For most longtime readers of Oliver Sacks, the most shocking thing about his new memoir On the Move (Knopf) will be the cover. On it, a leather-clad Sacks, better-known now as the Scheherazade of neurology (OK, I made that up; a writer about neurological matters for readers of normal neurological endowment), sits atop his hog of a motorcycle in what, in this family newspaper, could only be described as a studly manner. I've stopped a couple of toney conversations dead by producing my bound review proofs �" "[Pause.] Is that Oliver Sacks?" Then, louder, the second question, "Is Oliver Sacks gay ?"
Yes and yes.
Time and again Sacks hymns the glory of motorcycle-riding �" leaving you breathless with his account of, as a medical resident in LA, spending rare weekends off riding solo to the Grand Canyon to arrive there at dawn, then back to LA in time for work, 1,000 miles later. His candor about his sex life is, in his telling, also non-sensational. Preternaturally shy even as a young British expat in San Francisco, the city of his dreams, Sacks says, matter-of-factly, "San Francisco's gay bathhouses were not to my taste." He's candid about the select individuals he loved, and was intimate with, and midway through the book there's a revealing story about a one-week odyssey with someone previously unknown, around the time of his 40th birthday.
"We had a joyous week together �" the days full, the nights intimate, a happy, festive, loving week �" before he had to return to the States. There were no deep or agonized feelings �" we liked each other, we enjoyed ourselves, and we parted without pain or promises when our week was up. It was just as well that I had no knowledge of the future, for after that sweet birthday fling I was to have no sex for the next 35 years."
His 35-year-later intimate, who appears at the end of the memoir, is a writer from San Francisco. Read Billy's blog post, "AIDS at 30," in The New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jun/06/aids-30-time-capsule/, and you'll sense the genuineness.
I still remember the shock of reading, in "Altered States" in a 2012 New Yorker, Sacks' account of his profligate drug use, primarily of speed and acid, in California and New York early in his professional life. The drugs flow in On the Move, and it's almost the most harrowing part of this unsparing autobiography. Balancing it is Sacks' overlapping phase of extreme body-building ("Muscle Beach"), which, like the drugs, finally tore him down as much it built him up. Unless you're one of his many close friends �" among the gay ones have been W.H. Auden and Bay Area poet Thom Gunn �" you're going to be doing a lot of adjusting of your previous, self-conceived ideas of the Sacks who writes the compassionate, mind-blowing case histories.
That Sacks is, of course, the "important," lasting one, and even the most general reader of On the Move will reap the rewards of what he learned about migraines, deafness, color-blindness and less well-known neurological phenomena such as proprioception ("the sixth sense"), postencephalitic awakening and Tourette's Syndrome, this last popularly misunderstood these days as only the obsessive utterance of "dirty words," coprolalia, which is but one of its manifestations. Sacks' career-long effort has been to go beyond the syndrome and diagnosis to their particular manifestations in patients he insists on seeing as individuals.
Disguising identities as needed, Sacks brings a multitude of his patients, whom he regards as among his most important teachers, to vivid life on the page. He is a doctor who, not single-handedly but instrumentally, has brought people of hopeless diagnoses out of the caves of their isolating symptoms and, too often, their all-too-literal institutional cages.
Among his patients has been Oliver Sacks, and his courage teasing out the meaning of an accident on one of his exotic one-man adventures �" this one involving a bull in a fjord �" provides one of the book's strongest chapters, about the painful and painstaking writing of A Leg To Stand On. Recovering from the incident, which might easily have cost him his life, involved all manner of pain. What makes his a quintessentially Sacks story is his revelation that it was a memory of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto that literally got him moving during physical therapy. "With this playing in my mind," he writes, "I found myself suddenly able to walk, to regain (as neurologists say) the 'kinetic melody' of walking."
It was his The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat that brought Sacks international fame, but for some of us it was with a later book, Musicophilia, that he entered the canon. There's a lot about writing, too, in On the Move, including unsparing accounts of what he calls his "too-muchness" (e.g., footnotes longer than some mathematics dissertations �" even in this memoir �" but as fascinating as what they annotate). "It seems that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing," he reports. For him the fusion of "science and storytelling" is imperative.
Nearly as startling as anything else in the book are Sacks' frequent stories of manuscripts, data sets and entire books that somehow just got lost. Sacks, it would seem, has mislaid more work than most people accomplish in a lifetime. It's significant that he does not mention the recent diagnosis of his own incurable cancer, word of which has shocked and saddened all who admire him, but instead refers to another forthcoming book �" this while he has an article in the current New Yorker.
The book's title is a direct steal from the title of one of Thom Gunn's poems, one of whose stanzas ends with, "One is always nearer by not keeping still." Having known Gunn into the poet's old age, Sacks observes, "He had, so far as I could judge, no thoughts of slowing down or stopping. I think he was moving forward, on the move, until the end." Those words could also be self-referential.