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| Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 1999 |
by Jon Weiner
The summer of 1986 was the first season of the Marine Biological Laboratory's science-writing program. I was a member of the inaugural class of writers who spent eight weeks in the fishing village of Woods Hole, MA, learning biology by doing biology. The program was the brainchild of a friend of mine, Jamie Shreeve, who was MBL's public relations officer at the time, and Jamie was running it with the help of an older science writer, John Pfeiffer.
Although Pfeiffer was already in his 70s, he looked much younger. He was tall, thin, fit, with thick, ruffled white hair. He seemed to know everyone in Woods Hole and he seemed to be welcome everywhere, without any program to sustain him. He had once been the science editor of Newsweek and the science editor of CBS. He'd also spent one year on Madison Avenue, which he'd hated, although the money had helped him to escape from the city when he was still a young man and write full time. Now he and his wife, Naomi, spent every summer in Woods Hole, and they spent part of every winter at the faculty club at Stanford as guests of his friends in the anthropology department. In between, they lived in Bucks County, PA. He had written a series of books about human evolution, the best-known of which was The Emergence of Man, then in its fourth edition. That book had been in print so long that it had required a revised title, The Emergence of Humankind.
I already knew Pfeiffer by reputation. His books had made him a model for the field of science writing. The acknowledgements in Emergence include more than four pages of closely-set type listing the names of hundreds of anthropologists, archaeologists, bone hunters, and flint-knappers who had helped him during the decades of work he'd devoted to the subject. He'd climbed down into every cave and gorge from Olduvai to Altamira to Combe Grenal, and he'd made close friends in all the many fields he'd mastered. Margaret Mead had asked him to dinner to talk shop and argue details after the first edition of The Emergence of Man. John Updike had raved in The New Yorker about Pfeiffer's latest book, The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry Into Art and Religion, in which he tried to explain why our ancestors suddenly began painting bison and horses and humanoid stick figures on the walls of their caves.
But it was his personality as much as his career that made him a role model for Shreeve, for Boyce Rensberger, for me, and for dozens of other science writers in Woods Hole and elsewhere. He was tremendously enthusiastic and ebullient about science, life, painting, poetry, music, travel, and food. He loved big talk and big thoughts and he made big sweeping hominid gestures of the arms. In college he'd hesitated between physics and poetry, and although he chose physics, he never lost the poetry. Naomi once told me that when he was at Newsweek and CBS, he used to scribble poems and shove them into a drawer of his desk when anyone came in. He was always typing up new poems he'd just discovered and sending them to his friends, or quoting his favorite line of the poet Muriel Rukeyser: "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." For Pfeiffer the poetry was not separate from the science: they were all part of his enthusiasm for life. He was always eager to draw diagrams of Neanderthal and Cro Magnon skulls on paper napkins at lunch and speculate about what had driven that creative explosion. He had a way of talking and writing about these things that was plain, sane, and passionate. You remembered what he said not necessarily because he'd found the mot juste but because you felt he'd gotten it right. I once heard him talk about painted caves on National Public Radio. "We'll never know what those paintings meant to the people who painted them," he said, with feeling, "but we know they meant a lot."
I've never known a writer who made the writing life look so easy. He reminded me of the Zen story about the butcher who found enlightenment and could carve a cow with one stroke of the ax. He always hated questions about himself, partly I guess because he didn't like to brag. But when we pushed him to explain how he had stayed afloat all these years, he would say that the adoption of Emergence in college courses had been like winning a MacArthur Fellowship. He also said that he'd made grant writing a sort of second career. He was superbly easy and comfortable when he interviewed scientists-with Pfeiffer, an interview was only one more enthusiastic conversation. He was just as easy on the tennis court, and he had such a graceful way with his wife, Naomi, that the two of them made Jamie's wife think of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He also loved to adopt young writers and share his sense of the poetry of life. "Sometimes you have to do something just for the hell of it," he told me, walking by Eel Pond. "Even if it makes no sense. Because it makes no sense. You'll find out," he said.
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| A state policeman helps John Pfeiffer out of a cave near Easton, Pennsylvania, where he had been trapped for almost 24 hours. |
I assumed that was the point of a story he once told me-one of the only stories he ever told me about himself. When he was a young father, he said, he took his son Tony and two of Tony's friends down into a cave in Bucks County. They got lost somehow, and they spent the night shivering in a grotto, standing in two inches of water, in short-sleeved shirts, with only a dozen Tootsie Rolls to eat, while the batteries in the flashlight died. Pfeiffer told me that when they finally climbed out of the cave the next morning, into the arms of state troopers and the larger circle of anxious friends and parents, one of the kids yelled, "Mom, that was great! Can I go down there again?"
"Yes," his mother said. "But next time you have to go with a grown-up."
Pfeiffer must have inspired dozens of science writers over the years, but I wonder if anyone ever copied him as devotedly as Shreeve and I did. It is a testament to his magnetism that Shreeve eventually quit MBL to go visit the world's painted caves, and meet Pfeiffer's thousand and one flint-knappers and bone collectors (carrying letters of introduction from Pfeiffer). Shreeve wrote a big book, The Neanderthal Enigma, which he dedicated to Pfeiffer. I followed Pfeiffer even more closely. My wife and I had been thinking about leaving New York, and after our summer in Woods Hole we decided more or less on the spur of a weekend to move to Bucks County. Since we couldn't afford New Hope, where the Pfeiffers lived, we bought a house nearby. John and Naomi gave us wonderful long dinners, and the start of a social circle here in Bucks County that is still expanding today. The Pfeiffers' house was plain, comfortable and elegant, like John's prose, with a terraced garden (Naomi's) that sloped down to the Delaware River. John's office was a few minutes' walk from the house, a writer's garret lined with books and paintings and framed snapshots of flint-knappers, bonehunters and cave explorers. After a day at the typewriter he would take his rowboat up and down the river. In the winter he would skate on the canal.
He and I met often for shop talk and lunch at the New Hope Diner. He was writing a lot for Smithsonian in those days and he insisted on fixing me up with his editor, Jack Wiley, so that I could do the same. Whenever I worried aloud about a piece of writing, I always felt from his reactions that he was younger than I was. For him the glass wasn't half full, it was overflowing. Once when I fretted about finding a lead, he drew a big sweeping circle in the air. "It's a circle," he said, with gusto. "Where do you go in?" For him the problems were part of the pleasure-even the niggling problems. "If you don't like to pay your own health insurance," he'd say, "you shouldn't be a free-lance writer." Sometimes Shreeve and I wondered if there was some dark secret in his past, because he seemed so reluctant to talk about it. But I think now he was too excited about whatever he was working on in the present. He lived that line of Emerson's, "The sun shines today also." I could never get him to tell me how he'd become such a world-class cave expert; he preferred to talk about the wonderful quality of the latest peaches in the supermarket, or about some restaurant's buffet table, where he was always the top carnivore, or about his latest Smithsonian project, which would take him aboard a giant battleship in the Pacific. "We're so lucky," he would say in the diner. "We can go anywhere in the world we want!"
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Now both of us were busy writing evolution-continues books. I was writing The Beak of the Finch. He was trying to analyze certain trends that he thought he discerned in Western society: something about a move away from competition and toward altruism and cooperation. To me that sounded less like a description of society than a description of Pfeiffer. He was so excited about his research, talking with economists and labor leaders and entrepreneurs, that for a while he seemed to grow even younger. I'll never forget how thrilled he was when the students occupied Tiananmen Square. "Let's go!" he cried in the New Hope Diner. "Let's just go! We could be there tomorrow night!" I hated to be the old one of the two of us who refused to do the spirited thing that made no sense.
In retrospect, the illness that would get him had already set in. He'd been fascinated by the human brain all his life and the brain was letting him down. A series of small strokes was slowly changing his personality-at first, by making him only more so. Over the next few years he grew too hyper and enthusiastic to sit still in a chair and type. He told me that although he was sure he was on to something, he might never get it down on paper. I told him I had a dream project too and I admired him for chasing his so hard. "Then write it," he said. "Because something may happen, and you may never get the chance." He never did write his big book. He never finished his last article for Jack Wiley at Smithsonian. He and Naomi moved to a retirement village in Newtown. I used to drive down there sometimes, pick John up and take him to Pizza Hut-his choice-where he would eat all of the pepperoni at the buffet table. In at least one way he hadn't changed. He still resisted talking about the past, only about the present and the pepperoni.
One morning this September, Naomi found John sitting in his living-room easy chair, holding the remote. That wasn't like him, because he didn't watch TV in the morning. At first she thought he was asleep. Tony flew in from Colorado, and together he and Naomi cleaned out John's things as briskly and unsentimentally as they could manage. I drove down to Newtown, and Jamie Shreeve drove up from Washington. When I told Naomi I wanted to write something about John, she lent me two scrapbooks that had somehow survived the Pfeiffers' reluctance to preserve their own pasts.
As soon as Jamie and I had left, we took a look at the two scrapbooks in the Newtown Starbucks. Both of them were devoted to clippings from Monday, May 27, 1957. There were headlines from the New York World-Telegram, the New York Mirror, the New York Daily News, the Trenton Times, the Easton Express, the Allentown Morning Call, all about the nationally known science writer who had gotten himself trapped in a local cave. The cave had belonged to one Mrs. Anna Hart, of Raubsville, PA, and according to the Bethlehem Globe-Times, Mrs. Hart was puzzled how the science writer had managed to get lost for almost 24 hours. She told the reporter, "The public has explored the cave for 200 years without incident."
Shreeve and I couldn't believe that our world-famous cave explorer had managed to get so lost. We were laughing instead of crying, holding a Starbucks wake of two. I kept reading out the headlines and hooting.
"Mother Clasps Son After He is First To be Led from Hole; He Says: 'We Went In, Just Got Lost'"
"That Was Something, Huh? His Pal Notes"
"Pfeiffer Praises 3 Boys' Pluck, Calls It 'Darn Fool Thing To Do.'"
Then we started reading the stories, and we discovered a wrinkle that Pfeiffer had never mentioned, in spite of all our questions. According to the New York Mirror, Naomi had said that John knew "nothing at all about caves." The Morning Call said Pfeiffer "didn't reveal whether he had any plans for writing about his experience in the cave." The Easton Express: "Mr. Pfeiffer . . . took a dim view of the spelunking future. When asked if he'd find another hobby, he declared, emphatically, 'That's putting it mildly.' In many ways, exploring the passageways of the human brain is considerably safer."
I looked at Jamie. When Pfeiffer got lost down there in Carpenter's Cave, he was still known as the author of The Human Brain. He had not yet started writing about human evolution. I said, "So he gets lost in a cave for a night with three small boys. He has a horrible time, he's completely embarrassed. And he spends the rest of his career climbing down into every cave on this planet."
"Well, Jon," Jamie announced, in a mock-solemn voice, as I closed the scrapbooks, "you've got your story."
Now I'm sitting here in my study in Bucks County, loaded down with boxes of books from Pfeiffer's study, many of them with his penciled notes: The Art of Memory, In Pursuit of the Past, The Darwin Reader; boxes of thick volumes of anthropology and archaeology, slim volumes of poetry, and a brown paper grocery bag full of Benny Goodman tapes. One of the books on my own shelf is Annie Dillard's latest, For The Time Being, with this line on page 99: "Recently, according to the ever fine writer John Pfeiffer, an Arizona rancher skinned a bear with an obsidian knife in two hours instead of the usual three and a half; he said he never needed to press down."
Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. His latest book is Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist And His Quest For the Origins of Behavior.