The headline in the Guardian, “A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair,” caught my eye. A hidden figure, behind a concept that I’ve known of since I was a young environmental writer? That was intriguing in itself, and the man in question was James Lovelock, a memorable contributor to the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability. (I always like to read about “my” authors, and it’s a delight to know that quite a few of them read this newsletter.) As I read the review, though, what came to mind was something else: T S Eliot’s secret love affair.
Indeed, secret love affairs seem to be the order of the day. The story Jon Watts, the Guardian's global environment writer, tells in The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory is unique, I suspect, in part because the subject was an active participant when he was over 100 years old, and his secret lover was 92. Watts ended up as a kind of go-between, conveying to Dian Hitchcock that her long-ago lover had confided that he had truly loved her.1
But that’s not the only surprise in the book. Lovelock talked to Watts about his work for the British secret services, describing himself as a “mini Q” for MI5, as well as his years with NASA and Royal Dutch Shell. He admits that he realized CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and burning fossil fuels was causing the greenhouse effect, but failed to get the government or Shell to act. From the podcast:
Jim was somebody who was able to appeal to an extraordinary spectrum of people in these polarized times. It's hard to imagine somebody who had an appeal on the left, on the right, with scientists doing very, very deep, groundbreaking science, particularly in atmospheric chemistry, but who was also able to appeal almost as a green guru to new age thinkers. That spiritual side of embracing and immersing yourself in nature, that is also a very important part of appreciating and wanting to care for the environment.
Margaret Thatcher, a chemist by training, admired Lovelock’s scientific work. Watts explains:
The single comment summed him up best was from his younger daughter, Jane, who said, my father has two loves. One, the natural world, and two, bombs. Towards the end of his life he said he was he probably Britain's longest serving spy, and there are there were letters on on his wall and in his documents from the head of the British secret services thanking him for his long and distinguished service and see even wrote not just on behalf of Britain, but because of the work you do for Gaia as a citizen of the planet. . . .
The things that emerged during our discussions that were very interwoven with the development of Gaia theory. . . . As Jim would say, everything connected with everything else. The work from Shell opened his eyes to what was going on with pollution, The tracing work for the secret services opened his eyes to how to identify and track movements of certain gases that led to greater understanding of pollution and what was going on in the stratosphere.
The other woman behind the Gaia Theory (also called, especially in early days, the Hypothesis) is the American biologist Lynn Margulis, who co-authored the popular article “The Quest for Gaia” that was published in New Scientist in 1975. She took a more maternal approach to her relationship with Lovelock, and in later years encouraged his extramarital affair with the woman he later married as his second wife. The letter Watts quotes from Margulis to Lovelock has such a familiar tone: the Great Man needs and deserves the comfort of a mistress in order to pursue his important work. This was Lewis Mumford’s view, and it caused enormous pain to his wife Sophia.2
And for all his flaws, Lovelock comes across as a lovable character, with a sense of humor and insatiable curiosity. The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory is published in the UK by Canongate , and in the US by Greystone Books.
Everything connects: a long PS to the podcast
This podcast convinced me, along with Lovelock, that everything connects. For one thing, Jon Watts is also the author of a fascinating 2010 book about China, When a Billion Chinese Jump. He called the book “a travelogue through a land obscured by smog and transformed by cranes; one that examines how rural environments are being affected by mass urban consumption. What are we losing and how? Where are the consequences? Can we fix them? It projects mankind’s modern development on a Chinese screen.” I was drawn to China with similar questions, at about the same time.
I have a copy of Lynn Margulis’s 1995 What Is Life? that was recommended to me by Sophia Mumford, when she was 95. She had become interested in, though dubious about, feminist perspectives, but I think she must have got the book because she knew or knew of Margulis from her husband Lewis, who died in 1990. Before he stopped writing, he had hoped to write a book about life, and it would be no surprise if he had known Margulis, though I haven’t found a direct link between them. Rachel Carson also had that question - what is life? - on her mind at the end of her life.
And Lovelock had a direct connection with T S Eliot’s circle: he worked closely with Baron Victor Rothschild, who was not only a senior figure at Shell but an avid book collector who offered Eliot’s close friend John Hayward a home in his mansion in Cambridge during World War II: “Hayward’s six years in Merton Hall had been a kindness which he never forgot. In Victor Rothschild he had found a true friend.”3
After the war, Hayward and Eliot shared a flat in London found for them by an older friend of mine, Linda Melton Benson. While there was some question about Eliot’s sexual orientation, Hayward was disabled but distinctly heterosexual, a fact confirmed by another friend’s mother. She was a young graduate working at Bletchley Park and had an affair with Hayward while he was living in the Rothschild mansion. Rothschild himself was rarely there, as he was was stationed with MI5 in London, but Hayward’s social life surely set the maids chattering.
The stories of hidden figures - wives, lovers, and assistants whose contributions were unacknowledged - have become common. The film Hidden Figures, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, is based on real-life events at NASA, where Dian Hitchcock also worked. It surprised me that Hitchcock didn’t express anger about how she had been treated by Lovelock, both as a woman and as a fellow scientist. How much can we criticize men for taking advantage of their privileged situation? At what point should they have ensured that women got credit and proper compensation? Should we blame them for taking what was offered, and what other men had, what was accepted as normal? How do older women make peace with what they were denied?
In any case, I’m glad she was comforted when Jon Watts told her that the man who had left her 50 years earlier, without a word of farewell, was acknowledging her and giving her a place in his life, and in the history of Gaia.
That’s an improvement on the T S Eliot story. Near the end of his life, at the instigation of a jealous young wife, the famous poet signed a letter in which he cruelly and at length denied ever having loved Emily Hale, a beloved companion whom he had chosen not to marry but remained close to until his secret second marriage to Valerie. Fortunately, Emily Hale never saw that spiteful letter, which was only released when the trove of Eliot’s love letters she left with Princeton was opened in 2020.
Lovelock, too, had a younger second wife who cared for him in his very old age, but she seems to have left her husband and his biographer to talk freely and not tried to control the earlier narrative, as Valerie Eliot was determined to do. The account of Lovelock’s late-life marriage was, however, the one part of the biography that struck me as a bit thin, something of a fairytale construct that reminds me of Valerie Eliot’s tales4 as well as Lewis Mumford’s last lover.
For an amusing perspective on Great Men and their mistresses, I suggest Somerset Maugham’s story “Appearance and Reality,” available online from Gutenberg Canada. some of Maugham’s stories end tragically but not this one.
From Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T S Eliot, and Their Circle by John Smart was also based on embargoed letters. It’s fascinating to think of all the secrets Eliot kept from the friend he shared a flat, and many friends, with for a decade.
One of these days I must update “Dear Mrs Eliot,” published in the Guardian in 2005, because the details that came from Valerie herself have turned out to be half-truths, or made up entirely.
Share this post