Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [133]
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.
PS. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.
That he had written such a letter to the woman he loved, two years after her death, could never become part of the iconography of Feynman, the collection of stories and images that was already beginning to follow him about. The letter went into an envelope, the envelope into a box. It was not read again until after his death. Nor did Feynman speak of his graveside outburst at the burial of his father, even to friends, although they would have recognized at least one of its potential morals, his unwillingness to submit to hypocrisy. The Feynman who could be wracked by strong emotion, the man stung by shyness, insecurity, anger, worry, or grief—no one got close enough any more to see him. His friends heard a certain kind of story instead, in which Feynman was an inadvertent boy hero, mastering a bureaucracy or a person or a situation by virtue of his naïveté, his good humor, his brashness, his commonsense cleverness (not brilliance), and his emperor’s-new-clothes honesty. The stories were true, at least in spirit, though like all stories they were selectively incomplete. They were admired, polished, retold, and once in a while even relived.
Many of his friends at Los Alamos had already heard variations of a draft-examination story, in which he needled an army examiner who asked him to hold out his hands. Feynman held them out: one palm up, the other palm down. The examiner asked him to turn them over, and he did, providing a wise-guy lesson in symmetry: one palm down, the other palm up. Shortly after his first year at Cornell, Feynman got a chance to refine the story. The army was still drafting, and his educational deferments had run their course. The Selective Service scheduled a new physical examination. Feynman’s version of the story, told countless times in the decades that followed, varied from the half serious to the strictly comic. The basic form went like this:
Stripped to his underwear, he goes from booth to booth, until—“Finally, we get to Booth No. 13, Psychiatrist.”
Witch doctor. Baloney. Faker. Feynman held an extreme view of psychiatry. His mind was his bailiwick, and he liked to think himself in control. Sensitive psychiatrists might have noted his tendency to deny the occasional roiling undercurrents; the undercurrents and the denial were their bailiwick. He preferred to stress the unscientific hocus-pocus of their enterprise (conveniently shifting terminology, lack of reproducible experiments), as reflected in a movie he had seen recently, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in which “a woman” (Ingrid Bergman), “her hand is stuck and she can’t play the piano … she used to be a great pianist… .” Certainly he never considered whether he (himself at that moment unable to work) might have had any but the most rational of reasons for feeling: “It’s boring as hell… .” The woman ducks off-screen with her psychiatrist, comes back, sits down at the piano, and plays. “Well, this kind of baloney, you know, I can’t stand it. I’m very anti. Okay?” Apart from everything else, psychiatrists are doctors, and Feynman has his reasons for holding doctors in contempt.
The psychiatrist looks at his file and says with a smile, Hello, Dick! Where do you work? (“Well, what the hell is he calling me Dick for? You know, he don’t know me that well.”)
Feynman says coldly, Schenectady. (This is temporarily true. He and Bethe are supplementing their Cornell salaries by working that summer at General Electric.)
Where at Schenectady, Dick?
Feynman tells him.
You like your work, Dick? “I couldn’t like him less, you know? Like a guy bothering you in a bar.”
Now a fourth question—Do you think people talk about you?—and Feynman detects that this is the routine: three innocent questions