The Book of the Dead (5 page)

The repressive parental regime backfired in an interesting way. Lovelace fulfilled her mother’s hopes by developing exceptional gifts as a mathematician, but she also proved herself her father’s daughter by bringing a poetic imagination to bear on
mathematical problems. At thirteen, she was doing Leonardo-like calculations for a flying machine. By seventeen she had survived a debilitating bout of measles and run the full gamut of teenage rebellion from migraines and dramatic weight loss to an attempted elopement. She entered society, keen on both dancing and intelligent conversation. As one of the few women at the time who could talk passionately about algebra, she soon had a group of admirers that included the most eminent scientists of the day.

One of these was the mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage, who was then trying to fund his difference engine, an 8-foot-high, 15-ton, 25,000-part mechanical calculator that he had hoped would render obsolete the notoriously inaccurate books of tables on which the whole financial system depended. The reason such tables were unreliable was that they were compiled by people, known as computers. (The first use of the word
computer
to mean any kind of calculating machine wasn’t until 1897, a quarter of a century after Babbage’s death.) Babbage failed to get his difference engine built, but he was very taken with Lovelace, and over the next few years he shared with her his plans for an even more ambitious project: an analytical engine, a larger, steam-driven calculator that could be programmed by adapting the punched cards recently used to automate French silk looms.

Babbage could see Lovelace’s money and connections would be helpful, but he couldn’t have anticipated how fully she would understand the machine’s potential. Despite being married with three children under eight, she offered to translate a description of the engine produced by the Italian philosopher Luigi Menabrea. Her work so impressed Babbage that he asked for her notes. They turned out to be three times the length of the original text. Published together, the book became an instant bestseller. It
was, after all, by Byron’s daughter on a subject women weren’t supposed to understand. It is also a key text in the history of computing. Not only had Lovelace produced the very first computer program—a plan to get the machine to produce the complex sequence known as Bernoulli numbers—she also allowed her imagination free rein, predicting that in the future such an engine might be used to compose music and reproduce graphics and become an invaluable tool for science, commerce, and the arts. More even than Babbage himself, Ada Lovelace saw the awesome potential of what was one day to be known as the computer. In 1979, the U.S. Defense Department named their software language Ada in her honor, and her portrait is on the holographic stickers Microsoft uses to authenticate its products.

Over the next decade, Babbage again tried and failed to get his engine built. Lovelace had other priorities. Because her social status was enhanced by her success, she was busy living up to her Byronic inheritance. Dosed on laudanum or cannabis to dull the pain of a slow-growing cancer, she fell out with her mother and her husband by plunging into a series of intense relationships. She had a brief affair with Dickens and then fell for John Crosse, a professional gambler who inspired her to devise a mathematical system to beat the bookies. There is no record of whether it worked, but her daughter Anne did go on to found the Crabbet stud, from which almost all the world’s purebred Arabian horses now claim descent. Lovelace died at thirty-six, exactly the same age as Byron himself, and for all her mother’s attempts to keep them apart, she was buried next to him.

Lovelace’s story is an interesting variant on the absent-father scenario. Whether consciously or not, she established some kind of harmonic resonance with his memory during her short life, no
doubt encouraged by her mother’s hysterical attempts to suppress it. Who knows how the father-daughter bond might have evolved if he had lived? Byron’s life and relationships were notoriously messy, full of betrayal and recrimination. Her story reminds us that sometimes a dead father, particularly an iconic one, might be more useful than a living one.

Hans, the father of
Hans Christian Andersen
(1805–75), died when his son was eleven, but by then the die was already cast. The Danish storyteller responsible for some of the most popular tales ever told endured a life of misery that bordered on the operatic. He was born in an Odense slum, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman (possibly the only thing he had in common with Stalin). The family lived in a one-room house, and even before his father’s death, the young Hans had been subjected to enough trauma to fill a lifetime of therapy. Several biographers have suggested he may have suffered sexual abuse as a boy; in Andersen’s mostly autobiographical first novel,
The Improvisatore
, a man called Federico lures a young boy into a cave—and an early teacher called Fedder Carstens, whom Andersen claimed was “fond of me, gave me cakes and flowers and patted me on the cheeks,” mysteriously left town within a year of Andersen’s arrival at the school. As an adult, Andersen had a severe dislike of underground places.

They were a warm family, but his father became obsessed with the idea let slip by his grandmother that the family had once been rich and possibly even royal. This made an impression on the young Hans and fueled his sense of being different from the other children in his neighborhood. As soon as his father died, he was forced to work to support himself. It was a dismal experience.
While helping his grandmother at a hospital for the insane, he looked through a crack in a door and saw a naked woman in a room singing to herself. The woman noticed him and threw herself at the door in a murderous rage; the little trapdoor through which she received her food sprang open and she glared at him, her fingers scrabbling at his clothes. When an attendant at last arrived, Andersen was screaming in terror, “half-dead with fear.”

His experience in a clothing mill was no better. His appearance was so effeminate that a group of his coworkers forced him to pull his trousers down in front of the rest of the workforce to see if he was a girl. Later, he signed up as a carpenter’s apprentice, but on his first day at work, the previous episode still fresh in his mind, he could do nothing but stand trembling, blushing, and upset. The other apprentices noticed his distress and taunted him until he fled.

Andersen was an unprepossessing young man. Clumsy, pinheaded, and perpetually dreamy, he walked around with his eyes half closed; people would ask his mother if he was blind. Even his walk was unintentionally comic; one contemporary described it as “a hopping along almost like a monkey.” This physical clumsiness meant he failed to fulfill the one dream that had sustained him since his early childhood: to become an actor. However, Jonas Collin, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, took pity on him after his audition and offered to pay for him to return to school. The friendship with Collin and his family was one of the few relationships that Andersen managed to maintain through his life—but the return to school was a disaster. At the age of seventeen he was put in the lowest class with eleven-and twelve-year-olds, which, when added to his lanky frame and his dyslexia, made him an easy target for the sadistic bullying of the headmaster, who referred to him as an “overgrown lump.”

Andersen emerged from this in worse shape than before. He was deeply neurotic, tormented by stress-induced toothaches, convinced his addiction to masturbation would lead to his penis’s falling off or drive him mad. He was terrified of open spaces, of sailing, of being either burned or buried alive, and of seeing a woman naked (the result of his experience at the asylum as a child). He was so embarrassed about his skinny, concave chest that he built it up by stuffing newspaper in his shirt.

His love life was equally barren. Not one of his (usually gay) crushes was reciprocated. As his literary fame grew, he began to travel widely and struck up friendships with Mendelssohn and Dickens, and got to know Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Heinrich Heine. But rather like Heaviside’s, there was something about Andersen’s manner that annoyed people. He could be both vain and ingratiating at the same time. After staying with his hero Dickens in 1857, his host stuck a card above the bed in the guest room saying: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family AGES.” Many think that the character of Uriah Heep was based on Andersen. Once he arrived unannounced to visit the other great contemporary master of the fairy tale, Jacob Grimm. Unfortunately, Grimm had never heard of Andersen and showed him the door.

His forays around Europe meeting the rich and famous did not go down well at home, and he was often abused on the streets of Copenhagen with shouts of: “Look! There’s our orangutan who’s so famous abroad!” Even his closest friends, the Collin family, would call him “the show-off,” and it was said that there was no man in Denmark about whom so many jokes were told.

Later in life, Andersen, rich but lonely, took to visiting brothels, paying the girls simply to talk to him. Like Newton and
Heaviside, he died a virgin, but bad luck pursued him even beyond the grave. The man he had loved in vain since childhood, Edvard, the married son of Jonas Collin, was originally buried with Andersen (along with his wife), as the writer had requested, but the family later changed its mind and moved them, leaving Andersen to face eternity much as he had lived—alone.

In Denmark, Andersen’s “adult” plays and novels are still read, but it is the fairy tales that have made him famous internationally. Translated into 150 languages, inspiring countless adaptations, and still selling by the millions each year, they are truly universal stories. It is impossible not to see Andersen—the gawky outsider whose love remained unrequited—in the tales of the Little Mermaid or the Ugly Duckling. Perhaps because the unhappiness of his childhood meant he was never able to “grow up” properly in his personal life, his best and most powerful writing was always for children.

In most of the lives in this chapter, the death or absence of a father operated subconsciously in shaping the pattern of the life. In the case of
Salvador Dalí
(1904–89), it was flamboyantly self-conscious. Dalí set out purposely to annoy and punish his father, who was a respectable lawyer and strict disciplinarian. The young Salvador deliberately wet his bed until he was eight, and developed a lifelong scatological obsession, depositing feces all over the house. To further infuriate his father, he also developed illegible handwriting—in reality, he could write perfectly well. At school, again just to annoy his father, he pretended not to know things.

The generous interpretation is that this was a form of attention seeking. The circumstances of his birth were unusual.
His parents had lost their first son—also called Salvador—only nine months and ten days earlier. He had been only two years old, and the parents never fully recovered from the trauma. They talked continually of their lost “genius,” hung a photograph of him over their bed, and regularly took the “new” Salvador to visit the grave. It was all very disturbing for the young Dalí, who was made to feel he was somehow a reincarnation of his elder brother.

He grew up an unusually fearful child, plunging into fits of hysteria if he was touched or saw a grasshopper or, like Andersen, a naked female body (this wasn’t helped by his father’s keeping an illustrated medical textbook on venereal disease on the piano to terrify him). But like all the lives in this chapter he had an exaggerated sense of his own importance, dreaming, as Freud and Byron had done, of becoming a great hero:

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

Dalí’s grandiose self-assurance gathered pace during his teens. But for all the posturing, he was prodigiously gifted and able to paint and draw with a classical precision that few of his contemporaries could match. As his mother remarked of his childhood sketches: “When he says he’ll draw a swan, he draws a swan, and when he says he’ll do a duck, it’s a duck.” At the Royal Academy in Madrid, he got himself expelled for refusing to take an oral exam. He wrote in explanation,