An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  After a morning of traveling and drawing, they would all return to the Hewson house for lunch, where they would often be joined by the Hewsons’ daughter, Annie, only a few years older than Stephen. He seemed to look forward to these outings and would become excited on Sunday mornings, waiting for Margaret and Andrew to collect him. For their part, the Hewsons felt a real affection for Stephen, even though they were not sure he felt any actual affection for them. They started taking him on occasional longer excursions—a trip to Salisbury, and two weekends in Scotland.

  Stephen’s obvious fondness for the visual effects of water—he lived near a canal in London and would sometimes walk along it with his mother or sister and do little sketches of the boats and locks—suggested to Margaret a theme for a new book. Together they would visit cities built around canals, “floating cities”—Venice, Amsterdam, and Leningrad—and draw these.

  Late in the fall of 1989, Margaret impulsively phoned up Mrs. Wiltshire and suggested that Stephen and his sister, Annette, come to Venice with them for their Christmas holiday. The trip went exceedingly well. Stephen, now fifteen, seemed to cope easily with the uncertainties of travel, which would have thrown him only a few years before. He portrayed, as Margaret hoped he might, St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, the great monuments of Venetian culture, and obviously enjoyed drawing them. But when asked what he thought of Venice, after a week in this high point of European civilization, he could only say, “I prefer Chicago” (and this not because of its buildings but its American cars—Stephen had a passion for these and could identify, name, and draw every postwar model ever made in the United States).

  A few weeks later, plans were made for his next trip, to Amsterdam. Stephen approved of the trip for a very specific reason: he had seen photographs of the city, and said, “I prefer Amsterdam to Venice because it has cars.” Once again, Stephen captured perfectly the feeling of the city, from his formal drawings of the Westerkerk and the Begijnhof to his tiny, charming sketch of an odd statue with a street organ. Stephen seemed very much alive, and in high humor, in Amsterdam and started to show new aspects of himself. Lorraine Cole, who came along on the trip, was particularly startled at the changes she saw:

  When he was little, nothing was amusing to Stephen. He now finds all manner of things funny and his laughter is incredibly infectious. He has gone back to caricaturing people around him, and he takes great pleasure watching his victims’ reactions.

  One evening in Amsterdam, when Stephen was due to give an interview for a television show, Margaret developed a severe attack of asthma and had to stay in her hotel room. Stephen was very distressed, refused to do the TV show, and could not be budged from the end of Margaret’s bed. “I’m going to stay with you till you get better”, he declared. “You’re not going to die.” Margaret and Andrew were very touched by this.

  “This was the first time we saw that he cared”, she told me. 97

  97. Visiting the autistic artist Jessy Park, I was struck by the great affection her parents showed for her. “I see how you love her”, I said to her father. “Does she love you, too?”

  “She loves us as much as she can”, he replied.

  Is it possible that Stephen was starting to show some belated personal development, in spite of his autism? Intrigued by Margaret’s report on the Amsterdam trip, I arranged to come along on the next visit, to Moscow and Leningrad, planned for May of 1990. I flew to London, met Stephen and Margaret there, and did some testing with Stephen. These tests, devised by Uta Frith and her colleagues, require one to react to various cartoons, some of which relate simple sequences of events while others cannot be understood without attributing different intentions, perspectives, beliefs, or states of mind (and sometimes dissemblings) to the characters involved. Stephen, it was clear, had a very limited ability to imagine others’ states of mind. (Frith writes that one researcher “carried out an informal survey in America using cartoons from The New Yorker. Very able and highly educated autistic people failed to understand them, or find them funny.”)

  I also gave him a large jigsaw puzzle, which he put together very swiftly. I then gave him a second puzzle, this time face down, so that he did not have the picture to assist him. He did this just as quickly as the first. The picture-meaning—it seemed, was not necessary to him; what was preeminent, and spectacular, was his ability to apprehend a large number of abstract shapes, and to see in a trice how they fitted together.

  Such performances are characteristic of autistic people, who also excel in tests of block design and especially in finding embedded figures. Thus the psychologist Lynn Waterhouse, testing one visual savant, J.D. (who as a boy, his parents said, was able to complete a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle in about two minutes and thereafter had to be given five-thousand-piece puzzles), found he performed “phenomenally well” on almost every visual-perception test she could give him: on tests of line orientation, visual gestalt closure, block design, and so on, he obtained nearly perfect results, in each case performing the tests at many times the normal rate. Stephen, like J.D., had prodigious powers of abstract-pattern recognition and visual analysis. But this alone could not explain his drawing—J.D., despite his perceptual powers, was not especially gifted in drawing.

  Stephen, then, was calling on another sort of power, of vivid representation—representation that created an external form for his perceptions, and that bore a very recognizable and personal style. Whether this power of representation entailed any depth of inner resonance or response remained completely unclear.

  Given Stephen’s powers of abstract visual analysis, how important was “meaning” to him? How much did he get the meaning of what he drew? And how much did it matter whether he did or not? I showed Stephen a portrait by Matisse and asked if he would draw it. (Margaret and Andrew are very fond of Matisse, and it was a print of theirs that I showed Stephen.) He drew it, from the original, swiftly and confidently; it was not wholly, literally accurate, but it was very Matisse-like. When I asked him to draw it again, from memory, an hour later, he drew it differently, and, another hour after this, yet differently again; but all his drawings (he did five in all), while different in detail, were strikingly evocative of the original. In some sense, therefore, Stephen had extracted the drawing’s “Matisseness”, had permuted it various ways, and had made this central in all his copies. Was this purely formal, cognitive, a matter of getting Matisse’s “style” in a formulaic way—or was he responding, at a deeper level, to Matisse’s vision, his sensibility and art?

  Stephen’s first drawing of my house was done from memory, after taking a quick glance on his first visit in February 1988. The second, also from memory, was done more than two years later; the third a year after this. Although he has changed various details with the passage of time, he manages to extract the “style” of the house in each version.

  I asked Stephen if he remembered my house, which he had visited more than two years before, and if he would draw it again for me. He nodded and again drew the house, but with various revisions. He now gave it one lower window instead of two; he removed a pillar from the porch and made the steps more prominent. He kept the (fictitious) chimney, and now he added a fictitious American flag on a tall flagstaff as well—I think he felt these as the ingredients of a formulary “American” house. Thus the Matisse and my house were conceived, and represented, in a variety of versions. In both cases, he got the style at once, and his later drawings were improvisations within this style.

  After all this testing, I was still bewildered. Stephen seemed so defective, and so gifted, simultaneously; were his defects and his gifts totally separate, or were they, at a deeper level, integrally related? Were there qualities, like autistic literalness and concreteness, that might in some contexts be gifts, in others deficits? The tests also gave me a feeling of disquiet, as if I had spent days reducing Stephen to defects and gifts and not seeing him as a human being, as a whole. I had just reread Uta Frith’s book Autism: Explaining the Enigma and wrot
e to her, “Tomorrow I go with Stephen to Russia—I have seen something of his odd skills and defects—I have yet to see him as a mind and person. Perhaps a week of being with him will show me this.”

  With these hopes, then, I set out with Stephen for Russia. Sitting at Gatwick airport, waiting for our flight, I was impressed by his deep concentration. He sat enthralled with the magazine Classic Cars. He looked at the pictures with extraordinary intentness—he did not raise his head from the magazine for more than twenty minutes. Occasionally he bent closer to inspect a detail—what he saw, I thought, would be forever imprinted on his cortex. Once in a while, he suddenly laughed. What, in this abstract exercise, excited his amusement?

  In flight, Stephen immersed himself in a drawing of Balmoral, after studying a postcard of the castle. He was oblivious of the conversations going on around him, the magnificent landscapes and seascapes below.

  At Moscow airport, Stephen, very quiet, looked at the cars—yellow cabs and black Zils with license plates starting with “MK.” A hideous smell of unrefined gas hung over the airport. Stephen sniffed, wrinkled his nose; he is extremely sensitive to smells. As we drove into the city, at 2 a.m., we saw tall, silvery birches by the side of the road and an immense, low moon. Even Stephen, seemingly oblivious of his surroundings before, gazed at the vast moonlit landscape with delight, his nose pressed against the cold window of the bus.

  The next morning, as we walked around Red Square, Stephen was actively curious, taking snapshots, peering at buildings, struck by their novelty. Other people turned around and stared at him in the street—black people, apparently, were unusual in Moscow. He found a spot from which he wanted to draw the Spassky Tower and had Margaret set his stool in precisely this place. Not there, or there, but here—passive in so many ways, he was entirely master now. In the middle of Red Square, he was a tiny figure, wearing a fur cap and navy-blue woolen gloves. Dozens of tourists swarmed around in the brilliant May sun; many of them peered at Stephen’s drawing.

  Stephen ignored them, or was unconscious of them, and drew on undisturbed. He hummed to himself as he drew, holding his pen, characteristically, awkwardly, childishly, between his third and fourth fingers. At one point he broke into giggles and laughter—but this, it turned out, was because a scene in Rain Man (“Don’t you dare drive!” he said) kept entering his mind. Margaret sat to one side as he drew, encouraging—“Good! Clever boy!”—advising him on aesthetic points and architectural details. At her suggestion, for instance, Stephen examined the tower’s crenellation. She is almost a collaborator in a way, and though his talent is so personal and indigenous, he clearly looks to her for affectionate and always affirmative comments.

  Later, we visited the History Museum, an eclectic red brick building, designed by an English architect. Margaret instructed Stephen, “Have a jolly good look at that building. Study it. Take in the vocabulary of that building now—I want you to draw it from memory afterward. ” But what Stephen actually drew later was different from the History Museum and bore half a dozen onion domes, not present in the original.

  I first wondered whether this was a defect of memory and asked him if he would draw St. Basil’s from memory. He did this instantly, a very accurate and quite charming sketch, in all of two minutes. Later in the day, he started a drawing of the vast shopping arcade at GUM, which he finished at leisure over a Coke in the hotel. He had retained by memory even the shop signs, although they were, to him, unintelligible Cyrillic letters. There was no faulting his memory, clearly.

  Margaret and I tried to think what had happened with the History Museum; Stephen was distracted when asked to memorize it (the police in Red Square made him nervous) and when asked how he felt about it would only say, “It’s all right” (which meant he did not like it). He tried to make it more attractive, I think, by crowning it with onion domes, but these were so out of keeping with the base that the resulting building looked hardly possible.

  The next morning, as we met for breakfast in the hotel dining room, Stephen greeted me with a booming “Hullo, Oliver!” shouted with great friendliness and warmth, or so I thought. But then I was not sure—was it merely a social automatism? The great neurologist Kurt Goldstein wrote of another autistic boy:

  He becomes fond of some people—At the same time, however, his emotional responses and human attachments remain shallow and perfunctory. Meeting him at intervals of several months, one is welcomed and bid goodbye with the same impersonal kindness as if contact were only real as long as it lasted during concrete presence—it is a presence without emotional content.

  At an Intourist shop, I bought a piece of amber. Stephen glanced at it indifferently—it held no visual appeal for him—until I rubbed it and showed him how it became electrically charged. It attracted tiny pieces of paper now, so that when I put the amber a few inches away they suddenly flew up to it. His eyes opened wide in astonishment; he took the amber from me and repeated the electrification by himself. But then his wonder seemed to fade. He did not ask what happened or why, and he seemed uninterested when I explained it. I was excited at seeing his initial astonishment—I had never seen him truly astonished before—but then it faded, died out. And this, to me, seemed rather ominous.

  At dinner, chortling, Stephen drew a cartoon of us all at the table, with himself fanning me. (I am sensitive to heat and always carry a Japanese fan, which he had often seen me use.) He portrayed me as cowering under the impact of the fan, and himself as large, powerful, in command—this was a symbolic representation, the first one I had seen him make.

  Traveling, living with Stephen—we had now been together for five days—I became very conscious of how brittle he was physiologically, of the profound fluctuations in his state. There were times when he was animated and interested in his surroundings and could do brilliant, funny impersonations and cartoons; and there were times when he would revert to the deepest autism and respond, if at all, like an automaton, echolalically. Such fluctuations, usually lasting a few hours, rarely days, are common in children with classical autism, though their cause is not understood. They had been much worse, I was told, when Stephen was younger.

  The next day we boarded a train for the daylong journey to Leningrad. Margaret had put together a huge hamper of provisions, more than enough for ourselves and any fellow passengers in the compartment. As the train got under way, we started with an early breakfast—we had left the hotel at five to make this early train. As she unpacked the basket, Stephen, half convulsively, swooped his head and sniffed everything as it came out. I was reminded of some of my postencephalitic patients, and some people with Tourette’s syndrome, whom I had also seen with olfactory behaviors of this sort. I suddenly realized that Stephen’s smell-world might be as vivid as his visual one; but we do not have the language, the means, to convey such a world.

  Stephen gazed uncertainly at our hard-boiled eggs—was it possible that he had never cracked one open? Playfully, I took one and cracked it on my head; Stephen was delighted and burst out laughing. He had never seen a hard-boiled egg cracked in this way, and he gave me a second egg to see if I would do it again, and then, reassured, cracked one on his own head. There was something spontaneous in this egg cracking, and I think Stephen felt easier with me after this, because I had shown him how playful, how silly, I could be.

  After breakfast, Stephen and I played some word games. He was quite good at I Spy, and when I prompted him with “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘c,’ ” he quickly reeled off “Coat, cat, café, coffee, cool, cup, cigarette.” He was very good at filling in letters in incomplete words. And yet, at sixteen, he was still unable, despite repeated demonstrations, to judge the constancy of volume, despite differing heights, in different vessels—a concept that, as Piaget showed, most children grasp at seven.

  The train passed through tiny villages of wooden houses and painted churches, giving me the sense of a Tolstoyan world, unchanged in a hundred years. As Stephen watched all this intently, I though
t of the thousands of images he must be registering, constructing—all of which he could convey in vivid pictures and vignettes, but none of them, I suspected, synthesized into any general impression in his mind. I had the feeling that the whole visible world flowed through Stephen like a river, without making sense, without being appropriated, without becoming part of him in the least. That though he might retain everything he saw, in a sense, it was retained as something external, unintegrated, never built on, connected, revised, never influencing or influenced by anything else. I thought of his perception, his memory, as quasi-mechanical—like a vast store, or library, or archive—not even indexed or categorized, or held together by association, yet where anything might be accessed in an instant, as in the random-access memory of a computer. I found myself thinking of him as a sort of train himself, a perceptual missile, traveling through life, noting, recording, but never appropriating, a sort of transmitter of all that rushed past—but himself unchanged, unfed, by the experience.

  As we approached Leningrad, Stephen decided it was time to draw. “Pencil, Margaret, dahhling!” he said. I was amused by the “dahhling”, a Margaretism that he had adopted, and I could not decide whether it was automatic or more conscious, a humorous parody. The train was very jolty, and I was able to make only brief notes. But Stephen was perfectly able to draw, with his usual speed and fluency,—I had been amazed by this earlier, on the airplane. (He looked clumsy, but he picked up some motor skills, it seemed, almost instantly, as some autistic people seem to do. In Amsterdam, he had had no hesitation in walking a narrow gangway to a houseboat, something he had never done before, and this reminded me of another autistic youngster I had met, who suddenly walked a tightrope, expertly and fearlessly, the day after seeing it done at the circus.)