On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

  I mentioned Friedman’s threats to my parents, hoping for their support, but my father, in what I felt was a rather cowardly way, said, “You had better not anger this man—he could ruin your life.” So I suppressed my feelings for many months; these were among the worst months of my life. I continued seeing patients in the migraine clinic, and then finally, in June of 1968, I decided I could not bear it any longer. I made an arrangement with the janitor to let me into the clinic at night. Between midnight and three in the morning, I would pull out my own notes and copy what I could laboriously by hand. I then told Friedman that I wanted to take a long holiday in London, and he immediately demanded, “Are you going back to that book of yours?”

  I said, “I have to.”

  “It’ll be the last thing you do,” he said.

  I went back to England in a state of trepidation, literally quivering, and a week later I got a telegram from him firing me. This made the quivering worse, but then, suddenly, I had a completely different feeling. I thought, “This ape is no longer on my shoulders. I am free to do what I want.”

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  Now I was free to write, but I also had an intense, literal, almost crazy feeling of an impending deadline. I was dissatisfied with my 1967 manuscript and decided to rewrite the book. It was the first of September, and I said to myself, “If I do not have the finished manuscript in Faber’s hands by September 10, I shall have to kill myself.” And under this threat, I started writing. Within a day or so, the feeling of threat had disappeared, and the joy of writing took over. I was no longer using drugs, but it was a time of extraordinary elation and energy. It seemed to me almost as though the book were being dictated, everything organizing itself swiftly and automatically. I would sleep for just a couple of hours a night. And a day ahead of schedule, on September 9, I took the book to Faber & Faber. Their offices were in Great Russell Street, near the British Museum, and after dropping off the manuscript, I walked over to the museum. Looking at artifacts there—pottery, sculptures, tools, and especially books and manuscripts, which had long outlived their creators—I had the feeling that I, too, had produced something. Something modest, perhaps, but with a reality and existence of its own, something that might live on after I was gone.

  I have never had such a strong feeling, a feeling of having made something real and of some value, as I did with that first book, which was written in the face of such threats from Friedman and, for that matter, from myself. Returning to New York, I felt a sense of joyousness and almost blessedness. I wanted to shout, “Hallelujah!” but I was too shy. Instead, I went to concerts every night—Mozart operas and Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert—feeling exuberant and alive.

  During those excited, exalted six weeks or so in the fall of 1968, I kept on writing, thinking I might add to the migraine book a much more detailed description of the geometric patterns that may be seen in a visual aura and some speculation about what might be going on in the brain. I sent these excited addenda to William Gooddy, an English neurologist who had written a lovely foreword to the book. And Gooddy said, “No—leave it. The book is fine as it is. These are thoughts which you will return to again and again in the coming years.”4 I am glad that he protected the book against my inordinacy and exuberance, which I think had become almost manic by that point.

  I worked hard with my editor to arrange the illustrations and the bibliography, and everything was ready by the spring of 1969. But when 1969 and then 1970 passed without publication, I felt increasingly frustrated and furious. Finally, I got a literary agent, Innes Rose, and he put some pressure on the publishers, who finally brought the book out in January of 1971 (although the imprint on the title page says 1970).

  I went to London for its publication. I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, “You’re in the papers.” There was a very nice essay-review in the paper which called Migraine “balanced, authoritative, brilliant,” or something of the sort. But so far as my father was concerned, this made no difference; I had committed a grave impropriety, if not a criminal folly, by being in the papers. In those days, one might be struck off the Medical Register in England for any indulgence in “the four As”: alcoholism, addiction, adultery, or advertising; my father thought that a review of Migraine in the general press might be seen as advertising. I had gone public, made myself visible. He himself always had, or believed he had, a “low profile.” He was known to and beloved by his patients, family, and friends, but not to a wider world. I had crossed a boundary, transgressed, and he feared for me. This coincided with feelings I had had myself, and in those days I often misread the word “publish” as “punish.” I felt that I would be punished if I published anything, and yet I had to; this conflict almost tore me apart.

  For my father, having a good name, shem tov, being respected by others, was all-important—more important than any particular worldly success or power. He was modest, even self-deprecatory, about himself. He downplayed the fact that he was, among other things, a remarkable diagnostician; specialists would often send him their most puzzling cases, knowing that he had an uncanny ability to come up with unexpected diagnoses.5 But he felt secure and quietly happy in his own work, his own place in the world, the good reputation and name he bore. He hoped that all his sons, whatever we did, would also earn good names for ourselves and not dishonor the name of Sacks.

  Gradually, my father, who had been so alarmed when he saw the review in The Times, started to be reassured when he saw good notices in the medical press, too; after all, the British Medical Journal and The Lancet had been established in the nineteenth century by doctors, for doctors. I think he started to feel, at this point, that I must have written a decent book and done the right thing persevering with it, even though it had cost me my job (and perhaps, if Friedman’s power was commensurate with his threats, any other neurological jobs in America).

  My mother liked the book from the start, and for the first time in many years I felt my parents were on my side, allowing that their crazy, renegade son, after years of misbehavior and folly, was now on the right clinical road—that there might be some good in me after all.

  My father, who, in a joking, self-deprecating way, used to speak of himself as “the husband of the eminent gynecologist Elsie Landau” or “Abba Eban’s uncle,” now started to call himself “the father of Oliver Sacks.”6

  I think that I may have underestimated my father as he underestimated himself. I was astonished and deeply moved, some years after his death, when the Chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks (no relation to our family), wrote to me:

  I knew your late father. There were times when we sat together in shul. He was a true tzaddik—I thought of him as one of the…thirty-six “hidden righteous” whose goodness sustains the world.

  Even now, many years after his death, people come up to me, or write to me, speaking of my father’s kindness, saying that they (or their parents or their grandparents) were patients of his during the seventy years he was in practice. Others, unsure, ask if I am related to Sammy Sacks, as everyone called him in Whitechapel. And I am happy and proud to be able to say yes.

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  When Migraine came out, I got a couple of rather puzzled letters from colleagues asking why I had published earlier versions of some of the chapters under the pseudonym A. P. Friedman. I wrote back, saying I had done nothing of the sort and that they should address their question to Dr. Friedman in New York. Friedman gambled foolishly on my not publishing the book, and when I did publish it, he must have realized he was in trouble. I never said a word to him, and I never saw him again.

  I think Friedman had delusions of ownership, a feeling that not only did he own the whole subject of migraine but that he owned the clinic and everyone who worked there and was therefore entitled to appropriate their thoughts and their work. This painful story—painful on both sides—is not an uncommon one: an older man, a father fig
ure, and his youthful son-in-science find their roles reversed when the son starts to outshine the father. This happened with Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday—Davy first giving every encouragement to Faraday, then trying to block his career. It happened, too, with Arthur Eddington, the astrophysicist, and his brilliant young protégé Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. I am no Faraday or Chandrasekhar, and Friedman was no Davy or Eddington, but I think the same deadly dynamic was at work, at a much humbler level.

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  Helena Penina Landau, my Aunt Lennie, was born in 1892, two years before my mother. The thirteen children of my grandfather and his second wife were all close to one another and exchanged frequent letters when distance separated them, but there was a special closeness between Lennie and my mother that lasted throughout their lives.

  Four of the seven sisters—Annie, Violet, Lennie, and Doogie—founded schools.7 (My mother, Elsie, became a doctor, one of the first female surgeons in England.) Lennie had been a schoolteacher in the East End of London before she founded the Jewish Fresh Air School for Delicate Children in the 1920s. (“Delicate” could mean anything from autism to asthma or simply “nerviness.”) The school was located in Delamere Forest in Cheshire, and since saying “the Fresh Air Home and School” or “JFAS” was cumbersome, we all called the school “Delamere” instead. I loved visiting it, mingling with the “delicate” children; they did not look too delicate to me. Every child (even I, a visitor) was given a square yard of ground surrounded by a low wall of stones in which we were free to plant whatever we wished. I loved botanizing with my aunt or her fellow teachers in Delamere Forest—the horsetails especially stay in my memory—and swimming in the little, shallow pond of Hatchmere (“Hatchmere of blessed memory,” as my aunt once wrote, long after leaving Delamere). In the dreadful war years when I was evacuated to Braefield, I passionately longed to be at Delamere instead.

  Lennie retired in 1959 after nearly forty years at Delamere, and towards the end of 1960 she found a small flat in London, but by that time I had left for Canada and the States. Four or five letters passed between us in the 1950s, but it was only when an ocean lay between us that we started to write long, frequent letters to each other.

  Lennie had sent me two letters in May of 1955—the first in response to my sending her a copy of Seed, a short-lived magazine (it expired after one issue) which a few friends and I had put together in my third year at Oxford.

  “I am much enjoying Seed,” Lennie wrote, “and like its whole format—the cover design, the luxurious paper, the lovely print, and the feeling for words that all you contributors have, whether grave or gay…. Will you be dismayed when I say how gloriously young (and of course vital) you all are.”

  This letter, like all her letters, opened with “Darling Bol” (occasionally “Boliver”), whereas my parents, more soberly, would write “Dear Oliver.” I did not feel she used the word “Darling” lightly; I felt very loved by her, and I loved her intensely too, and this was a love without ambivalence, without conditionality. Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.

  She would send me postcards when she traveled. “Here I am basking in brilliant sunshine in Grieg’s garden,” she wrote in 1958, “looking down at a magical fjord. No wonder he was inspired to make music. (What a pity you’re not here. There are a number of pleasant young men in the party…we’re a quite civilized bunch of mixed ages and sexes.)”

  Coincidentally, I too went to Norway in 1958 and stayed on a tiny island called Krokholmen in Oslo fjord (where a friend of mine, Gene Sharp, had a little house). “When I got your idyllic card from Krokholmen,” Lennie wrote, “I wished I could have come and been Man Friday to your Robinson Crusoe.” She ended her letter by wishing me “all that’s splendid for your finals in December.”

  —

  Nineteen sixty was a year of profound change for both of us. Lennie left Delamere after heading the school for nearly forty years, and I left England. I was twenty-seven and she was sixty-seven, but both of us felt we were embarking on a new life. Lennie decided on a leisurely trip around the world before settling in London, and I was already in Canada when I got her letter from her ship, the Strathmore.

  “We get to Singapore tomorrow,” she wrote. “For a couple of days [after leaving Perth], besides disporting dolphins, we had magnificent albatrosses following us…wonderfully graceful, dipping and rising in their flight, with a tremendous wingspan.”

  In October, when I had started working in San Francisco, she wrote, “I was delighted to get your letter…you certainly seem to have found a more satisfying outlet for your restless and searching spirit…. I do miss you.” Conveying a message from my mother, she added, “Her favorite indoor sport is still packing parcels for you!”

  In February of 1961, Lennie wrote of a recurrent problem with my brother Michael: “I have never seen Michael as alarming as at this time, and to my self-disgust, my pity changed to revulsion and fear, and your mother’s fierce protection somehow suggested (although I hoped my feelings didn’t come through) that everybody was out of step except Michael.”

  Lennie had been very fond of Michael when he was a boy; like Auntie Annie, she admired his precocious intellect and would bring him whatever books he desired. But now my parents, she felt, were denying the gravity—and danger—of the situation. “In the last weeks before he went back to Barnet [a psychiatric hospital] I feared for their lives. What a pathetic, blighted life.” He was thirty-two.

  After much searching—rents were high in London, and Lennie had never been able to save much (“Like you, money slips through my fingers”)—Lennie had found a place in Wembley: “I think you’ll like this little flat of mine. I like having my own home, and now am partly compensated for having lost Delamere. As I write, the almond trees outside my window are in bloom, there are crocuses, snowdrops and some early daffodils, and even a chaffinch pretending that Spring is here.”

  Going to plays was much easier now that she was in London, she wrote. “Looking forward to going to Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker tomorrow evening…. These new young writers haven’t the polished and rounded phrases of my generation, but they’ve got something real to say, and they say it with vigour.” She was enjoying, too, the rising generation of great-nephews and great-nieces, as she had with my generation—especially my brother David’s children.

  —

  In May of 1961, I sent her the manuscript of “Canada: Pause, 1960,” drawing on my travels across Canada, and another journal (“99”) about a night ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. These were in a sense my first “pieces”—self-conscious and precious in tone, but pieces which I hoped might be published one day.

  “I received your amazing excerpts from your journals,” Len wrote. “I found the whole thing breathtaking. I was suddenly conscious that I was gasping physically.” I had not shown these pieces to anyone else but Thom Gunn, and Auntie Len’s enthusiasm, not unmixed with criticism, was crucially important to me.

  Lennie was especially fond of Jonathan Miller and his wife, Rachel, as they were of her. Jonathan, she wrote, “remains the same unspoilt, simple, complex, brilliant, lovable, untidy genius—like you…. We had a long jaw together one afternoon when we were both at Mapesbury…. How he gets into his one life all that he does is incredible.”

  She enjoyed the photographs of California I sent. Riding far afield on my motorbike, always with a camera, I sent her photographs of California landscapes. “What lovely pictures,” she wrote. “So extraordinarily like the Grecian scenery I saw during my tantalizing brief visit on my way home from Australia…. Be careful on that steed of yours!”

  Len liked “Travel Happy” when I sent it to her early in 1962 but thought I was too free with the truckers’ “fucks” and “shits.” I found these exotic, very American—in England, we never went beyond “bugger”—but Len thought them “boring when written so frequently.” />
  In November of 1962, she wrote, “Your mum has begun to operate again [she had fractured a hip earlier in the year] which delights her, and she no longer feels frustrated. Your Pop is his same lovable, crazy, untidy self, leaving little bits of kindness in the shape of specs, syringes, notebooks and so on wherever he goes. And eager and willing hands gather them up and deliver them, as if it were the greatest honour in the world.”

  Lennie was thrilled that I was presenting a paper at a neurology meeting—my first sally into academia—but “not thrilled that you’re working up to an enormous weight again—you’re such a good-looking bloke when you’re normal.”

  I mentioned to her, a couple of months later, that I had been in a depression. “I know we all suffer them at times,” Len wrote. “Well, don’t have any more. You’ve got so much in your favour—brains, charm, presentability, a sense of the ridiculous, and a whole gaggle of us who believe in you.”

  Len’s belief in me had been important since my earliest years, since my parents, I thought, did not believe in me, and I had only a fragile belief in myself.

  Emerging from my depression, I sent Lennie a parcel of books, and while reproaching me for my “extravagance,” she replied, “Here are all my thanks to my favorite nephew.” (I liked the sound of that, for Lennie was certainly my favorite aunt.) She continued, “Picture me cozily by the fire, a bowl of Cox’s Orange Pippins to hand, immersed in Henry James’s elegant richness, and then suddenly realizing that the small hours have set in.” This letter was illegible in parts—“No, my writing hasn’t become senile, I’ve been trying to break in a new fountain pen, having lost my precious fifty-year-old one.”

  She always wrote with a broad-nibbed fountain pen (as I still do, fifty years later). “Darling Bol,” she ended, “may you be happy.”

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