3.
In the decades after the Second World War, scholars on all sides tried to make sense of what the war had meant, and among them was a prominent British scientist named C. P. Snow. Snow had served in the British government during the war. He was a Cambridge don, a successful novelist, and friends with everyone who was anyone in the British intellectual elite. In 1960 he came to Harvard University to give a lecture, a big chunk of which was devoted to the story of Frederick Lindemann.i Snow believed that Lindemann had played a hugely underappreciated role in the way the British chose to use their airpower. If you wanted to understand the befuddling attitude the British had about bombing, Snow said, you had to understand Lindemann.
As Snow put it in his Harvard lecture:
Lindemann was by any odds a very remarkable and a very strange man. He was a real heavyweight of personality…
Lindemann was quite un-English. I always thought if you met him in middle age, you’d have thought he was the kind of central European businessman that one used to meet in the more expensive hotels in Italy…
I mean, he might have come from Düsseldorf. He was heavy-featured, pallid, always very correctly dressed. He spoke German at least as well as he did English, and indeed under his English there was a tone of German—if you could hear him at all, because he always mumbled in an extraordinarily constricted fashion.
Frederick Lindemann—later known as Lord Cherwell—was born in Germany in 1886. His father was a wealthy German engineer. His mother was an American heiress. Lindemann was a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin just before the First World War—at a time when Germany was the center of the world in physics. Colleagues compared his mind to Isaac Newton’s. He had an extraordinary memory for numbers: as a child, Frederick would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of statistics from memory. He could demolish anyone in an argument. He also spent a considerable amount of time with Albert Einstein. Once, at dinner, Einstein mentioned some mathematical proposition for which he’d never been able to come up with a proof. The next day Lindemann casually mentioned that he had the answer; he’d figured it out in the bathtub.
Everyone talked about Lindemann. And for a writer like Snow, the gossip was irresistible.
His passions were much bigger than life…[They] reminded me…of the sort of inflated monomania of the passions in Balzac’s novels. He’d have made a wonderful Balzacian character. And, I said, he’s a figure who made a novelist’s fingers itch.
He enjoyed none of the sensual pleasures. He was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn’t only a vegetarian, but he would only eat very minute fractions of what you might regard as a vegetarian diet. He lived mainly on Port Salut cheese, the whites of eggs—the yolks being apparently too animal—olive oil, and rice.
Lindemann was eccentric and brilliant. But his greatest claim to fame was that he was Winston Churchill’s best friend. The two men had met each other in 1921 at a dinner arranged by the Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Churchill was an aristocrat, and Lindemann was really rich. So the two moved in the same circles. They hit it off. As for Churchill, if you read some of the letters he wrote Lindemann, they are almost worshipful.
The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.
Churchill’s personality is important here. He was a man of the big picture. A visionary. He had a deep, intuitive understanding of human psychology and history. But he struggled with depression. He had mood swings. He was impulsive, a gambler. He had no head for figures. Throughout his life he was always losing huge amounts of money on foolish investments. In 1935, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of more than $60,000 on alcohol—in one year. Within a month of becoming prime minister, he was broke.
Here we have a man with very little common sense, no ability to handle numbers, no way to bring order to his life. And so whom does he become best friends with? Someone disciplined, almost fanatically consistent. Someone who ate the same three things at every meal, every day. Someone so naturally at home in the world of numbers that, as a child, he would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of statistics from memory.