The first 200 pages of Oliver Sacks’s letters are among the best things I’ve read all year. He was new in America, not long out of Oxford University, writing to family and friends back home, and his observations were electric — wild and funny and befuddled and frank.
Sacks came to San Francisco in 1960 to start his medical career. He would later become a humane and best-selling explicator of neurological predicaments in books like “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” But for now, he was a research assistant who often went by his middle name, Wolf. He was into motorcycles and weight lifting and drugs and leather.
A large-scale new collection of Sacks’s correspondence, “Letters,” edited by his longtime assistant Kate Edgar, is out now. The entire book is worthwhile, but only the first third sings. After a certain point, by the early 1970s, fame sneaked up on Sacks and his letters became more decorous, professional and bland. His correspondents came to include W.H. Auden, Jane Goodall, Susan Sontag and Francis Crick. But his letters were magic only when he was unknown, when he was still finding himself. Perhaps someday these will be published separately, under a title like “The Education of a Medical Misfit.”
He had a crazy love for American vistas. Young Wolf roared around the West Coast on his motorcycles, picking up innumerable speeding tickets. His observations on the scenery sometimes drew from Greek myth. Certain rocks in California’s Santa Lucia Range are “the Symplegades whose clashings Odysseus was forced to skirt: and a little octagonal cafe, 50 miles north of San Luis Obispo — that is Eumaeus’ hut.” He once ran out of gas and tried to use his dismantled stethoscope as a siphon.
He was serious about weight lifting and was a veteran of Muscle Beach in Venice, Calif. He could squat 575 pounds and tried to break the world record. He called Gold’s Gym “the old Dungeon” and later referred to himself as a “veteran of the Iron Game.” This weight work made him creaky in old age.
Sacks (1933-2015) did not come out as gay until late in life. He did not report to his family back in England about San Francisco’s leather scene, though in a letter to a school friend (the satirist Jonathan Miller) he described rough trade as “the werewolf crowd.”
He’d come to San Francisco in part to meet the English poet Thom Gunn, a gay man who was similarly enamored of bikes and leather. They appear not to have been physically intimate, but Sacks wrote: “I think Thom was flattered, amazed, amused, to have this leather baby in his hands.”
Part of the joy of the first portion of “Letters” is simply watching Sacks leap into America like a big dog into a swimming pool. At 27 he was taken to what he called an American football “match,” for example. It was between the 49ers “and the Los Angeles Beefeaters or something,” he wrote to his parents.
He began to hoot with happy laughter at the spectacle and “earned some furious glances from the very serious people all around me.” He slipped out and repaired to Golden Gate Park “with a cigar and a quart of icy Schlitz beer,” as well as a translation of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”
Sacks had mixed feelings about New York City, where he moved in 1965, but here is an early impression that gives a sense of the level of the writing on display here:
Evening: walking and walking by the river. The New Jerusalem, its billion windows golden in the setting sun. The creation of the New York night, a monstrous ganglion come to life. Whose lamp is this, and whose is that? Cameos of 10 million lives. The fantastic Cubist backdrop of the New York waterfront.
He described himself as a “belly-oriented” man and had jumbo appetites. He was known in hospitals to help himself to food from his patient’s trays. At times he was overweight, and he had a self-deprecating sense of humor about it. He wrote to his parents: “I enclose a picture of myself taken at Monterey, emerging like some hairy and overweight Venus from a pacific lagoon.”
His early letters display his growing dislike of medical research — he wanted to be with patients, not staring down microscopes — and of the confines of institutional medicine. He ran afoul of his supervisors at various hospitals for his idiosyncrasies, which he described as “untidiness, unpunctuality, huge size, waddling gait.”
He slowly found his calling, which was individual attention and close observation. He began to write with dignity and delicacy about his patients. In many cases, such as the work with post-encephalitic patients in the late 1960s, an experience described in “Awakenings,” it was as if he began to pull at a weed and the whole root came out.
Sacks suffered from mood swings, the maelstrom of self. These never entirely went away. He saw the same psychiatrist in New York twice weekly for 49 years.
I don’t mean to entirely put you off his later letters. Some written to former patients and people struggling with pain and loss are substantial and moving. He disliked TV but was addicted to “Star Trek” because it had “the right relation to the Strange.”
One reason the letters, in bulk, become less interesting is that he began to receive too many of them, some 5,000 a year from readers. He tried to reply to each one. He was running to stand still. In one case he didn’t get around to replying for nine years.
There are very few letters to lovers in this collection. But in one, from 1965, Sacks writes: “My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions.” Reading the first third of “Letters,” I felt the same way.
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