Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

by Oliver Sacks

  CHAPTER NINE

  Housecalls

  My father was not given to emotion or intimacy, at least in the context, the confines, of the family. But there were certain times, precious times, when I did feel close to him. I have very early memories of seeing him reading in our library, and his concentration was such that nothing could disturb him, for everything outside the circle of his lamp was completely tuned out of his mind. For the most part he read the Bible or the Talmud, though he also had a large collection of books on Hebrew, which he spoke fluently, and Judaism – the library of a grammarian and scholar. Seeing his intense absorption in reading, and the expressions that would appear on his face as he read (an involuntary smile, a grimace, a look of perplexity or delight), perhaps drew me to reading very early myself, so that even before the war I would sometimes join him in the library, reading my book alongside him, in a deep but unspoken companionship.

  If there were no housecalls to do in the evening, my father would settle down after dinner with a torpedo-shaped cigar. He would palpate it gently, then hold it to his nose to test its aroma and freshness, and if it was satisfactory he would make a V-shaped incision in its tip with his cutter. He would light it carefully with a long match, rotating it so that it lit evenly. The tip would glow red as he drew, and his first exhalation was a sigh of satisfaction. He would puff away gently as he read, and the air would turn blue and opalescent with smoke, enfolding us both in a fragrant cloud. I loved the smell of the beautiful Havanas he smoked, and loved to watch the grey cylinder of ash grow longer and longer, wondering how long it would get before it dropped on his book.

  I felt closest to him, truly his son, when we went swimming together. My father’s passion, from an early age, had been swimming (as his father had been a swimmer before him), and he had been a swimming champion when he was younger, having won the fifteen-mile race off the Isle of Wight three years in succession. He had introduced each of us to the water when we were babies, taking us to the Highgate Ponds in Hampstead Heath.

  The slow, measured, mile-eating stroke he had was not entirely suited to a little boy. But I could see how my old man, huge and cumbersome on land, became transformed – graceful, like a porpoise – in the water; and I, self-conscious, nervous, and also rather clumsy, found the same delicious transformation in myself, found a new being, a new mode of being, in the water. I have a vivid memory of a summer holiday at the seaside, the month after my fifth birthday, when I ran into my parents’ room and tugged at the great whalelike bulk of my father. ‘Come on, Pop!’ I said.

  ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ He turned over slowly and opened one eye: ‘What do you mean, waking an old man of forty-three like this at six in the morning?’ Now that my father is dead, and I myself am in my sixties, this memory of so long ago tugs, makes me equally want to laugh and cry.

  Later we would swim together in the large open-air pool in Hendon, or the Welsh Harp on Edgware Road, a small lake (I was never sure whether it was natural or artificial) where my father had once kept a boat. After the war, as a twelve-year-old, I could begin to match his strokes, and maintain the same rhythm, swimming in unison with him.

  I sometimes went along with my father on housecalls on Sunday mornings. He loved doing housecalls more than anything else, for they were social and sociable as well as medical, would allow him to enter a family and home, get to know everybody and their circumstances, see the whole complexion and context of a condition. Medicine, for him, was never just diagnosing a disease, but had to be seen and understood in the context of patients’ lives, the particularities of their personalities, their feelings, their reactions.

  He would have a typed list of a dozen patients and their addresses, and I would sit next to him in the front seat of the car while he told me, in very human terms, what each patient had. When he arrived, I would get out with him, allowed, usually, to carry his medical bag. Sometimes I would go into the sickroom with him and sit quietly while he questioned and examined a patient – a questioning and examining which seemed swift and light, and yet one that reached depths and exposed for him the origins of each illness. I loved to see him percuss the chest, tapping it delicately but powerfully with his strong stubby fingers, feeling, sensing, the organs and their state beneath. Later, when I became a medical student myself, I realized what a master of percussion he was, and how he could tell more by palpating and percussing and listening to a chest than most doctors could from an X-ray.

  At other times, if the patient was very ill, or contagious, I would sit with the family in their kitchen or dining room. After my father had seen the patient upstairs, he would come down, wash his hands carefully, and make for the kitchen. He loved to eat, and he knew the contents of the refrigerators in all his patients’ houses – and the families seemed to enjoy giving the good doctor food. Seeing patients, meeting families, enjoying himself, eating, were all inseparable in the medicine he practiced.

  Driving through the City, deserted on a Sunday, was a sobering experience in 1946, for the devastation wrought by the bombing was still fresh, and there had been little rebuilding as yet. This was even more evident in the East End, where a fifth of the buildings, perhaps, had been leveled. But there was still a strong Jewish community there, and restaurants and delicatessens like no others in the world. My father had qualified at the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, and as a young man had been the Yiddish-speaking doctor of the Yiddish-speaking community around it for ten years. He looked back on these early days with peculiar affection. We would sometimes visit his old surgery in New Road – it was here that all my brothers had been born, and a physician nephew, Neville, now practiced.

  We would walk up and down ‘the Lane,’ that section of Petticoat Lane between Middlesex Street and Commercial Street, where all the stallholders hawked their wares. My parents had left the East End in 1930, but my father still knew many of the hawkers by name. Jabbering with them, reverting to the Yiddish of his youth, my old father (what do I mean ‘old’? I am now fifteen years older than the fifty-year-old he was then) became boyish, rejuvenated, showed an earlier, more alive self that I normally did not see.

  We would always go to Marks of the Lane, where one could buy a latke for sixpence, and the best smoked salmon and herrings in London, salmon of an unbelievable melting softness which made it one of the few, genuinely paradisiac experiences on this earth.

  My father had always had a very robust appetite, and the strudel and herrings at his patients’ houses, and the latkes at Marks, were, in his mind, just preludes to the real meal. There were a dozen superb kosher restaurants within a few blocks, each with its own incomparable specialties. Should it be Bloom’s on Aldgate, or Ostwind’s, where one could enjoy the marvelous smells of the basement bakery wafting upstairs? Or Strong-water’s, where there was a particular sort of kreplach, varenikas, to which my father was dangerously addicted? Usually, however, we would end up at Silberstein’s, where, in addition to the meat restaurant downstairs, there was a dairy restaurant, with wonderful milky soups and fish, upstairs. My father adored carp, in particular, and would suck at the fish heads, noisily, with great gusto.

  Pop was a calm, unflappable driver when he went on his housecalls – he had a sedate, rather slow Wolseley at the time, appropriate to the petrol rationing still in force – but before the war there was a very different side to him. His car then was an American one, a Chrysler, with a raw power and a turn of speed unusual in the 1930s. He also had a motorcycle, a Scott Flying Squirrel, with a two-stroke, 600 cc, watercooled engine, and a high-pitched exhaust like a scream. It developed nearly thirty horsepower, and was much more akin, he liked to say, to a flying horse. He loved to take off on this if he had a free Sunday morning, eager to shake off the city and give himself to the wind and the road, his practice, his cares forgotten for a while. Sometimes I had dreams in which I was riding or flying the bike myself, and I determined to get one when I was grown up.

  When T. E. Lawrence’s The Mint came out in 1955,1 r
ead my father a piece, ‘The Road,’ Lawrence had written about his motorbike (by this time I had a bike, a Norton, myself):

  A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess…

  My father smiled and nodded in agreement, as he thought back to his own biking days.

  My father had originally wondered about an academic career in neurology, and had been a houseman, an intern (along with Jonathan Miller’s father), to Sir Henry Head, the famous neurologist, at the London Hospital. At this point, Head himself, still at the height of his powers, had developed Parkinson’s disease, and this, my father said, would sometimes cause him to run involuntarily, or festinate, the length of the old neurology ward, so that he would have to be caught by one of his own patients. When I had difficulty imagining what this was like, my father, an excellent mimic, imitated Head’s festination, careering down Exeter Road at an ever-accelerating pace, and getting me to catch him. Head’s own predicament, my father thought, made him especially sensitive to the predicaments of his patients, and I think my father’s imitations – he could imitate asthma, convulsions, paralyses, anything – springing from his vivid imagination of what it was like for others, served the same purpose.

  When it was time for my father to open his own practice, he decided, despite this early training in neurology, that general practice would be more real, more ‘alive.’ Perhaps he got more than he bargained for, for when he opened his practice in the East End in September 1918, the great influenza epidemic was just getting started. He had seen wounded soldiers when he was a houseman at the London, but this was nothing to the horror of seeing people in paroxysms of coughing and gasping, suffocating from the fluid in their lungs, turning blue and dropping dead in the streets. A strong, healthy young man or woman, it was said, could die from the flu within three hours of getting it. In those three desperate months at the end of 1918, the flu killed more people than the Great War itself had, and my father, like every doctor at the time, found himself overwhelmed, sometimes working forty-eight hours at a stretch.

  At this point he engaged his sister Alida – a young widow with two children who had returned to London from South Africa three years before – to work as his assistant in the dispensary. Around the same time, he took on another young doctor, Yitzchak Eban, to help him on his rounds. Yitzchak had been born in Joniski, the same little village in Lithuania where the Sacks family lived. Alida and Yitzchak had been playmates as infants, but then in 1895 his family had gone to Scotland, a few years before the Sackses had come to London. Reunited twenty years later, working together in the febrile and intense atmosphere of the epidemic, Alida and Yitzchak fell in love, and married in 1920.

  As children, we had relatively little contact with Auntie Alida (though I thought of her as the quickest and wittiest of my aunts – she had sudden intuitions, sudden swoops of thought and feeling, which I came to think of as characteristic of the ‘Sacks mind,’ in contrast to the more methodical, more analytical, mental processes of the Landaus). But Auntie Lina, my father’s eldest sister, was a constant presence. She was fifteen years older than Pop, tiny in size – four foot nine in her high heels – but with an iron will, a ruthless determination. She had dyed golden hair, as coarse as a doll’s, and gave off a mixed scent of garlic, sweat, and patchouli. It was Lina who had furnished our house, and Lina who would often provide us at 37 with certain special items which she herself cooked – fish cakes (Marcus and David called her Fishcake, or sometimes Fishface, after these), rich crumbly cheesecakes, and, at Passover, matzoh balls of an incredible tellurian density, which would sink like little planetismals below the surface of the soup. Careless of the social graces, she would bend down at the table, when at home, and blow her nose on the tablecloth. Despite this, she was enchanting in company, when she would glitter and coquette, but also listen intently, judging the character and motive of everyone around her. She would draw confidences out of the unwary, and with her diabolical memory, retain all that she had heard.«12»

  But her ruthlessness, her unscrupulousness, had a noble purpose, for she used them to raise money for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She had dossiers, it seemed, on everyone in England, or so I sometimes imagined, and once she was certain of her information and sources, she would lift the phone. ‘Lord G.? This is Lina Halper.’ There would be a pause, a gasp, Lord G. would know what was coming. ‘Yes,’ she would continue pleasantly, ‘yes, you know me. There is that little business – no, we won’t go into details – that little affair in Bognor, in March ‘23…No, of course I won’t mention it, it’ll be our little secret – what can I put you down for? Fifty thousand, perhaps? I can’t tell you what it would mean to the Hebrew University.’ By this sort of blackmail Lina raised millions of pounds for the university, the most efficient fund-raiser, probably, they had ever known.

  Lina, considerably the oldest, had- been ‘a little mother’ to her much younger siblings when they came to England from Lithuania in 1899, and after the early death of her husband, she took over my father, in a sense, and vied with my mother for his company and affections. I was always aware of the tension, the unspoken rivalry, between them, and had a sense of my father – soft, passive, indecisive – being pulled this way and that between them.

  While Lina was regarded by many in the family as a sort of monster, she had a soft spot for me, as I had for her. She was especially important to me, to all of us perhaps, at the start of the war, for we were in Bournemouth on our summer holiday when war was declared, and our parents, as doctors, had to leave immediately for London, leaving the four of us with the nanny. They came back a couple of weeks later, and my relief, our relief, was prodigious. I remember rushing down the garden path when I heard the hoot of the car, and flinging myself bodily into my mother’s arms, so vehemently I almost knocked her over. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I cried, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ She hugged me, a long hug, holding me tight in her arms, and the sense of loss, of fear, suddenly dissolved.

  Our parents promised to come again very soon. They would try to manage the next weekend, they said, but there was a great deal for them to do in London – my mother was occupied with emergency trauma surgery, my father was organizing local G.P.s for casualties in air raids. But this time they did not come at the weekend. Another week passed, and another, and another, and something, I think, broke inside me at this point, for when they did come again, six weeks after their first visit, I did not run up to my mother or embrace her as I had the first time, but treated her coldly, impersonally, like a stranger. She was, I think, shocked and bewildered by this, but did not know how to bridge the gulf that had come between us.

  At this point, when the effects of parental absence had become unmistakable, Lina came up, took over the house, did the cooking, organized our lives, and became a little mother to us all, filling in the gap left by our own mother’s absence.

  This little interlude did not last long – Marcus and David went off to medical school, and Michael and I were packed off to Braefield. But I never forgot Lina’s tenderness to me at this time, and after the war I took to visiting her in London, in her high-ceilinged, brocaded room in Elgin Avenue. She would give me cheesecake, sometimes a fish cake, and a little glass of sweet wine, and I would listen to her reminiscences of the old country. My father was only three or four when he left, and had no memories of it; Lina, eighteen or nineteen at the time, had vivid and fascinating memories of Joniski, the shtetl near Vilna where they had all been born, and of her parents, my grandparents, as they were in comparative youth. It may be that she had a special feeling for me as the youngest, or because I had the same name as her father, Elivelva, Oliver Wolf. I had the sense, too, that she was lonely and enjoyed the visits of her young nephew.

  Then there was my father’s brother, Bennie. Bennie had been excommunicated, left the family fold, at nineteen, when he had gone to Portugal and mar
ried a gentile, a shiksa. This was a crime so scandalous, so heinous in the eyes of the family that his name was never mentioned thereafter. But I knew there was something hidden, a family secret of sorts; I surprised certain silences, certain awkwardnesses, sometimes, when my parents whispered together, and I once saw a photo of Bennie on one of Lina’s embossed cabinets (she said it was someone else, but I picked up the hesitation in her voice).

  My father, always powerfully built, started to put on weight after the war and decided to go at regular intervals to a fat farm in Wales. These visits never seemed to do him much good, weight-wise, but he would come back from them looking happy and well, his London pallor replaced by a healthy tan. It was only after his death, many years later, that, looking through his papers, I found a sheaf of plane tickets that told the true story – he had never been to the fat farm at all, but loyally, secretly, had been going to visit Bennie in Portugal all these years.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Chemical Language

  Uncle Dave saw all science as a wholly human, no less than an intellectual and technological, enterprise, and it seemed natural to me, in my turn, to do the same. When I set up my lab and started some chemical experiments of my own, I wanted to learn about the history of chemistry in a more general way, to find out what chemists did, how they thought, the atmosphere in centuries past. I had long been fascinated by our family and family tree – by tales of the uncles who had gone off to South Africa, and of the man who had fathered them all, and of the first ancestor of my mother’s of whom we had any record, an alchemically inclined rabbi, it was said, one Lazar Weiskopf, who lived in Lübeck in the seventeenth century. This may have been the incitement to a more general love of history, and a tendency, perhaps, to see it in familial terms. And so the scientists, the early chemists, whom I read about became, in a sense, honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection. I needed to understand how these early chemists thought, to imagine myself into their worlds.