On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
I do not know what she did in the day, though once she brought me a small bird and I realized she must have been hunting, as cats do. But whenever I was in the house, she would be on the porch. I was charmed and fascinated by this interspecies relationship. Was this how man and dog had met a hundred thousand years ago?
When it got cooler, in late September, I gave the cat—I just called her Puss, and she responded to this—to friends, and Puss lived happily with them for the next seven years.
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I was lucky enough to find Helen Jones, a wonderful cook and housekeeper who lived close by, and she would come to me once a week. When she arrived each Thursday morning, we would set out for the Bronx to do some shopping together, our first stop being a fish shop on Lydig Avenue run by two Sicilian brothers who were as like as twins.
When I was a boy, the fishmonger would come to our house every Friday carrying a bucket swimming with carp and other fish. My mother would boil the fish, season and grind them all together, and make a great bowl of gefilte fish; this, along with salads, fruits, and challahs, kept us going through the Sabbath, when cooking was not allowed. The Sicilian fishmongers on Lydig Avenue were happy to give us carp, whitefish, and pike. I had no idea how Helen, a good churchgoing Christian, would manage with making such a Jewish delicacy, but her powers of improvisation were formidable, and she made magnificent gefilte fish (she called it “filter fish”) which, I had to acknowledge, was as good as my mother’s. Helen refined her filter fish each time she made it, and my friends and neighbors got a taste for it, too. So did Helen’s church friends; I loved to think of her fellow Baptists gorging on gefilte fish at their church socials.
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One summer day in the 1990s, when I returned from work, I encountered a strange apparition on my porch, a man with an enormous black beard and head of hair—a mad tramp, was my immediate impression. Only when the tramp spoke did I realize who he was—my old friend Larry. I had not seen him for many years and had come to think, as many of us had, that he was probably dead.
I had met Larry early in 1966, when I was trying to recoup from my first, evil drug-addicted months in New York. I was eating well, exercising and gaining my strength back, going regularly to a gym in the West Village. The gym opened at 8:00 on Saturday mornings, and I was often the first person there. One Saturday, I started my workout with the leg-press machine; I had been a mighty squatter when I was in California and wondered how much of my strength had come back. I worked the weight up to 800 pounds—easy; 1,000 pounds—challenging; 1,200 pounds—folly. I knew it was too heavy for me, but I refused to concede failure. I did three reps, four, just, and my strength gave out on the fifth. I lay helpless with 1,200 pounds on top of me, my knees crushed into my chest. I could hardly breathe, much less shout for help, and started to wonder how long I could hold out. I felt my head getting engorged with blood, and I feared a stroke was imminent. At that moment, the door swung open, and a powerful young man walked in, saw my predicament, and helped me up with the bar. I hugged him and said, “You saved my life.”
Despite his quick action, Larry seemed very shy. It was difficult for him to make contact, and he had a driven, anxious look, his eyes never still. But now that contact had been made, he could hardly stop talking; perhaps I was the first soul he had spoken with in weeks. He was nineteen, he told me, and the previous year he had been discharged from the army as mentally unstable. He lived on a small pension from the government. He subsisted, as far as I could tell, on milk and bread; he spent sixteen hours a day walking the streets (or running, if he was in the country) and was happy to bed down anywhere at night.
He had never known his parents, he told me. His mother had advanced multiple sclerosis by the time he was born and was physically incapable of looking after him. His father was an alcoholic who abandoned them soon after Larry was born, and Larry had been farmed out to a series of foster parents. It seemed to me that he had never known any real stability.
I did not care to make a “diagnosis” of Larry, even though I was very free with psychiatric terms in those days. All I could think of was how much love and care and stability had been denied to him, how much respect had been denied to him, and I marveled that he had survived psychically at all. He was very intelligent and far better informed about current affairs than I was. He would find old newspapers and read them from cover to cover. He thought tenaciously, relentlessly, about everything he had read or been told. He would take nothing on trust.
He had no intention of ever getting a job, and this, I thought, took a special sort of integrity. He was determined to avoid a meaningless busyness; he was frugal, and he could live and even save on his modest pension.
Larry spent his days walking, and it was not unusual for him to walk the twenty miles from his apartment in the East Village to my house in City Island. He sometimes stayed over on my living room couch, and one day at the bottom of the refrigerator I found some very heavy bars, bars of gold that Larry had bought over the years. He had stashed them in my house, feeling they would be safer there than in his apartment. Gold, he said, was the only possession one could trust in an unstable world; shares, bonds, land, art, could all lose their value overnight, but gold (“element 79,” he used to say, to please me) would always hold its value. Why should he work, hold a job, when he could live, be independent, a free man, without doing so? I liked his courage, his forthrightness, in saying this and felt, in a way, that he was one of the freest souls I knew.
Larry was transparent and sweet natured, and many women found him attractive. He had been married for some years to a generously proportioned woman in the East Village, but, hideously, she was murdered one day by thugs who broke into their apartment to find drugs. They found none, but Larry found her corpse.
Larry had always lived largely on milk and bread, and in his distress now over her death he wanted nothing but milk. He became consumed by a fantasy of traveling the world with an enormous, lactating woman who would cradle him like a baby and let him suckle at her breast. I never heard a more primal fantasy.
Sometimes I would not see Larry for weeks or months—I had no way of contacting him—but then he would suddenly reappear.
He was an alcoholic like his father, and alcohol set off something mischievous and self-destructive in his brain. He knew this and usually avoided drinking. In the late 1960s, we dropped acid together a couple of times, and he liked coming with me, riding on the back of my motorbike, to visit my cousin Cathy—one of Al Capp’s daughters—who lived in Bucks County. Cathy was schizophrenic, but she and Larry understood each other intuitively and formed a strange bond.
Helen, too, adored Larry, and all of my friends liked him; he was an utterly independent human being, a sort of modern, urban Thoreau.
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In New York, I got to know some of my American cousins, the Capps (their original name was Caplin, and they were second cousins, really). The eldest was Al Capp, the cartoonist. He had two younger brothers—Bence, also a cartoonist, and Elliott, a cartoonist and playwright—and a sister, Madeline.
I have vivid memories of the first Capp family seder I attended in 1966. I was thirty-two, and Louis Gardner, Madeline’s husband, was a young and handsome forty-eight, very upright, with a military bearing; he was a colonel in the reserves, as well as an architect. Louis, at the head of the table, conducted the seder, with Madeline at the other end and an extraordinary pack of family members in between—Bence, Elliott, and Al, with their wives. Louis and Madeline’s children were running all over the place, when they were not reciting the four questions or looking for the afikomen.
We were all in our prime then. Al, still the brilliant and beloved creator of Li’l Abner, was read and admired all over America. Elliott, the most thoughtful of the brothers, was admired for his essays and plays. Bence (Jerome) crackled with creative energy, and Madeline, the darling of her brothers, was the center of it all. They were all brilliant, exuberant talkers, and I sometimes thought Madeline wa
I saw quite a lot of Al, who was a strange figure when I met him in the mid-1960s. All of the brothers had been communists or fellow travelers in the 1930s, but Al went through a strange political reversal in the 1960s, when he became a friend of Nixon’s and Agnew’s (though not entirely trusted by them, I suspect, because his wit and satire might be aimed at anyone in power).
Al had lost his leg in a traffic accident as a boy of nine, and he sported a very massive wooden leg (it made me think of Captain Ahab’s whalebone ivory leg). It may be that some of his aggressiveness, some of his competitiveness, some of his blatant sexuality, had to do with having been maimed, feeling that he had to show he was not a cripple but a sort of superman, but I never encountered this aspect of Al. He was always friendly and genial with me, and I grew fond of him and thought him full of creative vitality and charm.
In the early 1970s, Al, besides his cartooning, did a lot of university lecturing. He was a brilliant speaker and a darling of the lecture circuit, although dark rumors started to collect around him—that he was, perhaps, a little too forward with some of the women students. The rumors got darker; accusations were leveled. There was a scandal, and Al was fired by the hundreds of syndicated papers that he had worked for all his life. Suddenly the beloved cartoonist who had created Dogpatch and the Shmoo, who was in some ways the graphic Dickens of America, found himself reviled and out of a job.
He retreated for a while to London, where he lived in a hotel and published occasional articles and cartoons. But he was a broken man, as they say; his rambunctiousness, his vitality, deserted him. He remained depressed, and in declining health, until his death in 1979.
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Another cousin, Aubrey “Abba” Eban, was the prodigy of the family, the brilliant elder son of my father’s sister, Alida. He had shown exceptional gifts as a boy and had gone on to a dazzling career at Cambridge, becoming president of the Cambridge Union, gaining a triple first, and going on to become a lecturer there in Oriental languages. He had shown that despite the anti-Semitism prevalent in the England of the 1930s, a Jewish boy with no advantages of wealth or birth or social connections, with nothing except an extraordinary brain, could make it to the top in one of England’s oldest universities.
His passionate eloquence and great wit were already fully developed by the time he was twenty, but it was still unclear whether this would lead him to a political life—his mother, my aunt, had translated the Balfour Declaration into French and Russian in 1917, and Aubrey had been a committed and idealistic Zionist since childhood—or whether he would remain a scholar at Cambridge. The war and the developments in Palestine determined his course.
Aubrey was nearly twenty years my senior, and I did not have much contact with him until the mid-1970s. His life was in Israel; mine was in England and then the United States; his was the life of a diplomat and politician, mine the life of a physician and scientist. We saw each other rarely and briefly at family weddings and other events. And when Aubrey did visit New York, as foreign minister or deputy prime minister of Israel, he always seemed to be surrounded by security men, and there was little chance of saying more than a few words.
But one day in 1976, we were both invited to lunch by Madeline, and as soon as Aubrey and I met, it was evident to both of us, and to everyone there, that we showed a startling similarity of gesture and posture—the way we sat, our abrupt bulky movements, our style of speech and mind. At one point, we both got up suddenly from opposite ends of the table and collided over the beetroot jelly, which we both loved but everyone else hated. The whole table was set laughing by these similarities and coincidences, and I said to Aubrey, “I have hardly ever met you, and our lives are quite different, but I have the feeling that there is more genetic similarity between the two of us than there is between me and my three brothers.” He said that he had had the same feeling, that I was in some way closer to him than his three siblings.
How can this be? I asked. “Atavism” was his instant reply.
“Atavism?” I blinked.
“Yes, atavus, a grandfather,” Aubrey replied. “You never knew our grandfather Elivelva (even though you have the same Hebrew and Yiddish name). He died before you were born. But I was brought up by him when we came to England. He was my first real teacher. People laughed when they saw us together; they said there was an uncanny similarity between the old man and the child. There was no one else in his generation who spoke or moved or thought the way he did, no one at all like him in the parental generation, and I thought there was no one like him in my own generation, until you came through the door, and I thought my grandfather had come to life.”
There was an element of tragedy, or paradox, in store for Aubrey, who had won the world’s ear as “the voice of Israel.” His passionate and polished eloquence, his Cambridge accent, came to be seen by a new generation as pompous and old-fashioned, and his fluency in Arabic and sympathetic knowledge of Arab culture (his first book had been a translation of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Maze of Justice) rendered him almost suspect in an increasingly partisan atmosphere. So eventually he fell from power and returned to life as a scholar and historian (as well as becoming a brilliant expositor in books and on television). His own feelings, he told me, were mixed: he felt “a void” after decades of intense immersion in politics and diplomacy but he also felt a sudden, unprecedented peace of mind. His first act, as a free man, was to go for a swim.
Once, while Aubrey was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I asked him how academic life suited him. He looked wistful and said, “I pine for the arena.” But as the arena became stormier and narrower and more partisan, Aubrey, with his wide cultural sympathies and his spaciousness of mind, pined for it less and less. I once asked him how he wanted to be remembered, and he said, “As a teacher.”
Aubrey loved telling stories, and knowing of my interest in the physical sciences, he told me several stories of his contacts with Albert Einstein. Following Chaim Weizmann’s death in 1952, Aubrey had been delegated to invite Einstein to become the next president of Israel (Einstein, of course, declined). On another occasion, Aubrey recounted with a smile, he and a colleague from the Israeli consulate visited Einstein in his house in Princeton. Einstein invited them in and courteously asked if they would like coffee, and (thinking that an assistant or housekeeper would make it), Aubrey said yes. But he was “horrified,” as he put it, when Einstein trotted into the kitchen himself. They soon heard the clatter of cups and pots and an occasional piece of crockery falling, as the great man, in his friendly but slightly clumsy way, made the coffee for them. This, more than anything, Aubrey said, showed him the human and endearing side of the world’s greatest genius.
During the 1990s, no longer burdened or exalted by office, Aubrey would come to New York in a much freer and easier way, and I saw him more frequently, sometimes with his wife, Suzy, and often with his younger sister, Carmel, who also lived in New York. Aubrey and I became friends, the great difference in our lives and the near twenty-year difference in our ages mattering less and less.
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Dear, monstrous Carmel! She outraged everyone, at least all her family, but I had a soft spot for her.
For many years, Carmel was a mythical figure, an actress somewhere in Kenya, but in the 1950s she came to New York, married a director called David Ross, and with him established a small theater to stage his favorite Ibsen and Chekhov plays (though her own preference was always for Shakespeare).
When I met her, in May of 1961, I had just ridden from San Francisco on my motorbike—the secondhand bike that blew up in Alabama—and made the rest of the journey to New York by hitchhiking. I was rather dirty and disheveled when she received me in their elegant Fifth Avenue apartment; she ordered me to have a bath, and clean clothes were procured while mine were laundered.
David was riding high at the time; he had had a s
Carmel, too, was pretty high; she saw no reason why she could not master Norwegian and Russian—with her ear for languages, it should take only a few weeks—and provide her own translations of Ibsen and Chekhov. Her translation might have been part of the reason David’s John Gabriel Borkman crashed and lost a good deal of money when it opened in London. Carmel had wheedled most of this money from her family, who could ill afford it, and she never paid it back. Some years later, David had to be hospitalized in New York—he was prone to severe depressions—and soon after he died, whether from an accidental overdose or suicide was never clear. Carmel, deeply shaken, returned to London, where she had family and friends.
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Carmel and I would meet again in 1969, while I was in London writing the first case histories of Awakenings and Migraine was still in press with Faber & Faber. Carmel asked to see what I had written, and after reading the proofs of Migraine, she said, “Why, you are a writer!” No one had ever quite said this to me before; Migraine was being published by the medical division of Faber & Faber and was seen by them as a medical book, an idiosyncratic monograph on migraine—not as “writing.” And no one yet had seen the first case histories of Awakenings, no one but Faber & Faber, who rejected them as unpublishable. So I was buoyed by Carmel’s words and by her thought that Migraine might be received well not only by the medical profession but by general and even “literary” readers as well.