Vintage Reading (12 page)

De Kruif’s fierce attachment to his subjects mirrors that of the scientists themselves for their work. Pasteur, his theories questioned by posthumously published research, rises indignantly on the floor of the French Academy of Medicine to denounce his enemies, then runs off to perform the exquisite experiment that proves him right after all.

Elie Metchnikoff, a morphine addict inclined to periodic suicide attempts, goes off to Sicily with his young bride. There, he examines starfish larvae under the microscope, sees microscopic organisms eating other microscopic organisms - and gives the rest of his scientific life over to the holy grail of the “phagocytes” he’s discovered and named, and the immunity to disease they confer.

De Kruif’s prose, it must be said, too often degenerates into an effervescent cutesiness that to some readers will seem like pandering. Vexatious, too, are certain mannerisms of style and certain pet phrases—like “wee beasts” and “little animals” to describe microorganisms, and words like “gorgeous” to describe an elegant experiment, or “stuff” for a microbial stew. For de Kruif, “flashes of lightning” are forever illuminating a scientist’s way.

But such stage-lit prose arises from the author’s wish to illuminate dramatically a terrain that might otherwise be mistaken for being alien, stark,
and gray. De Kruif knows it’s not. When he describes experiments (with impressive clarity), we await their outcome with real eagerness. We are there as Ehrlich finds his “magic bullet” ...as Lazzaro Spallanzani conceives a way to isolate a single microorganism and then, under the microscope, sees it split in two before him.

“Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man named Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious new world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings, some ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many of them more important to mankind than any continent or archipelago.”

Thus, with the stylistic excess that is its hallmark,
Microbe Hunters
begins.

But doesn’t it make you want to read it?

____________

By Marcus Tullius Cicero
First appeared between 60 and 44 B.C.

Must an orator possess wide knowledge of many fields? Or can he simply collect odd scraps of information as needed and weave them, through his skill, into a spellbinding oration?

One day in 91 B.C., leading orators of the day met at a villa in Tusculum outside Rome to ponder that question. Crassus, the foremost public speaker of his time, was there. So was his friend Marcus Antonius, grandfather of the Mark Antony of “Friends, Romans, countrymen...” fame, and a speaker known for his easy, seemingly offhand delivery. Their debate, in the presence of younger colleagues, comes down to us today in Cicero’s “On the Orator.”

In those days, orators were regarded more highly than they are today, when we are apt to dismiss them as demagogic manipulators of people and language. At the time of the Roman republic, however, the orator was seen more as statesman than politician. And Cicero, a contemporary (and foe) of Julius Caesar, defender of Rome against the Catiline conspiracy, was the most distinguished master of Latin prose of all. For him, the art of the orator was beyond all others.

Could one master it without mastering the whole of human knowledge? No, Cicero has Crassus saying, “Unless the speaker grasps and understands what he is talking about, his speech will be worthless.” Not so, replies Antonius; mastery of specialized knowledge is “entirely unconnected with the proper function and business of an orator.”

In fact, Antonius never said any such thing. Nor did he, Crassus, and the others meet at Tusculum that day in 91 B.C. Rather, the semi-fictional gathering was Cicero’s way of making accessible a subject otherwise abstract
and difficult. In other writings, Cicero applied the same device to consider, for example, friendship (“Laelius”) and moral goodness (“Discussions at Tusculum”).

Cicero was himself no heavyweight thinker. But he was good enough a middle-weight to enjoy the intellectual company of the Greek philosophers of three centuries before. In effect, he translated the classical Greek mind, for which philosophy was as natural as breathing, into terms the Roman mind, for which it was not, could understand. He was a popularizer, and a measure of his success is that students of the classics have learned much of what they know about Greek thought through him.

But Cicero’s popularizing bent is weakness as well as strength. For one senses that this is picked-over intellectual territory—as indeed it was by the first century before Christ. The ideas are no longer fresh, spontaneous, raw, and unfinished. Rather, it’s as if Cicero had catalogued the main lines of thought that had come down to him, smoothed over the sharp edges and assembled them all in a neat package, like a college outline.

Of course it’s all charmingly done. Cicero was no noisy ideologue, convinced of the rightness of his views and the wrongness of all others. Rather, he was of genuinely eclectic temperament, at home with all ideas, wedded to none, committed only to their free interplay: Antonius demolishes the views of his opponent, Crassus, but only after paying flattering homage to them.

At one point, the two speak gratefully of at last being free of the press of public business and having time for matters of the intellect. Who today, one wonders, derives such delight in employing leisure so profitably?

A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth
for Western Civilization

____________

By Margaret Mead
First published in 1928

Back in 1925, before jet planes shrank the world, it took the young Margaret Mead two weeks to reach her island in the south Pacific. The 23- year-old anthropologist remained on Tau, in the Manu’a archipelago, for nine months, closely observing village life, in particular that of its girls and young women.

Then, in 1928, appeared
Coming of Age in Samoa,
the book based on her research, and critics of the day realized it was more than just another dry anthropological treatise. “Warmly human, yet never sentimental, frank with the clean, clear frankness of the scientist,” wrote one. For another, it was “an extraordinarily brilliant and, so far as I am aware, unique piece of work.”

What Mead was doing, she explained, was a kind of experiment, using the natural laboratory furnished by a primitive island culture: Were the
sturm und drang
of the teenage years, their nervousness, tumult, and rebellion, inevitable? “Were these difficulties due to being adolescent,” Mead wondered, “or to being adolescent in America?” Any society in which this familiar teenage pathology were absent, she suggested, would show it was nurture that was responsible, not nature.

But for 12 chapters, as Mead immerses her readers in the life of the island, this overarching question recedes into the background: We rise to the sound of cocks crowing, and to “the insistent roar of the reef.” We watch boys going off to fish in their dug-out canoes, girls looking after the smaller children, or weaving mats. We encounter the odd, floating, ever-permeable Samoan household where, faced with even a breath of discontent, one just moves out
of one thatched hut and into another. We’re treated to a chapter on dance, the one area of island life where excellence is not discouraged in the name of easy getting-along. Finally, after dark, it’s “under the palm trees,” the indigenous euphemism for clandestine lovers not so clandestinely coupling.

Occasionally, this broad survey of an irresistibly charming culture reads like the anthropology, the science, it is: “Obligations either to give general assistance or to give specific traditionally required service, as in a marriage or at a birth, fellow relationship lines, not household lines.” Such detached academic stuff, while
not
typical, suggests that Mead didn’t completely bridge the gap to “popular” writing, at least by today’s standards.

Then comes Chapter 13. Abruptly, what had been merely interesting begins to glow with brilliance. It’s as if the author had been holding back, husbanding her energy, like a baseball pitcher lazily warming up before reaching back for the first high, hard one over the plate. “For many chapters,” she writes, “we have followed the lives of Samoan girls, watched them change from babies to baby-tenders, learn to make the oven and weave fine mats, forsake the life of the gang to become more active members of the household, defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible, finally marry and settle down to rearing children who will repeat the same cycle.”

Now she returns, almost triumphantly, and with liberated energies, to her original question, almost forgotten while we’ve lolled about the pretty Pacific paradise:
Is the pathology of adolescence inevitable, or just an artifact of Western civilization
? Well, she replies, if her carefree, well-adjusted Samoan girls are any measure, it’s
not
inevitable.

Mead observes that the American teenager, unlike the Samoan, is faced with a plethora of choice, which she calls “the forerunner of conflict.” In a delightful parody, she imagines an adolescent whose father might be “Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaler, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and high tariff,” and so on—versus other family members whose values and lifestyles differ in every conceivable way from his, and from each other. How, then, is the poor, confused child to pick among them? No wonder she’s nervous and tense.

Then, too, Samoa is a more forgiving society than ours, Mead notes—a place where a “low-grade moron would not be hopelessly handicapped,” and where those afflicted with “slight nervous instability” can get along just fine.

But these represent just a sample of her insights. The point is, suddenly it’s
Western
society that swings under her magnifying lens—nervous, chaotic, furiously paced. Moreover, the three quarters of a century since her work first appeared have left it even more so, the lessons it might draw from the gentle Samoans all the more telling.

____________

By Henry Beston
First published in 1928

“East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold.”

This is Cape Cod, and one September many years ago, the naturalist Henry Beston took up residence there, at its outermost edge, in a two-room cottage he’d designed and had built on Eastham Beach, facing the North Atlantic. To the south lay only dune. His sole neighbors were coast guardsmen at the Nauset lighthouse a couple of miles north. Twice a week, a friend took him into town for groceries. For drinking water, he drove a well directly down through the sand ... There, on that solitary dune, his little house “faced the four corners of the world.” There, Beston resolved to live a whole year, alone, and record the life of wind, sea, marsh, and dune he saw there.

The Outermost House
, Beston’s record of that year, has been called “a classic of American nature writing.” In 1964, the Governor of Massachusetts and other dignitaries met on the Cape Cod beach to dedicate a plaque to the cabin in which it was written. The years since have seen Outermost House washed away. They have also, I think, weakened readers’ tolerance for the kind of effusively lyrical language in which the book that bears its name was written.

“The beach at night has a voice all its own,” Beston writes, “a sound in
fullest harmony with its spirit and mood - with its little dry noise of sand forever moving, with its solemn, overspilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like a lamp from the high heavens—and that sound the piping of a bird ...”

Now this is wonderful stuff, make no mistake.
But the whole book is written like that
- rhapsodic, swooning, dripping with nature’s beauty; and 222 pages of it, with virtually no retreat to anything plainer, sometimes deflects attention away from the natural wonders the author would evoke, and onto itself. “The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of the sea, winter and storm, the splendour of autumn and the holiness of spring—all these were part of the great beach.”

Is there a trace of smugness in all this? Does it read as much like a religious tract, a fervid paean to Nature, as a calm, quiet vision of the natural world? Is the author, like a lovesick teenager, almost
too
consumed by passion?

How, one wonders, could so spartan and so elemental a life as Beston lived for a year on that lonely beach produce prose so mannered and overwrought?

On the other hand
, something in the mad intensity and joy of the author’s solitary life is compelling, and that will, for many readers, carry the day. It matters so much to him, we sense— the terns floating overhead, the crickets racing off into the dune grass, the irresistible heaving of the sea - that in the end it matters to us. Maybe it
is
overdone, too full of florid sentiments and alliterative lushness ... But he is only a man, a writer, and the ultimate power and truth of the natural world he describes transcends his excesses. So that almost despite himself, Beston wins: He’s made you care.

____________

By Francis F. Beirne
First published in 1951