An exceptional talent for failure
David Hughes
THE CURIOUS LIFE OF ROBERT HOOKE: THE MAN WHO MEASURED LONDON by Lisa Jardine HarperCollins, £25, pp. 422, ISBN 0007149441 The charm of this unexceptionable book, subtitled gloomily but finely produced, is that it concerns a loser who longed for fame, even deserved it. Who Hooke? you ask. Few of us know he was as much responsible for replanning London after the Great Fire as Wren or that he insisted on himself as the source of Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation or that as Curator he breathed inspiration into the
early exciting years of the Royal Society, when Boyle, Newton and Halley were the big names.
But the awful truth is that Hooke (16351703) was minor, not minor in the nice, comfy way in which many prefer MacNeice to Auden, Poulenc to Messaien, Frink to Moore, Vaughan to Sutherland; we know we are thought wrong but think with feeling we are right. Hooke was minor in missing the boat, losing the plot, letting his temperament overwhelm his talents. And Hooke grows more minor, as well as iller and crosser, as his life groans on. Professor Jardine exerts her own talents to make a good case for him, but in these pages as in life he seems only intermittently alive. What on earth induced Pepys, attending the Royal Society to observe Hooke performing an experiment (irony enough in 1665) on the nature of fire, to jot down, 'Mr Hooke, who is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever saw.'
Even his sex life, such as it was, looks a shambles. Doomed to bachelorhood, he hires a maidservant to render respectable his cohabitation with his niece Grace, only to sleep with the former, then permit the latter to grant him an unspecified type of satisfaction in sex; Lisa Jardine has no handy way of putting it. Never has a jacket portrait (newly identified by her as him, hut nobody is sure) divulged a bitterer piece of work than Hooke, the eyes untrusting, the amiability as skimpy as the moustache, the mouth downturned as if in the throes of swallowing medicine, which he ceaselessly did to avert depression or insomnia. His only cheerful moments were on cannabis (brought him from the Orient by his explorer friend Robert Knox) when he appears to have giggled incessantly for at least two minutes. The only interminable thing he spent his life doing was to fail with a staggering degree of success.
Lisa Jardine identifies with the keen earnestness of the 17th century, without always conveying its exact relevance to the 21st in science's intricacies. As you read, you keep feeling you need a blackboard with squeaky chalk, to get the point of this man's eager-beavering life. But Flooke's childhood on the Isle of Wight, that diamond of paradise, is sweetly conveyed; his later life was perhaps dogged by its small insularity biting into his nature. But as a boy he revelled in exploring the island's 'dramatic geology', later drawing fossils and insects with precision and skill. One glance at the innards of a clock and he was constructing a working model out of wood. At 16 his back was already hunched from the hours spent over a lathe. John Aubrey was to call him 'certainly the greatest mechanick this day in the world', But from the start Hooke's doom was to be ignored or sidelined. At Westminster his name somehow evades the school records, He had only to design an equatorial quadrant, say, and someone else scooped his credit. Only his initials featured in Royal Society publications; even printers failed to register his name on title pages. His fault was never to see any single job through to a conclusion; his fate was to see his colleagues keep moving the winning post. They exploited his powers, while he failed their tasks by undertaking too many of them. He solemnly took offence as if it were holy orders.
Hooke's finest hour was as Wren's partner in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Sensibly he proposed a grid for the brand-new city, which was (of course) dismissed. But he and Wren 'dined out together almost daily', haunted the coffee houses with plots and plans, and Jardine argues well for Hooke's prime part in churches (St Martin-within-Ludgate, for instance) attributed exclusively to Wren. The hard-to-please John Evelyn, however, regarded him as architecturally minor, while faint in praise for his engineering.
My admiration for Lisa Jardine knows few bounds. Nobody, however bonny or germane, excels her on Newsnight Review. Her energy spreads itself not thin but thick: journalising, teaching, book-writing, biographising, chairing with wisdom and tact panels of wayward judges on the
Orange and Booker prizes she is at the height of her powers. If it is unfair or positively sexist to refer to the delight of her smile reproduced on the book's back flap; everything about an author counts if weighed in the contemporary balance of spin and hype. There is little wrong with Jardine's expository prose except a tendency to such phrases as 'on a daily basis', which she uses, to quote her again, on a regular basis. She is a pleasure to read more from absence of solecism than felicity of expression, but there is every reason why a good, well-researched biography should be workaday as well as workmanlike. At least she makes sure that one grows slowly fond of the silly old curmudgeon she tries so justifiably to turn into a hero.
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