The Whole Universe Catalogue

By R.Z. Sheppard

BUCKY byHUGHKENNER 338 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

If you want to get in touch with R. Buckminster Fuller--to invite him to accept yet another honorary degree, or to complain of a leak in your geodesic dome--what you do is cable "BUCKY," Carbondale, Ill. Trouble is, he is not likely to be there. With the exception of astronauts and veteran airline pilots, Fuller is one of the most traveled men in human history. There are well over 3,000,000 miles in his wake, and a schedule of worldwide lectures and consultations so crowded that he wears three watches. One runs on Carbondale time, where at the University of Southern Illinois, Fuller makes his headquarters as a Distinguished University Professor. The second keeps track of the time where he is, and the third tells him the time where he will be the next day.

Long ago Fuller adopted the Thomas Edison system of quick snoozes so that he could manage 22-hour working days. Yet it is typical of Fuller's unorthodox way of looking at the world that he first got the idea of catnaps from watching a dog. In his familiar role as a minister of progress from the 21 st century and "publicist for the universe," Fuller is not only a generalist in the best American twinker-tinker tradition, he is the human equivalent of Telstar--intercepting the music of the spheres and vectoring it down to earth with an enthusiasm just this side of Revelation. "I am no genius," Fuller likes to say, "but I am a terrific package of experience."

Geometry. The package is now 77.

It stands a little over five feet and usually comes wrapped in a clerical black suit and vest that sets off an honorary Phi Beta Kappa key. The head, or node receptor, as Fuller might call it, carries a hearing aid and glasses so thick they magnify his eyes. This figure has been around so long and has impinged on public awareness so many times, it sometimes seems that Fuller is constantly being discovered and forgotten.

The problem is that the Fuller package will not fit into any standard box. The geodesic dome is a marvel of simplicity and strength, but few engineers will admit that its creator is an engineer. Mathematicians are chilly, though many admire his geometry. Fuller's poetry, the hyperventilated phrasing of his ideas in a form that is supposed to facilitate understanding, frequently lapses into technological jargon. That fact did not seem to bother the Harvard selection committee that awarded Fuller the 1961-62 Charles Eliot Norton Professorship, a chair once occupied by T.S. Eliot. In trying to convey and assess Bucky, Hugh Kenner, a literary man who has written books on Joyce, Beckett and Pound, solves the Fuller packaging problem brilliantly. Instead of boxes, he spins a sort of geodesic Glad Bag in which Fuller's life, work and Utopian ideals are clearly and excitingly displayed, even as they are kept fresh from the souring realities of the world.

He was fitted with glasses at the age of four, and he suggests that poor eyesight had something to do with his preference for thinking in wholes rather than parts. In any case, the career that follows is a classic case of a man of long vision in a nearsighted world. Fuller grew up during an age of mechanical wizardry. In 1889, the Eiffel Tower revolutionized building. At the turn of the century Count Zeppelin had, in effect, laid a covered tower on its side, filled it with gas and floated off. Marconi sent a wireless message across the Atlantic. The Wright brothers flew, and off the Maine coast a boy named Bucky Fuller Tom-Swifted a rowing device--a combination jellyfish and umbrella that enabled him to pole through deep water.

Formal schooling did not go well.

Still, as a descendant of a prominent Massachusetts family that included Emerson's fellow transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, Bucky in 1913 became a fifth-generation Harvard man. Within two years he had been thrown out twice --the second and final time for running off to New York to blow his semester's living expenses on dinner for the entire Ziegfeld chorus line.

A last fling before adulthood closed in? The jobs Fuller held in early manhood might lead one to think so: machine fitter in a cotton mill. Navy ensign during World War I, managing exports for a meat packer and sales for a truck company. The presidency of the Stockade Building System (1922-27) sounds more like it. Fuller and his father-in-law copatented a tough, light substitute for bricks that eliminated the need for hod carriers and mortars. Holes in the blocks were lined up and cement poured in. Both the brick industry and the unions ganged up against the idea (which was later successfully renewed), and the company folded.

The business failure came during the most discouraging period in Fuller's life. It included poverty and the death of Alexandra, his three-year-old daughter, who died of spinal meningitis and polio. The child's death, said the grieving father, was "design-preventable." Always accenting the positive, he even turned from thoughts of suicide at 32 on the assumption that he was the custodian of one of the universe's vital resources.

Fuller chose two years of silence, study and contemplation instead. "From his silence," says Kenner, "he emerged talking of everything at once, and was barely intelligible." His first book, Time-lock, a chain reaction of nascent Fullerese, was "like a cloud of gas just condensing into a galaxy."

When it cooled down, Fuller's galactic vision turned out to be a peculiarly Yankee notion of universal principles translatable into an earthly Utopia. Fuller's trademark word was Dymaxion, which meant getting the most out of available technology. Dymaxion houses would solve the world's shelter problems. Dymaxion cars, steered by a single rear wheel, could park in a space only one foot larger than the car itself. Today, Fuller holds more than 20 patents, mostly for structural designs still to be put to use.

In these days of disenchantment with technology, it is not too difficult to find blind spots in Fuller's vision. Many of his ideas are as old as Archimedes. He is too rational for human nature. He avoids details, particularly politics, in favor of charting immense generalities. But Kenner, who is a protecting angel as well as a biographer, offers a final word. Fuller's mission, he writes, is to spread a sense of wholeness and connectedness. Like Emerson and Whitman, he wants people to feel the universe in blades of grass and bubbles. He also retains the faith that principles can be turned into models and that models can be explained in words. "The last Puritan," Kenner calls him. Fuller sees reality not as permanence but as process. "I seem to be a verb," he says of himself. A highly active and irregular one, and Kenner conjugates it with great understanding, grace and affection. -R.Z. Sheppard

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