Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications

Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications

I have just come across an article by Rachel Aviv in the December 15 edition of the New Yorker about Oliver Sacks’ dubious case histories, especially in Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Apparently, Sacks acknowledged that he made things up in his private journals, to which Aviv had access; I refer you to her article for details. As it happens, I reviewed Hat in the London Review of Books in 1986, explicitly raising the question of fabrication—exaggeration, embellishment, gilding the lily. You can read a section from my review below. At the time I wrote the review (I was 36) I had not met Sacks, but later in New York we became friends and stayed friends, despite some initial friction over my critical review. Now I see my well-founded suspicions amply confirmed. He never admitted to me that my strictures were justified, though he didn’t deny them either. He did, in later work, avoid this kind of inaccuracy, as well as the rather gushing nature of his prose. I subsequently reviewed both Musicophilia (New York Review of Books) and On the Move (Wall Street Journal) and found nothing similar to complain about. But this is not the main point of the present piece, which concerns the author of the article in question. No mention is made of my review in her long article, though others are cited as having comparable concerns. Why? It’s not as if my review appeared in an obscure place, or was not clear, or was by someone without credentials (I was an Oxford professor at the time). I find it hard to believe Aviv knew nothing of my review; if so, she didn’t dig very deep journalistically. Shouldn’t she have cited me, since I raised these concerns long ago, and independently of other people? And why didn’t she? Another suspicion recommends itself: it’s because of you-know-what—the disrepute cast upon my name in the last twelve years. I would like to believe this isn’t so, but my suspicions were well-founded before. So, Rachel, did you know about my review or not? If not, I suggest you read it and make the appropriate citation; if you did, why the lack of citation?