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The Early Loves of Oliver Sacks: Medicine, Muscles and Motorbikes
A new collection of personal letters tracks the neurologist’s raucous self-discovery and venerable career.
LETTERS, by Oliver Sacks
The first 200 pages of Oliver Sacks’s letters are among the best things I’ve read all year. He was new in America, not long out of Oxford University, writing to family and friends back home, and his observations were electric — wild and funny and befuddled and frank.
Sacks came to San Francisco in 1960 to start his medical career. He would later become a humane and best-selling explicator of neurological predicaments in books like “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” But for now, he was a research assistant who often went by his middle name, Wolf. He was into motorcycles and weight lifting and drugs and leather.
A large-scale new collection of Sacks’s correspondence, “Letters,” edited by his longtime assistant Kate Edgar, is out now. The entire book is worthwhile, but only the first third sings. After a certain point, by the early 1970s, fame sneaked up on Sacks and his letters became more decorous, professional and bland. His correspondents came to include W.H. Auden, Jane Goodall, Susan Sontag and Francis Crick. But his letters were magic only when he was unknown, when he was still finding himself. Perhaps someday these will be published separately, under a title like “The Education of a Medical Misfit.”
He had a crazy love for American vistas. Young Wolf roared around the West Coast on his motorcycles, picking up innumerable speeding tickets. His observations on the scenery sometimes drew from Greek myth. Certain rocks in California’s Santa Lucia Range are “the Symplegades whose clashings Odysseus was forced to skirt: and a little octagonal cafe, 50 miles north of San Luis Obispo — that is Eumaeus’ hut.” He once ran out of gas and tried to use his dismantled stethoscope as a siphon.
He was serious about weight lifting and was a veteran of Muscle Beach in Venice, Calif. He could squat 575 pounds and tried to break the world record. He called Gold’s Gym “the old Dungeon” and later referred to himself as a “veteran of the Iron Game.” This weight work made him creaky in old age.
Sacks (1933-2015) did not come out as gay until late in life. He did not report to his family back in England about San Francisco’s leather scene, though in a letter to a school friend (the satirist Jonathan Miller) he described rough trade as “the werewolf crowd.”
