WE live in a reductionist age, and seemingly the things we most like to see reduced are the reputations of great intellectual figures, especially if they are dead, white, and male. It is the Western equivalent of eastern Europe's fondness for tearing down big ugly statues and knocking their heads off. The present spate of literary statue bashing began in the Seventies' with biographies of H.G. Wells and a number of the Bloomsburyites, revealing all their little dark secrets, especially of the sexual variety, and showing them to have been thoroughly bad lots when it came to wives, lovers children and, in the recent case of Graham Greene, snails.
Denis Brian's biography of Albert Einstein comes enveloped in an electron cloud of hype. This we were told, is the book that would nail Einstein, the "secular saint" whose saintly image had been jealously and successfully preserved by Einstein's executor, Otto Nathan, and Nathan's secretary, Helen Dukas, from the clutches of both of whom the Einstein Archives had to be wrested by legal action.
In fact, Brian's book turns out to be a good, solid, unexcited though not unexciting Life of one of the greatest scientists of this or any other age, and is likely to enhance Einstein's reputation rather than tarnish it. Brian does reveal some things Einstein and his devotees would have preferred to keep hidden, things which show that Einstein was far from being a saint, secular or otherwise, and that he was as capable of low behaviour as any other homme moyen sensuel. However, the figure who emerges from these pages is far more interesting, and far more mysterious, than the sad eyed, woolly headed troll of popular imagining.
Einstein the man had an uncanny quality, characteristic of most great intellectuals. Many of those who knew him, including his second wife, considered that he had never really grown up emotionally, and certainly he had the child's sense of simple delight in the world, as well as the childs heartlessness when it came to the feelings and foibles of others. People's foolishness amused him. We can hardly appreciate now the magnitude of his reputation in his own time for his part, he could not understand why so many tens of thousands of otherwise sensible people should be interested in him. He had the humility of genius.
The most appalling suggestion in Denis Brian's biography is that Einstein forced his wife to give their first child, a girl, out for adoption at the age of eighteen months. The story put about was that the child had died, but the investigations of Brian and others seem to prove conclusively that the child was adopted. In the 1950s Einstein was warned that a woman was going about Germany saying she was his daughter he put a private investigator on to it, although the implication is that he was not trying to trace her, but to silence her.
Certainly it is horrible to think that a couple could give away their daughter at the age of eighteen months. However, considering recent revelations regarding our treatment of orphans, we Irish, of all people, should pause before uttering condemnations of others. All the same, Einstein's behaviour does make for chilling reading in places. He caused his first wife, Mileva, to have a nervous breakdown when he asked her for a divorce, and when a friend tried to bring about a reconciliation, Einstein compared the prospect of living with Mileva again to having a bad smell in his nostrils. As Brian says, "Einstein was not a man to pull his verbal punches.
THE most striking thing a bout Einstein the scientist, as is the case with so many of the revolutionary figures of the first half of this century Lenin, Joyce, Wittgenstein . . . is that his was essentially a 19th century sensibility. He was born in 1879 in Ulm, in the middle of Europe, and even when the nazis forced him to emigrate to the United States, he continued to be in all important respects a son of that Mitteleuropan world that came to a cataclysmic end in the first World War.
Newton was Einstein's most admired predecessor, even though Einstein's own work corrected a number of profound mistakes in Newton's physics. In an odd way, Einstein remained a Newtonian scientist to the end. Indeed, Einstein, faced with the fact that relativity posited an expanding universe, employed a bit of mathematical sleight of hand so as to make the equations come out (he was later to call this his biggest blunder), just as Newton in his theory of gravity had pretended, in order to "save the phenomena", that there are such things as absolute space and absolute time.
Quantum physics, which in its complexity, ambiguousness and dark beauty is perhaps the most emblematic intellectual creation of the 20th century, developed directly from certain aspects of Einstein's own theories, yet he could never accept the implications of as a previous biographer, Abraham Pais, put it, "Quantum physics was his demon". God, Einstein declared, does not play dice, whereas quantum theory and, more significantly, quantum mechanics suggests that God is in fact a hopeless gambling addict. The world according to quantum theory seems to be, as Denis Brian felicitously says, "the joint creation of an illusionist and the designer of a gambling casino.
Although I have no expertise whatever in these matters, I rather fancy that in the end Einstein will be proved to be right, and that what looks like uncertainty to us is merely a veil covering further and so far unimaginable complexities at the heart of things.
Einstein mostly by default was an active player in the politics of his time as an anti nazi in Germany in the 1930s, as a campaigner in European jewry's attempts to set up the Israeli state, and as a proponent of the drive to build an atomic bomb he wrote a famous letter to Roosevelt warning that German scientists might be on the brink of producing such a super weapon, which would certainly have been used by Hitler. He approached politics with his usual insouciance, but his fellow physicist I.I. Rabi looked beyond the mask. "Einstein gave the impression he was very naive on political matters, and very obstinate about scientific ones. I don't think he was at all naive. He was a very sophisticated man, but seemed naive because he cut to the heart of the problem." Einstein himself was of the opinion that his originality as a thinker was due to the fact that he had been a late developer, and so was unencumbered by many of the received ideas that cloud the minds of most of us.
Einstein also knew, of course, all the great ones of his day. The two most fascinating meetings, for this reviewer, were those with Freud though he declined to be psychoanalysed and with Franz Kafka. One wonders how Kafka would have responded to the story of the young Einstein's efforts to become a Swiss citizen.
On first applying he was disconcerted by personal questions such as "Do you lead a respectable life?" and "Were either of your grandfathers syphilitic?" Afterward, a detective named Hedinger had investigated him and his relatives, confirming his claims to syphilis free grandfathers, and describing Albert as "a very eager, industrious and extremely solid man" and a "teetotaller".
Denis Brian has produced a portrait of a fascinating, mercurial, wonderfully inventive, gay and gaily cruel man. Einstein emerges from this book as wholly and recognisably human, with all a human being's grandeur and pettiness. This is a remarkable achievement, considering the accretion of myths that have grown up around the image of Einstein. He was, at bottom, a 19th century rationalist, with an overlay of Spinozan religiosity. Asked if he was religious, this was his reply. "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion."
