university to tell the seven hundred people assembled that Fritz was not well, had to go to the hospital, and would not be there that evening. Following the cancellation, he picked up a number of messages for Fritz and returned to the hospital in order to deliver them. His account of those last seven days follows:

  “When I went back to Weiss Memorial Hospital that night, he was still sitting up. He wouldn’t lay down. He was quite a character in a hospital gown, smoking away. And he didn’t want Jane and me to leave. So we stayed there until about ten or eleven o’clock. There was no testing that they could start, except that they started feeding him intravenously because he was completely dehydrated.

  “T
he next day they started conducting a lot of tests. They continued to feed him intravenously and started giving him some plasma. Jane and I decided that we would have private nurses put on, which he didn’t want, so he just kept firing them. At the end of two days, we induced the night supervisor of nursing, a beautiful woman, to attend him. We gave her a copy of the Garbage Pail and said, ‘Read this and you’ll know who this guy is. She got into an instant appreciation and nobody could give him more tender, loving care.

  “Laura came flying in Monday night. By Wednesday, nothing was happening, in that his fever was still elevated. We called in a couple of more internists and a surgeon. Obviously, something was going on beyond their ability to diagnose. They came to the conclusion that they would have to go into the abdomen and see what was occurring. None of the tests told them anything definitive and he was not responding to any of the drugs. So the three doctors, Fritz, Laura, Jane, and myself met. The one commitment we made to Fritz was that he wanted to know about everything that was going to happen. And that certainly was a commitment that I insisted on being respected.

  “The exciting thing is that even though he was given various kinds of sedation, he would move in and out of that stage of clouded consciousness any time anything of significance occurred. Like in a good marijuana trip, he would come right up to his most astute sense of awareness and then he’d go back. So, he came in and out at will.

  “Anyway, Wednesday, the doctor said, ‘The only thing we can suggest is to operate. And as soon as possible.’ Fritz said, ‘That’s all right.’ So we set the operation up for Friday. By Thursday, his temperature went up and his respiration wasn’t too good. There was the typical discussion between the surgeon and the internist as to whether you operate under those conditions. I said to them, ‘The man to make that decision is Fritz.’