Letters

1

A New World

1960–1962

In July 1960, a few days before his twenty-seventh birthday, Oliver Sacks left England, intending to settle for a while in Canada or the United States—partly to escape the English military draft and partly to reinvent himself in a new place, without the suffocating closeness of a huge extended family. He had spent four years studying at Oxford, followed by medical school and then two years of working as an intern in London and Birmingham. During this time he developed his interest in weight lifting and motorcycles, and pursued clandestine sexual encounters, for in postwar England, homosexuality was a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment or (in the infamous case of Alan Turing) chemical castration. He had spent a summer on a kibbutz, hiked and traveled widely in Europe, and bought the first of many motorbikes. His mind was filled with images of the wide-open West he had seen in the photos of Ansel Adams, in cowboy films, and in the paintings of Albert Bierstadt.

Looking back at this period in his 2015 memoir On the Move, he wrote, I had a peculiar, unprecedented feeling of freedom: I was no longer in London, no longer in Europe; this was the New World, and—within limits—I could do what I wished.

He wrote regular letters back home, to his parents and his favorite aunt, Auntie Len, chronicling his travels with a mixture of hyperbole, gritty romanticism, parody, and an avid eye for detail.

To Elsie Sacks, Samuel Sacks, and Helena Landau

OS’s Parents and His Aunt

[*1]

August 2, 1960

Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island

Dear Ma and Pa, and, of course, Auntie Len,

Finding myself with a lull, and with a typewriter, I am sitting down to write you a long and overdue letter […].

I last wrote you, I believe, from Toronto, though I have sent a couple of postcards since. […]

From Toronto I flew to Calgary, going over the prairies at night. We touched down at Winnipeg and at Regina, where I snuffed the prairie air—there was no time for anything else. In Toronto, the air is humid, and smells of frenzy, sweat and gasoline. In the prairies it is dry and warm and aromatic, and smells of cinnamon and roasted buckwheat, as if the door of some gigantic oven had been opened. However, these are not the impressions on which to base important decisions! The sun rose slowly after we had left Regina, for we were chasing at 400 mph to the West; had we been going twice as fast, the miracle of Joshua would have been re-enacted, and the sun would have stood still in the heavens. At dawn I first perceived the limitless ocean beneath us, ripening wheat for more than a thousand miles in every direction, a sight unique to the Mid West. We veered to avoid a prairie storm, which was completely isolated and circumscribed in a cloudless sky, like some aerial jellyfish, grey and livid, hurling its long streamers on a little settlement below. At 6 a.m. we landed at Calgary […which] had just finished its annual stampede, and the streets were full of loafing cowboys in jeans and buckskins, sitting the long days out with their hats crushed over their faces. But Calgary also has 300,000 citizens. It is a boom town. Oil has brought a huge influx of prospectors, investors, engineers to it. The old West life has been overwhelmed by refineries, and factories, and by offices and skyscrapers. If you want to invest some $ in a sure thing, make it Albertan Oil, which is on its way to altering the world’s markets in oil. There are also tremendous fields of uranium ore, gold and silver, and the base metals, and you can see little packets of gold dust passed from hand to hand in the taverns, and men made of solid gold behind their tanned faces and filthy overalls. I must make a comment on drink here. You know the taverns of the cowboy films, the low swing doors, the tough guys within, smoking and quarreling, dicing, gambling and shooting. It’s not true, not at least in public. Canada has the most stringent licensing laws in the world, and the most prohibitive social ones. You cannot stand in a bar, cannot move to another table, cannot talk to a stranger. You cannot sing, play cards, or darts. There is nothing of the mildness and geniality of an English pub. Drinking is not gregarious here. It is hard and solitary, and Canada enjoys the highest incidence of drunkenness and alcoholism in the world. I forget whether I mentioned some of the other aspects of social prohibition in a new country: In Quebec, for example, a woman cannot vote, cannot divorce her husband, cannot have a banking account of her own, and can be arrested for wearing short sleeves or skirts in public (and frequently are). The old country (this is everyone’s term for it, both nostalgic and derisive) is very mellow in comparison.

Not only alcoholics, but cranks, psychotics, misfits, religious maniacs in uncomputed numbers. But this is another story.

I took the CPR[*2] to Banff, roaming excitedly in the train’s scenic dome. We passed from the boundless flat prairies through the low spruce-covered foothills of the Rockies, climbing gently all the time. And gradually the air became cooler, and scale of the country more vertical. The hillocks grew to hills, and the hills to mountains, higher and jaggeder with each mile we progressed. We puffed punily in the floor of a valley, and snowcapped mountains soared tremendous about us. The air was so clear, that one could see peaks a hundred miles away, and the mountains besides us seemed to be rearing over our very heads. Banff lies at 5500 feet, in a hollow, with peaks of 10 to 12,000 feet surrounding it in every direction. It is a tourist Mecca, bursting with fat Americans with their fat cars and their fat pocketbooks. I stayed there a day and a night, not sleeping, but writing and writing for more than fourteen hours at a stretch, while the tawdry costly night life opened, and blossomed and fell silent around 2 a.m., and the silence of the mountain fell upon the little town, so that I felt now it is mine, a still Banff beneath the mountain and the stars which nobody can take from me. At 4 I heard a genuine cuckoo, upon an augmented fourth, and then the clatter of waterfowl in the river, and at 5 the old Indian streetcleaner, with his close-cropped white head, wheeling his barrow along the street, collecting the refuse of civilization, the beer bottles and the cigar butts, and the funny hats, like the debris of a party. By 6, the early editions were being hawked, and barelegged hikers were gathering over their maps, and the old ladies had risen to see the dawn on the mountains. By 7, the great cars were passing along the road, East to West, West to East, on journeys immoderate, impossible, to a traveller in Europe. And by 8, the hamburger and ice-cream parlours were open, the groceterias and meateterias had their shutters down, and the fat Americans in their Hawaiian shirts stood on every street corner, taking pictures. It was a fascinating cross-section of a night, which seemed to retrace the evolution of Banff from a tiny settlement to a bustling tourist centre.

On my second day, I went to Sunshine Lodge, attracted by its name. It stood at 7200 ft., a luxurious cedar cabin, hung with trophies of the chase, and boasting a log fire of dimensions never seen in England. I woke next morning, and whipped open my curtains to see the sunshine. There was a blinding snowstorm, and I could see nothing. But it had cleared by 8, and after a prodigious breakfast (melon, fruit juice, enriched cereal K, trout, pancakes with maple syrup, ham with three eggs, toast and marmalade, Cuban coffee and two cigars, six thousand calories and close to my visceral heaven!), the sun was high in the cloudless sky, and the temperature over 90º.[*3] […]

A nature paragraph specially for Auntie Len: The Lodge is set in a huge alpine meadow, which was at its peak in early July. Dominant flowers are mountain avens (which were in seed when I arrived, like huge dandelion heads, alight and floating as they catch the morning sun). Indian paintbrush, in every shade from faint cream to intense dayglo vermilion. Chalice cups, Trollius, valerians, saxifrages, contorted lousewort and stinking fleabane (two of the loveliest, despite their names!). Arctic raspberries and strawberries, which rarely fruit; the three-leaved strawberries catch and hold at their centre a flashing drop of dew. Heart-shaped arnicas, calypso orchids, columbines and cinquefoils. Glacial lilies and Alpine speedwell. The rocks are clustered with succulent stonecrops. The main shrubs are willow and juniper, bilberry and buffaloberry. Various firs and spruces up to the timber line, and above this only larches, with their first white stems and downy foliage.

The birds are unnaturally tame, or rather just naturally tame (since this is a National Park, and no aggressive acts are allowed). I walked right up to a ptarmigan, which had just about shed its white winter plumage, accompanied by five chicks. […]

High up, through glasses, I saw a white mountain goat, perched on an unbelievably small pinnacle or rock, its four legs crushed together. I have seen black and brown bears galore, though no grizzlies. Elk and moose browsing in the lower pastures, especially if these are intersected with streams. […] I have seen trees fatally ravaged by porcupines, and I have eaten porky meat at a barbecue, tho’ I have seen no live ones yet.

All vegetation and animal life dies away as one climbs towards the summits, except moss campion, and various mosses and lichens. […] It is possible to run down a mountain, and this is one of the most exciting experiences in the world. And I did run down that mountain, flew it seemed, leaping from boulder to boulder, yelling and weeping and laughing all at once, miraculously exempt from fear or injury or fatigue. One of those experiences which make golf, and lumbar punctures, and all the paraphernalia of one’s normal, non-transcendent life, seem very dull in comparison.

I must here introduce the American family who looked after me. There were two Magoo-like men, as similar as twins, who called each other brother, though they were not brothers, I learned later, only friends. One was the Professor of Law at Philadelphia, and the other the president of the bar association of New Jersey, but I am happy I discovered what delightful companions they were before I found out what eminent lawyers they were. They took me under their wing, and we went around a good deal together. On a horse for the first time since Braefield,[*4] I accompanied them on the pack trails to Lake Egypt and to Mt. Assiniboine.

Riding horses is a great experience; I’m sorry I missed out on it for so long. […] However, I gradually got the hang of things. We ascended into a vast mountain plateau, so high that many of the cumulus clouds were beneath us. Man has made no changes here, cried the Professor, he has only enlarged the goat trails. It was a strange feeling, perhaps the first time I had ever had it, to know that our party were probably the only human beings in some hundreds of square miles. High on the plateau, above the trees and the insects, we seemed to be treading on the very top of the world. And then gradually we came down, our horses treading delicately in the undergrowth, to the glacial string of lakes with their strange names. Lake Egypt, Lake Sphinx, etc., and above them the Towering Pharaoh mountains, their old faces marked with gigantic hieroglyphic markings. Ignoring the cautious warnings of the others I dived into the clear waters of Egypt (you, Pop, you couldn’t have resisted either), and out of their cold, and clearness and calm, was distilled the intensest pleasure. To float on your back in an alpine lake, looking around you at peaks the majority of which are as yet unnamed and may well remain so, for why name peaks where nobody could live?

Another one of the exhilarating things about Canada is that one lives in an epoch of naming. Everything in England was named and done with half a thousand years ago, but here names are vivid and contemporary, Kicking Horse Canyon and Sorefoot Lake, and tell you of adventures which have happened within the span of a man’s memory.

The professor was a wonderful companion. On a strictly practical level, he taught me to recognize glacial cirques and different sorts of moraine, to decipher the trail of moose and bear, and the telltale ravages of porcupines; to survey the terrain closely for marshy and treacherous terrain, to predict the clouds (beware the sinister lens shaped clouds which portend violent storms), and to fix landmarks in my mind so that I could not get lost. But his range was enormous, in fact complete. We spoke of law and sociology, and economics, and politics and advertising, and business. I have never known a man so profoundly in touch with every aspect of his environment, physical and human, and yet enriched by a mocking insight of his own mind and motives which balanced and rendered intensely personal everything he said. His elder brother, whom they called Marshall (at first I thought he was a sort of emeritus Marshall, and the idea stuck), was a burly old man of nearly seventy-five, in full possession of his magnificent intellectual powers and wit, who smoked cigars before breakfast, and sang in the shower in a tremendous bass voice, and out-ate all of us, and pinched the waitress’s bottom, and yarned endlessly of his travels and adventures, mixing fastidious accuracy with grotesque distortions, till we were all pulped with helpless laughter. Old Marshall had virtually opened the Rockies to the Tourist trade thirty years before, and still knew every path and landmark far better than our guides.

I went on to Lake Louise by myself for a while, going along the trails to Lake Agnes and little beehive (a fire lookout, commanding a view a hundred miles long in either direction along the mountain valley), and then up to the Plain of the Six Glaciers, which boasted a fairytale teahouse, so high and light and airy it might have come directly from Shangri-La.[*5] Coming down from the Plain, I overtook a bearded man limping heavily, and supported by his tiny wife. And coming up at exactly the same time, the three of us were joined by a sleek Golders Green figure[*6] ascending from the Lake.

I’m a doctor, I said, can I help?

I’m also a doctor, the other fellow said, and I can also help.

Thus, by a fantastic coincidence, the only injured man in a thousand square miles met in the same moment the only two doctors in a thousand square miles. He’d been caught in an avalanche, and was lucky to escape with his wife. He suffered only a bruised back and fractured scaphoid (we agreed) on his left wrist. Other doc’s name was Elman (yes, yiddishe boy!), a graduate of university in Nova Scotia. We met over drinks later in the evening and chatted about this and that. He wants to do obstetrics and go to Hawaii; good luck to him. He was employed, by the way, in a curious double capacity. Two young doctors alternate between Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise, the two most elaborate hotels in the Rockies, and patronized almost exclusively by elderly rich hypochondriacs. The young doctors are chosen not merely for their professional skill, but for their soothing appearance, and their good looks, so that they may act as part-time gigolos to the lonely old ladies, and this subsidiary capacity is often more lucrative than the purely medical one.

Later last week I was invited by the Parks (the Philadelphia lawyers) to join them at the lodge on Lake Bow. It was called Num-Ti-Jah, the Indian term for a black sable, this being their name for the venerable Jimmie Simpson who owns the place. JS deserves a book to himself, and will get it one day I am sure. He is eighty-five, although he runs and swims like a boy of twenty. Coming from a patrician family in Lincolnshire, he was sent here in his teens, as were so many second sons of families, until the succession was secured by the eldest brother siring a son. He quickly made his way to the West (this was in the early [eighteen-]nineties), and became famous as a trapper, climber, explorer and geologist. He blazed the trail from Banff to Jasper, which only now is being consolidated to a highway. He shot (by accident) the largest sheep in the World, which now resides in the NY Natural History Museum. And he must be one of the greatest raconteurs in the world. His voice is not unlike Jonathan’s imitation of Moore or Russell,[*7] and his wit too has something of the same quality; and it is a strange experience to hear his fantastic tales, apocalyptic[*8] a few, but mostly true, about grizzly hunts, and gunfights, appalling climbs etc. in this lucid English voice. He is quite unpredictable, sometimes keeping to himself for days on end, and at other times becoming uncontrollably voluble. I was woken at 6 a.m. on my first day there by the sound of his tales, and went down on tiptoe to join the Parks who were listening to him. At first I tried to remember his stories for future reference, but there were so many, and so varied, that it was impossible, and I just surrendered to the magic of his personality. He is the very last of the Wild West men, and was a personal friend of all the famous ones, including the most famous of all, Bill Peyto, after whom a mountain and a lake are named.

(In parenthesis, I must tell you of Peyto’s cabin, which old Marshall showed us on the return journey from Egypt. Not a score of people know where it is, or even know that it exists, for it is listed officially as having been burnt down by order. Peyto was a nomad and misanthrope; a wit; a great hunter and observer of wild life; and the father of uncountable bastards. His cabin is built in the most inaccessible part of the forest, and in his lifetime none but he knew how to find it. In 1936, he had been feeling ill for some time. He scrawled on his door Back in an hour and rode down to Banff. He never returned. The scrawled message is still faintly visible, and inside his darkened and rotting hut, we saw his cooking utensils and ancient preserves, his mineral specimens (he operated a small talc mine), fragments of a journal, the Illustrated London News, piled high, from 1890 to 1926, an empty ink bottle from which the contents had evaporated, and all the eerie Marie Celeste like atmosphere of his vacated home. It was a very moving experience.)

I went with the Parks to the Columbia icefields, one of the few icefields accessible without being an accomplished climber. This was the real thing, gunmetal grey and limitless in size, not like the fairy grotto stuff of the Swiss glaciers. We rolled up three miles of it in a snowmobile (I sent you a postcard of these), and were told that we now had 1100 feet of ice beneath us. I saw a pothole into which a stream was pouring, and this was 800 feet deep. You saw the deepening blueness passing to black, you heard the rush, but never the impact of water. My first thought, foolishly, was of the marmalade pot lined tunnel through which Alice fell.[*9]

Finally taking my leave of the kind Parks, and promising to meet them in Philadelphia, I tried a little hitchhiking. I got as far as Radium Hot Springs, a sort of New-World Bad Auenstein for those with gout and disseminated lupus, and a little later found myself conscripted for firefighting. British Columbia has had no rain for more than thirty days, and there are forest fires raging everywhere (you have probably read about them). A sort of Martial Law exists, and the forest commission can conscript anyone they feel is suitable. I was quite glad of the experience, and spent a day in the forests with other bewildered conscripts, dragging hoses to and fro, and trying to be useful. However, it was only for one fire they wanted me, and when at last we shared a beer over its smoking dwindling ruin, I felt a real glow of confraternal pride that it had been vanquished. British Columbia at this time of the year seems bewitched. The sky is low and purple, even at midday, from the smoke of innumerable fires, and the air has a terrible stultifying heat and stillness. People seem to move and crawl with the tedium of a slow-motion film, and a sense of imminence is never absent. In all the churches prayers are said for rain, and god knows what strange rites are practised in private to make it come. Every night lightning will strike somewhere, and more acres of valuable timber conflagrate like tinder. Or sometimes there is just an instantaneous apparently sourceless combustion rising like some multifocal cancer in a doomed area. […]

Yesterday I arrived in Vancouver, which is like Toronto, which is like every other city in North America (with the exception of Montreal, Quebec, Victoria, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston and New York, which alone have a character of their own). Horrified by its rushing traffic, I made my way over to Vancouver Island. I must tell you of a little Leacock-like[*10] episode in Vancouver. I went into a glistening barber saloon and hair clinic, where eighteen determined young men shaved and clipped their anonymous clients in eighteen jewelled and gadgeted chairs. He snapped, What style, sir?—and I snapped back Manhattan, please, and when he said he hadn’t heard of it, and what was it please, I said, humbly, short back and sides. And then, after the cutting, without consulting me, he singed my hair, and frictioned it, and shampooed it, and vibro-massaged my scalp and neck, while I was trying to say no, no—and then perfunctorily brushed me down (I was wearing shorts and T shirt, indescribably filthy) and presented me with a bill for $4.50 which I paid numbly, with all the fight gone out of me.

Vancouver Island is different in tempo and nature from all the rest of N. America. The straits act as a valve, allowing free access to the mainland, but discouraging visits to the Island. The traffic is slower, and there is less of the tremendous pressure of supermarkets, and high-power advertising, and of the sharp and restless Motel life which Lolita has rendered so familiar to us. I came to Qualicum beach, attracted by the resemblance of its name to Colchicum, the autumn crocus, and Thudichum, the great chemist and polymath. (Clang associations, I hope not suggestive of early schizophrenia!)[*11] And I am staying at the Sunset Inn, which also attracted me by its name.

It is sunset now, and the setting sun is lighting up the hollyhocks, and the croquet hoops in the back garden, the tired happy men playing golf across the way. Inside they have a Broadwood piano, with a pile of Beethoven and Mozart sonatas atop it. A few clouds, illuminated, lie still above the atolls here and there. The Pacific Ocean is warm (about 75º) and enervating after the glacial lakes. I went fishing today with an ophthalmologist here, fellow called North, once at Marys and the National,[*12] now in practice in Victoria. He calls Vancouver Island a little bit of heaven which got left somehow, and I think he’s right in a way. It has forests and mountains and streams and lakes and the ocean. It has the highest standard of living perhaps anywhere in the world, and it is closeted away from the frenzy and fury which are almost synonymous with the American Way of Life. It attracts the elderly of the whole continent, but serene as it is, I don’t think it is for me. By the way, I caught six salmon; one just lets the line trail, and they bite, bite, sweet silvery beauties, which I shall have for breakfast tomorrow.

I’ll descend to California in two or three days, probably by Greyhound bus, as I gather they are particularly hard on hitchhikers, and sometimes shoot them on sight. […]

I hope and expect to find some letters from you when I look into Cook’s[*13] in San Francisco, though I imagine there may be a considerable lag. […]

I hope, Auntie Len, that you also will write to me, and tell me of your intentions and movements now you are home and entering upon your Indian Summer.[*14] […]

Please give my regards all round to family and friends, and especially Michael.[*15]

If you get a chance, I wonder if you could show this letter to Jonathan,[*16] and perhaps through him, to any other of my friends. I am so much on the move that I do not know when I shall next have the chance to type out a mammoth letter like this.

Look after yourselves.

Love,

OLIVER

—

In early August, OS arrived in San Francisco and took a room at the YMCA in the Embarcadero district, where he would stay for the next two months. It had a well-equipped gym and was known as a place for gay men to meet. He later recounted to friends that he enjoyed quite a lot of sexual encounters there; he also spent time in gay bars, where he often went by his middle name, Wolf. Naturally he did not describe those encounters to his parents (nor did he speak of his increasing experimentation with various illicit drugs). Still, there were plenty of other adventures for him to report on.

To Elsie and Samuel Sacks

August 24, 1960

c/o Thomas Cook, 175 Post St., San Francisco

Dear Ma and Pa,

[…] I have now been in and around San Francisco for two and a half weeks, have seen a fair amount of the city and country, visited hospitals and universities, made various enquiries and contacts. […] And after living here, I am now almost persuaded that the States in general, and California in particular, is likely to be my ultimate home, irrespective of my immediate course of action. Canada and the States are alike in providing space, affluence and professional opportunity of an order which would be almost inconceivable to me in England. You know as well as I how tight and tedious the professional ladder is in England, in neurology above all subjects: the long, wasted years as a peripatetic registrar etc. The only comparatively easy road to consultant status[*17] in England lies in psychiatry, and though I could easily use this (in England, or Canada, or the States) with the assurance of professional success, yet there is something in my temperament and training which inclines me to a more tangible subject, one in which I might less suspect myself of phoniness or indifferent standards, and one again which allowed of some experimental work of a laboratory kind. Perhaps I am deluding myself here. Perhaps I do have some therapeutic urge and ability, altho I cannot now perceive these as strong qualities in myself. In any case, the decision does not have to be made forthwith.

In comparison with Canada, the States is a country of densely packed intellectual centres. […] In so under populated a country as Canada, neurology hardly exists as a subject, whereas here, in California, there are enormous clinical-cum-experimental neurology set ups in all the major universities and a number of non-affiliated hospitals. In the States, a prodigious amount of money is directed to research, partly as a consequence of tax evasion. Fat industrial profits are propelled towards all deserving (and non-deserving) projects, in order to keep them out of the Fort Knox coffers.

And then again, California combines in itself the natural advantages and beauties of a whole continent. Climbing, skiing, desert, ocean, forest, vineyards—all lie within a day’s journey. San Francisco itself has unique natural advantages, as you probably know. The temperature gradient between the ocean and the burning interior propels a mist in and out of the city twice a day, so maintaining SF at an almost constant, and almost perfect, temperature, the year round. The city has all the cultural and intellectual assets of a huge centre like London, and yet itself has a population of less than a million, which is not expanding. It has a rich and fantastic history, which would grace a much older city. It has in itself, and is within easy range of, fantastic natural beauty of every sort.

I have put my head in at the U. of California Medical Centre, which is a triad of gigantic white buildings overlooking the Golden Gate Park, with an incomparable vista of San Francisco from the upper storeys (Neur. is very high up!), and its distant bridges, ocean, and hills. They have two neurologists there. […Also] three neurological residents, all of them weightlifters! (I always felt the two disciplines went together.) The Med. School faculty buildings were only rebuilt this year, and are a sort of Walter Mitty[*18] fantasy of what such buildings should be like. The interns are by no means overworked, having indeed only an eight-hour day, with most of their weekends off (this would cause a revolt if mentioned in the columns of the Lancet!).[*19]

I have also looked in at the Mt. Zion hospital. […] The staff are largely Jewish, tho’ the hospital is immensely popular among all sections of the population. Two thirds of the hospital’s total work is research (it has ca. 500 beds), which is as high a fraction as in any university medical school. I had a long talk with Feinstein,[*20] the assistant head in the neurosurgery (and neurology) dept. who is a brilliant if somewhat obsessional type, and watched him do some stereotactic operations (MZ is the foremost centre for these in California). He has a massive experimental setup behind him, with quantities of electronic engineers, etc., and seems to be turning out a lot of fine work. Stereotactic operations, by the way, allow one to put a lesion in a human or animal brain anywhere with a high degree of precision, and so is as valuable an experimental tool as a therapeutic one. In a way this is the best possible set up, for one is always involved with patients and therapeutic perspectives, which of course provide an endless series of experimental challenges. And as Feinstein puts it—a neurosurgical patient is a preparation which can talk.[*21] He raised the possibility of my doing what was on paper my internship at MZ, but in fact something nearer neurology and neurophysiology, and receiving a rather more respectable income than an intern.[*22] This might be very worthwhile indeed if it worked out.

Finally, I have been to Stanford Medical School, which has just moved from SF to a stunning building on the gigantic campus at Palo Alto (a pleasant township of 40,000 people, in marvellous countryside, about forty fast miles from SF). At present they have no neurological beds as such, except some purloined from the general medical side (a consequence of the recent move), but next year they will be associated with the local Veterans Administration (V.A.) hospital, which will bring them a total of 140 neurological beds, thus making Stanford the biggest neurological centre in the West. Stanford by the way has a very fine academic standing, better than UC, though has also the reputation of being very smoochy and snobbish, at least at the level of student selection. […]

There is a gigantic amount of red tape to exasperate and obstruct the immigrant doctor. One must submit innumerable documents, take a preliminary exam (only held quarterly, with another two-month delay for results), before one can accept an internship. On the other hand, one can be employed in a nonclinical capacity while awaiting the chance to take the exam and get results. […] I will go in person to Sacramento tomorrow to the Medical Board and try to get things in motion. If, and when, I have the machinery going, and a job lined up, then I shall start on my travels in the States if there is any further time in hand.

A final possibility is that of entering the [armed] forces here as a volunteer: minimum period two years. This cuts a lot of the red tape about citizenship etc. provides an excellent income (ca $6000 with all the perks), may be a way of doing one’s internship, and simultaneously of receiving some specialist training. If all this could be done at a military hospital in Western California […] then indeed there would be much in its favour. However, unlike the Canadian Forces, which are small and gentlemanly and to be trusted, the American forces are a gigantic and unwieldly organization, and no sort of bargaining may be possible with them.

Well, these are the prospects. Please tell me what you think of them. […]

It’s suppertime now, and the innumerable possibilities of SF culinary mastery lie before me. Deep sea bass down on Fisherman’s wharf, Japanese food, Italian, Chinese, haute cuisine, or a 3 lb. steak washed down with a gallon of light beer. For a belly-oriented type like me, SF is second to very few places in the world. As I leave the Y,[*23] I shall throw a glance in at the barber next door, who never seems to have any customers, but sits in his barber’s chair and plays the violin all day long. I shall be careful not to trip over the insensible winos littering the pavement, and must turn a stern face to the appeals of the alcoholic beggars who swarm the waterfront. In ten yards I can overhear as many languages. Fisherman’s Wharf it will be, in sight of the Golden Gate Bridge arched against the sunset, and the prison of Alcatraz on its island fortress, and gutters crackling with prawn and crab shells, and everywhere the sharp smell of clam juice, which (they say) is the very essence of the Pacific itself.

Please write to me on reception of this, and give my regards to all the family. […]

DON’T WORRY!

Love,

Oliver

To Elsie and Samuel Sacks

September 29, 1960

Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco

[*24]

Dear Ma and Pa,

I trust you are keeping well, and in good fettle for the Fast[*25] ahead. […]

I went to Yosemite National Park over the weekend, which is about 200 miles from here. After a blazing summer, the waterfalls are dry and the vegetation pretty parched. It’s a botanist’s paradise in spring and summer (I enclose, especially for Ma’s and Auntie Len’s envious delectation, a booklet on the High Sierra flowers), a climbers’ paradise in the summer, a skier’s in the winter, a geologists’ and pleasure lovers’ all the year round. Last Sunday was a day of a clarity unknown in England, and one could see the whole length of the valley, 100 miles either way. To see distant objects so clearly is so out of my experience, that the whole scene assumed an unreality, combined strangely with its extreme precision. I went into the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, and saw the Grizzly Giant, 110 feet in circumference, and 4000 years old, so old you feel it must be aware in a sense, if only of light, and growth, and hurt. […] No wind penetrates the big trees, and a total silence hangs inside the grove. It’s easy to see why people worshipped objects so ancient, and huge, and beautiful. The sequoia cones are quite tiny by the way, though there are some pines in California with cones a yard long. The high Sierra receives its first snow towards the end of this month.

I moved into hospital yesterday and am slowly finding my feet. They are giving me board and lodging and laundry, though I cannot receive any payment yet. But Levin[*26] will be giving me $60 a month, out of his own pocket, which should help. He’s really been very sweet about things: he said, look if you need more, just ask me. Though I’ll be pleased when I can receive a salary on a regular and normal basis.

Most of the house staff are Jewish, though their Jewishness does not extend beyond a love of chopped herring, and Jewish jokes, and passionate political arguments. It is the last of these, rising and falling in the wards, and the dining room, and the lounge, which is so different from the bland political apathy of my fellow residents in England. Everyone is very approachable, and the hospital more or less runs on first name terms. It seems to be a fairly paternalistic institution, since one can sign for free theatre and concert tickets etc. and has the run of U. Cal. and other institutions. There is a civic centre fifty yards away, with an immense floodlit swimming pool, which I shall probably be patronising frequently. The food is of high quality, attractively prepared, and unlimited in amount. This last is a potential danger, and I must rule myself with a rod of iron, otherwise I shall weigh 300 lb in three months or so. By the way, I enclose a picture of myself taken at Monterey, emerging like some hairy and overweight Venus from a pacific lagoon. Did I tell you about Monterey and Cannery Row in a previous letter or not? I spent about five days there, observing and eating marine biology.

Next week when I’m more into the swing of things, I’ll start going to the countless other sessions run into the hospital, EKG conferences and proctological seminars and various other frightening things. They certainly have a very splendid programme of postgraduate teaching, and as I mentioned, one can by reciprocity attend all the University meetings also. […]

Yesterday, a long fascinating session on a woman with an epileptogenic tumour.[*27] Various parts of her brain were stimulated, (she was, of course, fully conscious): first the motor and sensory areas were mapped out, and later various parts of the temporal lobe where stimulation gave rise to elaborate hallucinations, resembling those which usually preceded her fits. It was a fantastic experience, seeing her sit there, fat and happy in the neurosurgical chair, relate in a matter of fact voice her grotesque hallucinations, while Feinstein was scratching her exposed brain with his beaded electrode.

I must break off soon, because I want to go onto the wards and get to know some of the patients and their ailments. […]

The first rain of fall came today, and the climate is now that of London in September. Though a few miles inland, in Sacramento for example, it is still in the high eighties. I shall also go into a supermarket when some funds come, and send you the most gigantic and interesting food parcel you have ever seen. Believe you me, John Barnes[*28] is nothing compared even to a small-town supermart here, and the larger ones are staggering cornucopias of everything which can be eaten, swallowed, chewed, smoked, sniffed or drunk in the whole world.

I will write again soon, and in the meantime look forward to hearing from you again, and to receiving also the various forms I made mention of, without which I cannot start immigration proceedings. […]

Regards all round.

Love

Oliver.

To Elsie and Samuel Sacks

October 3, 1960

Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco

Dear Ma and Pa,

I hope you have lost weight and acquired virtue over the Fast; there should be a clear run now until Chanukah, unless I am forgetting something.

I looked in briefly at one of the orthodox shools yesterday, and found it fairly empty (this was midafternoon), although all of them were packed out on Friday night, which is accounted much the solemnest portion of the Fast. There are, I should explain, three denominations here: orthodox, conservative and liberal (reform). In the conservative, there is a cantor of sorts, admixture of men and women, retention of some Hebrew and yammelkas: it forms therefore a useful intermediary group for those who are too illiterate to enjoy the orthodox, but too coloured by custom and timidity to go right over to the liberal, i.e. the majority of people here.

One of my bosses, Bert Feinstein, invited me over to his family to break fast with them.[*29] They are all originally from Winnipeg, and his parents now run a hotel here, while his brother is a consultant radiologist. Of course they are not actually from Winnipeg; they left Rumania for the prairies in about 1920. His people have a splendid Spanish style house, with a glorious patio fronting the harbour by the Golden Gate Bridge. We broke the fast on Bourbon (a change from tea), which made all of us rather tipsy on empty stomachs, and the conversation was of the usual kind—namely, how offkey the Chazzan[*30] was, how irrational the rabbi was, how hot the shool[*31] was etc. They prepared a very splendid meal, with knishes, and cholent, and paprika stuffed with meatballs, and chicken stewed in wine, along with some more americanised items, like chicken fried in cornflakes (unpleasant) and corn pones (to humour a cousin from the deep south). […] The whole tribe is going to Las Vegas next week, where the prodigal Bert is reading a paper on his work. I find it difficult to imagine neurophysiology in that exotic setting of gambling, divorce and generally glittering vice: L.V. is a fantastic place, so I’m told, being an entirely artificial oasis, and rising like some hashish vision of Samarkand, fountains and gilded towers in the heart of the desert. And a very favourite place for scientific conventions.

I was invited last night to a party on Treasure Island, an entirely artificial island in the middle of the bay, created for the 1939 exposition, and this morning went on a fishing trawler for a couple of hours. I forbade them to throw the refuse away, and spent some happy time sorting over the sea stars and whatnot entangled in the nets.

A couple of my fellow interns took me with them to a Football match this afternoon, the Frisco Forty-Niners against the Los Angeles Beefeaters or something. It was a marvellous setting for a match, the enormous stadium surrounded by the trees of the Golden Gate Park, a brilliant blue sky, with thin clouds chasing across it from the ocean (which fronts the Park). There were about 60,000 people watching, mostly in the red caps of the SF supporters. I suppose you have seen pictures of American football. The players are enormously padded about the shoulders, which gives them a very top-heavy appearance, and at the start of the game face each other, pair to pair, in a low crouch, like the stance of fighters in Siamese wrestling. Despite their unwieldy appearance, they move as fast as a speeded-up film, and contract broken limbs with quite extraordinary frequency. Three players had to be carried off during the hour or so I watched. Between touchdowns, a brass band played, to the strutting of a group of drum majorettes. I was unable to repress a hoot of laughter at this, and earned some furious glances from the very serious people all around me. It is certainly rather scaring to hear the deep bay of a gigantic crowd, all bursting with the same emotion. It reminded me of an unpleasant science fiction story, in which people had discovered how to cause material changes by the exercise of their willpower, very substantial changes if they all willed together: criminals would be conducted into the centre of a vast arena, and there destroyed by the cumulative hatred of the people, all exerting their willpower to make them burn alive.

I left after an hour or so and retired to a secluded part of the GG park, with a cigar and a quart of icy Schlitz beer (the beer that made Milwaukee famous), and a translation of Il Principe, and decided that I preferred solitude to being one of a crowd. […]

Yesterday I went on my first rounds with Levin and Feinstein. Far more informal than those at the Middlesex.[*32] They have a very large range of involuntary movements under treatment (Parkinsonisms, dystonias, torticollis, tremors) etc. And a fair number of interesting emergencies come in. Being purely an observer at the moment, and unable to accept clinical responsibility, is quite a pleasant mixture. I saw one woman with a splendid parietal lobe syndrome, who draws extraordinary reversed clockfaces, always on the right side of the paper.[*33]

I got a letter from Auntie Len two days ago which I shall reply to shortly. She seems to be having very bad luck with her back and legs.

I have also just got a long and extremely interesting letter from Jonathan, who enclosed a review of his show, in Edinburgh.[*34] He is curtailing his Cambridge job in neuropathology to six months, and then spending a year in Showbusiness, so he can subsequently return to Medicine affluent, with it as a delightful hobby, not a mean breadwinning soulkiller.

Thank you, Pop, for your letter which came today, along with a list of policies. Surrounded entirely by Jews in this place you can hardly feel I am quite out of it. It would be hypocritical and pointless for me to profess any Jewish beliefs, theologically: but I am by temperament and training emptied of all religious type of beliefs. But I am conscious of our culture and uniqueness and will never lose contact with it.

yrs,

oliver

—

OS first met Jonathan Miller when they were both students at St. Paul’s School in London. The two of them, along with their friend Eric Korn, shared similar backgrounds: Jewish, sons of physicians, scientifically minded, brilliant. Miller later went to the University of Cambridge, where he read natural sciences and medicine and became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, an intellectual society at the college. He then qualified as a doctor and worked as an intern for two years before going on the road with Beyond the Fringe.

To Jonathan Miller

Schoolmate and Close Friend

October 11, 1960

Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco

My dear Jonathan,

I was delighted and excited to receive your letter, and also your cutting.[*35] So much had been happening to me that I imagined everybody else’s life was static in comparison, but I perceive that you too have been faced with important decisions, which may prove of far-reaching effect. I am glad in a sense you did not write before, because we would then both have been entangled in the essentially introspective intricacies of each other’s problems, and perhaps subsequently have found this a source of resentment whenever we regretted our decisions (and there are times when the best decisions seem disastrous).

First can I congratulate you on the Cambridge job, although this must have been almost a foregone conclusion. Even if there were no other considerations on the horizon, I think you would have been wrong and possibly wretchedly immersed in pathology for three years, and quite liable to find yourself deadended among the pots for good. As it is, it will be a delightful interlude, and you will also be a senior apostle who has made doubly good, and a bulwark of solid virtue and endeavour, conceivably. I like the way the papers are already speaking of neuropathologist Miller. It sounds a great deal more impressive, and funnier, than medical student Miller, schoolboy Miller, psychiatrist’s son Miller. Miller. I wholeheartedly agree with you that Medicine is better as a delightful hobby. […] All this, of course, is upon the assumption that you will return to Medicine, and of this I am not sure. Are you? […]

I honestly forget how much I have written to you in previous letters, and so risk repeating myself somewhat. First about my present position. I started here about a week ago, as a research assistant and guest at the hospital. This nomenclature is important, because I have not got my immigration status yet, and so am not permitted to accept employment. My duties, so far as I have any, are to acquaint myself with what goes on in the neurosurgery and physiology dept. and get involved in things as much as I can or desire: and otherwise, to examine what patients, attend what rounds and seminars I wish at the hospital. I cannot start internship even in California until after I have taken the State Board exam, and this damnably enough is not being held until next Spring.

The unit is essentially a stereotactic one concerned with dyskinesias, both from the experimental and the therapeutic side, with all the valuable interplay of the two aspects. Levin, the senior man, […] is cool and tortuous in all his ways, excepting his sudden generous impulses, and his driving (he drives a V-12 Ferrari, which is possibly the fastest production car in the world). Feinstein, the younger man, […] is brash and opinionated and never wears socks (unlike Levin, who not only wears socks, but has suits costing $300), but is volcanic with ideas, some of them penetrating, some of them amazingly obtuse, which he throws out with a fine lack of discrimination. Then there are some voluptuous secretaries whose legs you would slobber over, who live on peanut butter and saccharine tablets, and long to marry a doctor. And finally there is emeritus von Bonin, a wonderful old man […] with an enormous red face full of intelligent wrinkles and German humour, who is the final genial court of appeal regarding any uncertainty about the nervous system, animal or human. As for the interns here, they all look like Groucho Marx, wander round the hospital wearing T shirts and smoking cigars insolently into their patients’ faces, full of Jewish jokes and political vehemence, yet astoundingly open, and capable of unbelievable industry, except when the world series baseball is on, when everyone crowds before the TV sets and the patients have their coronaries and hematemesis unattended.

The World Series and the Kennedy-Nixon debates occupy everyone who has concerns outside his social group. After two months of haploid life[*36] I have emerged with pleasure and I think finality from its claustrophobic intensity, and find it an extreme pleasure to be working and living with people who talk and think and act apart from their own sexuality.

Money can buy so much here, and is the subject of such respect, that one falls insensibly into growing more conscious and envious of it. I am sure that (for the right sort of person, you and me) its freedoms far outweigh its responsibilities and limitations. The money rolls in, abruptly, almost as soon as one finishes residency, though whether it will do so as easily as it does now in five years’ time I can’t predict. The US deliberately underproduces doctors, which gives them an immense power, as well as great opportunities to be corrupted. There are only too many doctors round here who will shark a patient for $1000 worth of nonsensical investigations. But even the honest ones do very well. I spent last weekend with a young neurologist who has been in practice three years or so, who already has a superb redwood cabin on Mt. Tamalpais half an hour out of the city, with fifteen rooms and a swimming pool, and a prospect of the whole bay through one immense window, and endless mountains through the other, and went yachting[*37] with him later. […]

I have probably seen and thought and felt more than in the preceding ten years, and damnably none of it is on paper, or will be now, for that matter. I have had the material for a hundred essays, a hundred New Yorker articles, as well as a batch of novels. Perhaps it has all been so closely woven with my own emotional convolutions that I shan’t be able to disentangle it, I don’t know. If only I had had the sense to buy a camera! I hope you have bought one, by the way. I even paid a visit to Cannery Row, which effectively discharged any lingering nonsense about it.[*38] It no longer exists as such, because the sardines just stopped coming to the West Coast some years ago, and show no sign of returning. However there is a ridiculous Steinbeck theatre among the rusted desolate canneries, and the place has become a big tourist centre and is overrun with intimate bars and flashy seafood restaurants on the waterfront. However there exists an incomparable coastline for hundreds of miles south of this, with the richest tidal pools you could want. I found an absolutely monstrous chiton[*39] washed up on the shore at one place. I enclose, I don’t know why, a photo of myself at an idyllic cove near Monterey, eating, with a friend. […]

I have yet to meet Thom Gunn.[*40] He left SF for London the day I arrived, but is due back soon. But I am, by and large, disappointed by the werewolf crowd[*41] here. Yesterday, I encountered on the bay’s edge a familiar stooping figure, dressed in a very fine English suit with striped trousers and short, stiff collar, who was attracting a good deal of amused and surreptitious attention. I was, myself, in a pair of jeans (it was very hot) and nothing much else. Anyhow, it was Leslie Le Quesne from the Middlesex, over here for a surgical conference. When I plucked at him, he turned round with an arrogant air, and then amazement and pleasure overcame him and he yelled, My God, Sacks! followed by how extraordinary and it’s a small world many times. We had a few beers at a very posh waterfront bar, making a very incongruous pair, and it was all very unreal, Leslie’s intense uncompromising Englishness of face and dress and mind against such an exotic backdrop.

I am petering out in inanities. I look forward to hearing again from you when you start at Cambridge. Give my love to (? Dr.) Rachel.[*42]

To Elsie and Samuel Sacks

October 15, 1960

[Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco]

Dear Ma and Pa,

Thank you for your long and welcome letter: more than a week had elapsed since I had heard from you, or for that matter from anyone, and I was getting mildly alarmed.

[…] I have as yet received no parcels from England, nor the small packet from NY. I imagine the Customs have a habit of holding things up unnecessarily. You have evidently been put to a lot of trouble packing up my numerous and slightly awkward belongings, and I am deeply indebted to you for doing so. Indeed, I don’t know where I’d be without your help. However, I am surviving OK at the moment, for this benevolent hospital provides its dependents with white trousers (hence pants), shirts and coats: adding to these white socks and plimsolls we look much more like cricketers than doctors. […]

Last weekend I spent idly by myself, lying in the sun and reading in the immense Golden Gate Park all Saturday (I finished Henry James’ short stories, and devoured the autobiography of Charles Darwin). On Sunday morning, I went in for an outdoor weightlifting contest at China Beach and got placed third among the heavyweights. China Beach fronts a desolate surf beaten corner of the bay, and is in full view of Seal Rocks, so that one can watch the seals leaping around and basking while recovering breath between lifts. It is certainly a very romantic place for a weightlifting meet. […]

I have indulged in one small extravagance this week, a prism of thallium bromide-iodide from an optical co. for $5, of very high density and perfect translucency. You remember how I used to have a strange mystique about such things, and would spend enchanted hours poring over the lists of densities and refractive indices and crystal lattices in the International Tables, during my eccentric adolescence.

I am going tonight as my bosses’ guest to the quarterly hospital dinner, which will introduce me to those on the staff here whom I have not already met. It’ll probably be a posh affair and give ample scope for my satirical pen if I get to writing about it. Tomorrow I shall probably be going to a quarterly meeting of the American Neurological Assn. […]

There is a lot else to say, but I shall defer this to another letter. I hope you are both well at home. I am glad to hear Michael is doing some work at the hospital, and is on town parole: this seems to me a distinct improvement.[*43] I hope that sooner or later I shall hear from my other two brothers, to both of whom I wrote at Rosh Hashannah. I have written to Auntie Len last week, and am expecting her to reply soon.[*44]

Love,

Oliver

To Elsie Sacks, Samuel Sacks, and Helena Landau

November 28, 1960

Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco

Dear Ma and Pa and Auntie Len,

I have been remiss in writing, due to trying to do too many things in the same lifetime. […] Things are quieter with Grant[*45] away, though busier also, since I am starting to assist Bert Feinstein at the stereotaxic operations. I have now taken over the neurological work ups and follow ups on all patients and am designing various new rating techniques, both clinically and cinematographically, for evaluation of the operative results. The old anecdotal days of medicine are passing—I once had a patient—and one strives more and more to get results which can be processed statistically. In many hands this results in a nonsensical pseudo-quantification of evidence, and against this one must be on one’s guard.

I know quite a number of the house staff and attending staff now, and have even been known to play cribbage in the evenings. However I am still a dunce over card games, and intend to remain one. I have enough time-wasting activities to my credit already. Last Thursday was Thanksgiving (for the safe landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and the founding of White America), which is a sort of secular Xmas, with turkeys and ham and decorations etc. I went to no less than four massive dinners, one at Allinek’s (whose wife you delivered, Ma; they had some cousins there who were your patients in the East End, Pa),[*46] and at the parents Feinstein (where there was no ham in evidence, but stuffed cabbage balls and smoked salmon). Xmas has been largely taken over by Jews here, and I have heard Xmas trees referred to as Chanukah bushes in all seriousness. Which reminds me: you will be receiving a package of assorted American wonders around the start of the New Year.

The bike has done 800 miles since I bought it two weeks ago, and so is nearly run in.[*47] There is a speed limit all over the US of 65 mph, which is very frustrating: however one cannot really go faster if one tries, on account of the vast volume of traffic on the freeways—often almost bumper to bumper for hundreds of miles. Off the main roads however, there are enchanting country lanes, and winding mountain roads, and one can almost fancy oneself