Remembrance of things past … Writing

When I was young and brash and generally ignorant, I found writing easy. I could dash off pieces entitled “Towards a Semantic Sociology” with no effort at all. This appeared in a student’s magazine but fortunately did not achieve wide circulation and does not figure in my list of publications. I was eighteen and a committed logical positivist. At an even earlier age, I won a prize for writing. An organization, the Sons of England, had an annual essay competition in South Africa and the schools chose their best pupils to enter it. My school did not select me, but I decided to enter on my own. The subject was “The life of Nelson”. I repaired to the local library to read and, after being distracted by Lady Hamilton, learnt enough to produce an essay. To everybody’s surprise, including my own, I won the competition and had much pleasure in receiving the prize — a suitably jingoistic book — from the irritated headmaster at a school assembly. The book has long since disappeared, but the essay and prize should be the first entries in my curriculum vitae. Later, as my scientific career unfolded, and I began writing scientific papers, I found myself forced into a style of writing, that imprisoned me. All papers had to be set out formally with an Introduction, Material and Methods, Results and Discussion; one never, never used the word “I”, but instead that grovelling euphemism “the present author,” and instead of plainly saying that “the work of Watson et al. was a load of crap,” one was compelled to write that “their experiments led Watson et al. to erroneous conclusions.” Any thoughts one might have were labelled by others as “unfounded speculation,” a tradition that continues to the present day and is carefully monitored by those unsung guardians of scientific integrity — the everwatchful referees. I found myself becoming increasingly constipated, my vowels refused to work and writing became more and more difficult. I thought that if I carefully chose the pen, the paper and the colour of the ink my problems would be over, but it didn’t help and I simply became a stationery fetishist. For many years, I thought the stylistic constraint of writing scientific papers was the main reason for the loss of my youthful writing abilities, but I now realize there was another reason. I cannot write anything until I have everything clear in my head. There still remains the difficulty of a good opening sentence and the impossibility of starting with the second or even the third sentence, but once that hurdle is crossed, everything flows onto the paper in long-hand, almost finished. In my youth I had much less in my head to rearrange, especially in subjects like sociology or Lord Nelson, so I could get them onto paper very quickly. With the loss of ignorance, my head became filled with more and more thoughts, and picking a path through this jungle became increasingly difficult. Perhaps, with age, this store will thin out and the old ease of writing will return. Writing and talking are very similar in that both involve putting words together, but there is one difference: in talk one concentrates on what is being said at the moment, whereas what has already been said is gone, vanished; in writing, however, everything is there, with all its awkwardness, to confront you. I find talking very easy. I never use notes in seminars or lectures and all I have to be careful about is that I don’t use the same jokes twice in the same place. I was told that Fred Sanger once expressed the view that I was bright but talked too much, but then he once described Francis Crick as “that chap who is rather keen on genes.” Language is a source of endless fascination for me. I enjoy all those strange conjunctions that one can create to escape from the confines of everyday existence. Thus it seems very reasonable to me that a New York delicatessen company, Cohen & Caruso, might have matzohrella as a product. There may actually be an ancestral genotype for the ability to compound words: my young grandson proposed Sosumi as the name of a Jewish–Japanese restaurant. Naturally I make friends with other people who enjoy this kind of word play. Bernard Williams, the philosopher, and I spent many a happy hour inventing menus for astrophysicists, with such items as Toad-in-Black-Hole, and Pen Rosé wine, which would be offered in a club featuring live music from The Naked Singularity group. We also established the Squeaky Cheese Press to publish books with special titles suitable to the subject or the authors. Homage to Catatonia was a psychiatry monograph, and Daimons are Forever was a text in Jungian psychology. A book to be written by two friends, one an ornithologist, the other an astronomer, was entitled A Day with the Chicks; a Night with the Stars. And most proudly we had: The Turing Shroud: an Essay in X-ray Christology. Alas, none of these books will ever be written, and especially not by me, because I have been unable to find the good first sentences. R579