C8| Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
millionaire vulgarian in the contemporary mode”),
Strickland and Anne embark on an affair while
engaging in back-and-forth about “the trick” to life,
what “guys” know and the meaning of “honesty.”
During a reflection on naval history, Owen
Browne notes that the authors seem to crib from
each other, and Stone himself became embroiled in
a plagiarism dispute relating to the book. Browne’s
decision to falsify his geographical location, in
order to win the boat race, was, as Stone cagily
put it, “suggested by an incident that actually
occurred”—the doomed exploits of the yachtsman
Donald Crowhurst, as uncovered by the English
journalists Ron Hall and Nicholas Tomalin and
recorded in their extraordinary 1970 book, “The
Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst.”
Hall complained about the uncredited borrowing
(Tomalin had died while reporting on the Yom
Kippur War in 1973). Mr. Bell mocks the idea that
the Crowhurst story “somehow” existed outside
the “public domain,” but as Hall tried to explain at
the time, “no story could have derived more totally
from a single source.” Tomalin and Hall worked for
the newspaper, the London Sunday Times, that
had organized and sponsored the race, and were
granted exclusive access to Crowhurst’s writings
and log books. Stone pointed out that his knowl-
edge of Crowhurst’s deception went as far back as
the original press reports—from 1969, not, as he
claimed, 1968—but why does that matter when,
as he grudgingly admitted, he drew upon the
book for his novel?
Mr. Bell’s desire to take Stone’s side on every
matter extends in this case to reading only Stone’s
half of the correspondence. He repeats Stone’s
misquotation, in an essay in the Times Literary
Supplement, of a comment by Ron Hall, even
though Hall corrected him at the time. And as well
as omitting the more damning evidence, Mr. Bell
takes a cheap shot by saying that Tomalin’s death
had given him “something of a hero’s aura” as well
as making groundless reference to the involvement
of the “British gutter press.” Neither heroization
nor mud-slinging proved necessary. The facts
were more than enough.
It’s typical of Mr. Bell’s hagiographic tendencies
that he quotes Kesey’s assessment that Stone saw
“sinister forces behind every Oreo cookie” and
then imputes dubious motives to Stone’s critics
in this open-and-shut case. And Mr. Bell reveals
himself to be somewhat of the Stone mindset
when he speculates that James Wood’s “per-
snickety” 1997 New York Times piece about
Stone might have been more British revenge for
“Outerbridge Reach.”
Mr. Bell is so consumed with praising Stone’s
novels and defending his integrity that he makes
too little of his late-blossoming career as a writer
of book reviews and short stories. The series of
literary essays that Stone contributed to the New
York Review of Books—all but omitted from “The
Eye You See With”—reveals a personable lightness,
buoyancy of phrase and appetite for knotty nuance
too frequently lacking elsewhere. And while his
novels read like acts of evasion—an attempt to
sublimate his existential unease into portraits of
noble failed heroics—stories such as “Absence of
Mercy” and “Helping” feel raw and potent, direct
in their confrontation with Stone’s travails:
orphanhood, alcoholism, the pain that survives
even tried-and-tested forms of avoidance and
self-numbing. It’s an irony both regrettable and
unmissable that the only services that Stone’s
devoted friend and fan has neglected to render
are those that might provide strongest support
for the grand claims being made on his behalf.Mr. Robson is the lead fiction reviewer for
the New Statesman.ContinuedfrompageC7The Fiction
And Fact
Of Robert Stone
BYMARCIABARTUSIAK
E
DWIN HUBBLE,ar-
chitect of the mod-
ern universe, called
her “the best man at
Harvard,” a decided
compliment for a woman in the
1920s. Indeed, if Cecilia Payne-
Gaposchkin had been born the
opposite sex, she would surely
have been offered a professorship
shortly after completing her ex-
ceptional Ph.D. dissertation in as-
tronomy. Instead, Harvard officials
waited more than three decades
before bestowing that honor.
But Payne-Gaposchkin belongs
in the scientific pantheon. She
was one of the first astronomers
to apply the new laws of atomic
physics to astronomical bodies
and in 1925 uncovered the first
hint that hydrogen is the most
abundant element in the universe.
This was an astounding discovery
that echoes down the corridors of
astronomy to this day. Here is the
fuel for a star’s persistent burn-
ing; here is the gaseous tracer
that enables radio astronomers
to probe a long-hidden universe;
here is debris from the first few
minutes of the universe’s creation
in a big bang.
That is why “What Stars Are
Made Of” is a welcome addition to
the astronomical literature. Other
histories have included a chap-
ter or two on Payne-Gaposchkin’s
work; her daughter, Katherine
Haramundanis, had her mother’s
memoir published nearly 40 years
ago. But Donovan Moore, a former
newspaper reporter and television
producer, has produced the first
full-length biography, a beautifully
written and well-researched study.
Handling the science with a light
but deft touch, Mr. Moore primar-
ily focuses on this astronomer’s
personal life, the office politics
and the struggles one woman of
science faced in the first half
of the 20th century.
Born in 1900, the eldest of
three siblings, Cecilia Helena
Payne grew up in the Bucking-
hamshire village of Wendover and
later London. Tall, broad-shoul-
dered and often dowdily attired,
she was teased for being the
smartest student in the class,
years ahead of her peers. Her
school’s chemistry lab became her
chapel, “where she would steal
away, alone, to conduct her own
worship service,” writes Mr.
Moore. Though painfully shy, she
was still immensely curious, stub-
born and willful. Kicked out of one
school, she found another that en-
couraged her scientific interests
and helped her gain a scholarship
to Cambridge University.
Cambridge, then the world’s
mecca of science, had always been
her goal, and the year she arrived
on campus—1919—was crucial to
her fate. Originally intending to
Ramsey spent his adolescence at
the English boarding school with
the highest intellectual reputation,
Winchester College. During school
holidays, he learned German in order
to read books about philosophy,
mathematics and Einstein’s relativity
in their original language. In 1920,
he had a triumphant election to
the senior scholarship at the most
eminent Cambridge college, Trinity.
Cambridge University was entering
the most glorious decades of its 800
years of history. The Mathematical
tripos, however, was still a dreary
and archaic exercise in rote memori-
zation and impervious to the abstract
mathematics being developed in
mainland Europe.
Unsurprisingly, Ramsey didn’t take
any mathematicians as his mentors.
Instead he gravitated toward Keynes,
who became a lifelong friend, as well
as to three philosophers—Bertrand
Russell, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Witt-
genstein. These were men who op-
erated at the highest intellectual
altitude and at the tautest pitch of
intensity. When Ramsey and Keynes
ContinuedfrompageC7
lunched together and took a post-
prandial walk in 1921, they discussed
philosophy, epistemology, Occam’s
Razor, the history of mathematics
and of economics, probability in
mathematics, puzzles, games, and the
classical economist Alfred Marshall.
Heavy stuff, although Ms. Misak,
a professor of philosophy at the
University of Toronto, does her best
to lighten the burden without patron-
izing her readers.
Ms. Misak admires Ramsey, she
writes, because he pursued “the
feasible first best,” not the ideal, the
absolute or the certainty but “the
optimal solution for the real world.”
For Ramsey the causes of people’s
beliefs and disbeliefs, and even more
so the effects of their assent or
dissent, held far more interest than
the intrinsic nature of those beliefs.
The pragmatism of his philosophical
ideas ran contrary to Wittgenstein’s.
He mistrusted anything that was
beyond definition or analysis.
“Believing in Freud was better
than believing in God,” Ms. Misak
writes of Ramsey and his Cambridge
friends. Ramsey was highly sexed:
highly frustrated, too, because he
lived in a university where the sexes
were strictly segregated. Unlike many
of his friends who were bisexual or
homosexual and found physical relief
with one another, he was exclusively
attracted to women. He hankered for
a male friend with whom he could
explore the world in a companionate“passion”; but his sexuality was
insufficiently flexible for this to
happen. “Englishmen are more homo-
sexual... than foreigners,” Ramsey
wrote in 1925. “I do not mean that
they want to sleep with other men,
but that their relations with men are
more important to them than their
relations with women.”
In 1924, Ramsey spent six months
in Vienna. There he soon shed his
virginity by the connivance of a
“charming and good-natured” Vien-
nese sex worker. A more extensive
experience was undergoing psycho-
analysis by Freud’s colleague Theodor
Reik. What he sought most from
psychoanalysis was to optimize his
intellectual powers: He said that he
wanted to be made “cleverer” by the
talk-cure—by which he meant less
distracted from his life work, more
bent on concentration, perhaps
luckier. “Discoveries of importance are
made by remarkable people not by
remarkable diligence,” he thought.
On returning from Vienna, he
joined a psychoanalysis group in Cam-
bridge and in 1925 married Lettice
Baker. She was highly intelligent,
funny, pleasure-loving, vitalizing and
independent in mind. She had a taste
for younger men: Ramsey was five
years her junior, and a later lover of
hers, Julian Bell (Virginia Woolf’s
nephew) was 10 years younger still.
The Ramseys licensed each other
to have extramarital relationships.
Whereas Lettice interpreted this asRamsey was an active sportsman,
who liked to swim in the River Cam.
In November 1929 he fell ill, having
probably caught Weil’s Disease, a
bacterial infection, from animal urine
in the waters. After a misdiagnosis of
jaundice, he died in January 1930.
“A dreadful tragedy,” Strachey wrote;
“he was a real genius, and a most
charming person—infinitely simple
and modest.” Modesty is a key word:
It is hard to imagine a man less
selfish, pushy, self-advertising or
envious. At a time of nationalism,
populist intolerance and educational
botching, it is good to recall one of
his maxims: “True education is broad
and tolerant; it should make us feel
the littleness of man, of our nation,
and of our creed.”
“Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of
Powers”makes noble reading. Ms.
Misak is a born teacher who explains
tricky intellectual abstractions with
a clarity that is exceptional. More
than that, she writes with love. Her
tenderness toward Ramsey, his
parents and siblings, his wife and
friends gives spirit and delicacy to
the whole. There is astounding
emotional intelligence in every chap-
ter. One feels on each page Ms.
Misak’s fine mind concentrating hard
on doing the best she can. This is
an enthralling and glorious book.Mr. Davenport-Hines is the author
of “Universal Man: The Lives of
John Maynard Keynes.”Polymath
Frank
Ramsey
major in botany, Payne chanced
upon a ticket to hear British
astronomer Arthur Eddington
announce the results of his his-
toric solar-eclipse expedition,
which confirmed Einstein’s general
theory of relativity. The event, she
later recalled, was a “thunderclap”
that encouraged her to switch
majors to physics.
As she neared graduation,
though, she knew that her only
career choice in Great Britain
would be school teaching. A sym-
pathetic Cambridge astronomer
suggested she go to the female-
friendly Harvard College Obser-
vatory, where a bevy of women—
called “computers”—were cata-
loging and analyzing astronomy’s
greatest collection of photo-
graphic plates. Payne wrote a
heartfelt letter to the observa-
tory’s director, Harlow Shapley,
and secured a fellowship. It
didn’t hurt that one of her letters
of recommendation stated that
“she would not want to run away
after a few years’ training to get
married.”
In the fall of 1923, she arrived
in Massachusetts with a plan: She
would use Harvard’s hundreds
of thousands of plates to verify
a new equation, developed by
Indian physicist Meghnad Saha,
that related a star’s temperature
and pressure to the wavelengths
of light it radiates. More than
that, she wanted to compute the
relative abundances of various
elements found in the atmo-
sphere of stars.
It was grueling and tedious
work, with her chain-smoking all
the way. She pored over the pho-
tos for months, “collecting and
classifying the celestial flora” and
trying to interpret smeary spec-
tral lines, while Shapley pressured
her to produce results. Silicon washer savior; she was able to make
out how this element ionized in
four stages, allowing her to cal-
culate the temperature of hotter
stars. From there, she began to
work on abundances, which led to
an infamous snag.Helium appeared to be a thou-
sand times more plentiful in the
stars than expected. Worse than
that, hydrogen was a million
times more abundant than pre-
dicted. “She was treading on
treacherous ground,” writes Mr.
Moore. “The astronomy establish-
ment at the time held a common
strong opinion that the composi-
tion of all celestial bodies was
similar....that the sun and stars
were composed of the same ele-
ments on earth, with the same
relative abundance.” On our
world, free hydrogen and helium
are very scarce.
Reviewing her manuscript,
Princeton astronomer Henry Nor-
ris Russell, then the dean of
American astronomy, said her
conclusion was “impossible.” To
save her career, she backed down,
editing her dissertation to say
that her hydrogen and helium
results were likely “spurious.”
Ironically, it was Russell, using
another method, who finally con-
vinced the astronomical commu-
nity four years later that hydrogen
was indeed the prime element in
the cosmos (and long got the
credit for it).Even though Payne had written
what has been described as “the
most brilliant thesis ever written
in astronomy,” Shapley promoted
Payne merely to technical assis-
tant with little pay. And yet she
was still required to teach like a
professor. She acquiesced because
she wanted to stay at Harvard, for
it was there that this shy woman
began to broaden her horizons
both professionally and socially.
In 1933, during a trip to Eu-
rope, she met the Russian astron-
omer Sergei Gaposchkin, then
stateless and living under the
threat of Nazi persecution. Taking
pity, she campaigned to get him
a job at Harvard. Three months
after his arrival, they married.
And by 1940 they had three
children, who were often found
running through the observatory
offices. Together the couple
worked on variable stars, although
there were no more great break-
throughs for her. Sergei, flam-
boyant and quirky, was far less
accomplished, so, as Mr. Moore
notes, “she was holding down two
jobs—hers and his.”
Her final triumph occurred in
1956, when she became the first
woman to rise to a full professor-
ship at Harvard. Payne-Gapos-
chkin recognized what it meant.
Before her death in 1979, she
made remarks that still resonate
with women today: “I have
reached a height that I should
never, in my wildest dreams, have
predicted 50 years ago. It has
been a case of survival, not of the
fittest, but of the most doggedly
persistent.”Ms. Bartusiak is the author,
most recently, of “Dispatches
From Planet 3: Thirty-Two (Brief)
Tales on the Solar System,
the Milky Way, and Beyond.”What Stars Are Made Of
By Donovan Moore
Harvard, 298 pages, $29.95
A Life in Eclipse
ASTRO LABPayne-Gaposchkin at the Harvard College Observatory, which she joined in 1923.
ALAMYBOOKS
‘Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward, you will ask no other.’—CECILIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN
Cecilia Payne-
Gaposchkin cracked
the secret of the stars’
composition but got
scant credit for decades.permitting physically fulfilling but
emotionally superficial relationships,
Frank thought it meant that he was
allowed one other great love. He fell
head over heels for Elizabeth Denby,
an expert in the architecture and man-
agement of worker housing and well
described by a friend as “a handsome,
positive young woman...manifestly
a great original, with strong feelings,a ready gift of expression and an
unerring eye for human needs.”
Ramsey’s candor, zest for life and
generosity of spirit were life-enrich-
ing. His untidiness and indiffer-
ence to appearances, according to
Ms. Misak, made him all the more
adorable to his friends. On a walking
tour of Germany, he was questioned
by the police, who mistook him for
a lunatic escaped from an asylum
because his hair was full of straw
from a disintegrated hat. In the
Cambridge lecture halls of the 1920s,
his hair, his gown, his suit, his spec-
tacles and face would be smeared
in white chalk.Ramsey defined
probability in terms of
subjective degrees of
belief, laying the basis for
rational-choice theory
and game theory.