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Longman, pp 513, Pounds sterling 17.95

FIRST reaction to the book must be a groan. Yet another collection of
pieces wrenched out of other books – novels, poetry and essays, biographies
and autobiographies – this time all reflecting some aspect of science and
scientists and representing the work of authors ranging from Chaucer to
Arthur Koestler. The prospect is similar to that faced by someone approaching
the colossal buffet of food at a United Nations party. The only thing to
do is to advance gingerly and see what appeals.

Lo and behold, a delight at the first jab of the fork! There is nothing
so rewarding to a reviewer as immediate laughter and I would have serious
doubts about the character of anyone who could stay unmoved by the extract
from James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times in which he describes the aid
given by a professor of economics to a stupid football star, essential to
the university team, but who had to keep up with the class. The footballer
was asked to name any method of transportation and couldn’t. ‘How did you
come to college this year, Mr Bolenciecwcz?’ asked the professor. ‘Chuffa
chuffa, chuffa chuffa.’

After that, I surrendered to the skill and scope of Gratzer’s choice,
much illuminated by his own comments on introducing the extracts. For instance,
he remarks that scientific autobiography is in general anineffably boring
genre. Quite right.

Going back to his introduction (it is inevitable that a reader dashes
backwards and forwards in such a work, led on this eccentric course by allusions
and memories) I was startled to read, ‘William Cooper wrote one admirable
scientific novel (better, it seems to me, than anything of Snow’s).’ As
I find Snow’s novels tedious, this was another satisfaction and of course,
it showed what an excellent and discriminating critic Walter Gratzer must
be.

The proposition on which the collection is founded is that science,
although by far the most important activity of our times, has made little
impact onliterature, except perhaps fordisplays of contempt or fear. One
of the great intellectual endeavours of our age is considered, in Gratzer’s
irresistible phrase, ‘as no more than the gristle in life’s hamburger’.
The Literary Companion ought to do something towards making the hamburger
more digestible.

Walter Gratzer works for the MRC’s Cell Biophysics Unit at King’s College
in London. God knows how he has found the time to track down such a collection
of items. They are divided into sections, such as ‘The Laboratory Scene’
and ‘The Illuminati’ (famous scientists in biography and fiction), which
is rich in anecdote and, for me at least, identifies for the first time
some of the people on whom characters in the novels of Aldous Huxley were
based, among other pleasures. ‘The Thrill of the Chase: Discovery’, the
third section, contains some of the best didactic writing from H. G. Wells’s
novels, still a model of how to make information fascinating in the guise
of conversation, and a marvellous extract from Primo Levi’s description
of his adventures as a chemist. ‘Science Collides with the World’ is the
longest section, ‘Science and War’ is the shortest, for obvious reasons,
and mostly concerned with the Second World War. Although most of its content
is familiar, some items have lost none of their ability to raise the hair,such
as the secretly recorded conversation of German physicists brought to England
on learning of the explosion of the atom bomb over Hiroshima.

Gratzer calls his last section, ‘The Pathology of Science’, and it is
devoted, he says, to the obsessives – the men with staring eyes. Here are
the proponents of monkey glands, Reich and his orgone energy, Lysenko and
G. B. Shaw’s doctor stimulating the phagocytes; and also – a splendid piece
to end with – Ogden Nash’s poem about the utterly incompetent Dr Faustus
Foster, who thought he had sold his soul to the Devil but had sold it to
his guardian angel instead. ‘You’d revoke the licence of any rhymer who
ranked him with Teller and Oppenheimer’.

I can’t think of a more awkward book to have by the bedside, a good
place for it. It will keep you awake.