Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

by Oliver Sacks

  We gloried shamelessly in the luxury of the Schweizerhof, lying for hours, it seemed, in the enormous marble baths, eating ourselves sick in the opulent restaurant. But eventually we grew tired of overindulgence and started to wander through the old city with its crooked streets and its sudden views of mountain and lake. We took the funicular train up its cogwheel track to the summit of Mount Rigi – my first time on a funicular, or a mountain. And then we moved to the alpine village of Arosa, where the air was cool and dry, and I saw edelweiss and gentian for the first time, and tiny churches of painted wood, and heard the alpenhorn resound from valley to valley. It was in Arosa, I think, even more than Lucerne, that a sudden sense of joyousness finally overcame me, a feeling of liberation and release, a sense of the sweetness of life, of a future, of promise. I was thirteen – thirteen! – did not life stand before me?

  On the return journey, we stopped in Zurich (the town, Uncle Abe once told me, where Euler the mathematician had been born). And this stay, while otherwise unremarkable, remains in my memory for a very special reason. My father, who always sought out a swimming pool wherever he stayed, located a large municipal pool in the city. He immediately started lapping the pool, with the powerful overarm of which he was a master, but I, in a lazier mood, found a corkboard, hoisted myself upon it, and decided, for once, to let it buoy me, and just float. I lost all sense of time as I floated, lying still on the board, or paddling very gently. A strange ease, a sort of rapture came upon me – a feeling I had sometimes known in dreams. I had floated on corkboards, or rubber rings, or waterwings before, but this time something magical was happening, a slowly swelling, enormous wave of joy that lifted me higher and higher, seemed to go on and on, forever, and then finally subsided in a languorous bliss. It was the most beautiful, peaceful feeling I had ever had.

  It was only when I came to take off my swimming trunks that I realized I must have had an orgasm. It did not occur to me to connect this with ‘sex,’ or other people; I did not feel anxious or guilty – but I kept it to myself, feeling it as magic, private, a benison or grace that had come upon me spontaneously, unsought. I felt as if I had discovered a great secret.

  In January 1946 I moved from my prep school in Hampstead, The Hall, to a much larger school, St. Paul’s, in Hammersmith. It was here, in the Walker Library, that I met Jonathan Miller for the first time: I was hidden in a corner, reading a nineteenth-century book on electrostatics – reading, for some reason, about ‘electric eggs’ – when a shadow fell across the page. I looked up and saw an astonishingly tall, gangling boy with a very mobile face, brilliant, impish eyes, and an exuberant mop of reddish hair. We got talking together, and have been close friends ever since.

  Prior to this time, I had had only one real friend, Eric Korn, whom I had known almost from birth. Eric followed me from The Hall to St. Paul’s a year later, and now he and Jonathan and I formed an inseparable trio, bound not only by personal but by family bonds too (our fathers, thirty years earlier, had all been medical students together, and our families had remained close). Jonathan and Eric did not really share my love of chemistry – although they joined in the sodium-throwing experiment and one or two others – but they were intensely interested in biology, and it was inevitable, when the time came, that we would find ourselves together in the same biology class, and that all of us would fall in love with our biology teacher, Sid Pask.

  Sid was a splendid teacher. He was also narrow-minded, bigoted, cursed with a hideous stutter (which we would imitate endlessly), and by no means exceptionally intelligent. By dissuasion, irony, ridicule, or force, Mr. Pask would turn us away from all other activities – from sport and sex, from religion and families, and from all our other subjects at school. He demanded that we be as single-minded as himself.

  The majority of his pupils found him an impossibly demanding and exacting taskmaster. They would do all they could to escape from this pedant’s petty tyranny, as they regarded it. The struggle would go on for a while, and then suddenly there was no longer any resistance – they were free. Pask no longer carped at them, no longer made ridiculous demands upon their time and energy.

  Yet some of us, each year, responded to Pask’s challenge. In return he gave us all of himself – all his time, all his dedication, for biology. We would stay late in the evening with him in the Natural History Museum (I once hid myself in a gallery and managed to spend the night there). We would sacrifice every weekend to plant-collecting expeditions. We would get up at dawn on freezing winter days to go on his January freshwater course. And once a year – there is still an almost intolerable sweetness about the memory – we would go with him to Millport for three weeks of marine biology.

  Millport, off the western coast of Scotland, had a beautifully equipped marine biology station, where we were always given a friendly welcome and inducted into whatever experiments were going on. (Fundamental observations were being made on the development of sea urchins at this time, and Lord Rothschild was endlessly patient with the enthusiastic schoolboys who crowded around and peered into his petri dishes with the transparent pluteus larvae.) Jonathan, Eric, and I made several transects on the rocky shore together, counting all the animals and seaweeds we could on successive square-foot portions from the lichen-covered summit of the rock (Xantboria parietina was the euphonious name of this lichen) to the shoreline and tidal pools below. Eric was particularly and wittily ingenious, and once, when we needed a plumb line to give us a true vertical, but did not know how to suspend it, he pried a limpet from the base of a rock, placed the tip of the plumb line beneath it, and firmly reattached it at the top as a natural drawing pin.

  We all adopted particular zoological groups: Eric became enamored of sea cucumbers, holothurians; Jonathan of iridescent bristled worms, polychaetes; and I of squids and cuttlefish, octopuses, cephalopods – the most intelligent and, to my eyes, the most beautiful of invertebrates. One day we all went down to the seashore, to Hythe in Kent, where Jonathan’s parents had taken a house for the summer, and went out for a day’s fishing on a commercial trawler. The fishermen would usually throw back the cuttlefish that ended up in their nets (they were not popular eating in England). But I, fanatically, insisted that they keep them for me, and there must have been dozens of them on the deck by the time we came in. We took all the cuttlefish back to the house in pails and tubs, put them in large jars in the basement, and added a little alcohol to preserve them. Jonathan’s parents were away, so we did not hesitate. We would be able to take all the cuttlefish back to school, to Sid – we imagined his astonished smile as we brought them in – and there would be a cuttlefish apiece for everyone in the class to dissect, two or three apiece for the cephalopod enthusiasts. I myself would give a little talk about them at the Field Club, dilating on their intelligence, their large brains, their eyes with erect retinas, their rapidly changing colors.

  A few days later, the day Jonathan’s parents were due to return, we heard dull thuds emanating from the basement, and going down to investigate, we encountered a grotesque scene: the cuttlefish, insufficiently preserved, had putrefied and fermented, and the gases produced had exploded the jars and blown great lumps of cuttlefish all over the walls and floor; there were even shreds of cuttlefish stuck to the ceiling. The intense smell of putrefaction was awful beyond imagination. We did our best to scrape off the walls and remove the exploded, impacted lumps of cuttlefish. We hosed down the basement, gagging, but the stench was not to be removed, and when we opened windows and doors to air out the basement, it extended outside the house as a sort of miasma for fifty yards in every direction.

  Eric, always ingenious, suggested we mask the smell, or replace it, by an even stronger, but pleasant smell – a coconut essence, we decided, would fill the bill. We pooled our resources and bought a large bottle of this, which we used to douche the basement, and then distributed liberally through the rest of the house and its grounds.

  Jonathan’s parents arrived an hour later and, advancing toward the ho
use, hit an overwhelming scent of coconut. But as they drew nearer they hit a zone dominated by the stench of putrefied cuttlefish – the two smells, the two vapors, for some curious reason, had organized themselves in alternating zones about five or six feet wide. By the time they reached the scene of our accident, our crime, the basement, the smell was insupportable for more than a few seconds. The three of us were all in deep disgrace over the incident, I especially, since it had arisen from my greed in the first place (would not a single cuttlefish have done?) and my folly in not realizing how much alcohol they would need. Jonathan’s parents had to cut short their holiday and leave the house (the house itself, we heard, remained uninhabitable for months). But my love of cuttlefish remained unimpaired.

  Perhaps there was a chemical reason for this, as well as a biological one, for cuttlefish (like many other molluscs and crustaceans) had blue blood, not red, because they had evolved a completely different system for transporting oxygen from the one we vertebrates had. Whereas our red respiratory pigment, hemoglobin, contained iron, their bluish green pigment, hemocyanin, contained copper. Both iron and copper had excellent reduction potential: they could easily take up oxygen, moving to a higher oxidation state, and then relinquish it, get reduced, as needed. I wondered if their neighbors in the periodic table (some with even greater redox potential) were ever exploited as respiratory pigments, and got most excited when I heard that some sea squirts, tunicates, were extremely rich in the element vanadium, and had special cells, vanadocytes, devoted to storing it. Why they contained these was a mystery; they did not seem to be part of an oxygen-transport system. Absurdly, impudently, I thought I might solve this mystery during one of our annual excursions to Millport. But I got no further than collecting a bushel of sea squirts (with the same greed, the same inordinacy, that had caused me to collect too many cuttlefish). I could incinerate these, I thought, and measure the vanadium content of their ash (I had read that this could exceed 40 percent in some species). And this gave me the only commercial idea I have ever had: to open a vanadium farm – acres of sea meadows, seeded with sea squirts. I would get them to extract the precious vanadium from seawater, as they had been doing very efficiently for the last 300 million years, and then sell it for £500 a ton. The only problem, I realized, aghast at my own genocidal thoughts, would be the veritable holocaust of sea squirts required.

  The organic, with all its complexities, was entering my own life, transforming me, in the strongholds of my own body. Suddenly I started to grow very fast; hair sprouted on my face, in my armpits, around my genitals; and my voice – still a clear treble when I chanted my haftorah – now started to break, to change pitch erratically. In biology class at school, I developed a sudden, intense interest in the reproductive systems of animals and plants, ‘lower’ ones particularly, invertebrates and gymnosperms. The sexuality of cycads, of ginkgos, intrigued me, the way they preserved still-motile spermatozoa, like ferns, but had such large and well-protected seeds. And cephalopods, squid, were even more interesting, for the males actually thrust a modified arm bearing spermatophores into the mantle cavity of the female. I was still at a great distance from human sexuality, my own sexuality, but I started to find sexuality as a subject extremely intriguing, almost as interesting, in its way, as valency or periodicity.

  But enamored though we were with biology, none of us could be as monomaniacal as Mr. Pask. There were all the pulls of youth, of adolescence, and all the energy of minds that wanted to explore in all directions, not yet ready to be committed.

  My own mood had been predominantly scientific for four years; a passion for order, for formal beauty, had drawn me on – the beauty of the periodic table, the beauty of Dalton’s atoms. Bohr’s quantal atom seemed to me a heavenly thing, groomed, as it were, to last for an eternity. At times I felt a sort of ecstasy at the formal intellectual beauty of the universe. But now, with the onset of other interests, I sometimes felt the opposite of this, a sort of emptiness or aridity inside, for the beauty, the love of science, no longer entirely satisfied me, and I hungered now for the human, the personal.

  It was music especially which brought this hunger out, and assuaged it; music which made me tremble, or want to weep, or howl; music which seemed to penetrate me to the core, to call to my condition – even though I could not say what it was ‘about,’ why it affected me the way it did. Mozart, above all, raised feelings of an almost unbearable intensity, but to define these feelings was beyond me, perhaps beyond the power of language itself.

  Poetry became important in a new, personal way. We had ‘done’ Milton and Pope at school, but now I started to discover them for myself. There were lines in Pope of an overwhelming tenderness – ’Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ – which I would whisper to myself again and again, until they transported me to another world.

  Jonathan and Eric and I had all grown up with a love of reading and literature: Jonathan’s mother was a novelist and biographer, and Eric, the most precocious of us, had been reading poetry since he was eight. My own reading tended more to history and biography, and especially personal narratives and journals. (I had also started keeping a journal of my own at this point.) My own tastes being (as they saw it) somewhat restricted, Eric and Jonathan introduced me to a wider range of writing – Jonathan to Selma Lagerlof and Proust (I had only heard of Joseph-Louis Proust, the chemist, not of Marcel), and Eric to T.S. Eliot, whose poetry, he contended, was greater than Shakespeare’s. And it was Eric who took me to the Cosmo Restaurant in Finchley Road, where over lemon tea and strudel we would listen to a young medical-student poet, Dannie Abse, recite the poems he had just written.

  The three of us decided, impudently, to form a Literary Society at school; one already existed, it was true – the Milton Society – but it had been moribund for many years. Jonathan was to be our secretary, Eric our treasurer, and I (though I felt I was the most ignorant of the three, as well as the shyest) its president.

  We announced a first meeting to explore things, and a curious group came. There was a strong desire to invite outside speakers to address us – poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists – and it fell upon me, as president, to tempt them into coming. An astonishing number of writers did come to our meetings – drawn (I imagine) by the sheer eccentricity of the invitations, their absurd mixture of childishness and grown-upness, and the idea, perhaps, of a crowd of enthusiastic boys who had actually read some of their works, and who were agog to meet them. The biggest coup would have been Bernard Shaw – but he sent me a charming postcard, in a shaky hand, saying that though he would love to come, he was too old to travel (he was ninety-three and three-quarters, he wrote). With our invited speakers, and the vehement discussions that followed, we became very popular, and fifty or seventy boys would sometimes turn up for our weekly meetings, far more than had ever been seen at the sedate meetings of the Milton Society. In addition, we published a smudgy, purple-inked mimeographed journal, the Prickly Pear, which included pieces by the students and occasionally one of the masters and, very occasionally, from ‘real’ outside writers.

  But our very success, and perhaps other, never explicitly avowed thoughts – that we were mocking authority, that we had subversive intent, that we had ‘killed’ the Milton Society (which had now, in reaction, suspended its never-frequent meetings), and that we were a lot of obnoxious, noisy, clever Jewish boys who needed to be put down – led to our demise. The High Master called me in one day, and said without ceremony, ‘Sacks, you’re dissolved.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’ I stammered. ‘You can’t just ‘dissolve’ us.’

  ‘Sacks, I can do whatever I want. Your literary society is dissolved as of this moment.’

  ‘But why, sir?’ I asked. ‘What are your reasons?’

  ‘I don’t have to give them to you, Sacks. I don’t have to have reasons. You can go now, Sacks. You don’t exist. You don’t exist anymore.’ With this, he snapped his fingers – a gesture of dismissal, of annihilation – and went back
to his work.

  I took the news to Eric and Jonathan, and to others who had been members of our society. We were outraged, and puzzled, but we felt completely helpless. The High Master had authority, absolute power, and there was nothing we could do to resist it or oppose him.

  Cannery Row was published in 1945 or 1946, and I must have read it fairly soon after – perhaps in 1948, when I was doing biology in school, and marine biology had been added to my list of interests. I loved the figure of Doc, his searching for baby octopus in the tidal pools near Monterey, his drinking beer milkshakes with the boys, the idyllic ease and sweetness of his life. I thought that I, too, would like to have a life like him, to live in magical, mythical California (already, with cowboy films, a land of fantasy for me). America was increasingly in my thoughts as I entered my teens – it had been our great ally in the war; its power, its resources, were almost unlimited. Had it not made the world’s first atomic bomb? American soldiers on leave walked the streets of London – their gestures, their speech, seeming to emit a self-confidence, a nonchalance, an ease almost unimaginable to us after six years of war. Life magazine, in its large spreads, pictured mountains, canyons, deserts, landscapes of a spaciousness and magnificence beyond anything in Europe, along with American towns full of smiling, eager, well-nourished people, their houses gleaming, their shops full, enjoying a life of plenty and gaiety unimaginable to us, with the tight rationing, the pinched consciousness of the war years still upon us. To this glamorous picture of transatlantic ease, and bigger-than-life spontaneity and splendor, musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and Oklahoma! added a further mythopoeic force. It was in this atmosphere of romantic enlargement that Cannery Row and (despite its sickliness) its sequel, Sweet Thursday, had such an impact on me.