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The Oliver Sacks that most of the world knew — the one I fell in love with after we met in 2008, when he was 75 — was the beloved neurologist and the author of many best-selling books, admired worldwide. A forthcoming volume of Oliver’s letters, nearly 350 of them, spanning 55 years, from age 27 to 82, provides a more complicated picture of the man often referred to in his later years as “the poet laureate of medicine.” Even I, his partner for the last six years of his life, was surprised by what I read in many of these letters, which will be published next month for the first time. (A selection of excerpts from the letters will appear below this essay.)
Episodes or stories I’d certainly heard about or read about in his autobiography “On the Move” come startlingly, vividly to life in the letters, illuminated as they are by the irrepressible now of Oliver’s voice. We are in his mind, in his thoughts, in the heat of the moment, as he bangs out letter after letter on a typewriter or with a fountain pen (Oliver never owned a computer or sent an email or text).
In 1965, a 31-year-old Oliver wrote a letter to his parents about his application for a position at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. The required letters of recommendation, he wrote, had been solicited and sent. Oliver, in an attempt at self-deprecating humor, included a mock quotation about him from an unnamed boss: “He arrives late, he rides a motorcycle, he dresses like a slob, but he has a good mind tucked away somewhere, and maybe you’ll have better luck with him than we have had. I like him, but he has given me a lot of gray hairs.”
He did land the job, and spent a number of years at Einstein and working at Beth Abraham Hospital, where he encountered the patients he would later write about in “Awakenings.” But he never quite found his way, made friends or fit in. In a desperate state during this period, he wrote a fevered letter to his favorite aunt, Len, wondering if, like his older brother Michael, he might be schizophrenic.
“Who am I? What sort of person am I? Under my glibness and my postures and my facades, my imitations, what is the real Oliver like? And, is there a real Oliver?” He added, “I have always felt transparent, without substance, a ghost, a transient, homeless, or outcast.”
It’s always tempting to draw a lesson from a famous person’s life. As Oliver’s partner, I have not so much a single lesson but an overwhelming sense of gratitude for our time together — the same sentiment he expressed in “My Own Life” and the other essays he wrote for The New York Times near the end of his life. But for others, the multitudes of readers who adored him and his work, there might be a message about what we think of as failure and the possibility of redemption.
The popular conception of Oliver’s career as both a neurologist and a writer was one of tremendous success from the start. But this was not the case. Oliver was 52 when his fourth book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” became a wholly unexpected best seller in 1986. In his 20s, 30s and 40s, his life and career had been not only unorthodox, but by many means, a disaster.
Both compulsive and impulsive, driven by self-destructive behavior (especially in his yearslong addiction to amphetamines, and what Oliver himself called periods of intense “mania”), he moved from job to job — twice getting fired — searching to find his way as a neurologist, as a writer and as a closeted gay man. While he had published three books before “Hat,” none had been markedly successful. Even his best-known book from that period, “Awakenings” (1973), didn’t sell well at the time — that wouldn’t change until the film adaptation in 1990 — and was largely ignored by his neurological colleagues.
His next book, “A Leg to Stand On” (1984), took him 11 torturous years and dozens of drafts to complete. In the meantime, other potential books were either lost, destroyed by Oliver in fits of frustration, or never finished. He despaired that he would ever amount to much, a sentiment echoed by those who knew him.
Some of Oliver’s most revealing, passionate and numerous letters come during a short period in 1965, when he was 32, and that deal not with his mania or the frustrations of his medical career, but with love.
They were written in the aftermath of a fling he’d had during a week in Paris and Amsterdam with a Hungarian theater director named Jeno Vincze. The tone of these letters will be, for many people, a shock — they are that intense, both transcendentally beautiful and sometimes vicious. While Oliver had enjoyed countless hookups during his earlier time in San Francisco, living at the Y.M.C.A., no less, and had his heart broken by an unrequited romance with a young straight man in Los Angeles, this was the first time he had fallen so quickly and impulsively in love — a passion clearly fueled by drugs.
After returning to New York, he writes long letters to Jeno day after day: “My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness,” he writes in the first letter, and in the next, “I love you insanely.” But soon Oliver grows impatient and suspicious, for Jeno’s replies do not come as quickly as he’d like: “I am a thermometer in your hand. Infamous week! Each day I waited for your letter. Each day I sank into deeper despair.”
Within just a few weeks, it’s over for Oliver. “I really cannot imagine life with anybody,” he writes in a letter sent some two months later. “I want no further contact with you, for like you, I am all or none.” And then, “I do not know what the word ‘love’ means. Perhaps I loved you, but I no longer love you. I have only a sense of panic and revulsion, a categorical necessity to get away.”
This would be Oliver’s last romantic relationship of any significance for more than 40 years.
By the mid-1970s, he’d kicked drugs but was still adrift, fired from his job and picking up other gigs where he could. In a 1977 letter, he wrote to a former student about meeting some neurology colleagues at a conference: “When I mentioned my peripatetic, nomadic life … one of them said, ‘But, Oliver, this is all very — eccentric. You mean you don’t really have any position at your age?’ … ‘It is very simple,’ I answered, ‘I have the only real position there is … the only one with real tenure. My position is precisely at the center of medicine … at the very heart of medicine.’”
Oliver’s insistence on his own individuality, on being his most authentic self, mirrored his insistence on his patients’ individuality, on their absolute uniqueness as human beings, no matter how their neurological or psychiatric disorders made them feel. And ultimately, one might say, Oliver was his own most challenging and important patient.
That one’s humanity is embedded in one’s genetic uniqueness is beautifully articulated in a 2006 reply to a young woman with bipolar disorder, who had asked him, “Am I just a mistake that somehow survived evolution’s ax?”
Though she was a stranger to him — one of his thousands of correspondents — Oliver replied by letter immediately: “What seems to me less stressed, and most in need of stressing,” he wrote to her, “is that you are an individual — unique — with gifts and genes which no one else in the world exactly duplicates — and that means you have a true place and role in evolution — and in the present. That you have bipolar disorder … does not begin to encompass the whole of you — it is a what, while you are a you. You have to hold to this sense of personhood … which is deeper than any ‘condition’ you have.”
By the time he wrote this letter, Oliver was 73 and, with the help of his longtime psychoanalyst as well as a small staff that helped keep him organized, had achieved a certain serenity that had eluded him for decades. Or perhaps “coherence” is a better, more accurate word. His life, with its multiple contradictions and warring impulses, the difficulties and rejections and often self-inflicted wounds, as well as his tremendous success, now finally all made sense.
This is who he was: equally a neurologist and a best-selling author; at the height of his considerable intellectual powers; and still as boyishly curious as an 8-year-old. Still practicing medicine and teaching, he was also writing prolifically with great joy and ease, one book or essay flowing seamlessly into the next. And perhaps most significantly, after a lifetime plagued by self-loathing and internalized homophobia — not to mention 35 years of celibacy — Oliver could acknowledge without shame that he was a gay man, ready to experience romance and a long-term domestic relationship for the first time.
Two years later, in 2008, we met. How? To my surprise, he wrote me a letter after reading my book “The Anatomist.” And I — living in San Francisco at the time — wrote Oliver a letter back. We had a brief correspondence, all very collegial. But, once I moved to New York a year later, he and I started spending time together and getting better and better acquainted, despite a 28-year age difference. By the summer of 2009, we were in love. We remained a couple until his death at 82 in August 2015. He continued to write and reply to letters until nearly the day he died.
For Oliver to become the man he did was a triumph of his passion and determination. This didn’t happen in a single moment, of course — it took faith in his own abilities, time and persistence. It took kicking drugs, years of psychoanalysis and acceptance from his literary and medical colleagues. But Oliver’s own story shows us, as his work so often did, that lonely, disordered and unorthodox lives are not hopeless. They can be improved, even healed. That’s a message he would have been delighted to give the world.
Bill Hayes is the author of “Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me,” and “Sweat: A History of Exercise,” as well as the screenplay for a forthcoming film adaptation of “Insomniac City.”
The following excerpts from the forthcoming “Letters” of Oliver Sacks, edited by Kate Edgar, vividly depict the young Dr. Sacks struggling to find his way in the world as both a doctor and a writer, under the strain of intense self-doubt and battles with his own emotional and mental health.
MILK
To Augustus S. Rose, chair of the U.C.L.A. department of neurology, Oct. 21, 1963, after receiving a letter from Dr. Rose reprimanding him for drinking milk from the hospital supplies.
I take strong exception to the moral aspersions implicit in your letter — if you regard me as a thief, I will make full restitution for the milk “stolen” (it must total at least $3), and take my leave at the end of the academic year.
I will no longer delude myself regarding the auspiciousness of my career at U.C.L.A., having spoiled my academic record by the heinous sins of untidiness, unpunctuality, and slaking my thirst at the ward refrigerator. But you must know, as well as I, that a man is not the sum of his minor misdemeanors, but of his best endeavors. You are well aware that I am not devoid of intelligence or of serious interest in the neurological sciences, and I shall still nourish the hope that you will not entirely abandon me if I seek your support in finding myself a position elsewhere next year.
PASSION
To Jeno Vincze, a Hungarian theater director living in Berlin with whom Dr. Sacks had a brief, passionate affair, Oct. 4, 1965, Bronx.
My dearest Jeno:
I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is 7 o’clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the somber skyline. And soon there’ll be a billion lights. …
Your letter! What are you doing to me? I tore it open, and found myself trembling between tears and laughter. I pretended I had something in my eye, and rushed out of the room. You have said what I had intended to say. I wrote in my diary (my “diary” is really an endless letter to you, a conversation) after we’d been on the phone: I stride along the road too fast, driven by the rush of thoughts. My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile. They nod, and grin, and shout “great day.”
To Jeno Vincze, Oct. 6, 1965.
Jeno!
I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through 10 layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known. …
How constantly I talk with you! I write to you, continuously, in my diary. My last letter was overloaded, it had been building up for eight long days; it was congested, and in places false.
To Jeno Vincze, Oct. 12, 1965.
Jeno?
Still there? Still the same Jeno? Forgive me — it is eight days since I’ve heard from you. Eight days is nothing; one is busy; important business; the vagaries of the post; did I myself not keep you waiting for longer at a time of great uncertainty? True, true; completely true. I am too anxious, too demanding (like my mother who wants a letter every week: God forbid I should be as possessive as her!). But I feel like a fool writing to you — yet again — in the absence of response.
A LETHAL NEUROSIS
To Dr. Sacks’ favorite aunt, Helena Landau, whom he affectionately called Auntie Len, Feb. 18, 1966, Bronx.
I had, to put it bluntly, no life whatever in New York. That is to say, no friends, no one I could go to, speak to, trust, enjoy; my “interests” became stale and empty to me: hospital a burden daily harder to bear; harder still to dissimulate my feelings of boredom and despair. I couldn’t eat, or sleep, saw no conceivable future, saw my whole past as worthless and hateful; I compounded a deteriorating situation by drug dependency, and — but why upset you with this horrible catalog? I found myself, in short, finding existence intolerable, seeing no point whatever in further existence. More than this, I found myself struggling with what was, in effect, an insistent, a peremptory inner demand for acts of self-destruction, culminating in self-murder. I was in the grip of what one might term a lethal neurosis. …
What has happened to me en route so that I am slipping down the greased path of withdrawal, discontent, inability to make friends, inability to have sex, etc., etc., towards suicide in a New York apartment at the age of 32?
REGRETS
To Melvin Erpelding, a friend, December 1966, New York City.
How we have traveled, Mel! Always fleeing, always seeking, always deceiving ourselves, never arriving. Anchored to the Past, dreaming of the Future, and — in some fatal, blind sense — oblivious to the Present.
Lists of regrets, manufacture of dreams! I say to myself: Why did I leave Santa Monica? Beaches, white foam, Topanga, friends, the exhilaration which saturated every day. Bah! But what madness to leave San Francisco! Aerial, hilly, New Jerusalem. Or why did I not stay in the wilds, in the backwoods of Canada, a lumberman and poet? Or was not the real spitefulness ever to leave London — my only, wondrous London — my home, and the home of my people? Or was the real and ultimate sadness to grow up, to leave the Magic Region of childhood, the time of wish-fulfilment and infinite power, the feeling of love and an endless future?
Idiocy! It is all idiocy and vain regrets. Fatally easy to transfigure the past, to see in it millennia of epic happiness followed by cruel unmerited expulsions. It is the myth of Genesis all over again.
‘I HAVE UTTERLY BLOWN MY EGO TO PIECES’
To his friend Jonathan Miller, Sept. 23, 1968, New York City.
It has been an incredible three weeks, a concentrated, maniacal, annus mirabile. I have had a superb eruption of creative powers — I will never know more, generically, than I know now — and in so doing, as perhaps I always feared (and good reason to refrain from the danger!) I have utterly blown my ego to pieces. I suppose it might be called an acute schizophrenic psychosis, if labels are useful. Certainly I have been fantastically, beautifully hallucinated in the past week; the entire world has been no more than a tabula rasa on which I would project my metaphors as hallucinations …
A MAN WITHOUT A HOME
To Jonathan Cole, a medical student seeking to work with Dr. Sacks, March 21, 1976, Mount Vernon, N.Y. (Dr. Cole did come to work with Dr. Sacks the next year, and they became lifelong friends.)
I very much appreciate your generous response to my books, and feel grateful (and amazed!) that you should want to work with me.
My delay in replying is because I don’t know what to reply. But here, roughly, is my “situation”:
a) I don’t have a department.
b) I am not in a department.
c) I am a “gypsy,” and survive — rather marginally and precariously — on “odd jobs” here and there.
When I worked full-time at Beth Abraham (the “Mount Carmel” of “Awakenings”), I often had students spend some weeks with me for their “electives” — and this was an experience we would always find very pleasant and rewarding. I have the happiest memories of those far-off days.
But now I am, as it were, without any “position” or “base” or “home,” but peripatetic here and there, I can’t possibly offer any formal sort of teaching — or anything which could be formally “accredited” to you. … I have all the disadvantages, as I have all the advantages, of being a Non-Establishment, Non-Established, person — I rove freely and widely; I spend as long as I want with any patient I want; but I have no department, no courses, no colleagues, no help, no “position” (and for good measure no “security,” and almost no “means”).
HOPE
To Wendy, a college student who had written to Dr. Sacks about her bipolar disorder, Nov. 14, 2006.
What seems to me less stressed, and most in need of stressing, is that you are an individual — unique — with gifts and genes which no one else in the world exactly duplicates — and that means you have a true place and role in evolution, and in the present. That you have bipolar disorder, in a sense are bipolar, does not begin to encompass the whole of you — it is a what, while you are a you. You have to hold to this sense of a personhood (“personality” is not quite the word, it has got too Hollywoodized) — Coleridge talked about “personeity,” which is deeper than any “condition” you have, and perhaps these (relatively) gentle years at Gould Farm will allow you to realize this (realize it, in both senses — understand and actualize). You have much to hope and to live for. So, my best to you and keep in touch.
Source photographs via Oliver Sacks Archive, New York Public Library and Bill Hayes.
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