Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  Charlie bought his own space for a reply in the next edition, and the public debate ground on for three weeks without any resolution. In his final broadside, Herman offered this insight into the Pauling character: ". . . some people are afraid of the truth, and if telling the truth is knocking, then I must plead guilty, and what's more I shall continue doing this unfalteringly as long as I live. . . . I am going to have the last say if it takes forty years."

  Herman's reputation had been blackened. Soon after came his arrest for bootlegging and then, adding injury to insult, a fire destroyed some of the stock of the Red Cross store. Linus remembered passing by on his way home from school and seeing his father sitting on the curb outside the blackened store, shards of the shattered plate-glass window scattered around him, his head in his hands.

  - - -

  Herman had had enough of Condon. Between insurance proceeds and the sale of his share of the company, he made enough money to move his family back to Portland and start again. He found a good building on a busy street in a fast-growing suburb of the city and began remodeling it into a dream drugstore. He had learned some lessons in Condon: Stock was cut back to items more traditionally associated with a drugstore—no more jewelry or phonographs—and a first-rate soda fountain was added. Herman rented a fine house nearby for the family.

  Typically, he threw himself into his new business, working long hours to get it started right. Herman had once written Belle, "My one desire is to acquire enough wealth so that you and our darlings can live in luxury and enjoy life to its fullest extent." Now he was in a position to do it.

  Then, on an unseasonably hot June day in 1910, just a few months after returning to Portland, Herman fell suddenly ill. The next day, he was dead.

  Although the official cause of death was gastritis, Linus would later conclude that a perforating ulcer—the "tummick ake" Herman had complained of for so long—probably killed his father. It is likely that stress was a contributing factor. To some degree at least, Herman Pauling had, at age thirty-three, worked himself to death.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Boardinghouse

  "... a wonder we survived "

  Linus was nine years old the morning his Aunt Beth drew him aside and told him that he must be strong, that his father had passed away. The boy's reaction was strangely muted. He didn't fall apart or protect himself with disbelief. He didn't even cry. When asked decades later about the day of his father's death, he would remember that he experienced no sadness or anger, that he felt no special emotion of any sort then or later. When asked why his reaction was so unemotional, he said, "I suppose that I just accepted life."

  In fact, he was shattered. No nine-year-old boy—even an exceptionally intelligent, well-read boy—is capable of rationalizing death away, especially the death of his father. While Herman had not been a perfect father—he put too much of himself into his business; he didn't have time to know his children well—he had loved his son, had taken pride in him, had tried to guide his development. Linus was closer to his father than to any other member of the family. Herman was his role model, his ideal of manhood.

  And perhaps that ideal is what Linus was trying to achieve when he learned that his father had died. It would have been typical for a boy that age to go numb as he felt this sudden, sickening shift in his world, as he tried to comprehend what had happened. At the same time, he saw his mother falling apart. Belle had loved Herman deeply—he was the center of her life and her sole support—and when he died, she became first distraught, then hysterical. Linus would remember her breaking down completely, screaming and crying on the way to Herman's funeral. He did as he thought he must. He choked down his feelings of sorrow and abandonment in an attempt to mimic an "adult" way of dealing with an unendurable situation. He denied himself grief.

  And so, at an early age, Linus found a source of strength. He could control his emotions, he could hold steady, and in holding steady he found that he was capable of coping with his father's death. He was the man of the family now, he would have to help hold things together, and self-control was necessary. He learned this lesson well: For the rest of his life, with very few exceptions, Linus would continue to hold his emotions in check. The alternative—letting love or sorrow or any emotion engulf him—was too painful.

  - - -

  Herman's death was a severe shock to a family already under strain. Linus and his sisters were still adjusting to the move to a new town, the new school, the loss of friends. Linus didn't like Portland as well; the gloomy, six-month-long rainy season was especially hard to adjust to after Condon's clear skies and wonderfully snowy winters. In Condon he had been the son of a prominent businessman and a prodigy in a small school; in Portland he was one of a crowd.

  Belle had an added burden: Just three months before Herman's death she had lost her father, Linus Wilson Darling. Although she and her father had never been close, the quick succession of deaths and the prospect of raising three children without financial or emotional support broke her, mentally and physically. Soon after Herman's death she fell into deep depression and chronic illness from which she never recovered.

  Financially, Belle and the children were in serious trouble. After the estate was settled, Belle found herself having to fashion a new life with no house, no business skills, and no income. At first, she tried to keep Herman's drugstore going, hiring a man to manage it for her, but it didn't work. She sold the business, netting what was for that time a fair nest egg. But the money was not enough to support the family indefinitely. It had to be invested in a way that could generate enough money to keep them housed and fed. Belle finally settled on perhaps the only course of action she could take, spending almost everything she had on a house large enough to shelter her family and take in others. She would scrape by using the traditional skills of a wife and mother: cooking, cleaning, and caring for others. She would run a boardinghouse.

  It was a wrenching change for the family, a fall within a period of weeks from near affluence to near poverty. The situation was worsened by Belle's poor business sense. She paid $5,250 for a three-story, six-bedroom frame house next to a meat market on the outskirts of town and assumed a $2,300 mortgage—a total more than three times the assessed value of the property. She used more of her savings to furnish it with costly appliances, including one of the first electric ranges in the city, and hired a woman to help with cleaning and cooking. A small inheritance from her father's estate helped at first; she was able to pay off the mortgage, easing some of the month-to-month financial pressure. But the income from boarders still didn't cover her costs.

  Setting up the house took the last of Belle's strength. She began suffering from a general weakness that was later diagnosed as pernicious anemia, a ruinous, energy-sapping blood disorder in which the body is unable to properly absorb vitamin B12. The result is exhaustion, muscle weakness in the arms and legs, and in severe cases, mood swings, memory loss, even psychosis. At the time, there was no cure. Her doctor did all he could, prescribing long periods of rest and a diet rich in red meats designed to build the blood. The children would later remember the copious amounts of liver she ate, and "cannibal sandwiches" made of raw beef scrapings and blood on bread.

  Belle became increasingly a sort of living shadow, an exhausted background figure in her children's lives. At first, she tried to keep a few memories of happier times alive: She worked to provide a happy Christmas for the children, and there were weekends at Herman's parents' house in Oswego, a few singing parties (Lucile became an accomplished pianist, Pauline played the ukulele, and Linus loved to sing), and occasional short trips to the mountains with their aunts and uncles and cousins. Linus had especially happy memories of a summer month spent in the Oregon coast town of Gearhart, in a house the family got free from friends, where he fished from the dock, explored tidepools and jetties, and spent hours reading and dreaming on the beach. It was the only vacation the family had after Herman died.

  But worn out, broke, worried, and sic
k, Belle had little happiness to impart to her children. A cousin, Richard Morgan, lived in the Pauling house around 1915, when he was a child. Not once during the year he was there, he remembered, did he see Belle smile.

  - - -

  At first, after their father died, the children were allowed to "run wild," as Linus's sister Pauline remembered, playing on the streets until all hours. Belle didn't know how to be a mother and, with all the pressure on her, didn't have the time or energy—and perhaps lacked the inclination—to learn. She certainly didn't know how to raise a boy or what to tell him about life or maturing into a man. And she wasn't much better with her daughters. Belle's furtive, hurried explanation of menstruation so frightened and confused Pauline and Lucile that they felt it was a scourge that afflicted only women in their family. "I thought there was something wrong with us," Pauline said.

  After Belle had to let the hired woman go, she began depending on her children to help with cleaning, cooking, and other chores. She didn't have the energy to help them understand why they were asked to work so hard, and Linus and Pauline especially resented what they saw as constant nagging by their mother.

  The jobs were expanded to include outside work to help with the bills. At Belle's insistence, Linus began working for wages when he was about thirteen: setting pins in a bowling alley, delivering newspapers and special delivery letters and milk, selling meat at a butcher's shop, or projecting movies at a local theater on weekends. Apart from the projectionist work—Linus loved the movies, especially comedies and adventure stories—he found each job more unbearable than the last. He seemed to take pleasure in finding a reason to quit every one within a short time.

  Pauline—energetic, outgoing, pretty, flirtatious, and self-confident—took jobs every summer and dropped out of high school for a year to learn shorthand and typing at a local business college. But every penny she earned, she remembered with irritation for the rest of her life, was taken from her by Belle. Pauline's relationship with her mother became openly hostile when she was seventeen and Belle insisted that she date a well-to-do man in his mid-thirties. "My mother would have given anything if that had developed into something," she recalled. But Pauline was repelled by the thought of dating a man almost old enough to be her father. When her mother persisted, Pauline wrote a letter to the local police saying that Belle was forcing her to "go with" an older gentleman. Police detectives ("men in derbies," as Pauline remembered them) came to the house to talk with Belle, who had to do some fast talking of her own to straighten things out.

  Lucile, the quietest and shyest of the three children, took on the role of peacekeeper. Linus and Pauline both left home when they were teenagers; Lucile stayed home, studied and taught piano, and cared for her increasingly dependent mother until Belle's death. Lucile would always remember a happier, more "normal" upbringing than either her older brother or sister. But whenever she talked about her mother, she would cry.

  Pauline saw things more simply. "It was a wonder we survived," she said. "It was a very stark childhood."

  - - -

  The children were left to find their own ways to cope. The sisters, very close in age, formed a tight community of two, talking and playing, quarreling and reuniting, throughout their childhood. When she was older, Pauline became something of a party girl, arranging and attending swimming and singing get-togethers, dating a series of boys, creating a social life that filled her need for support. Lucile devoted herself to her music and to helping Belle.

  Linus withdrew into himself. He had nothing in common with his little sisters and paid as little attention to them as he could. Soon after his father's death he began distancing himself from his mother as well. Through his entire childhood, Linus could not remember having a single conversation with Belle about anything important. She had no interest in school or books, much of which she viewed as a waste of time that kept people from earning money. What communication existed was one-way, with Belle issuing requests and orders and browbeating the children, often from her bed. When Linus listened, he did so grudgingly; later, as he entered adolescence, he began openly ignoring her. "When she'd ask him to do some work around the place, like bring some wood up to the fireplace or take the garbage out or anything like that," Pauline remembered, "it would go right over his head. A week later, he still hadn't done it, you know, because he lived in a different world."

  It was a world richer, more reasonable, and more controllable than the emotional chaos of the boardinghouse. It was the world inside his mind. Linus always loved learning and found that by doing well in school his teachers would provide him some of the warmth and respect that he was missing at home. His interest in reading became a passion. About fifty books of Herman's and Linus Darling's were stored on a high shelf in the living room to keep them out of reach of the children. Linus found a way to get them down and inhaled them, everything from inspirational texts and a history of the San Francisco earthquake to Pinocchio and Dante's Inferno. He memorized Through the Looking Glass. Linus's attitude toward reading was illustrated on the bookplate he used as a boy: a pirate and a chest of loot, with the caption "Within good books lie buried treasures."

  After reading everything there was at home, he found another escape in Portland's large, marble-hailed, high-ceilinged county library, a sanctuary of order and knowledge. He spent hours there every week, racing through history books, short stories, popular fiction, and volumes on natural history. He developed a special taste for science fiction, especially Jules Verne's blend of technical wizardry and high adventure. When he was asked to visit a lonely younger cousin on weekends, he entertained her for hours by reading from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, something he remembered as a great opportunity. "I have trouble with encyclopedias," he would say later, "because I just keep reading until I stop and haul myself back to reality."

  - - -

  By the time he was ready to enter high school—he became a freshman at age twelve after going through an accelerated program in grade school—Linus was an extremely bright, self-motivated, energetic boy on the verge of puberty. He was, in other words, ripe for some type of passion.

  It would not come from social interaction. Younger and smaller than his classmates, unable to compete well in sports, bookish and painfully shy, Linus made few friends. He never dated in high school, partly because he never had money to spend on dates and partly because he didn't think of himself as very attractive. He was tongue-tied around girls and reserved around boys. "I was never much for playing or fooling around," he would say later. "I was usually by myself."

  Nor would religion inspire him. Herman and Belle had been irregular churchgoers, but Linus retained vivid memories of worship from visits with his German-born grandparents, Carl and Adelheit Pauling. After Herman's death, Belle frequently took the children to Oswego on weekends to visit their grandparents, a trip the children loved. The elder Paulings had a real home in which the woodstove was always warm and the smell of rich German cakes filled the air. A sod cellar was packed with home-canned fruits and crocks of sauerkraut and pickles; their grandmother had a cow and churned her own butter. There was a large, old-fashioned flower garden in the front yard that Adelheit harvested to create the arrangements she carried two miles to Herman's grave in Oswego Cemetery. Linus was a particular favorite of his grandmother, who gave him some of the maternal attention Belle couldn't. Carl and Adelheit were devout Lutherans. Because there was no church in Oswego, every month they would invite a minister from across the river to hold services in their house. Linus sometimes sat among the small group of worshipers in the front parlor, listening to the service and hymns sung in German. As with almost everything else that came within his range of perception, he spent time thinking about God and his works.

  That thinking culminated in a revelation. At his grandparents' one night, as he was drifting toward sleep, he began staring at a picture of Christ that hung on the wall in front of him. Suddenly, he jerked fully awake. Linus thought he had seen the halo around the Savi
or's head start to glow. Had he been more prone to belief, he might have accepted this as a minor miracle. Linus, however, checked his initial response by looking at other objects in the room and found that the glow wasn't limited to Jesus's halo. Although he didn't know the terminology, he demonstrated to himself that he had seen an optical illusion, the effect of retinal tiring from staring at the halo in the picture. Although he would think about religion off and on through his youth and would even attend a Christian Science Sunday school for a few months with a friend whose family belonged to the church, seeking a rational explanation for all phenomena came naturally to him.

  His rejection of religion led to a minor philosophical crisis. "I remember when I was eleven years old that I asked myself what evidence I had that the rest of world existed anywhere except in my consciousness," he recalled from a vantage point some seventy years later. "I could not think of any convincing evidence to the contrary." After wrestling with it for a while, though, he came to the conclusion that the people around him, the other grammar school students, appeared to have roughly the same relationship with the universe as he did. "This symmetry involves so many facets as to cause me to conclude that... it was highly probable that I myself did not occupy a unique position in the universe," he concluded.

  Having established his own philosophical position, Pauling turned his attention to everything else. He began collecting and classifying things, starting at about age eleven with a good-sized collection of insects. In this he was helped by Billy Ziegler, a drug-supply salesman and former business acquaintance of his father's who began spending considerable time at Linus's house after Herman's death. Ziegler's primary intention was to woo Belle. Although he appears never to have gotten far, perhaps because he was already married, he did make a positive impression on the children by regularly giving them little gifts (and occasionally bribing them with money to leave the house). Pauling used Ziegler as a source of supplies and convinced him to get a potentially deadly chemical, potassium cyanide, which Linus carefully mixed with plaster of paris to spread on the bottom of an insect-killing bottle.