December 2024 – …
This is book # 16 in the no-longer-very-aptly named Essays Project. Though perhaps, having detoured into the wilds of Shakespeare, a tour of the letters of Sacks, who is a formidable essayist, is steering us back towards the main track. Of course, letters are not essays, but their relative brevity and personal cast, as well as the wide-ranging nature of Sack’s epistles, give them a familial resemblance.
The book is edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’ assistant and editor of several decades; she also contributes a brief preface which offers her perspective on Sacks’ compulsive writing process. Alas for her brevity; I believe she could offer a lot of insight on Sacks. But perhaps his letters will serve. Onward!
Preface and Editor’s Introduction
Sacks loved correspondence. He felt one ought to reply to letters, immediately if possible. He corresponded with, literally, thousands of people, from school children to Nobel laureates. Sacks took pains to preserve his letters with carbon sets, drafts, or later, photocopies, though by no means does all his correspondence survive. But that part which does runs to about 200,000 pages, or about 70 bankers’ boxes.
Letters were an important way for Sacks to connect to the larger world, possibly a way to do an end-run around what he described as his ‘crippling shyness.’ Certainly they opened him to a vast range of ideas and stimulation; as Edgar says: “Often a serendipitous letter, totally unexpected, would launch him on a new essay or even a book. (p xiii) The letters are also important for understanding Sack’s development, both personally and intellectually.
Edgar offers interesting insights on Sacks’ approach to writing. “[Sacks] had difficulty […] editing his own work. Thus, when one editor or another asked him to clarify something or boil it down, he would simply crank a new piece of paper into his typewriter and start over. Voilà, a new draft. Eventually, the editor would have a pile of drafts, to say nothing of a sheaf of follow-up letters with new footnotes and addenda. It was difficult to choose the best among these, since most versions contained wonderful passages, but each headed in a different direction.” Edgar dealt with this by cutting and pasting among the many draftsand stitching together his various trains of thought.
In the longer term, they developed a more interactive way of working : “Oliver, on the other hand, wanted me actually sitting by his side as he tore each finished page out of the typewriter: “Here! What do you think?” I began referring to this as “combat editing.” I would arrive home after a day with Oliver, exhausted from the nonstop effort of trying to keep up with his restless intellect for eight hours. But it was also exhilarating work, and when he phoned me an hour or two later with new thoughts, I was ready to dive back in. What started for me as a freelance job, occupying a day or two a week, soon became a full-time vocation-and then some.”
1. A New World: 1960-1962 (27 – 29)
The letters begin with Sacks’ arrival in North America at the age of 27. He had finished four years of medical school and two years of internship, and left England in part to escape the draft, and in part to re-invent himself at a more comfortable distance from his large and opinionated extended family. It is easy to imagine that a significant motivation was his family’s non-acceptance of his homosexuality, but a first-hand assessment is not part of the record.* It is clear that, in addition to continuing in medicine and specializing in neurology, Sacks pursued other interests including motorcycling, weight-lifting, and clandestine sexual encounters.
*Later: I take it back: This will be covered quite thoroughly a few sections into the book; his home life was quite a bit more complicated and …fraught than was evidence from his biographies.
Most of the letters in the section are to his parents. I have to say I did a double take in realizing that he addressed them as “Ma and Pa,” not something I associate with either a Jewish or English upbringing. In any event, in this section his letters cover the period where he arrived in North America, got a position as a resident in Mt Zion Hospital in San Francisco, and embarked on a period of trying new things . These included motorcycling (although he had begun this in England I believe), weight lifting and body-building, and various tours around North America (a tour of Western Canada, trips to southern California, and a circuit of most of the U.S., during which he wrote his ‘Truckers’ essay. Other activities he mentions include boar hunting, scuba diving, spear fishing, and camping. With regard to his career we see him, initially delighted to get a position at Mt Zion, grow increasingly discontented with his position and colleagues, until he is able to land a new position in Southern California.
Other notable things in this section.
- He mentions his love of writing
- He describes going to a wrestling event, and how one of the body-builders he’s with, growing impatient at the gates, rips them off, and he and Sacks and a companion lead a crowd on a rampage into the arena. The police are summoned, and arrived, but no one is caught.
- He mentions, in a letter to Jonathan Miller, that he has indulged in the purchase of a prism of thallium bromide. Thallium bromide is a superconductor, and is used in detecting gamma rays and other electromagnetic radiation. He reminds Jonathan that he “used to have a strange mystic about such things;” however, as we shall see, his fascination with the elements, and even his totemization of them, is a theme that persists throughput his life. Perhaps this is another indication the he is trying to re-invent himself. However, note, as well, that thallium bromide is “extremely toxic and a cumulative poison which can be absorbed through the skin,” something of which Sacks, in his deep knowledge of chemistry, is no doubt aware. It makes me wonder about his motives, given that a few months later he writes his parents that he is manic depressive and that he has periods of acute sloth and misery.
- He mentions, as well, a neurology conference he attended with many of (at least in hindsight) of the ‘greats’ in attendance, including Wilder Penfielld, D. O. Hebb, and Aldous Huxley.
- He also confides to his parents that he thinks he is manic-depressive (something, in later years, that his analyst never agreed with): “”
- his writing
- being a hodlum
- the scientific conference with Penfield and Hebb and others
- jewel-like spams… manic depression
- eagerness to see patients and get to know them, followed by ‘I should have never become a doctor.
2. Los Angeles: 1962 – 1965 (29-32)
Sacks is now 29. So far, most of the correspondence — at least that covered in the book — has been with his parents.
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