Review: "Letters", by Oliver Sacks

During his 82 years on earth, Oliver Sacks produced such a virtual torrent of writings that he continues to speak to us from beyond the grave nine years after he died. This collection of his letters is the fourth book of his writings that has been published after his death, and I would not be surprised if more trickle out in the upcoming years. The man’s passions and intellectual curiosity were so multifarious and deep and his sheer urgent need to express them was so constant and acute, that thoughts and words rushed out of him like a never-abating volcano. Nothing might be so indicative of his prodigious powers of expression as these letters, lovingly edited and presented by his longtime associate and friend, Kate Edgar.

As Edgar tells us in the preface, it was hard to keep up with Sacks. His writing, while joyously readable and interesting, was vivid and complex, and he poured out words at a tremendous clip, often caring little about trifles like punctuation and capitalization because of the sheer speed. His method of getting Edgar to fix typos and punctuation was to have her sit next to him as he furiously typed on his typewriter, asking her to instantly edit every page as it came out of the machine. When an exhausted Edgar would make it back to her apartment late in the evening, there would be Oliver calling her, asking her to take a look at a few more pages that had somehow been produced even after that avalanche. It would surely have been the experience of a lifetime for her.

As anyone who has read Sacks’s oeuvre would know, Sacks was passionate about a remarkable number of things - medicine and neurology, chemistry, history of science, earthworms, plants, motorcycles, bodybuilding, narcotic drugs, travel, and of course, writing and people. There was nothing in his life that he did not commit to with extreme passion, sometimes gambling with his life while doing this as in the case of extreme bodybuilding and extreme drug use. His body of knowledge was tremendously diverse, ranging across science, literature, poetry, history and philosophy. In the tradition of the Great Books, he had digested classic works by Darwin, Hume, Shakespeare and other great writers and thinkers in their entirety, along with assimilating great works by neurologists and doctors. A remarkable memory seemed to enable him to summon references from these disparate sources on demand.

All these qualities are on incandescent display in this collection of letters, which start with his arrival in the New World in the 1960s and end two weeks before his own death in 2015. Every single one of them is full of vivid, gushing, empathetic, bracingly honest writing. They span so many different topics, emotions, people and thoughts that it would be impossible to do their contents justice. So a brief overview would have to suffice.

The first third of the collection is perhaps the most fascinating. It deals with the self-discovery of his coming of age in a new country, his explorations of his sexuality (he had several amorous encounters which he kept from his family), travels around the country on his motorcycle and the people he met as a doctor. For me one letter, written to his brother Marcus in 1966, stands out. It is almost phantasmagoric, and was likely written when he was on an amphetamine high. In it he performs an excruciatingly painful, vivid analysis of his family and especially his mother, that would make a psychoanalyst (especially a Jewish one) salivate. He presents his mother as a kind of loving Gorgon, crushing everyone who stood in her way and reducing his father to a whimpering non-entity. Undoubtedly the dominant personality in their family of six (which included his schizophrenic brother Michael), she was alternately a font of wisdom and love and a terrifying presence. When his father indiscreetly broke Sacks’s trust and told her he was gay, she flew into a violent rage and told him she regretted him ever being born. The subject was never brought up again, but it is obvious that Sacks’s passionate early relationships with men , followed by his complete withdrawal from those relationships until he was in his 70s were influenced by the trauma inflicted by his mother. And yet the letters back home are warm, loving and full of interesting observations on people and places. Sacks is often fighting battles with hospital personnel depicted in his book and the movie “Awakenings”. In one, he pleads with the administrators to let patients on L-DOPA outdoors, pointing out the rejuvenation that he has witnessed in them.

The middle third of the book details letters to new friends, including the writer W. H. Auden and the poet Thom Gunn whose poem, “On the Move”, inspired the title of Sacks’s memoirs. He is constantly receiving copies of books written by others and sending them his own work. A full chapter is devoted to letters to Sacks’s lover Jeno Vincze, a Hungarian theater director who Sacks met in Europe. The early letters display an intensity and a passion rivaling anything in D. H. Lawrence or Anais Nin; there is the usual ardor for physical and mental connection and impatient waiting for replies, followed by grumblings about the delay. But soon it’s over. He breaks up in a letter alternately filled with sorrow and vicious, almost cruel rejection. Sacks would not have a romantic relationship for another 40 years.

If the personal is on full display in the first half of the book, the professional is equally so in the second half. The letters here include his correspondence with scientific and literary luminaries like Susan Sontag, Stephen Jay Gould, Roald Hofmann, Francis Crick, Robert Silvers (the famed editor of the New Yorker, where Sacks published several essays) and Gerald Edelman. He calls Crick an “intellectual nuclear reactor” after meeting him and strikes up a particularly close friendship with Gould. I was especially pleased to see some dear friends make an appearance here: John Horgan to whom he writes a letter discussing stage fright, Richard Rhodes whose fascinating book on prion diseases he refers to, and Freeman Dyson to whom he writes praising Dyson’s essay on teaching. He seems particularly taken by Edelman and Crick, and by Crick’s protege Christof Koch.

Sacks was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in early 2015. The cancer had been detected earlier and had been removed. But nine years later it came roaring back. Sacks responded in the best way he could - by writing about it in the New York Times and in letters to friends and family. He is frank and matter-of-fact about it (“I don’t think I will outlast the month”) and even in the last few weeks his letters are full of discussions about science, literature and essays that he would urgently like to publish - there’s not a trace of self-pity or long-winded philosophical reflection. The publication of his memoir, “On the Move”” was fast-tracked after his diagnosis.

The essays that he wrote in the months before his death include one in which he expresses gratitude for the opportunity he had been given to have discourse with a global community of writers and readers; and one in which he seems to reconnect, in a way, with his Jewish roots. These were published as part of a slim book after his death. Sacks’s last letter was written on August 15, 2015. In it he described the writings he would like published after he was gone, and ended with an exhortation: “Let us begin - soon!”. He died two weeks later, on August 30.

There are few writers and thinkers I have come across who wrote so vividly and honestly about so many different things, and perhaps none who lived life so fully, compulsively, passionately, enjoying its every offering. Along with his memoir, this letter collection showcases Sacks at his most genuine and most inspiring. It should be an enduring monument to his legacy.