Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

Holy Spirit: but having noted the potential power of such a trust, they had not been able to say much about it.

In the first draft of her book it seems that Eleanor wrote that the Jewish people might have to undergo some extreme form of suffering before they could see that there had been enough of this and they could once more feel themselves as active agents in their destiny — as agents even in the destiny of others — in the way of imparting knowledge of the frightening interplay, beauty even, between triumph and suffering in events' patterning. But Eleanor wrote the first draft in the early days of the war before the extemities of actual Jewish suffering were known: later, when stories of horror began to filter through from occupied Europe, Eleanor put aside the first version of her book, with its view of the efficacy of suffering, and concentrated on what might be a direct and practical connection between this and the chance of the creation of a state of Israel: she became, that is, an increasingly ardent and optimistic Zionist. She did not mind the shelving of her book: she knew, as Max had done, that even in what might be true about the working-out of patterns, there are some things best recognised in silence.

Eleanor had been with Max when he had first gone to America: they had had their home, for a time, on the edge of a painted desert. She had been writing: he had been working on the Bomb: they had, as always, been happy together. But how was it possible in such circumstances to settle down without anxiety? So when Max still had work of importance to do but Eleanor had put her book aside, she went off on her own for a time to be an active worker in the cause of Zionism; she managed to get to Palestine, where she became part of an organisation that helped Jews to get out of occupied Europe. Max encouraged her in this: he said 'In marriage, why should it not be life-giving to be sometimes apart: what else is pattern?' Eleanor stayed in Palestine long enough to see success in her work but also the dangers inherent in Zionism — that the very reaction to suffering might go into chauvinistic runaway, out of control; that only by stepping back from memories of suffering might there be a coming to terms with the necessity to live at peace with neighbours. She would say 'Indeed, what else is pattern.'

During the years that followed, Eleanor and Max were sometimes together, sometimes apart: but always, they said, they felt themselves together — as partners, that is, in the working-out of some design, under the guidance of what turned up. They evolved an ironic style of talking about their love and their marriage: sometimes

they made jokes; sometimes they talked with great seriousness: usually they left spaces through which a listener or observer had to make his or her own way. What they seemed to be saying about marriage was that if there was disjunction there was no liveliness and if there was fusion there was no liveliness: liveliness depended on openness; on an energy going between.

Over the years, in fact, they each of them became increasingly involved with their own threads through the maze: they had sadness, difficulties in maintaining the vision and hopes they had had for themselves; but friends did not easily see signs of such uncertainty, which seemed peripheral to so much energy. Max, after an unproductive period in England just after the war, was offered a research fellowship in Canada: he was to be allowed to enquire into an area which had increasingly come to engross him — the borderline between physics and biology. When Eleanor returned from Palestine she stayed with Max in England for a time: then she went back to West Africa to complete the anthropological study she had planned when she had been there before going to Spain — on the possibility of an anthropology in which the anthropologist recognised his part in what he observed. To those who knew Max and Eleanor during these years it was true that there often seemed to be few conventional signs of their being married: Max from time to time had relationships with other women; Eleanor in her travels was likely to join up with someone she liked. But there was always the impression that in some crucial sense they trusted they were together; that it was this surety that gave them the freedom to go their own ways. Those who became fond of them sometimes protested about this. The girl called Lilia once said to Max 'You treat Eleanor as if she were God!' Max replied (with irony of course) 'Yes, it has been said that successful relationships depend on a third person, God.'

When Eleanor came back from West Africa she spent some time writing a long essay on marriage: she took as her anthropological field of study, as it were, European literature. In literature, she suggested, marriage was seen first as an end to be aimed at but then as something boring and even deathly when achieved: what seemed to be almost impossible to write about (or indeed to experience) was marriage as a successfully going concern. Of course, Eleanor argued, humans do get taken over by an exciting drive for surety and when this is achieved it is apt to seem second-rate: but what might happen if people just recognised this? Could there not be a

going concern on some quite different level — one from which it could be seen that a drive for security, when achieved, might then have to be turned to a drive for freedom, for the spark of liveliness to be maintained; and vice versa; and so on: this level being to do with a recognition of pattern. It is a contrasting to and fro, like that of a heart-beat, that is life-giving: one strand on its own, pursued to an end, of course is deathly. This was the first anthropological-type essay that Eleanor published. Max wrote to her — But who, except you and I, will understand this business of to-and-fro; of levels?

Max himself tried to make more of the matter of levels: he wrote papers which introduced the concept into most of the lines of research he was engaged in at the time. In physics, for instance, there had for long been the conundrums posed by quantum theory — light could be said to consist of either particles or waves according to the condition of the experiment — but this was a conundrum only when one was talking on the level of what was light. On the level of the viewer — the setter-up of the conditions of the experiment — there was no conundrum, Max argued, but simply a matter of choice: shall I set up this condition or that? And so the question on this level was what were conditions of mind. And indeed quantum theory allowed that it was mind, consciousness, working as it were on a higher level, that produced on a lower level the effects of choice — it was through the intrusion of consciousness that Schrodin-ger's cat, for instance, became actually rather than potentially dead or alive. And so should it not be one of the tasks of physicists not only to be trying to understand the nature of the outside world, but to be trying to understand the nature of understanding — the understanding by which the outside world in some sense seems to be organised.

In biology, Max continued to be interested in the recurring problems of how order had evolved and continued to evolve out of 'chance'; how chaos was organised into shape and then how shape and pattern were maintained. Once the whole process was under way evolution could perhaps be explained by the mechanisms of natural selection: but how did the whole process exist? What was the provenance of shape and pattern? If in physics there was a sense in which this or that occurrence was brought about by observation, by an activity of mind, then why should this not be the case in biological evolution — with regard to both the creation and perpetuation of forms, and to the possible emergence at least of new forms of understanding. At the heart of the disciplines of both