And How Are You Dr. Sacks? Page 2

  He respects facts, and he has a scientist’s passion for precision. But facts, he insists, must be embedded in, entired by stories. And stories—people’s stories—are what really have him hooked.

  And music. In his later work, he explains, he has come to appreciate the vital qualitative role music can play in the Parkinsonian’s or Touretter’s life across his recovery:

  Music, he insists, is in some profound way healthful.

  * * *

  In his living room, an elegant vintage stereo: The bequest to Sacks of his friend W. H. Auden.

  * * *

  On the irrational and the rational—Sacks has no romantic love of the irrational, nor does he worship the rational. The irrational, he says, can overwhelm a person—he’s seen it happen and he doesn’t romanticize the consequences—the irrational needs to be mastered into personality—otherwise it merely fractures and scatters. But at the same time, those who have been visited by these irrational firestorms and surmounted them can somehow become deeper human beings, more profound persons, for the experience.

  He points to a postcard reproduction of St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, by Van Eyck. “That,” he says, “is the painting’s actual size! What a miracle of compression! That is the kind of thing I would have liked to do with that book on five seconds in the life of a Touretter.”

  He prefers to work in institutions. (“I wouldn’t work anywhere else but in the back corners of asylums: that’s where all the treasures are.”) Such as Beth Abraham, the old chronic-care facility in the Bronx, the Mount Carmel of Awakenings. Though he also works for the State & the City. His other principal employers are the Little Sisters of the Poor. His parents and a niece, all doctors, all worked for the Little Sisters in other areas. “I like them,” he tells me, “because they are implicitly religious without being explicitly religious.”

  Thus he has very little income. And it’s not as if he couldn’t use the money. He points over to a wall (shelves & shelves) of EEG readouts. “There are incredible discoveries in there,” he assures me, “if only I had the time, if only I could afford the time.”

  I ask him why he doesn’t take private patients. “Well,” he says. “I do. I mean, if someone calls up in need, of course I’ll see them. But usually it ends up that I see them here, at the house, and often the first session can take five hours—I mean, it takes that long to begin to know someone—and after you’ve spent five hours with someone, it’s just awkward—how can you ask them for money? It makes me too uncomfortable. And then later I always seem to forget to bill them, anyway.”

  I ask him if he would accept a grant if one were tendered. “Oh,” he squirms, “it would arouse as much guilt as anything. I mean, there are people who need the money.”

  Oliver faced a major crisis in 1972. He was fired from Beth Abraham, lost his apartment, and had his mother die—all in the space of a few weeks. He returned to England, sat shiva for his mother for a full week, and “then a strange calm descended and I was able to complete Awakenings.”

  Six months before that crisis, bounding up some basement stairs, he’d crashed his head on the ceiling and been hospitalized. The final 11 case studies in Awakenings derived from the notes his secretary had taken at his sickbed as he recounted the stories of the patients.

  “Prokofiev,” Oliver tells me, “said he could never read Oblomov because he couldn’t relate to Oblomov’s lack of energy. Well, I seem to alternate between periods of Prokofian energy and Oblomovian sloth.”

  And there is a certain ursine melancholy to the man.

  He had been institutionalized himself between ages 6 and 10 during the war, in a very bad institution. The experience cast its dark shadow. He was the youngest of four children, and was, for all intents and purposes, raised as an only child by his two doctor parents, his father a jovial GP, his mother a tremendously accomplished gynecologist and one of the first female surgeons in England.

  Three older brothers, two of whom also became doctors, and the other … The third son, Michael, who’d been with him at the same very bad institution, several years older and indeed on the cusp of puberty, had been destroyed by the experience and is to this day, for all intents and purposes, a schizoid shell of his former self, living in London with their father.

  After attending Oxford and then medical school, Sacks himself left England, seemingly in a hurry though he is conspicuously vague about why, landing in California in 1960, where he completed medical residencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles, engaging all the while (he suggests in passing) in binges of drug-taking, muscle-building, speed-motorcycling and all manner of other extreme behaviors, before finally settling in New York.

  As I get set to take my leave, Oliver points to a book of Frank Kermode’s on the table that he refers to as The Genesis of Silence—“When I first saw this book I sat down and composed a letter to Kermode but I never mailed it. I guess I considered that it might be deemed a bit impertinent sending someone a 30,000-word letter on the basis of the title of their book alone! I still haven’t read it. I lent my copy, bought six more and somehow managed to lend them all. Well, I just got a new copy. Do you want it? Or maybe, on second thought, I should keep it and read it this time.”

  As he pulls the book away, I notice that he’s gotten the title slightly wrong. It’s actually The Genesis of Secrecy.

  All of that, as I say, from the first entry in my notebooks. There would be many more—presently fifteen volumes across four years as, pretty much on the model of my three previous years with Irwin, Oliver and I would get together several times a month, if not a week. Fairly early on I resolved to feature him as a subject for a future profile (Mr. Shawn immediately approved), a profile that grew into a prospective book as the months passed. Oliver was agreeable, if a touch wary. I would travel with him to London, join him on rounds (encountering, among others, the last remaining living Awakenings patients), dive with him into natural history museums and botanical gardens on both continents, join him for meals in New York City, or head out again and again to City Island, where he’d give me free run of his files. I would start recording interviews with colleagues and friends from his youth, and others.

  It was an odd period in his life. As I say, he’d already written what would in time (though not yet) come to be seen as his masterpiece. In the meantime, though, he’d fallen into an excruciating siege of writer’s block on the book immediately following that, an account of a leg accident of his own and its philosophically and therapeutically fraught aftermath. That terrible blockage (which actually often took the form of graphomania, as he spewed forth millions upon millions of words, just not the right words) would eventually take up almost a decade of his life (our first four years being the final four of that siege). Sometimes, a few days after one of our dinners, I might receive a bulging envelope, featuring a dozen-paged, typed (two-finger pecked), single-spaced amplification on some of the things we’d been discussing. He was tormented by feelings of wastage and uselessness. Indeed, he was at times floridly neurotic on all manner of themes, swinging wildly between feelings of grandiosity and of utter failure. He was pretty much a recluse out there on City Island, still as I say largely unknown, church-mouse poor, entertaining relatively few visitors (and still fewer friends), finding what surcease he could (often, in fairness, quite considerable) in his daily outings to see his patients. He and I kept up our conversations: He seemed to enjoy, by and large, dredging through his past and showing off his wards.

  Four years on, his blockage would finally lift and he’d at last complete that damned Leg book of his—with a whole flood of long-dammed-up material clearly just waiting to burst forth in its wake. Indeed, a year after that, in 1985, he would release his breakthrough collection, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, with almost a dozen other volumes to follow, celebrated bestsellers all over the world, and by the end of the decade Awakenings finally would see its translation to the screen, nothing to do with my treatment, alas, with yet more fame and celebration
to follow—anyway, just before all of that, I decided to take a retreat of my own, put my notes and transcripts in order (the index to my notes ended up taking up more than 250 pages), and finally embark on the writing of my long-gestating profile.

  At which point, Oliver asked me not to.

  He wouldn’t, he assured me, care what I did with all the material after he was dead, but he couldn’t live with the prospect of encountering it while still alive. He was wracked with compunctions about one particular aspect of his life, which—well, that’s the story, or an important part of it anyway, isn’t it? As you will see.

  Instead, he hoped that we could remain friends, and indeed we did. I married and he welcomed my bride into his life (and she, somewhat more forbearingly at times, him into ours). She and I had a daughter who became his goddaughter, and the girl grew to adore him (of which more anon, as well). We continued to have splendid adventures together. And then on the far far side of all that, just a few years ago, as he was dying, he not only authorized me to return to that long-suspended project. He positively ordered me to do so: “Now,” he said, “do it! You have to.”

  * * *

  It would necessarily be a different project. Back then I had been imagining something of a midcareer biography and was taking notes toward that. But life intervened, other things started consuming my attention, decades passed, and I stopped chronicling things Sacksian in the way I would have had to if I were going to be launching into a full-scale biography. In any case—have I mentioned?—the man was a graphomaniac. Talk about shelves groaning under the weight of notebooks! Someday someone is going to take on the project of a full-length Oliver Sacks biography, and it’s going to be an extraordinary book when it happens, but that person is going to have to be a lot younger than I am now. I wish him or her well—and I envy them.

  Instead, what I propose to offer here is at its core something more like a memoir, in particular of those four years in the early eighties when I was serving as a sort of Boswell to his Johnson, a beanpole Sancho to his capacious Quixote.

  Even that prospect was complicated quite late in Oliver’s life, however, for indeed just before he issued his command that I now return myself to the fray, he’d published his autobiography, On the Move, spilling many of the very tales that for so many years had seemed my own exclusive preserve. And yet perhaps not as complicated as all that, for Oliver’s late-life telling of his own tale was suffused—and how can one not celebrate this?—with a certain hard-won grace and serenity, whereas the Oliver one encounters in my notebooks from that time almost forty years earlier was a decidedly other creature, far more wildly (and sometimes, dare I say, delightfully) various, and the furthest thing from serene. In addition, my notebooks teemed with the kind of immediate “table talk” so often elided from more conventional biographies and autobiographies. Here was a sublime empathizer entrammeled in his own self-obsessions, a grand soliloquizer who often soared right past his audiences, blind at times to their very faces, an unparalleled clinician who nevertheless at times couldn’t help falling back into the role of a studiously detached naturalist, a chronicler who, while he would never consciously shade the truth, was nevertheless not averse to admitting, proudly, that on occasion he’d had to infer or even to imagine it into being.

  Nor had these been just any random four years in his life. In retrospect one sees the first half of the eighties as the virtual hinge of his professional and creative progress, as he seethed and churned to escape the demons of self-involvement veritably blocking any further advancement: By the time they were over, in 1985, this virtual hermit would be on the precipice of worldwide fame, and somehow becalmed and integrated enough (at long last centered rather than merely self-centered) to endure it. (By uncanny coincidence, these were also the years when I myself—albeit at a much less spectacular scale—was consolidating the lineaments of my own professional career, growing from a journeyman California scribe to a regular fixture at The New Yorker.)

  As I’ve reacquainted myself with my notebooks during these last few years, and considered how best to organize this book (whether, for example, to reshuffle everything into a sort of conventional biographical order), I came to feel that I ought rather to largely honor the chronology of the entries from those four years, giving the reader a lived sense of how all those often seemingly contradictory details gradually came together for me, offering the reader (and perhaps that future full-scale biographer) a chance to make evolving sense of it for themselves.1

  The passage of those four years will thus form the meat, as it were, of this volume. Once they have been forded, I will offer a considerably tighter summary of the years thereafter, at least from my point of view, and some wider thematic meditations as well (not least crucially on the sometimes contested question of Oliver’s credibility, among other such topics).

  But in the meantime, there’s this …

  PART I

  Getting to Know Him

  1

  Going for a Row

  My next time out to the island, I arrive a bit frustrated because I’ve just been caught by the local police in an unconscionable speed trap. Oliver sympathizes, takes me out to his driveway, and points to the grille on his car, out of which a little clear plastic spur protrudes.

  He tells me how he was always getting tickets for speeding, too, but that one day in Canada he was pulled over and told by the cop himself, “Look, our radar had you clocked at eighty-five.”

  “Radar?”

  “Of course. You should get yourself a Fuzzbuster.”

  “A Fuzzbuster?”

  “Sure. Look, we use electronic surveillance; you have to use countersurveillance. It’s only a game.”

  Oliver pauses, dreamily, before going on. “For a while I had the record for motorcycle speeding tickets in California. I used to belong to a semiprofessional racing club in San Francisco, and one afternoon I came tearing off the northern spur of the Golden Gate Bridge rounding that gentle curve right past a highway patrol car that must have been going about half as fast. Later they said I was going 122, although I think that must have been an exaggeration: I could swear I wasn’t going a mile over 115.

  “It’s not an antinomian tendency,” he goes on to clarify. “I just like speeding—you know, the sense of movement.”

  Our conversation shifts to the current state of play with his Leg book.

  “Like Gaul,” he says, “my Leg book falls naturally into three parts. One: A prologue, Encountering the Bull on the Mountain, fall, and rescue. Two: The ordeal in the hospital in a single room, largely inside my head, provoked to a climax by relentless introspection. Three, and now yet to be composed: A rural Turgenev-like pastoral recovery, making peace, expanding.

  “I love Turgenev. My mother used to read me Turgenev.

  “My friend the poet Thom Gunn reports that when his mother was pregnant, she read him the whole of Gibbon.”

  Which brings us around to a wider discussion of Thom Gunn and Oliver’s doctor colleague Isabelle Rapin and their roles in his life.

  “With Thom, as with Isabelle Rapin, I started out imagining them as the sternest people I’d ever met, and now see them as the kindest—stern, that is, but compassionate. In both cases, grounded in integrity.

  “With both of them the integrity can be felt as sternness or sweetness, depending on which side of the integrity you were on—I mean, over time I had occasion to show them prose occasioning responses of both kinds.

  “Thom is relentless on falsehood.”

  Oliver leaps up to show me a copy of Gunn’s new book, a volume of autobiographical essays, inscribed:

  To Oliver, a book of limping prose

  to a man whose prose strides, runs … leaps!

  At which point, as if taking a cue, Oliver suddenly asks me, “Shall we go out for a row? I mean,” he continues, “there will be no problem with speeding out there. At best you can only row three miles per hour!”

  We head out to the clapboard garage on the side of h
is little backyard—inside, a series of oars lined along the wall, one of them with its handle shattered clean off. We pick up the oars and oar grips and walk down toward the narrow beach at the nub end of his street. (I roll up my dress slacks, Huck Finn style.)

  The boat, a fifteen-footer, is moored upside down in a little sand alcove, the new keylock jammed with sand. “Only a Jewish intellectual,” Sacks grumbles, wrestling with the mechanism, “could get himself into such a fix.” And yet we two Jewish intellectuals finally manage to free the thing.

  And soon we are out on the water (with my notebook curled in my lap at the prow of the boat, I feel like a damsel with her parasol), Oliver pulling with a clean steady rhythm as the boat slices out toward the open channel. Oliver proceeds to row for well over two hours, a continuous steady rhythm, talking cheerfully all the while. A spangle of sweat soon appears on his brow, but not once does the conversation flag for breath—there is no change whatsoever in his breathing, despite the fact that such exercise would quickly exhaust anyone else I know.

  Back in California, in his Muscle Beach days, Oliver recalls, he was known as Doctor Squat or Doctor Quads. He had the strongest legs in the state—he has a photo of himself winning the state weight-lifting championship, hoisting six hundred pounds! (In the photo he shows me when we get back, he is huge, his large face ballooning with exertion—he is sporting a trim Abraham Lincoln/Amish beard.) “Mine was called a ‘dead lift,’ and for good reason—it kills. And indeed, in time I damaged a disk in my back. My legs were stronger than my back! My back wasn’t weak—it, too, was strong, only strong and vulnerable.”