Connections

Uncle Morris, who died in his bed in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, on Tuesday night, was a genius. Although he was paranoid, he was the most remarkable human being I have ever known, or ever expect to know. I think he was 95.

For several years in the 1980s, Morris Redman Spivack, who signed his artwork and sometimes his writing as Man Man, lived with me here in East Hampton. There are many who remember the diminutive old man, shuffling along Main Street in what was left of a Norwegian sweater, carrying a small plastic bag from the A&P with whatever it was he ate: mostly canned spinach, sweet potatoes, and rice.

He did not eat much. For all the years that he was in East Hampton, I never saw him put food in his mouth, although he would make suggestions about my own diet from time to time and offer me items such as fresh figs.

Uncle Morris. He had left this country in 1948 after a brush with the law in Los Angeles. Even then, 50 years ago, a man with law and rabbinical degrees, he was mistaken for a vagrant because of the way he dressed and because he had no visible means of support. He was incarcerated until his elderly father crossed the country by rail to take him home.

From that year on, he was a world traveler - a wandering Jew. He did things his way or not at all. And when, in his 80s, he decided living here was not congenial, he went to Cincinnati, where he found dormitory space in a theological seminary, and then to Beijing for a while. Occasional transportation, particularly by air, and meager rations, were the only things he used money for.

In 1948, he left this country for the new state of Israel, but didn't like it there at all. Years later, he was to tell me that he left Israel for Iran, earning his passage aboard a ship carrying other travelers by playing the violin. Oh, yes, he was, the family said, a child prodigy.

From Iran, he began walking eastward and was not to come back to the United States for some 38 years. Although he wrote letters home, my brother-in-law, David, was the only person I knew who had seen him in the intervening years.

It was about 1968. Morris was staying at the narrowest hotel in Paris, and, when David went to visit, Morris offered him nuts and oranges. They were Morris's full diet at the time.

What to say. Man Man walked and flew. He drew pictures and imagined. I never forgot my mother's telling me that he was "too honest for his own good." It was a turning point in my growing up: I decided that Morris was right; my mother was wrong.

He was the tiny American noted on a march from John o' Groats in Scotland to Land's End in Cornwall one year, wearing a pith helmet and a bit of plastic over open sandals.

In the Philippines, he was reported to be "lost among headhunters." In India, newspaper accounts said, he lectured on what was wrong with Einstein's theory of relativity. (His ideas were a perfect system that had nothing to do with reality, a physicist friend told me later.) Somewhere in the Far East he found a strain of rice that he thought would be a boon for Thailand, so he carried it back.

That was not surprising because as a young man he had spent time in the Catskills, where he discovered fossils that are now part of the Smithsonian collection, and farmed, growing beets that were said to be bigger than footballs. And always he kept journals and sketched.

In his later years, he settled in Upp sala in Sweden, where a woman was his patron. He wrote plays and made an 8 mm. film encouraging peace, not war. That was not surprising either. As a young man he had predicted the "talkies" and had written and self-published what I still think was the first screenplay.

Called "Broken Melody," the story is about a mother who sells her son's soul to the devil in exchange for a beautiful voice. At some point in the narrative, after the young man has been acclaimed as a singer, the devil suddenly reclaims the voice and the screen goes silent.

Uncle Morris did not believe in medicine. When "the wind blew him over" one winter in Reykjavik, and he was taken to have his wrist set at a hospital, he came back to East Hampton and removed the cast as soon as he got here.

My son David visited Reykjavik after Morris settled, as a wayfarer might, in a hostel there. Morris told him a lot about his life and David shot some film with the idea of documenting it.

Morris had become too frail to care for himself in the last few months, but he was not turned out. He had found what may have been the only place in the world, and the only people in the world, who would help him rest in peace. Helen S. Rattray