No easy story
Anthony Holden
From Apes to Warlords SoIly Zuckerman (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) One of the first Portraits of the Author As A Young Man in this book is a photo of SoIly Zuckerman, aged twenty-one, dissecting a baboon in his native South Africa. Beneath it is a picture of him cuddling a monkey, ten years later, in Oxford. By the end of the war, another ten years on, he had been reduced to eating them.
To be fair, he drew the line at goats. But Zuckerman's attitudes to apes and to human beings, in this fat and only partial autobiography, emerge as equally clinical. There are a lot of interesting people here; but he dissects human character with as much cold, scientific detachment, though not in as much detail, as he does non-human anatomy. Of himself, very little emerges at vast length. This is one of those memoirs for students of its author's special subjects, in this case biology and military history, not for those interested in the pulses of distinguished, action-packed lives.
It does not seem a logical progression from ape anatomist to wartime bombing Policy-maker, but in a strange way it was. Zuckerman's early life was spent around and inside monkeys and — especially in his Years as research anatomist at London Zoo — associated animals. With the outbreak of War, he was using them in experiments to determine the effects of bomb blast. Out of this grew a pivotal role in the fierce arguments about tactical bombing, with Zuc
kerman advocating the destruction of transport links (specifically, railways) rather than people.
He was, of course, right, strategically quite apart from morally. With Eisenhower and Tedder finally on his side, he was up against 'Bomber' Harris, a man disposed to taking his own orders rather than anyone else's, and Churchill through his right-hand man Lord Cherwell (rather irritatingly referred to throughout by his Christ Church nickname, 'The Prof'). What could have been a gripping narrative, with top-brass bickering almost fouling up Operation Overlord, becomes very heavy going as Zuckerman's academic prose tiptoes through a minefield of posthumous reputations.
He does, however, suggest, and at times articulate, the particular dangers common to military and scientific myopia. Neither of these supposedly co-operating camps really understood each other, and at times politicians would deliberately misunderstand one to persuade the other. In his influential March 1942 minute to Churchill, proposing the 'area-bombing' of German industrial cities and their populations, Cherwell completely distorted Zuckerman's survey of the bombing of Hull and Birmingham. 'There seems little doubt it would break the spirit of the people,' wrote Cherwell; 'there was no measurable effect on the health of either town', Zuckerman had concluded. Was Cherwell's falsification deliberate? Don't ask Solly Zuckerman. He is none too encouraging, furthermore, about these gentlemen's heirs in the nuclear age. He reminds us of Attlee's extra ordinary confession about Potsdam: 'We knew nothing whatever at that time about the genetic effects of an atomic explosion.' Nor, says Zuckerman, did the scientists. 'Issues such as the danger of radioactive environmental contamination, of possibly disastrous genetic changes, of radiationinduced cancer, did not come to the forefront of discussion until the 'fifties' — and nothing was done about them until the partial test ban treaty of 1963. What little has happened since leads this scientist to conclude, none too earthshakingly: 'Survival today depends on mutual deterrence, on fear of mutual annihilation, but the armsrace is nonetheless urged on by the momentum in the system.'
For the rest, Zuckerman — like so many unlikely academics — spent a part of his youth among such show-biz charismatics as the Gershwins, Dashiel Hammett and even Tallulah Bankhead. His sketches, alas, are much less vivid than those of A. J. Ayer, whose recent early autobiography overlaps here and there, and coincidentally ends in the same year, 1946. Zuckerman, again somehow surprisingly, tells us he introduced Ayer to e. e. cummings and — more
significantly — Bertrand Russell. I checked back to see if this could be true, and was
pleased to find the philosopher acknowledging his debt to old Zuck, relating the while much better anecdotes about him than he himself can muster.
Although the first 370 pages of this book tell even the specialist reader a good deal more than he can want to know, the past thirty years of Zuckerman's life are covered in just two more. In 1964, as we all know, he became high priest of Harold Wilson's white-hot technological revolution, and I
for one could take quite a lot of detail on that subject. His Lordship is clearly girding up for another hefty tome, whilst warning us that it will not be easy to tell the story of those post-war years'. Whatever dark hint lurks here, his second volume should be assured of a captive audience; on the evidence of his first, however, Ayer's continued confessions remain considerably more enticing.
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