J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  In 1926, Bernal was earning an annual salary of £300 as a research assistant in Bragg’s department. To supplement this, his mother sent him a quarterly allowance of an extra £50, sometimes in the form of dividend cheques from investments (that he always cashed but rarely acknowledged). Although he was much better off than most of his contemporaries at the Royal Institution, Sage’s expenditure was in excess of his income. He was always unworldly about financial matters, and his mother tried to inject some degree of discipline. As usual, the farm was not going well and dairy revenue was falling due to oversupply. Desmond’s younger brother, Kevin, had gone to work in the United States as an engineer for Chevrolet in Detroit, and Bessie was concerned about the prospects for her youngest son, Gofty, at Brookwatson – a place she had come to loathe as a stagnant backwater. She encouraged Desmond to write to her brother Jack, the physician in California, to see whether there would be any openings for him there. Sage did receive a list of crystallography departments from a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, but was warned that there would be a lot of competition for jobs and some teaching would be required.58 This was not an appealing prospect, and he stayed put.

  While Bessie Bernal may have tried to love her children equally, she always lavished the most attention on her eldest, Des. Her devotion was ensured by his precociousness – she was the first woman to be infatuated by his charm and intelligence. Desmond unwittingly placed more and more demands on her time as he grew through his childhood, and the only way she could satisfy him was to hand over the rearing of her two youngest children, Gigi and Gofty, to the maids and staff at Brookwatson. They became native Irish children, relaxed and happy, unconcerned by any British connections that in different ways troubled both Desmond and Kevin.

  As a young woman, Gigi was lively and headstrong, and much to her mother’s annoyance Desmond tended to egg Gigi on, rather than attempt to restrain her. In a postscript to the letter in which she had already upbraided Des for not paying any attention to the family at Brookwatson, Bessie beseeched him to: ‘Write Gigi; God knows I wish you had not encouraged her in “self-expression”’.59 Gigi, who was then twenty years old, wrote to Des about a dance at Brookwatson, which had been a ‘roaring success’,60 and listed all the men she had kissed, including Commander Bennett – ‘ripping, about 38, fair and quite exciting’ – whose attractiveness in her eyes was enhanced because he was married to a pretty American. It was unrealistic for Bessie to expect Desmond to take on the role of a disapproving father figure, but by the following year the rift between mother and daughter had widened. Bessie wrote to Desmond setting out conditions for Gigi to be allowed to return to Brookwatson to live: she should cease being insolent and sneering, behave with modesty and decency, wear proper and decent underwear, do her share of the work (milk cows in the evening), and must not make confidantes of the servants.61 Bessie remained furious that Desmond had encouraged Gigi ‘to cut loose’ and to ‘find herself… although the worst of it is you do not suggest how’.62

  Since Desmond had not followed her advice to emigrate to the United States, Bessie wanted to know whether he was still on the same salary and what the prospects for the laboratory were. Fortunately, Bernal would soon be able to tell her that he ‘had been appointed the first lecturer in Structural Crystallography to the University of Cambridge’.63 The post had been created on the initiative of the new Professor of Mineralogy at the University, Arthur Hutchinson. It was an exciting position which, if the successful applicant had enough drive and talent, might lead to the creation of a new school of crystallography that would rank with those already established by the Braggs, in London and Manchester. The two most likely candidates were Astbury and Bernal, who had both been supported by Hutchinson in the past and who had more than repaid his faith in them already by their accomplishments at the Royal Institution. While Bernal had been developing the equipment, theory and practice of single crystal rotation photographs, Astbury had been launched on his life’s interest by the most casual push from ‘Bill’ Bragg.

  One of Bragg’s delights was to give a series of Christmas lectures for schoolchildren, and he decided the theme of the 1926 talks would be ‘The imperfect crystallization of common things’. In connection with this, he asked Astbury to prepare some photographs of materials such as wool. There was work going on in Germany on the X-ray patterns of textiles such as silk and cotton, but no one in England had so far taken up their lead. Astbury was not put off by the rather imprecise and sparse X-ray diffractions obtained from fibres, and saw that in fact they offered the first glimpse of the three-dimensional structure of biologically important molecules. By the time the interviews were held in Cambridge in the summer of 1927, Astbury was just beginning his work and had not published anything to suggest that the field would be as fruitful as it eventually proved to be. There was a risk, no doubt, in the minds of his interviewers that he might be doggedly navigating his way into a cul de sac, and his answer to the question of how he viewed the prospect of collaboration did nothing to reassure them. In his bluntest Potteries accent, Astbury told the committee, ‘I am not prepared to be anybody’s lackey.’64

  In the face of this, Bernal probably just needed to be affable and to talk about his body of published work to land the position, especially as the committee already had a letter of recommendation from Sir William Bragg describing him as a ‘good and loyal colleague’ who ‘willingly and efficiently… has helped other workers whose experience was less than his own’.65 Instead when his turn came, Sage sat with his chin buried in his chest and seemed completely uninterested in the matter at hand. Hutchinson, who was in despair at the sight of his second candidate self-destructing, finally asked him what he would do with the job if he were appointed. ‘At which,’ according to C.P. Snow, ‘Bernal threw his head back, hair streaming like an oriflamme, began with the word No… and gave an address, eloquent, passionate, masterly, prophetic, which lasted forty-five minutes.’66 After such a virtuoso performance, ‘There was nothing for it but to elect him’, said Hutchinson.

  A few months later, Desmond was in his mother’s bad books again because he had written to the family’s solicitor about his inheritance. The problem was that his father’s estate was all tied into Brookwatson. In the lawyer’s opinion, it could not be divided until the youngest child reached the age of majority (Gofty was not yet 17 years old), and ‘in any event, it is not an estate which easily lends itself to division, because the bulk of it consists of land, at present of very uncertain value’.67 Bessie brought a dowry of £1,600 to Brookwatson at the time of her marriage in 1900, and was now dependent on the farm for her livelihood, as were her children to various degrees. Although times had been especially difficult during the years after Samuel Bernal’s death, Bessie, aided by her sister Cuddie, had become a shrewd manager, and farmed the 120 acres of prime grassland very competently. Her costs were low, largely because labour was cheap: she employed 15 labourers at minimum wage.68 She was not prepared to sell the farm at a gross undervaluation to ease Desmond’s financial straits. His salary at the Royal Institution had been modest and the lecturer’s salary at Cambridge was not much higher. He had to provide for Eileen and the infant Michael, but the immediate problem confronting him was that he owed £100 in tax on the unearned income from investments that his mother sent him every quarter. Once he explained this, his mother was sympathetic and wrote him a cheque, delivered with the admonishment: ‘For God’s sake get away from the money lender’s clutches.’69 So despite a high degree of freedom in his academic and personal life, Desmond was still mindful of his mother. She would continue to write letters to him, covering every inch of the paper in her spidery hand, dispensing advice and news in a mixture of French and English. Even though she did not always understand or even approve of his activities, Bessie’s loyalty to Des was unwavering.

  4

  Science Fantasy

  While at the Royal Institution, Bernal began to write his memoir. He might perhaps h
ave chosen the title, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Man, as a nod to his countryman James Joyce (a writer whom he admired), but instead settled on the duller but less pretentious, Microcosm. Although clearly intended for publication, Microcosm was never finished and survives only as a collection of mostly undated manuscripts (some typed) and notebooks.1 The writings begin with the following statement: ‘At the age of twenty-five I have set myself the task of writing down the results of my life, the sum of all the influences that have borne on me, and what my mind makes of these in its knowledge and action.’ Realizing that such an undertaking at his tender age might be regarded as impertinent, Bernal quickly acknowledged that he did not ‘despise the wisdom of age or prefer that of youth’ but thought that ‘they are different wisdoms’. He worried, though, if he waited till old age before attempting such a book, something would be lost: ‘There is a lack of adaptability in old men, the ideas they acquired in their youth tend to become fixed and new ones are absorbed with more and more difficulty so that they become out of touch with the times they are living in. Their ideas become also in a sense part of themselves, they are less conscious of the influences which formed them and thus less judges of the effect of these influences.’

  Bernal supposed that young people were generally too busy assimilating their environment and too anxious about the troubles that confronted them to commit their impressions to paper. The outpouring of Great War literature at the end of the twenties would disprove his theory, but at a time when those works were being written and their deep impact was yet to be felt, Bernal saw an abundance of youthful novels, poems and plays that seemed shallow, being ‘replete with influences and occupied, almost preoccupied, with problems’. These literary attempts were depictive rather than interpretative, dealing with the universe as it presented itself to the authors, whereas with his mainly scientific education, he was seeking to ‘violate nature so that she be understandable’. Such an analytical approach seemed to him to be as valid as any synthetic work of fiction: the two forms might appeal to different minds but had an equal right to appear. The ambitious aim of his book was ‘to put down the conscious dynamic content of a mind reaching its maturity in the first half of the twentieth century’. By conscious dynamic content, he meant ‘that part of knowledge and experience that appears to urge us to further thought and action’. His analytical method was a throwback to the armchair psychology of the nineteenth century, relying heavily on introspection. Mindful of Freudianism, he acknowledged the importance of unconscious pressures, but as he had no special training to articulate them, he disregarded them.

  Even though he restricted himself to conscious events, he faced an immediate difficulty: ‘In the whole field of thought I have no one supreme interest but am fascinated wherever I look.’ He prided himself on possessing an integrated mind, where every new piece of information was worked into his existing knowledge and thereby stood a chance of modifying his future judgments. He did not concern himself with the question of heredity, although he was well aware of the continuing influence of his family and other individuals who played a role in shaping his childhood. Apart from such personal relationships with their chronic and subtle effects, Bernal noticed that even more discrete ideas and experiences still tend to register as blurred impressions in the mind, after being filtered through culture, the physical environment and learning. ‘A single day will introduce us to a new way of cooking asparagus, a new political situation, a new passage of Herodotus, a new form of cement conveyer, new that is to us.’ There were, it appears, some necessary limits even to Sage’s brain or spheres of interest: ‘we cannot, as in our childhood, afford hours of study to the various sizes, shapes and colours of stones on the gravel beach, or the intimate habits of crabs, unless we are professed petrologists or zoologists.’ But even a single subject could give rise to protean connections, for example his thoughts about mathematics ‘which began with some crude attempts at a theory of numbers twenty years ago and [go] on to the appreciation of tensor calculus, mixed inextricably in my mind with associations of mistresses and books and professors, money sums and physics and crystallography’. In retrospect, it is easy to see that while Sage’s attempts to dissect out the formative strands of his existence are skilful and fascinating to watch, the exercise was bound to end in a tangle rather than in a recognizable pattern. The youthful memoirs did not materialize into a book.

  Some of the more developed themes in Microcosm became an exaggeration of features that Bernal wished to possess. His profile as a radical comes across as strong and unwavering, and he is especially eager to establish his credentials as an Irish revolutionary from a tender age. Recalling that at the Protestant school that he and Kevin attended in Nenagh, history was taught from a British imperialist perspective, Desmond mentions that he countered the bias by reading the history of Ireland for himself at home: ‘the long oppressions, the repeated failures, moved me to self-pitying resentment, a determination to be myself the instrument of delivery.’ Casting himself as ‘a singularly closed-in child’ who was fascinated with the possibility of inventing new things, he claims to have conceived a revelatory scheme in his pre-teen years that would dominate the next ten years of his life: ‘I would use science and apply it to war to liberate Ireland. But why stop at Ireland?… My phantasy occupied half my reflective thought. Everything I did, learning and growing, was with reference to it. Science, and Engineering, school would give me; for the art of war I would join the British Army to betray it. It would be a hard and unpleasant life, dangerous but worth the reward.’ There is no record of such an exciting and grandiose strategy in his teenage diaries, which give such unselfconscious accounts of his other preoccupations.

  His recollections of Bedford School in Microcosm were bitter and again revealed anti-English sentiments, missing from his earlier diaries: ‘There I could be tortured, humiliated, waste my time and my interest on dully repetitive games and military drill, but I could learn everything I wanted. I lived like a hostage in an enemy land. My companions were cheerful thieves and liars, and furtive sexual perverts. I merely thought they were English and kept my hatred of the race closer to myself. The war raged taking in turn all my seniors for Military Crosses or glorious deaths.’ For his own part, he gloried in an ‘obstinate insistence on being different’ and quietly rejoiced at the great struggle that Germany was making against the world, hoping it would lead to the destruction of England’s power.

  When considering the modern world, Bernal thought many people had not realized that the nineteenth century was over, and that the Russian Revolution, in particular, meant that the future development of society would not be a continuation of past trends. He was convinced that he was witnessing the last days of capitalism, a system doomed because it could not engender the loyalty of the majority of citizens, even though it commanded the services of the most intelligent. His analysis of money and wealth is full of idealism and remains aloof from any marketplace, where buyers and sellers might be active: ‘Instead of taking wealth as a good, in which case there is no halting in the pursuit of it, or an evil to be avoided at all costs, let us suppose for each individual, at each stage in his life, there is an optimum income.’ Optimum income he defined, on an individual and subjective basis, as enabling the citizen to be most effective in his or her contribution to society and to be happy. Once attained, no more effort should be spent in generating more income, for once bodily discomfort has been avoided, extra income leads to ‘the heavy comfort of the bourgeoisie, an excess of over-eating, over-dressing, over-furnishing, gross and sensual pleasures. The comfort that comes with increasing income comes so subtly that it is difficult to resist. It enervates by continued satiety and wastes endless time over the mere bodily business of living.’ He allowed that a certain amount of disposable money can enhance social pleasures but again favoured the concept of optimal limits. For example, travel was an endeavour that in Sage’s opinion should be undertaken on a limited budget because those who go first class shie
ld themselves from any intense, local experience. He suggested that ‘snobbery can be just as great a destroyer of independence as poverty’, since people consumed by reputation or status are as constrained in their behaviour just as much as the poor are. The ultimate motivation for the pursuit of riches, in his view, was to obtain power over others. He concerned himself very much with the behaviour of the individual rather than considering the aggregate picture of an economy.

  Industrialization seemed to Bernal to have brought near equality in the sphere of popular entertainment, where both rich and poor bought their amusement. The quality available to the millionaire, though uniformly bad in his opinion, was hardly different from that ‘available through film, wireless and the dancing hall to any honest workman’. Truly to enjoy oneself it was essential to have ‘friends who know you well enough to pick up allusions’ so that ‘you can laugh at the world together’. There was no such equality or frivolity in human sexuality, which Sage considered to be ‘a complex and delicate art’ for men and women. It was also the one activity that seems to be exempt from his law of optimal economics, in that ‘money can and does buy… the opportunity of practising it. The working man, or even more the working woman, has neither the time nor energy to develop it adequately… [it is] essentially the prerogative of people of leisure.’ Writing in the mid-1920s, Bernal had no doubt that a sexual revolution was already under way: ‘The successful use of birth control for over fifty years and its increasing dissemination is in an irresistible manner forcing a new sexual ethic based on the separation of intercourse and procreation. The effect is the surer because it partakes of the nature not of opinion or propaganda but of a material change of environment. Separated from its previous consequences, the sexual act becomes like a kiss, merely a demonstration of affection, more violent, more pleasurable but essentially of the same nature. It ceases to concern society and concerns only the parties involved and then only for the occasion. This is no moral doctrine but the physiological logic that can be seen in the increasing number of young people every year, beginning with the cleverest.’ But he still admitted that even the pre-eminent are ‘obliged to make some outward gestures to conformity’. In addition to effective contraception, the other powerful factor he identified as changing sexual mores was the ‘influence of Freudian psychology which gives scientific sanction to this behaviour’. He credited Freud with releasing him from the ‘phantasies of religion and rationalism’ so that he could fulfill his own desires.