Letters, p.6
Letters, page 6
It will be my birthday on Sunday, exactly one year since I flew from my homeland. It has, on the whole, been the best and most exciting year of my life, and one of a healthy bewilderment and discovery. But I feel old! But perhaps not too old to change.
My best love to you both—and to Auntie Len, who owes me a letter.
OLIVER
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
October 16, 1961
Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco
Dear Ma and Pa,
[…] The chief thing I have done this week has been to go to the Brain Research Institute in LA over the weekend. This enormous building was officially inaugurated—the largest neurological centre in the West, and on its way to being the best in the States—amid symposia, lectures, banquets. Grant Levin had procured me one of the coveted guest tickets.
I rode down on Friday night, along highway 33, through a lunar landscape of coccidiomyces spores piled in vast desolate dustheaps. When I got to Coalinga, in the middle of nowhere, at three in the morning, I found all the gas stations closed. There was no light anywhere. I honked my horn up and down the main street and banged on doors; no answer. The town was bewitched, or in a coma. I managed to shake a pint of gas out of petrol pump hoses, but could not force the lock on any of the pumps themselves. Then, had any of the inhabitants been awake, they might have seen a strange spectacle: an enormously bulky and muffled motorcyclist, one of Mother [sic] Zion’s favorite interns, dismantle his stethoscope and try to siphon some petrol out of the cars standing in the town square. However, I was unsuccessful, and just got mouthfuls of petrol for my pains. I tried to flag down cars, one or two passed in an hour, without success. So I went on slowly, hoping to make Blackwell’s Corner, a sort of oasis. But I ran out seven miles from it, it could have been worse, and had to push the bike for this distance. […] At last I got to L.A. and found that I had dropped one of my shoes en route. So I had to buy another pair. The conference itself was magnificent. Speakers had been invited from all over the world. […]
In the evening we had a splendid banquet at the Bel Air Country Club. Everything in LA is excessive in size and monstrousness, and Bel Air was about the limit in outrageous country clubs. I got a lot of pleasure from riding through its gilded gates on my bike still covered with dust from the desert. The meeting had a great sense of the past: the ghosts of Ramon y Cajal and Charcot and Hughlings Jackson[*60] strolling through the corridors.
Unfortunately it was so hellishly hot in LA over the weekend, the more so as I had on my best suit, complete with waistcoat and stiff collar, preposterous in a temperature of 110. For a week or so in October a burning wind comes up from the desert, properly called the Sirocco or the Santa Ana, but more expressively just THE BIG HEAT. It is a wind which drives men crazy. Crimes of rage and violence sweep over Southern California when the Sirocco blows. The traffic in LA was absolutely murderous. And it got no cooler at night: 100 all through Saturday night. On Sunday I decided that, Nobel laureates or not, I could take no more of the conference room, which was not airconditioned, and spent a lazy day down at the beach. Last night I rode back along the coast road, 101, and made LA back to SF in seven hours, which was fair going, considering how often I stopped to eat en route. The bike is well-called the Rolls Royce of motorcycles: at eighty it still has a weird silence and is completely cool and stable, so that one has supreme confidence in cruising at this speed. Whereas I always felt the Norton would either explode or just jangle itself to pieces through incessant nerve-wracking vibration. I saw a tremendous number of shooting stars, and also a small meteor, which I first took to be a rocket sent up by a ship in distress. A cosmic gala night. I suppose we must be passing through a shower of the things. I arrived back here profoundly exhausted, after three nights without sleep (for one cannot sleep when the sirocco blows) and eleven hundred miles of travelling. I hope there are not too many night calls tonight. Perhaps I could design a little cervical dilatometer which registers automatically, and so save myself the dreary business of having to check at all hours. For this is all I am in Obstetrics service: a greased finger, nothing more.[*61] They allow the interns to do nothing, nothing whatever, except circumcision and this is ridiculous because circumcision requires a good deal of judgement and experience. I refuse to do them: I’m scared stiff of cutting the whole caboodle off.
I’m at the end of the paper now, and someone is 7 cm. (what you used to call a crown) dilated […] so I must run. Please write and let me know what is happening back in London.
love,
OLIVER
P.S. I wonder if you could send me on two string vests, the ones with little arms. They don’t seem to have heard of them in America.[*62]
* * *
—
OS’s frustration with repeating an internship he had already completed in England was leavened by the prospect of moving on to a residency the following year. He had applied for a position at UCLA.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
November 13, 1961
Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco
Dear Ma and Pa,
[…] First: you will be pleased to hear that my months of miserable anxiety and maneuvering are over—the UCLA appointment has been confirmed, and I will be starting there on July 1. […]
I spent an interesting weekend boar hunting in the Santa Lucia mountains.[*63] A great sport—only we saw no boars, only an ancient spoor leading to a dried-up waterhole. However, I shot a jackrabbit. I discovered a marked relish, and an even more surprising natural ability, in the use of knife, bow-and-arrow and rifle. Knowing how timid I generally am, and astigmatic, I should be the last person in the world to enjoy such things. It must be an ancient bloodlust coming out in me. We stayed (there were five of us) with an old German couple in their ranch at the top of a mountain. It was a Paradisal place, perpetually windless and bathed in brilliant sun, with storm and fog rageing all around. Like the garden of Eden it was filled with exotic fruit trees, and, idiot that I was, I gorged myself on unripe guavas, which are supremely delicious. […]
I also got in some Scuba diving: they have great corals and underwater fishes near Monterey. I don’t know now whether to save my pennies for a gun, or a diving suit, or a flight to New York, all of which I want equally badly, and unreasonably!
On the way back, we stopped off at Santa Cruz to see an uncle of Ted’s (Ted, the weightlifting neurologist at Cal., organized the whole thing): this was a doctor, totally paralyzed by polio and living in a tank respirator, and engaged in writing a novel about the early Norse invasions of America. He was a marvellous talker, a sort of paralysed Homer. He suddenly crystallized a feeling I’ve had, incoherently, for some time: that America has everything except—a mythology. This gives things an almost moonlike desolation, an absence of human and magical intent. Yet there is so much which is the very stuff of legend, just waiting. Waiting, perhaps, for someone to compose an enormous spurious mythology of the continent. I am haunted by the idea. This seems an odd note to end on.
Love,
Oliver
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
February 4, 1962
Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco
Dear Ma and Pa,
I’m afraid it is about a fortnight since I last wrote: I have very little to write, and have been in no mood for writing in any case. One of my periodic depressions: I see myself clearly as manic-depressive now; jewel-like spasms of sharp delight and sensitivity in everything, good humour, wild hopes and ceaseless writing, alternating with long horrible periods of sloth and misery. I dearly hope that the stimulating environment of UCLA next year will diminish the depressions, and lengthen the productive and scintillating manic phases. As Orwell says (in a very depressing little book, A Clergyman’s Daughter), the devil’s subtlest weapon is the sense of futility. Almost all of us at Mount Zion, in varying degrees, are afflicted with this; it comes of having nothing of any importance to do, and no responsibility.
Travelling is my chief balm and stimulant, as music was to Saul, and I look forward with enormous pleasure to taking off for Mexico, in four days’ time (I will send you postcards en route). I wish I had longer: one week’s vacation in the fifty-two is pretty minimal. The weather has been remarkable here: it was bitterly cold two weekends ago, and actually snowed a bit; the streets were full of children who had obviously never seen snow before, and were making their first tentative snowballs, by a sort of instinct. Now the whole state is gripped by a dense fog, and there have been hideous road-accidents everywhere; I have hardly ventured out myself. The weather should be lovely at this time in Mexico—never hotter than 70 by day, or colder than 40 by night. The roads are treacherous, and I will do all my travelling by day. […]
Love to all at home,
Oliver
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
February 23, 1962
Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco
Dear Ma and Pa:
I hope you are both well, out of the cold weather and the smallpox scare. […]
To go through various points you raise […]. Sorry you found “too many four-letter words” in my trucking interlude![*64] But I could not, as you imagine, give verisimilitude to my picture without using their dialogue: and of course the four-letter words mean nothing—they are merely verbal condiments. […]
I must tell you something more of Mexico: I penetrated about five hundred miles below the Arizona border and then turned back, and came back along dirt roads, through tiny squalid villages where the inhabitants would stand and stare and gabble as I went past on my extraordinary mechanical contrivance—the like of which they had probably never seen before! What with my red shirt, and my beard (have I told you—all the interns are growing beards for our centennial this year!), many of them would shout: see, Castro!! as I went past. Their poverty is inconceivable by European standards: you see men and pigs scavenging on the same garbage heaps. The whole population is pitifully thin and emaciated: I felt ashamed of my own bloated repletion while I was there. And in the streets of Culiacan I saw a corpse lying in the gutter, probably dead of starvation, with nobody paying any attention to it. When it starts smelling too high, they will collect it and throw it on the rubbish dump. This should give you some idea of the squalor which exists in Mexico. Much of this could be alleviated by major schemes of physical help (housing, roads, irrigation, mechanization etc) and, above all, education. However, all the government’s money is spent on a handful of show-places, like Mexico City, Guadalajara, Mazatlan etc. There exist a small number of enormously wealthy Mexicans, whose wealth is flaunted in the middle of all this gruelling poverty. You would think that here are the ingredients of revolution: but no! So far as I could comprehend, in my poor halting Spanish, there is a universal sense of passiveness, of laissez-faire: it is warm, the sun shines, the children play, there is always manana. There is an aspect of this attitude which is very pleasant: you see the men lying in the fields doing nothing, sleeping with their sombreros over their faces; it is all so picturesque, so romantic, so relaxing. California seems full of gibbering maniacs in comparison! They are an amazingly kindly and hospitable people: I was many times invited into their little shacks as I passed through the villages. Naturally I could not refuse the little food they gave me—though I suspect I may have become a carrier of Entamoeba in consequence. The children loved the bike: they would clamber onto it, sometimes two or three at a time, and I would take them along to the next village, eight or ten miles away, and then they would run back home!
Luckily my tires stood up to all this punishment, although this set have lasted barely five thousand miles in all. I had a lot of trouble getting back into the States: I had forgotten to re-register as a resident alien, and had to swear on the bible that this was a bona-fide mistake: they rifled through all my luggage, and even all my pockets (while I stood naked), impounded some tetracycline, codeine comp. and benzedrine I had in my emergency kit, and then fined me for not declaring them. Oh yes, a good time was had by all! I emerged however with my Mexican purchases, a gallon of fiery tequila (for my friends: I can’t stand the stuff), a Mexican blanket, and a guitar (which cost thirty bob new!).
And now I’m back in harness again.
Love,
OLIVER
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
March 25, 1962
Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco
Dear Ma and Pa,
[…] I took a train down to LA last Friday (to save my legs for the contest); a beautiful journey, through much wilder country than the road goes. I had forgotten what a very pleasant way of travelling train is; so few people use them here. […]
The [weightlifting] contest went well, though not quite as I wished. I and my chief contender took first place jointly, and we both squatted with 575 lb. which was substantially above the old record (515 lb.). So I shouldn’t complain, because I am now one of the (joint) Californian champs. However I just missed 600, by the skin of my teeth, which breaks my heart, for I have been obsessed with this figure for years, and consider that it more or less separates the men from the boys. I feel that if there hadn’t been so much messing around at the contest (in which one “cools off,” physically and mentally) I might have got it. I am determined to reach, or surpass, this figure in the near future, so I must (regrettably) keep my weight up for a little while yet. If I could do 650, I would be the 10th man in the world to reach this figure, but I think this would be too much to hope for in the few weeks of eating and training I have left, before the Pacific Coast contests on May 5th.
I hope to send on to you (and indeed delayed this letter in the hope that I would have received them) some photos etc. of the contest, and also of Los Angeles, which I took myself. In black and white this time—colour is much too expensive for general use, at least on an intern’s income.
After our excessively rainy winter (three times the usual amount), I think Spring is getting the upper hand here.
However, to counteract this, I am now back on surgery for my remaining eight weeks, and this (as I have said many times before) is as hellish as one can imagine. I am happy to say that I have given the department a great deal of trouble first by my size, for they have had to get scrub-suits made to measure for me, and second by my beard, which in its exuberance cannot be covered by a regular mask. Since they suspect it of harbouring staphylococci, I am wearing for the moment a sort of reversed snood, until they can figure out a new sort of mask. Anyhow, this cuts down on my attendances in the operating theatre, which is all to the good. […]
Best regards to Michael, David and Lillie, Auntie Len, and the kids.[*65]
Love
OLIVER
Skip Notes
*1 OS writes in Uncle Tungsten and On the Move of his deep attachment to one of his mother’s sisters, his Aunt Helena, known as “Len” or “Lennie.” In On the Move, he also quoted some excerpts from this lengthy letter.
*2 Canadian Pacific Railroad.
*3 OS was sometimes prone to exaggeration, and this list of breakfast items might seem a good example, but he did overdo, especially at breakfast buffets, even into his seventies.
*4 A boarding school in the English Midlands to which OS and his brother Michael were evacuated during the Second World War.
*5 James Hilton’s hugely popular 1933 novel Lost Horizon was set in a remote paradisal valley he called Shangri-La. (Lost Horizon would become one of the first mass-market paperbacks published in the United States, in 1939.)
*6 Golders Green, a neighborhood in London near where OS grew up. Unclear what the term “Golders Green figure” means, though it may connote Jewishness.
*7 Jonathan Miller, one of OS’s closest friends from their school days, was apt to imitate many famous (or otherwise) figures, including British philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, whom he likely encountered during his studies at Cambridge.
*8 Presumably he means “apocryphal.”
*9 Another one of OS’s literary touchstones was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
*10 Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), a famous Canadian humorist.
*11 Clang associations, or associating words by sound rather than meaning, are often simply playful but occasionally may suggest a thought disorder such as schizophrenia. OS was fond of pairs or lists of word permutations; these were often based on their etymological roots but frequently on their sounds (if he could combine both factors, so much the better).
*12 Two London hospitals.
*13 Travel agencies like Thomas Cook and American Express, in those days, also served as poste restante locations.
*14 Len had recently retired from her career as headmistress of the Jewish Fresh Air Home and School near Manchester and had returned to London to enjoy her “Indian summer.”
*15 OS’s brother Michael Sacks, four years his elder. Though OS did write separately to Michael during this period, none of those letters survive.
*16 Miller.
*17 In England, a registrar is a young doctor with specialty training, somewhat equivalent to a resident in the United States; consultant status is roughly analogous to the more senior position of “attending physician.”
