Letters, p.18
Letters, page 18
I see no immediate prospect of my being able to repay you in dollars. You want the money, which is reasonable enough, and I, indeed, cannot tolerate the existence of a debt which has nagged me since 1964, and which was not of my soliciting in the first place. If you are agreeable to the prospect, I will ask my parents to pay you the money in sterling, and you will have to add whatever increment seems to you reasonable to buffer you against possible debasements of the pound. They are in a position to repay you, and I am not. I will have to repay them in time—but this is as it should be: debts are best kept within the family, and you are the only creditor I have ever had outside my family.
Perhaps you will write again and state your feelings in the matter. You would be foolish to refuse repayment from my parents, for further demands from me will necessarily be fruitless, and will only aggravate the enmity between us.[*30]
Yours sincerely,
Oliver Sacks
To Mike Warvarovsky
October 14, 1968
234 East 78th St., New York
Dear Mike,
I received your letter with enclosures (it was curious seeing my attitudes of six weeks past—oh, what an eternity ago!—reflected back at me from my own letter), and a postcard from an American Military Base (God Bless America!!!) which arrived this morning. I will ask you to forgive the faintness of the typewriter ribbon, which is just about typed out after several hours of my two-finger pounding every day, and any incoherencies which you may detect, which are due to delirium, for I may have a highish fever at the moment, and get a little mad when my cerebral cortex becomes overheated.
I have no photos of myself and new bike, nor am I likely to get any, because I have given my cameras away (the Kodak as a gift, the Nikon as a sort of permanent loan to a friend in London): for I am through with photography in this continent. I know all about it, its beauties and uglinesses: I have sucked it dry. I am full up and overflowing, and need no more records: perhaps, most pertinently, I no longer feel I am really here at all. I am in the enchanted timeless world of my own thinking (which has shifted now the Migraine book is over) to problems of willed movement and the manifold paradoxes of Parkinsonism, my current study and next book; beyond this, to problems of representation and the spoken word (my third book will be on Aphasia, or rather all the Asymbolias), and beyond this, to the metaphoric and dramaturgic representations of madness (my fourth book: “The logical structure of Madness”). But it is not a lonely world—far from it! The voices of the past are always with me, Wittgenstein, Liveing, Wiener, Gowers, Hughlings Jackson; in the eighteenth century, my grandfathers Robert Whytt and Cheyne; in the seventeenth century, my great grandfather, the most admirable Thomas Willis (of the circle of Willis, which you will be studying in your 48 hour week, and all sorts of other things), and the labyrinthine mind of Sir Thomas Browne. Behind them: Ptolemy, Pliny, Heraclitus (“One cannot enter the same river twice”), Aristotle, Plato (I shall think like Aristotle, but dream like Plato) back to divine Pythagoras. And in bed, every night, I read The Odyssey, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, and knowing that time has no real existence: that all life is a circularity of metaphors in an endless moment. No, it is not a lonely life, I have never felt less lonely in all my life. In my new life—and I feel so new, yet so old!—the stupid distractions and confusions and blindnesses vanished, I hope for good. I have forged some friendships deeper (those based on truth), and I have brought others to a close (those based on craving, claiming, sucking, and envy); I have travelled more than 2000 miles since my return, hither and thither, in what country has not yet been polluted by its vile owners: and two or three times a week, I go to the Opera, or to plays, or concerts. I have never enjoyed life so much, nor felt that I deserved to enjoy it before. […]
Memories crowd upon me, all memories have returned to me: memories I thought I had shed as a tree sheds its leaves. Nothing is lost, nothing forgotten: only concealed from awareness, when there are motives for concealment. And especially, your letter reminds me, especially memories of California, of the wild beauties of Big Sur. (I would invest it with a mythical past, with all the scenery from Homer: rocky Ithaca: those rocks near Santa Lucia, those were the Symplegades whose clashings Odysseus was forced to skirt: and a little octagonal café, fifty miles north of San Luis Obispo—that is Eumaeus’ hut; and the old dog there that licked my hand, was that not Argus, the old hound of Odysseus who knew his master after twenty years? And that other café, gilded, garish, surely King Antinous’ court, where royal myths and memories unfurled like music!) Jade Beach, where I dived with, scrambled with Mel (beautiful, lost Mel! what has the wide world done with you?). The timeless beauties and absurdities of Muscle Beach, the voices I still hear, the monstrous bodies and postures I can summon to my mind. (Shall I see them again, shall I hear them, shall I touch them? Shall I go to the West Coast this Christmas, or let them retain their permanence in the amber of my memory?) The myrtle-trees of Oregon, globe-like, solitary, silhouetted on the enormous plains…sweet Lois[*31] with her violet eyes (she died of an overdose, some damn psychedelic drug). San Francisco, rising dreamlike from its misted ramparts—how vividly, how agonizingly I bring back its image to my mind, San Francisco on a Sunday morning, September 3, 1960, when I first saw it on my first day in America! Memories, memories! The weights of the old Dungeon,[*32] clanging like cymbals on warm winter evenings, Dave Sheppard, bloated, beautiful, stooped in some shuttered mindless meditation by the battered valveless radio in the now-defunct Dungeon. And that great wave which smashed me…I see the slim surfers in the grey waters of Malibu, I see them as I would see them when I spiralled down the loops of Topanga Canyon, sitting on their boards, rocking, rocking, to and fro, endlessly, happily, on the vast bosom of Mother Ocean, and their fearless male figures riding her waves, the first and oldest riding in the world; and Mother Ocean, huge, impatient, tossing them off her mighty body, somersaulting her tiny lovers, smashing her children—oh, with such power! with such an ineffable lack of human malice!—on the timeless yellow Beach. […] Voices, voices, like the fluttering of leaves. Sunlight bubbling in a thousand valleys. Memories of faces which I would not see as they were, but as I wanted to see them: memories of a thousand wishes and fears. And, perhaps because I am writing to you, and a particular chord of memory vibrates in resonance, I am haunted now by the image of Mel, but it is a haunting without guilt, without remorse, only the sense of sadness and loss because we were both so blind, so ignorant, so innocent, and so suspicious.
But I am indulging myself in this letter and this mood. I have put away my photos and writings of the first thirty-five years, for they have about them a dreadful circularity, as if I were whirling round and round, passively, on a phonograph record. I am finished with this merciless gyration, and I welcome the limitations no less than the infinities of my conscious future.
The days are endless, tranquil, full of excitement.
yrs,
Oliver
To Mike Warvarovsky
October 22, 1968
234 East 78th St., New York
Dear Mike,
Here are the two photos we took in Germany, on that strange Saturday morning—oh! incredibly long ago.
I’ve been rather low since my last letter to you, largely (at least I hope largely) due to having had the ’flu, which is rampaging in New York at the moment. I should have gone to bed, read science-fiction, and been tenderly looked after, which is the sort of regression one needs when one is sick. But, as we exiles find out, one misses home most when one is ill in some lonely foreign comfortless country, where nobody gives a fuck etc. So I didn’t go to bed, and went to work every day, with a highish temperature etc. and have generally, one way and another, lost about ten days. I think it is partly in place of a depression: for I needed some sort of come-down after the elated hyperactive month I had had. I suppose there is some wisdom in the body and mind, which decrees that a creative or elated bout will go on for so long (as long as is needed), and then be followed by a period of rest, sleep, depression, hibernation, whatever, as the systole of the heartbeat is succeeded by diastole.
I’m not actually depressed in the old way i.e., feelings of hate, fear, guilt, accusation, worthlessness, etc. None of that, or very little at all events. But a sense of loss, of grief, of waning power, of loneliness, of sadness. More a feeling of mourning for a lost loved object: the object here being not a human lover or mistress, but the book, the state of mind which created it, and that part of myself which, quite literally, I have shed with the writing of it. I have lost part of myself, although the loss will be recouped, a thousand times over, in the gain which I receive from the publication of the book: the knowledge that my ideas will be scattered like seeds (I almost said inseminated) into the minds of others, and the sort of wide half-sexual intimacy with my unknown audience that this will give me. But all this has not come about yet. There are months of waiting, of fiddling, of arranging this and that, and perhaps, inevitably, I will have feelings of sadness and loss during this time.
Otherwise, I ignore my environment as much as possible. I no longer have the overwhelming paranoid feelings for it I had before—hatred, terror etc. Rather, an unchanging sense of disgust and pity, and a hunger for beauty and order and open country. I escape, physically, at weekends, by leaving the city, and—in spirit—at concerts, theatres etc. in which, for the first time in my life, I am fully indulging myself. I almost try to make-belief that I am not here: to seclude myself with my interests, my thoughts, my books, my correspondence, my friends here and there, art, nature, exercise, anything which will blot out the sad and ugly reality of Amerika awaiting its Nixon.
Do write,
yrs,
Skip Notes
*1 In later years, OS credited Dr. Shengold with saving his life many times over; in 1985 he would dedicate his fourth book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, to him. He continued his therapy with Shengold twice weekly for forty-nine years, until the final year of his life.
*2 I.e., the previous September.
*3 Employees of the New York City Transit Authority walked out for two weeks in January, immobilizing the city.
*4 Parents in London were exhorted to send their children away from the city to avoid German bombings. As physicians themselves, Elsie and Sam worked especially long hours, but they must have agonized nonetheless about sending their two youngest boys away. OS later wrote about his almost daily beatings at the hands of a sadistic headmaster and the meager, unpalatable rations of wartime. He found solace, as much as he could, in reading and his passion for prime numbers.
*5 The existing copy of this letter ends here. It is unclear whether it was ever finished or sent, or if a page is missing.
*6 Indeed, this letter shows OS in an unusually condescending and even vicious mood. It is likely he never sent it, and possible that he was high on amphetamines when he wrote it.
*7 OS described in On the Move how, when he was eighteen and admitted his attraction for other men, his mother blew up, saying, “You are an abomination! I wish you had never been born.”
*8 Henry Head was a distinguished neurologist under whom Sam Sacks did his internship (that is, was his “houseman”).
*9 In the event, he did neither. After their parents died, Michael lived in a group house in the Mapesbury neighborhood, where OS continued to visit until Michael’s death in 2007.
*10 Madeline Capp Gardner. OS would become close to the Gardner family, joining their holiday and family celebrations for decades.
*11 Ring Lardner (1885–1933) was known for his often satirical short stories and gift for dialogue.
*12 Beth Abraham, a hospital for chronically ill patients.
*13 OS is referring here again to his postgraduate studies at Oxford’s Laboratory of Human Nutrition and a failed experiment on jake paralysis.
*14 OS related this story about Pablo Casals (then the most famous cellist in the world) again nearly forty years later in Musicophilia, apparently from memory.
*15 Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek (1946) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1955).
*16 Whittington, a poor country boy who came to London and eventually became its Lord Mayor, was, according to legend, attracted by the rumor that the big city’s streets were paved with gold.
*17 Mel and his girlfriend, Blossom.
*18 In On the Move.
*19 OS had recently moved away from the riverfront and into a sublet in the heart of the West Village, just a few buildings away from the Stonewall Inn, where, two years later, riots would mark the beginning of the modern gay civil rights movement. (By then, however, OS had moved to the Upper East Side, to be closer to his work in the Bronx.)
*20 Earlier in June, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War, resulted in Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula.
*21 Here OS exaggerates: Graetz’s history, eleven volumes in the original German, was published in six volumes in English. But the number 127 would have pleased him, as it is a prime number.
*22 That is, take over as the hospital’s neurologist.
*23 Also known, more formally, as Bronx Psychiatric Center.
*24 OS’s brother David and his daughter Elizabeth.
*25 Early in 1968, OS moved to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was only a few blocks from Madeline Gardner’s family. Her daughter remembers how OS would routinely drop in for an ample breakfast on his way to work.
*26 Arnold P. Friedman was director of the Montefiore headache clinic, as well as chairman of the headache sections of both the American Medical Association and the American Neurological Association.
*27 A Nobel laureate in medicine.
*28 Warvarovsky had become a military doctor and was stationed in Munich.
*29 Bonnard had insisted that OS repay her in American currency rather than British.
*30 Bonnard continued to refuse repayment from OS’s parents, but eventually, in April 1971, he was able to repay the debt himself.
*31 Identity unknown.
*32 Joe Gold’s gym, fondly nicknamed “the Dungeon,” had been founded in Venice Beach in 1965.
5
Coming to Life
1969–1971
Soon after he started working at Beth Abraham Hospital in 1966, OS began to notice dozens of patients, scattered among the wards, who were virtually immobile and unable to communicate. Going back through their records, he realized that they were all survivors of the pandemic of encephalitis lethargica that had swept the world for several years after World War I. This still-mysterious disease was often fatal, and those who survived were often left with strange syndromes that could seem like an extreme form of Parkinson’s. Huge care facilities had been built to house many of these people, but there was no clear understanding of what had caused the epidemic, and no cure (either for this postencephalitic syndrome or for “ordinary” Parkinson’s disease, which was far more common).
By the 1960s, the epidemic itself had been forgotten and so, for the most part, were these postencephalitic patients, some of whom had been hospitalized for forty years. In 1968, though, the medical community was galvanized—as was the press—by the news that people with Parkinson’s could be helped by a new miracle drug called levodopa, or L-dopa. Wondering whether this drug could also help his own immobilized patients, OS applied to the FDA to use it as an experimental drug.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
[ca. March 1969]
[New York]
Dear Ma and Pa,
[…] You ask what “FDA” stands for: it stands for Food and Drug Administration. I solicited FDA for a special “investigator’s licence” so that I could inaugurate a research project on a drug called “DOPA”[*1] in Parkinsonism (there is some evidence, questionable at present, that DOPA may be as useful and as specific for Parkinsonism as insulin is for diabetes; my prime concern would be to substantiate or refute this belief). I had intended to incorporate the DOPA trial in a broad-based study of that form of Parkinsonism which has hitherto been most refractory to treatment and least understood in mechanism: so-called “akinetic” Parkinsonism. As soon as the FDA gave me a number (a privilege: for they turn down 300 requests for the experimental use of DOPA every day!), and as soon as I had drawn up the skeleton of a research project, I was immediately approached by Labe Scheinberg (Professor and Chairman of the Neurology Dept. at Einstein) and by Irving Cooper (the neurosurgeon who has operated on more Parkinsonian patients than anyone living): both wished to join forces with me, and run a combined study. The suggestion is a flattering one and could potentially be of the greatest mutual benefit: on the other hand, I must beware of any pressures to dislodge me from my central position in the investigation. You will understand that when two powerful men, who have some claim to be considered as the first neurologist and first neurosurgeon in New York, appear on the scene in this fashion, there is a risk that someone of negligible formal status such as myself may get squashed between the two Leviathans. Therefore I have to make it clear, without ruffling tempers or jeopardizing my own position, that the project was my suggestion, must be controlled, finally, by me: and that when credit is apportioned, it is I who must be first name on any or every paper which appears. This is not arrogance: it is survival. […]
