When Oliver Sacks arrived in New York City, in September, 1965, he wore a butter-colored suit that reminded him of the sun. He had just spent a romantic week in Europe travelling with a man named Jenö Vincze, and he found himself walking too fast, fizzing with happiness. “My blood is champagne,” he wrote. He kept a letter Vincze had written him in his pocket all day, feeling as if its pages were glowing. Sacks had moved to New York to work as a fellow in neuropathology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, and a colleague observed that he was “walking on air.” Every morning, he carefully polished his shoes and shaved. He adored his bosses. “I smile like a lighthouse in all directions,” he wrote Vincze.
Sacks was thirty-two, and he told Vincze that this was his first romantic relationship that was both physical and reciprocal. He felt he was part of a “two man universe,” seeing the world for the first time—“seeing it clear, and seeing it whole.” He wandered along the shipping piers on the Hudson River, where gay men cruised, with a notebook that he treated as a diary and as an endless letter to Vincze. “To watch life with the eyes of a homosexual is the greatest thing in the world,” Vincze had once told Sacks.
Sacks’s mother, a surgeon in London, had suspected that her son was gay when he was a teen-ager. She declared that homosexuality was an “abomination,” using the phrase “filth of the bowel” and telling him that she wished he’d never been born. They didn’t speak of the subject again. Sacks had moved to America—first to California and then, after five years, to New York—because, he wrote in his journal, “I wanted a sexual and moral freedom I felt I could never have in England.” That fall, during Yom Kippur, he decided that, rather than going to synagogue to confess “to the total range of human sin,” a ritual he’d grown up with, he’d spend the night at a bar, enjoying a couple of beers. “What I suppose I am saying, Jenö, is that I now feel differently about myself, and therefore about homosexuality as a whole,” he wrote. “I am through with cringing, and apologies, and pious wishes that I might have been ‘normal.’ ” (The Oliver Sacks Foundation shared with me his correspondence and other records, as well as four decades’ worth of journals—many of which had not been read since he wrote them.)
In early October, Sacks sent two letters to Vincze, but a week passed without a reply. Sacks asked his colleagues to search their mailboxes, in case the letter had been put in the wrong slot. Within a few days, however, he had given up on innocent explanations. He began dressing sloppily. He stopped coming to work on time. He had sex with a series of men who disgusted him.
After two weeks, Vincze, who was living in Berlin, sent a letter apologizing for his delayed reply and reiterating his love. He explained that he was so preoccupied by thoughts of Sacks that he felt as if he were living in a “Klaudur,” a German word that Vincze defined as a “spiritual cell.” He seems to have misspelled Klausur, which refers to an enclosed area in a monastery, but Sacks kept using the misspelled word, becoming obsessed with it. “It ramifies in horrible associations,” he wrote Vincze. “The closing of a door. Klaudur, claustrophobia, the sense of being shut in.” Sacks had long felt as if he were living in a cell, incapable of human contact, and this word appeared to be all he needed to confirm that the condition was terminal. The meaning of the word began morphing from “spiritual cell” to “psychotic cage.”
“He just got back from his poker game.” Cartoon by Liana Finck Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The intimacy Sacks had rejoiced in now seemed phony, a “folie à deux”—a two-person delusion. His doubts intensified for a month, then he cut off the relationship. “I must tear you out of my system, because I dare not be involved,” he told Vincze, explaining that he barely remembered how he looked, or the sound of his voice. “I hope I will not be taken in like this again, and that—conversely—I will have the strength and clarity of mind to perceive any future such relationships as morbid at their inception, and to abort the folly of their further growth.”