Hopeful Monsters

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by Nicholas Mosley


  The other incident that has stayed in my memory of this time (a bump from a corner of the maze; a nugget left behind in the sieve) was to do with the rocketing to fame of Professor Einstein.

  The publicity given to the corroboration of the General Theory of Relativity, combined with the apparent need of the public for at least the illusion of a liberating vision, had resulted in adulation for Einstein but also a growing hostility. In particular there was animosity towards him on the part of some scientists in the Berlin Academy, who either did not understand what he was proposing, or did not like it if they did. They complained not only that his physics was incorrect, but that his theories were undermining objective principles about right and wrong. In particular there was a physicist called Lenard, a Nobel prizewinner, who led the attack

  against Einstein. After a time this took the form of a crusade against what came to be called 'Jewish' physics. It had been a characteristic of German anti-Semitism, I suppose, that Jews were held to be subversive to objective standards of right and wrong.

  These so-called 'true German' scientists embarked on a series of public lectures to try to warn what they saw as the gullible public about the machinations of the wicked Professor Einstein. My father got tickets for one of these lectures; he wanted to attend it so that, of course, he might be better armed to defend Professor Einstein. He got two tickets, intending to go with my mother, but my mother was becoming more and more distant from both my father and me at this time; she would spend two or three nights at a time away at her soup-kitchen; she was becoming increasingly involved again in Communist politics. When she came back to the apartment now she would sleep in the dining-room which had been rearranged to take a bed; my father and I ate and sat in the drawing-room. At the time of the shooting in Pariser Platz I had felt some kinship with my mother; it was as if some light had entered my mind about the prevalence of death. But my mother did not seem to want to take any notice of this; it was as if she wanted quite openly now to hand me over to my father.

  So when my father asked her to go with him to the anti-Einstein lecture, saying that there might be a chance here of their joining hands in their work, she just said 'Take Eleanor.'

  My father said 'Eleanor's too young.'

  'She's not too young for most of the things you get up to.'

  So my father said to me 'Would you like to come to this lecture?'

  I said 'Can I?'

  He said 'There's no reason why not.'

  I thought - I still do not know if she wants to damage me, or encourage me, my mother.

  I remember that I tried to dress up to appear as old as I could for this lecture: I put on one of my mother's hats; it looked ridiculous; I took it off. In the end I wore just one of my mother's shawls. The lecture was in the old Philharmonic Hall; there were boxes in tiers; there did not seem to be any empty seats in the hall. I suppose it was brave of my father to take me; many of his colleagues were there; they looked at me curiously. I think my father had told them that I was some sort of mathematical prodigy - which I was not. We sat in the stalls. The audience did not seem to be so different from that at a concert of Wagner's music that my father had taken

  me to not long before in the same hall; the music had made my mind go blank; I had thought - If I were a snake, yes, I would be being drawn up out of a basket. Now I thought - Will this lecture be about Jewishness and non-Jewishness? I must pay attention: I have to study, after all, what is it to be half Jewish and half not.

  The first speaker was a large man in evening dress who had a purple sash across his chest. He spoke about the Theory of Relativity being contrary to the German Spirit; this Spirit was to do with the Fatherland and blood and God, while Relativity was to do with atheism and decadence and chaos. According to him Relativity was also, in some contradictory way, to do with a highly organised conspiracy for world domination. The Absolute German Spirit, he said, if it did not take heed, would be overwhelmed by an alliance of rampant subjectivity and alien invasion. The man made strange gestures with his arms as if he were throwing stones. I thought -How long will it take the stones to go right round the universe and hit him on the back of the head?

  The next speaker was a small neat man with a beard. He explained how the so-called 'corroboration' of the General Theory was anyway not scientific because it was probable that any peculiarities in the experimenters' measurements were caused by the deflection of light by the murky atmosphere round the sun. And anyway, he added - was it not significant that the theory of Professor Einstein had been confirmed, if that could be the word, by the British! This last remark brought forth a growl of approval from the hall. My father was sitting with his hair seeming to stand on end. I thought - But he will not shoot up and make some public protest, will he? Is it not best, in this strange territory, if we remain somewhat secret; then according to the theory will not these people find their criticisms coming down upon themselves?

  Then at a certain stage of the evening there was a slight disturbance in the hall; heads were turning as if a wind were blowing them; there were people entering late and settling down in one of the boxes in the first tier. One of them, sitting at the front, even looked like Professor Einstein. People around us began to whisper; my father was looking up at the box as if he were indeed now transfixed by light; then he murmured to me that the man in the box was, to be sure, Professor Einstein. There was the dark halo of hair; the humorous look that seemed to be going far outwards and inwards all at once. This was the only time that I saw Einstein in the flesh. From the front of the box he bowed slightly to the audience; he

  seemed to be acknowledging their whisperings. The speaker on the platform had paused; Einstein waved at him as if he were encouraging him to continue. The whispering in the hall subsided. (This was on 27 August 1920; I have checked the date; do you think it makes it more telling if I can say 'I have checked the date'?) Einstein sat back in his box. The speaker went on. He was suggesting what a dangerous and terrible thing it was to have no objectivity. Einstein was nodding and smiling; he leaned back and spoke to one of the people behind him; this person laughed. The man on the stage paused again; he seemed both at a loss and furious. I thought suddenly - But what of that crowd, those waiters, the people who jeered at the soldiers! Einstein leaned forward and clapped, sardonically, at the speaker; it was as if the performance might be over. Then my father whispered 'Oh don't overdo it!' I remember this whisper quite clearly: I thought I understood it. I put my head in my hands. Several images had come into my mind all at once: there was my mother walking like a bird amongst the dead or dying bodies as if on a battlefield; there was the girl curled up with her hands to her middle (I read later that she had died); then there was a photograph I had come across recently when I had been looking through some of my mother's papers, which was of the body of Rosa Luxemburg when she had been dragged from the canal some months after she had been killed. Her face was like that of a wooden doll, half eaten by worms. So I felt I understood when my father whispered 'Oh don't overdo it!' When the small furious man on the platform began speaking again his beard pointed and waggled up and down like a machine-gun. Professor Einstein seemed only to have his halo of hair to protect him.

  human intercourse and the enjoyment of exquisite objects. He had begun one lecture with the words 'We should spread scepticism until at last everybody knows that we can know absolutely nothing'; and then apparently had been overcome with laughter.

  My father also came from a Cambridge family but one of a more austere intellectual tradition. He was a scientist: his father and grandfather had been scientists - one a biologist and the other a physicist. My father was a biologist specialising in the field of genetic inheritance. There was a good deal of controversy in this area as he grew up; orthodox Darwinists were under attack; it was difficult for them to explain how evolution could have occurred simply through chance mutations and natural selection. There seemed to be too many coincidences required for the emergence, by these means, of complex org
anic forms.

  I was an only child. I do not know why my father and my mother did not have more children. Perhaps too many coincidences have to be taken into account for the answering of such questions.

  I had a bedroom on the top floor of our house, from which I could look down on what went on in the world below. There were the red-tiled roofs of the village; the tops of creeper-covered walls along which squirrels ran. My mother might be talking to Mr Simmons the gardener by one of the herbaceous borders; my father might emerge on to the lawn from the greenhouse where he had once kept the famous collection of sweet peas with which he had been able to confirm some of the ideas about genetic inheritance put forward by Mendel. These had made it easier to understand the evolution of complex organic forms.

  I had been allowed the use of an attic room of our house in which I could set up my toys. At an earlier time in my childhood I had created a model village complete with houses and shops and a church; there were roads and a railway system that ran right round the room; at the door there was a drawbridge to allow giant humans to go in and out. It had seemed important to me to try to make a model of the real world in my attic; not exactly so that I could control it, but rather perhaps so that there should be somewhere orderly and exact in which I might feel at home. At the time about which I am writing my model village was still intact: but now I spent more time with my electricity and chemistry sets, which I suppose were like factories springing up and polluting the once pristine countryside.

  Beyond a green baize door on the top floor of the house there

  were the rooms of Mrs Elgin the cook and Watson the parlourmaid (what complex evolution of forms must have been required for a cook but not a parlourmaid to have acquired the prefix 'Mrs'!). On the floor below there were my mother's bedroom and my father's separate bedroom and their bathrooms and two spare rooms. There was a primitive bathroom next to my bedroom, which had pipes that shuddered and bubbled like pieces of my chemistry set.

  The times when I felt most at home outside the fastness of my attic were when my father was away; he used to go on lecture tours to the Continent and to America. Then I could ride my bicycle in and out of the croquet hoops of the lawn; in the evenings I could stay in the drawing-room and be read to by my mother. My mother and I would sit side by side on the curved seat on the inside of a bow window; our backs would be to the setting sun; there would be the cool touch of flames at our necks. When I was younger my mother had read to me fairy stories; I think we went on being interested in fantasies and myths somewhat after a time when they might have been thought suitable for a boy. My mother had a professional interest in fairy stories since she was studying psychoanalysis and saw that useful insights might be gained by an analysis of such matters: I suppose I liked whatever was of interest to my mother. In particular I enjoyed stories in which a person went on a journey for the sake of some precious object that had to be found or some person to be rescued; on the way there were meetings with birds, magicians, rings, wells, animals; there had to be an understanding of portents and tricks, an answering of riddles.

  I would wonder - Is this or is it it not to do with the real world?

  Or - This is one of the riddles?

  Most of all during these evenings I would like the proximity of my mother; I would put my head against her shoulder so that I could better follow the words that she was reading; with the sun behind us, it was as if we were in long grass on a summer's day. My mother was a large golden-haired woman who sat straight-backed; there was a way in which the top half of her body seemed to be like milk contained miraculously by the air. I would put my arm around her; when she had finished reading she would hug me.

  She would say 'You shouldn't be stuck with your old mother! You should be out playing with friends.'

  I would say 'I haven't got any friends.'

  She would say 'Do you want any?'

  I would say 'No.'

  She would say 'Why not?' Then - 'Don't tell your old mother!'

  Often when my father was working in Cambridge he would bring a gang of his friends home at weekends. They would arrive in cars or on bicycles; they would come on to the lawn pulling off scarves and caps or goggles; they would be laughing and nudging one another and chattering. They broke into my mother's and my quiet world like Vikings in longboats from the sea. My father kept in the hall an enormous bag of shoes suitable for croquet or tennis; he would bring this bag out and toss shoes to people even as they came on to the lawn; they were supposed to catch them; this was a game even before the start of a proper game; it was as if there had to be established from the very beginning of a visit the style that the guest was expected to conform to.

  My mother would move graciously from one to another of my father's guests. She often wore a long white skirt nipped in at the waist. The people she spoke to would stand awkwardly and hit at their legs with a mallet or a racket. My mother would stay with them for a time; then move back through the windows into the drawing-room.

  Once, after my mother had gone, my father's friends played leapfrog on the lawn.

  My father would call to me 'Where are you off to?'

  I would say 'I thought I'd just go upstairs.'

  'Don't you want a game of croquet?'

  'I've just had one, thanks.'

  'Who with?'

  'Myself

  'Don't strain yourself, will you.'

  My father was a large, thick-set man with a moustache that came down over the lower part of his face like a portcullis. He would wear a panama hat when he played croquet. He would crouch over his ball, then go bounding after it. I would wonder - Why can he not let it go its own way; would he then have to trust to birds, rings, portents, riddles?

  I understood that my father was quite famous for the work he had done in biology. From books I had in my room I did not find it difficult to understand the business of natural selection: all life evolved by means of chance mutations in genes, the products of which are put to the test by the environment; most mutations die, because of course what is established is what is suited to the environment. But occasionally there is a change in the environment

  coincident with a genetic mutation, the result of which is suited to the change - suited in the sense that it is more likely to survive in the new conditions than the established stock from which it comes. So then it is the mutation or mutant that survives and eventually the old stock dies. But what seemed mysterious to me - what had once apparently seemed mysterious to my father - were the questions of what occasioned these mutations; what is called 'chance'; how many and how frequent coincidences had to occur for it to be possible for a new form of life to emerge? Was it not what might be called 'miraculous', that so many coincidences seemed to have to happen all at once for a new strain to occur?

  At Sunday lunches my mother would say to my father 'Can you explain to Max?'

  My father would say 'It's really a matter of statistical analysis.'

  My mother would say 'I understand that it is a matter of all sorts of mutations being latent and potentially available in the gene pool.'

  My father would say 'Lovely bits of mummy and daddy swimming in the gene pool.'

  My mother would say 'I do think it a pity that you cannot be serious with Max.'

  My father would say 'You can use such images if you like. But such language does not help explanation.'

  My mother would look away as if she were someone in a fairy story imprisoned in a castle.

  There were times, nearly always when my father was away, when a group of my mother's friends came down from London. They would emerge on to the lawn having walked perhaps from the station; they were unlike my father's friends in that they did not make much noise. There was a rather ancient young man with steel spectacles and beard; a much younger-looking young man in white flannels who danced up and down in front of him. There were two tall ladies in floppy hats and with beads who went and gazed at the herbaceous border. Then they would all sit in deckchairs and seem to be waiting to
be photographed. When they talked it was as if they were trying out lines for a play.

  After they had gone, and my father had come home, he would say 'And how are the Wombsburys?'

  My mother would say 'Very well, thank you.'

  My father would say 'Bedded any good boys lately?'

  My mother would say 'Please don't talk like that in front of Max.'

  I would want to say - But of course he can talk like that in front of me!

  My father once said to my mother 'If I were you, I'd watch out for them having a go at Max.' My mother got up and left the table.

  I suppose I wondered why my father and my mother went on at each other like this; but their style seemed to be just part of the grown-up world. There was all the battling and jockeying for position. I would wonder - This is something to do with the needs of natural selection?

 

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