Books: Scientific Autobiography

BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD—J. W. N. Sullivan—Knopf. Few U. S. writers on science approach the authority and lucid readableness of England’s Bertrand Russell and John William Navin Sullivan. Laymen curious about what science is up to can turn with reasonable hopefulness to Russell’s The A B C of Atoms, Sullivan’s Three Men Discuss Relativity. In this brief (220-page), disarming autobiography, Journalist Sullivan, calling himself Julian Shaughnessy, explains about himself with the same simple sincerity he uses to explain Bach or Bohr. Realistic, humble, Sullivan calls popular works on science “one of the most unprofitable of all forms of reading,” admits ”it seems that I am a man without any marked talents.” He wrote his autobiography under the common desire to understand and justify his own existence. Son of an Irish sailor, Shaughnessy-Sullivan had little formal schooling, thinks he missed nothing but “a prodigious waste of mental energy.” He got a good job early, with an electrical manufacturing company. His job and his fellow-workers roused his interest in science. He put himself through London University, emigrated to the U. S., returned for the War which “completely reorganized my life.” Music struck him all of a heap; Dostoyevsky was a “revelation.” He had an unsuccessful love affair, tried to scatter the memory among other women. One of them got a divorce to become his mistress, died before their experiment had completely failed. Now, middleaged, unambitious, disillusioned, he waits to see what will happen with the rest of his life, has no high hopes, except some day to write “an enormous critical study and biography of Isaac Newton.”

Without going into the irrelevancy of detail, Shaughnessy-Sullivan gives the impression of having said what there was to say about his microcosmos, drops many a memorable remark by the way. Novel-addicts will cheer his dictum: “Novels, in particular, enlarge one’s life. More than any other branch of literature they make one acquainted with the panorama of life, and with the variety of human emotions.” His view on war is more practical than Kellogg’s and the late Aristide Briand’s: “It seems to me that the only way to prevent future wars is to make people afraid of war. If the probability of death and torture is made sufficiently high the spirit of adventure will not prevail against it.” With no pretense at being a philosopher, he can be as effectively philosophical as Schopenhauer: “Christ who called us sons of God, and Swift who called us little odious vermin, are both making a quite unnecessary fuss about almost nothing.”