On the Move: A Life

Author:Oliver Sacks [Sacks, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385352543
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-27T22:00:00+00:00

Thanks so much for your charming letter. Have read Awakenings and think it a masterpiece. I do congratulate. My only query, if you want laymen to read it—as they should—is that you should add a glossary about the technical terms you use.

Love,

Wystan

I wept when I received Auden’s letter. Here was a great writer, not given to facile or flattering words, judging my book “a masterpiece.” Was this, however, a purely “literary” judgment? Was Awakenings of any scientific worth? I hoped so.

Later that spring, Wystan wrote to me again, saying his heart had been “acting up a bit” and that he hoped I could come to the house he shared with Chester Kallman in Austria. But I did not go, for one reason or another, and I deeply regret that I didn’t visit him that summer, for he died on September 29.

—

On June 28, 1973 (Awakenings’s publication day), The Listener published a wonderful review of Awakenings by Richard Gregory and, in the same issue, my own article about Luria (I had been invited to review The Man with a Shattered World and to expand my review to include Luria’s entire oeuvre). The following month, I was thrilled to receive a letter from Luria himself.

He later described how as a young man, a nineteen-year-old who had founded the grandiloquently titled Kazan Psychoanalytic Association, he had received a letter from Freud (who did not realize that he was writing to a teenager). Luria was hugely excited at receiving a letter from Freud, and I felt a similar excitement receiving one from Luria.

He thanked me for writing the article and dealt at length with all the points I had raised in it, indicating in very courteous but no uncertain terms that he thought I was deeply mistaken in various ways.11

A few days later, I got another letter in which Luria spoke of receiving the copy of Awakenings which Richard had sent him:

My dear Dr. Sacks,

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