by Andrew Brown
Despite the recent catastrophic insult to his legendary brain, Sage was still thinking with great subtlety. He sent a short message to the IUCr congress, in which he referred to the sweep of Nobel Prizes by the ‘co-founders of molecular biology’ in 1962 and Hodgkin’s 1964 prize. He expressed the opinion that ‘the foundation of molecular biology is an event in the whole history of science comparable with that of Darwin’s theory of evolution or Dalton’s atomic theory’. Bernal was in everyone’s thoughts in Moscow. Belov, who was elected as the next IUCr president, sent a message saying that Sage’s ‘very absence served to emphasize your part as not only our temporal leader, but predominantly spiritual, world’s crystallographer Number 1 … the most universal crystallographer’.46 Belov added that he became a crystal chemist only after hearing Bernal lecture in Leningrad in 1935.
Sage paid homage of his own to Lawrence Bragg when the Royal Society awarded Bragg the Copley Medal in November 1966. Bragg had always remained a faithful supporter of Bernal’s, although uncomprehending of his politics. Bernal wrote to him, saying:
This is only to congratulate the Society for giving you at last the Copley, which you have deserved many times over. It cannot really at this stage mean much to you, as you and the whole scientific world know what you have done. Crystal structures may seem now an old story, and it is, but you, its only begetter, are still with us. Three new subjects, mineralogy, metallurgy, and now molecular biology, all first sprang from your head, firmly based on applied optics. You can afford to look back on it all with justified feelings of pride and achievement.47
Sage reached the official retirement age of 65 years in May 1966. It was the end of an era in crystallography at Birkbeck – not only because he would no longer be in charge, but new laboratories were finally ready and the Torrington Square houses were to be demolished. Lenton saw the wreckers arrive and immediately feared for the Picasso mural. He ran into Sage’s office, and Sage told him to stop them. When Lenton asked how, he was told ‘Shoot the bloke if you like.’48 Lenton successfully intervened and suggested that before cutting the lathe and plaster wall, it should be backed by plaster of Paris to prevent it crumbling. The College readily agreed that the drawing was Bernal’s property. In a display of punctiliousness that reflected years of devoted committee work, Sage wrote to the College secretary to point out, ‘I appreciate that the College has given me permission to dispose of the drawing as I wish, but I am not sure how to proceed with regard to obtaining the permission of the University Authorities regarding the removal of the wall itself.’49 The mural was donated to the new Institute of Contemporary Art and returned to Birkbeck many years later.
Bernal remained interested in world affairs and was disturbed by what he saw. There were reactionary generals imposing counter-revolution in South America, Algeria and Indonesia, all backed by the CIA: ‘If my head and my voice were clearer, I would write a great article on this subject; that is why I am praying that I may be able to say what is in my head before I die.’50 He wrote multiple drafts of an essay ‘Enormity or logic and hypocrisy in the ultimate solution’51 that would be published in part in an obscure French journal. The opening paragraph sets a dark tone, but was informed by more than his own sense of impending death.
This is the most pessimistic essay. It should be impossible, all my friends say, to write anything about world politics without indicating a hopeful solution and showing what we must do to achieve it. But I cannot do this and I do not see it is logically necessary. Death and birth may be indeed inescapable for the world of man as well as for every individual in it. There may be no limit to human folly and callousness. But we ought to know what we are in for: and not in a distant, unimaginable future, but within forty years from now. Many now alive may see the beginning of the end of humanity, a self-destructive consequence of evolution, biological and social.
The looming force that preoccupied him was the population explosion and the coincident food shortage. His concerns were reinforced by reading the proceedings of a conference held at the California Institute of Technology in March 1967 on ‘The next ninety years’. The first signs of the crisis would be seen in the Third World, but even there it would not be uniform – there would be degrees of want.
One of the symptoms is the spread of shanty-towns, as in the Bustees of Calcutta or the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where thousands of people go because it is even harder to live in the countryside and where, without roads, water, fuel or drainage, they manage somehow to find a life for themselves and their many children. There also is the greatest discrepancy between ostentatious wealth and abject poverty. It is also in those areas that there is the greatest degree of internal instability, wars, revolutions, and military coups sedulously fostered by the American CIA, [who] cannot deal with the conversion of the dying centres of the US cities themselves into urban ghettos.52
In his opinion, the economic priorities of the wealthy prevented any effective action from being taken.
Little can be done because the one source of wealth, the land, is in the hands of big landlords who invest their profits abroad, and industry and trade is in the hands of foreign companies who exploit people to great profit for their shareholders. The overall picture is the unfavourable terms of trade for the Third World countries who have to sell their raw materials cheap and buy their machinery dear, ensuring that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Standing out against this grim picture are the Socialist States, either established ones like Russia or China, or newly-liberated ones like Algeria, Cuba and Syria.53
Bernal was again chary about foreign aid as the answer. First, military aid was steadily increasing compared with civilian aid, but more importantly ‘it is very difficult to imagine how such aid would benefit the people of the underdeveloped nations’. While he did not foresee the socialist kleptocrats, who would divert so much aid money from Africa and the Middle East over the next three decades, he identified the essential problem: how do aid programmes make provisions ‘for lowering the burdens these people have to suffer from native landlords and wealthy men who invest their capital and profits in Europe, or for providing dollars to invest in industry or the improvement of agriculture’.54 Exacerbating all these problems, in his opinion, was the US’s intention to rule the world so that ‘nothing must be done to interfere with the position or property of the foreign trusts, nor must the status of friendly wealthy people, local landlords or military personalities in the client countries be interfered with in any way’.
While he mentioned the provision of fertilizer and agricultural machinery for the Third World, Bernal seemed convinced that the bulk of the necessary food supply would have to come from North America. The fact that the rich did not need the poor for their own survival presented ‘the most frightful assault on the Puritan conscience … If some African tribe is the first victim of world starvation, and if it is widely publicized, as it is very likely to be, there will be such a broad-based protest as may even make the defender of the cruel burning up of villages with napalm and the destruction of crops in Vietnam, [L.B.J.] ultimately change his mind. But he will have to deal, in the sequel, with a series of agonizing decisions where it will be evident that anti-Communism is not enough, and that not everybody in the world can be a good American.’55
Sage saw no easy or palatable solution. He did not believe that mankind was ready to starve quietly, but the present measures to deal with the population explosion were pathetically futile and useless. He often quoted Swift’s 1729 ‘Modest Proposal to the Peoples of Ireland’ – a satirical solution by which the starving peasants would sell their numerous children to the rich to be eaten, thereby increasing the supply of meat and enriching themselves in the process. What was required now, in Bernal’s view, was ‘an economic and social revolution affecting the whole world and particularly the poorer three-quarters of it in Asia, Africa and Latin America’.
It implies abolition of large estates owned by landlords, and of foreign organizati
ons which are sending their profits out of the country. With them must go the reactionary governments which protect both these. This justifies, insofar as it succeeds, the worldwide revolutions preached by Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung. The Third World must awake and free itself by its own efforts.56
He repeated many of these points when disagreeing with ‘an optimistic forecast’ about the Year 2000 by Max Steinbeck of the East German Research Council. Regardless of any birth control measures, Sage agreed that the world population would be five billion by 2000 but ‘the chances of providing all these people with food and roofs over their heads are most improbable’.57 The only examples that gave him heart were the improvements made in Cuba and North Korea over the previous decade.
In December 1967, apparently in an effort to clarify his own thoughts, Sage wrote a comparison of Chairman Mao and the Soviets, who had been locked in mutual hostility for some years. In his opinion, Mao was aiming for nothing less than the complete moral, economic and political transformation of humanity.58 The Maoists were dedicated to completing the Cultural Revolution, and this required the active loyalty of every citizen. The nationwide inquisition in China was designed to search out and denounce people who still clung to old cultural customs and ideas. Given the opportunity for varying interpretations of Mao’s dicta and the continual round of denouncements, Bernal thought it was amazing that there was any order at all and not complete anarchy. He suspected there was a secret cadre organizing operations. The economic effects of the revolution were hard to gauge because no statistics had been published for years, and Sage thought on balance that ‘the changes for good or bad have not been very great’.59
When it came to the Soviets, the purpose of their contemporary policies was ‘even more difficult to grasp than the Chinese’. Kosygin had replaced Khrushchev in 1964, but there did not seem to have been any fundamental change in direction, and while there were probably reasons to depose his friend, Sage did not understand what they were. Khrushchev’s guiding principle had been to seek peaceful co-existence with states of different economic and political systems, and he had been dedicated to spreading disarmament. While the Soviets had been prepared to support countries in South America and the Middle East that openly defied the US, they had, at the same time, sought a general détente with the US, especially in the area of nuclear non-proliferation.
It has been a regular policy of the Soviet Union to avoid as far as possible, and with no regard to ‘face’, any direct confrontation which might lead to the outbreak of nuclear war. This policy denounced as it has been in Peking, has guided the Soviet actions in the latest events, especially after war in the Middle East. The war against Israel went very badly for the Arab cause, but was not considered by the Soviet Union worth starting a nuclear war about. Although the Chinese government violently criticized it, it is evident, at the same time, that they themselves have not taken action in the face of much more evident threats by US forces on their own boundaries in S. China. Despite the speeches about America being only a paper tiger, they have themselves submitted in this case to what they have called nuclear blackmail.60
He wrote a separate note for the WPC about the 1967 Arab–Israel war, which he saw as a foretaste of ‘a vaster conflict between Western capitalist states and the whole of the underdeveloped world’.61
The full tragedy of the Balfour Declaration in 1918 [sic] in setting up the State of Israel, aroused at the time and ever since the bitterest resentment of the impoverished Arabs, and the very successes of the Israeli State only serve to embitter them still further. They found that the setting up in their countries of an imitation, subsidized Europe was a constant reminder of their own economic inferiority, and, added to the historic hatreds between Jew and Arab was enough to provoke the most bitter reprisals.
This in itself will be enough to set up a new form of the old division of the whole world between the haves and the have-nots, the affluent and the starving peoples. The war between them may very well be long-drawn out with many reversals of fortune. On the one side there is massive power and money, on the other there are many millions of people, but they are not yet awakened to the reality of the situation.62
In the aftermath of a brilliant victory by Israel, Sage thought that the ‘imperial world’ would be convinced of the value of the bridgehead it had set up in the Middle East, but warned that it might become a ‘wasting asset’. He predicted that the natural sympathy for the Israelis in the West following the Nazi atrocities might not last for long, and that if the Israeli government did not succeed in the very difficult task of obtaining from the Arab countries full recognition and guarantees against future aggression, the very existence of Israel would remain threatened.
In 1967, Sage could still read scientific papers and was active to some degree in the crystallography department at Birkbeck. Colleagues at Cambridge, especially Olga Kennard, would write or come to see him and tell him about progress (in her case on the burgeoning Crystallographic Data Centre). Max Perutz drove to Highgate one weekend, and brought his latest electron density maps of horse haemoglobin for Sage to see. The maps were at 2.8 Å resolution and showed the positions of the individual amino acid residues in the haemoglobin molecule. Sage was delighted that the pictures were so clear.63 Despite the kindness of old friends, Sage began to feel cut off from his world. He wrote to Rosenheim asking about his prognosis. He asked whether there had been any progress in stroke therapy and questioned whether it was worthwhile continuing with physiotherapy since there had been no improvement in his walking for two years. At one point he had managed to move around with two walking sticks, but was now essentially confined to a wheelchair. He worried about the strain on Eileen, who took him to his appointments, and also ‘the demoralizing effect on physiotherapists, who are most devoted and take endless trouble, but have seen no improvement for so many months’.64 He wondered when he might expect a fatal stroke to carry him off. Rosenheim was sympathetic, but unable to supply any answers.
Bernal’s health continued to decline, and he required considerable assistance with everyday activities. Margaret Gardiner came to see him occasionally and sent the following description to Zuckerman.
You do know, don’t you, what a wretched case [sic] he’s in. His speech is virtually unintelligible to all except those who are with him constantly and he can only walk horribly slowly, by being hoisted up on to a kind of baby pusher affair – and then he has to be helped down again. As it appears that his mind isn’t at all affected, the frustration and humiliation is immense, poor devil. People tend – inevitably I suppose – to treat him like a child or an idiot, or just avoid him because seeing him is too painful and difficult.65
Margaret reflected that Sage’s wayward habits were now coming to his rescue: ‘various “wives” – no one of whom could have supported the full burden of caring for him – now share it (with a certain acerbity) between them!’66 The acerbity was not confined to the ‘wives’. Margot rented a flat in Swanage for their 1968 summer holiday, and Anita stayed with friends nearby so that she could help out with Sage’s care. But neither the accommodation nor the social arrangements worked smoothly. The flat was poorly equipped for a man, who was immobile and needed help to go to the toilet. And there was conflict between Anita and Margot occasioned by the communist crisis of the summer – the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was reminiscent of Hungary twelve years before, but the number of British communists who supported this latest example of repression of ‘socialism with a human face’ was markedly diminished. Those who favoured the Soviet invasion were known as ‘tanks’. Margot was resolutely ‘anti-tank’, whereas Anita was Wercely ‘tank’.67
Anita’s devotion to the Soviet cause was absolute and concealed a terrible secret. In the 1930s, her sister, Pearl, married a Dutchman, George Fles, and the couple emigrated to Stalin’s Russia.68 Anita liked George (although she disapproved of the state of marriage) and would write to him. She enclosed with her letters articles about the Soviet system that she
wanted his opinion about. When he was arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes in 1937, these articles (including some about Trotsky) formed the central case against him and sealed his fate. Pearl fled with her young son to the US, and many years later learned that George died in 1939 in the gulag.
Although Sage had resigned from the presidency of the WPC three years earlier, no recognizable successor had emerged and he was still regarded as the moving spirit of the organization. Following requests from the WPC, Anita, abetted by Ivor Montagu, made frequent attempts to get him to sign press statements and letters endorsing the Soviet invasion. He refused.69 When he returned to London, Sage slowly set out his thoughts using an electric typewriter his American cousin, Persis, had given him and which was now his main instrument of expression. Referring to ‘the stupid and illegal movement of Soviet military units into Czechoslovakia on the night of August 21st’,70 Bernal suggested it implied that any deviation from strict CPSU orthodoxy would be regarded as ‘a reactionary plot’ to be suppressed by whatever means necessary. While questioning whether ‘the steps taken in Czechoslovakia were really necessary in the light of the whole international situation’, he still believed that the USSR had been provoked ‘by reactionary forces acting both externally and internally on the orders of the American government’. Pravda sought to explain the Soviet action under the doctrine of ‘peaceful counter-revolution’. Bernal did not think the crisis in Czechoslovakia would serve as a casus belli in the West because the US government clearly accepted that the country lay in the Soviet sphere of interest. Acceptance of the new status quo would ‘save the peace but at the expense of the new-found freedoms of the Czech people’. The whole affair might be an indicator of growing openness in Soviet society.