Scientist, Novelist: A Tradition of One

Among the axioms espoused by Thomas McMahon is that the writing of fiction and the practice of applied science are fundamentally incompatible endeavors. “Orthogonal activities,” in fact, is how novelist/scientist McMahon dismissed the partnership of science and literature. In the tradition of scientists and novelists, McMahon said, there is no tradition.

“Zero,” he said. “Name one.”

Name one other than himself, is what McMahon should have said. Tall and lanky, the 43-year-old Harvard professor holds the university’s prestigious Gordon McKay professorship in applied mechanics, and in addition, carries the rank of professor of biology. His specialty is biomechanics, a cross between biology and mechanical engineering. A tinker since childhood, McMahon translated his fascination with movement and the physiology of locomotion into the invention (with Harvard colleague Peter Greene) of the Harvard track, “on which people can run faster than on any other (indoor) surface.”

Every day, McMahon bicycles the 14 miles between his home in Wellesley and his office just opposite the venerable University Museum here. He churns out scholarly articles, teaches undergraduate and graduate classes and sometimes subs as a physics instructor at the nearby Perkins School for the Blind. Two books by McMahon, “Muscles, Reflexes and Locomotion,” and “On Size and Life” (co-authored with John Tyler Bonner), attempt to explain scientific issues to a broad popular audience. McMahon has written for the PBS-TV series “Nova,” and in his spare time, consults for Nike athletic shoes. He also writes novels.

To McMahon, the latter fact is roughly akin to admitting some genetic anomaly. “I never say I am a novelist,” he said in the quiet, even voice that sounds like it came out of one of the quirky characters of his own creation. “Oh, I never do. It’s an invisible part of me.”

So much so, McMahon said, that “the people who encounter me in my role as an applied scientist are very unlikely to know that I write novels.” He shifted slightly in his big wooden chair. “I try to keep it sort of under wraps here.”

Already, as a graduate student at MIT, McMahon’s theoretically incompatible combustion of energies was blasting the test tubes of convention. His doctoral project involved a heart-assist device that went on to bolster aortas and help save lives around the world. His other postgraduate endeavor was a work of fiction that Little, Brown snapped up almost instantly. “Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel,” it was called, lest anyone be inclined to confuse it with anything so antithetical as a thesis in nuclear chemistry.

That book dealt with the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. His second novel, “McKay’s Bees” (Harper & Row), drew upon McMahon’s fascination with muscles and movement, focusing on characters with motor handicaps. Now, in “Loving Little Egypt” (Viking), McMahon at once takes on the mysteries of the telephone system, lionizes the genius of invention, explores the particular and private world of blind people and addresses the well-documented rivalry between Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

Early Days of the Phone

Seven years in the writing and research, “Loving Little Egypt” transports the phone freaks of the 1960s to the early days of the telephone system. These were the folks, it will be remembered, who wreaked electronic havoc on Ma Bell, starting with such relatively harmless pranks as dropping dimes into the phone with a string and retrieving them immediately afterward, and progressing to more brazen forms of phone Bolshevism. Because McMahon recalled that “at least in the beginning,” many of those telephonic radicals were blind, hero Mourly Vold’s visual impairment plays a key role in the story.

Like E. L. Doctorow, to whom McMahon acknowledges a major literary debt, many of his characters are actual historical figures transported into a fictional setting. Amazingly, even someone with the totally improbable name of Mourly Vold turns out to have been a real person, “a promising younger colleague” of Sigmund Freud, McMahon said.

That rather arcane fact did emerge from conversation with a Harvard colleague. “We have a funny names club,” McMahon said, suggesting the image of two Harvard professors who gleefully collect odd appellations.

But the vast majority of his associates, McMahon said, would no doubt react with complete astonishment to learn what he does with those names.

“Scientists and engineers are impatient with fiction in general, particularly with modern fiction,” McMahon said. “If you gave them a questionnaire, and asked them to name two writers, you might be able to get them to say that Shakespeare was a good writer, and ‘whoever it was who wrote “Moby Dick” ’ (and they could not remember who).”

His students, McMahon said, might collapse collectively at their computers to learn of their professor’s secret persona. “I think some of my students would be shocked and put off by what I write in these books,” he said. “I don’t think any of my students know about this side of me.”

The problem, McMahon theorizes, is that “particularly in the physical sciences, the concern is always with precise and consistent knowledge. There’s not a great deal of room for anecdotal sorts of thinking--or another word that fits in here is synthetic sorts of thinking.”

Scientists must live in a world of facts, of absolutes, McMahon said. “We never in science investigate the personality of things,” he said. “Literature, on the other hand, is social. It is concerned with the personalities of things.”

In fiction writing, in literature in general, McMahon said, “the evidence that proves the point is emotional evidence, rather than analytical evidence.” By contrast, “in science, you play it by the rules until you get to the point where you can interpolate the rules.”

A Common Ingredient

Still, the two fields do share one common ingredient. “The thing that science prizes above all else is originality,” McMahon said, “just as in literature.”

That convergence is hardly enough to attract most scientists to the sphere of fiction, McMahon contends. One reason he keeps so quiet about his private pastime is that many of his colleagues, concerned as they are with “really accurate knowledge of how things work that we see in front of our eyes,” express no use for something so frivolous as made-up stories.

“A typical thing that a scientist is likely to say is that he hasn’t got time to read fiction,” McMahon said. “And what he means by that is that it’s not a worthy use of one’s time to read it. I think that the next thing they might say is that it’s hard enough to keep up with the publications in their own field--but whoever asked them for that last sentence?

“Furthermore,” McMahon went on, “if you really draw them out on it, they’ll start talking about the difficulties they had with a high school English teacher who made them write essays.”

McMahon, on the other hand, was already writing short stories in high school, even as he was hammering away equally on nonverbal inventions. At Cornell, McMahon pursued creative writing courses along with his undergraduate science program, but it was in graduate school, he said, that he began to bloom as a writer. Though enrolled in a Ph.D. program at MIT, McMahon was able to join the writing class of Harvard professor Theodore Morrison. Under Morrison’s tutelage he embarked on his first real try at a novel, “Principles,” a book that was bought by the first publisher who saw it. As a fortuitous result, said McMahon, “I really never had all this terrible frustration that writers talk about in trying to get published.” Sometimes even McMahon struggles with the dichotomy between his activities. “On some days it does seem difficult to integrate the two different perceptions of life,” he said. “But most of the time, it seems transparently easy.”

For one thing, McMahon the writer holes up at home in Wellesley, where his wife Carol, an oil painter, and two children have learned to leave him alone at his word processor. They persevered, he said, throughout the five false starts of “Loving Little Egypt,” and tolerated his immersion into the inventions that figure so prominently in the tale.

As for the title, McMahon acknowledges its mildly X-rated connotation. In fact, “Little Egypt” is the handle by which Mourly Vold becomes known to his huge network of fellow phone freaks.

“That was a bit on my mind,” McMahon said, “that it should be a provocative title, and one that should catch people’s interest.”

Another Novel?

While not currently in progress, another novel will almost certainly follow. “I’m thinking about something now,” McMahon said. “But at this stage, I wouldn’t even tell my wife what it’s about.”

More than likely, however, it will again concern some aspect of science. “Eventually,” McMahon said, “you write what you know.” Besides, “I want people to find out about those things that are out there. I want them to know something about electricity and magnetism.”