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 potentiaclass="underline" 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.