Collected Essays (94 page)

“I was half bluffing when I told Gerry Piel, publisher of
Scientific American,
that I had enough material for a regular column. At that time I don’t think I owned a single book on mathematics.”

Although Gardner may have had no mathematics books in 1956, he did have 10 years of experience in the rough-and-tumble world of free-lance writing. His career as a professional writer started in 1946, shortly after he returned from four years on a destroyer escort in World War II. Still flush with his mustering-out pay, Gardner was hanging around his alma mater,

the University of Chicago, writing and taking an occasional GI Bill philosophy course. His break came when he sold a humorous short story called “The Horse on the Escalator” to
Esquire
magazine, then based in Chicago. The editor invited the starving writer for lunch at a good restaurant.

“The only coat I had,” Gardner recalls, “was an old Navy peajacket that smelled of diesel oil. I remember the hatcheck girl looking askance when I handed her the filthy rag.”

Over the next few years
Esquire
bought a dozen of Gardner’s stories, but early in the 1950s the magazine moved to New York, changed editors, and left Gardner without a market. He decided to go to New York, too, and settled in Greenwich Village. By regularly eating lunch with a circle of fellow magicians. he soon made a number of interesting contacts-from card sharps to mathematicians. A literary agent talked him into writing his first book,
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

This book (still in print from Dover Publications) surveys more than 50 different pseudoscientific belief systems on subjects like UFOlogy, phrenology, sight without glasses, orgone energy, dianetics, and ESP. Its debut was not auspicious; the first edition was remaindered after nine months, but it focused attention on the young writer. “I would hear myself being attacked on radio talk shows,” Gardner recalls. “One night I turned on the radio and the first thing I heard was, ‘Mr. Gardner is a liar.’ That was John Campbell, editor of the old
Analog
magazine. He was mad at me for attacking dianetics.”

Gardner still takes delight in puncturing the claims of those he calls “psychic hustlers.” He tells the story of his friend The Amazing Randi, a magician who recently unmasked a young psychic who claimed to be able to turn the pages of a phone book by the sheer force of his will.

Randi offers $10,000 to anyone who can perform one paranormal feat under “mutually agreed upon observing conditions.” He got in touch with the young psychic and offered him the reward if he could repeat his demonstration on the television show
That’s My Line.

“The kid’s gimmick was to blow a thin stream of air at the phone book,” Gardner explains. “I remember when Randi figured it out. He was delighted. Phoned me up and said, ‘All you have to do is fold up the edge of the page a little bit. It’s beautiful.’’’

So Randi came to the show with a pocket full of Styrofoam particles. “The kid didn’t suspect a thing. At the last minute Randi scattered the Styrofoam all around the phone book.” Gardner is laughing with an infectious delight. He loves the play of hoax and counter-hoax.

“The kid didn’t know what to do. He kept pacing around and doing karate kicks, trying to dislodge the Styrofoam without being obvious. Finally, the time was up, and the kid said it was impossible. He explained the heat of the lights was building up static electricity on the Styrofoam, and that the static electricity disturbed his
Field.
No one believed him. And then just before the credits Randi blew away the Styrofoam and did the trick. It was beautiful.”

The 1952 preface of that
Fads and Fallacies
book ends with a note of special thanks to Charlotte Greenwald for help in proofing and revising. Marriage soon followed. They are a
karass,
in Kurt Vonnegut’s terminology, a couple one cannot imagine apart.

Their first son was born in 1955 and their second three years later. Gardner needed a regular income in those years and with his usual serendipity found a job that was just right for him: contributing editor for
Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine.
He designed features and wrote stories for
Humpty, Children’s Digest, Piggity’s,
and
Polly Pigtails.

“Those were good years at
Humpty,”
he muses. “Eight good years. In terms of actual page count I did half the pages of each issue. I’d write a story and some doggerel, but my main thing was the activities that damage the page.”

Damaging the page is a key concept for Gardner. Coloring, pasting, folding, cutting out-these are activities that damage the page. “Librarians hate it. A magazine like
Cricket
would never think of having you cut the page. I doubt if anyone besides the Parents’ Institute owns an undamaged run of
Humpty.
Fittingly, Gardner’s first article for
Scientific American
involved damaging the page. The article, called “Logic Machines,” featured a bound-in cardboard sheet with pieces for the reader to punch out and manipulate. After Gardner’s next
Scientific American
article, called “Hexaflexagons” (about paper folding), Piel suggested the column to Gardner. In January 1957 he started with a game column on magic number squares and went on from there.

The fact that Gardner started with little mathematical knowledge probably worked to his advantage. Reading his columns one feels the wonder and excitement of the explorer-not the condescension and unconscious omissions of the expert. “The later columns are much more sophisticated because I was teaching myself math doing the research. I accumulated stuff faster than I could write columns.” Despite this wide mathematical experience, Gardner holds to his amateur status. “I’m like a person who loves music and enjoys listening to it, but who doesn’t compose or even play very well.” Looking at a recent book of mathematical essays collected in his honor, he remarks matter-of-factly, “A lot of the articles are a little beyond my mathematical ability.”

Gardner will retire from
Scientific American
at the end of this year. He will be replaced by Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
Hofstadter plans to change the name of the column from “Mathematical Games” to its anagram, “Metamagical Themas.”

Gardner is looking forward to his new freedom. In turning down a chance to accept an honorary degree he recently wrote, “I have no desire to be in
Who’s Who
or to go about the country making speeches. I just want to live quietly and anonymously in the mountains of western North Carolina and write the sort of books I wanted to write before I got sidetracked.” With some 30 books in print,
the
book Gardner wants to write is a series of linked philosophical essays, tentatively entitled
The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.
“Scrivener” is a self-deprecatory sort of word meaning something like “scribbler,” and the “whys” correspond to chapters ranging from “Why I am Not a Solipsist” to “Why I do Not Think Immortality Impossible.”

Those who have watched Gardner parry and thrust at the ESP crowd may be surprised to learn that he has had a lifelong fascination with religion. He describes himself as a Platonist and a theist.

Why then is he so suspicious of those who claim to have psychic powers? Gardner smiles and shakes his head. “What does a belief in the vastness of the universe have to do with whether or not Uri Geller can bend a spoon?”

Afterword: Martin Gardner (1914-2010)

For my generation of scientists, Martin Gardner was a wise and beloved father figure. From 1956 to 1981 he published a monthly column on “Mathematical Games” in the
Scientific American
—turning wild mathematical arcana into puzzles and games. And he published scores of books. He returned over and over to certain topics: curved space, the fourth dimension, number puzzles, and
Alice in Wonderland.

Oddly enough, he had no mathematical training at all—he’d never taken a college course in the subject. As he once remarked to me, “I’m like a person who loves music and enjoys listening to it, but who doesn’t compose or even play very well.”

When he retired from
Scientific American
, I arranged to interview him at his house for a magazine profile. The graying Martin was kindly and sharp. Immediately he showed me a magic trick where he made a coin move right through a sheet of latex rubber that he’d stretched tight over a shot-glass. He claimed he’d made the coin move through the fourth dimension.

I begged him for the secret, and he showed me how to work the trick. And the next morning he lent me a box of rare books on the fourth dimension that I could use for researching my own book on this topic.

Although Martin was also known for his blasts against pseudoscience, he was fascinated by religion and metaphysics. The very last time I spoke to him on the phone he was showing off his newly learned ability to speak in tongues. He’d gotten curious about the topic and, being Martin, had mastered it.

He was a fascinating and warm-hearted man, always learning, always in flux—a benign trickster who cajoled thousands of us into scientific careers.

Note on “Martin Gardner”

Written 1981 and 2010.

First part appeared in
Science 81
, 1981, second part in
Time
magazine, 2012.

The article was one of my very first journalism gigs. Martin had just retired from writing his column for Scientific American. I’d corresponded with him a bit over the years—Martin always answered letters, typing them out by hand. So I presumed on our pen-pal relationship and wrote him that
Science 81
wanted me to do a profile of him. At the same time, I told
Science 81
that Martin would like me to write an article about him. Meeting him was paradise for me, a lasting inspiration.

William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg

In 1982 I went to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, as sort of a teacher. Naropa was the brain-child of a Tibetan guru who brought his followers there, they called him “Rimpoche.” I had a mathematician friend, Newcomb Greenleaf, who happened to be in the organization there, and he got my wife Sylvia and I invited out the first summer I was teaching at Langhorne-Evans. Rather than being there in my role as an SF writer, I was supposed to give some lectures on the philosophical One/Many Problem as filtered through the concepts of mathematical set theory. I’d bring my family along, and we’d get a free apartment and a little money. It was our first drive out West, and we loved it. We five squeezed into our station wagon, making a special cushioned area in the way-back that we called the Pig’s Nest. For me the big thrill of the trip was to meet my beatnik heroes, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, scheduled to talk on writing, also the Beat poet Gregory Corso was to show up. “The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics,” is what they called the whole literary aspect of Naropa. At Burroughs’s seminar, there he is in his coat and tie, bone-dry voice, reading this and that, then answering questions. I’d seen him before in Paris when we’d both been invited to speak at some nebulous psychiatry conference. That time, in Paris, Burroughs was into how to keep people from seeing you. The basic move being to see them first, and by staring at them, keep them from looking at you. And he’d actually used it on me in the hotel, me wanting to “have a chat” and then being in the elevator with him, but not noticing him. When we get out of the elevator Sylvia asks me, “Didn’t you notice who you were standing next to, Rudy?” But in Boulder, old Bill was a real sitting duck, right in front of all us arty types, with Allen G. saintly helpful selfless fixing window, mike, chairs. At Q & A time, I ask Burroughs, “Do you have any good SF ideas on how to send yourself into outer space without using rockets?” Burroughs: “As a virus, to code your information in a bug which others catch.” Me: “You used to say the word is the virus. Now would you say that the artist reproducing his software in a virus-like fashion so that later readers participate in his consciousness?” Burroughs: “That’s why they call us the immortals.” Some strange resonance there—every now and then I have a faint feeling like I’m from outer space myself. “You seem so serious today,” I said to Burroughs. “Do you laugh when you’re writing?” He gave a thin, sly smile “I might. If it’s funny.” Someone else asked old Bill why he didn’t just write a bestseller to make some money. He said something like this: “It’s not possible. People may think you can lower their tone and write a bestseller, but you can’t do it. You can’t write down to the reading public. People want to feel you working at the limits of your abilities.” After the talk I had a chance to press a paperback copy of my novel
White Light
into Bill’s hands. “Far out,” he said. He liked the title, and the fact that the book was SF. My main friend there at Naropa was a Filipino guy called Arturo. He and his wife June taught Tai-Chi, which is more or less like Indian-wrestling. Arturo was always high, always with a pint of brandy and a pipe of weed, telling Sylvia the secret of life: “Life is a river. A long and winding river.” I loved it, talking with him was like being with Cheech and Chong rolled into one. I’d complain to him about my worries about getting fucked up too much. Arturo: “What fucked up, is he fucked up, is this cat fucked up?” One night I’m over at Arturo’s, loud music haw-haw, streaks and flares, “Let’s do a hot-tub,” says June. I’m thrilled to bits, out west hot-tub, but the kids are freaked at undressing, and Sylvia also not into it. They split and I stay, and start bragging about what a great writer I am, the new Jack Kerouac, June and Arturo dig it, say, “Well, we’ll tell Allen to come over.” And then like I turn around whammo, Ginsberg is there, I give him a jay, we get off a little. And I’m trying to tell about my high-school friend Niles and I reading “Howl” drunk to our wondering girlfriends—but Allen’s heard that a lot of times, he picks up interest when I say I want to write like Jack, “And what I want from you, Allen, after being hung-up on the beatniks all these years, what I want is your blessing.” And real fast he whaps his hand down on my head like a skull-cap or electric-chair metal cap zzt zzt “BLESS YOU” he yells. We sit down and rap for awhile on the couch, “Why did the beatniks get so much ink?” “Fine writing.” Sure, then into the hot-tub with Allen and Arturo, also Allen’s young boyfriend, passing around some brandy, remembering articles about people drinking and drowning in hot-tubs, yes let’s have that too, so I lean down face-down in the bubbles, nod out, the air bloo bloo blug bubble float, heated water, no gravity, people tap my back, float, see the wheat field sliding diagonally, the train rushes by we ride it to Shangri-la, there’s a tunnel with sparks, the idol shrinks. Sit up, and a nice fat girl next to me. Later I’m quoting Kerouac haikus to Allen: “Useless, useless! Heavy rain driving into the sea.” “Neal liked that one a lot,” says Allen. The next day Sylvia and I took the kids out to the Coors Brewery for a tour, we were so excited we got Sylvia earrings that were two tiny Coors cans. “Your old lady, man,” says Arturo, looking at them, “your old lady.” Which was a nice way to think of Sylvia—not my good angel, or little wifey, but my old lady, Mamma Sylvia with beer-can earrings and frizz-bop hair. Bright lipstick. Not that she liked being called “my old lady” for more than about ten minutes. We had fun out there. One night Allen was reciting poetry with a new-wave band, the Gluons, and Arturo drifts in, sits with us, out with the trusty corn-cob weed-pipe, “You think they throw me out for this?” I get off right away, jagged and uptight, a clubfooted tightrope-walker, mad with ambition. “Relax,” says Arturo, I come back with, “Sure, relax, but if I relax too much I wouldn’t be here or bother to breathe, right?” “Relax!” Which, come to think of it, is what Allen had told me years before, when I’d seen him doing a poetry reading with his father—who wrote tame Ogden-Nash-type ditties—the two of them had read at Rutgers, father & son, and after the reading I’d pressed forward to ask Allen my big question: “Do you think dying is like taking acid?” He looked me over, took in my tension and rapped out, “Relax!”, then softened and said, “It’s probably easier.” So anyway, at the nightclub I’m relaxed with Arturo, and Gregory Corso is right there with us too, I’m hoping to pick up some scraps of Beat wisdom from him, vicious criminal though he looks like, but first I go out to dance some with Arturo and Sylvia. On the little stairs down to the dance-floor Arturo does a great Tai Chi move—he falls down, but in such a way that it’s possible to catch him. Then Allen reads his new poem, “Birdbrain,” snaking back and forth, bald head twitching, a Hindi dancer, holding up a sheaf of papers, “I am Birdbrain!” and “I declare Birdbrain to be victor in the Poetry Contest! There’s a break while the band leaves the stage, we sit down, and I tap Gregory on the shoulder. He whirls around, “Do you so love me?” He pushes his face an inch away from mine, “Do you so love me?” “Uh, yeah, sure.” “Why?” “Well, I always really dug Jack and he was your friend…” “O.K. We’re all here. We’re all here but something’s wrong. What?” “Jack’s dead.” “You got it. Lissen to this. Blukka. Whatsat mean? Blukka.” “I don’t know.” “Here and now. Like right there, trying to understand that, you got a blukka.” “Yeah, sure. Satori.” I jerk in excitement and our heads bang hard into each other. “Here and now,” says Gregory. “Like you can’t hold onto it. Let it go past. A knot on your head.” On the stage, Allen is back. This poem is for Gregory Corso, he says. Gregory, reacting to that, locks his head on my shoulder to continue talking, head to head like prisoners in Attica. I’d seen them do that at the poetry workshop I taught at Attica one time with my Viet-vet writer friend Gerald McCarthy. Two guys, instead of doing the “class” sat knee to knee with their heads on each others shoulders, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, talking private, planning drug deals, escapes, who knows. In Attica, there were still a lot of bullet holes chipped out of the walls inside, left over from the big riot when all those guys got killed. Talk about feeling locked up. I read them some of
Spacetime Donuts
, my first novel, a prison scene inspired by Canadian bust. One old guy scribbled while I read, an old Black murderer, and then he came back at me with an incredible rap-poem about robots and energy bolts. Another guy, a shy young white guy, showed me his notebook full of special pin-ups of women snipped from magazines. So lonely, so touching. In Boulder with the Gluons, Allen is reading, and Gregory is talking into my ear, “I knew a guy who died. I knew a guy who died.” “You mean Jack?” “I knew him, you know. And he died. I didn’t meet him after he was dead. I didn’t meet him after he was dead. I knew a guy who died.” “Yeah.” I really feel we should be listening to Ginsberg’s poem. Gregory chuckles and leans back, picking up my tension. “Look at him,” he says admiringly. “Look at Ginsey go.” Ginsey is flickering like a flame, his head dancing and spouting total communist propaganda, it’s just so Beat. “He’s the master, “says Gregory. “We’re like two guys at a ball-game. On the mound, the master. The master. Two guys in the stands.” Then the poem’s over and Allen walks back, “Did you listen to your poem, Gregory?” Sylvia starts running some rap on Gregory then, and he rolls up his sleeve to reveal his special tattoo. It’s a little oval with a red dot and a green dot inside the oval, and coming off the top of the oval is a line which branches at its end. “What is it?” he says to Sylvia. “It’s a stop-light,” retorts my so-called old lady. “No, what do
you
know,” goes Corso, “It’s the first thing anyone ever drew. What you got is the brush and the bag to keep…what they paint with, the stuff. And the place to dip different colors, the palette. It’s the first thing man ever painted.” Outside it was raining and I
drove
, golf-style, the lime from June’s drink with the handle-loop of my umbrella, then faded out with Sylvia. A big time.