by Andrew Brown
I met Bernal first in the spring of 1930, in his laboratory in Cambridge. He impressed me then as the most brilliant scientist that I had ever met, and I have retained this impression, which was substantiated by the many later discussions that I had with him. He was astonishingly quick in grasping a new idea, and was often able to contribute an illuminating insight, based on the breadth of his knowledge and his extraordinary ability to see interconnections between apparently rather distant fields of science… Bernal must be considered one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century.43
It was another Noble laureate, Sir Edward Appleton, who put his finger on the central paradox of Bernal’s life. He saw ‘two Professor Bernals: one is the brilliant natural philosopher of worldwide renown, the other a fervid convert to an extreme political theory.’44 Although Sage was amused by this description and was quick to jest about his Jekyll and Hyde image, Appleton was making a serious charge. It was repeated even more pointedly by A.J. Cummings, the News Chronicle journalist, who dared to tell Sage in 1949 that the Soviet system, to which he was so devoted, contained millions of slaves in the gulags as ‘an organic element, a normal component of the social structure’. When he could not refute Cummings’ facts, Sage wrote to his editor dismissing them as ‘allegations from professed anti-Soviet sources which are unverifiable and not even self-consistent’.
Appleton’s description of him was accurate, and the possible reasons underlying Bernal’s unshakeable beliefs mystified those of his friends who did not share them. To Max Perutz it seemed to be a question of faith. It is clear from Bernal’s undergraduate diaries that his overnight conversion to socialism coincided with his withdrawal from the Catholic Church. Arthur Koestler described the spiritual ecstasy of his own overnight conversion to communism in Germany during the 1930s.
To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows… The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past… Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity – except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness.45
Perutz concluded that Bernal ‘must have been one of those characters who needed an absolute belief’.46 Just as tragic world events test the faith of Catholics, Sage was distressed by Hungary in 1956, but in Perutz’s view he could not ‘face the wrench of not being communist’. However, his misgivings were shown only to a few close friends, like Dorothy Hodgkin, who were presumably experiencing similar emotions of their own. Perhaps the most egregious example was when Martin Bernal questioned his father about the veracity of Chinese official statistics in 1959, and Sage agreed that they were invalid and inaccurate. It is now known, but largely overlooked, that the famine Martin sensed in its earliest stages resulted in the deaths of 60–70 million people. It is ironic that thousands of those intellectuals who attended Bernal’s wonderful lectures in China would starve to death, after being dismissed from their posts and sent to labour in the fields.
Aaron Klug takes a different view of Bernal’s political convictions. He described walking one day with Bernal from Birkbeck to University College. They passed a church, and ‘Bernal gave a description of the church, the history of the Church of England and the Reformation; he gave a little extempore account of the Anglican revolution. I could see the way he spoke about it, he spoke with the long eye of history.’47
In the long eye of history, if you think of all the brutalities, the murders, Henry VIII breaking away from Rome, all those kind of things, we don’t think kindly of those things, yet we think it has all been for the good. It is really a view that history is progressive and that you have to put up with the blemishes. I didn’t know him well enough to know whether in the middle of the night, he began to have doubts.48
Klug does not believe that Bernal could have thought all those who perished in Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s were spies or counter-revolutionaries rather than victims of an ideological struggle. But he might have believed that the collectivization of agriculture was a reform, rather like the setting up of mediaeval land enclosures or the advent of industrialization – to be associated with short-term pain before ultimately improving the lot of the peasants. The bloodshed would be accepted by history as another necessary price of progress, in Bernal’s mind.
In 1954, his friend from undergraduate days, Kingsley Martin wrote a sketch of Bernal for the New Statesman that contained elements of both the Perutz and Klug views.
Bernal was not the man to do without a religion. His romantic temperament demanded an ideal to give sanction and purpose to the duty of investigating and changing the very imperfect world around him… post [First World] war Cambridge was in every way destructive of Catholicism. It did nothing to satisfy the need for social change… and the universal aspiration to put an end to war. Most able young men became Socialists of some kind. Bernal was not of a temper to be satisfied with the moderation of British Labour. Only Communism satisfied his needs, since he thought it alone had the proper attitude towards Science. Bernal was an unorthodox, because anti-liberal, recruit to the line of idealists from Condorcet to H.G. Wells, whose faith was Progress through Science… He appears uninfluenced by such questions as whether millions of people really live in and die miserably in Siberian labour camps. If such things happen in the Soviet Union they are part of the necessary historical process. If he is bothered by the preposterous and cruel nonsense of the purges, whereby the children of the Revolution periodically devour each other, he maintains an obedient silence… He cannot allow himself to admit faults in Moscow: that would set at war within himself the romantic and scientific sides of his nature which are integrated in his Communism.49
Martin was surely right that science and communism were two sides of the same Bernal coin. Both carried the promise of a better world, but one face was counterfeit. Sage was a visionary who did not confine himself to one sphere of human activity. His predictions about the course of science (stating, for example in the 1920s, that X-ray crystallography would reveal the structure of proteins and the secrets of life) were no more audacious than his confidence that communism would reorder society, banishing the inequalities that he found so unjust. But his theoretical speculations about molecular structure were far more insightful than his prognostications about the transformation of society. Like many Western intellectuals between the wars, Sage was blinded by the imperfections of his own country to the horrors of Stalinism. When science and communism came into direct conflict in the Lysenko affair, Sage betrayed his scientific principles. In his activities with the World Peace Council, he was an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, whether he realized it or not. He continued to believe in the world revolution, almost until the end of his life, despite the mounting evidence of communism’s moral and economic bankruptcy in country after country. He would never have accepted historian Richard Pipes’ verdict that ‘Communism was not a good idea that went wrong; it was a bad idea.’50
Max Perutz was amused that Bernal was such an outspoken advocate of the central planning of science because Bernal ‘was a man who never planned anything. He was totally disorganized.’51 His personal life was certainly colourful and chaotic, and like his science career, unlikely to suffer imitation. Sage did form deep attachments to some women, but would always be on the lookout for sexual adventure (even after his first stroke). The first time she ever heard Bernal’s name, Margaret Gardiner was on a train in France talking to an Englishman, who asked her if she believed in ‘sexual varietism’. When she confessed ignorance about the term, he said ‘There is a wonderful chap that I know in Cambridge who believes in sexual varietism.’ The chap was Desmond Bernal. Margaret would later discover something of Bernal’s devotion to se
xual varietism, but saw that he would never abandon anyone if he could help it – she said he was faithful in his fashion. Margaret thought he ‘felt a sort of moral compulsion… to give everybody their turn, you know, and to expect the others to accept it’.52
Sage’s life was so crowded that he sometimes could not avoid letting his friends down. Zuckerman experienced this in North Africa in 1943 and seems to have been strangely scarred by it. In the second volume of his memoirs, published in 1988, Zuckerman related in some detail how he turned on Bernal at a dinner party at home in the early 1950s. Understandably irritated by Bernal’s repeated predictions of the fall of liberal democracy and its replacement by a Marxist society, Zuckerman said he ‘didn’t give a damn about Bernal’s politics’ and that he had no intention of conforming to the rationally designed framework that Bernal was proposing. Zuckerman described Sage becoming more and more silent, ‘his big head sinking into his chest’.53 Zuckerman regarded the one-sided row as the end of their friendship; Sage thought no more of it, and always referred to Solly Zuckerman as his friend.54 He never attempted to convert colleagues or friends to the communist cause – he had no need to because he believed the Marxist revolution was inevitable. That is not to say that some were not drawn to communism after being dazzled by Sage.
Whatever his faults, Bernal always tried to see the best in people, and until becoming depressed towards the end of his life, remained optimistic about the human race. He would always strive to be courteous towards others, whether they were delegates to a WPC conference giving a three-hour speech at one am in a language he did not understand, or scientists who did not agree with his ideas, or his political opponents. His essential humanity was always displayed in the company of children. He would never talk down to them – nor to bricklayers, taxi drivers and farmers – preferring instead to use the brilliance of his exposition to allow them to glimpse the world through his eyes.
Desmond Bernal led a fascinating and complex life, which seemed linked to history from the time he came of age in a deeply divided Ireland. He avoided the Great War and survived the Spanish influenza. As a young scientist he was fortunate to cross paths with some of the greatest figures of the day; his imagination and brilliance shaped the development of crystallography and led to molecular biology. His ideas changed the course of science, and he inspired a generation of younger researchers, who went on to glittering success. Sage was a renaissance figure – widely read, steeped in history and literature, and a notable authority on architecture and the visual arts. He was a pioneer in thinking systematically about the integration of science with society, and even though many of his predictions in that sphere have not come to pass, he clearly foresaw the emergence of Big Science. His objective studies of the effects of bombing on cities stood the test of time, and the D-Day invasion might well have taken a different course without his diverse contributions. He instantly understood, like many of his war-hardened colleagues, the devastating threat of nuclear weapons, and he devoted himself to calling for their abolition. In doing this, he was unbalanced in his assessment of the one-sided nature of the threat from America, but Bernal’s opinions on the use of nuclear weapons and his contacts with Khrushchev may have helped the Soviet leader to step back from the abyss during the Cuban missile crisis. Bernal was the first to utter the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that looms so large today. In all these activities, he was the quintessential twentieth-century Sage of science.
Notes
Bernal’s voluminous papers (JDB papers), meticulously organized and catalogued by the late Brenda Swann, are held in the Manuscript Department of Cambridge University Library. I am grateful to the Syndics of the Library for permission to quote from them.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. Bernal, J.D. Microcosm. Undated document. JDB Papers, B.4.1.
2. San Jose Daily Mercury (26/3/1900).
3. Hodgkin, D.M.C. (1981). Microcosm: the world as seen by John Desmond Bernal. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 81B, 11–24.
4. Hruby, D.D. (1965). Mines to Medicine. San José, California.
5. Hodgkin, D.M.C. (1980). John Desmond Bernal, 1901–1971. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 26, 17–84.
6. Kee, R. (1982). Ireland. Little Brown and Co., Boston.
7. See note 5.
8. See note 3.
9. See note 6, p. 124.
10. See note 1.
11. Bernal, E (25/4/37). Letter to J.D. Bernal. JDB Papers, O.2.1
12. See note 1.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Miller, J.J. Undated family notes. JDB Papers, O.1.3.
16. See note 1.
17. Bernal, J.D. (1954). Four stories for Boris Polevoi. JDB Papers, B.4.68.
18. Ibid.
19. Bernal, J.D. (1909). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
20. See note 1.
21. See note 5.
22. Bernal, J.D. (11/11/11). Letter to Aunt Mod. JDB Papers, O.2.2.
23. See note 1.
24. Ibid.
25. Bernal, J.D. (5/10/14). Letter to E. Bernal. JDB Papers, O.2.2.
26. Bernal, J.D. (1915). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
27. Bernal, J.D. (1916). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
28. See note 6, p. 137.
29. Foster, R.F. (1988). Modern Ireland 1600–1972. Allen Lane, London.
30. Ferguson, N. (1998). The Pity of War. Allen Lane, London.
31. See note 29, p. 474.
32. See note 6, p. 153.
33. See note 27.
34. Pais, A. (1991). Niels Bohr’s Times. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
35. Bernal, J.D. (1917). Character book. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
36. Bernal, J.D. (1917). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
37. See note 34, p. 132.
38. See note 36.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Gilbert, M. (1994). The First World War. Henry Holt, New York.
44. Ibid, p. 391.
45. Bernal, J.D. (1918). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
46. Ibid.
47. See note 6, p. 178.
48. See note 45.
49. See note 6, p. 177.
50. Ref. 45.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Bernal, G. (1971). Interview with E. Bernal. JDB Papers, P.6.1.
58. See note 1.
59. See note 45.
60. Ibid.
61. Balibar, F. (1993). The Science of Crystals. McGraw-Hill, New York.
62. Story Maskelyne, N., Miers, H.A., Fletcher, L. et al. (1901). The structure of crystals. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 297–337. John Murray, London.
63. Ref. 45.
64. Synge, A. (1999). Early years and influences. In B. Swann and F. Aprahamian (eds.) J.D. Bernal, pp. 1–16. Verso, London.
65. Bernal, J.D. (1919). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. See note 6, p. 124.
69. See note 65.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. Thomson, J.J. (1937). Recollections and Reflections. Macmillan, New York.
2. Bernal, J.D. (1919). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Bernal, J.D. Microcosm (undated manuscript). JDB Papers, B.4.1.
6. Ibid.
7. Gilbert, M. (1991). Churchill: A Life. Henry Holt, New York.
8. Dowie, J.A. (1975). 1919–20 is in need of attention. Economic History Review, pp. 429–50.
9. Moynahan, B. (1997). The British Century. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
10. Ferguson, N. (1998). The Pity of War, p. 400. Allen Lane, London.
11. Martin, K. (1966). Father Figures. Hutchinson, London.
12. Lovell, A.C.B. (1975). P.M.S. Blackett.
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 21, 1–115.
13. See note 2.
14. Ibid.
15. See note 5.
16. See note 2.
17. Ibid.
18. Snow, C.P. (1964). J.D. Bernal, a personal portrait. In M. Goldsmith and A. Mackay (eds.) The Science of Science, pp. 19–29. Souvenir Press, London.
19. Bernal, J.D. (1920). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
20. Dobb, M. (1978). Random biographical notes. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2, 115–20.
21. Hobsbawm, E. (1967). Maurice Dobb. In C.H. Feinstein (ed.) Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth, pp. 1–12. Cambridge University Press.
22. Kee, R. (1982). Ireland, p. 180. Little Brown and Co., Boston.
23. See note 2.
24. Ibid.
25. See note 19.
26. Ibid.
27. See note 22, p. 182.
28. Foster, R.F. (1988). Modern Ireland 1600–1972, p. 498. Allen Lane, London.
29. See note 19.
30. Todd, J.A. (1958). John Hilton Grace. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 4, 93–7.
31. Motz, L. and Weaver, J.H. (1993) The Story of Mathematics. Plenum Press, New York.
32. See note 19.
33. Ibid.
34. See note 31.
35. See note 19.
36. Ibid.
37. Bernal, J.D. (23/2/20). Letter to E. Bernal. JDB Papers, O.2.1.
38. See note 19.
39. Slobodin, R. (1997). W.H.R. Rivers. Sutton, Stroud.
40. See note 5.
41. Sargant Florence, P. (1968). The Cambridge Heretics (1909–1932). In A.J. Ayer (ed.) The Humanist Outlook, pp. 225–39. Pemberton, London.
42. Ibid, p. 228.
43. See note 11, p. 102.
44. See note 2.
45. See note 19.
46. Bernal, J.D. (1921). Diary. JDB Papers, O.23.1.
47. See note 19.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. See note 22, p. 185.
52. See note 19.