Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (29 page)

I could not make that request of Sir Lawrence until March, after the conclusion of my six-week tour of East Africa, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The trip was arranged at the last moment by Charlie Wyzanski, who, as a trustee, had recently been there looking at the foundation's African operations. The East African offices were in Nairobi, and I flew there in a BOAC VC-10, first class, as senior Ford Foundation staff traveled. Sitting next to me was a woman who asked to see the
Honest Jim
manuscript that I had by my side. This she read in two hours, telling me she could not put it down. After going on to give three lectures at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Frank Sutton, the former Harvard junior fellow, joined me on a trip to see how foundation monies directed toward wildlife conservation were being used. First we stopped at Queen Elizabeth Park, on Lake Edward, above which the Mountain of the Moon rose into the clouds. Later, we were surrounded by hippos and crocodiles, while an old-fashioned,
African Queen-like
boat took us to the base of Murchison Falls, over which the White Nile cascades down.

Also staying at the Makerere Faculty Club was the Oxford-educated writer V. S. Naipaul, who, over several breakfasts, showed no interest in the fact that I too was generating English prose. Around the swimming pool, stand-offish in a quite different way, was the petite, well-shaped daughter of Donald Soper, the prominent English Methodist. Caroline betrayed no desire to learn from
Honest Jim
how Cambridge science moved. She was only there babysitting her sister's children while her Cambridge brother-in-law gave physiology lectures to Makerere students. They followed their Cambridge equivalents in wearing academic gowns in their dining hall, a custom I honored on several evenings, to my discomfort.

Upon the conclusion of my African lectures, which also took me to Tanzania, Sudan, and Ethiopia, I made Geneva my main base until my sabbatical ended in late May. From there I went twice to London, the first time to give Sir Lawrence my manuscript and tell him that Harvard University Press wanted to publish it. On my second visit to his Royal Institution top-floor flat, I waited nervously outside until upon entering he put me at ease, saying that by writing the foreword he could not sue me for libel. Later I learned that his initial reaction to my manuscript was, as feared, one of white-hot anger but that his wife, Alice, had cooled him down. Immediately I had Tom Wilson officially inform Bragg about HUP's publication plans. Within a month, Bragg delivered his crisp, elegant foreword saying I wrote with a Pepys-like frankness. Feeling that I had a book that I could now publish, I sent the manuscript to Francis asking for comments about its accuracy.

I also gave
Honest Jim
to my friend of many years Janet Stewart, then an editor at André Deutsch, to see whether they would like to consider it for British publication. Janet and I had first met in Cambridge when she was up at Girton College. Now married to the barrister Ben Whitaker, she had been in publishing in New York before returning to England as an editor with Deutsch. She and her husband lived on Chester Row and over dinner I gave them news of Bragg's foreword. Several days later I went to Deutsch's offices on Great Russell Street, where Janet introduced me to her Hungarian-born boss and uncomfortably looked on as he offered me a £250 advance. I politely replied I would pass his offer on to Harvard University Press director Tom Wilson. Later I told Tom to find a British publisher who understood that scientists are not indifferent to money.

Tom's choice proved also to be Hungarian, the portly, astute George Weidenfeld, said to be an inspiration for Kingsley Amis's novel
One Fat Englishman.
His publishing house, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, had recently gained notoriety by publishing
Lolita,
which had cost Nigel Nicolson his seat in the House of Commons (though it apparently did not interfere with Weidenfeld's being created a life peer in 1976). Tom sent
Honest Jim
to George in time to let him read it before I passed through London in mid-July on my way to a scientific meeting in Greece. Then Weidenfeld and Nicolson had offices above Bond Street. George himself lived in an Eaton Square flat whose high ceilings let him optimally display his large canvases, which soon included a Francis Bacon. Wasting few words, George offered me a $10,000 advance, half payable upon signing his contract, the other upon my book's publication. Immediately I accepted, asking him to send the contract to Tom Wilson to see that its terms were compatible with those in the contract I was about to sign with HUP.

By then Francis had let me know he did not like the title
Honest Jim,
its implication to him being that I alone was hawking the gospel truth. That one would hardly make such an assumption buying a used car from “Honest Francis,” or even from “Honest Jesus,” did not budge him. So I changed the title to
Base Pairs,
aware that this pun by itself might lead to a libel suit caused by a jacket cover with Francis and me and of Maurice and Rosalind staring at each other à la
Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Though Tom Wilson wanted me to use my third choice,
The Double Helix,
he went along with
Base Pairs
on the title page of an only mildly revised manuscript sent to Francis, Maurice, John Kendrew, and Peter Pauling, together with forms to sign saying they had no objections to HUP's publishing my manuscript.

We should have realized that neither Francis nor Maurice would see any advantage in giving permission to publish material that they felt not only failed to serve the public interest but also harmed them. Too soon their response came through a high-powered attorney, who wrote President Pusey of his clients’ contention that they were libeled by my manuscript. They employed the same lawyer that Jacqueline Kennedy had unsuccessfully used to block publication of
The Death of a President,
William Manchester's book on her husband's assassination. Both Tom Wilson and I noted that this New York hired gun was careful not to specify that
he
considered my book libelous. Nevertheless, we feared that President Pusey would feel himself involved in something untoward, and Tom later unilaterally decided that HUP would move ahead only with the Harvard president's approval.

I also should have realized that Peter Pauling would feel a filial duty to send my manuscript to his father. After reading it, Linus fired off an angry letter to Tom Wilson calling
Base Pairs
“a disgraceful example of malevolence and egocentricity” He wrote demanding that I remove the lines “Linus's screwy chemistry” and “Linus looking like an ass.” These were phrases I knew good taste would lead me to delete before the manuscript went to the printer. But since they were true, I was loath to remove them before absolutely necessary. In a similar vein, I never should have sent out a manuscript saying that Francis had never been a member of any college because he was thought to pinch other people's ideas. By this I only intended to convey the reason why King's, to their great loss, had not made Francis a fellow despite his unquestioned brilliance.

Already Tom Wilson had assigned his editor Joyce Leibowitz the task of working with me to make the manuscript less objectionable to the story's principals, at the same time preserving its aim to tell what really happened. Joyce had the wit to see that my story would benefit from an epilogue saying that my descriptions of Rosalind Franklin did not do justice to her scientific accomplishments while at King's. Also helping me was the bright literature major Libby Aldrich, who, like Dolly Garter, had taken George Wald's natural science biology course. Libby then was writing her senior thesis on Sylvia Plath, whom I remembered scurrying along King's Parade in Cambridge in the mid-1950s.

Soon after receiving the
Base Pairs
manuscript, John Kendrew took it to J. D. Bernal, who wrote him saying, “I could not put it down…. Considered as a novel of the history of science as it should be written, it is unequaled. It is as exciting as
Martin Arrowsmith.”
While asserting his opinion that I was unfair to the contributions of Rosalind Franklin and noting that I did not even mention the work of Sven Furberg, both from Bernal's lab, he offered the following comment: “Watson and Crick did a magnificent job, but in the process were forced to make enormous mistakes which they had the skill to correct in time. The whole thing is a disgraceful exposé of the stupidity of great scientists’ discoveries. My verdict would be the lines of Hilaire Belloc:

And is it True? It is not True.
And if it were it wouldn't do.”

I was also encouraged by a letter from the Hungarian-born imrau-nologist George Klein. During his late fall visit to Harvard Medical School, my father prepared Sunday lunch at 10½ Appian Way for the three of us. George left with a copy of
Base Pairs
to read on the plane back to Stockholm. From the Karolinska Institutet he sent a letter saying that I had written “an unparalleled description of the excitements, the frustration, the greatness, and the smallness of creative research students…. You should expect a hostile backlash from most scientists; you should not try to soften your book, have it printed as it is or not at all.”

Over three winter months, I continually made minor changes to correct misstatements of fact or personal intent, particularly as enlightened by Francis and Sir Lawrence Bragg. Again using
Honest Jim
as the title, I worried that Francis and Maurice's objections would lead Sir Lawrence to withdraw his foreword, and I wrote to him that I would understand if he saw fit to do so. On April 19 he replied that he would be very sorry if it came to that, but that he also wished to state categorically that his contribution was contingent on my making certain changes, in particular, one correcting my misstatement that Perutz and Kendrew told him they would leave Cavendish if Crick was fired. In conclusion, he “wished the book every success.” At the same time, John Maddox, the editor of
Nature,
found nothing libelous in the newest
Honest Jim.
In fact, he believed it to be much less dodgy than earlier reported to him: “In other words, I would like to see it published.” But when that occurs, he said, “you will have to barricade yourself in for six months or so.”

Both Maurice and Francis continued to oppose
Honest Jim
in every way possible. Ina letter, Maurice reminded me of having written when I sent him my first draft, “You might think you have reason to shoot me.” Now Maurice worried that “his letter would make me want to shoot him.” In it he suggested that I abandon any thought of publishing my book intact but instead have its science passages incorporated in the forthcoming book of historian Robert Olby on the double helix.

Contributions emerging from tape recordings of himself, Francis, Erwin Chargaff, and Pauling were also expected to appear in Olby's book.

Francis's five-page letter of April 13 started out saying that the new version was a little better but his basic objections were the same: “Your book is not good history;” “You did not document your assertions (with appropriate references)… displaying the history of science as gossip;” “Your view of the history of science is found in the lower class of women's magazines;” “If instead considered as autobiography, it is misleading and in bad taste;” “The fact a man is well known does not excuse his friends from respecting his privacy while he is alive;” “The only exception should be when private matters are of direct public concern like with Mrs. Simpson and King Edward;” “Your book is vulgar popularization which is indefensible.” On the next-to-last page, Francis raised the stakes. A psychiatrist to whom he gave the manuscript reportedly said, “The book could only be made by a man who hates women.” Another shrink concluded that I loved my sister to excess, “a fact much discussed by your friends while you were working in Cambridge, but so far they have refrained from writing about.” On the last page, Francis noted copies of his letter were being sent to, among others, Bragg, Pauling, and Pusey

A month later, Nathan Pusey told Harvard University Press that it could not publish my book, saying, “Harvard did not want to be involved in fights between scientists.” Libel considerations were likely not involved but no foundation for such objections seems to have been established in any case. Some months before, at a party dominated by Harvard Law students, a recent law school graduate told me that he was reading my manuscript for Ropes and Grey, Harvard's Boston lawyers, explaining that he had no past experience with libel matters. Once I learned that HUP was out, Joyce Leibowitz suggested I retain as my personal counsel the New York lawyer Ephraim London. A greatly respected legal scholar, Eph had successfully argued several freedom-of-speech cases before the United States Supreme Court. A tall, thin man with connections to publishing going back several decades, Eph had been Simon and Schuster's house counsel. Upon reading my manuscript, he said it contained no libel.

Already I had a new publisher, the newly formed Atheneum Press, started by Pat Knopf, son of the famous publisher Alfred A. Knopf, and Simon Michael Bessie. I chose it to stay with Tom Wilson, who was resigning as director of Harvard University Press to join Atheneum. Tom's leaving HUP had nothing to do with Pusey's decision to block my book. The decision had been made beforehand, in response to his approaching HUP's compulsory retirement age. Tom's children were still young and he needed a well-paid job into the foreseeable future. Ironically, only because HUP was not publishing my book could I continue to enjoy the reassurance of having Tom at my side. Lawrence Bragg, confident of Tom's integrity, let his preface stand. Fearing a libel action if not a petition for an injunction against
Honest Jim's
publication, Atheneum retained the New York lawyer Alan Schwartz, whom William Manchester had used to defend against Jacqueline Kennedy's libel suit.

I met with him and Tom Wilson several times before Eph London came into the picture to tell Schwartz that the changes he wanted were unnecessary, as
Honest Jim
was neither libelous nor an unwarranted invasion of privacy. Many of Schwartz's suggestions would blunt intended candor. His accepted version of the first sentence, “I can't ever remember seeing Francis Crick in a modest mood,” could only have been written by a timid lawyer. In a few cases, he wanted harmless substitutions such as
often
instead of
generally.
To these I gave in. As Tom Wilson strongly concurred, I also agreed to Schwartz's wish that the title become
The Double Helix.