A few days later, as we drive out to the party, Oliver’s doctor colleague and friend Mark Homonoff recounts having been out on City Island during last week’s invasion of the horseshoe crabs: “A neighbor was standing on his lawn, skewering caterpillars. ‘These creepers!’ he complained. ‘They’re bigger than ever this year. It’s the weather. First these creepers, and now the crabs. Things are really weird with nature this year.’ ” It was, says Homonoff, like the classic beginning of one of those 50s sci-fi flicks. In the car we fantasize about the rest of the film—the mad scientist on the other side of the island, who was carelessly emptying plutonium into the strait, and how now everything was converging on Oliver’s party: us, the neighbors, the whole Towering Inferno supporting cast, the huge mutating horseshoe crabs.

A few minutes later, I describe it all to Oliver by the beach. Looking out, he says, “Yes! Yes! And I’d be here fending off the hysterical neighbors, trying to calm their fears, to disarm them of their picks and shovels and rifles, trying to explain how these are good creatures, our fellows. And then I’d be turning toward them, the giant crabs, and saying, ‘Yes, welcome, eat us, eat us all—the world is yours. Lord knows we’ve made a complete botch of things!’ ”

Later: “I’ve been feeling bad for months,” Oliver says. “Remember that evening a while back on the way to Porgy and Bess when I said I don’t tell lies but sometimes I invent the truth. Well, this was not strictly accurate. Imagine. Not invent. I should have said, ‘I imagine the truth.’ In the sense that Tolstoy said there was only one story he ever wrote which he considered a failure—his story ‘Family Happiness.’ When asked why, he said it was because it felt made up. And of course he’s exactly right. I mean, Anna Karenina reads like a profile.”

The party is proceeding happily back up at the house—a wonderful mingling: literary types, professional colleagues, radicals, neighbors. At one point, women are racing up and down the narrow street: “The doctor needs chairs! Oliver needs more chairs!”

A watermelon is brought out. “I once had a bizarre acid trip,” Oliver tells me. “I thought the entire earth was edible.”

A few days later, Oliver conjures the end of his life: “A while back, I thought I had leukemia. And it was quite wonderful. I’d been dieting, lost 60 pounds since my last checkup, and the doctor said he wanted to take another blood test, mentioned that a few months earlier my red-blood-cell count had been low”—and here the doctor had paused meaningfully, a terminal diagnosis hanging in the air, before going on to say that it was “surely just a question of my not having eaten.”

“Anyway, between the two halves of that sentence, for a few fractions of a second, I was absolutely certain not only of having leukemia but that I had only three months to live. At last, I found myself thinking, I’ll be rid of my inhibiting neuroses and I’ll be able to write all the books I have backed up in me.

“Like Luria, who had a massive heart attack, and lived on one further year, during which he wrote four books, 40 articles—more than he had the previous 50 years—and all of it calm, lucid, sparkling clean, nothing rushed.

“For a split second I saw them all tumbling clear: the Tourette’s book, the five-second book, the homes-and-institutions book, the leg book, the dementia book … all in the wake of that wonderful death threat.

“And then the doctor finished his sentence.”

Uncanny, that last passage, couched there in the middle of the seventh of my 14 notebooks. Uncanny, because he was saying as much just the other day: how in the face of this new and actual death sentence he intends to pour himself back into his writing with redoubled intensity. There are at least two more books besides the autobiography that he hopes to complete in the months ahead, and that he is convinced he yet will. But uncanny also because, what a blessing, what a beneficence, grace abounding, that he did not die back then in the early 80s, and that he lived on another 30-odd years, gradually but steadily untying the knots that seemed to bind him, re-visioning and coming to terms with his past demons, and finding and at long last accepting present love.