The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  General relativity is a theory about gravity and, like special relativity, a theory about nature on the cosmic scale beyond everyday experience. J. J. Thomson was lukewarm about the idea, but Ernest Rutherford liked the theory so much that he said even if it wasn’t true, it was a beautiful work of art.37 Part of that beauty was that Einstein’s theory could be tested. Certain deductions followed from the equations. One was that light should bend as it approaches large objects. Another was that the universe cannot be a static entity – it has to be either contracting or expanding. Einstein didn’t like this idea – he thought the universe was static – and he invented a correction so he could continue to think so. He later described this correction as ‘the biggest blunder of my career,’ for, as we shall see, both predictions of the general theory were later supported by experimentation – and in the most dramatic circumstances. Rutherford had it right; relativity was a most beautiful theory.38

  The other physicist who produced a major advance in scientific understanding in that summer of 1913 could not have been more different from Einstein. Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Dane and an exceptional athlete. He played soccer for Copenhagen University; he loved skiing, bicycling, and sailing. He was ‘unbeatable’ at table tennis, and undoubtedly one of the most brilliant men of the century. C. P. Snow described him as tall with ‘an enormous, domed head,’ with a long, heavy jaw and big hands. He had a shock of unruly, combed-back hair and spoke with a soft voice, ‘not much above a whisper.’ All his life, Bohr talked so quietly that people strained to hear him. Snow also found him to be ‘a talker as hard to get to the point as Henry James in his later years.’39

  This extraordinary man came from a civilised, scientific family – his father was a professor of physiology, his brother was a mathematician, and all were widely read in four languages, as well as in the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Bohr’s early work was on the surface tension of water, but he then switched to radioactivity, which was the main reason that drew him to Rutherford, and England, in 1911. He studied first in Cambridge but moved to Manchester after he heard Rutherford speak at a dinner at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. At that time, although Rutherford’s theory of the atom was widely accepted by physicists, there were serious problems with it, the most worrying of which was the predicted instability of the atom – no one could see why electrons didn’t just collapse in on the nucleus. Shortly after Bohr arrived to work with Rutherford, he had a series of brilliant intuitions, the most important of which was that although the radioactive properties of matter originate in the atomic nucleus, chemical properties reflect primarily the number and distribution of electrons. At a stroke he had explained the link between physics and chemistry. The first sign of Bohr’s momentous breakthrough came on 19 June 1912, when he explained in a letter to his brother Harald what he had discovered: ‘It could be that I’ve found out a little bit about the structure of atoms … perhaps a little piece of reality.’ What he meant was that he had an idea how to make more sense of the electrons orbiting Rutherford’s nucleus.40 That summer Bohr returned to Denmark, got married, and taught at the University of Copenhagen throughout the autumn. He struggled on, writing to Rutherford on 4 November that he expected ‘to be able to finish the paper [with his new ideas] in a few weeks.’ He retreated to the country and wrote a very long article, which he finally divided into three shorter ones, since he had so many ideas to convey. He gave the papers a collective title – On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. Part I was mailed to Rutherford on 6 March 1913; parts 2 and 3 were finished before Christmas. Rutherford had judged his man correctly when he allowed Bohr to transfer to Cambridge. As Bohr’s biographer has written, B revolution in understanding had taken place.’41

  As we have seen, Rutherford’s notion of the atom was inherently unstable. According to ‘classical’ theory, if an electron did not move in a straight line, it lost energy through radiation. But electrons went round the nucleus of the atom in orbits – such atoms should therefore either fly apart in all directions or collapse in on themselves in an explosion of light. Clearly, this did not happen: matter, made of atoms, is by and large very stable. Bohr’s contribution was to put together a proposition and an observation.42 He proposed ‘stationary’ states in the atom. Rutherford found this difficult to accept at first, but Bohr insisted that there must be certain orbits electrons can occupy without flying off or collapsing into the nucleus and without radiating light.43 He immeasurably strengthened this idea by adding to it an observation that had been known for years – that when light passes through a substance, each element gives off a characteristic spectrum of color and moreover one that is stable and discontinuous. In other words, it emits light of only particular wavelengths – the process known as spectroscopy. Bohr’s brilliance was to realise that this spectroscopic effect existed because electrons going around the nucleus cannot occupy ‘any old orbit’ but only certain permissible orbits.44 These orbits meant that the atom was stable. But the real importance of Bohr’s breakthrough was in his unification of Rutherford, Planck, and Einstein, confirming the quantum – discrete – nature of reality, the stability of the atom, and the nature of the link between chemistry and physics. When Einstein was told of how the Danish theories matched the spectroscopies so clearly, he remarked, ‘Then this is one of the greatest discoveries.’45

  In his own country, Bohr was feted and given his own Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, which became a major centre for the subject in the years between the wars. Bohr’s quiet, agreeable, reflective personality – when speaking he often paused for minutes on end while he sought the correct word – was an important factor in this process. But also relevant to the rise of the Copenhagen Institute was Denmark’s position as a small, neutral country where, in the dark years of the century, physicists could meet away from the frenetic spotlight of the major European and North American centres.

  For psychoanalysis, 1913 was the most significant year after 1900, when The Interpretation of Dreams was published. Freud published a new book, Totem and Taboo, in which he extended his theories about the individual to the Darwinian, anthropological world, which, he argued, determined the character of society. This was written partly in response to a work by Freud’s former favourite disciple, Carl Jung, who had published The Psychology of the Unconscious, two years before, which marked the first serious division in psychoanalytic theory. Three major works of fiction, very different from one another but each showing the influence of Freudian ideas as they extended beyond the medical profession to society at large, also appeared.

  Thomas Mann’s great masterpiece Buddenbrooks was published in 1901, with the subtitle ‘Decline of a Family.’ Set in a north German, middle-class family (Mann was himself from Lübeck, the son of a prosperous corn merchant), the novel is bleak. Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno die at relatively young ages (Thomas in his forties, Hanno in his teens) ‘for no other very good reason than they have lost the will to live.’46 The book is lively, and even funny, but behind it lies the spectre of Nietzsche, nihilism, and degeneracy.

  Death in Venice, a novella published in 1913, is also about degeneracy, about instincts versus reason, and is an exploration of the author’s unconscious in a far more brutally frank way than Mann had attempted or achieved before. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer newly arrived in Venice to complete his masterpiece. He has the appearance, as well as the first name, of Gustav Mahler, whom Mann fiercely admired and who died on the eve of Mann’s own arrival in Venice in 1911. No sooner has Aschenbach arrived than he chances upon a Polish family staying in the same hotel. He is struck by the dazzling beauty of the young son, Tadzio, dressed in an English sailor suit. The story follows the ageing Aschenbach’s growing love for Tadzio; meanwhile he neglects his work, and his body succumbs to the cholera epidemic encroaching on Venice. Aschenbach fails to complete his work and he also fails to alert Tadzio’s family to the epidemic so they might escape. The writer dies, never having spok
en to his beloved.

  Von Aschenbach, with his ridiculously quiffed hair, his rouge makeup, and his elaborate clothes, is intended by Mann to embody a once-great culture now deracinated and degenerate. He is also the artist himself.47 In Mann’s private diaries, published posthumously, he confirmed that even late in life he still fell romantically in love with young men, though his 1905 marriage to Katia Pringsheim seemed happy enough. In 1925 Mann admitted the direct influence of Freud on Death in Venice: ‘The death wish is present in Aschenbach’s consciousness though he’s unaware of it.’ As Ronald Hayman, Mann’s biographer has stressed, Ich was frequently used by Mann in a Freudian way, to suggest an aspect or segment of the personality that asserts itself, often competing against instinct. (Ich was Freud’s preferred usage; the Latin ego was an innovation of his English translator.)48 The whole atmosphere of Venice represented in the book – dark, rotting back alleys, where ‘unspeakable horrors’ lurk unseen and unquantified – recalls Freud’s primitive id, smouldering beneath the surface of the personality, ready to take advantage of any lapse by the ego. Some critics have speculated that the very length of time it took Mann to write this short work – several years – reflected the difficulty he had in admitting his own homosexuality.49

  1913 was also the year in which D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers was published. Whether or not Lawrence was aware of psychoanalysis as early as 1905, when he wrote about infantile sexuality ‘in terms almost as explicit as Freud’s,’ he was exposed to it from 1912 on, when he met Frieda Weekley. Frieda, born Baroness Frieda von Richthofen at Metz in Germany in 1879, had spent some time in analysis with her lover Otto Gross, a psychoanalyst.50 His technique of treatment was an eclectic mix, combining the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche. Sons and Lovers tackled an overtly Freudian theme: the Oedipal. Of course, the Oedipal theme pre-dated Freud, as did its treatment in literature. But Lawrence’s account of the Morel family – from the Nottinghamshire coalfields (Nottingham being Lawrence’s own home county) – places the Oedipal conflict within the context of wider issues. The world inhabited by the Morels is changing, reflecting the transition from an agricultural past to an industrial future and war (Paul Morel actually predicts World War I).51 Gertrude Morel, the mother in the family, is not without education or wisdom, a fact that sets her apart from her duller, working-class husband. She devotes all her energies to her sons, William and Paul, so that they may better themselves in this changing world. In the process, however, Paul, an artist, who also works in a factory, falls in love and tries to escape the family. Where before there had been conflict between wife and husband, it is now a tussle between mother and son. ‘These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them…. As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul.’52 Just as Mann tried to break the taboo on homosexuality in Death in Venice, Lawrence talks freely of the link between sex and other aspects of life in Sons and Lovers and in particular the role of the mother in the family. But he doesn’t stop there. As Helen and Carl Baron have said, socialist and modernist themes mingle in the book: low pay, unsafe conditions in the mines, strikes, the lack of facilities for childbirth, or the lack of schooling for children older than thirteen; the ripening ambition of women to obtain work and to agitate for votes; the unsettling effect of evolutionary theory on social and moral life; and the emergence of an interest in the unconscious.53 In his art studies, Paul encounters the new theories about social Darwinism and gravity. Mann’s story is about a world that is ending, Lawrence’s about one world giving way to another. But both reflect the Freudian theme of the primacy of sex and the instinctual side of life, with the ideas of Nietzsche and social Darwinism in the background. In both, the unconscious plays a not altogether wholesome role. As Gustav Klimt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal pointed out in fin-de-siècle Vienna, man ignores the instinctive life at his peril: whatever physics might say, biology is the everyday reality. Biology means sex, reproduction, and behind that evolution. Death in Venice is about the extinction of one kind of civilisation as a result of degeneracy. Sons and Lovers is less pessimistic, but both explore the Nietzschean tussle between the life-enhancing barbarians and the overrefined, more civilised, rational types. Lawrence saw science as a form of overrefinement. Paul Morel has a strong, instinctive life force, but the shadow of his mother is never absent.

  Marcel Proust never admitted the influence of Freud or Darwin or Einstein on his work. But as the American critic Edmund Wilson has pointed out, Einstein, Freud and Proust, the first two Jewish, the latter half-Jewish, ‘drew their strength from their marginality which heightened their powers of observance.’ In November 1913 Proust published the first volume of his multivolume work A la recherche du temps perdu, normally translated as Remembrance of Things Past, though many critics/scholars now prefer In Search of Lost Time, arguing that it better conveys Proust’s idea that the novel has some of the qualities of science – the research element – and Proust’s great emphasis on time, time being lost and recovered rather than just gone.

  Proust was born in 1871 into a well-off family and never had to work. A brilliant child, he was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and at home, an arrangement that encouraged a close relationship with his mother, a neurotic woman. After she died in 1905, aged fifty seven, two years after her husband, her son withdrew from the world into a cork-lined room where he began to correspond with hundreds of friends and convert his meticulously detailed diaries into his masterpiece. A la recherche du temps perdu has been described as the literary equivalent of Einstein or Freud, though as the Proust scholar Harold March has pointed out, such comparisons are generally made by people unfamiliar with either Freud or Einstein. Proust once described his multivolume work in an interview as ‘a series of novels of the unconscious’. But not in a Freudian sense (there is no evidence that Proust ever read Freud, whose works were not translated into French until the novelist was near the end of his life). Proust ‘realised’ one idea to wonderful heights. This was the notion of involuntary memory, the idea that the sudden taste of a pastry, say, or the smell of some old back stairs, brings back not just events in the past but a whole constellation of experiences, vivid feelings and thoughts about that past. For many people, Proust’s insight is transcendentally powerful, for others it is overstated (Proust has always divided the critics).

  His real achievement is what he makes of this. He is able to evoke the intense emotions of childhood – for example, near the beginning of the book when he describes the narrator’s desperate desire to be kissed by his mother before he goes to sleep. This shifting back and forth in time is what has led many people to argue that Proust was giving a response to Einstein’s theories about time and relativity though there is no real evidence to link the novelist and the physicist any more than there is to link him with Freud. Again, as Harold March has said, we should really consider Proust on his own terms. Looked at in this way, In Search of Lost Time is a rich, gossipy picture of French aristocratic/upper class life, a class that, as in Chekhov and Mann, was disappearing and vanished completely with World War I. Proust was used to this world – his letters constantly refer to Princess This, the Count of That, the Marquis of the Other.54 His characters are beautifully drawn; Proust was gifted not only with wonderful powers of observation but with a mellifluous prose, writing in long, languid sentences interlaced with subordinate clauses, a dense foliage of words whose direction and meaning nonetheless always remains vivid and clear.

  The first volume, published in 1913, Du côté de chez Swann, ‘Swann’s Way’ (in the sense of Swann’s area of town), comprised what would turn out to be about a third of the whole book. We slip in and out of the past, in and around Combray, learning the architecture, the layout of the streets, the view from this or that window, the flower borders and the walkw
ays as much as we know the people. Among the characters are Swann himself, Odette, his lover and a prostitute, the Duchesse de Guermantes. Proust’s characters are in some instances modelled on real people.55 In sheer writing power, he is able to convey the joy of eating a madeleine, the erotic jealousy of a lover, the exquisite humiliation heaped on a victim of snobbery or anti-Semitism. Whether or not one feels the need to relate him to Bergson, Baudelaire or Zola, as others have done, his descriptions work as writing. It is enough.

  Proust did not find it easy to publish his book. It was turned down by a number of publishers, including the writer André Gide at Nouvelle Revue Française, who thought Proust a snob and a literary amateur. For a while the forty-two-year-old would-be author panicked and considered publishing privately. But then Grasset accepted his book, and he now shamelessly lobbied to get it noticed. Proust did not win the Prix Goncourt as he had hoped, but a number of influential admirers wrote to offer their support, and even Gide had the grace to admit he had been wrong in rejecting the book and offered to publish future volumes. At that stage, in fact, only one other volume had been planned, but war broke out and publication was abandoned. For the time being, Proust had to content himself with his voluminous letters.