On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
And almost every day, I sent completed bunches of typescript down to Colin, which we would then go over in minute detail. We spent hours that summer closeted together. And yet I see, from letters between us, that we still preserved a considerable formality: he was always “Mr. Haycraft”; I was always “Dr. Sacks.” On August 30, 1972, I wrote:
Dear Mr. Haycraft,
I enclose, herewith, five more case histories. The sixteen histories thus far come to about 240 pages in aggregate, which would be between 50 and 60,000 words…. I am thinking of adding four further ones…but I will defer here, of course, to your judgment in the matter.…
I have tried to move from piles and compilations of medical lists to stories, but obviously without complete success. You’re so right about the shape of Art and the shapelessness of Life—perhaps I should have had a keener, cleaner line or theme in them all, but they are so complex, like tapestries. To some extent these are crude ore, which others (including myself) can dig in and refine later.
With kindest regards,
Oliver Sacks
A week later, I wrote:
Dear Mr. Haycraft,
I have spent several days on an introduction…which I herewith enclose. I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways…. I need to talk to you again soon…as always, because you help me to unmuddle.
In the summer of 1972, Mary-Kay Wilmers, a neighbor of Colin’s in Gloucester Crescent and the editor of The Listener, a weekly paper published by the BBC, invited me to write an article about my patients and their “awakenings.” No one had ever commissioned me to write an article before, and The Listener had a very high reputation, so I felt honored and excited: it would be my first opportunity to convey to a general audience the wonder of the whole experience. And instead of the censorious rejections I had been getting from neurology journals, I was actually being invited to write, being offered a chance to publish fully and freely what had been accumulating and building up, dammed up, for so long.
The following morning I wrote the article at a single sitting and messengered it to Mary-Kay. But by the afternoon, I had second thoughts, and I phoned her to say that I felt I could do a better job. She said the article I had sent her was fine, but if I would like to make any additions or revisions, she would be glad to read them. “But it does not need revision,” she emphasized. “It is very clear, it flows easily—we would be happy to publish it as it is.”
But I felt I had not said everything I wanted to, and rather than tamper with the original piece, I wrote another one, very different in approach from the first. Mary-Kay was equally pleased with this; both were publishable as they stood, she said.
By the next morning, I was again dissatisfied and wrote a third draft, and that afternoon a fourth. Over the course of a week, I sent Mary-Kay nine drafts in all. She then took off to Scotland, saying she would try to conflate them somehow. She returned after a few days, saying she found it impossible to combine them; each one had a different character, was written from a different perspective. They were not parallel versions, she said, they were “orthogonal” to one another. I would have to choose one, and if I could not, she would do so. She finally selected the seventh (or was it the sixth?) version, and that is what appeared in The Listener of October 26, 1972.
—
It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing. Occasionally, a piece comes out perfectly, but more often my writings need extensive pruning and editing, because I may express the same thought in many different ways. I can get waylaid by tangential thoughts and associations in mid-sentence, and this leads to parentheses, subordinate clauses, sentences of paragraphic length. I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive. I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) “thick description.” All this creates problems of organization. I get intoxicated, sometimes, by the rush of thoughts and am too impatient to put them in the right order. But one needs a cool head, intervals of sobriety, as much as one needs that creative exuberance.
Like Mary-Kay, Colin had to pick among many versions, restrain my sometimes overabundant prose, and create a continuity. Sometimes he would say, pointing to one passage, “This doesn’t go here,” then flip the pages over, saying, “It goes here.” As soon as he said this, I would see that he was right, but—mysteriously—I could not see it for myself.
It was not just unmuddling that I demanded of Colin at this time; it was emotional support when I was blocked or when my mood and confidence sagged, as they did, almost to the point of collapse, after the first rush was over.
September 19, 1972
Dear Mr. Haycraft,
I seem to be in one of those dry, dead depressed phases where one can only do nothing or blunder round in circles. The damn thing is that it needs only three days good work to finish the book, but I don’t know whether I am capable of this at the moment.
I am in such an uneasy, guilt-stricken mood at the moment that I think I can’t bear the thought of any of my patients being recognizably exposed, or the hospital itself being recognized in Awakenings—maybe this is one of the things which is inhibiting me from finishing the book.
—
It was now past Labor Day, America was back at work, and I too had to return to the daily grind in New York. I had finished another eleven cases, but I had no idea how to complete the book.
I returned to the familiar apartment next to Beth Abraham where I had been living since 1969, but the following month the director of the hospital told me abruptly that I had to get out: he needed the apartment for his ailing old mother. I said I appreciated her need, but it was my understanding that the apartment was reserved for the hospital’s doctor on call and, as such, had been mine to occupy for the past three and a half years. My answer irked the director, who said that because I was questioning his authority, I could leave the apartment and the hospital. So, in a stroke, I was deprived of job, of income, of my patients, and of a place to live. (I continued, however, to visit my patients, albeit unofficially, until 1975, when I was formally reinstated at Beth Abraham.)
The apartment, which I had filled with my things, including a piano, looked desolate as it was stripped of everything, and I was in my now-empty apartment on November 13 when my brother David phoned me to say that our mother had died: she had had a heart attack during a trip to Israel and died while walking in the Negev.
I took the next plane to England and with my brothers carried her coffin at the funeral. I wondered how I would feel about sitting shiva. I did not know if I could bear it, sitting all day on a low stool with my fellow mourners for seven days on end, receiving a constant stream of people, and talking, talking, talking endlessly of the departed. But I found it a deep and crucial and affirmative experience, this total sharing of emotions and memories, when, alone, I felt so annihilated by my mother’s death.
Only six months before, I had consulted Dr. Margaret Seiden, a neurologist at Columbia, after I had rushed up the cellar stairs in my apartment, hitting my head on a low beam and injuring my neck. After examining me, she asked whether my mother was a “Miss Landau.” I said yes, and Dr. Seiden told me that she had been one of my mother’s students; she was very poor at the time, and my mother paid her fees for medical school. It was only at Ma’s funeral, when I met a number of her former students, that I learned how she had helped many of them through medical school, sometimes paying the entire cost. My mother had never told me (or anyone, perhaps) of the lengths to which she would go for her needy students. I had always thought of her as frugal, even parsimonious, but never realized how generous she was. I realized, too late, that there were whole sides to her which I had known nothing about.
My mother’s older brother, my Uncle Dave (we called him Uncle Tungsten, and it was he who introduced me to chemistry as a boy), told me many stories of Ma’s younger
It especially moved me to see so many of my mother’s patients and students and how they remembered her so vividly and humorously and affectionately—to see her through their eyes, as physician and teacher and storyteller. As they spoke of her, I was reminded of my own identity as a physician, teacher, and storyteller and how this had brought us closer, adding a new dimension to our relationship, over the years. It made me feel too that I must complete Awakenings as a last tribute to her. A strange sense of peace and sobriety, and of what really mattered, a sense of the allegorical dimensions of life and death, grew stronger and stronger in me with each day of the mourning.
My mother’s death was the most devastating loss of my life—the loss of the deepest and perhaps, in some sense, the realest relation of my life. I found it impossible to read anything mundane; I could only read the Bible or Donne’s Devotions when I finally went to bed each night.
When the formal mourning was over, I stayed in London and returned to writing, with a sense of my mother’s life and death and Donne’s Devotions dominating all my thoughts. And in this mood, I wrote the later, more allegorical sections of Awakenings, with a feeling, a voice, I had never known before.
—
Colin unmuddled and soothed my moods, along with all the intricate, convoluted, sometimes labyrinthine ins and outs of the book so that by December it was finally finished. I could not bear the empty, motherless house at Mapesbury, and in the final month of writing I more or less moved to the Duckworth offices in the Old Piano Factory, though I would return to Mapesbury in the evenings to have dinner with Pop and Lennie (Michael, feeling psychosis rising again within him after Ma’s death, had himself admitted to a hospital). Colin gave me a little room at Duckworth, and because my impulse to cross out or fiddle with what I had just written was so great at this time, we agreed that I would slip each page under the door as it was written. It was not just critical acumen that he provided but a sense of shelter and support, finally almost a home, which I needed quite as much at the time.
By December, then, the book was written.9 The last page had been given to Colin, and it was time to go back to New York. I took a taxi to the airport feeling that the book was complete. But then, in the taxi, I suddenly realized that something absolutely crucial had been omitted—something without which the entire structure would collapse. I hastily wrote it, and this was the beginning of a period of feverish footnote writing which continued for two months. This was long before the era of faxing, but by February of 1973 I had sent Colin more than four hundred footnotes by express mail.
Lennie had been in contact with Colin, who told her I was “fiddling” with the manuscript and deluging him with footnotes from New York, and this elicited a stern admonition from her: “Don’t, don’t, don’t tamper with it or add any more footnotes!” she wrote.
Colin said, “The footnotes are all fascinating, but in aggregate they come to three times the length of the book, and they will sink it.” I could only keep a dozen, he said.
“Okay,” I replied. “You choose them.”
But he said (wisely), “No, you choose them, because otherwise you’ll be angry with me for my choice.”
And so the first edition had only a dozen footnotes. Between them, Lennie and Colin saved Awakenings from my too-muchness.
I was thrilled to see galley proofs of Awakenings early in 1973. There were page proofs a couple of months later, but Colin never sent me these, because he was afraid that I would seize the opportunity to make innumerable changes and additions, as I had done with the galleys, and this would delay the scheduled publication.
Ironically, it was Colin who, a few months later, suggested postponing publication so that sections could be prepublished in The Sunday Times, but I was strongly against this, because I wanted to see the book published on or before my birthday in July. I would be forty then, and I wanted to be able to say, “I may be forty, I have lost my youth, but at least I have done something, I have written this book.” Colin thought I was being irrational, but seeing my state of mind, he agreed to stick to the original publication date in late June. (He later recollected that Gibbon had been at pains to publish the final volume of the Decline and Fall on his birthday.)
—
Staying at Oxford after my degree and often revisiting it in the late 1950s, I occasionally glimpsed W. H. Auden around town. He had been appointed a visiting professor of poetry at Oxford, and when he was there, he would go to the Cadena Cafe every morning to chat with anyone who wanted to drop by. He was very genial, but I felt too shy to approach him. In 1967, however, we met at a cocktail party in New York.
He invited me to visit, and I would sometimes go to his apartment on St. Mark’s Place for tea. This was a very good time to see him, because by four o’clock he had finished the day’s work but had not yet started the evening’s drinking. He was a very heavy drinker, although he was at pains to say that he was not an alcoholic but a drunk. I once asked him what the difference was, and he said, “An alcoholic has a personality change after a drink or two, but a drunk can drink as much as he wants. I’m a drunk.” He certainly drank a great deal; at dinner, either at his own place or someone else’s, he would leave the meal at 9:30 p.m., taking all the bottles on the table with him. But however much he drank, he was up and at work by six the next morning. (Orlan Fox, the friend who introduced us, called him the least lazy man he had ever met.)
Wystan, like me, had grown up in a medical household. His father, George Auden, was a physician in Birmingham who served as medical officer during the great epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. (Dr. Auden was especially interested in how the disease could alter the personality in children, and he published several papers on this.) Wystan loved medical talk, and he had a soft spot for physicians. (In his book Epistle to a Godson, there are four poems dedicated to doctors, including one to me.) Knowing this, in 1969 I invited Wystan to visit Beth Abraham and meet my postencephalitic patients. (He later wrote a poem called “Old People’s Home,” but I have never been sure whether this was about Beth Abraham or some other home.)
He had written a lovely review of Migraine in 1971, and I was very excited by this; he was also critically important to me during the writing of Awakenings, especially when he said to me, “You’re going to have to go beyond the clinical…. Be metaphorical, be mystical, be whatever you need.”
—
By the beginning of 1972, Wystan had decided to leave America to spend his remaining days in England and Austria. He found the start of that winter a particularly grim one, with a mixed sense of illness and isolation, as well as the complex and contradictory feelings aroused by his decision to leave America, where he had lived so long and loved so deeply.
His first real break from this feeling came on his birthday, February 21. Wystan always loved birthdays and celebrations of all sorts, and this one was particularly important and moving. He was sixty-five; it was to be his last birthday in America, and his publishers had prepared a special party for him, where he was surrounded by an astonishing range of friends old and new (Hannah Arendt, I remember, sat next to him). It was only then, at this extraordinary gathering, that I fully realized the richness of Wystan’s personality, his genius for friendship of all types. He sat beaming, ensconced in the middle of his friends, completely at home. Or so it seemed to me: I had never seen him happier. And yet, interfused with this, there was also a sense of sunset, of farewell.
Just before Wystan finally left America, Orlan Fox and I were helping him sort and pack his books, a painful task. After hours of shoving and sweating, we paused for a beer and sat without saying anything for a time. After a while, Wystan got up and said to me, “Take a book, some books, anything you want.” He paused, then seeing my paralysis, he said, “Well, I’ll
He handed me his libretto for The Magic Flute and a much-tattered volume of Goethe’s letters, which he fetched from its place on his bedside table. The old Goethe was full of affectionate scribblings, annotations, and comments.10
At the end of the week—it was Saturday, April 15, 1972—Orlan and I ran Wystan to the airport. We arrived about three hours early, because Wystan was obsessively punctual and had an absolute horror of missing trains or planes. (He once told me of a recurrent dream of his: he was speeding to catch a train, in a state of extreme agitation; he felt his life, everything, depended on catching it. Obstacles arose, one after the other, reducing him to a silently screaming panic. And then, suddenly, he realized that it was too late, that he had missed the train, and that it didn’t matter in the least. At this point, there would come over him a sense of release amounting to bliss, and he would ejaculate and wake up with a smile on his face.)
We arrived early, then, and whiled away the hours in a meandering conversation; it was only later, when he left, that I realized that all the amblings and meanderings returned to one point: that the focus of the conversation was farewell—to us, to those thirty-three years, half of his life, which he had spent in the United States (he used to call himself a transatlantic Goethe, only half-jokingly). Just before the call for the plane, a complete stranger came up and stuttered, “You must be Mr. Auden…. We have been honored to have you in our country, sir. You’ll always be welcome back here as an honored guest—and a friend.” He stuck out his hand, saying, “Good-bye, Mr. Auden, God bless you for everything!” and Wystan shook it with great cordiality. He was much moved; there were tears in his eyes. I turned to Wystan and asked whether such encounters were common.