Books: Short Notices: Feb. 23, 1968

Short Notices THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson. 226 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

When he was only 24, Chicago-born Author Watson helped solve the structure of the heredity-determining DNA molecule, a major feat for which he and British Scientists Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins eventually shared a Nobel prize. Now, 15 years later, he has written a highly literate day-by-day account of his experiences (the title is drawn from the spiral-staircase shape of DNA). The book will lead readers to important discoveries of their own: scientific research is not necessarily the calm, orderly process so tritely portrayed in modern legend, and scientists are all too human.

Watson describes his own shortcomings of laziness and lack of direction; his narrow escape from physical attack by a female crystallographer when he challenged her theories; the abrasive personality of talented Co-worker Crick; an incredible high school-level error by brilliant Chemist Linus Pauling that temporarily threw him off course, enabling Watson and Crick to win the DNA race; the distraction of wine and popsies at Cambridge University, where much of the great work was carried out. Burdened by the complex details of DNA research, Double Helix does not quite close the gap between C. P. Snow’s “two cultures,” but certainly narrows it.

BEAUTY BEAST by MacKinlay Kantor. 382 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

This is a book that should give pause to the Pulitzer Prize committee that awarded the palm to its author for a novel that was stronger but not much better (Andersonville). The new novel’s problem is simple enough: What happens when a twice-widowed white woman falls in love with her male mulatto cook? Pretty much what one would expect down on the Gulf Coast in 1854. He is handsome and graceful and goes by the name of Beauty Beast. He knows what to do with herbs and French sauces, and he can play Mozart and lesser composers on the pianoforte. His mistress, Sidney Shallop, has never known anything more moving.

Of course Sidney’s happiness cannot last and Beauty’s end is all too foreseeable. The real point is that he goes to his death with pride in his blackness and with no regard for what in him is owed to inherited whiteness. That touch is convincing enough, but not the narrative style (“When first Sidney saw Beauty Beast come walking with buoyant zeal, flesh of her nature lay scorched again”). There is something wildly outdated about such plantation-patented prose.