Not as Swift as Light
The author performs an entertaining errand that could not have been conceived before the 20th century.
Reviewed by Adam Goodheart
DRIVING MR. ALBERT A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain. By Michael Paterniti. 211 pp. New York: The Dial Press. $18.95. |
he well-loved old genre of the Great American Road Trip has, in all its many tellings and retellings, given birth to some strange sets of twins: Huck and Jim, Dorothy and Toto, Hunter S. Thompson and his 300-pound Samoan attorney. But never, perhaps, has there been so unlikely a pairing of pilgrim and sidekick as the young journalist Michael Paterniti and his traveling companion: a small Tupperware container full of stinking yellow liquid and, floating in that liquid like matzoh balls in a macabre chicken soup, a dozen largish chunks of the brain of Albert Einstein.
That the 20th century's greatest brain ended up crossing Kansas at 85 miles an hour in the trunk of a Buick Skylark was the work -- many people would say the fault -- of Paterniti's other traveling companion, a brain in the passenger seat. This brain, no less strange than Einstein's in its own way, resides in the timeworn but still living body of Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey. Harvey was the hospital pathologist who, after Einstein's death in 1955, performed the autopsy and, for reasons still tangled deep in his own cerebral neurons, removed the famous physicist's brain, eventually taking it home with him and storing it in a succession of beer coolers and cookie jars.
In the half-century since then, the brain's fate and Harvey's became inextricably intertwined. It was responsible for his being fired from his hospital position and, perhaps, for his eventual disqualification from medicine. He, in turn, brought it along on his life's wanderings from New Jersey to Kansas and back, through three failed marriages and several careers (the once-promising pathologist ended up, in his 80's, working as an extruder operator in a plastics factory). And as the brain slowly attained the status of cult object -- a British filmmaker made a documentary about it, a heavy-metal band recorded a song called ''Stealing Einstein's Brain'' -- so did the eccentric doctor himself. Harvey had announced that he planned to publish his research on the brain. But whenever a journalist tracked him down to ask him how work was progressing (whether in 1956, 1979 or 1988) he always replied that he was about ''a year from finishing study on the specimen.''
-- from the first chapter of
'Driving Mr. Albert'
"Not surprsingly, however, controversy immediately enshrouded the removal of
Einstein's brain. Word was leaked by Harvey's former teacher Dr. Zimmerman
that Harvey had Einstein's brain, and that he, Zimmerman, was expecting to
receive it from his student. When this was reported in The New York Times a
day after Einstein's death, Hans Albert, who knew nothing of his father's brain
having been removed, was flabbergasted. Otto Nathan expressed regret and
shock, and later implied that Harvey was a bald-faced thief. But, according to
Harvey, Nathan, who died in 1984, stood by the door of the morgue, watching
the entire autopsy. (Nathan would later claim he didn't know what Harvey was
up to.)"
If you'd passed their Buick on the highway, even without knowing about its gruesome cargo (which Harvey kept hidden away in a duffel bag), you might well have done a double take. ''More than a half-century apart in age,'' Paterniti writes, the writer sports space-age sunglasses and a tuft of chin hair; the doctor, ''shaped like a black question mark,'' wears threadbare dark suits, purple socks and neckties with decades-old price tags still attached. When Paterniti peppers Harvey with questions about the brain, the old man just chuckles nervously and says, ''Way-ell, it sure has been a wonderful specimen'' -- then launches off on rambling anecdotes about shad festivals in Connecticut or the 1931 Yale football team (''he begins each with words like: 'In the days of canals . . .' or 'I remember the Depression for its coffee' ''). When, somewhere deep in the Corn Belt, Paterniti finally gets fed up and asks Harvey point-blank if he can see the brain, his passenger just says ''Way-ell . . . ''and lapses into silence as the mile markers pass.
Such a trip might sound at first like an amusing stunt, or like fodder for a clever magazine piece, but not exactly promising material for an entire book. (And in fact, the kernel of Paterniti's story did appear in Harper's Magazine, where it won a National Magazine Award.) Somehow, though, Paterniti -- whose first book this is -- spun his tale out into a narrative that, perhaps like the wild-haired physicist himself, is simultaneously dead serious and inescapably funny. Reading ''Driving Mr. Albert'' is like having breakfast in a roadside diner next to a stranger who starts bending your ear with some far-fetched yarn. You start out skeptical, but then, as he hits his stride, you find yourself rapt, the pancakes growing cold in front of you.
Of course, this is a story that's got almost everything going for it, not least the visceral human fascination with that most sublime and nasty organ, the brain. Paterniti gleefully exploits this for all it's worth, like a grade school kid who's found something really, really gross to bring in for show-and-tell. When, in paragraphs agleam with Frankensteinian light, he describes Harvey performing the 1955 autopsy, you know that he shares a bit of the pathologist's ghoulish greed, and expects you to as well: ''He cracked the skull like a coconut, he removed a cap of bone, peeled back the viscous meninges, and snipped the connecting blood vessels and nerve bundles and the spinal cord. And then, at last, there it was. A huge, rough pearl. He reached with his fingers into the chalice of the man's cranium and removed the glistening brain.''
And what a brain it is, or was, depending upon whom you ask. That disagreement over tenses is the crux of the controversy that followed Harvey's dissection. Some medical researchers believe the physical structures of Einstein's brain may hold clues to the nature of intelligence, and they laud Harvey for saving it for science. (A few even dream of the day when its DNA might be used to clone a 21st-century replica of the great man.) Others say there's no more reason to save a dead brain than to keep a burned-out light bulb. Einstein's brain, they point out, was of average size or smaller, indistinguishable from a billion others; wherever the physicist's genius may reside today, it's not in Thomas Harvey's Tupperware.
Even while alive, though, Einstein was more than just the contents of his cranium. Paterniti recounts how, shortly after his general theory of relativity was confirmed in 1919, Einstein rocketed to star status, adored by the world as a kind of Little Tramp with a Nobel Prize. According to Paterniti, Einstein, who adopted United States citizenship at the age of 61, was an essentially American figure both for his iconhood and, perhaps, for the way he blended ''20th-century skepticism with 19th-century romanticism.''
So Paterniti aims to make his book into something bigger than the story of two men and a brain. ''Simply having Einstein's brain in the trunk rearranges the way you see everything,'' he declares, and he seizes on his 11-day cross-country trip as a chance to view America itself in a new light. With startling hubris, he pores over the much-read tea leaves of a million road-trip stories: the bumper stickers on passing cars, the Midwestern skies above the Interstate. And somehow, like an amateur tightrope walker, he pulls it off by the sheer strength of his naïve self-confidence, connecting Einstein's space- and time-bending theories to the nature of life in the scientist's adoptive homeland. True, his efforts inspire a few wince-producing passages. (''And do I dare to think that there will be no ending of the world, of America, of ourselves? I do. I really do.'') But I happened to start reading ''Driving Mr. Albert'' on a flight home from Africa when, somewhere over the Congo basin, Paterniti's prose brought to life the familiar continent rushing toward us.
Paterniti seems to have been favored by that happy little god of travel writers who sits on one shoulder and whispers in your ear, giving you the perfect anecdotes, the perfect set pieces at the perfect moments. Maybe Thomas Harvey isn't quite, as Paterniti eagerly claims, ''a rebel or a Casanova or a Beat wanderer . . . a hero or a thief or a holy man.'' But he becomes an unforgettable character nonetheless, especially in his almost Dadaist encounters with high-school students in San Jose, his third wife and, best of all, his former Kansas neighbor William S. Burroughs. (''What keeps the old alive,'' the novelist hisses on parting, ''is that we learn to be evil.'')
By the time ''Driving Mr. Albert'' hits the twin peaks of its two surprise endings, you realize that this book is really not the tale of just one brain, but three: Einstein's, Harvey's and Paterniti's own, which is not an inconsiderable creative device. It's a brain, in fact, that I'd be happy to travel with again.
hen Michael Paterniti happened
to mention the urban myth about
Albert Einstein's A.W.O.L. brain to
his landlord, he was in for a surprise
that would prove useful. Not only had
the landlord also heard stories that
Einstein's brain had disappeared after his death, but the landlord also
had a lead on its whereabouts. He
helped point the author toward Dr.
Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who
absconded with the brain after he
performed a 1955 autopsy on Einstein in Princeton, N.J. For nearly
half a century Dr. Harvey had hung
onto this grisly souvenir.
So Mr. Paterniti, sensing the makings of the magazine article (for Harper's) that he has now inflated into book form, made a pilgrimage to Dr. Harvey in Princeton. And when Dr. Harvey expressed a desire to go to Berkeley, Calif., Mr. Paterniti offered to take him there. Along came a high-concept, cutely titled account of a cross-country road trip involving an eccentric octogenarian scientist, a pensive young acolyte and a celebrity body part in a Tupperware container.
Assuming that "simply having
Einstein's brain in the trunk rearranges the way you see everything," Mr. Paterniti took to the
road. And he began the trip with a
handy predilection for finding whiffs
of Einsteinian thinking everywhere.
Because "Driving Mr. Albert" in
fact revolved around a brief, largely
uneventful car trip involving a not
very chatty passenger ("Way-ell, it
sure has been a wonderful specimen" is Dr. Harvey at his most
communicative), Mr. Paterniti often
found himself reaching for something more. And so he had ample
time to recall Einstein's life and its
implications, or to wonder about his
girlfriend home in Maine. Had she hit
a moose on the road? Had she run off
with the Federal Express man?
Naturally there was ample time to
contemplate the brain itself, cut into
240-odd fragments, and to endow it
with suitably cosmic implications.
After wondering whether it feels like
tofu, sea urchin or bologna, Mr. Paterniti reflects, "I mean, it's not really Einstein and it's not really a brain,
but disconnected pieces of a brain,
just as the passing farms are not
really America but parts of a whole,
symbols of the thing itself, which is
everything and nothing at once." Everything-and-nothingness serves as
the book's dominant motif.
So Mr. Paterniti is ever alert to
parallels between Einstein's life and
anyone else's. (Einstein and Dr. Harvey each had multiple marriages;
Einstein and a Japanese scientist,
whom the author also visited on a
separate jaunt described here, both
failed important exams as students,
and both had difficulties with postcollege employment.) And he likes to
imagine what Einstein's thoughts
might have been.
A train goes by in Arizona, prompting the author to write, "Were this
1931, Einstein might very well have
been on that train," and adding, "Undoubtedly, he would occasionally
have looked up from his equations to
see America beyond the window." At
another juncture he decides that Einstein would have been horrified by
MTV and Microsoft but amused by
tae-bo, Jesse Ventura and penis augmentations.
Eager for newsworthy encounters
Mr. Paterniti brings Dr. Harvey to
visit William Burroughs, who was
the doctor's neighbor in Lawrence,
Kan., even though the two elderly
men had met only once before. And
always alert to the possibility of larger meaning, Mr. Paterniti thinks he
glimpses evidence of Mr. Burroughs's most notorious exploits in
the famous old author's wrinkles.
For his part, Mr. Burroughs, the legendary wild man, downs five Coke-and-vodkas on top of his daily methadone, smokes a joint and then begins
addressing Dr. Harvey as Dr. Senegal. This is easily one of the more
newsworthy encounters along the
book's otherwise pedestrian journey.
Matters grow desperate. Mr. Paterniti is prompted by the offer of
more coffee from a waitress in Lawrence to reflect that she might have
been blown up in the 20-year-old television movie "The Day After." He
and Dr. Harvey call Evelyn Einstein,
the scientist's granddaughter, and
ask to visit her in Berkeley, to which
she replies: "I don't know. My house
is a mess."
They stop at carefully chosen
places of Einsteinian import, like Los
Alamos, N.M., without prompting
more than a "Way-ell" or two out of
Dr. Harvey. The author dodges a
truck bearing the name "Marianne,"
which is the name of his mother. And
he does his laundry, a process described with typically indiscriminate
fervor. "It feels powerful to drop the
dirty stuff of a long week into a tub of
sudsy water," he relates, "and have
my pants and shirts come out clean."
In the latter stages of the journey,
Mr. Paterniti takes to buttonholing
strangers for journalistic effect.
"I'm on a trip," he says to two tourists in Las Vegas, "and I was wondering what you two know about Albert Einstein?" A blackjack dealer
says, "I don't know anything about
him, but that man over there should
be able to help you." The casino
manager, asked about Einstein, curtly answers: "Haven't seen him in
here tonight. Sorry, pal."
In his search for the real meaning
of his experience, which ultimately
includes sleeping with the brain on a
pillow in his bed "just to see," Mr.
Paterniti grasps ambitiously and
self-importantly at every available
straw. But the best assessment of his
studiously cerebral journey comes
from Independence High School in
San Jose, Calif., where Dr. Harvey
stops to display his treasure to students "repulsed and captivated by
the man whose fingers are wet with
brain."
Dr. Harvey, "heady on the perfume of social studies teachers,"
meets one woman who sees what Mr.
Paterniti works overtime to aggrandize. "I'm meeting a footnote here,"
she tells him, and she's right.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
An eccentric octogenarian, a young acolyte and a body part.
"One of the themes of my earlier
life, as I recall it now, is that I was
forever projecting myself forward
and backward at the same time, negating the present moment, changing my mind with alarming frequency," he reports in suitably scientific
mode. Thus equipped, he could find
that in a Kansas City vista "shots of
light glance off the glass windows of
skyscrapers, electrons and quanta
firing past us like an invisible hail of
bullets." Or muse that "Pennsylvania is its own kind of in-between, not
rally east and not west, the pulse
between neurons."