Michael Paterniti - Interview

A RESTLESS WRITER EMBARKS ON THE ULTIMATE HEAD TRIP

It sounds like fiction, but journalist Michael Paterniti really did drive across the country with Albert Einstein's brain floating in a Tupperware container stashed in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a rented Buick Skylark. Also along for the ride was Dr. Thomas Harvey, the then -eighty-four-year-old pathologist who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955, during which he removed the brain and simply ply toted it home with him like so much take-out sushi. The piece Paterniti wrote for Harper's about this wondrously wacky road trip won him the 1998 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing; now he's published a book inspired by the article: Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain (Dial Press), out this month. Movie rights have already been acquired by Paramount-based producer Scott Rudin.

Paterniti first heard about the brain when he was in graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. At the time, it was just a wild story that was circulating, a kind of urban legend, but for some reason it stuck with him. Then, years later, when he was living in New Mexico, he happened to mention the story to his landlord, Steven. It turned out that Steven knew be beat writer William Burroughs. "Yeah, the guy with the brain lives next to William in Lawrence, Kansas. A real trippy dude. Weird cat," he said. He then offered to get the doctor's phone number for Paterniti from Burroughs.

By the time the two met, Paterniti had moved back east, to Maine, and Harvey was living with his sixty-seven-year-old girlfriend in Princeton, New Jersey. They saw each other several times, and once, over dinner, Harvey said how much he wanted to visit Evelyn Einstein, Albert's fifty-six-year-old granddaughter, in California--bringing along the brain, of course. Paterniti, who was then thirty-two and "living in the middle of nowhere with my girlfriend and accomplishing absolutely nothing," heard himself saying, "I could drive you."

DIANE BARONI: What was it about this story that grabbed you so much?

MICHAEL PATERNITI: I've often asked myself that. For one thing, Einstein was a prophet for my generation. He devised his own personal manifesto based in scientific principle and his own redefining of the universe. His brain was the vessel where religion and science met. Still, there's a part of the whole thing that's somewhat unseemly. Einstein's brain chopped into 250 pieces doesn't make much of a grail. But the more I got into it, the more pilgrims I found. More and more people I bumped into were obsessed with it. I think part of the reason is the back story, the mythological dimension of Harvey's taking the brain and then thumbing his nose at the establishment. The army wanted the brain, the government wanted the brain; all the leading neuro-anatomists wanted the brain; and Harvey just took it and disappeared with it, and nobody heard anything about it for decades.

DB: Why did you want to make the road trip?

MP: I was at a point in my life where I acutely felt a lack of direction and a lack of faith. As a kid growing up I'd been an altar boy, and hated it. I didn't like church; I didn't like having all that stuff rammed down my throat, and when I went to college I finally stopped going. So there was no spiritual element in my life. And then there's this huge desire to be free. To be free of a nine-to-five job, to be free of every possible entanglement, and driving across America is the age-old cure for that. I just had this huge itch to go.

DB: OK, but I still don't get why the trip had to be with an eighty-four-year-old man and a brain.

MP: To Harvey, the brain was a holy object, and I was in awe and incredibly curious about how a person has such faith. He'd lived with Einstein's brain for over four decades as its keeper and curator, the high priest of the brain, and I wanted to see him up close. I wanted to understand some of what he knew. In the end, Harvey is the uber-pilgrim, even though many people would say, "This guy is a complete freak." But the minute you get out into America, you realize that it's full of freaks. The country is built on them. So Harvey became this kind of sideways hero to me.

DB: How did your girlfriend react?

MP: Now she's my wife. Anyway, we were living out in the woods, and I was puttering around the house, driving her crazy. So part of her was relieved, although she might not admit it. But part of her was like, "You're what? What are you talking about? You've gone insane." And I was like, "Yeah, well, time for me to head out with Einstein's brain."

DB: What was it like to have the brain as a passenger?

MP: Take Einstein's brain out into America and you find that America changes. It becomes this huge cosmic, comic, amazing country made up of freaks and characters and forlorn people and people who have faith. It's not just like, "Oh yeah, we're in Kansas now; let's get a burger." You begin to see everything differently. But it was also just being on the road.