UNCERTAINTY SHROUDS THE BEGINNING. Let us say that it occurred in 1944—a reasonable probability—when my father was overseas and my mother rented a summer cottage for the two of us in Wainscott, Long Island. I was fourteen at the time. One evening my mother and I were invited for dinner at Mary Callery’s house on the North Shore, or perhaps on Peconic Bay. The time and place do not matter all that much. Mary Callery was my mother’s closest friend, beautiful, smart, temperamental, much involved with the international art community, herself a sculptor. There were other guests: the architects Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, newly arrived in America.
Mary Callery, Philip Johnson, and my mother drank dry martinis—no doubt more than two. I probably drank Coke; I don’t know what Mies drank, but I do know that after a while the martini drinkers entered a gay and gossipy realm where Mies and I had no part. Towards the end of the meal I went and sat next to him. I had been told he was a great architect. The prospect of talking to him was interesting because my father was also an architect, serious if not great. So I did not hesitate to question Mies about his work. We talked for about an hour. I suppose that having a fourteen-year-old as listener was better than no company at all; at any rate, he spoke to me seriously and without condescension. I have forgotten everything he said except for one thing: he insisted that all his notions of architectural space had been drawn from a book called On Growth and Form, the work of someone called D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. (When I later mentioned book and author to various literary mentors, none had ever heard of them.)
During my late adolescence I was a book stealer. I loved books, not just to read but to own, and there was no way I could buy all I wanted. Because I stole for love, I stole self-righteously. It took time for me to realize that if Scribner’s could afford my pilfering, I was doing palpable damage to places like the Holliday Bookshop. At the age of eighteen I stopped altogether.
In 1952 I moved to France with my wife and daughter. In Paris we became close friends with Tony and Eve Bonner. Two years later, the four of us decided to try living in Majorca, reputedly pleasant and unquestionably cheap. Tony was as much a bookworm as I. Faced with an indeterminate stay on a then out-of-the-way island, we took a brief trip to London to stock up on useful books. We spent most of our daylight hours in Foyle’s, viewing and reviewing its innumerable shelves.
It was during our first morning in that bookstore that I at last saw a copy of On Growth and Form (Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 2 vols.). It was late afternoon of the following day when I mustered the courage to steal it. I was by then in a pitiful state. I hadn’t stolen a book in years; my earlier recklessness had deserted me (I was now a husband and father). Even in pluckier days I would have hesitated before smuggling two fat volumes out of a store milling with attentive salesmen. But the unforeseen resurgence of a title pronounced once ten years earlier had set me trembling with superstitious lust. (I could not begin to contemplate paying the twenty pounds it cost—almost two hundred pounds in today’s money).
I spent an inwardly frantic, outwardly reasonable hour executing my theft, moving the two volumes separately and in stages from the middle of the second floor towards the ground-floor exit, camouflaging the manoeuvre by bringing books I planned to buy to the cashier nearest my point of escape. At last On Growth and Form was settled, not too conspicuously, on a rack between my cashier and the nearby door. I paid for my other books—over a dozen, as I remember—and on my way out picked up my covert objects of desire and walked out into Charing Cross Road. I did not look back. I did not run. I blessed the pedestrian throng.
That autumn On Growth and Form followed me to Majorca; back to Paris two years later; finally, two years after that, to Lans-en-Vercors (a mountain village near Grenoble). I wrote and published a novel. My marriage ended. I published more novels. My children went away. For a while I lived in Venice, without my books. I returned to Lans to begin life with a new family. I began teaching in America. My father died, my best friend died, my mother died. We moved to Paris. In 1996 we began spending summers in Lans once again; and it was there, on July 29, 1997, that I began reading my last stolen book. My progress was interrupted between September 23 and February 11, 1998. On July 18, once again in Lans, I finished On Growth and Form.
Near the end of his work, D’Arcy Thompson writes:
The biologist, as well as the philosopher, learns to recognise that the whole is not merely the sum of its parts. It is this, and much more than this. For it is not a bundle of parts but an organisation of parts, of parts in their mutual arrangement, fitting one with another, in what Aristotle calls a “single and individual principle of unity”; and this is no merely metaphysical conception, but is in biology the fundamental truth which lies at the basis of Geoffroy’s (or Goethe’s) law of “compensation” or “balancement of growth.”