In 1993 I spoke to my father by phone: he was living in Hawaii and I in London. He sounded confused, as if he was struggling for words. He was 88, and I discovered that he had had a number of small strokes, so that his speech was affected. I decided I should fly to Hawaii and see for myself.
My father was a successful artist and had a beautiful waterfront house on the windward shore of Oahu. He loved Hawaii, his pictures were well known and sold well, and he was very happy with Hope, his third wife. However, when I arrived, it was clear that he was in the early stages of dementia.
But his personality remained unaffected, and we sat on his deck and were able to talk, after a fashion. At one point he started talking about matter, space and rotation. It was all very garbled, but I knew what he was trying to say.
He was trying, still, to explain the Theory.
The Theory! My father had worked on it in his spare time for the whole of his adult life. He had told my mother about it when they first met in the 1920s, and it was nothing less than a Theory of Everything – the kind Stephen Hawking has talked about.
My father knew nothing about modern physics and there was no prospect of him learning such things, as he never got on with formal education of any sort. But he saw this as no problem. I suspect he was impressed by Albert Einstein, who became quite a media star during my father’s youth. Unknown clerk in Swiss patent office revolutionises modern physics! Well, if Einstein could do it, why couldn’t he?
It should be clear at this point that my father had invincible self-belief. He was convinced that if he thought about what made the universe tick for long enough, he could figure out the answer.
Basically, as far as I can understand (and I can say, without fear of contradiction, that I understand more about the Theory than any other living person), the universe is made of some kind of conscious “stuff”, and that this stuff circulates and eddies, and as it does so, it rubs against itself. Being conscious, it enjoys certain angles of rubbing, and the circles and eddies create atoms, molecules, energy, forces, etc, etc.
But above its role in the makeup of the universe, the Theory came to have a very important role in my relationship with my father because, from a very early age, I saw very little of him.
I was born when my mother was 40 and my father had a studio in Greenwich Village, New York, and didn’t return home for days at a time. He said he needed the studio to pursue his art, and rumour had it that he also used it to pursue various women. Then he met Hope and soon asked for a divorce. My mother spent the rest of her life telling me, endlessly, how badly he had treated her, how she had supported him and he had cast her aside. Well, that was true, but kind of hard for a child of nine or 10 to hear.
My father did regularly pay child support. Other than that, he would come once a week and take me to dinner. He would drink a martini and, while I was eating my shrimp cocktail, talk about his Theory. Aged about 10 or 11, I was very interested in science. My father never asked me about school or what I was doing; instead he talked about the Theory. I remember him saying once that he thought I was beginning to understand it, which must have reflected my skill in concealing my total bafflement.
He also assured me that the Theory would have profound consequences throughout the world. In particular, it would end the cold war. You see, he would say, the Russians, being very logical people, would realise the truth of his Theory, and thus realise that the universe was, in a sense, conscious. Thus the universe could be considered a kind of God. When the Russians saw that they had to abandon atheism, they would understand that Marxism as a whole was incorrect, and would cease their evil communist ways and become good capitalists!
When I grew older, my father and Hope moved to Hawaii and I seldom saw him, aside from very occasional visits to Hawaii and one visit he and Hope made to London. But the drafts of the Theory never stopped arriving.
Each would be between three and eight pages long, written in incomprehensible prose. A typical sentence might read, “Imagine a moving place that travels through distance with force.” As draft followed draft, I struggled to make any meaningful comment. If you wrote with a question, like “What is a moving place?” or how does moving with force differ from moving without force, you never received an answer, but only an equally incomprehensible new draft. There was almost never any mathematics in it. Also, and this is key, there were never any empirical predictions. When Newton hypothesised the existence of a universal force of gravity, he wrote equations to predict the motion of the planets. For example, scientists planning space probes still use Newton’s equations to plot their flight. My father’s Theory was useless. Why do the planets move as they do? Because the universal stuff makes them do so!
At one point, my father went as far as to pay $1,500 to publish a draft of the Theory as an advert in the Wall Street Journal. He was convinced that the captains of industry – whom my father’s rightwing view led him to believe were all highly intelligent men – would beat a path to his door and force the blinkered scientific establishment to pay attention to his views. Surprisingly, nothing happened.
I suppose this prompts the question, was my father mad? He was certainly delusional on the subject of his Theory. And certainly he could be described as narcissistic. But he had a successful job, a happy marriage, a beautiful home, a large circle of friends – by most criteria, he was a success. Although he didn’t make much of a success of parenting.
And so, to fast forward, at 88, in the early stages of dementia, my father was still struggling to articulate his Theory. I spent about a week in Hawaii, and late in the week, we were watching Murder She Wrote, one of his favourite shows. He looked confused and asked what was on. We told him. “Oh,” he said in satisfaction, “Murder She Wrote.” These were his last words. He was rushed to hospital but to no avail.
I remember going back to his house and, late that night, pouring myself a bourbon and talking to Hope, for the first time, about my father. She spoke about how happy he had made her and how much they had loved one another. At one point I said, “Well, Hope, I don’t suppose we’ll be hearing any more about the Theory.”
“Ah, the Theory!” she said, and laughed. And, in the midst of her sadness, that laugh conveyed a small sense of relief.
