Writer-Philosopher Confronts the Big Questions

When Michael Frayn arrived at Emmanuel College at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s, Ludwig Wittgenstein had been dead for a few years, but the philosophy giant’s ghost still dominated the endless campus debates over the nature of knowledge.

Frayn, too, soon fell under Wittgenstein’s spell (“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”), although his tutor turned out to be one of the rare anti-Wittgensteins on campus, which made for some lively tutorials.

“We’d argue ferociously for an hour and then adjourn for lunch and argue ferociously some more and then return to his rooms and argue until dinner,” Frayn recalls. “It was a wonderful way to learn philosophy. I still think that Wittgenstein is one of the great philosophers, and the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ one of the great works. He suggested that philosophy was not a body of dogma but a way of thinking about things.”

“Investigations” would be a pretty good title for the collected works of Frayn, the British playwright and author whose brainy, intricate texts range from the Broadway success of “Copenhagen” (about nuclear physics and human motivation) to the comic novel “Headlong” (about a museum curator’s pursuit of a painting that may or may not be a missing masterpiece).

“There are a lot of philosophical questions in life,” says Frayn, who was in San Francisco recently on a tour for his latest book, “Spies” (Metropolitan), “and you can’t not face them in any department of life. They can’t help but come into your writing.”

Frayn writes about mysteries that resist resolution, inquiries that change the inquirer and lead into labyrinths of possibilities.

His new novel is no exception. A thin volume about one summer in a young boy’s life, the book is an obsessive recollection of a time and place where nothing much really happens, yet everything turns out to have a momentous significance. The book is framed around the elderly Stephen Wheatley, who returns to his boyhood neighborhood and tries to untangle his knotted memories of that long ago period.

Stephen was a shy boy whose best (only) friend was Keith Hayward, a neighbor who went to a better school, lived in a better house and had--so it seemed--better parents. One day, Keith blurts out that his mother is a German spy. The boys spy on Mrs. Hayward and soon discover that she indeed does have a secret, which sets in motion a series of events that will haunt Stephen for the rest of his life.

“Just by looking at things I shouldn’t have looked at I’ve changed them,” the narrator says (a line that will ring a bell for anyone familiar with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle elucidated in “Copenhagen”).

In Proust, a cookie evokes endless memories; in Frayn, a flower provokes unanswerable questions. A tub of geraniums, for example, triggers an epistemological reflection in the young narrator. “I’m not sure,” he says, “now the question’s been raised, if I really understand even what it means to understand something.”

Critics, at least, seem to understand the book. “Bernard Shaw couldn’t do it, Henry James couldn’t do it,” gushed John Updike in the New Yorker, “but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success.”

In Britain, “Spies” has been talked up as a contender for the Booker Prize, the kingdom’s most revered literary award. And in this country, the novel could finally win Frayn the same ardent fans that his plays have attracted.

“Frayn manages to convey delicate shadings of feeling ... while moving the story along with a freight train’s dispatch,” wrote Dan Cryer in Newsday. “Tautly, elegantly constructed, the novel moves swiftly toward not one surprise but two.”

(The only significant dissenter was New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, who called “Spies” “a curious lapse in craft from this usually agile and artful storyteller.”)

Frayn says he had been thinking about the idea for the book for 25 years. During the war years, Frayn was friendly with a boy who took for granted all the advantages that Frayn envied, a boy so sure of his place in the world that nothing was more natural than telling his friend what to do.

“He seemed to have everything,” Frayn recalls. “Nice house, nice mother, terrifying father. Great toys. My toys were hopeless. He had the power of imagination. I had no imagination.”

The idea didn’t go anywhere for years until Frayn remembered one of their games. “I thought,” he says, “of something he said once: ‘My mother is a German spy.’ I think we followed her about for a couple of hours and gave up. What if we didn’t? What would we find out about her life?”

Remembering what it was like to be a boy turned out to be almost as hard for Frayn as researching quantum mechanics for “Copenhagen.” “I found it very difficult to know what it was like to be a child at any particular age,” Frayn says. “It took a surprisingly long time.”

Frayn’s own life started in the London suburbs, where his father was an asbestos salesman. “It wasn’t a very bookish home,” he says. After graduating, Frayn was drafted and trained as a Russian translator (he later won raves for his translation of Chekhov) before going to Cambridge on a scholarship.

Then he went to the Manchester Guardian newspaper, where he was a reporter and columnist before moving to the London Observer, where he began writing novels on the side. Frayn left journalism in 1968 to write novels full time (although he has continued to work as a journalist now and then).

Frayn is 68, thin, with a fringe of wispy white hair, and a face as well creased as an old map. He lives in Regent’s Park, London, with his second wife, Claire Tomalin, a biographer of, among others, Jane Austen. He has three grown daughters from his first marriage. He keeps an office within walking distance from home.

“Claire works at home,” he says. “That’s why I go around the corner. When we finish writing, we show each book to the other. It’s difficult to express reservations tactfully, but we’ve managed to survive so far.”

For years Frayn’s books earned more praise than sales. “The Tin Men,” Frayn’s first novel, came out in 1965 and won the Somerset Maugham award, but he was later dropped by his publisher. In 1982, his play “Noises Off” (a comedy about the making of a farce) was a big hit (as was its recent Broadway revival).

Then came “Copenhagen,” in 1999, which was an unlikely smash, considering it was about a real but somewhat mysterious meeting between two giants of nuclear physics in a Danish city during World War II. The controversy over what exactly happened at the meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (and why the Nazis never developed an atomic bomb) was given new life by the success of the play, which won a Tony Award on Broadway in 2000 and toured the U.S.

The play triggered at least half a dozen conferences in which historians and physicists argued over the scientific and moral issues dramatized by Frayn--and also led earlier this year to the Bohr family opening its archives and releasing an unsent letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, which kicked up the dust yet again.

Frayn doesn’t think the letter-- indicating that Heisenberg was working zealously on building a bomb--fundamentally alters the truth of the play, which, after all, is about the ghosts of the characters debating what transpired.

“I would think the argument will go on until the end of time,” he says. “It’s very difficult to have absolute knowledge. The evidence for everything is extremely confused and contradictory.”

Confusion and contradiction suffuse much of what Frayn writes.

“In a play, it’s not natural to know what’s going on in someone’s head,” he says. “Plays are more like life than novels. The difficulty is knowing why people do what they do. A play is a meeting of minds, including the audience. It’s not some people standing on stage saying the author’s lines. It’s two people trying to figure out what they’re doing. It can only succeed if the audience lets it succeed. Novels are not quite such a delicate business. It’s not a communal activity. With a book it can succeed with this person or that.”

After 10 novels and 13 plays, which does Frayn prefer? “I find them equally demanding,” he says. Currently, Frayn says, he is working on another play, although he declines to say more. “You can’t talk about a work in progress,” he says. “I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of ideas that haven’t come to fruition.”

One of his ideas has been both a play and a novel, “Now You Know.”

“I wrote it as a play,” he says. “It didn’t work. What’s wrong? I need to know what goes on in their heads. It’s a novel, so I published it as a book.

“Then I thought, now that I know what’s going on in their heads I can write it as a play, which I did. It has never been a great success as either.”