Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  Charlotte Burghes, née Franken, a journalist for the Daily Express, latched onto these reproductive themes, and early in the following year secured an interview with Haldane at his rooms in Cambridge. JBS was immediately impressed by her accuracy, integrity, and more besides. An affair followed, which Haldane openly flaunted around the college. After forcing a messy divorce from her husband, John McLeod Burghes, which involved a private investigator and a room at the Adelphi Hotel, Haldane was required to pay Burghes £1,000. He also had to fight for his position at Cambridge after being dismissed for “gross immorality” by a committee of six senior colleagues, the Sex Viri, in 1926. An aggravating circumstance was that Charlotte already had a four-year-old son, Ronnie, at the time of the affair. On appeal, after some assistance from Maynard Keynes, Haldane was reinstated on procedural grounds. He relished this victory and the recurring opportunities for Sex Viri puns.

  Bertrand Russell’s second wife, Dora, left a description of the Haldanes as they were then, down at the Russell retreat, Carn Voel, in Cornwall. “J.B.S. Haldane came with his wife Charlotte, just after his battle with Cambridge University about the accusations of ‘moral turpitude’ on account of her divorce. Ronnie, her son, was with them, and I could not help feeling some anxiety for him, with such a dominant personality for a stepfather. Charlotte was lovely, with her waist-length mane of black hair.”57

  After quickly marrying in 1926 at Haldane’s insistence, the pair set up quarters just outside the town of Cambridge in Roebuck House, an eight-bedroom former inn on Ferry Lane, in Old Chesterton on the Cam. They attracted their own fringe set from Cambridge and beyond to their famous “open houses.” Along with some of Haldane’s own students, like Martin Case, who lived at Roebuck House for a time, the company included authors, actors, and aesthetes such as John Davenport, Kathleen Raine, Michael Redgrave, Malcolm Lowry, William Empson, Hugh Sykes Davies, Wynyard Browne, Douglas Cooper, T. H. White, and many others. Anthony Blunt, the sexual adventurer and future keeper of the queen’s art collection, who would be exposed many years later as a devastatingly effective Soviet spy, was in attendance. JBS called these gatherings “Chatty’s addled salon” and, perhaps anticipating another Aldous Huxley, preferred not to attend. Charlotte was the principal attraction. She soon advanced on Malcolm Lowry, “the most romantic undergraduate of that period in Cambridge,” but Lowry seems to have been too frightened to go further than the furtive confidences that Charlotte responded to.58

  The marriage became frustrated after Charlotte discovered that she could not have children by Haldane, who may have been hampered by a war injury requiring a truss. Gossip had Charlotte complaining “what can one do with a man who carries his balls around in a bag.”59 Years later, she told her daughter-in-law, Betty Burghes, that JBS was impotent.60 Life with Haldane’s temper was not easy, as she later complained to the BBC.

  If he read something in the Times that annoyed him he would begin to bite his lips. Shortly afterwards he would find a pretext—any pretext—to pick a quarrel with me. I would try to postpone the nagging by saying ‘Yes dear’, and ‘excuse me for a moment, will you? I have to go to the bathroom’ and I would lock myself in there, knowing him to be standing outside biting his lips, clenching and unclenching his fists until I reluctantly came out, when the nagging would continue until his temper was sufficiently relieved; for the time being.61

  She found other outlets, writing novels inspired by the science that she found impossible to follow at Haldane’s level but could work with emotionally, and pursuing several affairs. She was also able to boost Haldane’s own reputation in print as an increasingly prominent intellectual and science popularizer, through her knowledge of the journalism business, distributing his articles through the Science News Service she started.

  Charlotte was a radical feminist of an idiosyncratic kind, perhaps to the left of Haldane at that stage, and she seems to have accelerated his drift further left.

  Our interest in politics had always been a strong one. We both were and had been, long before we had met, socialists and . . . ‘left-wing intellectuals’. Temperamentally also, we were strongly inclined to radicalism; both of us were psychologically counter-suggestible types, but also capable of enthusiastic interest in the social experiments now beginning to take place in the worlds of politics and economics. So it was that we began to feel more than slight curiosity about the Soviet Union, and in the theories of Marx and Engels which had inspired Lenin and Trotsky, and on which this State was founded.62

  On coming to Cambridge in 1923, Haldane had joined the biochemical laboratory of Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861–1947), who would receive a Nobel Prize in 1929 for his discovery of vitamins, or “accessory food factors,” as he called them. Being the reader in biochemistry, Haldane was his second in command. “Hoppy” was a chain-smoking socialist, though apparently that meant no more than indiscriminately signing any petition that came his way.63 Many of those who passed through his lab were budding radicals. Barnet “Doggy Woggy” Woolf (1902–1983),64 born in the East End of London to impoverished Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, was one of the earliest and more adamant of these.

  Woolf had joined the Communist Party in 1920 as a founding member while still a scholarship student at Cambridge. Ivor Montagu used to meet him in the rooms of the economist Maurice Dobb, an influential and openly communist don at Trinity College, a rarity in the 1920s.65 They were joined there by Allen Hutt, Philip Spratt, A. L. Morton, and John Desmond Bernal, among many others, who would all become prominent in the cause. Woolf became involved with Charlotte Haldane, who said that she made a protégé of the “able biologist and impassioned communist.” “It was he who first indoctrinated me with Marxist theory” because his “contempt for the ancient University, and, particularly, for most of its dons and undergraduates, found sympathy with me.”66 “Doggy,” who had joined the Hopkins lab after graduating in 1926, became close to JBS too, and must have been an important influence on his growing attraction to communism. JBS later referred to him in his book of children’s stories, My Friend Mr. Leakey: “When I want to borrow money I always go to a friend called Dr. Barnet Woolf, who thinks it is wicked to pay interest for it, I owe him two pence halfpenny at present.”67 Woolf remained in the Hopkins lab until the early 1930s, when he left to experiment with drama, poetry, and songwriting, but resumed a career from 1939 onward as a medical statistician.

  James Murray Luck (1899–1993) was another contemporary under “Hoppy.” He remembered Haldane as a “walking encyclopedia” and avid reader, familiar with the details of everybody’s research, who believed in “being one’s own rabbit.” “As such, he swallowed in three days a 3.5-liter aqueous solution of 85 grams of calcium chloride to induce a marked acidosis. Robin [Hill] and I were responsible for analyzing the great man’s urine. He developed an acidosis that was noteworthy.” When the acidosis was at its peak, they went swimming in the river Cam. “Soon, a punt, bent on descending the river, made its approach. Seated therein were Hoppy, who had been knighted but recently, Lady Hopkins, and two distinguished-looking guests. Haldane at once swam under and around the punt, describing in his booming voice his experiment on acidosis: ‘I am now excreting the most acid urine that has ever been excreted.’” According to Luck, learning physiology from Haldane was unorthodox. “At the first session, I remember he started off with the query, ‘How big do you think my liver is?’ He weighed 100 kg. We answered with widely different percentages of his body weight. ‘How much blood do you suppose I have?’ Answers: A few pints up to a few gallons. ‘How may one determine the blood volume?’ And so on.”68

  Other Hopkins lab alumni included younger biochemists like N. W. “Bill” Pirie and Joseph Needham, both of whom knew Haldane well at this time. Pirie, who took a Potemkin tour to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and wrote for the Marxist journal Modern Quarterly, would later write the Royal Society obituary of Haldane.69 The gullible Needham (who succeeded Haldane as reader in the Hopkins lab in 1933, after JB
S left the lab for University College London) was successfully manipulated by the Soviets in a bizarre piece of cold-war propaganda concerning germ warfare during the Korean War.70 He was a permanent fixture of Soviet-sponsored “Peace” organizations after that. Immersed in this atmosphere, Haldane had repeated opportunities to absorb far-left alienation, a sign of the broader radicalization of intellectual life in Cambridge that was already under way during the 1920s but that accelerated rapidly with the arrival of the Great Depression and the 1930s.

  The geneticist Sydney Cross Harland, who will often reappear in this story, left a curious reminiscence of Haldane from the spring of 1927, when he first met him. “I used to go pub crawling with him and his wife in the West End of London. On one occasion a man sitting near made a sneering remark about Mrs. Haldane, who was talking in a loud and rather shrill voice. Without saying anything, Haldane walked over to the man, took him by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers, and propelled him through the door into the street. Then he sat down again. ‘Do you think I did right?’ he asked.” Harland remembered that when Haldane was “agitated or excited,” then “the first half of each sentence was spoken while breathing out, and the second half while breathing in.” Even though he could be “brusque and even rude if he was bored or irritated,” and “liked to say things to shock people,” his company was stimulating. “When I upset one of his theories, he used almost to brag about it, rather as if he had done it himself. In conversation he could throw new light on almost any topic that arose.” Harland disputed the idea that Haldane had no sense of humor, but he never heard him tell a joke or laugh out loud—“although at times he would make an attempt to smile graciously, it was rather an evanescent and flickering sort of performance.”71

  2. WITH VAVILOV IN THE SOVIET UNION

  On March 22, 1928, Haldane received an invitation from Madame Polotseva of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR to visit the Soviet Union, in order to attend the Third Congress of Russian Physiologists, Biochemists and Pharmacologists in Moscow, from May 28 to June 22. With this communication, Haldane’s surveillance by MI5 was initiated, since the Society for Cultural Relations was known to be a vehicle for the Soviet propaganda agency VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries). Henceforth his mail, telephone conversations, public speeches, newspaper articles, and border crossings would receive intermittent attention, eventually amounting to a large dossier—routine snooping of the kind that he had himself performed for military intelligence at the end of the last war. Haldane accepted the invitation at once. It was to be his only trip to Russia; Charlotte would go one more time, with a different result, in 1941.

  Like all such tours, their visit was carefully planned and chaperoned by VOKS. Beside the conference, Haldane was invited to lecture at the Moscow and Leningrad institutes for genetics run by Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943).1 The trip stretched through the summer, during which Vavilov and VOKS ensured that the Haldanes got first-class treatment, with plenty of champagne, caviar, and conducted sight-seeing: a rare private viewing of Lenin’s mummy in Red Square; the Kremlin museums; the diamond and sable crown of Ivan the Terrible; the gilded carriages of the tsars; their summer palaces in Leningrad; ballets at the Bolshoi; and operas in Leningrad.

  Vavilov, who in 1928 was “a handsome man in his early forties with little dark twinkling Tatar eyes,”2 with a baritone voice, had trained as a geneticist before the First World War. He had even spent some time, between 1913 and 1914, with William Bateson in England at the John Innes Horticultural Institution. He had also made several expeditions abroad to gather seed samples before the revolution of 1917. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, he had adapted quickly to the new conditions and had continued to assemble a world-leading seed collection at his institute, with frequent forays all over the world in search of plant varieties. In 1928, Vavilov already had more than 20,000 types in this growing collection, the result of expeditions that eventually covered more than forty countries on five continents. He had received one of the first Lenin Prizes in 1926 and was the director of the Institutes of Plant Breeding and Genetics. Haldane, now a part-time adviser on genetics at the John Innes, was also an admirer of Vavilov’s novel theories about the origin of cultivated plants like wheat. Based on the patterns of genetic variation in his collection, Vavilov conjectured that these had been selected first by accident from wild varieties in mountainous areas before they were introduced into the great valley-based civilizations, such as those on the Euphrates and the Nile. Vavilov was thus one of the first genetic archaeologists or gene geographers.

  Because science in the USSR was then carved into institutional fiefdoms run by individuals with political patrons, Vavilov had a near monopoly in his field, controlling all of plant science.3 This covered some four hundred research institutes and experimental stations and tens of thousands of workers. Although Haldane always referred to him as a Soviet scientist, Vavilov had been a geneticist well before the Revolution, and was only Soviet and Marxist now by pure necessity, as were all the scientists who continued to work in the USSR. With few exceptions, the others had left of their own accord or had been forcibly exiled or even executed by Lenin and his successors.

  Like all the shepherded tourists of the Soviet era, the Haldanes were shown model institutions constructed and run only for that purpose. Charlotte was taken to the “Red October” chocolate factory, with seemingly superb day-care facilities for working mothers. She could not help noticing that the infants had a “fierce possessiveness” about their enamel chamber pots; socialism still had much to abrade. Later, she would regret that she was so easily taken in. “I strongly suspect that many ‘Intourists’ who have returned full of enthusiasm for such show-places had as little previous experience by which to judge them as myself.”4 Their will to believe supplied the push that VOKS gratefully pulled on. Charlotte thought that “People talked frankly with foreigners, and the O.G.P.U. was not at all obtrusive in everyday life.”5 But three years earlier, Haldane’s friend John Maynard Keynes had on his own visit already noted “a policy which finds a characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every family and group at home.”6

  In addition to attending the Third Congress of Russian Physiologists, Biochemists and Pharmacologists, the Haldanes were introduced in person to several scientists we will return to later. Vavilov’s junior colleague Georgii Dmitrievich Karpechenko (1899–1941) was a plant cytologist at the Institute of Applied Botany near Leningrad, and had also worked at the John Innes. Solomon Grigorievich Levit (1884?–1938)7 was a Jewish physician from Lithuania who had joined the Communist Party in 1919 and pioneered human medical genetics in the USSR as a member of the communist Society of Materialist Physicians. In 1928 he was attached to the Moscow University Clinic and in the next decade would start pioneering twin studies into human hereditary conditions. Professor Aleksei Nikolaevich Bach (1857–1946) had been a revolutionary under the old regime, living abroad in Switzerland before returning to Russia after 1917. He would later run the Institute for Biochemistry in Moscow in concert with Aleksandr Oparin and serve on the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Lina Solomonovna Stern (1878–1968) was another biochemist and physiologist, a Jewish Latvian who had been educated in Switzerland but returned to the USSR in 1925. Stern had been invited to Moscow by Aleksei Bach, who had known her when he was exiled in Switzerland, and she accepted out of sympathy for the stated ideals of the new regime. In 1928 she was the head of the Department of Biochemistry at the Mechnikov Institute of Infectious Diseases in Moscow. The Haldanes were welcomed into the homes of Stern and Levit and established a close rapport with them.

  In later years, two of these scientists were ultimately shot after brutal torture; one was sentenced to death after being tortured, but reprieved only to die of starvation and abuse in prison; while another was arrested, tortured, nearly shot, imprisoned, and then exiled. Only one escaped wholly unscathed.

  Charlotte later w
rote that after this tour she had more misgivings than JBS about the USSR. “To him, its outstanding characteristic was the Soviet attitude to science and scientists . . . the scientists and the factory workers were the most favoured classes.”8 This theme is repeated so often in JBS’s own references to the USSR (he never wrote at length about the tour) that we must reluctantly accept that he really believed it. For example, on returning home, he addressed the Fabian Society:

  . . . assuming the present Russian régime to last for another fifteen years, you will, for the first time in the history of the world, have a scientifically educated governing class at the head of a great State. What the result of that will be I do not pretend to know. It will, undoubtedly, be interesting. It may be a little too interesting for this country! . . . Among the small fraction of the Russian population who read seriously, science and politics take the place which are taken in England and the United States by religion and sport. . . . The public papers are full of science. . . . Workers’ classes there are on the most magnificent scale, and they have real science and real experiments of a type which are not allowed by law to be demonstrated to medical students in this country. They attempt in every possible way to link up science with politics.9

  Another comment deserves close attention. “They have altered the ruling class. They did not try to educate the old one.” Here “altered” is a euphemism for mass execution, torture, internal enslavement in labor camps, forced external exile, demotion to menial positions, constant hounding and overall loss of the usual privileges of citizenship, a campaign of persecution that extended through biological kinship to reach even distant family. Members of the ruling class became known as “former people.”10 A euphemism was required. His audience understood what he meant.