12 For the details and documentation of this claim, see chapter 15.
13 Don’t get me started on the illogic and hypocrisy of public attitudes to drugs—a real and tragic problem fueled, rather than helped, by our false taxonomies and hyped moralisms that suppress and paralyze effective thought. McGwire (and many other ballplayers) takes androstenedione, now sold at nutrition stores, entirely legally and over the counter (and overtly advertised, not hidden in drawers and available only by request—as druggists sold condoms in my youth). If baseball eventually decides to ban the substance because it may raise testosterone levels, shall we retrospectively denounce McGwire for obeying the law of his time? Do we annul the records of all artists, intellectuals, politicians, and actors who thought that smoking enhanced their performance by calming their nerves?
De Mortuis
When
Truly Bonum
14
Bright Star
Among Billions*
AS SAUL DESPISED DAVID FOR RECEIVING TEN THOU-sand cheers to his own mere thousand, scientists often stigmatize, for the same reason of simple jealousy, the good work done by colleagues for our common benefit. We live in a philistine nation filled with Goliaths, and we know that science feeds at a public trough. We therefore all give lip service to the need for clear and supportive popular presentation of our work. Why then do we downgrade the professional reputation of colleagues who can convey the power and beauty of science to the hearts and minds of a fascinated, if generally uninformed public?
This narrow-minded error—our own philistinism—arises in part from our general ignorance of the long and honorable literary tradition of popular presentation for science, and our consequent mistake in equating popularization with trivialization, cheapening, or inaccuracy. Great scientists have always produced the greatest popularizations, without compromising the integrity of subject or author. In the seventeenth century, Galileo wrote both his major books as dialogues in Italian for generally literate readers, not as formal Latin treatises designed only for scholars. In the eighteenth century, the Swiss savant J.J. Scheuchzer produced the beautifully elaborate eight-volume Physica sacra, with 750 full-page copperplate engravings illustrating the natural history behind all biblical events. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the most important and revolutionary of all scientific works, as a book for general readers. (My students often ask me where they can find the technical monograph that served as the basis of Darwin’s popular work; I tell them that The Origin of Species fulfills both allied, not opposing, functions.)
With the death of Carl Sagan, we have lost both a fine scientist and the greatest popularizer of the twentieth century, if not of all time. In his many books, and especially in his monumental television series Cosmos—our century’s equivalent of Scheuchzer’s Physica sacra and the most widely accessed presentation of our subject in all human history—Carl explained the method and content of our discipline to the general public. He also conveyed the excitement of discovery with an uncanny mix of personal enthusiasm and clear presentation unequaled by any predecessor. I mourn his passing primarily because I have lost a dear friend, but I am also sad that many scientists never appreciated his excellence or his importance to all of us, while a few of the best of us (in a shameful incident at the National Academy of Sciences) actively rejected him. (Carl was a remarkably sanguine man, but I know that this incident hurt him deeply.) Too many of us never grasped his legendary service to science.
I would epitomize Carl Sagan’s excellence and integrity in three points. First, in an age characterized by the fusion of high and pop culture, Carl moved comfortably across the entire spectrum while never compromising scientific content. He could joke with Johnny Carson, compose a column for Parade, and write a science fiction novel while maintaining an active laboratory and publishing technical papers. He had foibles aplenty; don’t we all? We joked about his emphatic pronunciation of “billions,” and my young son (much to Carl’s amusement) called Cosmos the “stick-head-up show” because Carl always looked up dreamily into the heavens. But the public watched, loved, and learned. Second, for all his pizzazz and charisma, Carl always spoke for true science against the plethora of irrationalisms that surround us. He conveyed one consistent message: real science is so damned exciting, transforming, and provable; why would anyone prefer the undocumentable nonsense of astrology, alien abductions, and so forth? Third, he bridged the gaps between our various cultures by showing the personal, humanistic, and artistic side of scientific activity. I will never, for example, forget his excellent treatment of Hypatia, a great woman, philosopher, and mathematician, martyred in Alexandria in A.D. 415.
You had a wonderful life, Carl, but far too short. You will, however, always be with us, especially if we as a profession can learn from you how the common touch enriches science while extending an ancient tradition that lies at the heart of Western humanism, and does not represent (when properly done) a journalistic perversion of the “sound bite” age. In the words that John Dryden wrote about another great artist, the composer Henry Purcell, who died even younger in 1695: “He long ere this had tuned the jarring spheres and left no hell below.”
14 Originally written as an editorial for Science, the leading professional journal of the trade—hence the mode of address to professional researchers, rather than to the general public.
15
The Glory of
His Time
and Ours
IN OUR SAGAS, MOURNING MAY INCLUDE CELEBRATION when the hero dies, not young and unfulfilled on the battlefield, but rich in years and replete with honor. And yet for me, the passing of Joe DiMaggio has evoked a primary feeling of sadness for something precious that cannot be restored—a loss not only of the man, but also of the splendid image that he represented.
I first saw DiMaggio play near the end of his career in 1950, when I was eight and Joe had his last great season, batting .301 with 32 homers and 122 RBIs. He became my hero, my model, and my mentor, all rolled up into one remarkable man. (I longed to be his replacement in center field, but a guy named Mantle came along and beat me out for the job.) DiMaggio remained my primary hero to the day of his death, and through all the vicissitudes of Ms. Monroe, Mr. Coffee, and Mrs. Robinson.
Even with my untutored child’s eyes, I could sense something supremely special about DiMaggio’s play. I didn’t even know the words or their meanings, but I grasped his gracefulness in some visceral way, and I knew that an aura of majesty surrounded all his actions. He played every aspect of baseball with a fluid beauty in minimal motion, a spare elegance that made even his swinging strikeouts look beautiful (an infrequent occurrence in his career; no other leading home run hitter has ever posted more than twice as many lifetime walks as strikeouts or, even more amazingly, nearly as many homers as whiffs—361 dingers versus 369 Ks. Compare this with his two great Yankee long-ball compatriots: 714 homers and 1330 Ks for Ruth, 536 homers and 1710 Ks for Mantle).
His stance, his home run trot, those long flyouts to the cavernous left-center space in Yankee Stadium, his apparently effortless loping run—no hot dog he—to arrive under every catchable fly ball at exactly the right place and time for an “easy” out. If the sports cliché of “poetry in motion” ever held real meaning, DiMaggio must have been the intended prototype.
One cannot extract the essence of DiMaggio’s special excellence from the heartless figures of his statistical accomplishments. He did not play long enough to amass leading numbers in any category—only thirteen full seasons from 1936 to 1951, with prime years lost to war, and a fierce pride that led him to retire the moment his skills began to erode.
DiMaggio sacrificed other records to the customs of his time. He hit a career high .381 in 1939, but would probably have finished well over .400 if manager Joe McCarthy hadn’t insisted that he play every day in the season’s meaningless last few weeks, long after the Yanks had clinched the pennant, while DiMaggio (batting .408 on September 8) t
hen developed such serious sinus problems that he lost sight in one eye, could not visualize in three dimensions, and consequently slipped nearly 30 points in batting average. In those different days, if you could walk, you played.
DiMaggio’s one transcendent numerical record—his fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941—deserves the usual accolade of most remarkable sporting episode of the century, Mark McGwire notwithstanding. Several years ago, I performed a fancy statistical analysis on the data of slumps and streaks, and found that only DiMaggio’s shouldn’t have happened. All other streaks fall within the expectations for great events that should occur once as a consequence of probabilities, just as an honest coin will come up heads ten times in a row once in a very rare while. But no one should ever have hit in fifty-six straight games. Second place stands at a distant forty-four, a figure reached by Pete Rose and Wee Willie Keeler.
DiMaggio’s greatest record therefore embodies pure heart, not the rare expectation of luck. We must also remember that third baseman Ken Keltner robbed DiMaggio of two hits in the fifty-seventh game, and that he then went on to hit safely in sixteen straight games thereafter. DiMaggio also compiled a sixty-one-game hit streak when he played for the San Francisco Seals in the minor Pacific Coast League.
One afternoon in 1950, I sat next to my father near the third base line in Yankee Stadium. DiMaggio fouled a ball in our direction, and my father caught it. We mailed the precious relic to the great man, and sure enough, he sent it back with his signature. That ball remains my proudest possession to this day. Forty years later, during my successful treatment for a supposedly incurable cancer, I received a small square box in the mail from a friend and book publisher in San Francisco, and a golfing partner of DiMaggio. I opened the box and found another ball, signed to me by DiMaggio (at my friend’s instigation) and wishing me well in my recovery. What a thrill and privilege—to tie my beginning and middle life together through the good wishes of this great man.
Ted Williams is, appropriately, neither a modest nor a succinct man. When asked recently to compare himself with his rival and contemporary DiMaggio, the greatest batter in history simply replied: “I was a better hitter, he was a better player.”
Simon and Garfunkel captured the essence of this great man in their famous lyric about the meaning and loss of true stature: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”*
He was the glory of a time that we will not see again.
15 DiMaggio, so wholly possessed of integrity and refinement both on and off the field, was also a very concrete man of few words. In his op-ed obituary for The New York Times, Paul Simon tells a wonderful story of his only meeting with DiMaggio and their contretemps over Mrs. Robinson:
A few years after “Mrs. Robinson” rose to No. 1 on the pop charts, I found myself dining at an Italian restaurant where DiMaggio was seated with a party of friends. I’d heard a rumor that he was upset with the song and had considered a lawsuit, so it was with some trepidation that I walked over and introduced myself as its composer. I needn’t have worried: he was perfectly cordial and invited me to sit down, whereupon we immediately fell into conversation about the only subject we had in common.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you ask where I’ve gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I’m a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven’t gone anywhere.”
16
This Was
a Man
WHEN MEL ALLEN, “VOICE OF THE YANKEES,” DIED LAST week,* I lost the man who ranked second only to my father for sheer volume of attention during my childhood. (My dad, by the way, was a Dodger fan and a Red Barber devotee.) As I considered the surprising depth of my sadness, I realized that I was mourning the extinction of a philosophy as much as the loss of a dear man—and I felt that most of the warm press commentary had missed the essence of Mel Allen’s strength. The eulogies focused on his three signature phrases: his invariable opening line, “Hello there, everybody”; his perennial exclamation of astonishment, “How about that”; and his inevitable home run mantra, “It’s going … going … gone.”
But I would characterize his immense appeal by two singular statements, one-off comments that I heard in passing moments during a distant childhood. These comments have stayed with me all my life, for integrity in one case, and for antic humor in the other.
One exemplifies the high road, the other an abyss, however charming. The comments could not be more different, but they embody, when taken together, something precious, something fragile, and something sadly lost when institutions become so large that the generic blandness of commercial immensity chokes off both spontaneity and originality. This phenomenon of modern life, by the way, is entirely general and not confined to broadcasting. In my own academic world, textbooks have become longer, duller, and entirely interchangeable for the same reason. Idiosyncratic works cannot sell sufficiendy, for curricula have been standardized (partly by the sameness of conventional textbooks)—and originality guarantees oblivion. Authors have become cogs in an expensive venture that includes, among others, the photo researcher, the slide maker, the teacher’s guide preparer, and the publicist. The great texts of the past defined fields for generations because they promulgated the distinctive views of brilliant authors—Lyell’s geology, or Marshall’s economics—but modern writers are faceless servants of a commercial machine that shuns anything unique.
One day in 1952, as Mickey Mantle struggled in center field the year after Joe DiMaggio’s retirement, many fans began to boo after Mickey struck out for the second time in a row. In the midst of his play-by-play broadcast, an infuriated Mel Allen leaned out of the press box and shouted at a particularly raucous fan: “Why are you booing him?” The fan shot back: “Because he’s not as good as DiMaggio.” And Mel Allen busted a gut, delivering a ferocious dressing-down to the fan for his indecency in razzing an enormously talented but unformed twenty-year-old kid just because he could not yet replace the greatest player of the age.
Ballantine beer and White Owl cigars sponsored the Yankees in those years—and Mel never lost an opportunity for additional endorsement. Home runs, for example, became “Ballantine Blasts” or “White Owl Wallops,” depending on the sponsor of the inning. When a potential home run passed just to the wrong side of the foul pole, Allen would exclaim, “Why that ball was just foul by a bottle of Ballantine beer.” One day Mickey Mantle hit one that seemed destined for success, and Allen began his mantra: “It’s going … going …” And then he stopped short as the ball went foul by no more than an inch or two. An astonished Allen exclaimed: “Why, I’ve never seen one miss by so litde. That ball was foul by no more than a botde of Bal—” And then he paused in. mid phrase, thought for a fraction of a moment, and exclaimed: “No, that ball was foul by the ash on a White Owl cigar!”
A man of grace and integrity; a shameless huckster of charming originality. But above all, a man who could only be his wonderful cornball self—Mel Allen, the singular, inimitable, human Voice of the Yankees. So take my two stories, titrate them to the optimal distinctness of lost individuality, and let us celebrate Shakespeare’s judgment in Julius Caesar: “The elements so mix’d in him that Nature might stand up and say to the world, ‘This was a man!’”
*This piece originally appeared in the New York Times on June 26, 1996.
V
Science
in
Society
17
A Tale of Two
Work Sites
CHRISTOPHER WREN, THE LEADING ARCHITECT OF LONDON’S reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul’s cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: “si monu-mentum requiris, circumspice”—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even sa
y sacred-ness—of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.
An odd coincidence of professional life turned my thoughts to this most celebrated epitaph when, for the second time, I received an office in a spot laden with history, a place still redolent of ghosts of past events both central to our common culture and especially meaningful for my own life and choices.
In 1971, I spent an academic term as a visiting researcher at Oxford University. I received a cranny of office space on the upper floor of the University Museum. As I set up my books, fossil snails, and microscope, I noticed a metal plaque affixed to the wall, informing me that this reconfigured space of shelves and cubicles had been, originally, the site of the most famous public confrontation in the early history of Darwinism. On this very spot, in 1860, just a few months after Darwin published The Origin of Species, T. H. Huxley had drawn his rhetorical sword, and soundly skewered the slick but superficial champion of creationism, Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce.
(As with most legends, the official version ranks as mere cardboard before a much more complicated and multifaceted truth. Wilberforce and Huxley did put on a splendid, and largely spontaneous, show—but no clear victor emerged from the scuffle, and Joseph Hooker, Darwin’s other champion, made a much more effective reply to the bishop, however forgotten by history. See my essay on this debate, entileed “Knight Takes Bishop?” and published in an earlier volume of this series, Bully for Brontosaurus.)
I can’t claim that the lingering presence of these Victorian giants increased my resolve or improved my work, but I loved the sense of continuity vouchsafed to me by this happy circumstance. I even treasured the etymology—for circumstance means “standing around” (as Wren’s circumspice means “looking around”), and here I stood, perhaps in the very spot where Huxley had said, at least according to legend, that he preferred an honest ape for an ancestor to a bishop who would distort a known truth for rhetorical advantage.