Letters, p.2
Letters, page 2
Each correspondent is identified briefly at first mention and/or the first letter addressed to them, or occasionally in a headnote. While some of the correspondents represented here are the people he was closest to, the converse is not necessarily true. Many of his dearest friends he saw frequently in person—there was rarely a need to write more than a brief note.
In many instances, especially in the era before OS had any secretarial help, it is quite difficult to know whether a letter was ultimately sent to its intended recipient. His archive contains multiple drafts of some early letters, as he used the process of letter writing to think aloud to his imaginary audience or searched for the most devastating or witty words to rant about a perceived injustice, venting his feelings safely onto a piece of paper. In cases where I am relatively certain that a letter was not ultimately sent, I have noted this. In other cases, I leave it to the reader’s best guess.
Information about the various essays by OS referred to in this book may be found in the Selected Bibliography.
1
A New World
1960–1962
In July 1960, a few days before his twenty-seventh birthday, Oliver Sacks left England, intending to settle for a while in Canada or the United States—partly to escape the English military draft and partly to reinvent himself in a new place, without the suffocating closeness of a huge extended family. He had spent four years studying at Oxford, followed by medical school and then two years of working as an intern in London and Birmingham. During this time he developed his interest in weight lifting and motorcycles, and pursued clandestine sexual encounters, for in postwar England, homosexuality was a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment or (in the infamous case of Alan Turing) chemical castration. He had spent a summer on a kibbutz, hiked and traveled widely in Europe, and bought the first of many motorbikes. His mind was filled with images of the wide-open West he had seen in the photos of Ansel Adams, in cowboy films, and in the paintings of Albert Bierstadt.
Looking back at this period in his 2015 memoir On the Move, he wrote, “I had a peculiar, unprecedented feeling of freedom: I was no longer in London, no longer in Europe; this was the New World, and—within limits—I could do what I wished.”
He wrote regular letters back home, to his parents and his favorite aunt, Auntie Len, chronicling his travels with a mixture of hyperbole, gritty romanticism, parody, and an avid eye for detail.
To Elsie Sacks, Samuel Sacks, and Helena Landau
OS’s Parents and His Aunt[*1]
August 2, 1960
Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island
Dear Ma and Pa, and, of course, Auntie Len,
Finding myself with a lull, and with a typewriter, I am sitting down to write you a long and overdue letter […].
I last wrote you, I believe, from Toronto, though I have sent a couple of postcards since. […]
From Toronto I flew to Calgary, going over the prairies at night. We touched down at Winnipeg and at Regina, where I snuffed the prairie air—there was no time for anything else. In Toronto, the air is humid, and smells of frenzy, sweat and gasoline. In the prairies it is dry and warm and aromatic, and smells of cinnamon and roasted buckwheat, as if the door of some gigantic oven had been opened. However, these are not the impressions on which to base important decisions! The sun rose slowly after we had left Regina, for we were chasing at 400 mph to the West; had we been going twice as fast, the miracle of Joshua would have been re-enacted, and the sun would have stood still in the heavens. At dawn I first perceived the limitless ocean beneath us, ripening wheat for more than a thousand miles in every direction, a sight unique to the Mid West. We veered to avoid a prairie storm, which was completely isolated and circumscribed in a cloudless sky, like some aerial jellyfish, grey and livid, hurling its long streamers on a little settlement below. At 6 a.m. we landed at Calgary […which] had just finished its annual “stampede,” and the streets were full of loafing cowboys in jeans and buckskins, sitting the long days out with their hats crushed over their faces. But Calgary also has 300,000 citizens. It is a boom town. Oil has brought a huge influx of prospectors, investors, engineers to it. The old West life has been overwhelmed by refineries, and factories, and by offices and skyscrapers. If you want to invest some $ in a sure thing, make it Albertan Oil, which is on its way to altering the world’s markets in oil. There are also tremendous fields of uranium ore, gold and silver, and the base metals, and you can see little packets of gold dust passed from hand to hand in the taverns, and men made of solid gold behind their tanned faces and filthy overalls. I must make a comment on drink here. You know the taverns of the cowboy films, the low swing doors, the tough guys within, smoking and quarreling, dicing, gambling and shooting. It’s not true, not at least in public. Canada has the most stringent licensing laws in the world, and the most prohibitive social ones. You cannot stand in a bar, cannot move to another table, cannot talk to a stranger. You cannot sing, play cards, or darts. There is nothing of the mildness and geniality of an English pub. Drinking is not gregarious here. It is hard and solitary, and Canada enjoys the highest incidence of drunkenness and alcoholism in the world. I forget whether I mentioned some of the other aspects of social prohibition in a new country: In Quebec, for example, a woman cannot vote, cannot divorce her husband, cannot have a banking account of her own, and can be arrested for wearing short sleeves or skirts in public (and frequently are). The “old country” (this is everyone’s term for it, both nostalgic and derisive) is very mellow in comparison.
Not only alcoholics, but cranks, psychotics, misfits, religious maniacs in uncomputed numbers. But this is another story.
I took the CPR[*2] to Banff, roaming excitedly in the train’s “scenic dome.” We passed from the boundless flat prairies through the low spruce-covered foothills of the Rockies, climbing gently all the time. And gradually the air became cooler, and scale of the country more vertical. The hillocks grew to hills, and the hills to mountains, higher and jaggeder with each mile we progressed. We puffed punily in the floor of a valley, and snowcapped mountains soared tremendous about us. The air was so clear, that one could see peaks a hundred miles away, and the mountains besides us seemed to be rearing over our very heads. Banff lies at 5500 feet, in a hollow, with peaks of 10 to 12,000 feet surrounding it in every direction. It is a tourist Mecca, bursting with fat Americans with their fat cars and their fat pocketbooks. I stayed there a day and a night, not sleeping, but writing and writing for more than fourteen hours at a stretch, while the tawdry costly night life opened, and blossomed and fell silent around 2 a.m., and the silence of the mountain fell upon the little town, so that I felt now it is mine, a still Banff beneath the mountain and the stars which nobody can take from me. At 4 I heard a genuine cuckoo, upon an augmented fourth, and then the clatter of waterfowl in the river, and at 5 the old Indian streetcleaner, with his close-cropped white head, wheeling his barrow along the street, collecting the refuse of civilization, the beer bottles and the cigar butts, and the funny hats, like the debris of a party. By 6, the early editions were being hawked, and barelegged hikers were gathering over their maps, and the old ladies had risen to see the dawn on the mountains. By 7, the great cars were passing along the road, East to West, West to East, on journeys immoderate, impossible, to a traveller in Europe. And by 8, the hamburger and ice-cream parlours were open, the groceterias and meateterias had their shutters down, and the fat Americans in their Hawaiian shirts stood on every street corner, taking pictures. It was a fascinating cross-section of a night, which seemed to retrace the evolution of Banff from a tiny settlement to a bustling tourist centre.
On my second day, I went to Sunshine Lodge, attracted by its name. It stood at 7200 ft., a luxurious cedar cabin, hung with trophies of the chase, and boasting a log fire of dimensions never seen in England. I woke next morning, and whipped open my curtains to see the sunshine. There was a blinding snowstorm, and I could see nothing. But it had cleared by 8, and after a prodigious breakfast (melon, fruit juice, enriched cereal K, trout, pancakes with maple syrup, ham with three eggs, toast and marmalade, Cuban coffee and two cigars, six thousand calories and close to my visceral heaven!), the sun was high in the cloudless sky, and the temperature over 90º.[*3] […]
A nature paragraph specially for Auntie Len: The Lodge is set in a huge alpine meadow, which was at its peak in early July. Dominant flowers are mountain avens (which were in seed when I arrived, like huge dandelion heads, alight and floating as they catch the morning sun). Indian paintbrush, in every shade from faint cream to intense dayglo vermilion. Chalice cups, Trollius, valerians, saxifrages, contorted lousewort and stinking fleabane (two of the loveliest, despite their names!). Arctic raspberries and strawberries, which rarely fruit; the three-leaved strawberries catch and hold at their centre a flashing drop of dew. Heart-shaped arnicas, calypso orchids, columbines and cinquefoils. Glacial lilies and Alpine speedwell. The rocks are clustered with succulent stonecrops. The main shrubs are willow and juniper, bilberry and buffaloberry. Various firs and spruces up to the timber line, and above this only larches, with their first white stems and downy foliage.
The birds are unnaturally tame, or rather just naturally tame (since this is a National Park, and no aggressive acts are allowed). I walked right up to a ptarmigan, which had just about shed its white winter plumage, accompanied by five chicks. […]
High up, through glasses, I saw a white mountain goat, perched on an unbelievably small pinnacle or rock, its four legs crushed together. I have seen black and brown bears galore, though no grizzlies. Elk and moose browsing in the lower pastures, especially if these are intersected with streams. […] I have seen trees fatally ravaged by porcupines, and I have eaten “porky” meat at a barbecue, tho’ I have seen no live ones yet.
All vegetation and animal life dies away as one climbs towards the summits, except moss campion, and various mosses and lichens. […] It is possible to run down a mountain, and this is one of the most exciting experiences in the world. And I did run down that mountain, flew it seemed, leaping from boulder to boulder, yelling and weeping and laughing all at once, miraculously exempt from fear or injury or fatigue. One of those experiences which make golf, and lumbar punctures, and all the paraphernalia of one’s normal, non-transcendent life, seem very dull in comparison.
I must here introduce the American family who looked after me. There were two Magoo-like men, as similar as twins, who called each other brother, though they were not brothers, I learned later, only friends. One was the Professor of Law at Philadelphia, and the other the president of the bar association of New Jersey, but I am happy I discovered what delightful companions they were before I found out what eminent lawyers they were. They took me under their wing, and we went around a good deal together. On a horse for the first time since Braefield,[*4] I accompanied them on the pack trails to Lake Egypt and to Mt. Assiniboine.
Riding horses is a great experience; I’m sorry I missed out on it for so long. […] However, I gradually got the hang of things. We ascended into a vast mountain plateau, so high that many of the cumulus clouds were beneath us. “Man has made no changes here,” cried the Professor, “he has only enlarged the goat trails.” It was a strange feeling, perhaps the first time I had ever had it, to know that our party were probably the only human beings in some hundreds of square miles. High on the plateau, above the trees and the insects, we seemed to be treading on the very top of the world. And then gradually we came down, our horses treading delicately in the undergrowth, to the glacial string of lakes with their strange names. Lake Egypt, Lake Sphinx, etc., and above them the Towering Pharaoh mountains, their old faces marked with gigantic hieroglyphic markings. Ignoring the cautious warnings of the others I dived into the clear waters of Egypt (you, Pop, you couldn’t have resisted either), and out of their cold, and clearness and calm, was distilled the intensest pleasure. To float on your back in an alpine lake, looking around you at peaks the majority of which are as yet unnamed and may well remain so, for why name peaks where nobody could live?
Another one of the exhilarating things about Canada is that one lives in an epoch of naming. Everything in England was named and done with half a thousand years ago, but here names are vivid and contemporary, Kicking Horse Canyon and Sorefoot Lake, and tell you of adventures which have happened within the span of a man’s memory.
The professor was a wonderful companion. On a strictly practical level, he taught me to recognize glacial cirques and different sorts of moraine, to decipher the trail of moose and bear, and the telltale ravages of porcupines; to survey the terrain closely for marshy and treacherous terrain, to predict the clouds (beware the sinister lens shaped clouds which portend violent storms), and to fix landmarks in my mind so that I could not get lost. But his range was enormous, in fact complete. We spoke of law and sociology, and economics, and politics and advertising, and business. I have never known a man so profoundly in touch with every aspect of his environment, physical and human, and yet enriched by a mocking insight of his own mind and motives which balanced and rendered intensely personal everything he said. His elder “brother,” whom they called Marshall (at first I thought he was a sort of emeritus Marshall, and the idea stuck), was a burly old man of nearly seventy-five, in full possession of his magnificent intellectual powers and wit, who smoked cigars before breakfast, and sang in the shower in a tremendous bass voice, and out-ate all of us, and pinched the waitress’s bottom, and yarned endlessly of his travels and adventures, mixing fastidious accuracy with grotesque distortions, till we were all pulped with helpless laughter. Old Marshall had virtually opened the Rockies to the Tourist trade thirty years before, and still knew every path and landmark far better than our guides.
I went on to Lake Louise by myself for a while, going along the trails to Lake Agnes and “little beehive” (a fire lookout, commanding a view a hundred miles long in either direction along the mountain valley), and then up to the Plain of the Six Glaciers, which boasted a fairytale teahouse, so high and light and airy it might have come directly from Shangri-La.[*5] Coming down from the Plain, I overtook a bearded man limping heavily, and supported by his tiny wife. And coming up at exactly the same time, the three of us were joined by a sleek Golders Green figure[*6] ascending from the Lake.
“I’m a doctor,” I said, “can I help?”
“I’m also a doctor,” the other fellow said, “and I can also help.”
Thus, by a fantastic coincidence, the only injured man in a thousand square miles met in the same moment the only two doctors in a thousand square miles. He’d been caught in an avalanche, and was lucky to escape with his wife. He suffered only a bruised back and fractured scaphoid (we agreed) on his left wrist. Other doc’s name was Elman (yes, yiddishe boy!), a graduate of university in Nova Scotia. We met over drinks later in the evening and chatted about this and that. He wants to do obstetrics and go to Hawaii; good luck to him. He was employed, by the way, in a curious double capacity. Two young doctors alternate between Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise, the two most elaborate hotels in the Rockies, and patronized almost exclusively by elderly rich hypochondriacs. The young doctors are chosen not merely for their professional skill, but for their soothing appearance, and their good looks, so that they may act as part-time gigolos to the lonely old ladies, and this subsidiary capacity is often more lucrative than the purely medical one.
Later last week I was invited by the Parks (the Philadelphia lawyers) to join them at the lodge on Lake Bow. It was called Num-Ti-Jah, the Indian term for a black sable, this being their name for the venerable Jimmie Simpson who owns the place. JS deserves a book to himself, and will get it one day I am sure. He is eighty-five, although he runs and swims like a boy of twenty. Coming from a patrician family in Lincolnshire, he was sent here in his teens, as were so many second sons of families, until the succession was secured by the eldest brother siring a son. He quickly made his way to the West (this was in the early [eighteen-]nineties), and became famous as a trapper, climber, explorer and geologist. He blazed the trail from Banff to Jasper, which only now is being consolidated to a highway. He shot (by accident) the largest sheep in the World, which now resides in the NY Natural History Museum. And he must be one of the greatest raconteurs in the world. His voice is not unlike Jonathan’s imitation of Moore or Russell,[*7] and his wit too has something of the same quality; and it is a strange experience to hear his fantastic tales, apocalyptic[*8] a few, but mostly true, about grizzly hunts, and gunfights, appalling climbs etc. in this lucid English voice. He is quite unpredictable, sometimes keeping to himself for days on end, and at other times becoming uncontrollably voluble. I was woken at 6 a.m. on my first day there by the sound of his tales, and went down on tiptoe to join the Parks who were listening to him. At first I tried to remember his stories for future reference, but there were so many, and so varied, that it was impossible, and I just surrendered to the magic of his personality. He is the very last of the Wild West men, and was a personal friend of all the famous ones, including the most famous of all, Bill Peyto, after whom a mountain and a lake are named.
(In parenthesis, I must tell you of Peyto’s cabin, which old Marshall showed us on the return journey from Egypt. Not a score of people know where it is, or even know that it exists, for it is listed officially as having been burnt down by order. Peyto was a nomad and misanthrope; a wit; a great hunter and observer of wild life; and the father of uncountable bastards. His cabin is built in the most inaccessible part of the forest, and in his lifetime none but he knew how to find it. In 1936, he had been feeling ill for some time. He scrawled on his door “Back in an hour” and rode down to Banff. He never returned. The scrawled message is still faintly visible, and inside his darkened and rotting hut, we saw his cooking utensils and ancient preserves, his mineral specimens (he operated a small talc mine), fragments of a journal, the Illustrated London News, piled high, from 1890 to 1926, an empty ink bottle from which the contents had evaporated, and all the eerie Marie Celeste like atmosphere of his vacated home. It was a very moving experience.)
