Genius (50 page)
Authors: James Gleick
Is always so to women …
In a postscript, she corrected his spelling of her name.
Women were expected to contend in the work force—another trend accelerated by the war—but they also stood in the centerpiece of a cozy domestic vision of family life. The professions, and particularly the sciences, remained in the rear guard. The new
Physics Today
summed up the difficulties from the sober perspective of someone who had spent more than a decade teaching physics to undergraduates at Bryn Mawr, where a local ditty asked,
Tell me what it is like to be teaching these girls?
Do you find that they have any brains?
Do they take themselves seriously (may I ask) or do you?
The editors were determined to keep the tone lighthearted. The author argued, not without sympathy, that the single most grievous obstacle to the success of women as physicists was their own “tendency to defer to the superior male.” Meanwhile employers continued to assume that women’s eventual priority would be marriage and children. In the
Physical Review
women almost never appeared as authors.
In their wholly male world, physicists were even less likely than other American men to look for intellectual partnership in their sexual relationships. Some did, nevertheless. In the European tradition, where the professoriat implied a certain social class and cultural grounding, wives had tended to share their husbands’ class and culture: Hans Bethe married the daughter of a theoretical physicist. In the American social stew, where science had become an upward pathway for children of the immigrant poor, whatever husbands and wives might be assumed to share, it was not necessarily a background in the academy. Feynman, alone anyway in the distant reaches of much of his work, seemed to date only women of obvious beauty, often blondes, sometimes heavily made-up and provocatively dressed—or so it seemed to some of the women he did not date. He hardly seemed interested in professional companionship from the women he chased, try though they might to offer it. “I’m learning more everyday about physics and realizing that there is just reams more to learn,” one of his lovers wrote. “Somehow the field of physics has a fatal fascination for me.” She suspected, though, that he had already moved on to someone else. She and all her successors shared an unforgivable handicap, and some of them guessed it: They were not Arline Greenbaum, Feynman’s Juliet, the one perfect love, the girl who had died before the mundane, domestic, day-today, year-to-year realities of ordinary life could have time to add a tempering color and tone to the romantic ideal.
Every so often Feynman would feel the urge to bring a measure of rationality to his relations with women. He loved to work out the rules, to find the systems. He tired of the susurrus of promises, flattery, cajoling. He hated having to apologize. He turned Arline’s favorite principle to a new purpose: “It seems to me that you go to lots of trouble to be sure the girl doesn’t think ill of you,” he wrote in a note to himself after one emotionally messy encounter.
WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT SHE
THINKS
? It is all right to care whether you hurt her or not—just do your best, (if you insist) on trying not to—then if the fact is that you are O.K., don’t bother to try to argue otherwise or try to get her to tell you you are wonderful… . Further, if you are selfish & look only to your physical pleasure—don’t try to convince yourself otherwise—or rather—don’t try to explain it to her or convince her otherwise.
In his favorite bar story he gradually deduces the procedural machinery of a bar: women flirt with the customers, the customers buy them drinks, the women move on. “How is it possible,” he would say, “that an intelligent guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?” He is such a neophyte in a bar, such a naïve outside-the-experience anthropologist, that even his education in how to order a Black and White with water on the side holds interest. He watches as bar girls goad him to buy champagne cocktails. In retaliation he learns a new set of procedures. The main rule is to treat the women with disrespect. It is psychological warfare. “You are worse than a whore,” he tells someone whom he has bought sandwiches and coffee for $1.10. His reward: she sleeps with him and repays him for the sandwiches, too.
All’s fair.
Feynman told these very stories to the women he dated. Despite their too-good-to-be-true quality, they were convincing and funny. No one ever caught him in a lie. Like many people who discover that storytelling is a talent—that they can hold an audience, focus a roomful of eyes—he honed his repertoire, never caring whether the crowd included people who had heard a story before. Nor, mostly, did they care. With his stories, his laughter, his dancing, his ability when alone with another person to concentrate his attention absolutely, he was intensely attractive to women. This despite the central coldness he held so close—this noetic Casanova. They suffered, sometimes, enormous pain. A second woman told him euphemistically that she had had an abortion: “The whole thing is horrible, cruel and wretched, and happens about once in two million… . I’m sure you never dreamt that any harm would come of such a sudden urge (shall we say, the ‘shortest part’ of an urge) but as I mentioned before the innocent have to pay, etc. etc.” Later she asked him to forgive the mean things she had said.
They almost always did forgive him. They loved to recite his virtues. A catalog that one woman set down on paper:
1. Handsome (could be)
2. clever (he thinks)
3. tall (very)
4. well dressed (trim)
5. a dancer (From a whore in Mexico City)
6. a drummer (whow!)
7. personality plus (oh boy!)
8. smart (putting it mild)
9. conversation (good)
10. sweet (sometimes)
On professional trips overseas he seduced women so regularly that his hosts knew he expected them to make introductions. In London he would meet Pauline or Betty, in Paris Isabelle or Marina, in Amsterdam Marika or Genny. He would see a woman for days and then file her farewell letter with the others:
My love for you is so great that I’m sure it would have brought us both a wealth of happiness … please always remember, when in the evening of your life … that somewhere in the world there is me and that I love you. For I shall always remember you because you are the only person that I have felt at complete ease and sympathy with.
There were so many attitudes a woman could assume for a short-term love affair. His lovers would warn him jovially not to break too many hearts, or they would wish him luck with all his projects “be they blonde or mathematical—or physical!” They would hint that they might appear on his doorstep—that his “
sorcière
” might not know the way to the moon and stars but could find the USA—or implore, “concerning your work hurry up to find an atomic broom which could fly from Europe to California in a couple of hours.” They would accuse him of preferring his own company—of a “Narcissus-of-the-mind complex.” They would wonder aloud what home really meant to him—was he not a little lonely, after all?
He was. His friends refused to understand why he finally chose to settle down with Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas, who had met him in a Cornell cafeteria and pursued him—they said cattily—all the way to Pasadena and finally accepted his proposal by mail from Rio de Janeiro. They considered her a platinum blonde (“the girl with the cellophane hair” was one unkind nickname that floated behind Feynman’s back) who wore white high heels and tight white shorts to picnics. They thought she was older than he was (the age difference was actually just a few months). Even before they married, they quarreled by mail about how much they should spend on interior furnishings and how he looked in old clothes. She made clear that she did not usually think scientists were much fun. She had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles—that was exotic enough to interest him. While he was in Brazil, she taught courses at Michigan State University in the History of Furniture and Institutional Interiors, mainly to men pursuing careers in hotel or restaurant management. “The pattern is that the girl who teaches this course usually marries one of those characters,” she told him.
They married as soon as he returned from Brazil, in June 1952, and they honeymooned in Mexico and Guatemala, where they ran up and down Mayan pyramids. He made her laugh, but he also frightened her with what she decided was a violent temper. She did not know what to think when, riding down a Mexican highway, she complained that the car’s sun flap was annoying her, and he pulled out a screwdriver and repaired it, with both hands off the wheel. She gave his friends the impression that she did not altogether appreciate him. She wanted him to dress better; they discovered that they could tell whether she was near by looking to see whether he was wearing a necktie. She nagged him, they thought. She liked to tell people that he was not “evolved” to the point of appreciating music and that sometimes she thought she was married to an uneducated man with a Ph.D.
They moved from Feynman’s bungalow apartment near campus to a larger place in Altadena, just across Pasadena’s northern border. She resisted socializing with other physicists. Once he missed a chance to catch Niels Bohr while he was in Pasadena briefly; as he and Mary Lou were sitting down to dinner, she said that she probably should have told him, but someone had invited them over that evening to see an old bore. Politically she was an extreme conservative, unlike most of Feynman’s colleagues, and as the Oppenheimer security hearings began, she irritated Feynman by saying, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” He, too, voted Republican, at least for a while. Divorce was inevitable—Feynman realized early that they should not have children, he confided in his sister—but it was nearly four years before they finally separated.
By agreement he confessed to Extreme Cruelty—
has wilfully, wrongfully, and without provocation, justification or excuse whatsoever inflicted grievous physical and mental suffering … ; plaintiff has suffered great physical pain and grievous mental suffering, and has suffered physical nervous shock to the extent that further married life between plaintiff and defendant has been rendered impossible.
He agreed to a circumscribed alimony, a total of ten thousand dollars over the next three years. She kept their 1950 Oldsmobile and all their household furniture. He kept their 1951 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, his scientific books, “All Drums and Percussion Instruments,” and a set of dishes that his mother had given him. The divorce had a fleeting life in the national press—not because Feynman was a celebrity, but because columnists and cartoonists could not overlook the nature of the extreme cruelty: Prof Plays Bongos, Does Calculus in Bed. “The drums made terrific noise,” his wife had testified. And: “He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens… . He did calculus while driving his car, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night.”
One day near Thanksgiving 1954, as Southern California’s winter neared with no discernible change of season, the smog had rolled up from Los Angeles toward the northern hills that cradled Pasadena, and for a moment their shared discontents had become too much. Feynman wrote to Bethe begging for his old job back. His eyes smarted from the smog; Mary Lou was complaining that she could not see the beautiful colors of the trees. He said he would take any salary—he surrendered unconditionally.
Soon afterward, someone rushed up to him with news of a discovery by Walter Baade, an astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory up in the San Gabriel Mountains, demonstrating that the stars of the distant universe were several times older than anyone had established before. Caltech in the fifties was becoming an international center of cosmological discovery. The same day, a young microbiologist told him of a discovery he had made, confirming the fundamental irreducibility of the DNA molecule as bacteria divide and divide again. With Linus Pauling and Max Delbrück on hand, Caltech had some of the leading lights of molecular genetics as the field was undergoing its sensational birth. Meanwhile, although Bethe had been thrilled by Feynman’s letter, he had to tell him that the most Cornell could offer on the spot was a temporary appointment.
Feynman changed his mind again. That same fall, Enrico Fermi died, and the University of Chicago decided to do whatever was necessary to hire Feynman. Its dean of the Division of Physical Sciences, Walter Bartky, and a younger physicist, Marvin Goldberger, later to become president of Caltech, traveled westward on the Super Chief—Bartky was afraid to fly—and took a taxi directly from the railway station to Feynman’s house. He refused to consider their proposition, and he begged them not even to tell him how much money they were offering. He was worried, he said, that Mary Lou would hear the amount and insist on moving. He had decided. He was going to stay at Caltech.
Where next, in the newly illuminated quantum world?
Feynman had reached maturity at a moment when the community of theoretical physicists shared a great unsolved problem, such a weighty knot that the enterprise could scarcely move forward until it was untied or cut. Now that quantum electrodynamics had been solved, no single problem seemed as universally compelling. Most theoretical physicists turned convoy fashion toward the smaller atomic distances and smaller time scales at which new particles appeared. They were driven in part by the logic of the past century’s history: each new step inward toward the atom’s core had brought not just new revelations but also a new simplification. The periodic table of elements had once served as a powerful unifying scheme; now it seemed more like a taxonomical catalog, itself unified by the deeper principles revealed by the quest inside the atom. A rhetoric was appearing in popular writing about physics by physicists and journalists: catchwords were
fundamental
and
constituents of matter
and
building blocks of nature
and
innermost sanctum of matter
. The phrases were seductive. Other kinds of science sought laws of nature, but a kind of priority seemed to belong to the search for elementary units.
