A User's Guide to the Millennium, page 16
Memories of James Joyce
James Joyce’s Ulysses had an immense influence on me – almost entirely for the bad. I read Joyce’s masterpiece as an eighteen-year-old medical student dissecting cadavers at Cambridge, then a bastion of academic provincialism and self-congratulation. Ulysses opened my eyes to an infinitely richer and more challenging world. Here, I knew, was the authentic voice of heroic modernism that rang through the European and American writers I had devoured at school while trying to recover from the shock of arriving in England – Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Kafka, Camus and Hemingway. Reading them at too early an age, long before I had the experience to understand them, was probably another mistake.
But Ulysses overwhelmed me. It might be set in a single day in a provincial European city, but in Joyce’s eye Dublin was the whole world, and that single day lasted longer than a century. Joyce’s text seemed to exhaust every conceivable possibility of narrative technique – in fact, technique became the real subject of the novel (a dead end, as the post-modernist writers demonstrate). Ulysses convinced me to give up medicine and become a writer, but it was the wrong example for me, an old-fashioned story-teller at heart, and it wasn’t until I discovered the surrealists that I found the right model.
I read Ulysses again last year and was even more impressed than I was forty years ago, though clearly it’s excessively interiorized, is curiously lacking in imagination and fails to engage the reader’s emotions, defects that of course recommend it to academia. But if not the greatest novel of the twentieth century it is certainly the greatest work of fiction.
Guardian
1990
Kafka in the Present Day
Kafka may be the most important writer of the twentieth century, far more important than James Joyce. He describes the fate of the isolated man who is surrounded by a vast and impenetrable bureaucracy, and begins to accept himself on the terms the bureaucracy imposes. Human beings today are in a very similar position. We are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment empires. They’ve made themselves more user-friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They’re rather subtle, subservient tyrannies, but no less sinister for that.
Sunday Times
1993
5 SCIENCE
Einstein, the Gene Pool, Freud and Richard Feynman…
Elevators and Relativities
The Private Lives of Albert Einstein
Roger Highfield and Paul Carter
Einstein: A Life in Science
Michael White and John Gribbin
Einstein the philanderer? The notion seems as odd as Picasso the pickpocket or Jean-Paul Sartre the arm-wrestler. Einstein is still the most famous scientist of the twentieth century, a remarkable achievement bearing in mind that few people outside the realm of theoretical physics have fully understood what relativity is about. I, for one, have never grasped the significance of those observers walking along the corridors of moving trains or firing light beams across falling elevators. And what does happen when we travel at the speed of light? It seems that we shrink and become infinitely heavy, a sensation that must be rather like meeting the tax inspector while riding the wall of death.
None the less, the theory of relativity has had immense popular appeal, especially in the uncertain years after the First World War. Everything was ‘relative’, in the moral sphere above all, and so anything went, which suited the temper of the times and was endorsed by Einstein’s saintly appearance. With his halo of untidy hair and kindly, patient eyes, he brooded like science’s conscience over the atomic revolution he had helped to create. Now all this is set to end. The Private Lives of Albert Einstein is a hand grenade lobbed into the sacred temple. In their scrupulously researched biography, Roger Highfield and Paul Carter reveal a very different Einstein. To their great credit these startling revelations never diminish the man but only increase our sense of wonder that a mere human being, with all the faults, frailties and pettiness shared by the rest of us, could fashion a theory that revolutionizes our view of the universe.
After Einstein’s death in 1955 two of his greatest admirers, his secretary Helen Dukas and his financial adviser Dr Otto Nathan, erected a protective screen around Einstein’s reputation that stood almost to this day. As controllers of his literary estate, they suppressed any damaging letters and closed the door to all but the most sympathetic researchers, virtually sealing Einstein into a monument consecrated to his own myth. It was only in 1987, when both were dead, that the real Einstein began to emerge.
During his life Einstein frequently stressed his indifference to the hurly-burly of human relationships, and many who knew him commented on his innocent and childlike nature. But in fact he was powerfully under the spell, for good and ill, of his strong-willed mother, and his behaviour in later life was that of a favourite child, who expects to be indulged, supervised and never denied. A lonely and dreamy boy, he was told after his sister’s birth that he had someone new to play with. Assuming she was a toy, he said: ‘Yes, but where are its wheels?’ – a shrewder question than it sounds. He was an erratic pupil, and his Greek master announced that he would amount to nothing, but he excelled in physics and after leaving school entered the Polytechnical School in Zurich. There he met a fellow student, a Serb named Mileva Maric, who was to become his first wife and of whom his mother thoroughly disapproved.
Their courtship was troubled, and interrupted by Einstein’s flirtations with other women. Mileva was a superb mathematician, and many have speculated that she made a significant contribution to the theory of relativity. In a letter to her, Einstein wrote: ‘I’ll be so happy and proud when we are together and can bring our work on relative motion to a successful conclusion!’ Highfield and Carter suggest that she was no more than a sounding board for his ideas, but one less happy contribution which she did make before their marriage was their daughter Lieserl, born in 1902. Einstein was never to see her, and regarded her as a burden from which he was determined to free himself. Lieserl vanished into history and all traces of her were erased from the official records of his life, though conceivably she might still be alive.
After their marriage Mileva bore him two sons, who could never escape from the shadow of their famous father. The younger, Eduard, later suffered from mental illness and died alone in a Swiss asylum. Mileva, too, withdrew into herself. Einstein had embarked on an affair with his cousin, Elsa, later to be his second wife, and it is known that the divorce papers – still kept under seal in Jerusalem – refer to violence within the marriage. Einstein’s second marriage covered the period of his fame and emigration to the United States. At first it seemed happier, Elsa having the good sense to treat the great man as a child, tolerating his tantrums and refusal to brush his teeth, and giving him pocket money. But Einstein’s philandering had become a career in its own right. Rich and beautiful women flocked around him, snubbing his wife and deeply wounding her.
None of this appeared in the popular press in the 1930s, and by the Second World War he was a revered figure who had attained the status of a lay saint. After his death in 1955 his brain was removed and found to contain a larger than average number of glial cells, a sign in experimental animals of more extensive neural connections and a greater responsiveness to the environment. Needless to say, where wives fit into the wiring circuit, if anywhere, has not been discovered. An even stranger revelation was made by his former Berlin doctor, Janos Plesch, who suggested that Einstein had died of syphilis, and claimed that the abdominal aneurysm which killed him was always associated with the tertiary stage of the disease. There were rumours of a visit to a Berlin brothel, and speculation that he had sired a number of illegitimate children. Yet none of these revelations lessens one’s respect. However close his appetites were to the common ground, whatever the defects of his personality, Einstein’s mind was set on the universe.
Michael White and John Gribbin’s Einstein is a superb introduction to his scientific work, the clearest and most accessible guide that I have read. After countless books explaining relativity I felt for the first time that I had begun to understand the theory – those moving observers, those mysterious trains, even that endlessly falling lift. At last I will be able to travel at the speed of light and stare the taxman in the face.
Daily Telegraph
1993
Magnetic Sleep
From Mesmer to Freud
Adam Crabtree
The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime. One-time pioneers are suddenly demoted and deemed to be little more than package tourists. Sigmund Freud, far from being the heroic first explorer of the unconscious mind, now seems to be one of the last to step off the gangway, as Adam Crabtree makes clear in this account of the precursors of psychoanalysis.
The unlikely figure who first raised the curtain on the era of modern psychology was Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician born in 1734, whom I have always associated with ouija boards, stage hypnotists and other assorted quackeries. In fact, he was a sceptical physical scientist deeply opposed to all paranormal phenomena. While practising as a doctor he became interested in the power that magnets seemed to exert over the workings of the human body. A Jesuit priest, with the daunting name of Father Hell, had developed a cure for stomach cramps involving the use of iron magnets. Mesmer’s careful experiments convinced him that currents of force, which he dubbed ‘animal gravity’, moved beneficially between doctor and patient. The most important magnet, he believed, was the human body, and he enjoyed a remarkable run of success, treating everything from haemorrhoids and paralysis to epilepsy and melancholia.
Despite his immense fame, Mesmer was distrusted by the orthodox medicine of his day, but he was able to pass on his torch to the most remarkable of his French pupils, the Marquis de Puységur, a former artillery officer intrigued by the phenomenon of electricity. After being trained by Mesmer at his Society of Harmony in Paris, Puységur turned his skills upon the daughter of his estate manager, who was suffering from toothache, and began a series of experiments that Adam Crabtree claims were to alter the course of psychiatry for ever. While laying on his hands, Puységur discovered that his patients sank into what he termed ‘magnetic sleep’. This was a state of sleep-walking consciousness during which the patients became extremely suggestible, developed an intense rapport with the therapist, but on awakening remembered nothing. It clearly foreshadowed both Freud’s therapeutic couch and the spotlit stage of the music-hall hypnotist.
Mesmer always believed his powers of healing were physically based, but Puységur was confident that the therapeutic benefits of the magnetic trance were wholly psychological. Indeed, many physicians were already worried about the painful secrets revealed by the entranced patients and the dangers of ‘unhealthy’ sexual attachment. Puységur, one observer noted, placed his hands on the head of a woman patient, gently tickled her nostrils and ‘pressed on her breasts in a manner that her nipples would have felt a slight rubbing’. In ‘lively and sensitive women’ convulsions occurred, with sudden movements of the arms and legs, the discharge of ‘the sweetest emotions’, followed by a state of languor and weakness. Surprisingly, the observer noted, the women felt no guilt and were ready to repeat the experience.
Well, yes, I dare say they were, and psychological medicine, as well as the arts of seduction, have never been the same since. In the nineteenth century the discovery of unconscious behaviour led to a huge popular interest in paranormal phenomena. Table-turning and wall-rapping, thought and memory transference were exploited by quacks and soberly investigated by responsible scientists. In the 1890s the French psychologist Pierre Janet elaborated the concept of the unconscious act, describing a submerged mental world that operated independently of normal consciousness and could give rise to inexplicable actions and emotions.
When Freud at last arrived on the scene, he seems from Adam Crab-tree’s account like the last guest at a party that had already begun to disperse. Perhaps this demotion of Freud reflects the therapeutic failure of psychoanalysis, and hints at yet another radical shift in the progress of psychology that may occur during the run-up to the next millennium. While we move the couch out of the consulting room and into the attic we would do well to reflect on what even stranger furniture might take its place.
Daily Telegraph
1994
The Evolutionary Terminus
The Language of the Genes
Steve Jones
Clasp your hands together – which thumb is on top? In half of us the right thumb is dominant and in half the left. The tendencies run in families. Again, some of us see the world through rosier spectacles than others. There are two distinct receptors for red light in the retina, and six out of ten of us have one, and the rest the other, as we discover when men with different receptors pick the jacket and trousers of a Father Christmas costume. Lastly, look around the office or your next cocktail party. One in twenty of us is not the biological child of the man we have always called our father. These differences, some trivial and some crucial to our lives, spring from our genetic codes, nature’s Rosetta stone which today’s biologists are rapidly deciphering. In this challenging book, drawn from his 1991 Reith Lectures, Steve Jones, of University College, London, takes the reader on an exhilarating trip around the double spiral of DNA, a rush of gravity-defying concepts and wild swerves of the scientific imagination that lurches to a breathtaking halt when he suggests that the roller-coaster ride of evolution may well be coming to an end.
He begins with an overview of genetic science today, and suggests that within ten years we may have decoded the 3,000 million letters in the DNA alphabet that shape a human being. Two-thirds of us die for reasons linked to the genes we carry, and genetics has begun to unravel the mysteries of sex, age and death, and the even greater puzzle, so dear to certain feminist hearts, of why there are men at all, or at least so many more of us than seems necessary from an evolutionary standpoint. Even our belief in our uniquely privileged place in nature is under challenge. Much of the chimpanzee’s DNA is identical to our own, and we share many of our genes with mice, bananas and bacteria. As Professor Jones comments in his vivid and often poetic prose, every one of us is a living fossil, bearing a record of the past that extends far beyond the beginnings of humanity. Advances in genetics, he points out, raise the most subtle moral dilemmas. Science may soon have the power to tell many of us how and when we are likely to die. We will be able to select the sex of our children, a time-bomb packed with political dangers of every kind, and not only free them from the threat of inherited disease but even influence their physical and psychological make-up. The prospect of a world populated by Mozarts and Mike Tysons, or even by socially cooperative psychopaths with a taste for flower arranging, no longer seems one of the wilder fantasies of science fiction.
The great motor of genetic change is the mutation, and Professor Jones devotes much of his book to an exposition of the role that mutations play in the lives of species, communities and individuals. Small populations are always at danger from inbreeding, when recessive characteristics emerge unchecked, as the Pennsylvania Amish show with their tendency to produce six-fingered children. But the number of mutations, beneficial or harmful, has begun to decline. As we travel the world, and take our partners from the further shores of the gene pool, our recessive genes are paired with normal ones that mask their effects. The rate at which mutations occur accelerates with age, and most babies are now born to women who are still young. ‘It may even be,’ Professor Jones remarks in the last lines of this stimulating work, ‘that economic advance and medical progress mean that humans are almost at the end of their evolutionary road, that we are as near to our biological Utopia as we are ever likely to get.’ I always suspected that eternity would look like Milton Keynes.
Daily Telegraph
1993
Deep in the Gene Pool
The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today
Helena Cronin
Natural selection is a ruthless taskmaster, but one with a taste for the gaudy and absurd, and capable of unexpected gentleness. The acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution is confirmed by the way phrases such as ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ have entered our language, truisms evident everywhere from the nearest farmyard to Prime Minister’s Question Time.
None the less, there are some surprising exceptions, which have puzzled biologists since Darwin’s day and are the subject of Helena Cronin’s fascinating book. The preposterous size of the peacock’s tail, which serves no conceivable practical purpose, runs counter to nature’s sense of thrift and utility. The obsessive activities of bower birds, as they scour the countryside for bottle tops, coins and silver foil with which to decorate their mating parlours, seem to consume far more energy than propagation alone would justify. The female bower bird, after all, has nowhere else to turn. But most baffling of all, and defying the competitive drive that is the engine of evolution, are the acts of altruism found throughout the animal kingdom. The sterile worker ant has renounced all hope of reproducing itself for the good of the commune, a show of public-spiritedness that guarantees its genes go nowhere. Many animals sacrifice themselves to warn others not related to them of predators, or share food from which they themselves would benefit. Given that natural selection rewards success, why have these altruistic strains not bred themselves out of existence?
Dr Cronin plunges into her biological detective story with gusto, first tackling the conundrum of the peacock’s tail. Darwin, as uneasy with the tail as he was with the almost God-inspired complexity of the human eye, attributed its size to sexual selection. The morose and dowdy peahen is sexually excited by the flamboyant tail, so males with the largest tails attract the most mates and pass on to the next generation a tendency towards larger tails. This seems confirmed by studies revealing that the more eyes in a peacock’s tail, the more often he mates. However, Dr Cronin has a different explanation, drawn from modern Darwinism’s belief in the collective importance of the gene pool in social animals. Whereas Darwin, who knew nothing of genes, saw evolution operating at the level of the individual and his own reproductive life, the neo-Darwinists consider the advantages which more complex strategies offer to the gene pool as a whole, and which may outweigh the sexual attractiveness of a single individual, however successful he might be.
