Mrs Whitehead said she liked you. You are very unusual and have the simplicity of a child. I think this is what she meant by your being charming. […] she said that I ought to make up my mind quickly, also that you and I would find it very difficult to get on together because we are so different.63
Yet Mrs Whitehead had second thoughts. Worried that Dirac was contemplating marriage without the spiritual commitment she believed was essential, she wrote Dirac a long and anguished letter, thundering like Lady Bracknell:
Would it be useful to go and talk to Prof. Eddington about spiritual things? I feel sad that you should have this limitation that you do not seem [?] to believe in God; and I am always afraid that I have failed to help you, how and when you need help.64
Mrs Whitehead pleaded with him not to make his decision when he was ‘in a mood’, a phrase he had used when they last met. This stung him into a rare candour about his state of mind. On 6 December, when Manci was preparing to sail from New York, he replied to Mrs Whitehead that he did not believe his decision depended on whether or not he believed in God. She had misunderstood his reference to his state of mind when he took his decision:
[By ‘in a mood’] I meant only that I would need to be in a courageous mood to take an irrevocable step, after I had made up my mind what I ought to do. I think I err on the side of trying to be guided too much by reason and too little by feeling, and this makes me feel helpless when it comes to problems that cannot be solved by the clear-cut reasoning that one has in science […] I have felt very favourably inclined to [Manci] for several months, with occasional relapses, which get less and less as time goes on.65
But Mrs Whitehead was not to be deflected; she wrote straight back to Dirac, insisting that ‘married love comes to its highest perfection between people who know and love God’.66 But these words were wasted on Dirac, for whom the concept of God had no precise meaning.
By the time he was among the dockside crowds at Southampton, waiting for Manci to arrive, he had made up his mind. During the drive to London in his sporty drop-head Triumph coupé, he steered his car to the kerbside and asked Manci, ‘Will you marry me?’67 She accepted immediately. When he told his mother the news, she was predictably shocked but summoned the grace to wish him and Manci well, offering to travel to London on the day before Christmas Eve to meet her future daughter-in-law. Dirac accepted, perhaps inadvertently giving his mother one last chance to persuade him to stay single.
Manci was staying in the smart Imperial Hotel in Bloomsbury, overlooking Russell Square. During their few hours together, Flo and Manci found a few moments to talk privately, leaving Manci puzzled. 68 As soon as Flo arrived home, she wrote to Dirac with a detailed account of the conversation:
FLO: You will be having twin-beds soon.
MANCI: Oh no, I must have a room to myself. I cannot allow Dirac to come in my bedroom.
FLO: What are you marrying him for?
MANCI: I like him very much and want a home.
Flo was astute enough to avoid outright condemnation. ‘Manci was very nice indeed,’ she wrote, before the inevitable qualification: ‘I suppose you know she is only contracting a “marriage of convenience”.’ 69 His mother knew how to unsettle him. She had just seven days to make him reconsider the balance he had struck between reason and feeling.
Notes - Chapter twenty
1 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, written from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 14 May 1935. Copy of letter held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
2 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, written in Pasadena, 31 May 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
3 Crease and Mann (1986: 106); Serber (1998: 35–6).
4 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 4 June 1935 and 10 June 1935 (DDOCS).
5 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 1 August 1935 (DDOCS).
6 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 22 June 1935 (DDOCS).
7 Quoted in Brendon (2000: 241).
8 Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 30 July 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 251).
9 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 August 1935 (DDOCS).
10 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 30 September 1935 (DDOCS). See also Dirac, M. (1987: 6).
11 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 22 September 1935 (DDOCS).
12 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 23 October 1935 (DDOCS).
13 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 9 October 1935 (DDOCS).
14 Letters from Dirac to Manci, 3 October 1935 and 8 November 1935 (DDOCS).
15 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1935 (DDOCS).
16 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 22 November 1935 (DDOCS).
17 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 3 October 1935 (DDOCS).
18 In Dirac’s letter to Manci on 6 February 1937, Dirac mentions that his father owned a copy of Shaw’s plays.
19 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 15 July 1934, Dirac Papers, 1/4/4 (FSU).
20 Dirac’s father’s notebook is in Dirac Papers, 1/1/10 (FSU). Charles dates his first entry September 1933. The latest date he referenced was 4 November 1935, so he probably ceased compiling the notes in early 1936.
21 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 146).
22 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 August 1935, Dirac Papers, 1/4/5 (FSU).
23 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 August 1935, Dirac Papers, 1/4/5 (FSU).
24 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 155–7).
25 Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 6 December 1935, in Kojevnikov (1996: 35–6).
26 One of the physicists who thought that Dirac was over-excited by the Shankland result was Hans Bethe, who wrote ‘What has happened to him?’ in a letter to Rudolf Peierls on 1 August 1936, in Lee (2007b: 152).
27 Dirac (1936: 804).
28 Letter from Heisenberg to Pauli, 23 May 1936, Vol. II, p. 442.
29 Letter from Einstein to Schrödinger, 23 March 1936, AHQP.
30 Letter from Schrödinger to Dirac, 29 April 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/3/3 (FSU).
31 Letter from Bohr to Kramers, 14 March 1936, NBA.
32 Letter from Dirac to Blackett, 12 February 1937, Blackett archive ROYSOC.
33 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 15 January 1936. Other details in this paragraph are in his letters to Manci of 25 January 1936, 2 February 1936 and 10 February 1936 (DDOCS).
34 Huxley (1928: 91) (‘Emotionally, he was a foreigner’) and p. 230 (‘a mystic, a humanitarian and also a contemptuous misanthrope’). See also Huxley (1928: 90, 92–6).
35 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 February 1936 (DDOCS).
36 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 23 February 1936 (DDOCS).
37 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).
38 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).
39 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 13 March 1936 (DDOCS).
40 Letters from Dirac to Manci, 23 March 1936 and 29 April 1936, and letter to Dirac from Manci, 24 April 1936 (DDOCS).
41 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 5 May 1936 (DDOCS).
42 Dirac had also fibbed to Kapitza in the previous year. Dirac makes this plain to Manci in his letter to her of 23 June 1936 (DDOCS).
43 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 June 1936 (DDOCS).
44 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 5 June 1936 (DDOCS).
45 Sinclair (1986: 55).
46 A. Blunt, ‘A Gentleman in Russia’, and a review of Crowther’s Soviet Science by Charles Waddington, both in the Cambridge Review, 5 June 1936.
47 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 7 June 1936, Dirac Papers, 1/4/6 (FSU).
48 Letters to Dirac from his sister, 6 June, 8 June and 9 June 1936, Dirac Papers, 1/7/1 (FSU).
49 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 June 1936 (DDOCS).
50 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 11 June 1936, Dirac Papers, 1/4/6 (FSU).
51 Daily Mirror, 21 May 1934, p. 14. The article concluded: ‘Dirac. Our great grandchildren may be repeating that name when the Chaplins, Fords, Cowards and Cantors are forgotten.’ Cantor is the American writer and entertainer Eddie Cantor.
52 Letter from Dirac to Manci,
17 June 1936 (DDOCS).
53 Letter to Dirac from his mother, July 1936, Dirac Papers, 1/4/6 (FSU).
54 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 27 August 1936, Dirac Papers, 1/4/6 (FSU).
55 Feinberg (1987: 97).
56 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 151).
57 Letter from Kapitza to Rutherford, 26 April 1936, quoted in Badash (1985: 110).
58 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936 (DDOCS).
59 Pais (1991: 411).
60 Both preceding quotes are from the letter from Dirac to Manci, 7 October 1936 (DDOCS). Dirac commented to an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the conference, that he was ‘genuinely enthusiastic’, quoted in Aaserud (1990: 223).
61 In Dirac, M. (1987), Manci recalls that she was on the Queen Mary’s maiden voyage. At that time, however, she was in Budapest.
62 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 19 October 1936 (DDOCS).
63 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1936 (DDOCS).
64 Letter to Dirac from Isabel Whitehead, 29 November 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/3/4 (FSU).
65 Letter from Dirac to Isabel Whitehead, 6 December 1936, STJOHN.
66 Letter to Dirac from Isabel Whitehead, 9 December 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/3/4 (FSU).
67 Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003. Manci often related this story of Dirac’s proposal to her. The description of the car is in the letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1935 (DDOCS).
68 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 29 January 1937 (DDOCS).
69 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 24 December 1936, Dirac Papers, 1/4/6 (FSU).
Twenty-one
Pythagoras says that number is the origin of all things; certainly, the law of number is the key that unlocks the secrets of the universe.
PAUL CARUS, Reflections on Magic Squares, 1906
On the morning of Saturday 2 January 1937, Dirac and Manci married in Holborn Registry Office in central London. He had wed his anti-particle, a woman almost opposite to him in character and temperament, as his father had done thirty-eight years before. That had proved disastrous, resulting in something akin to mutual annihilation, so Dirac may have feared – at least at the back of his mind – that history would repeat itself.
It was an overcast day, the crowds in London going about their business after the Christmas holiday, girding themselves for the harshness of winter. The wedding was a simple civil ceremony, with only a few guests, including Dirac’s mother and sister, the Blacketts, Isabel Whitehead and her husband.1 After lunching with them in a restaurant near by, the couple returned to their hotel and drove to Brighton. Dirac could not have picked a more conventional place for his honeymoon: for decades, it had been the most popular seaside venue in Britain for romantic trysts. It was a peculiarly raffish town, famous for its two Victorian piers jutting imperiously out to sea, for the pale green domes of its faux-oriental pavilion, its future-telling robot and a host of other tacky attractions.
It appears that no photographs were taken of the wedding, but Dirac took reels of them during the vacation, the best of them showing the newlyweds on a pebbled beach, smiling broadly, looking coy and love-struck. Dirac looks comfortable lying on the beach in his ill-fitting three-piece suit, pencils still protruding from the pocket of his jacket. In some of the snaps, it is possible to see a string-operated device that he devised to enable him and Manci to photograph themselves with no one else present.
After the honeymoon, while Manci was in Budapest with Betty, Dirac looked around Cambridge for a permanent home and discharged his duties as Lucasian Professor. Three weeks after Manci’s departure, rain lashing against the windows of his rooms in St John’s, he was overcome with loneliness, sheltering from the wind and drizzle of the Cambridge winter. He wrote to his wife ‘the first love letter I have ever written […] Rather late to begin is it not?’ In the two passionate letters he wrote in as many days, he revealed an almost Byronic expressiveness:
I realize more and more as time goes on that you are the only girl for me. Before we were married, I was afraid that getting married would cause a reaction, but now I feel that I will go on loving you more and more as I get to know you better and see what a dear, sweet girl you are. Do you think you will go on loving me more and more, or is it now as much as it can be?2
He had, at last, fallen in love. In the evenings, he read Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married – retrieved from his father’s library – and some books recommended by Manci, including John Galsworthy’s sprawling Forsyte Saga.3 But Dirac was spending most of his time in a Manci-obsessed reverie, counting the days to when she was due to return, dreaming of embracing her in bed under a new moon.4 It was now Manci’s turn to be sensitive about what others might think: brushing aside her worries that the censors in Hungary might be intercepting their mail, Dirac was uninhibited: ‘You have a very beautiful figure, my darling, so round and charming – and to think that it all belongs to me. Is my love too physical, do you think?’5 Struggling to find words equal to his passion, he continued:
Manci, my darling, you are very dear to me. You have made a wonderful alteration to my life. You have made me human. I shall be able to live happily with you, even if I have no more success in my work. […] I feel that life for me is worth living if I just make you happy and do nothing else.6
Manci appears to have been no less intoxicated: ‘If by any reason a war or anything would prevent me to see you again, I could never love anybody else.’7 She and Betty were getting on well in Budapest, at the Moulin Rouge, skating on the rinks and doing the Charleston on the dance floor after a few glasses of champagne.8 ‘I am very very happy and being thoroughly spoiled,’ Betty wrote to Dirac.9 But she was depressed and mourning her father: ‘he was the finest man I ever knew’, she wailed.10 In Betty’s view, her parents had each been the victim of an unfortunate marriage, and she gave Manci a reason why her parents disliked each other, though this was too personal for Manci to spell it out explicitly in a letter to her husband.11
Manci decided to take Betty in hand and to find her a husband: ‘[Despite] her little faults, a bit of untidiness and unpunctuality, I shall try to […] improve her and she will be a very good wife.’12 Within days, Manci had decided that her Hungarian friend Joe Teszler was just the man for her sister-in-law: kind, gentle and – an essential requirement for Betty – a Roman Catholic. This was one of Manci’s most effective pieces of social engineering: after a brief courtship, Betty married Joe – six years her senior – in London on 1 April 1937. In Bristol, Flo was now quite alone.
‘Some say that I got married rather suddenly,’ Dirac wrote to his wife.13 One of the dons who were surprised by Dirac’s marriage was Rutherford, who wrote to Kapitza: ‘Our latest news is that Dirac has succumbed to the charms of a Hungarian widow with two children,’ adding cryptically, ‘I think it will require the ability of an experienced widow to look after him.’14 A few days later, Dirac wrote to tell Kapitza the news: ‘Have you heard that I was married during the vacation […]?’15 Kapitza was probably surprised as he thought he knew Dirac well but had not even known he was seeing a woman. Anna Kapitza quickly wrote to Manci, though she too had not met her:
Dear Mrs Dirac (it sounds very official but he did not even write us your name!)
I hope you will be very happy with that strange man, but he is a wonderful creature and we all love him very much. Do come to see us in the summer.
Yours, Anna K16
After a second honeymoon in Brighton – only a month after the first – Dirac returned to Cambridge with Manci, who had left her children in Budapest. By late April 1937, they were still looking for a permanent home and living in a rented house in Huntingdon Road, a short stroll from the Kapitzas’ former home. It is not recorded how Dirac referred to her when he introduced her to his university colleagues, but it is quite possible that he described her not as ‘my wife’ but by his favourite appellation as ‘Wigner’s sister’ (this was a surprising choice of words for Dirac, usually fastidious in his choice o
f words to the point of pedantry: Manci was Wigner’s younger sister).17 She quickly established herself as one of the most colourful women in the university, holding dons spellbound as she passed on outrageous gossip about life in Princeton. Dirac looked on, adoringly.
For all her assertiveness, Manci was happy to be part of what she liked to call ‘a very old-fashioned Victorian marriage’.18 She regarded it as her duty to ensure that her husband’s meals were ready on time, to put her husband’s used clothes in the laundry basket every night, before laying out freshly ironed clothes for the next day.19 She allowed Dirac to set out a few ground rules of the relationship, including an understanding that French must never be spoken conversationally in their home – he wanted to put to rest all memories of his father’s linguistic regime. Perhaps surprisingly, she accepted that nothing in their domestic routine should ever interfere with Dirac’s work. This apparently caused no friction when they were alone but it did, on at least one occasion early in their relationship, lead to an embarrassing tiff: Dirac had agreed to go with her to visit friends for afternoon tea but refused to leave his study because he had not finished thinking. Manci went alone, made excuses for her husband and had to put on a brave face when her host took offence.20
The Strangest Man Page 41