Letters, p.8
Letters, page 8
Love,
Oliver
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
October 24, 1962
UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
Dear Ma and Pa,
I was going to write last night, but thought I’d wait and see what happened off Cuba first.[*5] So I drank a pint of rum toddy instead, and decided the first nuclear missile would find me cheerful. When I got to hospital this morning, I saw that all the clocks had stopped at six o’clock, a portent if ever there was one. However, the ships have retreated, so I suppose the immediate risk is over now. An agonising choice, with a fearful gamble at one end, and—I think—a great moral victory as the outcome. It even got through to the great American public, and briefly vied with the World Series Baseball in the attention it drew: the streets full of anxious (and expectant, and—who knows?—eager) citizens, hanging outside the plate-glass windows of television shops, hypnotized, and uncannily silent. […]
I had a phone call from Jessie Fox[*6] last Thursday. I had half been thinking of riding up to San Francisco for the weekend, and her call decided me. So we went up (Mel, who shares the flat with me, has now got a BMW of his own), and I met her on Sunday afternoon, and we talked our heads off about everything. She has a tremendous fondness and admiration for you both: “such luvly people!” she keeps on saying. […]
Mel and I [had] made a late start on Saturday, and arrived in SF very hungry and perished with cold. But we called on Anne, a nurse I knew pretty well from Mt. Zion, and she made us an enormous kedgeree of rice and fish (this was around one in the morning), and we slept like logs on her floor. Sunday was one of those perfect October days which only SF can concoct. Breathtakingly clear and sunny, though cold, yet windless, and with great woolly banks of fog wreathing the Bridges and the Bay, and the sailing-boats dodging in and out of it, playing blind man’s buff. In the afternoon, we all went over to the von Bonins[*7] in their little house high above the redwoods of Mill Valley. They seem to live in a Shangri-La of perpetual sunlight up there, high above the fogs and discontents of the rest of us. An idyllic scene: she playing Bach on the piano, as we came in, and he bent over a microscope. They are both nearer eighty than seventy, I imagine, but irrepressibly active, and curious, and young in spirit. Mrs. Von B tells me she had a letter from you. It was very nice of you to write.
We left SF around midnight on Sunday, and drove back through the night, each wearing four pullovers under our leathers. Though it wasn’t so cold in fact. I love driving back through the night in California, when the stars are so clear, and the Milky Way lies like a great arc above one. We were back by seven: moderate time for over 400 miles, just a steady average around 65.
I have received the first parcel of books from E. Joseph.[*8] The flat is beginning to look civilized now. I think too that I may buy a piano, a rather huge and ugly whitewood upright, which nobody will buy for this reason, but which has a lovely tone and perfect action: for $150. It would cost that to hire a piano for a year in any case. So I can get back to my beloved Bach: and perhaps a little Brahms too. Otherwise I am pretty busy. I have finished the abstract which has been sent in now: touch wood, there might be a chance of going to NY to read the paper at the Academy.[*9] I have been elected a member of the LA Society of Neurology. And I have to present a patient to the venerable Houston Merritt[*10] on Friday, which scares the hell out of me. So the days and the weeks pass, and one lives one’s life without knowing it.
Regards to all,
Oliver
* * *
—
With some time off from his job at UCLA for the Christmas holidays, OS made a brief visit to Jonathan and Rachel Miller in New York. In the meantime, his parents had written to tell him that his cousin Abba Eban,[*11] known to the family by his given name, Aubrey, was in Los Angeles.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
January 7, 1963
[Los Angeles]
Dear Ma and Pa,
I am very late in writing. A variety of things: going to NY [to visit Jonathan Miller], starting my new job here, not having a typewriter etc. etc.
First let me thank you for your long combined letter which came a couple of days ago; let me thank Michael for the H.G. Wells short stories—I shall write to him very soon.
I’ll deal first with your letter and the points you raise, and then with the other news in general. It was of course marvellous speaking to you all over the phone—although, paradoxically, the line was not nearly as loud and clear as when I phoned you from San Francisco. Jonathan is developing an outrageous parody of transatlantic phone calls (everyone shouting: hallo! how are you? yes, I’m fine. I say, FINE! And how are you? eh? YOU. Oh. I’m fine. What? I said I’m FINE TOO. etc.) […]
No, I did not know Aubrey was here. By the way, a little episode which will amuse you. As I was driving to the airport in New York, the cabby said, out of the blue: I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of him, but you have a voice just like Abba Eban! I don’t know whether he caught the common Oxford-Cambridge brogue, or whether his ear had detected some subtle genetic identity between us.
My piano is coming this week. I looked up an old friend in New York (a piano teacher) and he has given me his series of patent exercises to help get back the feel of the keyboard, after my long lay-off.
SCUBA means self-contained underwater diving apparatus (i.e. compressed air). Here is a newspaper clipping from last Saturday’s paper, showing me and three of my colleagues being instructed at the pool, in the Y. Fame at last! I will be going down with the group to Baja Mexico this weekend, below Ensenada, to scuba dive. I hope to get, first chance to use a spear gun there. The visibility is fantastic—you can see more than a hundred feet down.
As for my trips: I stayed in Chicago a couple of days: enough to be best man for Pete Weinberg and his wife (he was at mt zion) and renew acquaintance with them. They’re a sweet pair. It was icily cold and blizzardy there (they call Chicago the Windy City). Then I went on to NY.
Rachel met me at the airport, because Jonathan had a bug and a fever and was in bed. I spent a marvellous week with them. They have a tremendously full and happy life. I wish I could be near them for more of the time.
Most days I just walked about the city. After London, New York is incomparable. Wild electric beauty, crowds rushing in and out of taxis, theatres, delicatessens (I put back 12 lb.!), skyscrapers, ghettos, everything packed into the tiny extent of Manhattan island. Eight swarming millions. It makes Los Angeles seem like a vacuum, a huge inane senseless mess of people, with none of the culture and vitality of New York. But then, New York is packed into the crowded eastern seaboard: no hills, oceans, deserts, anything like California. I could not give up California to live in New York. The only solution would be to have New York in California. I visited lots of museums with them, went to parties, and meals, and talked and talked (Jonathan has a mind like an atom bomb), and even baby sat.[*12] I hardly had time to sleep. […]
I’ve got to run now. I’ll write again very soon. […]
Oliver
* * *
—
OS’s brother Marcus, a doctor (three of the four Sacks boys had become physicians, like their parents), had immigrated to Australia after the war. He was ten years older than OS, and thus had been away at school during much of Oliver’s youth, so they had barely spent time together as adults. In early 1963, on his way from Sydney to visit their parents in London, Marcus stopped in Los Angeles for a few days to see his youngest brother.
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
March 25, 1963
UCLA Medical Center
Dear Ma and Pa,
This is a considerably overdue letter, but by now Marcus will be with you, and relaying all the news firsthand. I’m glad the stuff arrived. I was delighted to get Michael’s letter, and will be replying to him in due course. He certainly seems to have devoured the books!
Last week was one of happy pandemonium, trying to be a resident at the VA,[*13] to continue my paper,[*14] and to be with Marcus as much as possible: three lives in one. Extraordinary how akin Mark[*15] and I are in many ways: the more so as we have had so little contact with one another during our lives. My attempts to show him Los Angeles were partly foiled by incessantly being lost: we must have travelled hundreds of miles, in the aggregate, in the wrong direction.[*16] One of the residents lent me his little Volkswagen to drive around for the week, which worked out splendidly, since Marcus (inexplicably) would have nothing to do with the bike.
I realize that I am (genetically) almost exclusively paternal. Marcus has a good dash of your blood also, Ma. He is, for example, a great deal tidier and more systematic than I: he immediately took me and my flat in hand, and made a pretty good attempt at metamorphosing the pair of us. Perhaps he is right in a way: my grossness etc. is not a charming attribute at this age. And I can’t expect to have the privileges of a large toy-bear in perpetuity. I took Mark to hospital, and he met Herrmann, and Markham,[*17] and a few of the residents. He was very popular with them all: and our iron-hearted blasphemous Irish staff-nurse Miss Fogarty, conceived, I suspect, a passion for him. “Tis a pity he’s so young!” she has been muttering today!
We went up to Mt. Wilson, or would have gone up had I not lost the way. We went to Marineland, after going forty miles off course, and Mark discovered a deep empathic feeling for the rollicking cetaceans there. We ate very well at a variety of restaurants, and both increased a few lbs. […]
The week went in a fever: over almost as soon as it started. Perhaps our next meetings will be over the Barrier Reef.
I must hurry back to my flaming paper now. I am beginning to hate the word myoclonus! I gave a rehearsal or preliminary version of the talk at our Clinical meeting here last Saturday, and it went down well, and controversially. Some of my most crucial lab. results will come in only a week or so before the actual meeting, so I must have two versions ready: one with argument X, and one with its contrary. Like the obituaries one prepares in advance!
That’s me lot for now—
Love—
Oliver
To Elsie and Samuel Sacks
April 25, 1963
Hotel Leamington, Minneapolis, MN
Dear Ma and Pa,
I know you have the utmost difficulty deciphering my writing, so I will write briefly now, and at length when I am back in LA.
Read the [myoclonus] paper today, or, rather, put it in my pocket and just talked.[*18] Went very well (though perhaps my “British” accent disarmed them) and was followed by a lot of vigorous discussion. The Press was even there—both medical and lay—so may have a little write up. I enclose a page from the programme, with the preliminary abstract written several months ago.
This is really a marvellous meeting—the whole of American Neurology is here (bronzed from Miami, teeth chattering from Alaska); I have met dozens of interesting people. Things are laid on with a shovel: here I am ensconced on the ninth floor of Minneapolis’ plushiest hotel, complete with bath plus bidet (so useful), television, escritoire, ankle deep carpet, and able, with an idle movement of my hand, to command an opulent breakfast in bed, or have my suit pressed. A lovely change! For a little while.
We all went this evening (300 of us, in five monstrous buses) to “Ye olde oak inne” (built 1957) on the shores of Lake Minnetonka (where Hiawatha wept for his beloved), were fed on roast ox and venison roasted whole on giant barbecues, and then herded in to see a charming old comedy, rather on the lines of Arsenic and Old Lace—thoroughly amateurish, and uproarious. Splendid evening!
The journey here is a story in itself. Came on the “California Zephyr,” which is the last and perhaps the most magnificent of a dying breed, the leisurely cross-country train. (Everyone flies now.) Sitting up in the “Vistadome” you can see 360° all round you, and are so insulated from the usual noise and vibration of a train, that you seem to be floating along in silence, about fifteen feet above the fields. You must travel the US like this one day. We climbed right up to 10,000 ft. in the Colorado Rockies, and needed four locomotives to lug us along. Air incredibly sharp and exhilarating—I’ve never been so high.
And the foods on the train! Nobody buys train food—far too expensive. There were Italians with enormous pizzas, and Americans with hamburgers and thermoses of coffee, and Chinese with weird concoctions, and me with pumpernickel and garlic würst, all guzzling in the same compartment. A great cultural education!
That’s me lot for now. I’ll probably find a letter from you in LA, and will write from there. Is Marc still with you, or where now? My love to Mike and Auntie Len,
yrs,
OLIVER
* * *
—
During the summer of 1963, Mel moved out of the Venice Beach apartment he shared with OS. The two would remain in touch until the 1980s, frequently corresponding and occasionally visiting each other. But Mel’s departure was a blow for OS: as he described in On the Move, he had romantic and erotic feelings for Mel, and they had spent much of their free time together, talking about books and marine biology, and exploring the West Coast. OS resolved never to live with someone again, and he decided to move to a house in Topanga Canyon, whose winding scenic roads he would have known well from roaming around LA on his motorcycle.
To Jonathan and Rachel Miller
August 21, 1963
UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
Dear Jonathan and Rachel,
[…] It was marvellous speaking to you again on the phone a couple of weeks back. It solves so many problems, just dialling. I didn’t have time to collect my thoughts—I thought it would take a few minutes to get through, but I was talking to you within 30 seconds of dialling.[*19]
I am constantly reading you or about you, and am overjoyed at the incredible opportunities opening out in every direction. I hope you will soon find the leisure and incentive to write a book, innumerable books—for incessant flittering in magazines, though it’s a great way to start (didn’t Trilling[*20] and Wilson[*21] etc. all start this way) may finally be rather destructive, and also tend to make you static in a way. I hope that when the Show is over you will be able to resist some of the commitments and temptations which will come your way, and get down to something “big.” You are wonderfully intelligent, but you have come to a time for major formulations, above the level of sentence or review. (Rereading this paragraph, it sounds odiously condescending. I should be one to speak?)
As I mentioned, I shall shortly be moving into a small house in Topanga; it is the middle of wild mountainous country and a mile from the nearest neighbour. A few minutes drive from the City. The Ocean ten minutes away. Plenty of room. I hope I can persuade you to spend a few days or weeks up here: time to collect your thoughts, dash off a monograph on Hughlings Jackson, and see something of Monsterville, Horroropolis or Faecal City[*22] (variously named). It would be criminal of you to go back to England without seeing something of the country: the South, the mid-West and the West Coast, at the very least. If you have time, travel by train. They are superb, uncrowded, leisurely, and almost extinct.
Myself: I’m in Neuropathology for a few months: slicing brains, peering at slides. Satisfied with fossil cells, ignoring our colleagues in the electron microscopy lab. I shrug my shoulders, like Gimpel:[*23] who is to say how many removes we are from reality? I find myself increasingly fascinated with degenerative brain disease (lipidoses, Alz., Jacob-Creutzfeldt, Canavan’s, etc. etc.). I see so many, and almost none of them are diagnosed in life. People don’t seem to be aware of how common these things are, how characteristic their presentations, how easily diagnosed in life. I have the material for half a dozen isolated papers, but am now wondering, ambitiously, whether I might not bring in my interest in the myoclonic syndromes etc. and attempt a monograph on degenerative brain disease. There has not really been such a thing, with the range and scope I am considering, for over fifty years. I realize increasingly, as you have of yourself, that I am purely an armchair scientist. I hate “research.” On the other hand, I can rummage through a library, assimilate a huge variety of stuff, classify it, tabulate it, analyse it, talmudically, and spew it out in Jamesian prose.[*24]
By the way my paper has been accepted by Neurology, and should be out in a couple of months or so. The original was 20,000 words too long and I had to revamp it completely. Herrmann cut out all my semicolons, commas and dashes, Aguilar (these are my co-authors) my wild images and metaphors. So it’s sort of dull now. I will send you a copy, my first-born, when it comes out.
I have become huge and oedematous once again. Psychologically, it is difficult for me to stay at a normal size. I love to shake the pavement as I walk, to part crowds like the prow of a ship. I shall make a final try this year for a world’s record in the Squat (want to do 750), and then stop messing around. I am becoming a mass of chronic injuries. Los Angeles is full of decayed weightlifters. Sheppard, world mid-heavy, a bloated alcoholic; Ashman, embittered, tubercular; Berger, imprisoned for rape; Ahrens, a grotesque psychopath.[*25] My ex-idols. Moral corpses.
Sexually, I have retired. My motivation, never great, has diminished to vanishing. I am fat, balding, elderly.[*26] There is no point staying around town. I am therefore ready to become a hermit in Topanga, and devote myself to Nature, my iguana and my milch-goat, and the typewriter. Incidentally, what do you think of James Baldwin? […]
