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Only now can I see how he said no to almost everything that life offered, not in rage or terror, not with vehemence or in indignation, but with a wry smile and a funny story, amused by the absurdity of the world. His revolt was self-contained and self-sustained. I don’t know how he did it.
Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever after glazed with the good fortune of brilliant readings. In a similar way my father blessed every court report and obituary notice with the weight of a remarkable life, finding unexpected depths and breadths in the thinnest journalese and kitschest sentiment, the words nothing, the drift of them everything. His kitchen filled daily with insights that belonged to an order other than that of the
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Within months of his vision in Russell Square Szilard patented the atomic chain reaction. ‘Knowing what it would mean,’ he wrote, ‘and I knew because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.’ He assigned the patent to the British Admiralty so that it might remain secret. Seeking to quarantine his terrifying revelations, he attempted to persuade eminent colleagues such as Niels Bohr and the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi that atomic weaponry was feasible, and that their nuclear research should therefore be kept secret to ensure Nazi Germany did not get the bomb first.
Many years later, when I went to Oxford, I studied history, an idea of time formed over 3000 years of human experience in Europe, which, I discovered, made perfect sense of European time, stopping at all stations of European progress and European thought. It was a straight railway line that perfectly mirrored an experience that became an idea, and an idea that became experience, and an experience that became European thought and then the European novel. But it made no sense of Tasmania.
His activism made him famous, and though he never won the Nobel Prize for physics, many eminent scientists and Nobel laureates believed he deserved it, while others argued he should win the Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to stop nuclear war. For his part, Szilard joked he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for failing to discover nuclear fission in the 1930s, which he believed, not without good reason, would have inevitably led to a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany. Yet, in a torment worthy of the ancient Greeks, as his fame grew his influence paradoxically waned, his ideas and influence fell out of
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It looked, he said of the camp, like a Buddhist hell. I asked if he helped them. He said he didn’t. I asked if as a medical man he did not feel it was his duty to help the sick and the suffering. ‘You have to understand,’ he said, and he said it as though commenting on the quality or otherwise of his green tea, ‘we did not see them as human beings.’ The green tea came in small cups. It was very hard to swallow. He told me the Australians were bad with their hygiene. The Japanese took hot baths. The Australians did not. This seemed to explain things. I said nothing in reply. ‘You understand?’
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The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In a 1920 interview with Strand magazine, H. G. Wells attributed the idea of the book to a remark of his brother Frank, to whom he dedicated the novel. They had been talking ‘of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans—a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians’. ‘We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. “Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,” said he, “and begin laying about them here!”’
The invasion was a sacrilegious act. Perhaps the gaping absence that haunts contemporary Tasmania is the loss of that sacred world. For we cannot imagine it. If it were imaginable we could not be Australia today.
In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world.
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release
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