In June 1974, Oliver Sacks wrote to Bob Rodman, a psychiatrist who had been a close friend since they were both medical residents at UCLA. Rodman’s wife, Maria – only 38 years old – had been diagnosed with a mysterious illness that would eventually prove fatal; Rodman wrote to Sacks of his shock, his despair; suicide, he wrote was a “luxury” since the couple had two young daughters.
Sacks’s response is, like so much in this extraordinary volume, a model of honest compassion which powerfully acknowledges the pain and challenge of grief. “I wish I had not been so blind before,” he writes, apologising for a delay in answering. “I did see that you were in the throes of crisis, but I failed to see the real and agonising events behind it.” He offers his own experience, not as distraction, but as means of connection: “I know very well those forces which shut one up and in, which confine one in an extra hell, when one most needs to reach out towards others, towards one another.”
But it wasn’t only to his close friends that he offered such warmth, and the kind of advice that considered the recipient’s whole circumstance; three years later he writes to a woman identified only as “a correspondent” who has contacted him as she struggles to care for a husband with Alzheimer’s. She wrote to him asking if he knew of a cure; he says plainly that there is none. But, he says, the task before her must not be at ultimate cost. “I hope you do not misunderstand me. I think that you need to ‘support’ your husband, to be with him, as it were, as the darkness closes in – this is the least, and the most, another human being can do; but you must not sacrifice your own life in the process.” In his generosity we see, again and again here, one soul opening as fully as possible to another: a rare and wondrous sight.
But then Oliver Sacks was a rare and wondrous man, though he himself would have been the last to acknowledge this. It didn’t matter how famous and venerated he became; his letters are full of self-deprecation and self-doubt which are as far removed from vanity as is possible to imagine. “I am not sure I have much capacity for abstract thought,” he wrote musingly in 2003, “but I think I am an accurate describer.” It was this ability – to describe what he truly saw, not just the individual details of a neurological condition but the person he met as a whole – which both made him who he was and kept him estranged, most notably at the beginning of his career, from the mainstream medical profession.
His accounts of his patients – Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Seeing Voices and Hallucinations – and his own memoirs, A Leg to Stand On, Uncle Tungsten, On the Move, the last published just before his death in 2015, made him a celebrity. Here he is, writing to Robert De Niro and Robin Williams (who both starred in Penny Marshall’s 1990 film of Awakenings); here’s a chatty note to Björk, who became a pal after she wrote in admiration of his book Musicophilia. Sacks revolutionised the landscape of serious yet accessible writing about medicine; if you admire Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Rachel Clarke or Adam Kay, you have Oliver Sacks to thank.
But revolutionaries are distinguished by their struggle: and this collection of letters (expertly edited by his long-time assistant Kate Edgar, who had over 200,000 pages, or 70 bankers’ boxes full, to choose from) is remarkable in revealing that struggle. In the early years of his career, his wish to practise what one might call holistic neurology, which considered the human as well as the symptoms, meant his work was excluded from scientific journals and – hard as it is to believe now – meant it was difficult for him to find medical work where he was accepted and which suited him. This is the portrait of an outsider.
The volume begins in 1960, when Sacks left England for the United States at the age of 27. The youngest of four brothers, he had been raised in a prominent north-London Jewish family (Abba Eban, once Israel’s foreign minister, was a cousin); both his parents were physicians. It was an atmosphere both supportive and intensely claustrophobic, as the reader of Uncle Tungsten (a love letter to chemistry as well as a memoir) and On the Move will know. The letters can, of course, be read as a standalone volume, but there is no doubt that considering his public writings casts a fascinating light on what is here. Not least because sometimes the “public” can seem more private, especially in relation to his parents. When Sacks told his mother he was gay, she said: “You are an abomination,” and added, “I wish you had never been born.” This shocking encounter appears in On the Move; in this volume of letters is only affection for his clearly very beloved parents.
In these years of the 21st century, such a seeming contradiction leads too quickly to judgement. But Sacks – just as much as any of us – contained multitudes. Love and conflict, love and suffering, are not in opposition but are companionate, as his words, written in fountain pen, continually demonstrate. And the book is a reminder of what we have lost as letter-writing, as an ordinary daily practice undertaken by all kinds of people in all walks of life, vanishes. Yes, Sacks had a heart and mind like no other, and all of his obsessions – weightlifting, swimming, motorcycles, music, chemistry, squid, ferns, the list could go on and on – are on view here. But the thoughtful space the letter offers, the privacy of its meditations, the time it takes to travel and be read and responded to: the form itself calls out the spirit as texts, emails, phone calls or Zooms never can.
This is notable in a correspondence with the playwright Brian Friel. Friel’s 1994 play Molly Sweeney drew on an essay by Sacks, “To See and Not See”; but in the first instance Friel failed to credit Sacks’s work. Sacks’s initial letter to Friel is formal, not to say tetchy: “I (and my agents) await your reply.” But a thoughtful exchange builds: Sacks lays out the clear echoes of his piece, but he also continually reiterates his admiration for Friel and the work: “I think Molly Sweeney is a very powerful play, a beautiful work of art, unmistakably and uniquely your own.” In the end acknowledgment is given and friendship cemented. Aside from anything else, this conversation (though we only see half of it) is a model of how to be in the world – if we can. The letter demands patience and careful thought, both of which are in short supply these days.
The range of his correspondence, which takes the reader to the end of his life and the deeply moving farewell letters he wrote to friends and family, is astonishing. WH Auden, Thom Gunn, Antonio Damasio, Deepak Chopra! And countless family members and friends and acquaintances, each addressed with love, care, true attention.
It is impossible for a reviewer to do justice to this book. It is a work of endeavour, of hope, of pain, of the richness of a truly remarkable life that also reminds us that all our lives are remarkable, all are extraordinary, if we will allow them to be. It is a blessing as much as a book. How lucky we were – and are – to know him.
Oliver Sacks: Letters
Edited by Kate Edgar
Picador, 752pp, £30
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This article appears in the 27 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Optimist’s Dilemma