John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

Freud suffered throughout his life from depression and paranoia. On the recommendation of his therapist friend Wilhelm Fleiss, he attempted to treat his mood swings with cocaine. Fleiss had elaborated a tenuous theory that every illness, from sexual problems to disease, was determined by the bones and membranes of the nose and that cocaine could alleviate their symptoms. Freud was delighted with his early results, even encouraging his fiancée to take some “to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color.” After a close friend became seriously addicted, he reduced his consumption in favor of cigars, soon developing a twenty-a-day habit. It killed him eventually, but not before he’d suffered the agony of thirty operations for mouth cancer. Eventually, his entire upper jaw and palate on the right side were removed, and his mouth had to be fitted with a plate to allow him to eat and speak. Undeterred, he would lever his mouth open with a clothes peg to wedge a cigar in. He died three weeks after the start of World War II, his doctor easing his passage with massive overdoses of morphine.

In the end, Freud got what he’d craved since his childhood—heroic status and universal fame—but not quite in the way he envisaged. Just as he saw Leonardo’s life as a movement away from the sensuousness of painting to the intellectual stimulus of science, so he was convinced that he was, in psychoanalysis, moving away from the neuroses of art in order to found a brave new science. In truth, while anyone who participates in therapy today owes a great deal to Freud’s methods, his grand theories don’t hold water. He is best read not as an experimental scientist but as a detective novelist who pieces together bits of evidence to come up with a cunning, all-consuming solution. As a psychological storyteller, he has few equals and it’s hard not to regret his decision to turn down Sam Goldwyn’s offer of $100,000 in 1925 to consult on a major Hollywood love story. But our real lives are rarely so neat as the stories we tell about them. As Voltaire once remarked: “Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”

Unfortunately, Freud never set down his thoughts on another great genius with a grisly childhood, Isaac Newton(1642–1727). Newton was the son of an illiterate Norfolk yeoman who could not even write his own name and who died four months before his son was born. At birth, according to his own memoirs, Newton was so small that he could fit into a two-pint pot and so weak he was forced “to have a bolster all around his neck to keep it on his shoulders.” His mother married the Reverend Barnabas Smith when Isaac was three. Smith hated him on sight and refused to have him in the house, so he was sent to live with his grandmother. Like Leonardo, he became isolated and withdrew into his own world, building and inventing. In Grantham, he frightened the townspeople by flying a lantern with a kite attached. He also made a sundial by fixing pegs to the wall of his schoolmaster’s house. It became known as “Isaac’s Dial.” He hated school, where he was bullied and usually came near the bottom of the class. Some measure of his unhappiness can be seen in the long list of sins he made as a teenager: “Putting a pin in John Keys hat to prick him,” “Stealing cherry cobs from Edward Story” and “Denying that I did so,” “Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter,” and the revealing “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.”

Reverend Smith died when Newton was seventeen and his mother responded by pulling him out of school so he could farm their land. He hated farming even more than school. It bored him. So, asked to watch the sheep, he would end up building a model of a waterwheel while the sheep wandered off and damaged the neighbors’ fields. On one occasion he was walking a horse home when it slipped its bridle; Newton didn’t notice and walked back with the bridle in his hands. All he wanted to do was study. His mother gave up and sent him back to school, where he astonished everyone by graduating with top marks.

From there he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. His Cambridge career, while not a disaster, was hardly a sparkling success—probably because he spent most of his time reading Descartes, Copernicus, and Galileo, men whose radical ideas fell well outside the curriculum. When the university closed as a precaution against plague in 1665, Newton returned to his farmhouse in Lincolnshire. Over the next eighteen months, entirely on his own, he went on to discover the laws of gravity and motion and formulate theories of color and calculus that changed the world forever. His discoveries in mechanics, mathematics, thermodynamics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics make him at least twice as important as any other scientific figure who has ever lived, and the book that eventually contained all his most original work, Principia Mathematica (1687), is arguably the most important single book in the history of science. When he returned to Cambridge, still only twenty-six years old, he was elected the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a position held for thirty years by Stephen Hawking). Three years later, in 1672, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and acclaimed as one of the most brilliant men of the age.

What happened to Newton over those two years staring out across the fens remains a mystery. His obsessiveness suggests he may have suffered from a mild form of autism, such as Asperger’s syndrome. Whether that’s true or not, Newton was certainly odd. He often forgot to eat and, when he did, he did so standing at his desk. At times he would work in his laboratory for six weeks at a time, never letting the fire go out. Frequently, when entertaining guests, he would go into the study to get a bottle of wine, have a thought, sit down to record it, and become so preoccupied that he forgot all about the dinner party. He was obsessed with the color crimson. An inventory of his possessions lists a crimson mohair bed with crimson curtains, crimson drapes, crimson wall hangings, and a crimson settee with crimson chairs and crimson cushions. He was famously paranoid, keeping a box filled with guineas on his windowsill to test the honesty of those who worked for him. He had a nerdish dislike of the arts, calling poetry “ingenious nonsense,” and on the one occasion he went to the opera he left before the performance ended. Yet he was vain enough to sit for more than twenty portraits, and his sense of his own uniqueness was never in doubt. He once constructed an anagram, Jeova sanctus unus , out of the Latin version of his name, Isaacus Neutonus. It means “God’s Holy One.”

There are obvious connections here with the confidence and self-absorption of Leonardo, and with the absentmindedness of a later thinker, such as Einstein. All three took themselves very seriously; all three may have had neurological quirks; all three either missed out on or hated formal education. Significantly, of the three, Newton had the toughest childhood and he was also the one who found friendship hardest. All the contemporary accounts reveal a cold, austere, and exasperating man. Even his servant recalled him laughing only once, when he was asked what was the use of studying Euclid. The slightest criticism of his work drove him into a furious rage, and his life was blighted by vicious feuds with other eminent mathematicians, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Hooke. He had one love in his life—a young Swiss mathematician named Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. The end of their affair caused Newton to have the first of a series of nervous breakdowns, and he almost certainly died a virgin.