An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  Stephen also showed abilities in spheres besides the visual. He was very good at mime, even before he was able to speak. He had an excellent memory for songs and would reproduce these with great accuracy. He could copy any movement to perfection. Thus Stephen, at eight, showed an ability to grasp, retain, and reproduce the most complex visual, auditory, motor, and verbal patterns, apparently irrespective of their context, significance, or meaning.

  It is characteristic of the savant memory (in whatever sphere—visual, musical, lexical) that it is prodigiously retentive of particulars. The large and small, the trivial and momentous, may be indifferently mixed, without any sense of salience, of foreground versus background. There is little disposition to generalize from these particulars or to integrate them with each other, causally or historically, or with the self. In such a memory there tends to be an immovable connection of scene and time, of content and context (a so-called concrete-situational or episodic memory)—hence the astounding powers of literal recall so common in autistic savants, along with difficulty extracting the salient features from these particular memories, in order to build a general sense and memory. Thus the savant twins, calendrical calculators whom I described in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, while able to itemize every event of their lives from about their fourth year on, had no sense of their lives, of historical change, as a whole. Such a memory structure is profoundly different from the normal and has both extraordinary strengths and extraordinary weaknesses. Jane Taylor McDonnell, author of News from the Border: A Mother’s Memoir of Her Autistic Son, says of her son: “Paul doesn’t generalize the particulars of his experience into the habitual, the ongoing, as many (most) other people do. Each moment seems to stand out distinctly, and almost unconnected with others, in his mind. So nothing seems to get lost, repressed, in the process.” So it was, I often thought, with Stephen, whose life experience seemed to consist of vivid, isolated moments, unconnected with each other or with him, and so devoid of any deeper continuity or development.

  Though Stephen would draw incessantly, he did not seem to take any interest in the finished drawings, and Chris might find them in the wastebasket or just left on a desk. Stephen did not even seem to concentrate on his subject while he was drawing. “Once”, Chris related to me, “Stephen was sitting opposite the Albert Memorial: he was doing a fabulous picture of that, but at the same time looking all around—at buses, the Albert Hall, whatever.”

  Though he did not think that Stephen needed to be “taught”, Chris devoted himself as much as possible to Stephen and his drawing, providing him with models, with encouragement. This was not always easy, because Stephen did not show much personal feeling. “In a way, he was responsive to us, the adults—he would say, ‘Hullo, Chris,’ or ‘Hullo, Jean.’ But it was difficult to reach him, to know what was in his mind.” He seemed not to understand different emotions and would laugh if one of the children had a temper tantrum or screamed. (Stephen himself rarely had tantrums at school, but when he was little, he would sometimes have them at home.)

  Chris was central in Stephen’s life between 1982 and 1986. He would often take Stephen, along with his class, on outings in London, to see St. Paul’s, to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, to see Tower Bridge being raised and lowered. These outings finally incited Stephen to words in his ninth year. He would recognize all the buildings and places they passed, traveling in the school bus, and excitedly call out their names. (When he was six he had learned to ask for “paper” when he needed it—for many years, he had not understood how to ask for anything, even by gesture or pointing. This therefore was not only one of his first words, but the first time he understood how to use words to address others—the social use of language, something normally achieved by the second year of life.)

  There were some fears that if Stephen began to acquire language he might lose his astounding visual gifts, as had happened, coincidentally or otherwise, with Nadia. But both Chris and Lorraine Cole felt that they had to do their utmost to enrich Stephen’s life, to bring him from his wordless isolation into a world of interaction and language. They concentrated on making language more interesting, more relevant, to Stephen, by linking it with the buildings and places he loved, and got him to draw a whole series of buildings based on letters of the alphabet (“A” for Albert Hall, “B” for Buckingham Palace, “C” for County Hall, and so on, right up to “Z” for London Zoo).

  Chris wondered if others would find Stephen’s drawings as extraordinary as he did. Early in 1986, he entered two of them in the National Children’s Art Exhibition; both were exhibited, and one of them won a prize. Around this time, Chris also sought an expert opinion on Stephen’s abilities from Beate Hermelin and Neil O’Connor, psychologists who were well known for their work on autistic savants. They found Stephen one of the most gifted savants they had ever tested, immensely proficient in both visual recognition and drawing from memory. On the other hand, he did rather poorly in general intelligence tests, scoring a verbal IQ of only 52.

  Word of Stephen’s extraordinary talents started to spread, and arrangements were made to film him as part of a BBC program on savants, titled “The Foolish Wise Ones.” Stephen took the filming very calmly, not at all fazed by cameras and crews—possibly even enjoying it slightly. He was asked to draw St. Paneras Station (“a very ‘Stephen’ building”, as Lorraine Cole emphasized, “elaborate, detailed and incredibly complicated”). The accuracy of his drawing is attested by a photograph taken at the same time. (There is, however, a curious error: Stephen makes a mirror reversal of the clock and the whole top of the building.) His accuracy was astounding, as were the speed with which he drew, the economy of line, the charm and style of his drawings—it was these that won viewers’ hearts. The BBC program was shown in February of 1987 and aroused a storm of interest—letters poured in, asking where Stephen’s drawings could be seen, and publishers offered contracts. Very soon a collection of his work, to be called simply Drawings, was slated for publication; and it was this I received the proofs of, in June of 1987.

  A is for Albert Hall

  U is for Underground Train

  (Part of Stephen’s London Alphabet, drawn when he was ten.)

  Notre Dame, drawn when Stephen was fourteen.

  Stephen’s rendition of Matisse’s Dance conflates the drawing of the Hermitage version with the colors of the Museum of Modern Art version.

  A Matisse face (upper left), reproduced by Stephen directly, and then by memory at hourly intervals.

  The old houses on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, as seen from Stephen’s hotel window.

  The Doge’s Palace in Venice.

  One of several drawings Stephen made of St. Basil’s, in Red Square.

  An aerial view of the Chrysler Building in New York, from the top of the Pan Am Building.

  A lavish interior at the Chicago Theater.

  Three tiny sketches, done at speed: an Arizona landscape, an elephant at the London Zoo, and St. Basil

  ’s.

  Stephen, only thirteen, was now famous throughout England—but as autistic, as disabled, as ever. He could draw, with the greatest ease, any street he had seen; but he could not, unaided, cross one by himself. He could see all London in his mind’s eye, but its human aspects were unintelligible to him. He could not maintain a real conversation with anyone, though, increasingly, he now showed a sort of pseudosocial conduct, talking to strangers in an indiscriminate and bizarre way.

  Chris had been away for some months in Australia and returned to find his young pupil famous—but, he thought, completely unchanged. “He recognized that he’d been on TV, and that he’d had a book published, but he didn’t go overboard, as many children would have done. He wasn’t affected; he was still the Stephen I knew.” Stephen had not seemed to miss Chris too much during his absence, but seemed glad to see him back, said “Hullo, Chris!” with a big smile on his face.

  None of this quite added up for me. Here was Stephen being exhibited as a signifi
cant artist—the former president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Hugh Casson, had called him “possibly the best child artist in Britain”—but Chris and others, even the most sympathetic, seemed to see him as greatly lacking in both intellect and identity. The tests that had been given to him seemed to confirm the severity of his emotional and intellectual defect. Was there, nonetheless, a mental and personal dimension, a depth and sensibility, in him that could emerge (if nowhere else) in his art? Was not art, quintessentially, an expression of a personal vision, a self? Could one be an artist without having a “self?” All these questions had been in my mind since I had first seen Stephen’s pictures, and I was eager to meet him.

  The opportunity came in February of 1988, when Stephen came to New York, accompanied by Chris, to make another television documentary. Stephen had been in New York for a couple of days, seeing and drawing the sights of the city, and—his greatest thrill—flying over it in a helicopter. I thought he might like to see City Island, the little island off New York where I live, and invited him to come to my house. He and Chris arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. Stephen was a demure, grave little black boy, though clearly with an impish side. He looked young to me, closer to ten than thirteen, with a smallish head, tilted to one side. He reminded me somewhat of the autistic children I had seen before, with a head-nodding mannerism or tic, and some odd flapping movements of the hands. He never looked at me directly but seemed to glance at me, briefly, out of the corners of his eyes.

  I asked him how he was finding New York, and he said “Very nice” with a strong Cockney accent. I have little recollection of his saying much else; he tended to be very quiet, almost mute. But his language had developed a good deal since the early days, and there were times, Chris said, when he would get excited and almost babble. He had been very excited on the plane—he had never flown before—and, Chris told me, “talked with the cabin crew and other passengers, showing his book around on the flight.” 96

  96. When Stephen was invited to sit in the jump seat for the New York landing, Chris recalled a prescient dream that he had reported before they left London. “I am being the pilot of the jumbo jet”, Stephen had said. “I can see the skyscrapers and the Manhattan skyline.”

  Stephen wanted to show me his latest drawings, of New York—they were all in a portfolio Chris was carrying—and I admired them (especially the aerial ones he had done from the helicopter) as he showed them to me. He nodded emphatically as he displayed them, calling some of them “good” and “nice.” He seemed to have no sense of either vanity or modesty, but showed me his drawings, commented on them, in an ingenuous way and with a total absence of self-consciousness.

  After he had shown me these, I asked him if he would draw something for me, perhaps my house. He nodded, and we wandered outside. It was snowing, cold and wet, not a day to linger. Stephen bestowed a quick, indifferent look at my house—there hardly seemed to be any act of attention—glanced then at the rest of the road and the sea at the end of the road, then asked to come in. As he took up his pen and started drawing, I held my breath. “Don’t worry”, Chris broke in, “you can talk at the top of your voice if you want to. It won’t make any difference—you can’t interrupt him—he could concentrate if the house was falling down.” Stephen did not make any sketch or outline, but just started at one edge of the paper (I had a feeling he might have started anywhere at all) and steadily moved across it, as if transcribing some tenacious inner image or visualization. As he was putting in the porch railings, Chris remarked, “I didn’t see any of that detail there.”

  “No”, said Stephen, his expression implying, “No, you wouldn’t.”

  Stephen had not studied the house, had made no sketches, had not drawn it from life, but had, in a brief glance, taken everything in, extracted its essence, seen every detail, held it all in his memory, and then, in a single, swift line, drawn it. And I did not doubt that, had we let him, he could have drawn the entire street.

  Stephen’s drawing was accurate in some ways, but took various liberties in others—he gave my house a chimney where there was none, but omitted the three fir trees in front of the house, the picket fence around it, and the neighboring houses. He focused on the house to the exclusion of anything else. It has often been said that savants have photographic or eidetic memories, but as I photocopied Stephen’s drawing I thought how unlike a Xerox machine he was. His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal—there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and, of course, Stephen’s unmistakable style. They were images and showed us some of the immensely complex neural processes that are needed to make a visual and graphic image. Stephen’s drawings were individual constructions, but could they be seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?

  His drawings (like those of my patient José) had a closeness to the actual, a literalness and naïvety. Clara Park, the mother of an autistic artist, has called this an “unusual capacity to render the object as perceived” (not conceived). She also writes of an “unusual capacity for delayed rendition” as characteristic of savant artists; this indeed was very striking in Stephen, who, after a single glance at a building, would retain it effortlessly for days or weeks, and then draw it as if from life.

  Sir Hugh Casson wrote in his introduction to Drawings:

  Unlike most children, who tend to draw less from direct observation than from symbols or images seen secondhand, Stephen Wiltshire draws exactly what he sees—no more, no less.

  Artists are full of symbols and images seen second hand and bring to their drawings not only the conventions of representation they acquired as children, but the entire history of Western art. It may be necessary to leave these behind, to leave behind even the primal category of “objecthood.” As Monet put it:

  Whenever you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have in front of you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever—Merely think, here is a little squeeze of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

  But Stephen (if Casson is right) and José, and Nadia and other savants, may not have to make such “deconstructions”, may not have to relinquish such constructs, because (at many levels, from the neural to the cultural) they never made them in the first place or made them to a far smaller extent. In this way their situation is radically different from that of the “normal”—though this does not mean that they cannot be artists, too.

  I started to wonder, too, about the relationships in Stephen’s life: how important they were, to what extent they had developed, in the face of his autism (and devastating early loss). His relationship with Chris Marris, perhaps the most crucial during his last five years at Queensmill, had threatened to end when, in July of 1987, Stephen had to leave Queensmill for a secondary school. For a while, Chris had arranged to continue seeing Stephen on weekends, to take him on drawing outings around London, and even on his first trips to New York and Paris. But by May 1989 these expeditions had come to an end, and Stephen seemed to lack the initiative to do much drawing on his own. It seemed as if he needed another person to get him going, to “facilitate” his drawing. Whether he missed, or mourned, Chris in a more personal way was far less clear. When I later spoke of Chris to Stephen, he would talk about him (always as “Chris Marris” or “Mr. Marris”) in a very flat and factual way, without any apparent emotion. A normal child would be deeply distressed at the loss of someone who had been so close for many years, but no such distress was apparent in Stephen. I wondered if he was repressing painful feelings, or distancing himself from them, but I was not sure whether, in his autistic way, he even had any personal emotion here at all. Christopher Gillberg writes of a fifteen-year-old autistic boy whose mother had died of cancer. Asked how he was doing, the boy replied, “Oh, I am all right. You see I have Asperger syndrome which makes me less vulnerable to the loss of loved ones than are most
people.” Stephen, of course, would never have been able to articulate his inner state in this way, and yet one had to wonder whether he took the loss of Chris with some of the same flatness as Gillberg’s young patient—and whether such a flatness might not characterize most of the human relationships in his life.

  Into this void irrupted Margaret Hewson. Margaret had been Stephen’s literary agent since the BBC program two years before and had developed an increasing personal and artistic interest in him. I had first met her in 1988, when, with Stephen, we roved around London on a drawing expedition. Margaret and Stephen, it was evident to me, got on very well. Stephen, though perhaps incapable at this point of any depth of feeling or caring, nevertheless showed strong instinctive responses to different people. He had taken to Margaret from the start—attracted, I think, by her enormous energy and impetus, the exhilarating, whirlwind atmosphere she seemed to create all around her, and by her obvious feeling for him and his art. Margaret seemed to know everyone and have been everywhere, and perhaps this gave Stephen a sense of a larger world, of horizons far beyond the narrow ones that had confined his life hitherto. Margaret, finally, was very knowledgeable about art, a knowledge that extended from art history to the technical details of drawing.

  In the fall of 1989, Margaret began obtaining drawing commissions for Stephen and taking him out drawing every weekend, along with her husband and partner in the literary agency, Andrew. She instantly abolished the use of tracing paper and rulers (such as he had used for some of the drawings in his second book, Cities, published in 1989), and insisted he draw freehand in ink. “One can learn the value of a line only by going straight into ink and making mistakes”, she declared. Under Margaret’s impetus and guidance, Stephen started to draw regularly once again, and to draw more boldly than he had ever done. (And yet even in Cities there had been some extraordinary freehand improvisations—imaginary cities, which Stephen had conceived, conflating the features of several real ones.)