R.I.P. Rev. Ernest Kosa, a county leader of a rarefied sort

Deceased at 96, he was exemplary as a local administrator on the county-government level and beloved as a rounded individual; not a guarded hack of an MH professional, he was a true leader as a moral man

[Among others, Rev. Kosa has one obituary, from NJ.com, here. Edit 12/11/18: Here is a scan of his letter to me from August 1987.]

I first dealt with Rev. Kosa in summer 1987, when I had been pursuing a complaint process against various parties at the Center for Mental Health (CMH) at Newton Memorial Hospital, stemming from unprofessional moves there (regarding me as an individual inquirer) starting in November 1986. I had been an award-winning student in psychology at George Washington University, graduating in 1984 with a 4.0 GPA in that major (of two majors I had), and an award for excellence in that major, membership in the honorary society Psi Chi, and an independent study class (in phenomenological and existential psychology) as well as an honors-related paper on the Bem Sex Role Inventory. I had also been a patient at the forerunner of the CMH in the later 1970s, and especially received crucial care there from Ira Kramer, Ph.D., a talking counselor who was a Jungian, along with medication from a consulting psychiatrist starting in winter 1978. So my “standing” with respect to mental-health issues was complex, primarily honorable, and by no means grounds for me to be treated as I was by the CMH in 1986-87.

Dr. Martin Nicolai Nielsen, an M.D. and the head of the CMH in 1987, refused to see me within the complaint process as an “appellate judge,” and the excuse was floated that vacations were going on by August 1987, when I last tried to have some response to my complaint come from his level. Previously I had submitted a complaint to, first, Dr. Richard Finkelstein (a Ph.D.) about a lower-level counselor (the original grounds for the complaint); then I appealed to John McNaught, a non-doctor administrator (with a master’s degree); and then Nielsen, who basically stonewalled me for maybe two months. Rev. Kosa, as the drug, alcoholism and mental health administrator for the county, was the next level to appeal to that summer (and I wrote him, I believe). In a cordial written response I got by sometime in August, he proffered the info that vacations were ongoing (or the like), but he didn’t give a sense of evasion or excuse or stony dismissal the way Nielsen had been doing for many weeks.

In 1989, after having gone to graduate school (in St. Louis) in fall 1987 and then returning to New Jersey and working for a daily newspaper for eight months in 1988, I returned to the swamp-ish “area of concern” of what remained to pursue of the complaint process of 1986-87. First, on my request (in early 1988) I had received copies of psychologists’ records stored at the hospital (from the 1970s), and in 1989 I reached the point where the most realistic complaint/query I could make (because certainly what had gone on in summer 1987 was painfully unfinished business) concerned how some information was entered into my files (by a clinician) in early 1987 uncontrovertibly contrary to the hospital’s confidentiality rules (and when I had not been seeing anyone, strictly speaking, as a clinician); the confidentiality rules I knew about because I had signed documents related to them starting in about early 1987. Again, I sent a letter to Dr. Nielsen about it, and heard no answer. I then appealed to Rev. Kosa. Kosa’s response and tone were far different, and I met with him in person.

Rev. Kosa voiced being baffled by Dr. Nielsen’s stonewalling. In our discussions in some room of the hospital complex, Rev. Kosa’s comments ranged even to the fact that in the old days, starting around World War II, your medical records were something you carried with you, as if your ownership and control of these were reflected in your being able to physically carry them to your next phase of life after the Army. This, at least, seemed the rule in the 1940s-50s or so. Rev. Kosa was, obviously, a man whose sense of principles came from an earlier, more innocent time than even could be appreciated as current in the later 1980s.

Since then, I always had a positive sense of Rev. Kosa. In the later 1980r, he was the one man tied to the CMH who issued a sense of working to the patient’s genuine interests regarding a set of ethical problems as I presented for addressing in 1986-89—except there are also grounds for forgiving the “team-player disservice” in 1987 of Dr. Finkelstein, who (with him as an individual practitioner, working in a small group practice) I later got into constructive dealings with from 2002 through 2005 when I had him give no fewer than three educational lectures for local support groups (and he had long since stopped working for Dr. Nielsen’s firm). I would see Rev. Kosa at the yearly Farm & Horse Show in the county (not talking to him directly), and would be aware of occasional instances of his doings in news in The New Jersey Herald.

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The meaning of Rev. Kosa as a mental health–related administrator in Sussex County is simply this: Rev. Kosa was a moral man with vision, making Dr. Nielsen look like a hack of a practicing doctor whose main concern seemed to be the viability of his business (whatever MH firm Nielsen was heading, whether the Center for Mental Health in the 1980s to early ’90s or his firm InHealth Associates from about 1995 on).

Mental health in a county like Sussex needs moral leaders, not nomenklatura-like self-servers, though maybe this is a quixotic view to hold.

R.I.P. Philip Roth

One of the last of his generation and significance, but on a different wavelength

[Edit 5/24/18. Edit 10/1/18.]

If my readers wonder why I didn’t include Philip Roth in my list of “Sons of Joyce” writers in a blog series including this entry among others, I have mulled over whether I should have included Roth. In part this is because he wasn’t of the “manic-minded” strain of thought where the conscience of a protagonist (or of the narrator himself) is the field through which the writing ranges, on the assumption that an individual’s conscience and strength were prime human values, not “being a node in a network with a selfie-cute face,” as seems the big value today.

But also Roth was different, in ways I could comment on but as might, to a large extent, reflect my own peculiar literary tastes.

Roth was actually one of the first modern-day writers I read in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when cutting my teeth on ambitious literature in part to be a writer of such material someday. I read his Portnoy’s Complaint first (in 1979, I think), which before reading it I was under the impression was a big laugh-riot; somehow I thought this meant it was as important to check out as had been Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 for me. I can’t fully remember Portnoy today—I remember it being funny, but not a laugh riot; and its sexual side, which I think made it super-notorious in its day (~1969), escapes me now to some extent; I would have to read it again (and maybe would have a far different appreciation of it).

I also read (in the early 1980s, perhaps) Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (I know I read the title novella; I don’t remember if I read other stories in the collection). And I read his 1960s novel When She Was Good (in about 1985), which despite what the title suggests wasn’t a mere sexual bacchanal; I remember it as being affecting (from the female main character’s side), and worth reading, but I am foggy on it (it’s been about 33 years).

Then I didn’t read other Roth novels, though I read reviews on him (over many years) with interest. I have long been interested to read his The Counterlife, one of the so-called Zuckerman novels. It’s interesting that with all the obit encomiums and works-listing I’ve heard today, I’ve not heard about the Zuckerman novels, which “back in the day” seemed to be taking over his general set of objectives by the later 1980s.

I think Roth appealed to me less than did Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gaddis, and even Norman Mailer [5/24/18: I forgot Saul Bellow, an influence on me], because the other men (in their younger-man’s works especially, which tend to define a writer) embraced a wider vision of this country—its range of people, its variety of experiences, its potential for violence and suffering, its figuring in sometimes-awful world history. (I have not read enough of John Updike either, but he could be considered maybe narrow in a WASP’s way as Roth was narrow in a Jewish way.) Not until Roth did a few novels late in life did he start addressing what other American novelists had made their main focus, such as in The Plot Against America and I Married a Communist and others.

I think it can be said he was a novelist who was most comfortable working within a narrow palette, looking especially at interpersonal situations and not so much broad and violent history. As I have worked on the Todd-house series (and thought about other issues), I have roughly worked up some ways to outline the types of mentalities, or ways of positioning themselves, of Jews in the U.S. There are (this is a start; subject to refinement):

* The “new Episcopalian”—someone aiming to be a big pillar of society (possible example—Janet Yellen);

* The “street punk” or “street screamer” (in this category, especially of the “screamer” subtype, which can encompass a range of types, I would include Bernie Sanders, not to say he’s gauche, just politically inconvenient);

* The fastidious analyst/clergyman type.

I would consider Roth in the third category. (How the latter two categories have some relevance and use for further discussion will come up when, months from now, I hope to look at a philosophy-scholar debate in 1979 between Albert William Levi and Steven Schwarzschild, on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sounds arcane? Wait till you hear about this.)

Roth was a fastidious writer, which was a sort of impression I think I even got when reading his early novels as I described above. In my reading in the 1980s and 1990s, the decades in which I read adult-aimed books the most, I felt he didn’t quite meet my needs as other writers did. As the years went on and I read reviews of his works, I had interest in some, such as one or two Zuckerman books, as I’ve suggested.

I think this kind of narrowness in him is why he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. In fact, this lack of his winning has been mentioned numerous times, and I would say by now that the “reason this happened” is reflected in how he never won it. Why must he have? He didn’t meet the judges’ criteria. (And as it happened, Roth himself didn’t seem to mind he didn’t win it.)

I’ve remarked before, in some blog entry last year or in 2016, that Roth was the type of male novelist, of some range of ostensibly “big themes,” who would appeal more to women than would the likes of, especially, Mailer. I am not writing Roth off; I hope to read some more of him in whatever time I have left to read more lengthy books. But he was a Jewish writer who was (to symbolize the issues a bit) not the sort who seemed like he either knew how to use workman’s tools, or knew a lot of people who did; or who had directly witnessed a lot of horrific history. He had, you could say, more of an inward bent, and an interest in more domesticated life. This didn’t make him trivial; but we can understand why his narrow range of themes marked him a certain way when we compare him with William Faulkner.

Faulkner, some might say, was a Southerner who wrote often-gothic Deep South stories. What made him more widely relevant? Well, the violence, and way in which he traced history as woven throughout the more modern lives he depicted, put him on a par with other major American writers, and European writers, who did the same. The sense of upheaval in Southern predicaments was something that resonated strongly with the sense of upheaval people (across the U.S., who liked to read novels) had in the mid-twentieth century, when European wars, economic depression, and Third World dislocation all impressed on educated people as defining modern life. Roth didn’t really start treating this sort of stuff until late in life, and then, as I gleaned from reviews, he might have been a seasoned/skilled writer in depicting it, but there was something on the derivative side about it. He had spent a lot of his most creative energy already on the early works like Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, and the later Zuckerman books.

So if I didn’t put him in my “Sons of Joyce” series, well, here I gave him more coverage than some of the individual writers in that series.