BOOK REVIEWED-Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance
by Dennis Overbye
Viking: 2000. 416 pp. $27.95
BETTMANN/CORBIS
Happy together? Einstein was said to have treated his first wife Mileva Mari
with undisguised contempt.
Seeking the laws of nature, physicist Albert Einstein invoked the Deity's love of harmony. For more than a decade, however, we have been aware that Einstein, the man, surrendered celestial harmony to earthly passion and engendered domestic dissonance. Einstein was the great defender of cause-and-effect in physics, but from his youth, he sought the affection of women, in parallel and in series, with little concern for the consequences. Celebrated as a gentle pacifist, Einstein treated his family with heartless disdain and his first wife with undisguised contempt. He raised large sums for charity while depriving his children of a tranquil existence. In Einstein in Love, science writer Dennis Overbye has provided an engrossing narrative of the personal and professional life of Time magazine's "Man of the Century".
Einstein's attraction to his first wife Mileva Mari, a free-thinking Serb of Austro-Hungarian nationality, echoed his sceptical attitude towards authority. Both were irreverent and unconventional students of physics. Early in their courtship he called her Doxerl (Dollie) and she called him Johanzel (Johnny), perhaps allusions to characters in A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen was a notable figure in Munich when Einstein was a boy there). Notwithstanding doubts expressed by the editors of the Einstein papers, there is circumstantial evidence that Mari shared in the genesis of relativity theory.
Just as Einstein took time to obtain a doctorate — failing several times in the attempt — he was also slow to reach maturity in personal relations. Shortly before he finally broke with Mari, when Europe was careening towards war in 1914, Einstein drew up a list of demands for keeping up appearances with her that reads uncannily as if it were the marriage contract of the emotionally crippled scholar Peter Kien in Elias Canetti's 1935 novel Auto da Fé.
When Einstein's station in life permitted it, he gave libido free rein. Women became, for him, an anodyne for the rigors of pure thought. Overbye portrays Einstein's second wife Elsa Einstein as a bourgeois comfort, suiting his station as a world-famous professor at Berlin University. Through her efforts, he ate well and recovered his Jewish heritage.
The charming affair between Einstein and Marie Curie, portrayed by Yahoo Serious in his underrated 1988 comedy film Young Einstein, is entirely fictitious, but it invites us to consider how Einstein loved. If we may infer from his correspondence, his love is largely sexless; momentous thoughts find little place in it. In addition to cute nothings, letters sent to his wives refer to food and drink, to the small universe of an apartment, and to the recollection of a night of mutual comfort. There are petulant, uncharitable judgements along with naive self-deprecation. Einstein in Love reveals Einstein's sadness at his personal failings alongside his elation at the prospect of a tryst. We are a long way from John Donne's "Extasie", in which mutual attraction leads to transcendence.
To hear Einstein's physicist friends speak about him is to imagine a figure of great strength and sensitivity. Einstein's portrait in Leopold Infeld's 1941 autobiography Quest (Chelsea, 1980), for example, radiates humility, honesty and charity. In Infeld's account, and in many others, the man behind the intellectual revolution produced by the energy quantum and relativity has the face of a kindly, absent-minded sage whose own historical account of what happened (written with Infeld) has the comforting English title, The Evolution of Physics. It is hard to overestimate the impact of such an image.
In his account, Overbye juxtaposes Einstein's emotional state and his scientific research. Einstein's love affairs and his thoughts about physics appear serially without connecting commentary. (The physics receives unnecessary and sometimes confusing explanation, while there is little attempt to analyse matters of the heart.) The disjointed style reinforces the reader's sense that the qualities of kindliness and humanity, as represented in the larger-than-life statue of Einstein on the Mall in Washington, are social constructions.
Einstein in Love ends abruptly with Einstein's triumph in predicting the deflection of starlight during the solar eclipse of 1919. The story carries a disturbing moral: repelled by the flawed genius of Wagner and Nietzsche, scientists in the twentieth century have portrayed this man as a personification of his great work.
