The man who fell in love with a table
John Gross
UNCLE TUNGSTEN by Oliver Sacks Picador, £17.99, pp. 336, ISBN 0330390279 hen Oliver Sacks was a boy, one of his teachers wrote in an end-of-term report: 'Sacks will go far if he does not go too far.' Certainly the young Oliver didn't do things by halves. The great passion of his boyhood was chemistry, which he pursued with an astonishing energy: but that still left room for a swarm of lesser passions, from music to photography. Any one of them would have taken up a large slice of an ordinary boy's spare time.
Sacks's parents were doctors — his mother a gynaecologist, his father a GP — and from the outset there was an assumption that the future author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat would follow in their footsteps. But there were broader scientific traditions in the family as well. Thanks to a remarkable autodidact grandfather, most of Sacks's many uncles and aunts on his mother's side had had some kind of scientific education. A number of them, along with some of his cousins, became scientists or mathematicians themselves, and as his own interest in science flowered he could rely on the encouragement of a formidable family support-system. There was Auntie Len, for instance, 'my botanical aunt', and Uncle Dave, 'my chemical and mineralogical uncle', and Uncle Abe, a scientistbusinessman whose achievements ranged from devising an improved method of 'pearling' light-bulbs to taking part in the invention of Marmite. (When Oliver became interested in astronomy, Abe was ready to hand: he had a small observatory on the roof of his house.) The most important of these mentors was Dave, the 'Uncle Tungsten' — it was a family nickname — from whom Sacks's memoir takes its title. Dave ran a firm which made light-bulbs with filaments of tungsten wire, but his fascination with the metal, and with metals and rocks in general, went far beyond commercial considerations. Oliver, from his early years, was fascinated by metals himself — by their feel, their colour, everything about them. He turned to Dave for guidance, and embarked on the long voyage of explo
ration which the memoir chronicles.
While Dave offered expertise, Sacks also owed a great deal to the liberal attitudes of his parents. They allowed him to rig up his own laboratory. and endured the sometimes messy or malodorous results. He spent his pocket money on samples from chemical supply houses and works of popular science — often battered Victorian volumes, which he writes about with affection. He was left free to haunt the Science Museum in South Kensington, where at the age of 12 he experienced a memorable epiphany — his first sight of the giant periodic table of the elements on display there, 'the most beautiful thing I had ever seen'. (He was uncertain, he adds, whether the source of the beauty was simplicity, coherence, rhythm, inevitability — 'or perhaps it was the symmetry, the comprehensiveness of every element firmly locked into its place, with no gaps, no exceptions, everything implying everything else'.)
There are moments, reading the book, when you are tempted to conclude that he was essentially the product of his environment. How could an extended family like the one he describes have failed to produce an Oliver Sacks sooner or later? But to believe that would be to reckon without the quality of his response — its ardour, its breadth, its humour. At almost every stage, even as a boy, he seems to have set what he was doing in its human context. He was especially interested in the history of science, and at least half Uncle Tungsten is given over — though not at one stretch — to an idiosyncratic account of the development of chemistry, with brilliant sketches of Boyle, Lavoisier, Davy, Dalton, Mendeleyev and other key personalities.
These pages reveal a powerful gift for popularisation, but they are not quite what you expect from a childhood memoir. There is bound to be a suspicion that if he is putting a lot of science in, he is leaving a lot of himself out.
He does in fact tell us a good deal about his non-scientific life. His writing is pointed enough for him to convey extended impressions of his parents, and other significant figures, within a few pages. He is also well aware that science partly served as a refuge from the blows which ordinary existence could inflict, and he leaves no doubt as to what the heaviest of those blows was. At the beginning of the war, when he was six, he was packed off for safety's sake to a small boarding school. It was run by a sadistic wretch (though his parents failed to realise what was going on), and he endured four years of misery. No wonder he later took so much pleasure in The Jungle Book, a consoling fantasy which had its origins in another childhood scarred by cruelty and apparent parental indifference.
Sacks doesn't dwell at length on the boarding-school episode and its emotional fall-out. He doesn't have to. There is anger in Uncle Tungsten, implicit rather than paraded. But there is also anger overcome.
If unhappiness was one of the forces that propelled him towards science, it soon counted for less than his enthusiasm and curiosity. He arrived at what was surely a balanced (and on the whole sympathetic) view of his parents. The qualities which eventually made him an outstanding writer emerged undamaged: insight, drive, a sense of drama, a love of life (for all that can be said against it), a feeling for what makes people what they are. He was to go far — and his memoir not only reveals some of the sources of his achievement, it is part of that achievement itself.
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