Revelations from Feynman’s pen

A lot of money has been made from the literary estate of Richard P. Feynman, the Caltech physicist, Nobel laureate and performance artist, who stumbled into bestsellerdom in 1985 with a collection of anecdotes, transcribed from tape recordings, called “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Three years later came a posthumous sequel, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” and when the anecdotes ran dry, his early, more serious work -- the stuff about physics -- was mined and recycled for every dollar it was worth.

In 1994, the three-volume “Feynman Lectures on Physics,” already a classic, was chopped and repackaged into “Six Easy Pieces,” and then came “Six Not-So-Easy Pieces,” complete with the original audio. “The Feynman Lectures Gift Pack” has fallen out of print, but we can look forward, later this year, to “The Very Best of the Feynman Lectures,” and maybe after that the second best.

Dredging deeper, his executors have anthologized miscellaneous talks, some better than others, about computers, nanotechnology, science and religion, science and society -- whatever, it seems, could be found in his file drawers. Altogether, Amazon.com lists more than 100 products -- books in various editions, tape cassettes, CDs, DVDs -- carrying the Feynman byline. All this from a man, it is fair to say, who was not so much a writer as a master of the spoken word.

All that was left were his letters. With the publication of “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track,” we get Feynman direct -- from his mind to the stationery and into the envelope. Compiled by his daughter, Michelle Feynman, the result is a labor of love and, at times, too much of a good thing. It takes some patience to sort through what is forgettable to uncover the hidden gems.

Only a true Feynman fanatic could appreciate, for example, the puffery of letters (a whole chapter of them) following the announcement of his Nobel prize, or the eight pages of correspondence in which he tediously tries to resign his membership from the National Academy of Sciences. Why? He can’t quite say: “Perhaps it is just that I enjoy being peculiar,” he tells the academy’s president.

There are also more than enough examples of his perfunctory (though often charming) replies to colleagues, cranks and well-meaning members of the public. One letter -- to Lewis H. Strauss, son of Adm. Lewis L. Strauss, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission -- consists of a single sentence: “In reply to your letter of August 2, I would most certainly agree that Dr. Stephen W. Hawking’s work is deserving of the Einstein Award. Sincerely, Richard P. Feynman.”

Filler like this detracts from the really good material. A long missive to Edwin H. Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, reveals Feynman, his showmanship on hold, fully engaged in the mysteries of color perception, invoking a lizard tracking a bug for breakfast and a museum-goer affixed before a Mondrian; as he tries to put together the pieces of a theory, we see firsthand the agility that made him great.

Other exchanges with fellow Olympians are less inspired but interesting in different ways. Here is Feynman giving Francis H. Crick, co-discoverer of the double-helical structure of DNA, the brush-off: “I regret having to do this, but I’m returning this paper to you unread. My schedule is such lately that I must refuse to get bogged down reading someone else’s theory; it may turn out to be wonderful and there I’d be with something else to think about.”

Crick said he understood completely.

It is around this time, in 1978, that Feynman’s cancer became manifest: a 6-pound abdominal tumor that was surgically removed. Linus Pauling (as tall a giant in chemistry as Crick was in molecular biology) writes to warn that chemotherapy is probably useless in such cases and that the five-year survival rate is frighteningly low. Characteristically, he advises his friend to fight back with megadoses of vitamin C.

Feynman’s optimistic reply -- the malignancy was “nicely encapsulated, ... neatly removed in its totality” -- is painful, for we know that a decade later he’d be dead. He wasn’t one to be morose, and he knew as well as anyone else about the trials of chronic disease. The story of his early marriage to Arline Greenbaum, who was slowly eaten by tuberculosis, has been told before -- by James Gleick in his biography “Genius” and by Feynman himself in “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

The letters that husband and wife exchanged -- he was working at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb while she convalesced in a sanatorium two hours south in Albuquerque -- bring the tragedy closer. Riding with them on this emotional roller coaster, we see the damage that too much optimism can bring. He really cannot believe she is dying. Sometimes you want to take him by the shoulders and shake him.

The best thing in the book may be a long letter to his mother, Lucille, written in August 1945, giving his firsthand account of the Trinity explosion: “I was blinded by a terrific silver white flash -- I had to look away. Wherever I looked an enormous purple splotch appeared -- it was just as bright when I closed my eyes. ‘That,’ said my scientific brain to my befuddled one, ‘is an after-image....’ So I turned back to look at the bomb. The sky was lit up with a bright yellow light -- the earth appeared white....” The yellow darkens to orange, fading and flickering, giving way to a cloud of smoke, “looking much like the stem of a mushroom.”

Feynman often insisted that he couldn’t write. Now we know better. It was another of his jokes.