Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  Later, when Haldane was serving at the Western Front, he hastily submitted preliminary results for publication.26 His coauthor, A. D. Sprunt,27 “a man of considerable promise,” had died of his wounds at Neuve Chapelle on March 17, 1915, after leading a charge on March 10. The following day, Haldane wrote a letter to the leading geneticist William Bateson (1861–1926) of the John Innes Horticultural Institute, explaining the work they had done on mice and asking, “If I am killed could you kindly give my sister help if she needs it.”28

  War had been declared shortly after Haldane graduated from Oxford. Plans for a six-week walking tour of the continent had to be abandoned. Instead, he volunteered to join the Black Watch, the family regiment of the Haldane clan. A commission as 2nd lieutenant was immediately forthcoming, since he had been in the Officers’ Training Corps while at Oxford. Four months of training in Scotland at Nigg, the headquarters of the 3rd Reserve Battalion, followed. There he learned bombing techniques.

  After transferring to the 1st Brigade of the Black Watch, he landed in France in January 1915 as their bombing officer. The brigade was located in the region of Neuve Chapelle and Festubert. Given the freedom to shift for himself, he made smoking compulsory in their bomb repair shop—to strengthen nerves, he said. He noted national differences between Scots Guards and Indian troops under bombardment by trench mortars. “The Guards swore with great fluency, dodged round the traverses, and were rarely hit. The Indians stood and waited to be killed, which they were. They apparently thought that the bombs were devils, and could not be dodged.” But he was thoroughly enjoying it. “April was one of the happiest months of my life.”29 Minor wounds he received to his arm at this time went unmentioned in later life.30

  After the first gas attack in May, JBS was withdrawn to assist his father, who had been asked to devise countermeasures. His assistance involved inhaling chlorine gas to test respirators, arguably less dangerous than being at the front. A working respirator was put together using carbonate of soda, but manufacturing it in larger quantities at home was complicated by the inadvertent substitution of “caustic” for “carbonate” by the War Office, leading to many burned fingers.31

  JBS was quickly appointed a gas officer to the Black Watch. He was just in time for the Battle of Aubers Ridge of May 9, arriving in the afternoon. (This was not the Battle of Festubert, which began on May 15, by which time he was already wounded.) As he ran toward the front line—“the moderate dose of chlorine which I had inhaled prevented me from expanding my lungs”—the Black Watch ahead of him went over the top. The Germans were replying with a massive bombardment.

  Imagine the loudest bang you have ever heard, say a clap of thunder from a house struck in your immediate neighbourhood. Now imagine this prolonged indefinitely, a solid bang without intermission. And behind this, like the drone of a bagpipes behind the individual notes, a sound as of devil-driven tramcars taking a sharp corner.

  Lesser bombardments had frightened me. This entirely novel sound intoxicated me. I ran forward through the monstrous black bursts of smoke and fountains of earth and bricks where the German shells were exploding . . .

  I woke up, and began to scrape the earth off me. I noticed blood on my face and hands, and pains in various places. I realised that I had been hit. This struck me as funny, an automatic psychological defence reaction of considerable value. I ran on to a house and took stock. I was wounded in the right arm and left side, but my face was only scraped.32

  Since all the ambulances were full, he had to walk back for help, once the shelling was over. After a few miles he met the Prince of Wales, who was touring the battle scene in his personal motorcar, and gratefully accepted a lift. Shrapnel was left permanently in his arm. “Lord Haldane’s nephew wounded,” reported the Times.33 Shell-shocked, he was sent back to England to recuperate. Organizing a grenade school helped him to regain his nerves. Covert (but unwelcome) intervention by his family delayed his return to France. Assigned a desk position for a while, he kicked his heels.

  In September 1916, Haldane went with the 2nd Black Watch to Mesopotamia, where he commanded a sniper unit on the banks of the Tigris. The company of his fellow officers there was congenial. “Our conversation was often fairly intelligent. We would discuss incidents in mediaeval Scots history or topics in elementary physics, with a vehemence which was encouraged by the complete absence of reference books.”34 It was recorded that “Captain Haldane did excellent work sniping and kept the enemy well in hand.”35 He liked the work. “I get a definitely enhanced sense of life when my life is in moderate danger.”36 This stint was cut short when a warehouse fire ignited some of their own bombs and he was wounded in the leg and, when it would not heal, invalided to India. After recovering, he ran the Central Bombing and Stokes Howitzer School in Mhow, south of Indore, demonstrating inter alia the use of rifle-fired Mills bombs. A bout of jaundice—which he attributed to compulsory meat rations in a hot climate—cut this short. Rest in the Himalayas allowed him to return to London and a cameo role there in Military Intelligence. This was less romantic than it sounded, “mainly routine snooping into other peoples’ affairs in the hope that something may turn up.”37 (As in his own case, a decade later.)

  Demobilization came in January 1919, accompanied by a 25 percent disability pension. But there would be no stirring lines from Haldane about poppies or foreign fields. “I liked the war, or rather those brief periods of it when I was actually in the front line.”38 The violence appealed to him. “When I got the opportunity of killing other people during the war I enjoyed it very much, though it is now more fashionable to say that one hated every moment of it. If I were ashamed of that particular skeleton (which is really a quite respectable relic of primitive man) I should hide my real motives from myself, invent excellent moral reasons for violence, and go forth in holy anger and pious grief to smite the wicked, or at least encourage others to do so. As it is I view that kind of moral indignation in myself and others with profound suspicion, and try to work off my steam in other ways.”39

  JBS proceeded, at the age of twenty-six, to take up a fellowship at New College in Oxford. Supplementing the early practical training his father had given him with some quick reading, he taught physiology at New College and got by without a scientific degree for the rest of his career. He seems to have remained politically inactive at this time, except for the occasional street-fighting incident.

  And in June 1919 I acted as chucker-out at a meeting addressed by George Lansbury and Austin Harrison to protest against the original version of the Treaty of Versailles, which was even more unworkable, and an even more flagrant breach of Wilson’s promises to Germany, than the final form of the treaty. The interrupters, who were the sort of people who now hail Hitler, threw tomatoes. I had my tactical scheme prepared. I approached one of the smaller ones from behind, placed a finger in each nostril, and dragged him backwards, hooked and struggling like a salmon, and too agitated to hit me in a vital spot. The rest followed, but before they rescued him they were half way to the door.

  I am no boxer or wrestler. My tactics are to grapple with a man and use my weight to bump him against a wall or floor. I remember being down once or twice, and there was some rather half-hearted fighting with chairs before we cleared the Corn Exchange. On my way home the interrupters counter-attacked. I took refuge in a jeweller’s doorway between two plate-glass windows, determined to break them if attacked. My opponents did not assault this position, and on the approach of a policeman, who scented danger to property, they dispersed.40

  Sometime around the early 1920s, he was introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s offbeat circle at Garsington Manor, probably by the family friend and Old Etonian acquaintance Julian Huxley. Huxley later became a fellow traveler for a while in the 1930s, but at that time was a zoological Fellow in New College. Huxley had been inducted into the country retreat of the Bloomsbury set at Garsington during the war and remembered Haldane as “an odd character” in those days, who “enjoyed displaying” h
is memory by “reciting Shelley and Milton and any other poet you chose, by the yard.”41 He once had to escort Haldane all the way downstairs to the front door to escape a long recitation of Homer in Greek. He also recalled Haldane’s penchant for sampling the scientific literature broadly.

  [H]e used to make me feel embarrassed—I was a zoologist, he a physiologist—by asking me if I’d read so-and-so on something-or-other in such-and-such a learned journal, always in my own field. I never had, but I always assumed that he had. But fate caught up with him, in the shape of the Lancelot Hogbens, who were staying with us. Haldane asked me one of those humiliating questions—had I read X on something-or-other: but before I could answer, Mrs. Hogben said ‘Have you?’—and he confessed, ‘Well, actually I haven’t—but I did note the title. . . .’42

  Soon Haldane mixed with the likes of John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf—he already knew Julian’s literary brother, Aldous. The eccentric Ottoline—“Very tall, fantastically dressed and enjoying the wearing of exotic clothes acquired in her travels . . . with something equine in her long intelligent face”43—had captured Bertrand Russell for a while in earlier years.

  It could be dangerous to linger at Garsington too long. Ottoline stopped speaking to D. H. Lawrence when she appeared without much disguise as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love—Lawrence was bemused by her fury. Haldane, too, was hurt when he reappeared in Aldous Huxley’s satire Antic Hay (1923) as that strident materialist the physiologist Shearwater, with a “large spherical head” and no time for the newspapers, since he is “chiefly preoccupied with the kidneys.”

  ‘The kidneys!’ In an ecstasy of delight, Coleman thumped the floor with the ferrule of his stick. ‘The kidneys! Tell me all about the kidneys. This is of the first importance. This is really life’.44

  JBS also recognized his baleful reflection in Mr. Scogan from Crome Yellow (1922), a character who may have been based on table-talk for Haldane’s own book Daedalus (of which more later). In his “fluty voice,” Scogan dreams of “the goddess of Applied Science” abolishing sex.

  An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.45

  Aldous bit through the muscle. Two decades later Haldane returned fire in his autobiography—ineffectually, since it was never published—with a humorless taunt that Aldous was muddled and embittered by the eye infection that led to his near-blindness. “It took not only superb natural gifts, but a staphylococcus, to make the man who most perfectly voices the spiritual muddle of the English middle class intellectuals.”46

  In his last year as a fellow at New College, JBS walked with his sister, Naomi, on a tour through the hilly Auvergne region of central France. They lodged inexpensively in small cafes with attached rooms along the way. Their relationship swung between extremes in later years, with long periods of estrangement. On this tour, it seems to have been at its closest. One day, after drinking too much wine, they dozed off in an abandoned quarry. According to Naomi, soon to be a novelist, they “turned dizzily towards one another. And suddenly Jack was shocked to his respectable Haldane soul. I wasn’t. But that was all. The next year he had gone to Cambridge.”47

  Haldane moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1923, as a reader in biochemistry. Soon he met up with the Honourable Ivor Montagu (1904–1984), forming a connection that had important consequences much later in his career. Montagu was the youngest son of Lord Swaythling, from a family of immensely wealthy Jewish bankers, originally named Samuel, that had been ennobled in 1907. He was an undistinguished zoology student at Cambridge from 1921 to 1924, going up to King’s College as a Fabian but quickly progressing to the stronger stuff disseminated by Marxist circles. Ivor fondly recalled that he first met Haldane

  in Market Square, Cambridge, on General Election night. An illuminated screen was fitted up which announced constituency results on lantern slides as soon as they were declared. Conservative win after Conservative win came up, each differing only by the size of its majority, and as each appeared on the screen J.B.S. Haldane booed. The rowdies did not like the boos and, headed by one or two soldiers in uniform, they surrounded and tried to rush Haldane. He stood his ground, and such was his stability and mass that, as they approached, each successive wave fell back as from a cliff.48

  They struck up a friendship, but although Montagu was recruited to a Communist Party cell at Cambridge around this period, or just after, he later insisted that Haldane was himself not yet a Marxist.

  Montagu stated in his memoirs that he lost touch with Haldane for some years after leaving the university in 1925, which may well be true. After going down with a pass degree, Montagu set off on one of several purportedly zoological trips to the Soviet Union. This attracted the attention of MI5, who marked down his fondness for saluting correspondents as tovarich (comrade) and then routinely monitored him, intercepting mail and telephone calls and following his public career with some interest. Their case-note description of Montagu reads “broad-shouldered, over six foot, has dark curly hair and is of distinctly Jewish appearance. His eyes are dark brown and his complexion is pale. He is generally rather dirty and untidy.” Another entry in his file, from 1926, noticed his first visit to the Soviet Union, and that “Montague [sic] has for some time been known to associate with the inner ring of the Communist Party.”49 He was already in touch with Willi Münzenberg, who operated a well-funded propaganda empire of front companies for the Soviets, including film distributors.50 Montagu then began distributing pro-Soviet films through his fledgling film company, Brunel and Montagu, and the London Film Society, which he helped to found in order to evade British censorship. In the meantime, he had taken up international table tennis with so much enthusiasm that he eventually raised suspicions in intelligence circles that he was using his foreign ping-pong contacts as a cover for espionage. “They write interminably to IVOR MONTAGU about Table Tennis and trying out of Table Tennis balls . . . but even in England, which is not known for sanity in this respect, we find it hard to believe that a gentleman can spend weeks upon weeks upon weeks testing Table Tennis balls.”51 He appeared and reappeared in a slew of Soviet front organizations, such as the Friends of Soviet Russia, and the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, which organized chaperoned tours of the Soviet Union for likely friends. Presently the Daily Express was gleefully reporting that “Banker-peer’s son acts as communist cashier.”52

  Since he was independently wealthy, Montagu was able to experiment widely beyond table tennis, trying journalism, script writing, film editing, and public political activism. Along the way, he encountered Leon Trotsky, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. He may have been sent to spy on the recently exiled Trotsky, whom he visited in Turkey in 1930. The former leader of the Red Army did not trust him, and wrote that Montagu was “paralyzed by his adherence to the party” in an intercepted letter to a British follower.53 A film project with Eisenstein in Hollywood failed after six months, but Montagu successfully worked with Alfred Hitchcock, through the Gaumont Film Company, on the early spy thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), and Sabotage (1936).

  At a cocktail party in 1933, the left-wing Labour MP “Red Ellen” Wilkinson introduced Montagu to the energetic Soviet agent Otto Katz, a Münzenberg associate also known as “Andre Simone” and by many other names—though Montagu may already have been known to him.54 This piqued the interest of MI5, since they had been following Katz for some time. In the same year, Montagu assured a public meeting that the British Metropolitan-Vickers engineers on trial in Moscow for “wrecking”—in one of Stalin’s
early show trials—were without doubt guilty, and that the British government knew it, but were using the trial as an excuse to break off relations with the Soviets.55 In 1937, he wrote a sarcastic letter to the New Statesman about the Great Terror show trials of that year, opening hopefully “Sir, It is amazing what a mess people get themselves into when they try to explain the ‘Moscow confessions’ by any cause other than the guilt of the accused”—only hitting the mark by accident when doubting that foreign legal representation would have been helpful to the victims.56

  It took MI5 another thirty years to discover that, during the Second World War, Montagu had graduated from spy films to the real thing, successfully unifying theory with practice as an active member of the “X Group,” an espionage apparatus run by the Soviet military intelligence agency, GRU. But that evidence required a lucky break that their intermittent snooping could never turn up.

  Haldane stayed on at Cambridge till 1932, but by 1924 he had already established a liaison with the female journalist who would ultimately push him much further left, toward the Communist Party proper. This was the year in which he would turn thirty-two. They met after he published a skillful piece of speculative science futurism called “Daedalus, or Science and the Future,” in the American New Century magazine (August 1923). This is one of his best known and most admired pieces, a quiverful of well-informed eugenic speculations that still penetrate today. In Haldane’s telling, Daedalus is a god-killing geneticist, having slain Minos, son of Zeus, and conducted breeding experiments in the labyrinth. The “breeding experiments” are an allusion to the insemination of Minos’ wife by a bull, with the aid of Daedalus’ hollow wooden cow, in which she lay for copulation; she gave birth to the minotaur. When Minos cut off Daedalus’ “funding” for these “experiments,” Daedalus slew him.