Letters, p.3
Letters, page 3
I went with the Parks to the Columbia icefields, one of the few icefields accessible without being an accomplished climber. This was the real thing, gunmetal grey and limitless in size, not like the fairy grotto stuff of the Swiss glaciers. We rolled up three miles of it in a snowmobile (I sent you a postcard of these), and were told that we now had 1100 feet of ice beneath us. I saw a pothole into which a stream was pouring, and this was 800 feet deep. You saw the deepening blueness passing to black, you heard the rush, but never the impact of water. My first thought, foolishly, was of the marmalade pot lined tunnel through which Alice fell.[*9]
Finally taking my leave of the kind Parks, and promising to meet them in Philadelphia, I tried a little hitchhiking. I got as far as Radium Hot Springs, a sort of New-World Bad Auenstein for those with gout and disseminated lupus, and a little later found myself conscripted for firefighting. British Columbia has had no rain for more than thirty days, and there are forest fires raging everywhere (you have probably read about them). A sort of Martial Law exists, and the forest commission can conscript anyone they feel is suitable. I was quite glad of the experience, and spent a day in the forests with other bewildered conscripts, dragging hoses to and fro, and trying to be useful. However, it was only for one fire they wanted me, and when at last we shared a beer over its smoking dwindling ruin, I felt a real glow of confraternal pride that it had been vanquished. British Columbia at this time of the year seems bewitched. The sky is low and purple, even at midday, from the smoke of innumerable fires, and the air has a terrible stultifying heat and stillness. People seem to move and crawl with the tedium of a slow-motion film, and a sense of imminence is never absent. In all the churches prayers are said for rain, and god knows what strange rites are practised in private to make it come. Every night lightning will strike somewhere, and more acres of valuable timber conflagrate like tinder. Or sometimes there is just an instantaneous apparently sourceless combustion rising like some multifocal cancer in a doomed area. […]
Yesterday I arrived in Vancouver, which is like Toronto, which is like every other city in North America (with the exception of Montreal, Quebec, Victoria, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston and New York, which alone have a character of their own). Horrified by its rushing traffic, I made my way over to Vancouver Island. I must tell you of a little Leacock-like[*10] episode in Vancouver. I went into a glistening barber saloon and “hair clinic,” where eighteen determined young men shaved and clipped their anonymous clients in eighteen jewelled and gadgeted chairs. He snapped, “What style, sir?”—and I snapped back “Manhattan, please,” and when he said he hadn’t heard of it, and what was it please, I said, humbly, “short back and sides.” And then, after the cutting, without consulting me, he singed my hair, and frictioned it, and shampooed it, and vibro-massaged my scalp and neck, while I was trying to say no, no—and then perfunctorily brushed me down (I was wearing shorts and T shirt, indescribably filthy) and presented me with a bill for $4.50 which I paid numbly, with all the fight gone out of me.
Vancouver Island is different in tempo and nature from all the rest of N. America. The straits act as a valve, allowing free access to the mainland, but discouraging visits to the Island. The traffic is slower, and there is less of the tremendous pressure of supermarkets, and high-power advertising, and of the sharp and restless Motel life which Lolita has rendered so familiar to us. I came to Qualicum beach, attracted by the resemblance of its name to Colchicum, the autumn crocus, and Thudichum, the great chemist and polymath. (Clang associations, I hope not suggestive of early schizophrenia!)[*11] And I am staying at the Sunset Inn, which also attracted me by its name.
It is sunset now, and the setting sun is lighting up the hollyhocks, and the croquet hoops in the back garden, the tired happy men playing golf across the way. Inside they have a Broadwood piano, with a pile of Beethoven and Mozart sonatas atop it. A few clouds, illuminated, lie still above the atolls here and there. The Pacific Ocean is warm (about 75º) and enervating after the glacial lakes. I went fishing today with an ophthalmologist here, fellow called North, once at Marys and the National,[*12] now in practice in Victoria. He calls Vancouver Island a “little bit of heaven which got left somehow,” and I think he’s right in a way. It has forests and mountains and streams and lakes and the ocean. It has the highest standard of living perhaps anywhere in the world, and it is closeted away from the frenzy and fury which are almost synonymous with the American Way of Life. It attracts the elderly of the whole continent, but serene as it is, I don’t think it is for me. By the way, I caught six salmon; one just lets the line trail, and they bite, bite, sweet silvery beauties, which I shall have for breakfast tomorrow.
I’ll descend to California in two or three days, probably by Greyhound bus, as I gather they are particularly hard on hitchhikers, and sometimes shoot them on sight. […]
I hope and expect to find some letters from you when I look into Cook’s[*13] in San Francisco, though I imagine there may be a considerable lag. […]
I hope, Auntie Len, that you also will write to me, and tell me of your intentions and movements now you are home and entering upon your Indian Summer.[*14] […]
Please give my regards all round to family and friends, and especially Michael.[*15]
If you get a chance, I wonder if you could show this letter to Jonathan,[*16] and perhaps through him, to any other of my friends. I am so much on the move that I do not know when I shall next have the chance to type out a mammoth letter like this.
Look after yourselves.
Love,
OLIVER
* * *
—
In early August, OS arrived in San Francisco and took a room at the YMCA in the Embarcadero district, where he would stay for the next two months. It had a well-equipped gym and was known as a place for gay men to meet. He later recounted to friends that he enjoyed quite a lot of sexual encounters there; he also spent time in gay bars, where he often went by his middle name, Wolf. Naturally he did not describe those encounters to his parents (nor did he speak of his increasing experimentation with various illicit drugs). Still, there were plenty of other adventures for him to report on.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
August 24, 1960
c/o Thomas Cook, 175 Post St., San Francisco
Dear Ma and Pa,
[…] I have now been in and around San Francisco for two and a half weeks, have seen a fair amount of the city and country, visited hospitals and universities, made various enquiries and contacts. […] And after living here, I am now almost persuaded that the States in general, and California in particular, is likely to be my ultimate home, irrespective of my immediate course of action. Canada and the States are alike in providing space, affluence and professional opportunity of an order which would be almost inconceivable to me in England. You know as well as I how tight and tedious the professional ladder is in England, in neurology above all subjects: the long, wasted years as a peripatetic registrar etc. The only comparatively easy road to consultant status[*17] in England lies in psychiatry, and though I could easily use this (in England, or Canada, or the States) with the assurance of professional success, yet there is something in my temperament and training which inclines me to a more tangible subject, one in which I might less suspect myself of phoniness or indifferent standards, and one again which allowed of some experimental work of a laboratory kind. Perhaps I am deluding myself here. Perhaps I do have some therapeutic urge and ability, altho I cannot now perceive these as strong qualities in myself. In any case, the decision does not have to be made forthwith.
In comparison with Canada, the States is a country of densely packed intellectual centres. […] In so under populated a country as Canada, neurology hardly exists as a subject, whereas here, in California, there are enormous clinical-cum-experimental neurology set ups in all the major universities and a number of non-affiliated hospitals. In the States, a prodigious amount of money is directed to research, partly as a consequence of tax evasion. Fat industrial profits are propelled towards all deserving (and non-deserving) projects, in order to keep them out of the Fort Knox coffers.
And then again, California combines in itself the natural advantages and beauties of a whole continent. Climbing, skiing, desert, ocean, forest, vineyards—all lie within a day’s journey. San Francisco itself has unique natural advantages, as you probably know. The temperature gradient between the ocean and the burning interior propels a mist in and out of the city twice a day, so maintaining SF at an almost constant, and almost perfect, temperature, the year round. The city has all the cultural and intellectual assets of a huge centre like London, and yet itself has a population of less than a million, which is not expanding. It has a rich and fantastic history, which would grace a much older city. It has in itself, and is within easy range of, fantastic natural beauty of every sort.
I have put my head in at the U. of California Medical Centre, which is a triad of gigantic white buildings overlooking the Golden Gate Park, with an incomparable vista of San Francisco from the upper storeys (Neur. is very high up!), and its distant bridges, ocean, and hills. They have two neurologists there. […Also] three neurological residents, all of them weightlifters! (I always felt the two disciplines went together.) The Med. School faculty buildings were only rebuilt this year, and are a sort of Walter Mitty[*18] fantasy of what such buildings should be like. The interns are by no means overworked, having indeed only an eight-hour day, with most of their weekends off (this would cause a revolt if mentioned in the columns of the Lancet!).[*19]
I have also looked in at the Mt. Zion hospital. […] The staff are largely Jewish, tho’ the hospital is immensely popular among all sections of the population. Two thirds of the hospital’s total work is research (it has ca. 500 beds), which is as high a fraction as in any university medical school. I had a long talk with Feinstein,[*20] the assistant head in the neurosurgery (and neurology) dept. who is a brilliant if somewhat obsessional type, and watched him do some stereotactic operations (MZ is the foremost centre for these in California). He has a massive experimental setup behind him, with quantities of electronic engineers, etc., and seems to be turning out a lot of fine work. Stereotactic operations, by the way, allow one to put a lesion in a human or animal brain anywhere with a high degree of precision, and so is as valuable an experimental tool as a therapeutic one. In a way this is the best possible set up, for one is always involved with patients and therapeutic perspectives, which of course provide an endless series of experimental challenges. And as Feinstein puts it—a neurosurgical patient is a preparation which can talk.[*21] He raised the possibility of my doing what was on paper my internship at MZ, but in fact something nearer neurology and neurophysiology, and receiving a rather more respectable income than an intern.[*22] This might be very worthwhile indeed if it worked out.
Finally, I have been to Stanford Medical School, which has just moved from SF to a stunning building on the gigantic campus at Palo Alto (a pleasant township of 40,000 people, in marvellous countryside, about forty fast miles from SF). At present they have no neurological beds as such, except some purloined from the general medical side (a consequence of the recent move), but next year they will be associated with the local Veterans Administration (V.A.) hospital, which will bring them a total of 140 neurological beds, thus making Stanford the biggest neurological centre in the West. Stanford by the way has a very fine academic standing, better than UC, though has also the reputation of being very “smoochy” and snobbish, at least at the level of student selection. […]
There is a gigantic amount of red tape to exasperate and obstruct the immigrant doctor. One must submit innumerable documents, take a preliminary exam (only held quarterly, with another two-month delay for results), before one can accept an internship. On the other hand, one can be employed in a nonclinical capacity while awaiting the chance to take the exam and get results. […] I will go in person to Sacramento tomorrow to the Medical Board and try to get things in motion. If, and when, I have the machinery going, and a job lined up, then I shall start on my travels in the States if there is any further time in hand.
A final possibility is that of entering the [armed] forces here as a volunteer: minimum period two years. This cuts a lot of the red tape about citizenship etc. provides an excellent income (ca $6000 with all the perks), may be a way of doing one’s internship, and simultaneously of receiving some specialist training. If all this could be done at a military hospital in Western California […] then indeed there would be much in its favour. However, unlike the Canadian Forces, which are small and gentlemanly and to be trusted, the American forces are a gigantic and unwieldly organization, and no sort of bargaining may be possible with them.
Well, these are the prospects. Please tell me what you think of them. […]
It’s suppertime now, and the innumerable possibilities of SF culinary mastery lie before me. Deep sea bass down on Fisherman’s wharf, Japanese food, Italian, Chinese, haute cuisine, or a 3 lb. steak washed down with a gallon of light beer. For a belly-oriented type like me, SF is second to very few places in the world. As I leave the Y,[*23] I shall throw a glance in at the barber next door, who never seems to have any customers, but sits in his barber’s chair and plays the violin all day long. I shall be careful not to trip over the insensible “winos” littering the pavement, and must turn a stern face to the appeals of the alcoholic beggars who swarm the waterfront. In ten yards I can overhear as many languages. Fisherman’s Wharf it will be, in sight of the Golden Gate Bridge arched against the sunset, and the prison of Alcatraz on its island fortress, and gutters crackling with prawn and crab shells, and everywhere the sharp smell of clam juice, which (they say) is the very essence of the Pacific itself.
Please write to me on reception of this, and give my regards to all the family. […]
DON’T WORRY!
Love,
Oliver
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
September 29, 1960
Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco[*24]
Dear Ma and Pa,
I trust you are keeping well, and in good fettle for the Fast[*25] ahead. […]
I went to Yosemite National Park over the weekend, which is about 200 miles from here. After a blazing summer, the waterfalls are dry and the vegetation pretty parched. It’s a botanist’s paradise in spring and summer (I enclose, especially for Ma’s and Auntie Len’s envious delectation, a booklet on the High Sierra flowers), a climbers’ paradise in the summer, a skier’s in the winter, a geologists’ and pleasure lovers’ all the year round. Last Sunday was a day of a clarity unknown in England, and one could see the whole length of the valley, 100 miles either way. To see distant objects so clearly is so out of my experience, that the whole scene assumed an unreality, combined strangely with its extreme precision. I went into the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, and saw the “Grizzly Giant,” 110 feet in circumference, and 4000 years old, so old you feel it must be aware in a sense, if only of light, and growth, and hurt. […] No wind penetrates the big trees, and a total silence hangs inside the grove. It’s easy to see why people worshipped objects so ancient, and huge, and beautiful. The sequoia cones are quite tiny by the way, though there are some pines in California with cones a yard long. The high Sierra receives its first snow towards the end of this month.
I moved into hospital yesterday and am slowly finding my feet. They are giving me board and lodging and laundry, though I cannot receive any payment yet. But Levin[*26] will be giving me $60 a month, out of his own pocket, which should help. He’s really been very sweet about things: he said, look if you need more, just ask me. Though I’ll be pleased when I can receive a salary on a regular and normal basis.
Most of the house staff are Jewish, though their Jewishness does not extend beyond a love of chopped herring, and Jewish jokes, and passionate political arguments. It is the last of these, rising and falling in the wards, and the dining room, and the lounge, which is so different from the bland political apathy of my fellow residents in England. Everyone is very approachable, and the hospital more or less runs on first name terms. It seems to be a fairly paternalistic institution, since one can sign for free theatre and concert tickets etc. and has the run of U. Cal. and other institutions. There is a civic centre fifty yards away, with an immense floodlit swimming pool, which I shall probably be patronising frequently. The food is of high quality, attractively prepared, and unlimited in amount. This last is a potential danger, and I must rule myself with a rod of iron, otherwise I shall weigh 300 lb in three months or so. By the way, I enclose a picture of myself taken at Monterey, emerging like some hairy and overweight Venus from a pacific lagoon. Did I tell you about Monterey and Cannery Row in a previous letter or not? I spent about five days there, observing and eating marine biology.
Next week when I’m more into the swing of things, I’ll start going to the countless other sessions run into the hospital, EKG conferences and proctological seminars and various other frightening things. They certainly have a very splendid programme of postgraduate teaching, and as I mentioned, one can by reciprocity attend all the University meetings also. […]
