In 1960, Oliver SacksA 27-year-old University of Oxford graduate, he arrived in San Francisco on a Greyhound bus. Born in Cricklewood, London, Sacks spent most of his 20s training to be a doctor, but began to feel that English academic medicine was stifling and stratified. A “stiff and boring” professional learning, he thought, was the only one available to aspiring neurologists like himself.
Sacks, a young queer man with a growing interest in motorcycle leather, had other reasons for leaving. The revelation of his sexuality caused a family rift: his mother felt it made him an “abomination”. And so he sought escape across the Atlantic. America was to him the wide open west of Ansel Adams photographs; California was Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The new world promised “space, freedom, interstices in which I can live and work”. This is how we meet Oliver Sacks in Letters: as an immigrant who undertakes an internship at Mount Zion Hospital, the first step in a career on American soil that would span another five decades.
Sacks’ San Francisco years were also the beginning of his life as a writer. The city was not an arbitrary choice. As he eagerly confessed to a one-time lover, Jenö Vincze, his real motivation for traveling to California was to force a meeting with an artistic idol, the British-turned-Haight Ashbury poet Thom Gunn . Gunn’s The Sense of Movement (1957) spoke and ignited Sacks’ penchant for motorcycles. Moreover, it worked on Sacks the kind of private miracle that only poetry can: it helped decode “the chatter” of his emotional life. “There is a strange, colossally large London Jew called Wolf,” Gunn wrote to his partner in 1961, after meeting Sacks (who gave his middle name, Wolf, as a name of war when visiting the city’s gay bars show for its lycanthropic resonances). “[He] came out to be a doctor here because I live here.” Sacks shared his writing with Gunn, whom he found a relentless but tender critic, whom the poet later credited as having first impressed upon him that he had real literary talent; a defining moment for a man who would publish a dozen books.
“I am not a good correspondent,” Sacks wrote to his parents in 1961, “because I speak and write at people rather than for them.” It’s an apt summation of letters: 52 years of outgoing mail sent (or left unsent) to family, friends, scientists, writers and, later, fans and celebrities, an array of addressees as diverse as the subjects Sacks “writes about” . Unleashed in a self-described “volcanic logorrhoea” that typifies his writing style, these letters variously consider botany, etymology, entomology, geology, neurology, and literature; the conflict between xenophobia and xeniality in Star Trek; the “phantasmagoric-comic unconscious” of actor Robin Williams. Edited by Kate Edgar, who worked as Sacks’ editorial assistant for more than 20 years, Letters represent a mere fraction of the total in his archives, which span over 200,000 pages.
Many of the letters included are incomplete, with ellipses indicating gaps that our editorial logic must credit us with, even when they sometimes appear to interrupt thought-provoking lines. In a 1984 letter to Lawrence WeschlerFor example, Sacks’ conflicted musings about strike action in hospitals that could put vulnerable patients at risk feel prematurely curtailed. Despite this excision, Letters leaves one with the overwhelming impression of a brilliant and lively mind, a man whose intellectual appetite was great, and whose professional and creative passions – far removed from the self-absorbed obsessions of ‘ n pedant – first and foremost an act of outreach, the means by which he tried to communicate with others, a “love affair with the world”.
Sacks is an engaging and entertaining prose stylist—inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse—and the organization of Letters, separated into broad thematic, chronological chapters with concise editorial introductions, provides narrative momentum. The resulting book is much more engaging than the difficult reference text for Sacks specialists it could have been. It may, in fact, serve as a more affecting autobiography than his On the move (2015), which occasionally slips into sentimentality. Letters are full of profundities of the hand, moments of heightened perception that briefly unravel the more unfathomable aspects of human nature. Here he is mourning, after the death of his mother in 1972, an emotional state he considers “so different from depression: it’s so filling and real and expanding and unifying and – (it sounds like an almost blasphemous word) – nourishing”.
Letters also draws an illuminating line from Sacks’ neurological career to his unlikely rise as a best-selling author. In the late 60s, after moving to New York, Sacks treated a group of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, also known as “sleeping sickness,” with an experimental drug, L-dopa. This experience led to his second book, Awakenings (1973), who combined scientific research with storytelling through case studies of his patients’ lives and their responses to treatment – a hybrid genre that irritated his colleagues as much as it struck a chord with general readers. The literary attention that Awakenings received put Sacks on a path to public prominence.
“Briefness has never been a trait of mine,” he wrote to Mrs. Miller, a physiotherapist who helped him regain mobility after a leg injury in 1974. Abundance indeed – the instinct against excess – is all over these letters. As a 30-year-old powerlifter, Sacks often bragged to his parents about his weight, how much he could lift, the amount he ate – “I like to shake the pavement as I walk, to to separate multitudes like the prow of a ship.” At Mount Zion, special scrubs had to be made to accommodate his bulk, and he found himself in disfavor with his superiors for stealing patients’ food.
But his overconsumption was not always diet. Over the next 10 years or so, Sacks took a prodigious amount of amphetamines and psychotropic drugs—”every dose an overdose”—with one trip producing visions of the “neurological heavens” so intense that they inspired him to write his first book, Migraine (1970) to be written ). By the 80s, after Awakenings and an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show that boosted his profile, pump iron and crack pills were replaced by correspondence. “I get at least fifty or sixty letters and phone calls a day,” he told his father with the same pride he once felt after squatting 575 pounds, “and, if anything, this number is increase!”
What was Sacks trying to satiate? His drug abuse, the workaholism that eventually displaced it, speaks of the addict’s need to fill or fill a void, an attempt to stave off the unbearable loneliness that comes with a moment’s rest. And loneliness certainly runs through these pages. Sacks once felt that his existence was made bearable only by rejecting intimacy and becoming “impersonal or supra-personal”; relationships, he said, were forbidden territory for him.
Late in life, he cited internalized homophobia as the driving force behind this isolation, a heartbreaking admission as he felt temporarily liberated from this oppressive “social matrix” during that short-lived 1965 love affair with Jenö. It wasn’t until 2008, after 30 years of celibacy, that a letter exchange cute encounter with writer Bill Hayes resulted in a loving, intimate companionship, one that would last the rest of Sacks’ life. It’s a poignant but bittersweet moment that arrives at the end of Letters, the coda to this portrait of a man who, half a century earlier, had traveled the world in the hope of meeting a poet who could truly understand.
