...well, it'll be available July 3, but the author's copies came.

Let me tell you a little about this one. I decided to write this when I was a senior in college. I discovered Bronowski in my sophomore year when I found a copy of the book version of his 1973 documentary series, The Ascent of Man on my grandparents' bookshelf. A year later I got to see the miniseries (then only available in rare VHS copies) and in my senior year, I decided to write a biography of Bronowski. It had never been done before. I, of course, had no idea how to write a biography or a book of any sort. But I started heading to libraries to look stuff up, and reaching out to people who had known Bronowski. I got to meet Bronowski's widow, Rita, at their La Jolla home where the last episode of The Ascent of Man was filmed. (She even gave me a copy of Bronowski's hard to find book Nature and Knowledge.) The photo I took of her during that visit is in the final book.
I also got to meet Francis Crick. He bought me lunch, for goodness sake, and on the way back to his office (which had been Bronowski's) even told me about the then-newly discovered eyeless gene. Truly an experience I'll never forget.
Years came and passed, and there were many other things to do, including law school, writing my first book, getting married... and in all that time, I would now and then tinker away on this project. Particularly helpful were the librarians at many institutions who were kind enough to make me copies of archival materials and send them to me. Jennifer Toews at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where Bronowski's papers were then kept (they're now at Jesus College, Cambridge) was particularly helpful. In 2009, and again in 2010, I got to have nice conversations with Lisa Jardine, Bronowski's daughter, whom (I can hardly believe it) I was able to help with her Tanner Lectures on Human Values and in a small way on her film, My Father, The Bomb, and Me.
The fact that Bronowski's life had never been written before presented an immense challenge, in that I didn't even have a timeline to follow. Writing a biography of Frederick Douglass is simple, by comparison, because he wrote so much about himself and it's relatively easy to find out what he did when (although there are still some intriguing blank spots there). At long last, I found that new research sources weren't turning up anything new. Whenever I'd find something I didn't already have, it basically just reinforced something I already knew. Of course, a person could spend a lifetime writing a biography, since a biography takes up the whole space of a life--so I finally decided to knock off the research, finish the manuscript, publish and be damned. I know, oh, I know all too well!, how many stones I've left unturned. But you have to make the call as to how many more stone-turnings the audience can be expected to put up with. I wasn't prepared to attempt something on the scale of Dumas Malone or Robert Caro, and certainly readers weren't! I had to go at last with Bronowski as I saw and appreciated him--and particularly to keep in mind that my book is primarily about his ideas. Finding out, for example, precisely when he met Leo Szilard (which I still don't know) was less important to the story I wanted to tell than, say, the relationship between his prize-winning play The Face of Violence and the poetry of William Blake.
That was another challenge: I could not expect most readers to know practically anything about Bronowski. Most biographies either tell you who the person was or delve into the significance of his or her ideas. I would have to do both--and I hope I have balanced the two in a thorough but non-boring way. Structuring the tale would present a real challenge. In this regard, I'm indebted (among many, many others) to Robert and Mary Bagg, whose book Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur is a prime specimen of the style I was aiming at. I read their book late in the preparation of the mansucript, but it helped immensely during the editing process to aim in the direction I wanted to go.
The experience has given me a whole new respect for writers such as, say, Peter Ackroyd, who turn out volume after volume of solidly researched, superbly written, reliable and interesting new material, which is both sound scholarship and compelling narrative. But at the same time it has made me immensely more skeptical of biographies. Having seen from this side just how much inference and detective work goes into telling a life story, and how easy it would be to get the wrong impression, I have come over the years to read biographies (my favorite genre) with a lot more skepticism than before. I will admit, for example, that I have no idea what Bronowski did during his trip to India in 1967, during which he advised the Indian government on its education policies. But as I said, I had to draw the line somewhere. Fortunately others, particularly Stephen Moss, are still working on their own projects on Bronowski's life. I can't wait to see what they find.
The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski was a labor of love. I hope very much that readers enjoy learning more about this fascinating man. He knew everyone, or was involved in everything, interesting in the 20th century--from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Samuel Beckett (all of whom he knew; Bronowski's book European Caravan was Beckett's first appearance in a book), to the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which he witnessed first-hand as the head of the mission sent to assess the A-bomb's effects) to the poetry of William Blake (the understanding of which Bronowski revolutionized) to the founding of the Salk Institute (he was one of the first to join), Jacob Bronowski's life and ideas sound a fascinating range of subjects. I'm delighted that after all this time, I'm finally able to introduce him to you.
Update: Oh, I should mention: I've set up a separate Twitter account, @DrBronowski, where I'll be tweeting some interesting additional tidbits. Please follow!





Comments policy