Easy Pieces: Reading Popular Books on Science

James Gleick: Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (1992)

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

- Richard Feynman [quoted in Genius, p.285]

Perhaps I should say: trying to read popular books on science. They tend to start off quite straightforwardly, then segue into some esoteric explanation of something mathematical, and after that I'm lost ...

But no-one gets anywhere without perseverance. The other day I bought a copy of the book above for a couple of bucks in a Salvation Army shop. I've been reading it ever since with steadily increasing interest. I don't really understand it, mind you. It still isn't quite clear to me exactly what Richard Feynman's "genius" consisted of. There's no obvious manifestation of it to be seen as yet, unlike Einstein's Theory of Relativity or Oppenheimer's atomic bomb. But at times I begin to think that even a scientific illiterate such as myself might be able to glimpse something of his achievements even at second-hand.

Richard Feynman: Six Easy Pieces: The Fundamentals of Physics Explained (1994)

A few years ago, I bought a copy of the book above (also second-hand, in an opportunity shop). The title proved to be a bit of a misnomer, as I can't say I found any of the pieces particularly easy. But, as I recall it, that was also the point of the film Five Easy Pieces - which is presumably what the two editors, Matthew Sands and Robert Leighton, were thinking of when they gave their book of selections from Feynman's introductory lectures that title.

Bob Rafelson, dir.: Five Easy Pieces (1970)

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William Blake: Newton (1795)

John Maynard Keynes ... spoke of Newton as "this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe ... that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind - Copernicus and Faustus in one. Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to this esoteric brotherhood."

- Freeman Dyson [quoted in Genius, p.317]

I suppose that the question I'm asking myself here is a fairly obvious one. Why do I keep on battering my head against the brick wall of books such as these? I clearly lack the background in mathematics - let alone physics - to make sense of them, and yet there's something attractive in the notion that a few ideas, a few precious gleams of knowledge might get through the barrier of my resolutely humanist education and give me a glimpse of what the universe is all about.

Banesh Hoffmann: The Strange Story of the Quantum (1947)

Some of the blame must be laid at the door of Banesh Hoffmann's The Strange Story of the Quantum. There's a tedious habit among us literary folk to try to sum up Einstein's famous theories as something along the lines of "everything is relative" - or (even worse) to make strained analogies between Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the perilous lack of convictions underlying modern thought.

And as for all the stupid things we've said at one time or another about Schrödinger's cat! Don't get me started ...

How We Misunderstood Schrödinger’s Cat

Back in the days before Wikipedia, though, it wasn't so easy to get quick summaries of what such pat formulae really meant. Hoffmann's Strange Story of the Quantum gave me my first real glimpse into how these discoveries had actually been made, without all the clichés. I suppose, in a sense, I've been looking for a sequel as good as that ever since.

Rudolf Thiel: And There Was Light: The Discovery of the Universe (1958)

Way before that, though, I encountered a copy of the book above in the Rangitoto College Library. Its admittedly somewhat simplistic account of the history of astronomy fascinated me, and it wasn't long before I found myself reading Arthur Koestler's rather more testing exploration of the same territory, The Sleepwalkers:

Arthur Koestler: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1958)

Like most of Koestler's work, it's suffered a bit of an eclipse in recent times. There are certainly many eccentricities in his account of the birth of modern cosmology. His decision to end with Newton, on the rather flimsy pretext that we still inhabit an essentially Newtonian universe, is particularly frustrating.

What's great about the book is its engagé and even, at times, polemic tone. Koestler argues his case passionately, and he makes it clear that sticking to the comfortable concensus of opinion is not an option. He follows the evidence where it leads him - a strong encouragement to his readers to do the same. I've read the book so many times I practically know it by heart, but the lengthy account of his hero Kepler's life and times still gives me a thrill after all these years.

Andrew Hodges: Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (1958)

One of the advantages of having been a Sci-fi fan since my early teens is that boffin extraordinaire Alan Turing was well known to me long before the details of his wartime service at Bletchley Park were revealed. The "Turing test" was a frequent subject of discussion in the SF magazines I read, and his vital part in the creation of modern computers was common knowledge to us Sci-fi mavens long before the name "Enigma" ever strayed into print.

And, like everyone else, I stumbled through the pages of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach with increasing bewilderment - until, that is, I made the reluctant decision to skip the pages of exercises and simply try to follow the text.

Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1999)

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Leonardo da Vinci: Vitruvian Man (c.1490)

Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has gone stale, which men of old have spoken.

- Khakheperressenb, an Ancient Egyptian scribe [quoted in Genius, p.326]

Do I feel better for having read all these books? Not particularly. They mostly just succeeded in underlining for me the gulf between my kind of knowledge and the mathematical, scientific kind.

At least I've ended up knowing a bit more about what I don't know, though. I get enough from them to see the bankruptcy of the simplified explanations we tend to rely on. So in that sense I do feel a bit better educated.

Each one I pick up still gives me a shiver of hope, however. As Liza Minnelli once put it: "Maybe this time ..." In any case, it seems to be enough to keep me filling in these gaps in - at the very least - my knowledge of the history of science.

Minnellian Woman: Cabaret (1972)

I wonder, too, if any of this fascination has manifested itself in my own work? My first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno, for instance, concludes with the diagram below - chosen, I suppose, as a kind of distorted mirror-image of Da Vinci's Vitruvian man.

The novel itself is ordered according to a mad numerological scheme, inspired principally by the Memory Palaces described in Frances Yates' classic account The Art of Memory (1966). I suppose that the simultaneous fascination and distrust I feel for such ways of ordering the mind has been influenced also, by all this reading about modern science: its apparently chaotic and arbitrary nature, combined with its inability to find a way out of its dialectic structures, are continually belied by the practical success its towering edifices of thought repeatedly achieve in the (so-called) "real world".

What else can a poor humanist do, under such circumstances, than construct a Don Quixote-like parody of the kinds of rabbit-hole thinking which have become more and more prevalent over the past 25 years?

Jack Ross: Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000)

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NAASP: Stars

Cosmology, Mathematics & Physics

1. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)
2. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
3. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
4. Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
5. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
6. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
7. Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945- )
8. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
9. Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
10. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)
11. Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)
12. Alan Turing (1912-1954)
13. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

---

Filippo [Giordano] Bruno (1548-1600)


1. Bruno, Giordano. Candelaio. Ed. Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti. Collezione di Teatro, 59. 1964. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1981.


2. [Bruno, Giordano. ‘La Cena de le Ceneri’. 1584. In Opere Italiani. Volume 1: Dialoghi Metafisici. Ed. Giovanni Gentile. 3 vols. 1907-9. Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1907. 1-126, 415-17. / ‘De Gli Eroici Furori’. 1585. In Opere Italiani. Volume 2: Dialoghi Morali. Ed. Giovanni Gentile. 3 vols. 1907-9. Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1908. xii-xix, 377, 408, 434. / Firpo, Luigi. Il Proceso di Giordano Bruno. Quaderni della Rivista Storica Italiana, 1. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1949. 16-17, 46-51, 54-61, 104-5, 120. / Frigerio, Maurilio. ‘Cronologia.’ In Invito al Pensiero di Giordano Bruno. Milano: Gruppo Ugo Mursia Editore S.p.A, 1991. 5-17.]


3. Bruno, Giordano. La Cena de le Ceneri: The Ash Wednesday Supper. 1584. Ed. & Trans. Edward A. Gosselin & Lawrence S. Lerner. 1977. Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts, 4, 59. Toronto: University Of Toronto Press, 1995.


4. Bossy, John. Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. 1991. London: Vintage , 1992.


5. Filippini, Serge. The Man in Flames. 1990. Trans. Liz Nash. Dedalus Europe 1999. Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus Ltd., 1999.


6. Fulin, R., ed. Giordano Bruno a Venezia: Documenti inediti tratti dal Veneto Archivio Generale. Nobilissime Nozze: Comello - Totto. Venezia: Tip. Editrice Antonelli, 1864.


Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)


7. Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. 2004. Arrow Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2005.


8. Rosen, Edward, trans. Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus / The Letter against Werner / The Narratio Prima of Rheticus. Second Edition, Revised with an Annotated Copernicus Bibliography, 1939-1958. 1939. New York: Dover Publications, 1959.


Albert Einstein (1879-1955)


9. Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. A Popular Exposition. 1916. Trans. Robert W. Lawson. 1920. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1977.


10. Bodanis, David. E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. Macmillan. London: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2000.


Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)


11. Feynman, Richard P. Six Easy Pieces. 1995. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.


12. Gleick, James. Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics. 1992. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 2000.


Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)


13. Santillana, Giorgio de. The Crime of Galileo. 1955. Time Reading Program Special Edition. 1962. Alexamdria, Virginia: Time Life Books Inc., 1981.


14. Sobel, Dava. Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.


Stephen William Hawking (1942-2018)


15. Hawking, Stephen. The Illustrated A Brief History of Time: Updated & Expanded Edition. 1988. A Labyrinth Book. London: Bantam Press, 1996.


16. Hawking, Stephen. Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. London: Bantam Press, 1993.


Douglas Richard Hofstadter (1945- )


17. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.


18. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. 1985. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.


19. Hofstadter, Douglas R., & Daniel C. Dennett, ed. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.


Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)


20. Banville, John. The Revolutions Trilogy: Doctor Copernicus; Kepler; The Newton Letter. 1976, 1981, 1982. Picador. 2000. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2001.


21. Connor, James A. Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother. With Translation Assistance by Petra Sabin Jung. 2004. HarperSanFrancisco. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.


22. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Introduction by Herbert Butterfield. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1959.


Isaac Newton (1643-1727)


23. More, Louis Trenchard. Isaac Newton: A Biography, 1642-1727. 1934. New York: Dover Publications, 1962.


Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)


24. Bird, Kai, & Martin J. Sherman. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. 2005. London: Atlantic Books, 2009.


25. Monk, Ray. Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Jonathan Cape. London: Random House, 2012.


Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)


26. Campbell, John. Rutherford: Scientist Supreme. Christchurch: AAS Publications, 1999.


Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954)


27. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. 1983. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


28. Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by A. Square. Illustrations by the Author. 1884. Classic Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.


29. Casti, John L. Paradigms Lost: Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science. 1989. Avon Books. New York: The Hearst Corporation, 1990.


30. Crombie, A. C. Augustine to Galileo. Volume 1: Science in the Middle Ages, 5th – 13th Centuries. 1959. A Peregrine Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


31. Crombie, A. C. Augustine to Galileo. Volume 2: Science in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, 13th – 17th Centuries. 1959. A Peregrine Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


32. Duncan, David Ewing. The Calendar: The 5000-year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens – and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days. London: Fourth Estate, 1998.


33. Euclid. The Thirteen Books of the Elements / Archimedes. The Works, Including the Method / Apollonius of Perga. On Conic Sections / Nichomachus of Gerga. Introduction to Arithmetic. Trans. Thomas L. Heath, R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Martin L. D’Ooge. 1926 & 1939. Great Books of the Western World, 11. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.


34. Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos. 2004. London: Penguin, 2008.


35. Hoffmann, Banesh. The Strange Story of the Quantum. 1947. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.


36. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition. 1962. Introductory Essay by Ian Hacking. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2012.


37. Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. 1983. Rev. ed. 1998. Viking. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.


38. Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1934. Trans. by the author with Dr. Julius Feed & Ian Feed. 1959. Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2014.


39. Poundstone, William. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Doubleday, 1992.


40. Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.


41. Rucker, Rudy. The Fourth Dimension, and How to Get There. Foreword by Martin Gardner. Illustrations by David Povilaitis. 1985. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.


42. Segrè, Gino. Faust in Copenhagen: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age. 2007. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2008.


43. Singh, Simon. Fermat’s Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World’s Greatest Minds for 358 Years. Foreword by John Lynch. 1997. London: Fourth Estate, 2002.


44. Singh, Simon. Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It. 2004. London: Harper Perennial, 2005.


45. Teresi, Dick. Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - from the Babylonians to the Maya. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.


46. Thiel, Rudolf. And There was Light: The Discovery of the Universe. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston. London: Andre Deutsch, 1958.

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Erik Desmazières: The Library of Babel (1997)

Copernicus & Mallock: Two Bizarre Books

[Owen Gingerich: The Book Nobody Read (2004)]

[Tom Phillips: A Humument (1980 / 2012)]

Sometime around noon on the 5th of November, 1966, the artist Tom Phillips was poking around an old warehouse in London, looking for bargain books:

When we arrived at the racks of cheap and dusty books left over from house clearances I boasted to Ron [Kitaj] that if I took the first one that cost threepence I could make it serve a serious long-term project. My eye quickly chanced on a yellow book with the tempting title A Human Document. Looking inside we found it had the fateful price. 'If it's a dime,' said Ron, 'then that's your book: and I'm your witness.' ['Notes on A Humument,' p.370]

45 years and five editions later, A Humument stands as a curious monument to human ingenuity. "Energy worthy of a better cause," as my father might say. Or energy very sensibly employed, perhaps? Who can say ...

Phillips does goes out of his way to mention the interesting fact that the warehouse stood on "Peckham Rye, where William Blake saw his first angels", and it was (of course) Blake who once reminded us that energy is "eternal delight."

•

Sometime in October 1970, Historians of Science Jerry Ravetz and Owen Gingerich asked themselves whether (at the time or since) anyone had actually read Nicolaus Copernicus's ground-breaking text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex [Six books on the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres] (1543). The question was prompted by the rather bad review Arthur Koestler gave the book in his 1959 classic The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Koestler referred to Copernicus's book as an "all time worst seller" and "the book that nobody read." But was he right?

How can you actually tell if anyone read a book or not? A simple name on the fly-leaf is insufficient. I have lots of books in my collection which I've never read. Some of them are reference books which it's useful to have but which I'll never read cover to cover - others I'm been meaning to get to but haven't yet done so.

Nor is quoting from the book any kind of irrefutable proof. Plenty of people read the summaries and advertising copy for Copernicus's book, but did the do more than dip into its somewhat forbidding contents?

The answer (according to Gingerich) is marginal annotations. His conversation in York that Saturday evening in 1970 prompted him to look up a copy of the first edition at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. It turned out to be annotated from beginning to end, and thus suggested the interesting counter-question:

If it was read so rarely, why was the very next copy I chanced upon so full of evidence of a most perceptive reader, who had marked innumerable errors and who had worked his way through to the very end, even past the obscure material on planetary latitudes that brought up the rear of the four hundred page volume? [The Book Nobody Read, p.422]

And so began on what the blurb to his book calls "a thirty-year odyssey to examine every one of the hundreds of surviving copies of the original in order to prove [Koestler] wrong."

Once again, it sounds a rather unlikely way of spending one's time - fantastically arduous and demanding an almost insane level of precision in recording every detail of every copy (labour which eventually resulted in An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), to which The Book Nobody Read is a rather more lighthearted companion volume).

Along the way, Gingerich discovered a huge amount about the sixteenth-century scholarly networks, transcending religion and politics, which united the astronomers and mathematicians of the age, and which enabled them to copy and supplement each other's notes in the margins of copy after copy of De revolutionibus. Koestler's rather flippant and dismissive remark was proved not only to be "dead wrong" (as Gingerich puts it), but to mask a whole complex of fascinating (and hitherto undreamt-of) connections.

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[The Book Nobody Read]

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

1. Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. 2004. Arrow Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2005.
2. Rosen, Edward, trans. Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus / The Letter against Werner / The Narratio Prima of Rheticus. Second Edition, Revised with an Annotated Copernicus Bibliography, 1939-1958. 1939. New York: Dover Publications, 1959.
3. Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
4. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. 1959. Introduction by Herbert Butterfield. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1972.

[A Humument]

Tom Phillips (1937- )

1. Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. 1980. Fifth Edition. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2012.

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So what's my point in comparing these two projects? They both seem to have occupied roughly the same period of time: forty-odd years for Phillips, thirty-odd years for Gingerich. Both have as their central object the illumination / elucidation of a single book: in Gingerich's case a (famously unreadable) scientific classic, in Phillip's a (not very widely read) Victorian novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document (1892).

Of course in the one case Gingerich's labours could be said to have cast light on an obscure sector of intellectual history; whereas Phillips' indefatigable cutting and pasting and colouring casts light on nothing except the strange workings of his own mind.

Or do they? Surely the mere popularity of Phillips's book - in contradistinction to Mallock's, which failed miserably to equal the success of his earlier satirical novel The New Republic (1877) - tells us something about the spirit of our own age, our postmodern distrust of the sanctity of the text, our singular dedication to game-playing and chaos?

Both projects are equally crazy. I guess that's what I'd like to suggest to you. I know that Gingerich's comes accompanied with all the panoply of "hard" science - the graphs, the tables of analysis, the famous names of the past - but then Phillips doesn't lack those scholarly trappings either. The fascinating notes on his project reprinted at the back of his book refer to it as "'a Gesamtkunstwerk in small format'", though a "full Variorum Edition may remain a dream (or a posthumous project) since the wheel is still turning and the odd spark still flies off" [p.383].

Both books, Phillips' and Gingerich's, are in fact "Human Documents" of the most fascinating kind: they show the unexpected consequences of immersion in virtually any product of the human imagination. The fact that they're both consecrated to particular copies of a single book doe tend to endear them to bibliophiles such as myself, but one can easily see how the principle could be extended.

In his lifetime, as the caricature below suggests, Mallock had a hard time reconciling the conflicting claims of religion and science. it's hard to know if he would have been pleased to see one of his novels at the centre of so arbitrary an embellishment as A Humument, but I doubt that he would have failed to see the point. If we can have no clear idea in advance of the end results of our investigations, then it doesn't pay to reject any possible line of enquiry out-of-hand. This applies to Phillips' work every bit as much as Gingerich's.

['Spy': Is life worth living? (Vanity Fair, 1882)]

True, one might call Copernicus an intellectual giant, Mallock a dwarf, but it's salutary to remember that - during their respective lifetimes - the opposite was the case. Mallock was widely read and well regarded, while - to those very few who had heard of him - Copernicus was known only as an obscure cleric in a small town on Poland's Baltic coast, who exhibited the strange quirk of devoting his spare time to celestial mechanics.

One book I found lurking in the back of a second-hand shop in Whangarei; the other was lent to me by inveterate poet and text-experimenter Richard Taylor. I leave it to you to guess which was which.

[Nicolaus Copernicus (Toruń, 1580)]

Oh, and last but not least: a Happy New Year to you all ...

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Finds: Thoroughly Munted

Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. 1913. Trans. Anne Hyde Greet.
Foreword by Warren Ramsey. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

It's funny when you go snooping around in the ripped old paperbacks in the back of a bookshop (in this case, Jason Books on High Street, long before it came up in the world and went boutique). You see something there which hardly even seems to merit picking up - in this case a backless wodge of papers with a pasted spine and no title-page - which turns out to be one of the finds of your life.

I see from the inscription above that it was on the 5th September, 1979, some 30-odd years ago, and the book in question was Apollinaire's Alcools - or, rather, a complete dual-text translation of the same, which some iconoclast had ripped apart and then deposited among the other trash to be pulped. A price of 15 cents hardly seemed exorbitant even at the time, especially when I think of the amount of time I've spent leafing through those pages, reading and rereading those amazing poems: "Zone", "Le Pont Mirabeau" - above all, "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé":

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait a
Mon amour vint a ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

More than a half-century has passed since the manuscript beginning with these lines was fished out of limbo, read and read again, and a dazzled magazine editor called across the room that here, at last, was a first-rate poem. A reader of the sixties might find other terms in which to express his approval, though some of Paul Léautaud's are still serviceable: "I read, read twice, three times, was carried away, dazed, delighted, deeply moved. Such melancholy, such evocative tone, such bohemianism, such rangings of the mind, and that faintly gypsy air and the total absence of that abomination of ordinary verse, la rime riche ... "

- Warren Ramsay, "Foreword"

I'm glad that that front page of the foreword hadn't gone the way of the title-page and all the other prelims (including the copyright page). That idea of an editor picking up the poem for the first time, reading it, and immediately recognising genius was, I suspect, the main reason I persevered through all the strange pages of Apollinaire's book. I'd never read poetry like this, had no frame of reference to set it in - for a while, it seemed to me as if I'd never read poetry at all before this, my discovery of the Modern.

Even as first published in that distant spring of 1909 (when it lacked two stanzas of the Zaparogian Cossacks' horrendous letter and, unlike the more characteristic final version, was punctuated), "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" has the authority of the more mature Apollinaire, the vibrancy of a modern poet speaking in his own voice ...

I don't quite know why anyone would take what must have been a fairly new book (Anne Hyde Greet's version of Alcools was published in 1966, a mere ten years before I found it in those back shelves in Auckland) and dismember it like that. Had the poet displeased them somehow? Perhaps that word scrawled on the back cover holds some clue, like the "CROATOAN" found carved on a tree by the lost settlers of Roanoke Island: "scenarios", it appears to read. But what scenarios, when and where?

I doubt I'll ever know.

•

Arthur Koestler. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937.
Abridged ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY ARTHUR KOESTLER
TRANSLATED BY TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

On February 8th, 1937, six months after the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, the troops of General Franco entered Malaga. The author, then a war correspondent for an English Liberal newspaper, had remained in the besieged town after its evacuation by the Republican army. On the day after the entry of the conquering troops, he was arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. For four months he was kept in solitary confinement, witnessing the executions of his fellow prisoners and awaiting his own. He kept a diary in his cell, which he succeeded in smuggling out when released; this diary forms the main part of Dialogue with Death.

Under pressure of world-wide protests General Franco agreed that Koestler should be exchanged for a prisoner of the Republican Government. He was released in May 1937. Dialogue with Death was first published in January 1938, as the second part of Spanish Testament. The original edition, with an introduction by the Duchess of Atholl, contained a number of chapters dealing with political and military aspects of the Civil War, which was then still in progress. Since then it has become, in the words of the New Statesman and Nation, a book "which should rank among British classics."

This rather scruffy looking Penguin I found in the shelves of an old second-hand furniture shop which used to nestle in the heart of the Mairangi Bay CBD, between Max Paterson's stationers and the greengrocer's shop. It was run by a lady called Ruth Thorne, who maintained a couple of bays full of battered books at bargain prices.

This one probably set me back ten or twenty cents, in July 1979, a couple of months before I bought the Apollinaire. It had an almost equally great influence on me, though.

Those 1940s Penguins seem so strange and exotic to us now, but it's worth remembering that they just looked junky at the time. It was the content of the book that interested me, the strange intense account that Koestler gave of his experiences in a death-cell during the Spanish Civil War. I'd already read his classic novel about the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon, at the recommendation of our Russian teacher, Eddie Meijers, but it was this coverless paperback which had the stronger effect on me, I think. Something about the way he wrote was so vivid and immediate - I guess I've been trying to find something like it ever since.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Translated by
TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

PENGUIN BOOKS
HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND
300 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK U.S.A.

Published in 1938 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Abridged edition published in Penguin Books Feb. 1942
Reprinted in Penguin Books March 1943

FOREWORD

NONE of the characters in this book is fictitious; most of them are dead by now.

To die - even in the service of an impersonal cause - is always a personal and intimate affair. Thus it was almost inevitable that these pages, written for the most part, in the actual expectancy and fear of death, should bear a private character. There are, in the author's opinion, two reasons which justify their publication.

In the first place, the things which go on inside a condemned man's head have a certain psychological interest. Professional writers have rarely had an opportunity of studying these processes in the first person singular. I have tried to present them as frankly and concisely as I could. The main difficulty was the temptation to cut a good figure; I hope that the reader will agree that I have succeeded in overcoming this.

In the second place, I believe that wars, in particular civil wars, consist of only ten per cent action and of ninety per cent passive suffering. Thus this account of the hermetically sealed Andalusian mortuaries may perhaps bring closer to the reader the nature of Civil War than descriptions of battles.

I dedicate it to my friend Nicolas, an obscure little soldier of the Spanish Republic, who on April 14th, 1937, on the sixth birthday of that Republic, was shot dead in the prison of Seville.

A.K.

THE AUTHOR

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, a Hungarian subject, and studied engineering and psychology respectively at the Technische Hoschschule and the University of Vienna. He became a journalist at the age of 21,lived as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Paris and Moscow, travelled in Soviet Central Asia and in the Arctic on board the Graf Zeppelin. While correspondent of the News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by General Franco's troops and was imprisoned for having denounced, in the British Press, German and Italian intervention on the Nationalist side.

In 1938 he abandoned journalism to take up novel-writing. His works include The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon (fiction), Scum of the Earth, which relates the author's experiences during the French collapse, and Spanish Testament, of which Dialogue with Death is an improved version. Koestler is now serving as a private in the British Army.

Of course the word "abridged" always acts on me like a red rag on a bull. I always want the book, the whole book and nothing but the book.

As I read more about Koestler, though, I began to understand the curious politics behind these various versions of his Spanish civil war memoir, the strange fusion of communists propaganda and personal testimony in the original version (which I found some years later in a pile of old Gollancz Left Book Club editions:

Koestler, Arthur. Spanish Testament. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. Left Book Club Edition. London: Gollancz, 1937.

Eventually I even discovered a third version of the book, from the "Danube Edition" of his collected works, which began to appear in the 1960s. There's something about that battered old Penguin that seems almost to embody history for me, though.

The fact that it had been printed a mere six years after the events described in it gave me a powerful sense of their reality, their tangible weight and gravity.

I've never been able to ignore those ripped and munted books at the backs of bookshops ever since. How can you know what treasures might be sitting there, glowing radioactive in the dark?

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937. Abridged ed., 1942. Rev. Danube ed., 1966. London: Papermac, 1983.