Marie Curie and the Death of Childhood

by

Gillian Polack

Books are personal. Sometimes their subjects are intensely so. When I received the offer of Marie Curie: A biography (by Marilyn Bailie Ogilvie) to review, I instantly said “I want this book.” While I was waiting for it to arrive by mail, I found that it had set off a chain reaction of emotions which led me to think about an entirely different book. This article is in two parts, therefore. The first section is about Marie Curie and why she is important to me and what this new study of her has to say. The second is about the death of my childhood. As an adult, I find it ironic that Curie’s tragic life represents the best elements of that childhood.

Part One

As I read Marie Curie: a biography I found myself arguing with it. One of my early book loves was a biography of Marie Curie. It was part of a series on lives of famous scientists. I believe my niece sequestered it when she was doing high school science. If I can borrow it from her, I’ll write about it someday. Ideally, I should be writing about it now, but that wouldn’t be fair on Ogilvie. The power of childhood memory would make it very hard to see her book as anything but derivative. This is one of the arguments I found myself having with the book as I read it.

In the chapter about the U.S., Ogilvie uses more primary sources, but a lot of the time she rests her descriptions on the evidence collected by others. This means that she seldom breaks new ground. This is not a cutting-edge biography. In my arguments, however, I found myself thinking “Even though I don’t agree with her history and I would rather she had written more extensively and had done something more innovative or insightful, this isn’t a bad volume for someone who doesn’t know who Marie Curie is and why she’s important”. I liked the biography of my childhood better, but I was about nine when I read it.

As history, Ogilvie’s book is not that useful. As biography with reasonable explanations of the science the Curies did, to be read on a train or dipped into at leisure, it’s respectable.

Ogilvie’s Marie Curie is not a long book (less than 200 pages) and there is quite a bit of repetition. The history is more the history of science and Curie’s role in the science of the day than a broader understanding of how women’s roles were complex and changing and how she was able to be the person she was. It operates against the assumption that women had few options and that Curie was exceptional. That Curie was exceptional was undeniable, but a better social history would have helped me understand why Ogilvie argued from the direction she chose.

And here my adult self is in internal argument with my child self. I want to point out that France in the late nineteenth century was a marvelously rich and complex society and that it is far less surprising that Curie emerged there than Ogilvie suggests. I want to know about how Curie was self-defeating: the book talks about how Pierre Curie’s modesty and wish for work rather than prestige made him self-defeating, but doesn’t look at how Marie Curie’s behaviour influenced her choices and opportunities. In other words, we see the results of her life, not the causes.

The half-remembered book of my childhood talked about her greatness. Ogilvie’s book focuses more on how difficult her life was and the prices she paid. I found it fascinating that Curie learned to cook and that she minimized housework—this means that she assumed she had an active role in housework, which was not something I would have expected for a woman of her background. It’s a very clear indication that the Curie home was so focused on science that they couldn’t spare the money for comforts that others of their background took for granted. I would like to know how many servants they had and, if they had none (even when there was money), why not. I would love to know why Curie cooked even when her husband had a full-time job. Cooking takes time and surely that time was, ideally, laboratory time? What household choices did Curie make? How did she make them? How was she regarded by women of the same period who made quite different choices? All of this is touched on only very briefly and in no depth. This is a wasted opportunity to me, because I see those household choices as underpinning Curie’s career choices. She was a rare person who received a PhD and two Nobel prizes.

The child inside me wants to know about the science and how she changed the way we look at atomic structure. The child in me also wants to know the trail of unawareness she followed: when I was under ten it puzzled me that she couldn’t see that her work was killing her. Ogilvie doesn’t answer my childhood questions (although she partially answers the revolutionary results from Curie’s work) and she doesn’t contextualise Curie’s home situation. What’s interesting is that she talks about Curie having kept household accounts and journaling the stuff of daily life. This means that these answers are there, but Ogilvie is writing an introduction to Curie’s life and doesn’t delve deeply.

My editor's pen grew restless. I wanted to cut down some of the oversized paragraphs and overburdened sentences. I wanted to circle the sentences where the subject didn’t agree with the object. These problems were not severe, but they did slow me. They would slow most readers, even without an editor’s pen, because they would take most readers out of the story and send them off searching a cup of tea or coffee.

It’s not a book I would buy, but it’s a very good book to argue with.

Part Two

While I write this section of the essay, I’m discovering that my television doesn’t like the hot weather, so I’m watching a version of On the Beach which keeps on breaking up. It’s all that Atomic Holocaust, turning Gregory Peck into pixels. I’m determined to see at least some of the movie, however, because the book has such strong memories for me. Different memories to Curie’s biography. Much later. Connected, however, because without Curie’s work, there would be no possibility of an atomic holocaust.

I’ve given up on the television and the perfidy of its picture quality. I’ll have to get a copy of the film and watch it another time. The memories are too overwhelming, anyway. I was born four years after the book came out, two years after the film.

Nevil Shute’s book is a character study. It shows a bunch of people facing quiet, suburban doom and how they deal with it. Melbourne is a character and how she deals with gradually slowing down and stopping is as heart-breaking as any other aspect.

I didn’t read On the Beach as a child. I lived in the Melbourne he so lovingly depicted. Only my Melbourne was alive and his was slowly dying. His imagination was too bleak for me then, and too close to home.

I gave in when I lived in Toronto. I was only there for one year, but I was living overseas for the first time, rather young and very alone, and Robarts Library had a nice Australian collection. A bit old-fashioned, but some good selections. I read my way through it, starting with Patrick White and ending with Nevil Shute. After Nevil Shute, I started reading Canadian writers. This was entirely because of On the Beach.

On the Beach begins:

In the Northern Hemisphere, the end had come suddenly, disastrously, touched off by a skirmish that became a nuclear war.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the end would come slowly, as radiation drifted in the wind.

The Gregory Peck film isn’t as disturbing as the novel. The people are too beautiful and the accents break the reality. They’re devised for a U.S. audience at a time when the U.S. didn’t understand our dialect at all. To be honest, I don’t know if this can ever be as effective on film as it is on the page. On the page, it’s a book about small folks and big decisions. How do we all face inevitable death? If it is clear we’re all going to die, what choices do we make, and why? In that one key theme, it’s like a Holocaust novel. Human beings who have lived good lives facing the impossible with as much grace as they can find within them.

I was brought up in the heart of suburban Melbourne and my family had moved there—over the generations—from the heart of Melbourne itself. The dentist in the city in the 1920s was a relative, as were the owners of the elegant linen shop in the Royal Arcade. This means I see myself in the changing accents of Melbourne and I see the years before my childhood in On the Beach.

Shute gave us a scarily precise depiction of Melbourne’s gentle fifties suburbia in On the Beach. How a city can slow down and shrink. How life becomes smaller and smaller until everything stops forever.

Melbourne didn't change as quickly back then as it does now. My early childhood was precisely that Melbourne Shute delineates. The streets had the same traffic patterns. The electorates had the same voting patterns. Even the trams were the same model. Dad used to call them “climate controlled” or “naturally air-conditioned.” They were hot in summer, cold in winter and all the rain washed straight through them. Other cities buy up those old green trams and use them for tourist runs. I’ve always wondered how much of that tourist planning was inspired by Ava Gardner’s infamous (and probably fictional) comment about Melbourne (“On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.”), and the appearance of trams in Shute’s novel.

In On the Beach, the world died in 1963. Two years after I was born. It wasn’t a dramatic death. It was a soft asphyxiation from drifting radiation. On the Beach is possibly the most suburban post-apocalyptic novel ever written.

There aren’t very many suburban post-apocalyptic novels. Most writers dramatise the big things and make survival possible, even if that survival is only for one brave human. Most apocalyptic novels are about fighting big fights and facing down armies or zombies or aliens. Nevil Shute wrote about people. People facing an inevitable end from an atomic holocaust. He wrote about how they lived right until that end and how they loved and how they all, every single one, eventually died.

Without Curie’s work on the atom there could have been no end-of-the-world as written by Shute. From the scientist to the writer: my microcosmos in two generations.

In another way On the Beach is a document of a society that’s now gone. Melbourne has become one of the great cities of the world in the last fifty years. People still live quietly domestic lives there, but tourists romp through and see a Great City. They eat the best Greek food and wonder about the fusion cuisine. They still angst about cricket and football, but the football is not only Aussie Rules and the football matches are played across the nation, not across the state. According to pundits, it’s one of the world’s most livable cities. My family first came to Melbourne when the town had less than 40,000 people: these days it’s home to millions.

Reading Shute’s book in Toronto was the end of my childhood. I was twenty-one. It made me realise that the science my family loved was a very mixed blessing and that nothing is permanent. It made me rethink Curie’s work. For a while she toppled from her pedestal.

When I was over my homesickness, I realised that her work was still astonishing and the trials she had to bear, impossible. She brought the dream of holocaust and even the reality into our world. She also brought radiation, an understanding of the structure of matter and, more than everything, the hope that bright minds can thrive and change the world, no matter what that world throws at them. She was dead before her understanding of matter was turned into a deadly weapon.

Shute’s end of the world remains a reminder to me than science is not ethically neutral, that decisions about what is to be done with our understanding of the world have consequences. Curie’s life is a reminder about how very important it is to learn and think and grow and to never, ever give up.

Books mentioned in this column:
Marie Curie: A Biography by Marilyn Bailie Ogilvie (Prometheus Books, 2011)
On the Beach by Nevil Shute (Ballantine Books, 1957)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.