Cultural Amnesia (92 page)

Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller were not, however, the first to
conceive of using a nuclear chain reaction to initiate a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen.

—RICHARD RHODES,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
, P. 375

I
N HIS
The War Against Cliché
, Martin Amis hilariously demolishes—nukes, to use one of his favourite verbs—a book about sex written by this same
Richard Rhodes. On the evidence of the quotations adduced by his reviewer, Rhodes’s sex treatise must indeed be a disaster. I can’t bring myself to read it, but partly because I would
like to retain my respect for the author of two of the best books I have ever read about science and technology,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
and
Dark Sun
. Though it might not apply to sex, where some of the secrets are buried deep, Rhodes has a nose for the enriching detail. The immediate consequence
of reading the above quotation is to find out who
was
the first to conceive of a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen, and thus of the device that we later
came to know as the hydrogen bomb. Guess forever and you will never guess.

It was the Japanese physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara. He gave a lecture on the subject in Kyoto in May 1941,
seven months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Hagiwara was also very early in the field on the subject of uranium isotope separation, with particular emphasis on plutonium (
Dark Sun
, p. 77). Later on, the plutonium option was to become the biggest single Allied secret of the war, outranking even the secret of the code-breaking operations.
Though Rhodes doesn’t say so—he doesn’t need to say so—Hagiwara’s precocity raises interesting questions about what Japanese physics might conceivably have achieved
if the initial strategic plan of Japan’s armed forces had worked out and America had been quickly brought to terms. We can tell ourselves that the strategic plan would never have worked
out. We can also tell ourselves that Japan would never have been able to match its physics with a concerted technological effort comparable in its vastness to the one with which the Americans
were able to back up the brain-work in Los Alamos: but we can’t tell ourselves the second thing with quite the same confidence that we can tell ourselves the first. Post-war, after a defeat
amounting to total destruction, Japanese technology got itself together again well enough. If there had been an early truce, leaving time to get organized, there is no telling what might not have
been accomplished, although even the Japanese now commonly say that there would have been no fully modern reform of their science and industry if it had not been for the defeat and the
occupation. Rhodes is probably right, however, to stay off those paths. His best gift is to present the facts and let the
reader do the awed speculating. (The disqualification
of justly forgotten techno best-sellers like Robert Jungk’s
Brighter than a Thousand Suns
is that their authors, short of information but long on
excitable prose, stifled the reader’s reaction by trying to echo it in advance.) Rhodes, aware that he is dealing with genuinely high drama, goes easy on the theatrical effects. We learn
that when Niels Bohr was in Cambridge he brushed up his English by reading
David Copperfield
. When Fermi was building the first reactor in Chicago, the
graphite slabs were hefted into position by the college football team in mufti. (Captain Future, block that kick!) At Bikini on March 1, 1954, the Castle Bravo H-bomb shot was a fifteen-megaton
runaway. The merit of Rhodes’s books is that he withholds moral judgement long enough to bring out the creative atmosphere generated by brilliant people working together on vast, novel
projects. In
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
he can even make you see how an ugly customer like General Leslie Groves might be just the man to have around if
you are trying to build an atomic bomb that will work. The awkward implication is that if you want to do without the company of General Groves, you must organize a world free of conflict. Such a
world is hard to imagine, but perhaps Rhodes thought that establishing the principles of stress-free sex was the way to start.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

For those who look on the arts as a kind of celestial sports competition, Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875–1926) is up there with Bertolt Brecht for the title of German Poet of the Twentieth Century. The standard view of the contending couple is that Brecht’s poetic art was
dedicated to social revolution, whereas Rilke’s poetic art was dedicated to art. There is a lot to be said for that view as it applies to Rilke, because few writers who have died so
young covered so much aesthetic ground. Born in Prague, he studied art history there and also in Munich and Berlin. The personalized melancholy of his early verse gave way to an overt quest
for God after he made two trips to Russia, where he met Tolstoy and the Pasternak family. (Lou Andreas-Salomé, a recurring figure in his life as she was in the lives of many other
famous men of his time, was along for the ride up the Volga.) In Paris he got himself appointed secretary to Rodin. An ideal aestheticism took over from mystic revelation in the poems of
Neue Gedichte
(1907). Some would say that his strongest and least self-consciously ethereal verse was to be found in that volume. Showing signs of
believing that he had arrived at the apotheosis of art, he ascended to the empyrean in his
annus mirabilis
of 1922, when he wrote all of
The Sonnets
to Orpheus
and all of
The Duino Elegies
: works in
which the Poet is elected (some might say self-elected) as the only shaping force capable of dealing with natural energy. Rilke’s verse is hard to translate but some of the
middle-period verse comes across in parts. The prose is a better bet, especially the deliberately approachable
Letters to a Young Poet.
When he actually
had so much to say that he wanted to be understood, Rilke turned out sentences that you could write a book about.

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings
that can gather around a new name.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE,
Gesammelte Werke
, VOL. 5

T
HE MOST
OFTEN
quoted thing Rilke ever said in prose, this was his equivalent of Mae West’s “Come up and see me some time.” She never said it quite that way, just as Bogart never
quite said “Play it again, Sam.” But Rilke did say, pretty well exactly, this. He said it, of course, in German, where it sounded even more stately, because in German
“fame” and “name” do not rhyme, so there is no cheap chiming of start and finish. Neat as it is in either language, however, here is a good example of a sentence begging
to be misunderstood. The idea behind it is at least half right, although it would have no force unless it was partly wrong. To take an example: the actress Marion Davies remains famous only for
being the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. The facts, however, say that she was an extremely talented comedienne, well capable of earning a high salary in her own right; and that she
genuinely loved Hearst, who was in awe of her. It did him credit: though he could have had any woman who was available for money, he loved talent.

But the facts are hard to get at. Her films are not in circulation. The film that makes the myth is
Citizen Kane
, which, since the title character is based on Hearst, reinforces the idea that Marion Davies was a casualty, because Kane’s mistress in
the film is an insufficiently gifted singer forced to humiliate herself to gratify Kane’s egotistical dreams for a young woman he loves like a toy. The cumulative power of a
myth, and the difficulty of dispelling it, are both demonstrated by how generations of high-IQ film society attendees have prided themselves on their knowledge of
Citizen Kane
’s biographical subtext, down to and including the supposed fact that “Rosebud” was Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s
clitoris. In Rilke’s sentence,
Inbegriff
could possibly be translated as “essence,” but since the dictionary gives us the alternative
“sum total” we might as well use it, because in myth-mongering the driftwood helps build the edifice. The
Inbegriff
of misunderstandings about
Marion Davies would be very hard to shake even if a showreel of her comic moments on film were to be tacked on to the end title of
Citizen Kane,
however it
was reproduced in whatever medium. Orson Welles did a terrible thing to William Randolph Hearst. To assault the tycoon’s reputation was one thing, and no doubt Hearst deserved it. But to
belittle the woman he loved was cowardly, and it is worth wondering whether the crime remained on Welles’s conscience, and thus helped to explain some of his self-destructive behaviour in
later years. Whatever the truth of that, there can be no doubt that Welles contributed mightily to the corroboration of Rilke’s remark. The fame of Marion Davies survived her death, but it
had little to do with the woman who had once been alive. It was a sum total of misunderstandings.

Fame can be polarized between two contrary distortions and leave its true human subject untouched in the middle. Brecht is
a classic case. As the poet and playwright of the international left he was revered by the progressive intelligentsia across the world. After Stalinism at long last became questionable, the
international left was only reinforced in its fashionable authority, and Brecht’s reputation along with it: he was thought to represent what had been permanently valuable in the socialist
world view. Apart from the operas, whose value was seldom challenged (only Lotte Lenya ever dared to say that Brecht would have been nothing without Kurt Weill), the plays were thought to be
profound analyses of world capitalism in crisis. In my time as a student in Sydney in the late 1950s,
The Good Woman of Setzuan
was mounted with reverence
and greeted with awe. The amateur actors concerned with the production, many of them my friends, had no idea that the body count of Mao’s Great Leap Forward was still mounting even as they
fretted over trying to remember their lifeless, hectoring lines about the difficulty of jolting Chinese peasants out of their selfish ways.
(It was from the producer of
The Good Woman
that I bought my set of the Brecht-Weill opera
Mahagonny
, on the understanding that if he had not been
strapped for cash by the inescapable effects of world capitalism in crisis, nothing would have induced him to part with it.) Even as late as my undergraduate years in Cambridge, Brecht’s
unswervingly charmless
A Man Is a Man
was one of the Cambridge Theatre Group’s gifts to the Edinburgh Fringe, the production having been given into
the keeping of an earnest young theatrical vagabond on the grounds that he had once been with the Berliner Ensemble.