Chapter 1Bensonhurst

Foreword

In 1992 the National Academy of Sciences declined to elect Carl Sagan.

He was blackballed in the first round, which under the Academy's rules forced a debate and a vote of the whole membership. He finished somewhere near fifty per cent against a two-thirds threshold. Cosmos was dismissed in the room as fluff. Afterwards, an unnamed member said that if he had not done television, he probably would be in the Academy.

Two years later the same Academy gave him its Public Welfare Medal.

That ballot is the event this whole book organizes around, and the way it is usually told is wrong in a specific and interesting way.

The comfortable version is that a jealous profession punished a man for being famous. It is a good story, it is partly true, and it makes the Academy's position unintelligible — which means it cannot explain what actually happened.

The Academy votes on a research record. So this book builds the research record first, and fourteen of its twenty-two chapters end before Cosmos airs in 1980.

Venus, in 1961, at twenty-six: the argument that the planet is not a swamp but an oven, that a runaway greenhouse has cooked the surface past the melting point of lead. Mariner 2 flew past in December 1962 and found it.

Mars, through the 1960s: the argument that the seasonal wave of darkening was wind-blown dust and not vegetation, settled in the most theatrical way possible when Mariner 9 arrived in November 1971 to find the planet hidden under the largest dust storm ever observed, and the air did not clear until January, and what emerged first were the summits of the Tharsis volcanoes standing above the weather.

Tholins on Titan. The Viking imaging team at Chryse Planitia in 1976. The Pioneer plaque. The Voyager record. Four missions.

By the time a reader reaches Chapter 21 they can score the ballot themselves, which is the point of building the book this way, and I have tried not to tell them how.

What I can say is what the book refuses.

It refuses the hagiography. He was right about Venus at twenty-six and he was wrong, on television, in January 1991, about the Kuwaiti oil fires cooling the atmosphere downwind and damaging the Asian harvest. He won a Pulitzer in 1978 for The Dragons of Eden, a book resting on a model of the brain that neuroscience has since discarded — which means the book whose science aged worst is the one that got the prize.

And it refuses the prosecution. The single serious procedural charge against him is the nuclear winter sequence of 1983, in which a Parade cover reached tens of millions of readers before the peer-reviewed paper appeared in Science. That charge has never been satisfactorily answered and Chapter 17 does not answer it. But Chapter 18 records what happened afterwards: the model was corrected, the numbers were moderated in 1990, and from about 2007 three-dimensional modeling came back around to conclusions as severe as the original.

He was vindicated on a finding by a method his critics were right to distrust, and he did not live to see it.

There is one thing in this book that I want to flag now because it is the thing most likely to be read as either salacious or evasive, and it is neither.

Chapter 13 is the Voyager Golden Record, assembled in the summer of 1977 by a committee that included Sagan, Ann Druyan, Frank Drake, Jon Lomberg, Timothy Ferris, Alan Lomax — and Linda Salzman Sagan, who was Carl Sagan's wife.

Among the sounds pressed into that gold is an hour of Ann Druyan's EEG, compressed to a minute, recorded while she thought about what it is like to fall in love. It was recorded two days after the telephone call in which she and Sagan first declared themselves to each other.

The divorce from Linda Salzman did not come until 1981.

That is the most romantic object ever launched out of the solar system and this book names its price rather than softening it. Ann Druyan's account of that summer is attributed to Ann Druyan throughout. Linda Salzman Sagan's interior is not narrated, because she has not published one.

There is a reason a new life of this man is worth writing now.

The two standard biographies were both published in 1999. The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive opened at the Library of Congress in November 2013, and no full-length life has yet been written from those boxes.

This book has not written from them either. What is in them would change several chapters — the Harvard correspondence around the tenure refusal of 1968, the Cosmos production files, the SETI and Planetary Society lobbying records, and the material from 1991 and 1992 — and where one of those gaps falls, the chapter says so rather than writing around it.

Two more things, briefly.

In 1958, at twenty-three, Carl Sagan worked on a classified United States Air Force study of detonating a nuclear device on the Moon, calculating how far the dust would spread and whether the flash would be visible from Earth. He then listed the classified title on a fellowship application, which is how a biographer found it forty years later.

The peace activist's first job was filed before the peace activist existed, and Chapter 4 puts it there rather than at the end.

And the phrase he is most famous for, he never said. Billions and billions was invented by Johnny Carson's impression of him, and he spent the rest of his life unable to get rid of it, which is as neat a summary of what public fame does to a person as this book could construct.

He died in Seattle on 20 December 1996, at sixty-two, of pneumonia following three bone marrow transplants for myelodysplasia, with his sister as donor.

His last book, published the year before, is a manual for detecting error. It contains an account of one of his own.

Chapter 1 · Bensonhurst

A cloth cutter works blind, and that is the whole difficulty of the trade. He lays the goods down on a long table in layer after layer until the pile is as deep as his machine will take, and the pile is not fabric any more but a solid block of it, a compressed loaf of wool or gabardine or lining silk with a paper pattern pinned across the top sheet. Then he brings the blade down through the whole of it at once. He cannot see what he is cutting. He can see only the topmost sheet, and he must trust that everything beneath it is lying flat and true and has not crept, because the layers underneath will come up exactly as accurate or exactly as ruined as the one he was looking at. Cloth cannot be uncut. There is no revising a mistake in a cutting room; there is only the pile, spoiled, and the cost of it, and a foreman. A cutter's errors are therefore permanent and expensive, and his successes are invisible, because a good cut disappears into a finished garment that goes out into the world under some other firm's label with somebody else's name stitched inside the collar.

Samuel Sagan cut cloth in a Manhattan garment loft. That is the fact the record hands us, and it is worth holding still for a moment before moving on from it, because a man's trade is not decoration in a life like this one. It is the daily demonstration a child grows up watching. The father worked in a building he did not own, at a table he did not own, on material he did not own, producing objects that would be sold under a name that was not his, and the measure of whether he had done it well was that nobody could tell he had done it at all.

The loft was in Manhattan; the family lived in Brooklyn, in Bensonhurst, where Rachel Gruber ran a two-room apartment on his wages. Two rooms. That is the physical dimension of the household, and the record is unusually willing to give it. What Samuel earned in those rooms' name is not something this book can print, because no figure for it has been produced; a wage in the garment trade of that period was a thing negotiated season by season and written down, if at all, in ledgers that were not kept for biographers. What can be said is the arithmetic the two rooms imply. A household in that space does not have a study. It does not have a place where a child goes to be alone with a question. Whatever privacy existed in that apartment was privacy of the mind, which is a thing a person has to build for himself, and which, once built, tends to be defended for life.

Carl Edward Sagan was born there on November 9, 1934, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York. There was a sister, Cari. Beyond her name, the record available to this book does not carry her early years, and it will not be filled in with plausible material; a great deal about the interior of that apartment is simply gone, and the honest thing is to say so at the front of the book rather than to keep quietly not saying it for the rest of it.

He was born into the Depression, into a Jewish working class in a borough full of it, in a year when a garment cutter's employment was a matter of the season and the order book. This is the ordinary American story of the period, and it is worth resisting the temptation to make it extraordinary in retrospect. Brooklyn was full of households that looked exactly like this one. What has to be explained is not the household but the fact that this particular child came out of it convinced, for the rest of his life, that the universe was a subject an ordinary person had standing to inquire into. That conviction is the engine of everything that follows — the books, the television, the long argument with his own profession — and its origin is the least documented part of a life that would eventually be documented to an almost oppressive degree.

Here the biographer has to be careful, and the care is worth explaining once so that it does not need explaining again. The two standard lives of Carl Sagan, Keay Davidson's and William Poundstone's, were both published in 1999, and Davidson's is the one that carries the childhood. Both were written before the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive was opened at the Library of Congress, and neither biographer worked from those boxes. The collection is described as holding childhood papers among its correspondence and drafts and teaching files. This book has not read them for this chapter and does not pretend to have. What follows is reconstruction from the standard accounts and from the stories Sagan told about himself, and the difference between those two categories will be marked wherever it matters.

It matters most about his mother. Samuel Sagan comes down to us with a trade attached — the loft, the table, the blade — and Rachel Gruber comes down to us with an apartment. That asymmetry is not a description of the marriage. It is a description of what the record keeps. Occupations get written down; the management of two rooms on an uncertain wage does not, and a woman who does the arithmetic of rent against groceries against a child's shoes, year after year, leaves behind no document that says she did. The temptation in a chapter like this one is to supply her a personality — the fierce mother, the thwarted intelligence, the ambition transferred whole onto a son. Versions of that portrait circulate, and they have the smoothness of things that have been repeated rather than found. This book is not going to narrate her interior when it has no testimony from her with which to narrate it. She was there. She ran the household. The household produced what it produced.

And these were, in any case, years in which a Jewish family in Brooklyn read the foreign pages of a newspaper with a particular attention. Europe was doing what Europe was doing. What the Sagans said to one another about it across their table is not preserved, and no honest account of this childhood can reach it. The atmosphere can be stated; the conversation cannot.

Then, in 1939, the future opened in Queens.

The World's Fair at Flushing Meadows sold a single proposition, which its own promotional language called the World of Tomorrow. Its great symbols stood at the center of the grounds, white and abstract and unlike anything in the built landscape of New York: the Trylon, a tapering spire going up into nothing, and beside it the Perisphere, an enormous smooth globe resting on the earth. They were not buildings in any ordinary sense. They had no windows to read a human scale off, no cornices, no fire escapes, nothing that told a visitor how tall a floor was or where a person would stand inside. They were shapes — a spike and a ball, pure geometry at civic scale, a needle and a planet. A child raised among Brooklyn brick was taken across the borough line and shown, standing on the ground in front of him, a sphere the size of a building.

Somewhere on those grounds, Westinghouse sank a metal capsule into the earth of Flushing Meadows, packed with the ordinary objects and records of its moment, and the instruction that went into the ground with it was that it should stay there for five thousand years. Not a decade. Not a generation. Five thousand years — a span across which no company, no government, and no language on that fairground could reasonably expect to survive. It was a message dispatched to recipients not yet born, in a civilization that could not be described, by an organization that would not exist to see it received, and the entire transaction was conducted with no possibility of an answer coming back. Nobody buries a capsule for five thousand years in order to be replied to. They bury it in order to be understood.

One must be careful here, because this is exactly the place where a biography lies to itself. A boy of four or five — he turned five that November — does not stand in front of a buried capsule and receive a vocation. Whatever passed through him at Flushing Meadows is not recoverable, and no scene reconstructed out of an adult's later fondness for the fair can be trusted as a record of what a small child understood on the day. What can be said, and is worth saying plainly, is that the fair was in his life, that he was of an age to be marked by it rather than to analyze it, and that the particular gesture at the heart of it — assembling a message for strangers who will not answer, and sending it out anyway — is a gesture that recurs in his adult career with a persistence no biographer is obliged to call coincidence and none is entitled to call proof.

There is a second thing the fair taught, and it is the class lesson, which is easy to miss because it is not about wonder. The fair was a public event. It put the future on a fairground, charged admission, and expected a garment cutter's family to walk through it. It did not treat the coming century as the private property of the people who would build it. Its entire form was an argument that the technical future belonged, by right of audience, to the general population of New York, and that the correct way to present a scientific proposition to a working family was to build the thing at full size and let them walk around it. A boy from a two-room apartment in Bensonhurst was, at Flushing Meadows, the intended recipient of the whole performance. He would spend his professional life reproducing that arrangement, and be told by colleagues that it was beneath a scientist.

The other formative scene of this childhood happened at a desk, and it is smaller and better than the fair.

He got a library card. This is, on its face, the least dramatic sentence available about a New York childhood — the public library issued cards to children as a matter of routine — and it is the hinge of the chapter. A library card is a municipal instrument for transferring the contents of a civilization to a person who cannot afford to buy any of it. It does not ask what the applicant's father does for a living. In a household where the space could be counted in rooms and the money could not be stretched, that card was the one thing in the boy's possession whose value bore no relation whatever to the wage supporting the apartment.

He went in and asked for a book about stars. He was handed a book about Hollywood.

Stop on that, because the whole of this life is in it. The exchange has an obvious comic shape and is usually told for the laugh — the future astronomer, aged small, presented with a picture book of movie actors. But look at what actually occurred at that desk. A child used a word correctly. The adult on the other side of the counter heard the word and mapped it to the meaning the surrounding culture had made overwhelmingly the more probable one. This was America in the age of the studio system, when the word star belonged first to Los Angeles and only afterward to the sky, and the librarian was not being foolish. She was being statistical. Given the word, given the era, given the average patron who used it, she produced the likelier book. The failure was not hers and it was not his. It lay in the space between a question and its reception, which is the space where meaning is lost, and it had just cost a boy the answer he came for.

And then he did the thing that decides everything. He did not take the wrong book and go home. He said it again. He clarified — not stars, stars, the ones in the sky at night — and the correction worked, and the right book was found, and he left with what he had actually come for. That is the entire operation, learned at the height of a library counter: state the question, watch it be misunderstood, refuse the misunderstanding, restate it until the other person has it, take possession of the answer.

The record does not fix the day, the branch, or the name of the person behind that desk. No ledger has been produced that would. The story survives because Sagan told it, which is a category of evidence to be handled with open eyes: an anecdote retold across a public career is not a photograph, it is a made object, worked smooth by use, and this one has the suspicious perfection of a parable. It is precisely the origin story a man in his position would need to be true — the boy who asked the right question, was given the wrong answer, and insisted. A biographer notes that. A biographer also notes that an invented childhood memory is not usually the one that makes the child ridiculous, and that the comedy in this story is at his own expense. What can be stated with confidence is not that the scene happened exactly so, but that this is the shape he understood his own beginning to have; and a man's account of his own origin is evidence about him whether or not it is evidence about the event.

There is a further turn in the exchange, and it is the reason this chapter opens the book. The word the boy used and the word the librarian heard were the same word. He wanted the kind in the sky. He was offered the kind in Los Angeles. He would give his working life to the first meaning and be accused, late and by his own profession, of having crossed over into the second — of having become, in the end, precisely the thing the librarian assumed he was asking about. That charge, when it came, was made in rooms this book will reach in their proper place, and it will not be summarized here. What belongs in this chapter is only the observation that the ambiguity was inside the word from the beginning, that it was not a trick played on him late in life by television, and that he first ran into it as a small boy who had asked a perfectly clear question of a person doing her job correctly.

Whatever volume he finally carried out contained, somewhere in it, the fact that reorganizes a childhood: that the sun is a star, that the stars are suns, and that they are unimaginably far away. There is no way to receive that information gently. It arrives as a demolition. Everything the boy could see from the windows of the apartment — the streets of Bensonhurst, the whole apparatus of the city, the Manhattan his father crossed the river to reach every working morning — was abruptly a very small feature of an arrangement whose actual dimensions he had just been handed in a book he was allowed to take home and did not have to buy.

Here is what that does to a child in two rooms. To a boy with an estate and a telescope, such a fact is an enlargement of a world that was already large. To a boy whose physical world is a Brooklyn apartment and a father in another borough, it is something else entirely: it is the discovery that the smallness of his circumstances is not a fact about the universe. The universe is not two rooms. The universe is enormous and old and available, and — this is the part that had to be taught somewhere, and that his household evidently taught — it is askable. It does not belong to a class of people. It does not require a name stitched inside a collar. You may walk into a public building and request it, and if the request is misheard you may say it again.

That is the disposition this chapter exists to establish, and it is worth naming precisely, because getting it slightly wrong makes the rest of the book unreadable. The drive in Carl Sagan was not simply curiosity. Curiosity is common. Plenty of curious children became perfectly ordinary astronomers who published in the journals and were elected to things. What sat underneath his particular temperament was narrower and more demanding: the conviction that a true thing is not finished until it has been received. On that view, a fact that has failed to land in another mind has been mishandled somewhere along the way — somebody did not restate it clearly enough, and the remedy is to say it again, differently, until it lands. That conviction is generous. It is also a compulsion. It is what eventually carried him onto television, and it is what put him permanently at odds with a profession whose deepest instinct is that the work is complete when the paper is accepted.

He was a Brooklyn cutter's son with a library card, in an apartment where his mother's labor left no document, in years when his family read the news out of Europe and said things at their table that are lost. Nothing in that describes a man whose name would one day be put to a vote. What it describes is a boy who had been told — by a fair, by a librarian, and by whatever passed between his parents at that table — that the universe was something a person like him was allowed to ask about, and who had already learned, at the height of a library counter, that being allowed to ask was not remotely the same thing as being understood.