The British Brigade soldier Walter Greenhalgh remembered being visited near the front line by Haldane, who was “particularly interested in the effects of bombing and so on.” They put him up on a camp bed in their office.
. . . in the middle of the night—Haldane was a huge man, almost filled the door you see—he’s kicking at me you see. ‘Yes, yes?’ ‘What are those things in there?’ he says. I said ‘what things?’ He said ‘those things against the wall’. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘those are Pete’s shells’. I said, ‘when the enemy sends over a dud shell, Pete goes out there and he collects it, and he brings it back here, and one day he’s going to open it up because he firmly believes that there is a message of solidarity, that these shells have been sabotaged’. ‘What? You’re stark raving mad! That’s enough explosive in there to blow the town to pieces! Madness, absolute madness!’ And off he went, we never saw him again. He disappeared . . . Anyway the next day along came a lot of engineer men, they loaded all these shells into a truck and then they took them all away and they sort of blew them up outside in a field.65
When Haldane finally arrived back in London from Boulogne on April 16, MI5 archly noted that “the condition of the clothing he was wearing suggested that he had recently been exposed to the weather.”66 Back in Spain, Norman Bethune was now considered to be a fascist spy by a Republican cabal, and was therefore persuaded to leave on a fund-raising tour in North America at the end of April. Then Bethune was simply denied re-entry into Spain, though this doesn’t seem to have shaken his faith. He would die in 1939 of a septic cut on Chairman Mao’s Long March, in northern China. Years later, H. J. Muller wrote to a colleague that if the Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit had not broken up, then “all of us . . . would still be there (under the ground).”67
In the meantime, Charlotte had taken up the Dependents Aid Committee Fund on behalf of the Daily Worker, to support the volunteers they were recruiting. Since the British government had forbidden its citizens from fighting in Spain, this was, strictly speaking, illegal, though the law seems to have been weakly enforced. After March 1937, she was based in Paris as an underground Party member, facilitating the transfer of the volunteers to Spain, warning them about the dangers of venereal disease, reporting to the Party on their “political and personal reliability,” and calling herself “Rita.” She noticed that the volunteers were forced to surrender their passports to the Party—these valuable documents were later used by the NKVD for espionage purposes. Her circle in Paris included a young American she called “Jack”—Arnold Reid,68 a former editor of the magazine New Masses, who appears to have been another of her lovers. Later Reid would be killed in Spain, apparently “sold down the river by his own party” due to ideological differences, a verdict attributed by Charlotte to the CPGB apparatchik Bill Rust.69 After three months in Paris, at the end of May 1937, she returned to her Dependents Aid Committee fund-raising in London.
MI5 were curious at this time about a house that the Haldanes had leased in the country—Mascalls in Broad Chalke, Salisbury, Wiltshire, described by MI5 as “A Cromwellian house of about 10 rooms standing in about two acres of grounds.”70 They spent occasional weekends there, and it was looked after by a “handyman” when they were away. At times Charlotte went there alone. It is possible that the house was used for clandestine purposes, though Norbert Wiener recalled visiting the Haldanes for a few weeks before the Spanish Civil War, at an “old stone house” set in “a country of delightful walks and views.” Wiener thought that the Haldanes had chosen it because the downs of Sussex, which Charlotte took a liking to, were too pricey.71 MI5 also noticed several weekend trips to Paris by JBS—for example, he returned to England from Boulogne on May 15 and October 8, 1937. These trips were too brief to have included Spain itself, and were likely to have been visits to the Communist International setup that Charlotte had been based in, but MI5 did not make any explicit deductions.
JBS briefly returned to Spain for a final visit with Harry Pollitt, arriving sometime in December 1937 and leaving in early January 1938. There had been changes. His friend Juan Negrín had replaced Largo Caballero as prime minister in May 1937. According to Walter Krivitsky, who described Negrín as a “willing collaborator” and “just the type to suit Stalin’s needs,” this had been an NKVD objective for some time.72 Under Negrín’s administration, the NKVD operated much more freely than before, and the Soviets called in their favors. The POUM had been “liquidated” with Negrín’s consent, and its leader, Andreu Nin, had been “disappeared.” Alexander Orlov’s men had tortured Nin in one of their secret prisons and shot him—the warrant for this had been signed by Stalin himself and was found in the Soviet archives decades later.73 His body was never found. Other factions were also “liquidated,” leaving the Communist Party in a commanding position.
Negrín invited JBS and Pollitt to visit the front at the Battle of Teruel and to view the cabinet meetings held “on the ground floor of an ordinary house.”74 Haldane had romantic notions about Negrín, writing of the Spaniards that “Being an heroic people, they will only give their allegiance to an heroic man.”75 In Barcelona, Haldane observed the escalating air raids and was shown the air-raid shelters in the hills dug 55 feet down, “a labyrinth of passages about 7 feet high by 4 feet broad.”76 He noticed that air raids produced differing reactions. He had found Madrid nonchalant, but not the Catalans. “After an air-raid on a village in December 1937, people ran out into the country with such vigour when they saw another squadron approaching that I could not help joining them, though I did not run as far as some, and stopped as soon as I saw a ditch.”77 He visited the exhibition in Barcelona on the Battle of Madrid. “As a foreigner in a city under bombardment, and infested with spies, I did not consider it healthy to take too many notes.”78 He described spending a night (January 2, 1938) roughing it with evacuees in Tarancon, “on the road from Madrid to Valencia.”
I had managed, after a long walk through snow, to get a place on an empty food lorry from Madrid as far as Tarancon, along with another man and a woman. Night fell, and the ground was covered with snow. After an hour or so’s search, we found a farm on the outskirts with a big dug-out, which was used as sleeping quarters for women and children. I also got a small loaf by telling the authorities that I was a very important person. I slept with about twenty other people in a stable where there were also three mules, which helped to warm the place, and which had a pleasant smell.79
Haldane re-entered England on January 6, 1938, carrying numerous small parcels he said were “Presents from members of the International Brigades to their families.”80 Whereas his earlier reporting from Spain had been upbeat morale-boosting stuff for the Republican cause, now he wrote unconvincingly that “I hope . . . that the people of Britain will never see what I have seen in Spain.”81 Stephen Spender, who was drawn into the Communist Party for a time in 1937, said that Haldane actually relished the details of this, his brand-new war. “During the Spanish Civil War I was one evening at a Christmas party given by his sister, Naomi Mitchison, when Haldane appeared, having just returned from Spain. Haldane seemed quite unhappy until the children’s charades were stopped and he could regale the guests with stories of his violent Spanish adventures.” Spender noticed that Haldane “seems to enjoy displays of violence,” and that a few years later, when air-raid shelters were being bombed during testing, “Professor Haldane insisted on sitting in one of the shelters whilst high explosives were dropped nearby.”82 Recall Haldane’s own reaction to being bombarded on the Western Front during the First World War, where the “entirely novel sound intoxicated me.”83
In late January 1938, Charlotte made her own trip to Spain, without JBS. She chaperoned Paul Robeson, the Negro folk singer and enthusiastic fellow traveler of the Soviet Union, and his wife, Ellie. Robeson made a ten-day tour and was pleased to croon “Ol’ Man River” to the International Brigade in his baritone. Charlotte’s job probably included keeping the Party informed of all doings. After the tour was
over, she stayed on for nearly two more weeks, and visited the British Battalion at Teruel with Bill Rust. The fact that she was then granted an interview in Barcelona by the prominent Stalinist Republican personality Dolores Ibárruri underscores the importance that the Republicans attached to their foreign friends. She would meet up with Ibárruri again in Russia during the next war.84
JBS continued to appear in public through 1938 to support the Spanish cause and to lambaste the foreign policy of the government. (Naomi said that “his great gesture to demonstrate a point was to slap his thigh.”85) MI5 reported that, at the Merseyside Aid to Spain Committee, in front of 1,000 attendees in St George’s Hall, Liver-pool, he “described the Prime Minister as the greatest advocate of Communism in this country, intimating that if he continued acting in this weak-kneed manner in which he was doing when intimidated by Fascist bullies, the people of this country would rise in open revolt to assert their rights.”86 He opened a screening of his old friend Ivor Montagu’s propaganda film Spanish Earth to the more select audience of the Farnham Left Book Club.87 But the developing defeat of the Republicans proportionately deflated the overseas campaign on their behalf. Now Haldane’s focus turned increasingly to air-raid precautions in Britain, which quickly developed into a form of monomania.
Charlotte’s marriage to JBS seems to have been in trouble by this time. She rarely mentions him in her autobiography, Truth Will Out, between mid-1937 and 1939. On returning to England from Spain, she was pushed out of the Dependents Aid Committee Fund by Harry Pollitt. Later in 1938, she set off on a long mission for the Communist International, billed as a Daily Worker correspondent, to Chiang Kai-shek’s communists in China. The purpose of this extensive trip was never clearly explained by her, since the reportage alone could not have justified the expense. When she returned in early 1939, she found that her “personal affairs” had “undergone a change” since she had left. Fred Copeman, the sardonic battalion commander from Spain, who had replaced her at the head of the Dependents Aid Committee Fund, lived at the Haldane residence in London at around this time.
Good woman Charlotte was. Oh, she was a good one. Mind you, you do in life see things. Charlotte must have been 45 or 50 but she acted as if she was 16 you know. She would doll around that bloody house in Regent’s Park with castanets. She was getting a bit fat by now you know. Everything wobbled. And she had about half a dozen lads from the Brigade living there, and I used to sit back—on the one hand there was the old boy the Professor who had the chair at London University in Biology, and whose biology was very practical when it came to the good looking girls you know. He wasn’t short of that. And on the other hand here was Charlotte trying to look as nice as these lovely little students. The lads were quite delighted because—but I used to sit back and think Oh Charlotte!88
Aside from Charlotte’s numerous love affairs, JBS had met Helen Spurway, a student of his at UCL who had made rapid progress. Afraid of drawing damaging publicity, the Communist Party, via Bill Rust, exerted its discipline over both of the Haldanes to block a divorce. All boundaries between personal and political life were long erased. JBS had submerged intellectually into Marxism and the Party.
In an exchange provoked by his essay “A Dialectical Account of Evolution,” which he had first published in 1937, Haldane confessed that he had been working on his Marxist interpretation of biology for a while. “The process took me some six years, so it was hardly love at first sight.” This account was obviously his ticket to the Marxist game, proof of his credentials as a serious worker of their technique, and he wanted to be confident that he had something convincing. He worked out the details in a broader setting the following year in The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (1938), which attempts to reveal that mathematics, astronomy, sociology, and biology are all thoroughly dialectical, when read correctly. He begged off tackling economics. His chief inspiration here was Engels, since Marx wrote little about science. Engels had published Anti-Dühring (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science) in 1878, and added more material in his unpublished fragment Dialectics of Nature—Haldane wrote a preface to a translation of this in 1939.89
The gist of the analysis can be extracted from Haldane’s attempt to explain one of the central Marxist dogmas, “the unity of opposites,” early on in The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences. Haldane gives two examples, both of which fail.
1.“For example, if I say, ‘John Smith is a man,’ I am asserting the identity in a certain context of a particular, John Smith, and the universal, man. This identity has led philosophers into very great difficulties. . . .” Haldane wants to argue that John Smith is therefore a “universal” and a “particular” at the same time, with the particular being the “opposite” of the universal. But a particular is not the opposite of a universal; “John Smith is a man” means only that John Smith is an element of the set of men, not that he is the set of men. There is no “unity of opposites” in this, and the “difficulty” is just a confusion.
2.“Again, I say that the wood of which this table is made is hard, or it would not support things, and soft, or it could not be cut. Two opposite qualities are united.” Now, if something can be exhaustively divided into two categories A and B, then we may well say that B is the opposite of A because not-A implies B, and it must be one or the other. But the opposite of “hard with respect to supporting things” is “soft with respect to supporting things,” not “soft with respect to cut-ability.” Another confusion.90
Haldane nevertheless went to great lengths to squeeze, press, fold, iron, soak, pummel, and fillet evolutionary biology into the round hole of dialectical materialism, with its limited toolbox of concepts such as “thesis,” “antithesis,” “synthesis,” “constant flux,” and “contradiction,” and its mechanistic idea that these are the steps by which all history progresses, as if on an eternal revolving ratchet. His “solution” is summarized in the table below.
None of the terms that feature in dialectical materialism have any precise meaning, so that this sort of categorization is limited only by the patience of the audience and the ingenuity and determination of the practitioner; almost any domain will do. Contrast this to Haldane’s revealing statement, in another context, that the theoretical work that R. A. Fisher and he conducted on evolution “made us investigate the exact meaning of a number of words in common currency. Thus Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest, but never defined fitness exactly. Fisher and I have had to do rather complicated calculations about natural selection. So we had to define fitness fairly rigorously.”91
Just how broad these dialectical categories must be is driven home by the realization that absolutely everything, real, conceptual, or imaginary, must be placed in one or the other category, since dialectical materialism “explains” everything. Haldane embraces this flexibility: “the negation of a negation may mean several rather different things. Why not? If a formula is to be applicable to natural events in the spheres of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and economics, and also to our thought about them, then it must be elastic.”92 But elastic classification, or in this case reclassification, does not explain anything unless it adds to, rather than subtracts from, what we already know. Abstraction is useful when it allows a body of theory to be developed that is applicable to anything that satisfies its definitions, so that the theory does not have to be reinvented for every instance or special case of the abstraction. Correct classification makes that theory available and applicable to the case at hand. The best examples come from mathematics, which in modern times has proceeded by revealing unsuspected commonality through continued abstraction and unification; but precise definitions are unavoidable there, and the right abstractions have required very hard work to get right.
HALDANE’S DIALECTICAL CATEGORIES FOR EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
What biological consequences follow from the one-size-fits-all elastic dialectical classification? Haldane argued that he personally had only been able to “see” some consequences
of selection-mutation equilibria, like the frequency of hemophilia, after describing the concept of an equilibrium verbally in terms of dialectical materialism. He conceded that “I do not claim that these results could not have been obtained without a study of Engels. I merely state that they were not reached without such a study, and that so long as I find dialectical materialism a valuable tool in research, I propose to state the fact.” In short, personal revelation.
John Maynard Smith—who was a student and close friend of Haldane and a communist at Cambridge in the 1930s and for many years afterward—found little of value in Haldane’s Marxist treatment of biology. The problem the Marxists faced was that “classical Mendelian genetics was damned undialectical. . . . What it says, if you think about it, is that genes determine development in an embryo, but development has no influence on genes.”93 Thesis-antithesis-synthesis is most naturally interpreted here as the idea that development affects heredity, as in Lamarck’s acquired characters, but it just so happens that it doesn’t work that way. But we know that this is so, and Haldane knew that it is so, despite and not because of dialectical materialism. Haldane was able to avoid that sort of interpretation only because he was working backward from the known facts and already knew which pitfalls to steer clear of. But his interpretation has some obvious objections of its own.
Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday Page 7