Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  The biologist Peter Medawar—a future Nobel Prize winner—knew Haldane when they were at UCL together in the 1950s, developing a mixture of wonder and horror.

  In some respects—quickness of grasp, and the power to connect things in his mind in completely unexpected ways—he was the cleverest man I ever knew. He had something novel and theoretically illuminating to say on every scientific subject he chose to give his mind to: on the kinetics of enzyme action, on infectious disease as a factor in evolution, on the relationship between antigens and genes, and on the impairment of reasoning by prolonged exposure to high concentrations of carbon dioxide.

  However, Haldane was not a good experimenter, nor was he fundamentally original.

  He was not himself the author of any great new biological conception, nor did his ideas arouse the misgivings and resentment so often stirred up by what is revolutionary or profoundly original. On the contrary, everything he said was at once recognized as fruitful and illuminating, something one would have been proud and delighted to have thought of oneself, even if later research should prove it to be mistaken.

  Echoing Darlington, Medawar thought that Haldane’s “great strength” was “to see connections, to put two and two together, to work out the deeper or remoter consequences of taking certain theoretical views.” Medawar’s horror was reserved for Haldane’s political opinions.

  People were wont to ask how such a clever man could be so completely taken in by Communist propaganda, but Haldane was not clever in respect of any faculty that enters into political judgement. He was totally lacking in worldly sense, a sulky innocent, a whole-hearted believer in Them—the agents of that hidden conspiracy against ordinary decent people, the authorities who withheld the grants he had never asked for and who broke the promises they had never made.

  This trait was harmful to his career. “It might have made a difference if Haldane in his lifetime could have been made to realize the degree to which his work was obstructed by his own perversity. He was so ignorant of anything to do with administration that he did not even know how to call the authorities’ attention to the contempt in which he held them.”12

  Another view is given by Peter Marler, an ethologist who had taken Haldane’s lectures on genetics at UCL in the 1930s, but drank on more familiar terms with both JBS and Helen Spurway in the mid-1950s—at The Mill in Cambridge, and later at pubs in London. He developed an admiration for their tolerance of beer and vintage cider. “Spurway is well equipped vocally, and became even more loquacious as evenings wore on. We had to leave one pub hastily, in the face of verbal abuse, when she threatened to drown out the resonant voice of Winston Churchill coming through the radio on the bar.”13

  An incident involving Spurway demonstrates her frame of mind shortly before the Haldanes emigrated from England to India. On Guy Fawkes Night of 1956, she had been out drinking in Bloomsbury with an American research assistant at UCL, William Carey Clarke. (It may be significant that JBS was not there, given that it was his birthday.) Walking back after three and a half pints of bitter (Spurway’s count), they were stopped by a police constable at Torrington Place. Seeing the constable’s police dog, Spurway stamped on its tail, producing a yelp. When asked why, she replied, according to the constable, “For fun, that’s what dogs’ tails are for.” Then she raised her hand to her nose, in a Hitler mustache, and goose-stepped off. After both Spurway and Clarke were arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, she assaulted the constable (Clarke seems to have intervened here). Spurway proclaimed in court that “The British Government made the word police the obscenest word in the English language. I thought it would be constructive if the police were to realize they were hated and despised.” She denied hurting the dog, as she had had rubber soles on, or assaulting the constable. Found guilty on all charges, she was fined 10 shillings for public drunkenness, £5 for assaulting the policeman, and 10 guineas in costs. Clarke was found guilty of technical obstruction and fined a guinea. Spurway promptly refused to pay, preferring two months imprisonment. “I hope to go to India and I will be very much happier with many of my friends if I too have been in a British gaol.”14 Clarke must have paid his own fine. After a few days in Holloway Prison, Spurway was freed when her fines were paid by an undisclosed person—rumored to be a Mr. Waller, possibly from a newspaper hoping to get an interview.15

  Shortly after this, the American evolutionary ecologist John Tyler Bonner met Haldane and Spurway for dinner out. He recalled that they “both loved to shock” and “loved to argue.” Spurway “reveled” in the details of the police dog incident.

  We ate at a small restaurant in Soho and soon were embroiled in some very spirited arguments. One was about some biological aspect of sex. Mostly they argued with each other, and both of them had very penetrating voices as they became more intense, resulting in all the people at the neighboring tables staring at us. Even though they both appeared to ignore the stir they were causing, I could not help feeling they not only were aware of it, but enjoyed seeing the shock waves travel across the room. By the time we left the restaurant, we were on to discussing the recent work in animal behavior and its evolutionary implications. It was a subject of concern to all three of us, and indeed it was the central theme of one of my lectures, in which I drew parallels between behavior and development. We all had more to say, so they said they would walk me to Portland Place, but we still had not finished, so I walked them back toward University College. The whole process repeated itself again before we were ready for bed. On one of the laps we passed the BBC building, and on the ground floor a low window was open at the top, and one could hear a radio blaring away. Haldane was talking, and suddenly he veered across the broad sidewalk, stood on his toes, shoved his enormous head into the open window, and yelled with tremendous force, ‘SHUT UP’. He went directly on to his next sentence as he cruised back alongside us without skipping a beat.16

  The following year Haldane resigned his UCL professorship and announced that he was emigrating from the UK to India. Plans for his retirement had long been germinating. As early as 1950, discussions in the Party headquarters at King Street had mentioned retirement in 1957.17 That year he turned sixty-five. Haldane extracted as much publicity as possible by dramatically claiming that he was forced to leave the country on moral grounds because of the British role in the Suez Crisis of 1956, which he described as “criminal.” His thoughts on the Soviet invasion of Hungary were not preserved. In reality, he was attracted by the dramatically lower living costs in India, by the close connections between Nehru’s government and the Soviet Union, and by the new opportunities afforded by the deprived Third World for publically claiming the moral high ground. Elsewhere he also let slip that “One reason why I have gone to India is to avoid chronic ‘rheumatic’ joint pains.”18 The fact that India was still in the Commonwealth may have played a role, too, keeping him at least partially in touch with the rest of the world. He made no attempt to reestablish himself in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union itself, despite his past praise and advocacy of their planned scientific and educational establishments and superior living conditions.

  For India this was a major coup, but Britain shrugged. The geopolitical significance of the Weldon Professor of Biometry at UCL was obscure to them, his conceit perhaps a little ridiculous. Intellectuals have never had much cachet in the English-speaking world. Governments pay no attention when they publish articles expressing their opinions about this or that. By contrast, in the Soviet Union intellectuals were taken very seriously indeed (some say this is still the case in France). When Solzhenitsyn published something, the attention of the Politburo was engaged, to his detriment. In their domains, words and images supplanted reality. Which is not to say that the powers there ever had any liking for intellectuals. As we have pointed out above, Lenin routinely dismissed them as “lackeys of capital who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not its brains, they’re its shit.”19 Those who moved abroad to make trouble were hunted down.
But not in Haldane’s case—the “establishment” in Europe and America would shower him with awards in his absence.

  Haldane’s destination was the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), run by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972), an influential statistician of Haldane’s own generation who had originally trained as a physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. The country was in the throes of its second “Five-Year Plan,” which must have pleased him. The Journal of Genetics went with him, as did Spurway. A post awaited her, too.

  JBS now professed love for India and things Indian, including Hindu philosophy. If this was so then he had changed his mind from earlier years. In the late 1930s, writing in his unfinished autobiography, he was at best ambivalent about India, to which he had been invalided during the Great War. Then he was hostile to Hinduism. “The Hindu caste system is the greatest glorification of snobbery that the world has ever known. If I am a Brahmin I not only enjoy privileges in this world and probably the next but I deserve to do so for having been good in past lives.” “The ideal position in India would seem to be that of a wealthy Brahmin with an Oxford degree, and a high rank in the civil service.” He was drawn more to Islam than Hinduism. “I could sympathize less with Hinduism amongst other reasons because I am a potential Muslim but not a potential Hindu. An act of faith admits one to Islam. Hindus are born, not made. And Islam is a religion of universal brotherhood, whilst Hinduism perpetuates a complex hierarchy of classes. Further I am sufficiently prudish to find the human sexual organs unsuitable as religious symbols.” He was not impressed by the Hindu temples at Benares. However, he was able to “greatly respect the intellectual achievements of some Indians” and express hope that “communism, like Islam, will be a source of vitality to the Indian genius.”

  Now he donned Indian dress and progressively gave up meat, espoused nonviolence, and took up the idea of painless research on animals, which he generalized to “nonviolent biology.” His reasons, on being asked, often invoked the feelings of his hosts, a notion that had not been operational when he lived in England. With Spurway he took up observation of animal behavior to a greater degree and claimed to derive spiritual enlightenment from the process. For the alienated, it is a short step from revolution and the liquidation of classes to simply embracing the other.

  J. B. S. Haldane in India, early 1960s. Photograph by Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg, estherlederberg.com.

  When Joshua Lederberg visited him in India in 1957, they passed an evening on Haldane’s roof watching a lunar eclipse. Looking at the moon, Haldane speculated that, if the Russians were to land there first, they might send a signal, such as a red star. Lederberg wondered if a thermonuclear explosion would be visible from Earth. Some quick calculations suggested it might barely be visible. Lederberg deplored the possibility. “He didn’t disagree with me, although I think he would have still been very pleased for the pro-Soviet demonstration that I think he half hoped would actually happen.”20

  Richard Lewontin recalled meeting JBS in Europe for the first time in the late 1950s. “I thought him a bit of a humbug. Dressed in his dhoti, smoking a twisted black Burmese cigar and addressing a group of admirers in a Dutch café, he seemed unreal. Nor was I alone in that opinion.” They met again in America, when JBS was shopping at a department store for Helen Spurway. “Haldane pulled out an Indian rupee note, announcing to the sales clerk ‘I’m a Hindu, you know’. As he left, she turned to me and said ‘That’s funny. I could have sworn he was one of those high-class Englishmen’.”21

  Within India, Haldane was feted and much in demand. In a letter to Joshua Lederberg dated March 7, 1959, he betrayed a certain weariness at his new role and the usual tetchiness. “If you wish to use a given name please call me John. Jack is not my name, and nobody who has taken the trouble to ask me uses it. My sister does, but she always knows what others want better than they do. . . . I am rather isolated here. The only alternative is to chuck research and be a grand old man.”22 He was skeptical that India was overpopulated. “I was fool enough to believe the people who were worried by the falling birth rate around 1930. I think India is grossly under-cultivated and under-irrigated. I am not sure that it is overpopulated, though things would be easier if fewer babies were born.”23 John Tyler Bonner also kept up a correspondence with Haldane after their dinner in Soho, continuing when Haldane moved to India. “He seemed to enjoy living in India, although he could be as difficult with his new Indian friends as he was with the people he left. I asked him once why he had left Britain, and he said, looking at me as though I did not exist, ‘Because there are too many damned Americans here, especially damned American soldiers.’”24 Haldane’s baiting of Americans was an old indulgence, which Peter Medawar had experienced with embarrassment when hosting visitors to UCL. By now it was becoming a profession.

  In January 1961, a much-publicized mix-up occurred over a banquet to be held in honor of some visiting students sponsored by the U.S. Information Service. Haldane claimed that the students were deliberately prevented by the Americans from seeing him and were told to meet with an American official instead, all supposedly for political reasons. A public week-long hunger strike in protest followed, though he did permit himself the luxury of coffee.25 Then latent tensions at the ISI between Haldane and Mahalanobis came to a head. During a visit to India by the Soviet apparatchik Alexei Kosygin (1904–1980),26 arrangements were made to take him on a tour of the ISI. Mahalanobis and Haldane had differing ideas about the best way to present research in Haldane’s lab, so Haldane immediately resigned, in high dudgeon. Spurway followed suit.

  In the interim, Haldane had turned down the offer of a trip to the United States. Writing to Lederberg, he gave a disingenuous reason. “I applied to the local American consul. Before I could even apply for a passport I had to state all organizations which I had joined since my 16th birthday (1908) with dates of joining and leaving them. As I cannot remember all these organizations or dates and object to (a) lying (b) putting myself in reach of U.S. criminal law by making a false statement, this keeps me out.”27 In another letter to a colleague he mentioned the Association of Scientific Workers and the Genetical Society in this regard.28 Naturally, some organizations from the long list were rather more interesting than others.

  Haldane worked from his own home in Calcutta, expecting to form a Genetics and Biometry Research Unit working for the government Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He took some loyal colleagues at ISI with him, but was taken aback when he discovered that he was now, as a government employee, forbidden to take part in politics. His absence from Europe finally stimulated a shower of honors from that direction. After receiving a large monetary award, the Feltrinelli Prize, from the Lincean Academy in Italy, he toured Europe for a few months. He addressed conferences there and accepted an honorary doctorate from Oxford and a fellowship of New College. At Oxford, he visited his aging mother. He had just returned to India when he got the news that his mother had died, leaving him a large sum of money. He was always generous in using his money to support research students in India. Within a year he had resigned from the CSIR, which had failed to build facilities in time for him and tried to impose red-tape regulations and other nuisances.

  J. B. S. Haldane at Royaumont, France, in 1958. Photograph by Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg, estherlederberg.com.

  So it was on to Orissa, southwest of Calcutta, where in June 1962 he was to start his own lab in the capital, Bhubaneswar. Unfortunately it was “lousy with Americans” and British businessmen. Nevertheless, he continued to conduct research there and proved influential among the emerging Indian geneticists who were drawn to him and who still remember him fondly. In 1963, he lectured at the Hague on Human Society and Genetics and then went on a lecture tour to America, ostentatiously refusing again to declare whether he was a communist (the requirement was kindly waived). At a conference in Florida he discovered that he had rectal cancer, but the prognosis appeared good. The
following year, 1964, he had several operations in London at the UCL hospital; they were unsuccessful, but he was not told so at the time and left there feeling unduly optimistic. It seems that “emigration” from the UK to India had not affected his use of National Health Service benefits. While he was in London, he recorded his self-obituary for the BBC and wrote some flippant doggerel, “Cancer is a Funny Thing,” which was published in the New Statesman.29

  I wish I had the voice of Homer

  To sing of rectal carcinoma

  Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,

  Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.

  · · · · · · · ·

  I asked a doctor, now my friend,

  To peer into my hinder end,

  To prove or to disprove the rumour

  That I had a malignant tumour.

  After Haldane returned to India, the cancer recurred toward the end of the year. When told this by Spurway, he was furious to discover that he had not been told the truth in London; it would have altered his research plans. One of his last acts was to write a letter of apology to Kosygin, who had just succeeded Khrushchev, about the incident from 1961.30