A painful experience six months ago may have provided Oliver Sacks with
an idea for his next neurological case study. “I’ve actually been thinking
of writing a piece about what one can see as a neurologist or psychologist
who decides to cycle in New York,” he says.
The celebrated British author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat seems
to be considering a sequel: The Neurologist Who Mistook His Bicycle for an
Aeroplane.
The story will be based on his experiences as a 74-year-old cyclist in
Manhattan, where he has lived for the past 43 years. When you’re out riding
in New York, Sacks says, “you see every form of inattention, and basically
functional deafness and blindness. Even schizophrenics don’t walk in front
of cars the way New York pedestrians do”.
Earlier this year he was pedal-ling along one of the city’s cycle paths when
he noticed a woman hovering at a pedestrian crossing ahead of him.
“She was wearing an iPod, or whatever. I rang my bicycle bell, she didn’t hear
it, I’ve got a loud klaxon, she didn’t hear it. I blew my police whistle,
she didn’t hear it.”
At the last possible moment, the woman stepped directly into Sacks’s path. “I
went over the handlebars, which is not good in your seventies,” he says.
“Not good at any age, really.”
The accident occurred as Sacks was polishing off his latest foray to the outer
margins of neurological experience. In his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of
Music and the Brain, he discusses the cases of the surgeon who was struck by
lightning and became obsessed with learning to play the piano; of the
musician whose memory was destroyed by disease but who can still play a Bach
sonata; and of the countless ways in which the human brain is stimulated, soothed,
agitated and sometimes shattered by music.
It is the work of a man who, to borrow Sacks’s description of the brain, is
“exquisitely tuned to music”. It is written in his signature style – filled
with quirky charm and compassion, more descriptive than analytic, more
lyrical than scientific. The New York Times has called him “the poet
laureate of medicine”.
None of which makes Sacks any more appreciative of iPods or other portable
devices. It’s not that he doesn’t approve of music as a background to the
business of life – he sometimes switches the radio on when he’s working in
his Greenwich Village office, and recalls a story about Nietzsche, who liked
to jot down big ideas while attending concerts by Bizet. “Nietzsche said,
‘Bizet makes me a better philosopher’,” says Sacks, “and I sometimes feel
that a musical background somehow organises more musical thinking.”
It’s just that he gets understand-ably angry when he ends up on the pavement
with a mouthful of blood. “In a way it’s wonderful that all this music is
available in something as small as an iPod,” he says. “But it’s sort of
dangerous, because the street is full of zombies who are impervious to the
reality around them.”
He isn’t really a grumpy old fogey, though. In person he is impossibly sweet,
chattering away merrily about everything from Nietzsche to pilchards, then
begging me to stop him from “babbling”. At one point he discovers that I
occasionally visit the New York Botanical Garden to photograph plants. He
leaps up to present me with an inscribed copy of his Oaxaca Journal, a 2002
account of his botanical exploits in Mexico (he is a prominent member of the
American Fern Society).
He does tend to slope around in tatty sweaters and baggy trousers, but he
swims and cycles regularly, and manages a punishing medical workload that
includes house calls to an epilepsy clinic and to old folk’s homes in Queens
and the Bronx. In September he took up a new position as professor of
clinical neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, which is also
designating him an official university artist.
Sacks first made his name as a literary physician with Awakenings (1973), his
startling account of a group of patients who were immobilised by
encephalitic leth-argica, better known as sleeping sickness. They were
brought back to active life by an experimental drug that proved to have
frighteningly erratic effects. The book was later made into a successful
film, with the comedian Robin Williams perfectly cast as the twinkly,
unkempt, but profoundly sympathetic Sacks.
It was in 1985 that Sacks first wrote about the extraordinary moment when one
of his patients was leaving his office “and started to look around for his
hat. He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife’s head . . . he had
apparently mistaken his wife for a hat. His wife looked as if she was used
to such things”.
Quite apart from deserving the Nobel prize for the best book title ever, that
account cemented Sacks’s reputation as the world’s foremost translator of
exotic medical afflictions into moving human drama. His own story turns out
to be equally moving, but there are clearly parts of it that have not yet
been told.
Sacks was born in London in 1933 to a general practitioner and his surgeon
wife. His mother cheerily taught Sacks anatomy by bringing home mal-formed
foetuses for him to dissect. He hated boarding school, gave up religion,
found solace in music and when, as a child, he was asked what were his two
favourite things in the world, he replied: “Smoked salmon and Bach.”
Going up to Oxford to study medicine he became depressed, and his parents
found him a psychoanalyst. This would ultimately lead to perhaps the most
remarkable relationship of his life. “When I first came to New York [as a
young doctor] I got drug-addicted on amphetamin-es, stopped going to work,
and I got quite frightened,” he recalls. “On the last day of 1965, I looked
at my then very gaunt face in the mirror, and said, ‘Oliver, you won’t make
it for another year without attention’.”
He was introduced to a young psychoanalyst. He has been seeing the same man
every week for the past 41 years. “I saw my man this morning. It’ll be 42
years in January,” he says. But surely, I suggest, this must be more about
friendship than analysis.
“Oh no. I think we respect and like one another, but I’m still Dr Sacks and
he’s still Dr Shengold. I know very little of his personal life. But I know
that he knows me, especially some of my mischievous and masochistic
proclivities, better than anyone in the world, better than any friend or
nonprofessional could.”
Sacks, who has never married, lives alone in a flat near his office. He seems
mostly to be looked after by Kate Edgar, his busy and efficient
assistant-cum-guardian angel. “Kate holds me together,” he says. “I can no
longer imagine what the preKate days were like.”
Does he wish he’d had children? “I have many, many god-children, including
Kate’s son. In the footnote of one of my books there was a misprint and he
was called my grandson. I was inclined to leave the misprint. I often
thought I would like to have grandchildren but I’m a sort of loner. A
friendly loner, but a loner of sorts.”
At one point in our interview, Sacks picked up a copy of his book with his
bearded features beaming genially from the cover. He hurriedly turned it
over.
“I usually take the cover off so I don’t have to look at myself,” he says.
Sounds like a case for Shengold.
Sacks has never taken American citizenship. “There may be a deeper reason for
this, but I suspect it’s just laziness.” He likes being officially described
on his US visa as a resident alien. “It implies a certain separation.” His
English accent remains intact, though he has no plans to live again in
England. “I used to think about returning, but the England or London I am
sometimes nostalgic about has largely disappeared.”
There’s an English grocery shop around the corner from his flat, and he
sometimes goes there to buy pilchards. “I’m particularly fond of them, and
they are unknown to Americans,” he says. Then he smiles. “When I start
talking about pilchards, it’s time to rein me in.”
I ask Sacks how long he intends to keep working. Does he ever feel like
retiring to the beach in Bermuda? “God forbid,” he replies. “I’d go out of
my mind with boredom. If I did go to Bermuda, I’d find some Bermu-dan
research to do . . . possibly a study of boredom in Bermuda. You know, I
think that could be the title of a book.”
Sacks is already at work on his next book, about visual perception and
hallucinations, and there may be more to come after that. “My father retired
at 70 and went back to work 48 hours later,” he says. “He reretired at 80,
did the same thing. At 90 we said, at least stop the house calls, but he
stopped everything else and stayed with the house calls, which he did until
his 95th year.”
Sacks says he tends not to think about death. “I don’t think it’s very
interesting. But I think I’ll be sorry when my number is up. It sort of
depends. I see a lot of very old people who say that when the good Lord
calls, they’re ready to go. But I don’t feel that way myself.”
He says he would be “very saddened and angry” if “something lethal” affected
his health. “Of course in New York, something lethal has a habit of turning
up.” Watch out for those pedestrians with iPods.
