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| Oliver Sacks, medical storyteller extraordinaire, in Manhattan on the edge of the Hudson, 1990. By Ken Shung/MPTVImages.com. |
A Rare, Personal Look at Oliver Sacks’s Early Career
The world was saddened to learn of neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks’s terminal illness through a recent op-ed. With Sacks’s new autobiography out this month,Lawrence Weschler shares early stories and diary entries about Sacks, his close friend, before Sacks achieved worldwide fame.
This past February 19, fans and friends of Oliver Sacks learned, by way of an article he published in The New York Times, that the great neurologist and medical chronicler had terminal cancer. “Nine years ago,” he explained, “it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.”
I have been both a longtime fan and a longtime friend of Sacks’s—and, what is more, had once, for a period of four years several decades ago, been his impending biographer. Back in those days, in the early 1980s—some years after the publication of his not yet celebrated masterpiece Awakenings and just before the spate of books, beginning with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that would bring him fame—Oliver was something of a recluse, living alone in a modest clapboard house out on City Island, in the Bronx, commuting each day to his medical rounds at the state hospitals and nursing homes that constituted his principal employers. Back then, he had relatively few friends and was regularly available for the frequent meals and forays that came to constitute the early days of our friendship.
I had originally written him a letter, sometime in the late 70s, from my California home. Somehow back in college I had come upon Awakenings, published in 1973, an account of his work with a group of patients who had been warehoused for decades in a home for the incurable—they were “human statues,” locked in trance-like states of near-infinite remove following bouts of a now rare form of encephalitis. Some had been in this condition since the mid-1920s. These people were suddenly brought back to life by Sacks, in 1969, following his administration of the then new “wonder drug” L-dopa, and Sacks described their spring-like awakenings and the harrowing siege of tribulations that followed. In the book, Sacks gave the facility where all this happened the pseudonym “Mount Carmel,” an apparent reference to Saint John of the Cross and his Dark Night of the Soul. But, as I wrote to Sacks in that first letter, his book seemed to me much more Jewish and Kabbalistic than Christian mystical. Was I wrong?
He responded with a hand-pecked typed letter of a good dozen pages, to the effect that, indeed, the old people’s home in question, in the Bronx, was actually named Beth Abraham; that he himself came from a large and teeming London-based Jewish family; that one of his cousins was in fact the eminent Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban (another, as I would later learn, was Al Capp, of Li’l Abner fame); and that his principal intellectual hero and mentor-at-a-distance, whose influence could be sensed on every page of Awakenings, had been the great Soviet neuropsychologist A. R. Luria, who was likely descended from Isaac Luria, the 16th-century Jewish mystic.
Our correspondence proceeded from there, and when, a few years later, I moved from Los Angeles to New York, I began venturing out to Oliver’s haunts on City Island. Or he would join me for far-flung walkabouts in Manhattan. The successive revelations about his life that made up the better part of our conversations grew ever more intriguing: how both his parents had been doctors and his mother one of the first female surgeons in England; how, during the Second World War, with both his parents consumed by medical duties that began with the Battle of Britain, he, at age eight, had been sent with an older brother, Michael, to a hellhole of a boarding school in the countryside, run by “a headmaster who was an obsessive flagellist, with an unholy bitch for a wife and a 16-year-old daughter who was a pathological snitch”; and how—though his brother emerged shattered by the experience, and to that day lived with his father—he, Oliver, had managed to put himself back together through an ardent love of the periodic table, a version of which he had come upon at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and by way of marine-biology classes at St. Paul’s School, which he attended alongside such close lifetime friends as the neurologist and director Jonathan Miller and the exuberant polymath Eric Korn. Oliver described how he gradually became aware of his homosexuality, a fact that, to put it mildly, he did not accept with ease; and how, following college and medical school, he had fled censorious England, first to Canada and then to residencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in his spare hours he made a series of sexual breakthroughs, indulged in staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation, underwent a fierce regimen of bodybuilding at Muscle Beach (for a time he held a California record, after he performed a full squat with 600 pounds across his shoulders), and racked up more than 100,000 leather-clad miles on his motorcycle. And then one day he gave it all up—the drugs, the sex, the motorcycles, the bodybuilding. By the time we started talking, he had been pretty much celibate for almost two decades.
Early on, Oliver had agreed to let me write his biography, and I began filling what would become 14 notebooks of accounts of our meetings and conversations. Much of our time consisted of his telling me ever more (to his mind) scandalous tales in the hopes that I, too, might finally concur in his estimation that his homosexuality was a terrible blight, a disfiguring canker on his character, which I just as regularly refused to do. He would not be assuaged. Midway through the process, he began to have second thoughts about our whole biographical project. Was there any way that I could tell his story without the homosexual stuff? Alas, there wasn’t.
Because I’d become increasingly convinced that the single most important moment in his professional life had come not on the day he began giving L-dopa to those living statues at Beth Abraham, summoning them back to life, but rather in the months before that, when Sacks had had the audacity to perceive that some of the patients were in fact not like the others—that, harrowingly, outward appearances notwithstanding, these particular patients were alive on the inside, completely conscious and lucid but trapped within their inert bodies. No other doctors had dared to imagine such a thing—and, really, how could they have been expected to? The answer, I thought, in Oliver’s case, had everything to do with insights Oliver gained from his epic drug bingeing, and there was no way to tell that story without exploring the sexual self-censure that had led him to seek escape in drugs in the first place.
In that case, Oliver came to feel, he would much rather have me not proceed with the biography. He would prefer we just stay friends. Which was all right by me. I stored the notebooks in the back reaches of one of my closets. And we remained close. Oliver was present at the party celebrating my own marriage and would become a doting godfather to our daughter. Over the years, we and the few other friends who knew of the issue would try to pith him of his self-contempt and self-denial regarding his sexual nature—for the longest time, to no avail.
But he did get over the writer’s block that had been afflicting him for years, and books began pouring out, to ever increasing acclaim. In 1990, a fine film was made of Awakenings. He found an extraordinary assistant, Kate Edgar, and eventually, at long last—perhaps most miraculously of all—about seven years ago he allowed himself to fall in love, with the writer Billy Hayes, the author of The Anatomist, about Henry Gray of Gray’s Anatomy. As he entered his 70s, the self-censure slowly fell away—well, not all of it, this being Oliver—and last year he managed to embark on his own telling of the story of his life: all of it. That autobiography, On the Move, will be published this month by Knopf.
Oliver Sacks at the New York screening party for the movie of his book Awakenings, starring Robin Williams as a character based on Sacks, 1990.
Courtesy of Oliver Sacks.
Earlier this year, my daughter, Sara, and I were visiting his apartment in Greenwich Village, and Oliver took to reading to us from the manuscript. He told us how he’d have preferred to call the book My Own Life, in homage to another of his intellectual heroes, the philosopher David Hume, who during his final illness had polished off a gorgeous autobiographical essay of that title, but everyone had advised against it. Afterward, I rummaged around my closet and pulled out the notebooks filled with our conversations from 35 years ago, and began to read them.
A few weeks later came Oliver’s article in The New York Times, which he called “My Own Life.” (Sara said, “I guess he got to use his title after all.”) In light of the news, the contents of my old notebooks seemed to take on a whole different cast, and with Oliver’s blessing I offer some excerpts.
JUNE-JULY 1981
He lives today on City Island, an approximately 30-minute drive from Manhattan, and out onto a small, almost quaint fishing-and-boating enclave. He has lived there for about nine months, having slowly migrated across a succession of stages from Greenwich Village, where he lived when he first alighted in the city. His house, at 119 Horton Street, is near the end of the island, the terminus of this somehow unexpected urban appendix. It is a brief walk to the narrow beach. He thinks of himself as only partially terrestrial, or, rather, as entirely amphibious. He tells me he regularly swims out to the bridge in the distance.
He is a large, robust fellow, given to impish, child-like outbursts, his motions and postures often awkward, also like a child’s. He calls himself, to himself, “Ollie.”
When we first meet I tell him he does not look the way I expected. “My physical look changes radically over time,” he replies. “Sometimes I’m bearded; sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I weigh 190 pounds; sometimes I weigh 300.” (“That must be some beard,” I say.) He is currently somewhat closer to 190. He has severe back problems, the result of several accidents (“worldly infelicities”), and when we go to dinner, a brief walk to a nearby fish restaurant, he carries along a square flat pillow (“something of a cross between a prosthesis and a transitional object”). At dinner he suffers recurrent heat flashes, his face reddening and his brow glistening with sweat, and when we return to his home, he heaves himself before the air conditioner in his study (there is one in every room) and basks in its shivery flow, relieved at last. He kneels before the thrumming machine, as if in ecstatic prayer (a contented seal).
He tells me he had to get an actual house as his home—this is his first—in part to store his “secret production.” He points to a long shelf parallel to his bed, atop which at least 30 notebooks are neatly arrayed: “At most times I am either talking, listening, or writing. That’s from the last six months.” He figures he writes one million words a year. He has a problem, he admits, translating this torrential outpouring into published form.
In other rooms, hundreds of casebooks—notebooks devoted to individual patients, whose names appear on the spines—are piled one atop another. There is a tilework of tape cassettes in their plastic cases—interviews with patients, a wailing wall of human suffering. There are dozens of videotapes, also of patients. Sacks recently emptied his meager bank account of its last $5,000 in order to buy videocassettes so he could record the entirety of one course of therapy with a particular patient suffering from Tourette’s syndrome.
He is thinking of writing a book to be titled Five Seconds, a detailed study of the myriad, speeded-up lives that a ticcing Touretter can live through in any random, five-second period—he needs to use high-speed video equipment in order to even begin to capture it all. He insists that every face change or yelp is significant, and that they all relate, one to the next.
He respects facts, he tells me, and he has a scientist’s passion for precision. But facts, he insists, must be embedded in stories. Stories—people’s stories—are what really have him hooked.
And music. He has come to appreciate the vital qualitative role music can play in the Parkinsonian’s or Touretter’s life, and across a patient’s recovery. In his living room there is an elegant vintage stereo: a bequest to Sacks from his friend W. H. Auden.
On the irrational and the rational: Sacks has no romantic love of the irrational, nor does he worship the rational. He speaks of their inter-penetration, as of a garden—delirium, bounded and tamed back just enough to allow for humane living. The irrational needs to be mastered into personality. But at the same time, those who have been visited by these irrational firestorms, and surmounted them, are somehow deeper human beings, more profound persons, for the experience.
He recently attended a conference on Tourette’s syndrome. Ninety-two specialists gave papers on EKG readings, electrical conductivity of the brain—all kinds of technical subjects. Sacks, the 93rd, got up and said, “It’s strange. I’ve been sitting here all weekend and heard not one sentence on what it might be like to be a Touretter.”
OCTOBER 1981
‘The years from age 17 through 32 are for me a gray period—I have few recollections, even though these included my years at medical school, at which I did very well.
“Part of this time I spent in California, doing my residency at U.C.L.A. I lived on Venice Beach, disguised to myself as a muscle builder at the open-air jungle gym. I was quite suicidal: I took every drug, my only principle being ‘Every dose an overdose.’ I used to race motorcycles in the Santa Monica Mountains. Apparently I created something of a ruckus at the U.C.L.A. hospital: I would take some of the patients, the M.S. victims and the paraplegics who hadn’t moved in years—they’d ask me and I’d take them out, strapped to my back, motorcycling in the mountains.
“It was a tremendously self-destructive period: one day I looked at myself in the mirror, my cheeks all sunken, and I said, ‘Ollie, keep this up and you won’t be here in another year.’ ” He laughs. “Hard to imagine me with a sunken skull now that I’m all folds and dimples.”
MARCH 1982
Oliver visits me in Manhattan, and we go out to a barbecue place for dinner.
Sometimes he holds his head like a bowling ball, his huge palm spread over the top of his round skull. His face, a confluence of spheres. Cherubic circles—beard, cheeks, gold wire spectacles.
He is reading Maurice Natanson’s book on the philosopher Edmund Husserl. We discuss the “natural attitude,” how even though x, y, and z may happen outside your frame of reference—your frame of nature—still you always retain the idea of a frame of reference or nature. But no, says Oliver. He is interested in precisely those voyages that take one to the edge, and beyond the edge, of nature.
Emphasis on the musical and on touch. How one patient of his felt unmusicked, needed to drink of music’s spirit before she could move—either that or the touch of a healthy person. Sacks feels these sensations are similar: we are moved by what moves us.
During recent dental surgery, after the novocaine took effect, Oliver grabbed for the mirror to make sure the bottom of his face was still there. He is a phenomenological literalist: he takes his sensations literally. He talks of the difference between a cow that has received a spinal tap and a human. The cow, who’s entirely sensation, experiences nothing strange. The human experiences a terrifying fall into the uncanny. A void of context. A black hole.
Oliver’s pocket watch is incredibly loud. It has, he tells me, caused incidents—elevators have been cleared, and buses, and airport lounges. He claims not to hear it, except at night when it stops, at which point he wakens with a start.
MAY 1982
He wrote his first book, Migraine, in nine days. “It had gotten to the point,” he tells me, “where I said to myself, ‘Now look, Sacks, you really must write this thing. I’ll give you 10 days or else we’re going to have to kill ourselves.’ This worked. It scared me into starting.”
He says, “At times, the world seems rife with malevolence, chaos. I am almost overwhelmed, but then it suffices for me to perceive the spectacle of quiet goodness, say the Little Sisters of the Poor, and everything is all right.
“I see 10 patients a day and write 500 words on each meeting—a thousand patients a year, a thousand stories.”
JUNE 1982
A phone conversation with Oliver, who is in California to meet with his old friend the poet Thom Gunn. “I met Thom through his poetry—his first collection,Fighting Terms, and then especially the next one, The Sense of Movement,appealed to me. Seeking him out was one of the things I had in mind when I came out to California.
“Let’s see. I arrived in September 1960, and we met some while after that. I saw much of him at the time. I did a lot of traveling on my motorbike, wrote many travel pieces. Anyway, I would show them to him. He would criticize some pieces in terms which at the time I found cruel—I approached him raw and vulnerable, as a student or acolyte, and his criticism perhaps made me retreat.
In his Muscle Beach days, with his BMW motorbike, around 1962.
Courtesy of Oliver Sacks.
“Years later, we were re-united at the time of my publication of Awakenings. He sent me a letter that at the time obsessed me: I kept it in my pocket or wallet for months. I wrote reply after reply, eventually well over 200 pages, none of which I posted.
“Basically, he wrote that when he’d first met me he’d thought me the cleverest man he’d ever met, and yet he’d found something lacking, and precisely the most important thing—a sympathy, a humanity. ‘I despaired of you,’ he wrote, ‘and now this. What happened? What changed?’ ”
I ask: What had changed?
“Well, that would require an autobiography.”
He hesitates and wonders how open he should be—should allow himself to be. He sighs and goes on.
“What had excited me in Thom Gunn’s poetry was its homoerotic lyricism, a romantic perverseness. The perverse turned into art. He gave a voice to things which I’d imagined singular and solitary, and this filled me with admiration.
“And the other side of this: he dealt with elements in myself with which I had never come to terms. And still haven’t.”
JULY 1982
‘My mother,” he says, “was sensitive but inhibited.” Their relationship was, by Oliver’s account, too intense, too close. He was her youngest, and a prodigy.
One of the first buried memories to emerge during his psychoanalysis: how she used to bring home monstrosities from surgery, monsters, fetuses in jars—this when he was 10—and then, when he was 12, how she brought him along to perform a dissection of a corpse.
“When I was 21 and home from college, I accompanied my father one evening on his rounds. We were driving in the car, and he asked me how things were going. Fine. Did I have any girlfriends? No. Why didn’t I have any girlfriends? I guessed I didn’t like girls … Silence for a few moments … Does that mean you like boys? Yes, I replied, I am a homosexual.
“I asked my father not to mention this to my mother under any circumstances: it would break her heart—she’d never understand. The next morning, my mother came tearing down the stairs, shrieking at me, hurling Deuteronomical curses, horrible judgmental accusations. This went on for an hour. Then she fell silent. She remained completely silent for three days, after which normalcy returned. The subject was never mentioned again during her lifetime.
“My analyst tells me he’s never encountered anyone less affected by gay liberation. I remain locked in my cell despite the dancing at the prison gates.”
We have developed a pattern, Oliver and I. He comes over in the evening to my apartment. I begin by offering beer and cheese and crackers, which he eats with gusto. Then we go out to dinner: then we return and I offer him ice cream. (He’s already eaten a Granny Smith apple on the way home.) He then seems to veer along a narcoleptic precipice. When he starts yawning impulsively—nodding, gasping to wakefulness—I ply him with coffee: two, three, four cups. Eventually he’s awake enough to drive home.
After our most recent dinner, I get a letter from him. “Lovely seeing you last evening—I do greatly enjoy our evenings together and wonder if the sudden, peculiar collapsed feelings I seem to get toward the end are not because of the ‘forbiddenness’ and anxiety involved—your probing concern to elicit my substance and reality and draw a good appreciation to me, whereas my fearful-deprecatory part says, ‘No! It’s a lie—you’re nothing—not real—lie low—shut up—be mute—stay hidden … Die!’ ”
AUGUST 1982
I visit Oliver again, out on City Island, and arrive complaining of having been caught in a speed trap. He asks me if I might like to go out for a row—“I mean,” he says, “there will be no problem with speeding there. You can only row three miles per hour!”
We go out to the garage—inside, a series of oars lined along the wall. We pick up the oars and oarlocks and walk down toward the water. The boat, a 15-footer, is moored upside down in a beachy depression, and the new keylock is jammed with sand. (“Only a Jewish intellectual,” Oliver says, “could get himself in such a fix.”) We finally manage to free the lock. Soon we are out on the water, Oliver pulling with a clean, steady rhythm as the boat slices out toward the open channel. He proceeds to row for over an hour, a continuous steady rhythm, talking cheerfully all the while.
Sacks the swimmer near his City Island home, 1996.
By James Estrin/The New York Times/Redux.
We continue on out. The Empire State Building glistens in the distance, on the far horizon—a paperweight souvenir of itself. “Over there,” Oliver says, gesturing the other way, “is the Throgs Neck Bridge.” Two pulls of the oars. “That’s my favorite swim: from the island out to the pylons and back, about six miles.” Another pull of the oars. “Although it can get a bit hazardous, since the people in their motorboats don’t normally expect swimmers in these waters.” A few more pulls. “Especially late at night.”
Swimming runs in the family. “My father loved to swim. The poor man’s equivalent of crossing the English Channel—a 15-mile swim off the Isle of Wight—is a feat for which he has held a succession of records by decile, including currently, for 90-year-olds.”
And his mother? “She was not so much into swimming.” Two beats. “She held several English records in the standing long jump.” A laugh. “Very un-Edwardian thing to do.”
AUGUST 1982
‘When the writing is flowing, I am powerful and cheerful and can’t imagine it ever being otherwise,” he tells me as we set out on a walk along Riverside Drive. “And when the writing becomes blocked, I am crestfallen and palsied, and there, too, I can’t imagine it ever being otherwise. In either case, my visions of the future are at all times characterized by a spurious permanence.”
By 79th Street we decide to cut east, over to the American Museum of Natural History. Once we are inside, Oliver’s disposition brightens. We head over to the hall of mollusks and stop before a case of squid, nautili, and octopi. Oliver is by now positively chipper.
I ask him what he has always liked about them. For a moment he stares at the case thoughtfully—the polymorphous, slightly goofy octopus; the sleek propulsive squid; the squat cephalopod. He finally erupts, “You can see what I like about them.”
He pauses. “With octopi,” he says, “I suppose it was partly the face—that here, for the first time in evolution, appears a face, a distinct physiognomy, indeed a personality—it’s true, when you spend time with them, you begin to differentiate between them, and they seem to differentiate between you and other visitors.
“So, there was that, this mutual sense of affection for the alien.
“And then there was their way of moving, which is jet propulsion.
“And their eyes, which are huge.
“Their birdlike beaks, which can give you a nasty nip.
“And their sexual habits—the male, you see, donates a sperm-filled leg to the female.
“That, and their ancientness.
“And their simultaneous adventurousness—how they threw off the repressive shell and moved out, to float free.
“And then, I guess, their sliminess.”
He giggles. “I do like the slimy.”
A few minutes later, before an exhibition of clay models of prehistoric heads, Oliver mentions that his school in England had a collection of brains in jars. “The brains of the great. Turgenev’s was huge, 3,000 milligrams. Poor Anatole France’s was only 800.” I ask him why he became a neurologist rather than some other kind of doctor. The question, to him, hardly makes any sense. “I mean,” he stammers, “obviously I became a neurologist rather than, say, a cardiologist, because there’s nothing for an intelligent man to be interested in in cardiology. The heart, I suppose, is an interesting pump, but it’s just a pump. Neurology is the only branch of medicine that could sustain a thinking man.”
OCTOBER 1982
We take a trip together to London. Oliver’s publisher has achieved something of a muddle, over rights, with Harold Pinter’s publisher over the book Other Places, which includes “A Kind of Alaska,” Pinter’s one-act version of Awakenings. Oliver is completely flummoxed over how, if, and when to approach Pinter. I suggest he simply call and greet him.
“Ah, yes,” Oliver says. “Greet. To greet. Not to apologize, nor to accuse. To greet. What a wonderful word. I must remember it. ‘Hello, Mr. Pinter. This is Dr. Sacks. I am calling to greet you.’ Yes.”
At St. Paul’s, Oliver tells me, he, Jonathan Miller, and Eric Korn had founded a tremendously successful literary society, which quickly eclipsed the staid Milton Society.
“We were a ravenous Jewish overgrowth,” he recalls, “and one day the headmaster called me in and said, ‘Sacks, you’re dissolved—you don’t exist.’ As simple as that. A phrase that has persisted within me, hauntingly, through the years.”
We come to 37 Mapesbury Road, the home of Oliver’s childhood and still the residence of his father—a two-story red-brick Edwardian house. Michael, the mad brother, abides upstairs. Oliver, unconsciously rapt, slides his hand along the bark of the plane trees lining the road. In his father’s study, a photograph of a burly Oliver, all in leather, on his motorcycle. A photo of his mother, “still not gray, though that’s the only way I remember her.” His father is a short, roly-poly man with a little squib of a mustache, joyfully oblivious. Michael flits about the edges of life: a heart-rendingly raw being, his posture erect, dressed in full dark suit at all times, with a daft semi-crew cut and a nervous, clipped, but proper speaking manner.
When Oliver first sees him on this visit, he asks, “How are you?”
“All compulsion and contradiction.”
Another time, Michael says, “I live in Little Ease,” referring to the torture cell in the Tower of London, where prisoners could not stand or sit or lie down.
Another time: “I am the favorite of a sadist god.”
On the plane home, Oliver has a small briefcase and no other luggage. Inside, his supplies for a three-week stay in London: some underwear, five spectacle cases (one filled with pens), a pair of swimming trunks, goggles, and Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind. “There you have it,” he says. “The essential Sacks!”
JANUARY 1983
His housekeeper regularly writes lists of things he should buy. “The other day,” Oliver tells me, “on the list was the word ‘fail.’ I figured this was some prodigiously self-deprecatory detergent and set about looking for it. But no stores had it. I decided its name must have been self-fulfilling.
“Only, my housekeeper subsequently corrected me: ‘No, no, you idiot—foil!’ ”
We discuss phantom limbs—and specifically a patient he’s been seeing recently who had a phantom finger for over 40 years, until he developed a diabetic neuropathy, a progressive paralysis of his other fingers in his hands, at which point he lost the phantom finger as well. “The best cure for a phantom, I always say, is a stroke, which wipes out the representing part of the brain.”
He adds, “At Beth Abraham we have one patient with a phantom wristwatch! And another with phantom coins!”
Oliver talks about the story behind Awakenings: “I arrived at Beth Abraham in September 1966 and first began hearing of L-dopa in February 1967. The post-encephalitic patients—80 of them dispersed amongst a population of 500—had come at different times, and there had never been any particular reason to put them together. I was very ignorant: I didn’t know what to make of this high concentration of trancers—they stood out by a strange isolation. Stillness punctuated by sudden explosions of movement, as in the mind-blowing case of the fellow who hadn’t moved, seemingly, for months, and who one day, as I was taking a case near him, suddenly exploded into a riotously funny imitation of a berserk neurologist—he grabbed my ophthalmoscope, a complex tool, strapped it on his own forehead, did his whole shtick, carefully returned the scope to its case, and then reverted to his eerie stillness, as if nothing had happened.”
FEBRUARY 1983
A visit with Oliver to Beth Abraham, in the Bronx, and then to the Holy Family Home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, in Brooklyn.
At Beth Abraham he reviews the file of one patient he’s just seen: “A nice lady with a time bomb in her head, a tumor that will soon claim her. I’ve seen many people like her, whose days are measured and who have started to live gracefully: whatever neuroses she may have had have fallen away, and she’s living fully.”
In his briefcase, Oliver has a reflex hammer (his mother’s), periodicals in several languages (Arizona Highways, magazines in Yiddish and Spanish), and a foam ball.
“My main neurological tool is the ball,” he says. “You can learn a lot from how the patients play—and many patients who will do nothing else will open up to a gently tossed ball.”
Beth Abraham’s halls are wide and jammed with people in wheelchairs—a strange and eerie scene through which Oliver walks with grace. The halls blossom with greetings as he passes. It is clear that he is loved here. “Hello, Doctor!” these sad, crumpled patients somehow manage to grunt, and he hellos them back as if they were people, as if they are people (not as if they were like people). We pass one man who Oliver informs me is listed as “Patient No. 20” in the institution’s files and who has been here since the hospital opened, in 1919.
Oliver is called away for a moment, and off in a side lounge I happen upon the patient referred to as Gertie in the book, one of the last of the still-living Awakenings patients. She is slumped over in a wheelchair, her chin resting on her chest, her hand trembling mildly, subdued but lucid, her voice attenuated. I lean over to talk with her, and lean in to catch her replies. I ask her if she remembers what it was like to come to, suddenly like that, from her decades-long statue trance, that day back in 1969. “Oh, yes,” she whispers. What was it like? “Well, suddenly I was talking.” And does she happen to remember her first words? “Oh, yes.” And what were they? “Suddenly I heard myself say, ‘Ooooooh, I’m talking.’ ”
On the drive to the Little Sisters, he says, “I am a clinical ontologist, one for whom the diagnostic question is: How are you? How do you be?” Oliver has been coming to the Little Sisters’ home in the Bronx since 1971, to the one in Queens since 1975, and to this Brooklyn facility since 1976. He is the only neurologist who visits these homes.
Oliver sets himself up in a little office on the second floor and is quickly briefed by Sister Lorraine, a wise soul. The patients are brought in one by one. Oliver positions himself like a big teddy bear, a Santa Claus, on a small, low roller chair, and greets them expansively, waving, as the door opens and each new patient is brought in from the hall.
Olga, who has Parkinson’s, gets wheeled in. Oliver asks her to stand up, and she has a terrible time, struggling to rise up from her wheelchair—but then Oliver has her sit down, and he holds out two hands, a single extended finger protruding from each, and she clutches the fingers and gets up effortlessly. “See: you share your action with them,” he comments to me.
Reviewing her chart, before she had come in, he had noted how the anti-psychotic agents made her more Parkinsonian and the anti-Parkinson’s drugs made her more psychotic. “Last year,” he says, “she went around in a fever of inverted solicitude, waking everyone up to ask if she looked okay. But lately she’s been feeling depressed.”
“Last time I got like this,” she says, “they gave me shock treatment. Do you think I should have it again?”
“You’re the doctor,” Oliver replies.
After she leaves, he says, “Part of me is repelled by shock treatment—shocked by it—but one does see over and over and over again how obsessive depression and melancholia can be short-circuited. It’s as if the circuitry of despair gets tripped up, and the patient sometimes has more courage and sense than we do.”
I step away for a conversation with Sister Lorraine, who always refers to Oliver as Doctor, as in “Doctor is tremendous.”
“I love Doctor’s notes on patients,” she says. “He always types them on green paper, perhaps out of a sense of hope. And the depths of his perception! Most consultants’ notes are cut-and-dried, aimed at the problem with no sense of the person. Even with the psychiatric consultants, you seldom sense the total person. But Doctor verbalizes enough to make that individual—say, one of the 30 utterly non-responsive ones—become a person. He will write, for instance, ‘The It became an I, and now it’s a person.’ And it did—one had seen it actually happen. How many others would have even allowed themselves to imagine there was still an ‘I’ inside that vegetable?
At home in his study earlier this year.
© Billy Hayes.
“I can’t imagine his being that profound without having had profound experience. I don’t know what it was, but I know it’s not just brilliance. One day he was looking at a woman who’d lost the feeling in her fingertips and hence could no longer finger the rosary. He just sensed what that would mean—even though he’s not Catholic—and he asked me, ‘Is there any way maybe we could create a bar with 10 beads or bumps? Would that still be valid?’ ”
Several days afterward, I join Oliver for a midwinter swim at the New Rochelle Y. The sight of him emerging from the dressing room: A massive, solid physique swathed in fur. His wide transparent goggles. Long black flippers, fingerless webbed neoprene gloves with implanted weights, and atop it all, covering the only hairless part of his body, a black swimming cap. He lumbers forward, gingerly: the Rebbe from the Black Lagoon.
And yet, once in the water, his swimming is grace-filled, relentless, powerful. And endless: he ordinarily does 72 laps but can, and does on occasion, enter a fugue state, swimming for hours on end.
Once, describing his swimming: “It’s slow, but I never tire. My stroke is long, powerful, and almost entirely underwater. Out in the Sound, I come up for air, descend, and re-emerge 20 yards later. One of my neighbors once mistook me for a migrating whale. Perhaps it’s my destiny to die harpooned.”
JULY 1983
Oliver calls me, tremendously excited: “I’m in a Precambrian bliss!” he says. It develops that he was out swimming in the Sound and was returning to shore when, putting his foot on a rock, it moved! That rock, and then its neighbor, and then the neighbor’s neighbor—the whole field of rocks turned out to be a horde of horseshoe crabs, beached for mating.
“My people,” Oliver proclaimed, “my people have come!”
Oliver’s birthday is July 9, a Saturday. He will be 50, and he is throwing himself a party, his first since he was 21, and he has gone hog wild. After days of shy withdrawal, he has stoked himself up with a pint of rum and has been calling everyone in sight. “And to my astonishment, far from dismissing the invitation out of hand, everyone is being tremendously kind and responsive.”
On the Fourth of July, we stand on the beach watching the fireworks: “I don’t know what got into me: I invited the entire block!”
A few days later, as we drive out to the party, Oliver’s doctor colleague and friend Mark Homonoff recounts having been out on City Island during last week’s invasion of the horseshoe crabs: “A neighbor was standing on his lawn, skewering caterpillars. ‘These creepers!’ he complained. ‘They’re bigger than ever this year. It’s the weather. First these creepers, and now the crabs. Things are really weird with nature this year.’ ” It was, says Homonoff, like the classic beginning of one of those 50s sci-fi flicks. In the car we fantasize about the rest of the film—the mad scientist on the other side of the island, who was carelessly emptying plutonium into the strait, and how now everything was converging on Oliver’s party: us, the neighbors, the whole Towering Inferno supporting cast, the huge mutating horseshoe crabs.
A few minutes later, I describe it all to Oliver by the beach. Looking out, he says, “Yes! Yes! And I’d be here fending off the hysterical neighbors, trying to calm their fears, to disarm them of their picks and shovels and rifles, trying to explain how these are good creatures, our fellows. And then I’d be turning toward them, the giant crabs, and saying, ‘Yes, welcome, eat us, eat us all—the world is yours. Lord knows we’ve made a complete botch of things!’ ”
Later: “I’ve been feeling bad for months,” Oliver says. “Remember that evening a while back on the way to Porgy and Bess when I said I don’t tell lies but sometimes I invent the truth. Well, this was not strictly accurate. Imagine. Not invent. I should have said, ‘I imagine the truth.’ In the sense that Tolstoy said there was only one story he ever wrote which he considered a failure—his story ‘Family Happiness.’ When asked why, he said it was because it felt made up. And of course he’s exactly right. I mean, Anna Karenina reads like a profile.”
The party is proceeding happily back up at the house—a wonderful mingling: literary types, professional colleagues, radicals, neighbors. At one point, women are racing up and down the narrow street: “The doctor needs chairs! Oliver needs more chairs!”
A watermelon is brought out. “I once had a bizarre acid trip,” Oliver tells me. “I thought the entire earth was edible.”
A few days later, Oliver conjures the end of his life: “A while back, I thought I had leukemia. And it was quite wonderful. I’d been dieting, lost 60 pounds since my last checkup, and the doctor said he wanted to take another blood test, mentioned that a few months earlier my red-blood-cell count had been low”—and here the doctor had paused meaningfully, a terminal diagnosis hanging in the air, before going on to say that it was “surely just a question of my not having eaten.”
“Anyway, between the two halves of that sentence, for a few fractions of a second, I was absolutely certain not only of having leukemia but that I had only three months to live. At last, I found myself thinking, I’ll be rid of my inhibiting neuroses and I’ll be able to write all the books I have backed up in me.
“Like Luria, who had a massive heart attack, and lived on one further year, during which he wrote four books, 40 articles—more than he had the previous 50 years—and all of it calm, lucid, sparkling clean, nothing rushed.
“For a split second I saw them all tumbling clear: the Tourette’s book, the five-second book, the homes-and-institutions book, the leg book, the dementia book … all in the wake of that wonderful death threat.
“And then the doctor finished his sentence.”
Uncanny, that last passage, couched there in the middle of the seventh of my 14 notebooks. Uncanny, because he was saying as much just the other day: how in the face of this new and actual death sentence he intends to pour himself back into his writing with redoubled intensity. There are at least two more books besides the autobiography that he hopes to complete in the months ahead, and that he is convinced he yet will. But uncanny also because, what a blessing, what a beneficence, grace abounding, that he did not die back then in the early 80s, and that he lived on another 30-odd years, gradually but steadily untying the knots that seemed to bind him, re-visioning and coming to terms with his past demons, and finding and at long last accepting present love.
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