Einstein's brain the only one on this road trip
The pickled brain of the great scientist is the star attraction
in Michael Paterniti's sometimes bizarre cross-America carnival.
KILDARE DOBBS
Saturday, August 12, 2000
DRIVING MR. ALBERT:
A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
By Michael Paterniti
Dial, 211 pages
In 1998, Michael Paterniti won a U.S. National Magazine award for a travel article that he has now inflated into a book. Driving Mr. Albert is partly about crossing the United States in a rented Buick Skylark and partly a freak show along the great, dismal Midway of America, in which the prize attraction is the actual brain of Albert Einstein, or bits of it floating in paraldehyde in two Tupperware cookie jars. There are other delights, almost as gruesome: for example, a visit with the late William S. Burroughs, the millionaire junkie and author of Naked Lunch, and a brief rest in crazy Las Vegas before lighting out for California and a conversation with sad Evelyn Einstein, the great physicist's granddaughter, in Berkeley.
The pickled brain was in the possession of Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who performed an autopsy on Einstein in Princeton Hospital in 1955 and, in effect, stole the brain and took it home. Harvey claimed authority for doing so, but no evidence has been found. He distributed bits of the organ to various scientists, including McMaster University's Dr. Sandra Witelson, who claims that there are significant differences between Einstein's and other brains. Amazing! The world had noticed something of the kind.
Possession of the brain seems to have carried a kind of mummy's curse for Harvey, who was fired from his job and failed in a couple of marriages. He's an indistinct character in the book. Though Paterniti got him to describe the actual autopsy in ghoulish detail (a treat for all of us), his direct speech in the text is restricted to exclamations of "way-ell" and "heh-heh-heh." One character refers to Harvey as the White Rabbit, which for Paterniti alludes to a movie starring James Stewart -- as if the reader has never heard of Noel Coward and his play Harvey.
The author tracked down Harvey in New Jersey and offered to drive the 85-year-old pathologist on his planned trip to California with the brain. He got the job. I wondered why he wanted it, until I remembered that ambitious journalists like to have their names linked with big stories and famous personalities. In the end, the grandeur can rub off on the reporter; Walter Cronkite is considered presidential material, actors are confused with the characters they play, the movie critic wins honorary degrees. The text makes it clear that what Paterniti reveres in Einstein is his status as superstar.He wants to touch greatness. Literally, withhis fingers in the cookie jar.
Interwoven with the travel story are biographical sketches of Einstein in the manner of magazine profiles. The pure scientist is held responsible for the atomic bomb -- hey, the biggest bang of all.
Another running digression records the young man's affair with his girlfriend. Does he love her? Well, "there was a rightness about who we were as a couple, of our guaranteed happiness." What does it mean? This is an example of the kind of windy abstraction into which Paterniti sometimes lapses. There's more of this stuff at the climax of the book, at the end of the quest (whatever it was), when something amazing is called for. "But I am here now. In the now now. . . . I feel something I can't quite put my finger on, something euphoric but deeply unsayable. Is it love or just not hate? Is it joy or just not sadness?" Well, it's his conundrum, not ours. And does this author "dare to think that there will be no ending of the world, of America, of ourselves?" He tells us: "I do. I really do."
For me, at all events, the earth did not move.
Samuel Johnson had a friend who gave him sound advice about writing: Go through your work and cross out anything that strikes you as particularly good. Paterniti could profit.
But one doesn't want to write him off, since he shows, in his wicked evocation of a visit with William S. Burroughs in Lawrence, Kan., that he does have what it takes to be an imaginative reporter. The father of the Beats has just taken his daily dose of methadone. "Have you ever tried morphine?" he asks Harvey. "Tell me about your addictions, Doctor."
A friend or manservant called Wayne brings Burroughs a present: a dinosaur bone. "The Bone! The lovely, lovely Bone!" he says. Later he is still chanting, "The beautiful bone, the beautiful bone, the beautiful bone!"
At last he addresses Harvey in a whisper, "What keeps the old alive, Dr. Senegal, is that we learn to be evil."
Other freaks are imported in passing, for example Jeremy Bentham, who bequeathed his head and skeleton to University College, London. The author doesn't seem to know that Bentham's mummy or effigy still sits on a chair in the college and is carried in to all meetings of the board. Life -- London life anyway -- is sometimes just as ghoulish as journalism.
Kildare Dobbs, travel writer and poet, is author of Ribbon of Highway, recording a 16,000-kilometre journey west and east across Canada by bus. His latest book is Casablanca: The Poem, which "Maintains the perfect musicality of the film," says Vatican Radio.
Here are a few of the great man's thoughts, selected from the just-published The Expanded Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice (Princeton, 407 pages).
On the bomb: "The unleashing of power of the atomic bomb has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and thus we head toward unparalleled catastrophes."
On the universe: "I can, if the worse comes to worst, still realize that God may have created a world in which there are no natural laws. In short, chaos. But that there should be statistical laws with definite solutions, laws that compel God to throw dice in each individual case, I find highly disagreeable."
On fame: "With fame, I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon."
On himself: "I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart. In the face of all this, I have never lost a sense of distance and the need for solitude."
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