My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.
Predictably, his wanderlust is informed by a need to escape the past – not only the traumas of wartime Britain but also the emotional confinements of his middle-class childhood. He was sent to boarding school, where he was beaten by sadistic teachers. His mother’s reaction when she learns that he is gay haunts him for decades: ‘You are an abomination,’ she says. ‘I wish you had never been born.’ Yet Sacks’s parents were not unloving. As he observes, his mother was troubled, having already raised one son, Sacks’s brother Michael, who had developed schizophrenia:She was speaking, though I am not sure I realized this at the time, out of anguish as much as accusation – the anguish of a mother who, feeling she had lost one son to schizophrenia, now feared she was losing another son to homosexuality, a condition which was regarded then as shameful and stigmatizing.
Sacks later acknowledges that his parents cared more for him than he realised when they were alive. He is also supported by his broader family – most notably his Aunt Lennie, to whom he pays outsized tribute. On the Move is a very sentimental, moving work. But it is also very funny. Here Sacks recalls sleeping overnight in a truck surrounded by other trucks:Putting my ear to part of the latticed framework I now heard other noises too – the sounds of joking and drinking and making love – coming from all the other trucks all around us, impinging on the antenna of my ear.
I lay, contented, in the darkness, feeling myself in a very aquarium of sound, and very soon I feel asleep.
His elegant recollections of his own often awkward trysts from this period are worthy of Edmund White and Armistead Maupin. They include a wrestling workout with a naval officer, which is ‘sexually exciting’ even though ‘it was not a purposively sexual act’. There are several frantic rendezvous, though a great love affair will elude him until much later in life. Sacks is drawn to contrasting personalities. He notes how his mentors often appeared in complementary pairs. And he habitually compares himself to others. His friend, the poet Thom Gunn, ‘was lapidary and incisive; I was centrifugal and effusive’. His tense relationship with a jealous supervisor named Friedman makes him think of other professional jealousies between elders and their young proteges:This painful story – painful on both sides – is not an uncommon one: an older man, a father figure, and his youthful son-in-science find their roles reversed when the son starts to outshine the father.
Sacks’s tendency to think in binary form is more than just an affect. It speaks to a writing tradition that stretches back to Plutarch, the ancient Greek biographer whose pairings of Greek and Roman lives gave rise to moral lessons. Sacks counterpoises different lives, including his own social personae at various stages in his life, to instructive effect. If On the Move has a moral, it is a conventional one about the importance of living life free from resentment and self-judgment. But there are some fascinating paradoxes here. On the one hand, Sacks wants us to note his self-effacing shyness: ‘I am shy in ordinary social contexts; I am not able to “chat” with any ease.’ Yet with his evident delight in regaling readers with recollections of parties with WH Auden, conversations with his cousin (and Israeli Foreign Minister) Abba Eban, the bestowal of honours from the Queen and encounters with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams (who starred in the 1990 film of Awakenings), he is clearly gregarious and loves mixing with celebrity. Moreover, while Sacks’s narrative suggests that he had to put down youthful tchotchkes before he could pursue a serious life in neurology and writing, there is room for another interpretation of his story, that of a man who never fitted in and instead used his outsider status to challenge the medical establishment from within. The wise one never stopped being wild. Sacks is at his vivid best when he discusses his own writing. He positions himself as the inheritor of a tradition of 19th-century literary studies of science, and likens his work to that of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: ‘I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with (in Clifford Geertz’s phrase) “thick description”.’ His self-description as a ‘storyteller’ is distinctly liberal humanist in its celebration of a ‘universal human disposition’:I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other.
Not that writing comes easily to him. He describes the writing process for each of his books, including the many arduous years it took to complete his third book, A Leg to Stand On (1984) He also records the medical profession’s cool reception of his books. But there are compensations, including his embrace by literary and scientific heavyweights. Auden, we learn, described Awakenings as a ‘masterpiece’ and it inspired a play by Harold Pinter as well as the film. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat became an opera by Michael Nyman and Christopher Rawlence. Stephen J Gould was a fan. Recently, Sacks revealed in the New York Times that he has been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. On the Move does not offer a comprehensive account of Sacks’s life – it says little, for instance, about his political convictions, or his thoughts on gay rights – but makes for a satisfyingly full reading experience nonetheless. If it is to be his last work, it closes the loop on a remarkable life and establishes the case for how Sacks would like to be remembered: as a writer. Adrian Phoon is a Sydney writer. He’s appeared in SameSame, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, New Matilda and a lot of karaoke bars. He tweets @highonprose. Oliver Sacks On the Move: A life Picador 2015 PB 256pp $34.99 You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.Tags: Armistead | Maupin, Clifford | Geertz, Edmund | White, Harold | PInter, Marlon | Brando, Oliver | Sacks, Robert | de Niro, Robin | Williams, Stephen J | Gould, WH | Auden
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