This ironic quote-unquote became at last a part of him, and enabled him to utter things that no one else would have been forgiven. He could even ridicule himself at any length, since this trick, in principle very simple, through consistent application rendered him quite impossible to pin down or catch.
With humor, with self-irony, he built up around his person such a system of invisible fortifications that even those — like me — who had known him for years could not predict how he would react. I think that he strove particularly for this, and that the things he did, which sometimes indeed bordered on the clownish, he did with secret design, though they seemed perfectly spontaneous.
Our friendship resulted from the fact that Baloyne first looked down on me and later envied me. Both the one and the other I found amusing. At the beginning he believed that as a philologist and humanist he would never in his life need mathematics; concerned with things of the spirit, he placed knowledge of man over knowledge of nature. But then he became involved in linguistics as in an illicit love affair; he began to wrestle with the currently reigning fashions of structuralism and developed a taste, however reluctantly, for mathematics. And thus arrived, unwillingly, on my territory. Realizing that there he was weaker than I, he was able to admit this in such a way that it was I, with my mathematics, that was the butt of the joke. Did I say that Baloyne was a Renaissance figure? I loved his exasperating home, where there were always so many people that you could not talk to the host in private earlier than midnight.
What I have so far said touches the fortifications Baloyne raised about his personality but not the personality itself. A special hypothesis is needed to divine what lives intra muros. It was, I think, fear. I do not know what he feared. Himself, perhaps. He must have had a great deal to hide, surrounding himself as he did with such a labored din; he always had so many ideas, plans, projects, and got himself into so many unnecessary things, was a member of all sorts of societies, conservatories, a professional respondent to academic questionnaires and polls of scientists; he overburdened himself intentionally, because in that way he would not have to be alone with himself — there would never be time. He dealt with the problems of others, and understood people so well, one naturally assumed he understood himself well, too. A mistaken assumption, I believe.
Over the years he imposed upon himself various constraints, until they hardened into his external, publicly visible nature — that of the universal activist of reason. He was, then, a Sisyphus by choice; the magnitude of his efforts disguised any failure, because if he himself established the rules and laws of his activity, no one could know with any certainty whether he was accomplishing all that he set out to do, or sometimes stumbled, particularly since he boasted of his defeats and made much of the littleness of his intellect, but in quotes of ostentation. He had the special penetration of the richly endowed, who are able to take hold of any problem, even one foreign to them, immediately from the proper angle, as if instinctively. He was so haughty that he was forever bending himself — as in a game — to humility, and so anxious that over and over again he had to prove himself, to assert his merit — while at the same time denying it.
His study was like a projection of his soul. Everything in it was gargantuan: the chest of drawers, the desk; you could have drowned a calf in his cocktail pitcher. From the huge window to the opposite wall was one battlefield of books. Apparently he required this chaos pressing from all sides — and in his correspondence, too.
I speak this way of my friend and risk his displeasure, though before I spoke no differently of myself. I do not know what it was among the people of the Project that determined finally the Project’s fate. Therefore, just in case, thinking of the future, I am also presenting here those bits and pieces that I have not been able to put into any coherent whole. Perhaps someone else, someday, will manage that.
In love with history, rapt in history, Baloyne drove backward, as it were, into the time coming. For him modernity was a destroyer of values, and technology an instrument of the Devil. If I exaggerate, it is not by much. He was convinced that the culmination of humanity had already taken place, long ago, possibly in the Renaissance, and that a long, accelerating downhill career had begun. Although he was a Renaissance homo animatus and homo sciens, he took pleasure in contacts with people whom I would rank among the least interesting, though they present the greatest threat to our species; I mean politicians. He had no political ambitions himself; or, if he did, he kept them even from me. But various and sundry gubernatorial candidates, their spouses, Congressional hopefuls or “in” Congressmen, and gray-haired, doddering Senators, as well as those hybrid types only half politico, or a quarter, who occupy positions veiled in mist (but mist of the best quality), were all to be found, all the time, at his house.
My attempts to keep up a conversation with such people (like holding up the head of a corpse, but I did it for Baloyne) collapsed after five minutes, whereas he was able to jabber with them for hours on end — God only knows for what reason! Somehow I never asked him point-blank about this, but now it turned out that those contacts bore fruit, because during the screening of candidates for the post of science director of the Project it came to light that they all — all the advisers, experts, board members, committee chairmen, and five-star generals — wanted only Baloyne, trusted only Baloyne. He, however, and I know this, was not at all eager to assume the post, smart enough to realize that sooner or later there would be conflict, and ugly conflict, between the two groups that it would be his job to keep united.
One had only to remember the Manhattan Project and the fate of people among those who directed it but were scientists, not generals. While the latter were all promoted and could tranquilly set about writing their memoirs, the former, with surprising regularity, met with “ostracism from both worlds,” i.e., the worlds of politics and science. Baloyne changed his mind only after a meeting with the President. I do not believe that he allowed himself to be taken in by any kind of argument. It was simply that the situation in which the President made the request — a request Baloyne was able to fulfill — possessed for him sufficient justification to risk the most he had to risk: his whole future.
But here I am falling into journalese, because, besides everything else, he must have been driven by a genuine curiosity. A part of it, too, was that a refusal would have seemed like cowardice, and only a man to whom fear, day by day, is a stranger can be cowardly with the full knowledge that he is being cowardly. One who is timorous and unsure will lack the courage to expose himself so horribly, confirming, as it were — to himself as well — the ruling feature of his character. But even if this sort of desperation played a role in Baloyne’s decision, he undoubtedly proved to be the right man to occupy what was the most uncomfortable office in the entire Project.
I have been told that General Oster, the chief administrator of HMV, was so unable to deal with Baloyne that he voluntarily stepped down from his post; Baloyne meanwhile fostered the image of a man desiring above all else to quit the Project, and made so much noise lamenting the fact that Washington would not accept his resignation that Osier’s successors, anxious to avoid unpleasant exchanges at the top, deferred to him as much as possible. When he felt himself more secure in the saddle, he proposed that I be included in the Science Council; the threat of resignation was no longer needed.
Our meeting took place without reporters and flash bulbs; but, of course, any sort of publicity was quite out of the question. As I stepped from the helicopter onto the roof, I saw that he was truly moved. He even attempted to embrace me (which I cannot stand). His retinue stood at a respectful distance; I was being received like a sovereign lord, but had the feeling that we were both aware of the ineradicable ridiculousness of the situation. On the roof there was not a single man in uniform; the thought occurred to me that Baloyne had carefully kept them out of sight so that I would not be antagonized. But I was mistaken — mistaken, however, only regarding the extent of his influence, because, as I discovered later, he had removed uniforms from the entire area under his jurisdiction.