"On the Move: A Life," by Oliver Sacks
“On the Move,” the new memoir by Oliver Sacks, ends on an elegiac note, with the author reflecting on his love of writing. Even after publishing a dozen books, it’s a task that still absorbs him completely. He admits that writing leaves him oblivious to all other concerns, including the passage of time. In the book’s final line, he writes: “Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.”
In February, Sacks published an essay in the New York Times in which he revealed that he was dying of cancer. “At 81, I still swim a mile a day,” he wrote. “But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.” Although he was first diagnosed nearly a decade ago, the cancer could no longer be halted. He would have to decide how to spend the remaining months of his life.
So the arrival of “On the Move” proves bittersweet, both a gift and a coda. In what the author describes humbly as “an autobiography of sorts,” he revisits his family life, his writings and early career, as well as youthful passions — both intellectual and physical. Preceding the genial, avuncular sage we know today was a muscular, handsome, leather-clad gay man, reckless and addicted to speed — whether by way of motorcycles or pharmacology.
As a boy in boarding school in England, he lacked confidence. He describes feeling “a sense of imprisonment, and powerlessness — and I longed for movement and power, superhuman powers and ease of movement.” At age 12, he received a sharp assessment from a schoolmaster: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.”
Following his first term at Oxford, the shy, awkward Sacks was taken to Paris by his brother David. In addition to seeing the usual tourist stops, David planned to take him “to a kindly whore who would put me through my paces, skillfully and patiently teaching me what sex was like,” Sacks writes. But the prostitute, who resembled his aunt, noticed his terror and spent the session consoling him with a cup of tea.
He fell in love for the first time in 1953, with a Rhodes scholar and poet. The men became close friends. But the object of Sacks’ ardor was heterosexual and would die of Hodgkin’s lymphoma less than two years later. In despair and determined to finally lose his virginity, Sacks headed to Amsterdam at 22, where he had sex with a man he met in a bar. It was the first of many affairs, although Sacks confesses to being timid and inhibited for his entire life. (In fact, after a fling the week of his 40th birthday, Sacks did not have sex again for the next 35 years.)
In 2009, however, he met his current partner, the love of his life: “We have a tranquil, manydimensional sharing of lives — a great and unexpected gift in my old age, after a lifetime of keeping at a distance,” he writes.
He recalls his painful decision to leave England at age 27 — partly to escape his schizophrenic brother, Michael, whose violent behavior terrified the family. Sacks would devote his life to studying disorders of the human mind, of course, but he needed to do so without proximity to his troubled brother. He also yearned to get away from his mother. They were extremely close, and he was the favored son (among four boys), but his mother found his sexuality sick and shameful.
Sacks landed, quite happily, in San Francisco, where he began a hospital internship, obsessively hit the gym and spent his free weekends exploring Northern California on his new motorcycle. In the city he met Thom Gunn, whose poetry he greatly admired, and the two became friends. (Sacks recounts other notable friends throughout the book, including W.H. Auden and Robin Wil- liams.)
This period of his life, before he ended up in New York in 1965, also marked the beginning of his drug trips: marijuana, LSD and a four-year addiction to amphetamines: “The doses I took got larger and larger, pushing my heart rate and my blood pressure to lethal heights,” he writes, noting the irony of a neurologist ignoring the potentially dangerous effects of the drugs on his brain. (He notes that “the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life — the possibility, the temptation, of regression never goes away.”) He credits therapy, writing, various friendships and the allconsuming nature of his clinical work with helping him to beat his addiction.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of “On the Move” is the array of stories about the origins of Sacks’ many books. He shares his difficulties with writer’s block and depression. And he describes how some ideas evolved into books in unlikely ways. One began as a piece he submitted to the New York Review of Books. The editor, Bob Silvers, offered advice and encouraged him to develop it further. (Having this invaluable support, Sacks recalls, would allow him to “form the nucleus” of his 1985 book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”)
No matter what he writes about — whether struggling to understand what his patients are going through, or describing his love of swimming or photography — Sacks always seems open to learning more. He appears keenly interested in everything and everyone he encounters. He’s a wonderful storyteller, a gift he says he inherited from his parents, both of whom were doctors. But as he proves again in his latest (and perhaps final) book, it’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.