Adventure classics -- Fathers and sons feud on

Palace Walk

by Naguib Mahfouz

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Leo Tolstoy famously wrote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But I’m going to propose an amendment: That all unhappy relationships between fathers and sons are alike. They’re all variations of The Brothers Karamazov. Not that Dostoevsky is included on the usual list of influences for Naguib Mahfouz’s 1956 novel, Palace Walk. It didn’t have to be. Its influence is written in our human DNA, regardless of language or culture.

Consider the similarities between Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and Mahfouz’s, whose version of the boozing, womanizing, tyrannical father is al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, father of three sons, one a half-brother to the others, thanks to dad’s multiple marriages. The oldest son is Yasin, the image of al-Sayyid Ahmad in everything except strength of personality. The middle son is the intellectual Fahmy. The third is Kamal, gentle and religious, and still too young to comprehend why his beloved sisters sleep in the same beds as their husbands.

Because there are sisters in Mahfouz’s version of the dysfunctional family that’s a stand in for Egypt’s political unrest in the early twentieth century. And a mother, al-Sayyid Ahmad’s beautiful second wife, Amina, whose love provides the emotional glue holding this unhappy family together. The women in Mahfouz’s story add a gentler element, but their story is part of the history of their country that opens in Palace Walk during World War I.

The politics that form the story’s backdrop are as complicated as the al-Jawad family. Although occupied by British military since the late nineteenth century, Egypt was still nominally under the control of the Turkish Ottomans. When the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany in World War I, Great Britain formalized its control of Egypt and the strategically-important Suez Canal through puppet rulers. Al-Sayyid Ahmad feeds a scrap of information about the investiture of one such ruler to his illiterate wife, Amina, who is delighted by any news of the outside world, having been effectively imprisoned by her husband in her own house for the twenty-five years of their marriage.

Time-warped Amina also believes that long-dead Queen Victoria is still the ruler of England, and will receive a delegation asking for Egypt’s independence with “a woman’s heart.” Amina’s husband doesn’t disabuse her of this notion. After all, he’s force fed her a culture of lies for their entire married life. Does he stay out until past midnight and then come home drunk? He insists his nightly escapes are innocent fun, enforcing his protests with verbal and physical abuse. For all her sweetness of nature, Amina passes this insidious culture of lies to her children. They, in turn, lie freely to their father, whose temper becomes ever more violent as his addiction to alcohol takes hold.

What could be more natural then that Fahmy, although considered the reasonable one in the family, will lie to his father about his involvement in Egypt’s nationalist party? Or that al-Sayyid Ahmad will believe the lie, choosing to lie even to himself as he watches protestors, including women like those in the illustration for this post, pour into the city.

It’s a lie that rings prophetically years after Mahfouz’s death. “Al-Sayyid Ahmad looked around. The place was almost packed with people. . . There was blessed safety in numbers. ‘They won’t slaughter this swarm of people,’ he reflected. ‘They wouldn’t take the innocent along with the guilty.’”

Mahfouz took the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad’s family to the third generation in his Cairo Trilogy of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. He would live to become disillusioned with Egypt’s twentieth century revolution, receive the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, and survive a 1994 assassination attempt, dying at age 94 in 2006.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a June of tales about Texas and the Southwest with Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.)

Adventure classics -- Life’s elementary, said Dr. Watson

The Double Helix

by James D. Watson

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“I know of no other document in which the degradation of present-day science to a spectator sport is so clearly brought out,” snipped biochemist Erwin Chargaff in his review of The Double Helix, the short and often snarky history of how two young men who uncovered a fundamental secret of life with the help of X-ray pictures and a penchant for building models.

It didn’t help Chargaff’s opinion of either the book or its writer, Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson, whose work with fellow scientists Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins built on some of Chargaff’s own discoveries of the chemical nature of DNA, the molecule that encodes genetic information. “As one of the world’s experts on DNA,” Watson wrote in The Double Helix, “(Chargaff) was at first not amused by dark horses trying to win the race. . . He realize(d) that he was about to listen to a nut.”

In the more than sixty years since, it’s become difficult to imagine anyone not knowing DNA’s double helix structure. The spiraling stair illustration drawn by Crick’s artist wife Odile is one of the most iconic images of science. But even by the middle of the twentieth century, many biologists considered DNA too “stupid” to carry the almost infinite amount of genetic information needed to code for every living creature on our planet.

Was it really the basis of all genes? If so, the secret must be as much in its physical structure as its chemistry, because it seemed to be nothing for a long chain (or maybe multiple chains) of a single type of molecule attached to only four other types of molecules.


“Then DNA was still a mystery, up for grabs, and no one was sure who would get it. . . As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events. . .” Watson wrote in the preface and prologue to the first 1968 edition of The Double Helix.

It was the tale, he said, of five people: X-ray photographer Maurice Wilkins; Wilkins’ assistant, the gifted Rosalind Franklin, who died before the prize for the discovery was awarded; chemist Linus Pauling, already clarifying the physical structure of other biological molecules; fast-talking doctoral student Francis Crick; and himself, a twenty-two-year-old with a brand new PhD and a “hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry.”

That’s an admission reassuring lay readers like me. I could follow the trail Watson left without any remembrance of my own long past college chemistry courses.

Wilkins’ and Franklin’s pictures of DNA in crystal form excited Watson about chemistry. It was an excitement whetted by his sojourn in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, known for its work on molecular structures, and “the fun of talking to Francis Crick.” And in the background was Linus Pauling, the one to beat if Watson and Crick hoped to snatch a Nobel Prize for demonstrating both DNA’s structure and its potential as the carrier of the secrets of life.

Watson arrived at the lab where Crick worked in late 1951. Wilkins’ and Franklin’s X-rays seemed to show a helical structure for DNA. Except when they didn’t. But how was it all arranged? And how did it do its work?

“The final version (of the paper) was ready to be typed on the last weekend of March (1953),” Watson wrote. “Our typist was not on hand, and the brief job was given to my sister. There was no problem persuading her to spend a Saturday afternoon this way, for we told her that she was participating in perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin’s book.”

Watson’s original Double Helix is less than 140 pages, but I enjoyed The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix edited by Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski for its multitude of photographs and references to the people and places Watson mentions. Readily available on Amazon, or check your local library, as I did.

(Next week -- Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with John Berendt’s tale of sex, murder and voodoo, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.)

Adventure classics -- Age, eternity & a really big fish

The Old Man and the Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

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I won’t say you have to be old to appreciate Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 classic, The Old Man and the Sea. But it certainly requires more wear and tear, more patience with imperfections, and more willingness to persevere in the face of inevitable disappointment than I could muster when first reading it in my teens.

I was interested to compare my recent re-reading of Old Man and the Sea to that of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki adventure, discussed in my August 1 blog. Writing only a few years apart, both authors lovingly detail the sea they observed at close view -- Heyerdahl from atop his raft, Hemingway from the vantage of small fishing boats. Heyerdahl’s account brims with joy, Hemingway’s with resignation.

In his biography, Hemingway, the late Kenneth S. Lynn says The Old Man and the Sea was not only “a profoundly personal statement on the part of an author who was deathly afraid that he wasn’t any good any more, it expressed a collective mood of disillusionment no less surely than had (his first novel) The Sun Also Rises.”

For a United States immersed in conflict in Korea, with Second World War hero General Douglas MacArthur publicly fired and disgraced, “the American hero was perceived to have changed,” Lynn writes. “He was experienced, but older now. . . There was no longer any common agreement about what the meaning of winning was, so that no victory ever brought unalloyed satisfaction.”

Little wonder the old Cuban fisherman Santiago takes his own heroes, not from the ranks of soldiers or politicians, but from baseball, where winning is easier to define.

“Think of the great DiMaggio,” he says, setting out after eighty-four days without taking a single fish. But of the great marlin he catches, only the shark-ravaged skeleton will
remain to testify to his prowess by the time he reaches shore again.

The book was an immense popular and critical success, soon receiving the Pulitzer Prize. When rumors of the Nobel Prize circulated, Lynn reports Hemingway was pleased but also wary, telling a friend “no one who had ever won had ever written anything worth reading afterward.”

Hemingway had reason to fear. Although only in his early fifties, he realized too well his powers were fading. The Old Man and the Sea had been written as he worked on an intended trilogy of sea novels. In the end, it was the only portion he was willing to put his name on. Within the next decade, he would follow his father’s example and end his life, leaving his widow Mary to combine the previously unpublished works under the title Islands in the Stream.

Hemingway’s health prevented him from traveling to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, but he sent a statement which was read aloud at the awards banquet. “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. . . (A writer) does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

(Next Wednesday Adventure classics continues a month at sea with Ursula LeGuin’s fantasy of a world covered with water, A Wizard of Earthsea.)