In 1966, the London-born neurologist Oliver Sacks, then in his early thirties, started working at Beth Abraham, a hospital for the chronically ill, in the Bronx. He soon began noticing dozens of patients, scattered among the wards, who were virtually immobile and unable to communicate. Going through their records, he realized that they were all survivors of encephalitis lethargica, also known as sleeping sickness, which had swept the globe after the First World War. This disease could be fatal; those who survived it sometimes developed syndromes that could seem like an extreme form of Parkinson’s. By the sixties, some of Sacks’s patients had been hospitalized for forty years, and the encephalitis epidemic itself had largely been forgotten.
In 1968, the medical community was galvanized by the news that people with Parkinson’s could be helped by a new drug called levodopa, or L-dopa. Sacks wondered whether “DOPA,” as he called it, could also help his patients, and he applied to the F.D.A. to use it as an experimental drug. His findings would become the basis of his groundbreaking book “Awakenings,” published in 1973.
Years later, Sacks became friendly with the director Peter Weir, who was considering taking on the film adaptation of “Awakenings.” In the end, Penny Marshall directed the movie, which came out in 1990 and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Robin Williams was cast as the doctor modelled on Sacks, and Robert De Niro as one of his post-encephalitic patients.
March 26, 1969
Dear Ma and Pa [Elsie and Samuel Sacks, both doctors],
I hope you are keeping well and in good spirits. . . .
Things at Beth Abraham continue on their blundering course. The DOPA still never came (my chief, a schnorrer at heart, is trying to beg for some . . . despite the fact that he is rolling in funds specially donated for its purchase), and I can hardly bear to face my poor Parkinsonian patients who have been promised and promised, and let down and lied to, a dozen times in the past six months. You will not be surprised that this stupid situation fills me with rage and guilt. Fortunately, there are a few other patients whom I can study quietly, in my own time, in my own way. It is obvious, however, that I can depend on Beth Abraham for nothing. . . .
Before I forget, thank you, Ma, for the motorcycle leathers which arrived a few days ago.
I imagine Spring is arriving in England, and things are bursting from the ground.
Keep well, write soon, say a special hello to Michael, Auntie Len, David and family, etc.
Love,
[c. April, 1969]
Dear Ma and Pa,
. . . My three patients are doing extraordinarily well on the DOPA: one of them, who was virtually unable to talk or move . . . is now chatting and toddling down the corridors. I am inclined to think that DOPA may indeed turn out to be as useful for Parkinsonians as insulin for diabetics, or nearly so. In the meantime, I have been studying the three patients closely, and am gathering some novel and fascinating insights into their state. . . .
As usual, I have said more than I should; but you will gather, if nothing else, that the emotional Barometer (to which all other things are secondary) has moved to FAIR: occasional showers, but sunny intervals. . . .
Love to everyone (as the Hippies say),
May 17, 1969
Dear Ma and Pa,
. . . I now have 15 patients on DOPA, and am staggered and gratified at its ability (in many though not all cases) to reanimate patients who had been virtually petrified for years. . . . This, of course, in turn leads to a very complex state of affairs: one cannot restore the potential of movement and independence to someone who has been helpless and dependent for decades without creating a most complex, unprecedented situation for them and everyone associated with them; I am fascinated by this aspect, among others. . . .
I have been working like a madman for the last fortnight. . . . I am gathering almost more information than I can deal with and starting to nibble on the huge Parkinson literature. . . .
[Charles] Messeloff [Beth Abraham’s medical director] still wants to get everyone involved . . . in his stupid American concept of a Big Deal and a Multidisciplinary Approach, etc. I try to ignore all this and arrogate the patients to myself. . . .
I have very little to say otherwise, for I have indeed had very little life outside the hospital lately. . . . I hope you are all keeping well.
Love,
May 25, 1969
My dear Mike [Warvarovsky, a friend from California],
I should have replied earlier to your charming letter written in Venice, all bubbling with the freshness and joys of travel. I adore the wide-openness, the innocence, with which you see the world. . . . How right you are about catacombs and secret thoughts!
Everything we build is an allegory of ourselves: the whole human world a metaphor of the human state. My own love is for city walls . . . those high stone walls which enclose, defend, and unify a city, as we wall off the citadel of ourselves. . . .
I have started the intensive work on my Parkinson patients . . . and I have had the intoxication of seeing l-DOPA, a ravishing drug, restore to an incredible life . . . patients who had been almost literally turned to stone, speechless, motionless, and even thoughtless, for twenty years or more by the horror of their disease. My first patient, a man of fifty, who had had the severest Parkinsonism since the age of fifteen and had not spoken or moved for more than ten years, said (his first words): “I am reborn. I have been in prison for thirty-three years. You have released me from the custody of my symptoms.”
Neurophysiology shows what poetry and philosophy have always known: that we are—in a very fundamental sense—automata, reflex-machines; and also that we are composite. Knowing that we are necessarily passive and composite, we can then make ourselves, for daily purposes, active and unified. But there is no “soul” and no “will”—these are fictions, universal fictions, like the Garden of Eden.
Oooh! I am sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble ahead like this. . . .
July 30, 1969
Dear Ma and Pa,
A very brief note, whose arrival I may myself precede.
You sound like you enjoyed Malta very much—islands have something lovely about them. . . . I nearly blue [sic] everything I had to go for a voyage to the Galapagos Islands with the Darwin Society, but alas! have had to content myself with reading The Voyage of the Beagle as my bedside book. . . . The last three months will turn out to have been, I suspect, the most interesting and productive in my entire life: what I started, reluctantly, as a trial of just another drug has proved an almost incredible tool for the dissection of a vast range of human behavior, from the most primitive postural reflexes to the most complex psychotic reactions. . . .
Will look forward greatly to seeing you all, and to a calm month of (alas! it has to be almost entirely) work.
Love,
August 14, 1969
My dear John [Z., a former lover],
For others a postcard, but to you I cannot send less than a letter. But what there is to write, or what I should write, is another matter. . . .
It was a lovely flight (once we were off the ground), and I had a beautiful soaring sense of freedom as soon as we were on our way, which became sort of ecstatic (and made me weep to myself) as we floated down, at the end, through great soft fleecy clouds . . . down to funny little Gatwick Airport, which is so rural that we almost landed in a flock of sheep (they scattered, bleating, as we neared the ground). . . .
I have spent ten days—how? I am not quite sure. A lot of time with my old friends, afternoons in Kew Gardens . . . swimming in the lakes on Hampstead Heath . . . smoking an infinite number of delicious Havanas (which one cannot, of course, buy in the States, because Cuba is the “foe”), and doing a certain amount of thinking, reading and writing for my book. I think I will have to start on its serious composition almost at once, but the whole subject has extended itself so much in my mind, and excites me so much, that I am afraid to take the plunge: it is exactly the feeling one has before leaping from the top diving-board. . . .
I have thought of you a certain amount, and have wondered what was a-doing with you. I hope we can construct some meaningful but not-too-intense relationship when I return in September, something calm and civilized, and not at all devouring-torrid-enslaving, etc. . . .
Yours,
OLIVER
September 12, 1969
Memo to Dr. Messeloff:
I think it essential that the administration ruling confining our patients on medication to the Hospital be modified with regard to our DOPA patients. Several of our patients have been going home regularly . . . others have gone on summer camps . . . and others on day trips. In all cases the patients have been given l-DOPA and other medications to cover their needs while out of the hospital. There have been no problems whatever. Is this all to stop?
Going out is the very breath of life for these unfortunate patients who have been not only institutionalized, but imprisoned in their symptoms, for up to fifty years. . . . Two of my patients, Lillian G. and Tillie A., have been institutionalized for more than 35 years, and have not seen the outside world for more than ten years. They were both looking forward eagerly to going to the beach on September 10, and were both heartbroken when this was suddenly vetoed at the last moment.
It is a great cruelty to activate these patients and then deny them activity, to animate them and then deny them the amenities of life. I consider excursions an absolute necessity for their well-being. . . .
O. W. Sacks
September 13, 1969
Dear Jonathan [Miller, director and friend],
I imagine that you are once more surrounded by wife and family (you look terribly lost even in a few days of enforced bachelordom), and working up for your opening of Twelfth Night. . . .
For myself I am working about as hard as I could hope to do for a sustained period without breakdown. . . .
When I returned [from London], it was to find myself the focus of a little minor fame, the consequence of [Israel] Shenker’s NY Times article [“Drug Brings Parkinson Victims Back Into Life,” August 26, 1969]. I had about two hundred letters from patients (and their doctors) as far afield as Australia. . . . This has brought me a little pleasure (I confess), but more distress. Especially as it has all gone to the head of Charlie Messeloff, the old fool who runs Beth Abraham. . . . In my absence he assumed dictatorial powers, summarily fired the Chief of Medicine (an excellent man . . . ), capriciously altered the medication, and did endless harm. . . . I found that five patients of mine had broken hips: Charlie, in his senile logic, had thought that if they were doing well on X Gm. daily, they would do twice as well on 2X Gm.: they were wildly activated, hurled themselves to and fro on their weak and contractured legs, and of course went down like ninepins. . . . It is ironic and even tragic that my position at Beth Abraham should be rendered intolerable by him, at a time when everything else is going beautifully. . . .
I do hope that your poor father is out of his nightmare complications, and being restored to his former state. . . .
Yours,
October 3, 1969
Dear Mike [Warvarovsky],
Thank you for your postcard (postmarked Sept 2). . . .
In the last six months or so I have been almost continuously involved and buoyed up by my current work . . . and now feel like a treasure-ship staggering into port laden with almost more than it can carry. A unique group of patients . . . a unique drug, and a unique observer (myself) have combined to give me a remarkable insight into human behavior. . . .
From getting up at 4:30 each morning to write, to my exhausted sleep—which is usually filled with dreams of Parkinsonism and the teeming theories of the moment—I have little time to myself, and almost none for human relationships or ordinary pleasures. . . . In a paradoxical way, my existence has become tolerable and pleasant by having become, in a sense, impersonal or suprapersonal. There is much less fear, less craving, less blaming, less claiming, and all that. Monk-like, the Spinoza of 78th St. . . .
February 7, 1970
Dear Michael [Sacks’s brother, who was diagnosed as having schizophrenia as a teen-ager],
I was very happy to receive your short note of January 4, and have been guilty and angry at myself for not having made any reply to it in the month since its arrival. . . . My reactions . . . are contradictory, and this has made the writing of a return letter difficult.
One general thing is quite clear, and a requisite for your survival (as a person). You must have some third mode of existence, some middle ground, between living at Hospital (which, with the exhaustion of its initial promise, is barely tolerable for you) and living at home (which is less tolerable): you must have some middle ground between feelings of doom . . . and fantasies of redemption. . . . Above all, you must secure some release from your conscience, which is the most merciless I have ever known: like Kafka, you labor constantly under a sense of infinite guilt. . . .
I spend a great deal of my life in just this paranoid posture, filled with feelings of hate, vengeance, abjection, hopelessness. And I too (though obviously much less than yourself) regard every moment as a moment of crisis, full of threat and promise. . . .
I have just heard (in a letter from Ma and Pa) that you have secured a job in the West End, partly inside and partly outside. I am very glad to hear this. Please let me know more of it.
Besides a job you need (not economically, but for your very sense of existence, and for the possibility of release from the knots of hate and spite which bind you, and our parents, at Mapesbury) a place of your own—a hostel, a little furnished room, something you can get away to. . . .
Anyhow, I have said much too much, and sounded pompous and patronizing, which I was afraid I would.
Do drop me a line, when you feel like it, and tell me how things are going with you.
Love,
Oliver
[c. April, 1970]
Dear Jonathan [Miller],
Lovely to get your letter yesterday. . . .
When I tot things up, I realize that first I have another dozen articles to write, and . . . then I must get on with my next subject . . . which is “dementia” . . . and then “schizophrenia.” So I see years of work stretching ahead, which gives me a good privileged feeling (the “task,” the “mission,” etc.) but also a feeling of being walled-in, and having to shelve the wild wanderings and wanderlusts and extravagances of youth, neurosis, drugs, etc. But it is not a bad bargain. Thank God I have a remarkable ability to sublimate and to become dedicated to things, otherwise I would end up catatonic, like my brother in Bedlam.
Physically life has become a good deal better, now that I have a car (a 1967 Rover) and a pleasant apartment. The hospital is renting me this for a fairly token sum. I have six rooms (which is large for NY) which occupy the ground floor of an oldish house . . . and also a little garden fore-and-aft thrown in. . . . I hope you will consider staying over for a day or two when you next come to NY.
Naturally . . . I also feel aghast at the thought of such comfort and security etc. and feel that a) I will be punished for it, b) that it will suddenly be taken away, and c) that it will cause an immediate stultification, petrification, mummification. . . .
And the resistance one must fight to find new ideas! So much emotion, so much attachment, goes with the old. And one feels like a murderer when one must smash down one set of ideas to make room for a new set. . . .
My love to the family—I will hope to see you all in August.
Yrs,
Oliver
May 6, 1970
Dear Ma and Pa,
This letter will arrive, I imagine, about the time you return from Israel. I hope you had a good, relaxed time there: what is the general atmosphere like? From the outside, of course, the whole Middle East seems to be boiling in a particularly dangerous way, or about to blow up. Indeed the whole world seems that way at the moment—tensions are extremely high here, following the invasion of Cambodia and the brutal shooting of those students in Ohio. . . . Most of the colleges throughout the States are putting on strikes or boycotts; there is a very fearful, ominous atmosphere, something like that in the first days of 1939, I imagine.
It seems almost improper to pursue one’s personal life, when everything around one is so agog. . . .
One way and another . . . my beloved post-encephalitic patients, and their infinitely varied reactions to l-DOPA, have led into a vast landscape of clinical study, really into a life’s work. And by the time I am “through” with them, I will have derived an experience and knowledge of primitive (sub-cortical) behavior matched by nobody else around, to say nothing of the “bonuses” like the study of tics, obsessions, mannerisms, perceptual distortions, memory upsurges, etc. as these occur in the patients. . . .
I feel myself almost diagrammatically divided into a “good” self and a “bad” self. The good self is full of love and wonder and praise etc. This is the part which makes me see my patients as miraculous concatenations of disordered brain-systems, and to feel endless sympathy, understanding, compassion, etc. for them. . . . The bad part is full of hate and fear and blame, and is as selfish and destructive as the other is altruistic and constructive. . . . Teaching, patients, poetry, philosophy, Nature, etc. bring out the good, lyrical part of me, which is much pleasanter for me, and for everyone concerned. . . .
It was lovely to hear you all over Pesach, and I will look forward to your next letter.
June 8, 1970
Dear Augusta [Bonnard, psychiatrist],
. . . I suddenly bethought myself of your paper on “The primal significance of the tongue,” and want to say how full of interesting observations and insights I have found it. . . .
For the first two years of analysis, I was consumed with feelings of reproach and even hatred against my parents, seeing them as all-culpable vehicles and inducers of neurotic misery. These feelings I have worked through, and now I find myself loving and admiring them for a quality (indeed, the most valuable human quality) which has been the center of their lives, and is now the center of mine: namely, a feeling of devotion and dedication to their patients and their problems. . . . And it is obvious, from my knowledge of you and from re-reading your paper, that something very similar and intense must be a mainspring in your own life. . . .
I will be coming to England this August . . . and will hope to see you then.
Best wishes . . .
Oliver Sacks
September 12, 1970
My dear Paul [Turner, physician],
. . . It was an enormous pleasure seeing you in London again, and—I realize in retrospect—a meeting which certainly coincided with, and possibly prompted, a change of mood. . . .
I went to see C. [a neurological colleague and distant cousin] at Hammersmith, the day after meeting you, whom I found very bright, eager, but essentially pedestrian. That’s a mean word to use after his receiving me so pleasantly. . . . He sat in his clinic, alert, neat, quick, with a pile of ruled test-sheets in front of him, rapidly reducing his patients to test-scores, and paying (unless I do him an injustice) almost no attention to them as people: tremor 3, rigidity 2½, akinesia 4, next patient please, etc. . . . In some very fundamental sense, when all the gradings and rating and testings and measurements have been done . . . the very flesh of the subject has escaped, like a jellyfish through a tea strainer. . . .
I am forgetting that this is a letter, and getting all hot-under-the-collar and polemical. Actually, I think I am rehearsing the preface to my book on Parkinsonism, which I have just started writing, and which perhaps C.’s book has, in part, stimulated. . . .
Thank you again for everything, and looking forward to hearing from you.
Best regards to your wife,
November 7, 1970
Dear Ma and Pa,
It seems a long time since I wrote or received a letter, but I don’t suppose it can really be so long. . . .
In the meantime, I have decided to split my originally planned book into two. The [first part] will deal specifically with l-DOPA, laying stress on its dangers, on the reasons why these have not been adequately reported. . . .
I have held my hand for nearly two years, refraining from any premature publication of large studies (as . . . my own common sense advised, although Messeloff, of course, was always pestering and nagging me to publish “something positive,” in less-than-no-time, etc.). But now I have seen the whole melancholy round of l-DOPA (and it is round—like the Earth: a man cannot escape from his Parkinsonism any more than he can walk off the surface of the earth: at the point when l-DOPA seems most effective, when the patient shows anti-Parkinsonism, or is in the Antipodes of Parkinsonism, at that moment his course is already rounding itself to return to where he came from)—now I have seen the whole round, I am ready to pour out a spate of publications. . . .
I should be grateful, Pa, if you could refrain from mentioning my DOPA book to anyone at the moment, especially cousin C. Do write and tell me how you all are, and what is happening in London.
OS
August 18, 1971
Dear Wystan [W. H. Auden, poet],
Your letter was forwarded to me a few days ago, and it (or your poem, or you) was the best of palliatives. Does there come a point (if one is very lucky, or has the right gifts, or grace, or works at it) when style, feeling, content, judgment all flow together and assume the right form? . . .
In some sense, I think, my medical sense is a musical one. I diagnose by the feeling of discordancy, or of some peculiarity of harmony. And it’s immediate, total, and gestalt. My sleeping-sickness patients have innumerable types of strange “crises,” immensely complex, absolutely specific, yet completely indescribable. I recognize them all now as I recognize a bar of Brahms or Mahler. . . .
I hope I can find some way to describe these, because they are unique states, at the edges of being . . . and when the last of the sleeping-sickness patients die (they are very old now) no memory will be left of their extraordinary states. Writing seems more of a struggle now—maybe I’m trying something harder—I find meanings go out of focus, or there is some sort of “slippage” between word and meaning, and the phrase which seemed right, yesterday, is dead today. . . . And medical jargon is so awful. It conveys no real picture, no impression whatever, of what—say—it feels like to be Parkinsonian. . . . One patient called it the push-and-pull, another the goad-and-halter. It’s a most hateful condition, although it has a sort of elegant formal structure. But no book that I know of brings home that Parkinsonism feels like this. . . .
I hope I can join Orlan [Fox, a mutual friend] on a lightning visit to Vienna. . . . [Auden spent his summers in Kirchstetten, outside the city.] But if I cannot come I will surely see you in New York. . . .
Yours ever,
August 28, 1971 [unsent]
Dear Sir [George L. Fite, editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association],
I must acknowledge, somewhat belatedly, your letter, and your return of my manuscript on l-DOPA.
And, of course, the list of “comments” provided by your consultant(s). The latter is a quite remarkable production, not for its intrinsic value (for it seems almost entirely valueless as a rational critique), but for the light it casts on the state-of-mind and emotional attitudes of your consultant(s), who—if I do not misunderstand you—must be regarded as representing, after a fashion, the “official” attitude to l-DOPA.
I need scarcely say that I was at first distressed, and even shocked, that innumerable observations based on years of daily contact with patients . . . could be so ignorantly and wantonly dismissed, or “wished away”: the attitude immortalized in Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap (“I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” . . . ). Your consultant(s) do not make . . . any substantive criticisms of my work, and have therefore descended . . . into petty jibing, pomposity, vapid rhetoric—in a word, Podsnappery. Indeed, if I did not know it directly, I could infer the importance of my own work from the very intensity of this threatened, denying, and defensive reaction. . . .
I know you will appreciate that feelings must be discharged and expressed once in a while. With this letter, therefore, I shall regard the JAMA “episode” as closed.
Yours sincerely,
Oliver Sacks
October 25, 1971
Dear Mr. Haycroft [sic; Colin Haycraft, publisher, Gerald Duckworth & Co.],
It was a very great pleasure meeting you last month, and an immense encouragement (and surprise) that you were interested by the case histories I wrote in 1969. I am exceedingly sorry to be so tardy in replying to you. . . .
My chief reason for holding back, though, is connected with . . . my fears that publishing such detailed information about living people might be distressing to them. . . . I have spoken to most of the patients whose case histories I gave you, and none of them have raised any special objections. . . . It was due to such misgivings that I put the histories away in a drawer after writing them.
I have just been reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti—I don’t know if you know the book—which may have some analogies to Awakenings. . . . And Freud’s “Dora” analysis, which he put in a drawer for five years after writing!
I hope therefore that some of my conflicts being resolved, I can get on with the necessary revision and emendations. . . . I will write relatively short . . . epilogues bringing each case up to date—this is bound to add a rather tragic element . . . because in many cases the superb effects of the drug were not maintained, or [were] otherwise compromised. . . .
November 24, 1972
Dear Professor Kermode [Frank Kermode, literary critic],
I was overcome with pleasure and gratitude when I saw your letter last week. . . .
I felt a great need to express myself and my “data” in a wholly different way and to a wholly different audience; I was delighted—and scared—when the Listener commissioned my article; and breathed the biggest sigh of relief I have ever breathed when I saw that someone like yourself approved. . . .
If one gives them a chance, patients always describe their Parkinsonism or whatever in terms of worlds and landscapes. They depict. It has taken me years and years . . . to learn to listen to them, and to try and feel my way into the nature of their experiences. . . .
Back in 1966, I saw my first post-encephalitic patient—he had once been a librarian—with a look on his face at once infinitely clenched and infinitely remote, but I couldn’t begin to imagine his state until he whispered “Panther” and suddenly put Rilke’s Panther into my mind.
I have tried to convey the sort of lives some of these people have in my forthcoming book Awakenings (Duckworth). It is bound to be a partial failure because one really needs to be a novelist as well as a neurologist, but I hope it will convey something of what these extraordinary, tormented, involuntary explorers of the depths experience. . . .
February 10, 1973
Dear Colin [Haycraft],
I have returned to find a distressing and potentially calamitous situation at Beth Abraham—and one which is reflected in thousands of Beth Abrahams all over the country. Nixon’s latest budget has upped defense (I mean “defense”) expenditure by twenty billion or whatever, and has made a merciless cutback in monies available to schools and hospitals. . . . I found on my return that Margie (our devoted speech therapist), all the physiotherapists, occupational therapists, etc. had been summarily sacked. There has been an abrupt (and probably permanent) closing-down of our Workshop, our Rehabilitation Department, etc. . . . I went up to the ward and found almost every patient speechless-motionless with fear. . . . Indeed, this is a death sentence for many of them . . . and for many of the 3 million patients in the US in so-called “extended care” institutions. . . . Horrible. And the fact that it has come from the highest level gives one an absolute sense of impotence. . . .
Enough said. I will cease to shoot letters and footnotes in your direction for a while. . . .
Best regards,
March 31, 1973
Dear Wystan [Auden],
When I got your lovely letter of February 21, I was filled with a rush of affection and gratitude, immediately wrote an answer, put it in an envelope and stamped it, placed it under a volume of the OED to flatten it, took it the next day meaning to post it—and I cannot be sure whether I actually did so or not. . . .
Thank you immensely for your magnanimous reaction to my book. [Auden wrote, “Have read Awakenings and think it a masterpiece. I do congratulate.”] You are the only person, other than my publisher, to whom I have shown a copy; and there is nobody whose favorable response could make me happier than your own. . . . The positive experience with the Listener article, like the five years of negative experience which preceded it, persuade me that it is all-but-impossible to have any real and fruitful dialogue in Medicine and medical circles (especially the barren neurological ones to which I belong), whereas there is obviously a mass of real, alive people outside Medicine who will listen to me, and with whom I can enjoy the delight (the necessity) of real converse. . . .
Essentially, at the moment, I am mourning. . . . [Sacks’s mother died unexpectedly, in November, 1972.] I felt diminished almost to zero by my mother’s death . . . and it is only in the last few days, perhaps, with the signs of Spring all round me, that I have started to feel a re-stirring of my own sap, and a re-realization that I exist in my own right, that—unexpectedly, amazingly—I am still here, and the world is here. . . .
I do not know whether you will still be in England when I come there in May. . . . If (as I fear) I will miss you then, I will at least hope to hear from you, and to see you here, there or somewhere soon.
p.s. I will now go and post this letter instantly, lest it get caught up in indecision like the last one!
June 11, 1973
My dear old friend Seymour [post-encephalitic patient] . . .
Thank you very much for your letter which I got today. . . . It is always a pleasure, and a compliment, to receive letters from you (and even to be a voice amid your “voices,” when you hear voices). I have always had the greatest esteem and affection for you—as has everyone who knows you at Beth Abraham. . . . Indeed, in a sort of way, you have always represented (at least, in my eyes) the conscience of Beth Abraham, the epitome of that unconquerable human spirit which disease, drugs, and the isolation and imprisonment of institutionalization can never oust or conquer. . . .
To turn a patient, a friend, into a “character” in a book seems monstrous in a way; and I would not do so were I not convinced, over-and-above all personal considerations, that your lives and stories (I speak of all of you—victims of the sleeping sickness . . . ) are of the deepest interest, and deeply moving, and that they could cast a unique light not only upon the peculiar illness from which you have suffered so long, but upon the nature of human nature, the human spirit, in general.
But, you will understand . . . this is a very difficult and tense period, awaiting its publication. . . . My feeling is that I should not show the book to you—to anyone—before it is published. . . .
So, I will ask you, as I ask others in Beth Abraham, to be patient. . . .
With kindest regards,
August 26, 1989
Dear Peter [Weir, director],
Delighted to get your letter—I should have delayed my own, because I saw Dead Poets Society almost immediately after I wrote, and thought it magnificent—one of your finest. . . .
(In my ignorant way) I had not, in fact, seen Robin Williams until I saw him here—and having since seen him in Good Morning, Vietnam etc. I am extremely glad I saw him in your film first. I thought he gave a wonderful performance—performance as, incarnation as, the schoolteacher—that you had brought out marvellous “straight” acting; whereas in Vietnam I had the sense of him playing himself. . . .
Now I have met him, and found him (not only coruscatingly, quasi-Tourettishly spontaneous and funny, but also) warm and empathetic—I was most moved by the patience and tenderness he showed when I took him to meet and listen to two of my aging post-encephalitic patients. I feel happier (tho’ not really happy!) about the question of the “real me” and the fictional one. . . . But at least I can be assured that Robin will infuse all his intelligence and warmth and humor and personality into the part. . . . (When we went, with Robt De Niro, and Penny [Marshall] etc. to see a psychiatric ward in Bronx State, Robin suddenly exploded, in the car on the way back, with the most incredible, phantasmagoric replay of the entire scene, taking on different voices, different personae, with kaleidoscopic rapidity—it was a most amazing, even neurologically amazing, eruptive achievement. . . .)
Robert De Niro seems, at first, a polar opposite—shy to an almost pathological degree (I felt this, since I sometimes have this frozen shyness myself . . . )—but he has been becoming easier and warmer each time we’ve met. I am going to London tomorrow, will meet him there, and show him the last-remaining group of post-encephalitics (just 9, out of the 20,000 originally brought to the Highlands Hospital in 1920). . . . I will try to show Penny and the actors the clinical realities (of patient, of doctor, of hospital, etc.—and then, I think, disengage myself, and watch from the sidelines; since filmmaking is as deep a mystery to me as book-making to them . . . ).
I very much look forward to you coming to New York again, and to Thai dinners in the rain!
Affectionately, Oliver
March 10, 1990
Dear Robin [Williams, actor],
. . . I find quite a sense of loss now the shooting is over—which surprises me, in a way, because I often cursed it when it was going on! But it was also very fascinating in a way, and a real delight—and honor—to work with people like you and Bob (etc.). . . .
I was very moved by getting your copy of the script (with all its evocative photos), and the beautiful leather-bound copy of [the screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s] script, with your lovely inscription—thank you so much for both! I will certainly treasure them in my (chaotic) archives. . . .
I am adding . . . about 50,000 words to Awakenings [including an appendix] . . . about the many (and all wonderful) dramatic representations of AW. . . . Above all the film and the filming have been for me quite extraordinary experiences. And real ones too: as real in their way as working with the original patients, and as real as the . . . “scientific” model-making and world-making which followed.
But you—as actors, as dramatists—are also making worlds; and though these are “illusions,” they are also full of truth. . . .
My warmest best wishes to you and Marsha—and hopes to see you in New York, or California, before long.
Love,
Oliver ♦
This is drawn from “Letters.”
