Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance
By Dennis Overbye Viking, 416 pages, $39.99 REVIEWED BY
Like portrait photography, biography must be judged as one of the creative arts. Certainly the biographer should make clear the ineluctable foundation of facts he has to work with. But far more significant than the purely metric qualities of a life, which can be encapsulated in a Who's Who entry, the biographer should lead the reader into the sense of a life as lived in the world, and as experienced by other human beings.
It's easy to request such biographical virtues, but harder by far to realize them. In the case of Albert Einstein, his life had petrified into an almost trans-human monument even before it ended. However, that problem threatens to defeat every writer who attempts to render a personality who, by general agreement, has attained world-historical importance.
So Dennis Overbye has to be praised as a brave man for his biographical essay Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance. Overbye, deputy science editor of The New York Times, is aware of the difficulties. "Strictly speaking, this is not a biography," he tells us. "Instead my goal has been to bring the youthful Einstein to life, to illuminate the young man who performed the deeds for which the old man, the icon, is revered." Overbye lists, like medals of honour, the five eyeglass prescriptions he wore out during the seven years in which he squinted at hundreds of published and unpublished letters in Einstein's cramped handwriting.
Wherever Einstein walked, it seems, Overbye followed a century later. From the Engadine Alps to Lake Como, he wore out the shoe leather that's as essential a biographer's tool as a laptop computer. And there were the interviews, with Einstein's descendants, and friends of descendants, and on and on. This is precisely the book one would expect from a conscientious, talented New York Times science editor. Even then, there will be gaps where no research will suffice, and the writer has to draw on his imagination.
Oh! The accuracy of it all, the accuracy! What a burden it is, even when borne lightly, as only a polished writer such as Dennis Overbye can. But while I was reading Einstein in Love,I yearned for the spirit of someone crass, like Sam Goldwyn, to descend upon the sober pages and render the story truly romantic and more than a little bit vulgar.
Perhaps Einstein himself could qualify for this role. Young Albert wrote in a poem to a friend, "The upper half thinks and plans, but the lower half determines our fate." Shakespeare once lucked upon a similar sentiment. The distinction between Einstein's upper half and his lower half rules the structure of the book, and of Einstein's adventures. As Overbye tells us on the second page, "All his life, Albert Einstein has been trouble for women."
The complications of his many libidinous entanglements constitute half the romance of his life. The other half is governed by the profound, almost mystical sense that nagged at him from his earliest years, a sense of the unity of natural law, which led him into the study of philosophy, physics and, finally, the topic we today would call cosmology.
Compared with the agitated family lives of most people I know, Einstein's intimate history does not seem terribly complex or fraught with undue conflict. Here was a high-spirited and gifted young man, skilled on violin and piano, who enjoyed lounging around and engaging in high-flown dialogues with his friends, flirting and making promises he couldn't keep. The one promise he did persist with was his fascination with the philosophy and physics of the technological age, which was expanding a century ago just as it is today.
It is in this part of the saga that Overbye comes into his own as a science writer. Overbye's accounts of the physics of Einstein's era are superb. He weaves into the story the most remote and ancient speculations, which (as he reminds us) reach back to Aristotle, Leucippus and Democritus in the 5th century B.C.
The scientific segments of Einstein in Love are the parts that move me most deeply. As for Einstein's family and love life, well, he was as indecisive, heartless and remorseful as we all are. I have to conclude from this restless story that supreme genius can be as careless with others' heartstrings as any dimwit. But that's not new. At least Einstein gave good value for the sufferings he inflicted on others. Richard Lubbock is a Toronto science writer, addicted to almost all naturalistic theories of the cosmos, even those that don't make sense.