Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (12 page)

When it was time for my father to open his own practice, he decided, despite this early training in neurology, that general practice would be more real, more ‘alive.’ Perhaps he got more than he bargained for, for when he opened his practice in the East End in September 1918, the great influenza epidemic was just getting started. He had seen wounded soldiers when he was a houseman at the London, but this was nothing to the horror of seeing people in paroxysms of coughing and gasping, suffocating from the fluid in their lungs, turning blue and dropping dead in the streets. A strong, healthy young man or woman, it was said, could die from the flu within three hours of getting it. In those three desperate months at the end of 1918, the flu killed more people than the Great War itself had, and my father, like every doctor at the time, found himself overwhelmed, sometimes working forty-eight hours at a stretch.

At this point he engaged his sister Alida – a young widow with two children who had returned to London from South Africa three years before – to work as his assistant in the dispensary. Around the same time, he took on another young doctor, Yitzchak Eban, to help him on his rounds. Yitzchak had been born in Joniski, the same little village in Lithuania where the Sacks family lived. Alida and Yitzchak had been playmates as infants, but then in 1895 his family had gone to Scotland, a few years before the Sackses had come to London. Reunited twenty years later, working together in the febrile and intense atmosphere of the epidemic, Alida and Yitzchak fell in love, and married in 1920.

As children, we had relatively little contact with Auntie Alida (though I thought of her as the quickest and wittiest of my aunts – she had sudden intuitions, sudden swoops of thought and feeling, which I came to think of as characteristic of the ‘Sacks mind,’ in contrast to the more methodical, more analytical, mental processes of the Landaus). But Auntie Lina, my father’s eldest sister, was a constant presence. She was fifteen years older than Pop, tiny in size – four foot nine in her high heels – but with an iron will, a ruthless determination. She had dyed golden hair, as coarse as a doll’s, and gave off a mixed scent of garlic, sweat, and patchouli. It was Lina who had furnished our house, and Lina who would often provide us at 37 with certain special items which she herself cooked – fish cakes (Marcus and David called her Fishcake, or sometimes Fishface, after these), rich crumbly cheesecakes, and, at Passover, matzoh balls of an incredible tellurian density, which would sink like little planetismals below the surface of the soup. Careless of the social graces, she would bend down at the table, when at home, and blow her nose on the tablecloth. Despite this, she was enchanting in company, when she would glitter and coquette, but also listen intently, judging the character and motive of everyone around her. She would draw confidences out of the unwary, and with her diabolical memory, retain all that she had heard.«12»

But her ruthlessness, her unscrupulousness, had a noble purpose, for she used them to raise money for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She had dossiers, it seemed, on everyone in England, or so I sometimes imagined, and once she was certain of her information and sources, she would lift the phone. ‘Lord G.? This is Lina Halper.’ There would be a pause, a gasp, Lord G. would know what was coming. ‘Yes,’ she would continue pleasantly, ‘yes, you know me. There is that little business – no, we won’t go into details – that little affair in Bognor, in March ‘23…No, of course I won’t mention it, it’ll be our little secret – what can I put you down for? Fifty thousand, perhaps? I can’t tell you what it would mean to the Hebrew University.’ By this sort of blackmail Lina raised millions of pounds for the university, the most efficient fund-raiser, probably, they had ever known.

Lina, considerably the oldest, had- been ‘a little mother’ to her much younger siblings when they came to England from Lithuania in 1899, and after the early death of her husband, she took over my father, in a sense, and vied with my mother for his company and affections. I was always aware of the tension, the unspoken rivalry, between them, and had a sense of my father – soft, passive, indecisive – being pulled this way and that between them.

While Lina was regarded by many in the family as a sort of monster, she had a soft spot for me, as I had for her. She was especially important to me, to all of us perhaps, at the start of the war, for we were in Bournemouth on our summer holiday when war was declared, and our parents, as doctors, had to leave immediately for London, leaving the four of us with the nanny. They came back a couple of weeks later, and my relief, our relief, was prodigious. I remember rushing down the garden path when I heard the hoot of the car, and flinging myself bodily into my mother’s arms, so vehemently I almost knocked her over. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I cried, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ She hugged me, a long hug, holding me tight in her arms, and the sense of loss, of fear, suddenly dissolved.

Our parents promised to come again very soon. They would try to manage the next weekend, they said, but there was a great deal for them to do in London – my mother was occupied with emergency trauma surgery, my father was organizing local G.P.s for casualties in air raids. But this time they did not come at the weekend. Another week passed, and another, and another, and something, I think, broke inside me at this point, for when they did come again, six weeks after their first visit, I did not run up to my mother or embrace her as I had the first time, but treated her coldly, impersonally, like a stranger. She was, I think, shocked and bewildered by this, but did not know how to bridge the gulf that had come between us.

At this point, when the effects of parental absence had become unmistakable, Lina came up, took over the house, did the cooking, organized our lives, and became a little mother to us all, filling in the gap left by our own mother’s absence.

This little interlude did not last long – Marcus and David went off to medical school, and Michael and I were packed off to Braefield. But I never forgot Lina’s tenderness to me at this time, and after the war I took to visiting her in London, in her high-ceilinged, brocaded room in Elgin Avenue. She would give me cheesecake, sometimes a fish cake, and a little glass of sweet wine, and I would listen to her reminiscences of the old country. My father was only three or four when he left, and had no memories of it; Lina, eighteen or nineteen at the time, had vivid and fascinating memories of Joniski, the shtetl near Vilna where they had all been born, and of her parents, my grandparents, as they were in comparative youth. It may be that she had a special feeling for me as the youngest, or because I had the same name as her father, Elivelva, Oliver Wolf. I had the sense, too, that she was lonely and enjoyed the visits of her young nephew.

Then there was my father’s brother, Bennie. Bennie had been excommunicated, left the family fold, at nineteen, when he had gone to Portugal and married a gentile, a shiksa. This was a crime so scandalous, so heinous in the eyes of the family that his name was never mentioned thereafter. But I knew there was something hidden, a family secret of sorts; I surprised certain silences, certain awkwardnesses, sometimes, when my parents whispered together, and I once saw a photo of Bennie on one of Lina’s embossed cabinets (she said it was someone else, but I picked up the hesitation in her voice).

My father, always powerfully built, started to put on weight after the war and decided to go at regular intervals to a fat farm in Wales. These visits never seemed to do him much good, weight-wise, but he would come back from them looking happy and well, his London pallor replaced by a healthy tan. It was only after his death, many years later, that, looking through his papers, I found a sheaf of plane tickets that told the true story – he had never been to the fat farm at all, but loyally, secretly, had been going to visit Bennie in Portugal all these years.

A Chemical Language

U
ncle Dave saw all science as a wholly human, no less than an intellectual and technological, enterprise, and it seemed natural to me, in my turn, to do the same. When I set up my lab and started some chemical experiments of my own, I wanted to learn about the history of chemistry in a more general way, to find out what chemists did, how they thought, the atmosphere in centuries past. I had long been fascinated by our family and family tree – by tales of the uncles who had gone off to South Africa, and of the man who had fathered them all, and of the first ancestor of my mother’s of whom we had any record, an alchemically inclined rabbi, it was said, one Lazar Weiskopf, who lived in Lübeck in the seventeenth century. This may have been the incitement to a more general love of history, and a tendency, perhaps, to see it in familial terms. And so the scientists, the early chemists, whom I read about became, in a sense, honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection. I needed to understand how these early chemists thought, to imagine myself into their worlds.

Chemistry as a true science, I read, made its first emergence with the work of Robert Boyle in the middle of the seventeenth century. Twenty years Newton’s senior, Boyle was born at a time when the practice of alchemy still held sway, and he still maintained a variety of alchemical beliefs and practices, side by side with his scientific ones. He believed that gold could be created, and that he had succeeded in creating it (Newton, also an alchemist, advised him to keep silent about this). He was a man of immense curiosity (of ‘holy curiosity,’ in Einstein’s phrase), for all the wonders of nature, Boyle felt, proclaimed the glory of God, and this led him to examine a huge range of phenomena.

He examined crystals and their structure, and was the first to discover their cleavage planes. He explored color, and wrote a book on this which influenced Newton. He devised the first chemical indicator, a paper soaked with syrup of violets which would turn red in the presence of acid fluids, green with alkaline ones. He wrote the first book in English on electricity. He prepared hydrogen, without realizing it, by putting iron nails in sulphuric acid. He found that although most fluids contracted when frozen, water expanded. He showed that a gas (later realized to be carbon dioxide) was evolved when he poured vinegar on powdered coral, and that flies would die if kept in this ‘artificial air.’ He investigated the properties of blood and was interested in the possibility of blood transfusion. He experimented with the perception of odors and tastes. He was the first to describe semipermeable membranes. He provided the first case history of acquired achromatopsia, a total loss of color vision following a brain infection.

All these investigations and many others he described in language of great plainness and clarity, utterly different from the arcane and enigmatic language of the alchemists. Anyone could read him and repeat his experiments; he stood for the openness of science, as opposed to the closed, hermetic secrecy of alchemy.

Although his interests were universal, chemistry seemed to hold a very special appeal for him (even as a youth he called his own chemical laboratory ‘a kind of Elysium’). He wished, above all, to understand the nature of matter, and his most famous book,
The Sceptical Chymist
, was written to debunk the mystical doctrine of the Four Elements, and to unite the enormous, centuries-old empirical knowledge of alchemy and pharmacy with the new, enlightened rationality of his age.

The ancients had thought in terms of four basic principles or elements – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. I think these were pretty much my own categories as a five-year-old child (though metals may have made a special, fifth category for me), but I found it less easy to imagine the Three Principles of the alchemists, where ‘Sulphur’ and ‘Mercury’ and ‘Salt’ meant not ordinary sulphur and mercury and salt but ‘philosophical’ Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt: Mercury conferring luster and hardness to a substance, Sulphur conferring color and combustibility, Salt conferring solidity and resistance to fire.

Boyle hoped to replace these ancient, mystical notions of Elements and Principles with a rational and empirical one, and provided the first modern definition of an element:

I now mean by Elements [he wrote]…certain Primitive and Simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made up of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those call’d perfectly mixd Bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved.

But since he gave no examples of such ‘Elements’ or of how their ‘unmingledness’ was to be demonstrated, his definition seemed too abstract to be useful.

Though I found
The Sceptical Chymist
unreadable, I was delighted by Boyle’s 1660
New Experiments
, where he set out, with an enchanting vividness and a wealth of personal detail, more than forty experiments using his ‘Pneumatical Engine’ (an air pump that his assistant Robert Hooke had invented), with which he could evacuate much of the air from a closed vessel.«13» In these experiments Boyle effectively demolished the ancient belief that air was an ethereal, all-pervading medium by showing that it was a material substance with physical and chemical properties of its own, that it could be compressed or rarefied or even weighed.

Evacuating the air from a closed vessel that contained a lit candle or a glowing coal, Boyle found that these ceased to burn as the air was rarefied, although the coal would begin to glow again if air was reintroduced – thus showing that air was necessary for combustion. He showed, too, that various creatures – insects, birds, or mice – would become distressed or die if the air pressure was reduced, but might revive when air was readmitted to the vessel. He was struck by this similarity between combustion and respiration.

He investigated whether a bell could be heard through a vacuum (it could not), whether a magnet could exert power through a vacuum (it could), whether insects could fly in a vacuum (this he could not judge, because the insects ‘swooned’ with reduction of air pressure), and he examined the effects of reduced air pressure on the glowing of glowworms (they glowed less brightly).