The strongest influence in my life

BBC Radio 4, 27 May 1975⁹⁶

It is very hard to make an accurate or truthful estimation of personal influences in one’s life, because, usually, the choice one makes is determined by hopes or regrets about the sort of person one is at the moment. I think that, in making choices about strong personal influences, one is really looking backwards and making judgements about oneself, so that, at this particular moment in my life, when I am reconsidering my life in the theatre, and whether I will continue in the theatre, my choice of a biology teacher and a philosophy teacher – at school and at Cambridge respectively – is strongly determined by new feelings; and although, undoubtedly, I was powerfully affected by my first exposure to my biology teacher, I do not think that his influence would have worked strongly if I had not had some sort of interest in the subject before I met him.

At the age of 12, I was started on the path towards biology by a gift from my father. He gave me a large Victorian brass microscope, perhaps hoping to lure me into medicine as he was a doctor himself. I do not think there was anything quite so calculating, but he gave me this present and it had a very powerful effect on me. At night, with a desk lamp, I used to stare down this long barrel, this well-shaft, into a brilliantly illuminated world. I used to look at hay infusions and blood films and the surfaces of leaves and collections of diatoms and foraminifera – slides which I had bought with my spare pocket money from rather dusty microscopical shops in Soho. And, without quite knowing what I was looking at, and without quite understanding why I was even looking, I became intrigued by this peculiar basement at the bottom of the world – as if someone had opened a staircase to a level of the world which I had not suspected existed at all.

In some ways, perhaps, I was moved, in that mood of adolescent vanity, by the figure that I struck at my desk, as much as by the sort of things that I was looking at down the microscope. I had been weaned on the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and was already very powerfully influenced by the idea of a serious, heavy, studious world of South Kensington science, of heavily moustached savants moving gravely between teak benches with these brass taps and these great microscopes, indulging in serious controversy – the world of Conan Doyle and Professor Challenger, as well as the Wells scientists.

By the time I entered my public school, my microscopic experiences had already convinced me that science was what I wanted to do, but I entered the school on the classics side, because, as usual in English prep schools, science was looked down upon: it was regarded as a slightly artisan skill. I remember wandering, in the lunch-hours, around the biological laboratories, and looking in through plate-glass windows. There I could see boys dissecting, opening dog-fish, again rapt and studious in the South Kensington sort of way. And, at the teacher’s end of the room, I saw this mysterious, rather agricultural figure of the biology teacher – rather tweedy, rather apple-cheeked, fair hair and tawny moustache – moving backwards and forwards behind his desk, sucking at his pipe, and occasionally writing things on the blackboard. And, for some reason, he stayed in during his lunch hour, when other masters were out either on the sports field or having their lunch.

This silent spectacle behind the aquarium windows of the biology laboratory began to intrigue me. I felt that in some way this was a sort of Eden or Paradise from which I was being excluded, and that I was being condemned to a prison of the classics. Finally, in desperation, I went to the headmaster and said that I wanted to change to the biology side. He tried, in a last desperate move, to retain me for classics, by saying that even if I wanted to become a doctor I should stay on the classics side because I would learn the Latin names of diseases, and would therefore be able to christen my discoveries with more panache; but that did not work, and I finally entered the biology side and came under the influence of this very remarkable man, Mr Pask.

I can remember very little about the actual quality of his mind, nor can I even remember any burning enthusiasm on his part. I can only infer his enthusiasm from the results upon us, and upon the extraordinary institution which he had managed to create. He was known very affectionately amongst the class as Sid, and I can remember a very touching occasion, 15 or 20 years after I left school, in which a whole series of generations of biologists and doctors got together to celebrate Sid’s fortieth anniversary at the school, and it was strange to see this cavalcade of scientists all of whom had been influenced and shaped by the enthusiasms of this man. I can remember no distinct ideas which he imparted to us, and yet, at the end of four or five years, I had accumulated a systematic knowledge of biology which must have been imparted to us by him.

Perhaps he did it by putting things in our way rather than by actually instructing us, and this, in a way, is the most potent form of instruction. He assumed that we were adults on a small scale. He equipped his library on the scale of a university library – he did not have elementary textbooks, he had the textbooks which one would have used for Part II of the Tripos at Cambridge.97 I can remember the heavy, august volumes of Ray Lankester, Sedgwick textbooks of zoology, Strasburger botany. I can remember the spinach-coloured covers of the botany volumes, and the brighter green of Parker and Haswell’s textbooks of zoology.

Perhaps, in some ways, he created for us a science which it is no longer possible to practise, a science which is associated with people more like Darwin than with Francis Crick, a science which was descriptive, classificatory, rather than biophysical and mathematical. He himself had been trained in Cambridge under the great anatomists of the 1920s, and I think he brought to us the world of South Kensington. The effect of Mr Pask was so powerful on all the boys of my generation, and he had trained us up to such a high level that, by the time we entered our universities, and particularly by the time I went to Cambridge, we really were almost ready to take the final exams.

One discipline which I had never encountered at school was the philosophy of science. At the hands of Mr Pask, science was all content, rather than a method of thought. The idea that there might be some system of thought which would question these classifications, and, indeed, question the whole nature of inquiry itself, never really occurred to us. When I first went to Cambridge, I came under the influence of a philosopher of science who turned my world upside down. He made this world of opaque objects transparent to the influence of philosophical thought. He introduced me to the idea that one would have to consider the whole nature of science itself – to question the enterprise of scientific inquiry, rather than take on scientific inquiry as something which was given.

He was an American called Norwood Russell Hanson. He was tall, very muscular, robust, a Johnny Appleseed figure – great mane of hair, trousers that were always too short, thick rubber-soled shoes, and he would bounce behind his desk, demonstrating to us the principles of thought rather than the principles of science. I was supervised by him, which meant that I used to take my essays to him once a week and we would sit knee to knee in a tiny office at the top of a rickety staircase, in a place called the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, which housed a few rather ancient microscopes, one or two astrolabes, and some rusty collections of seventeenth-century instruments. There, over a faltering gas fire, in the early Fifties, we would discuss the philosophy of science.

Now, here was a man the content of whose thought I can actually remember. He created no décor; for him, there was no question of establishing a series of objects, or setting up a library, or introducing us to appearances – it was simply the stream of his thought which affected me. Perhaps the most important thing which he did was to introduce me to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, who had died a year before I went up to Cambridge. And, in some sense, this was a road to Damascus: the whole idea of inquiring into the nature of language, and discussing the relationship of language to the world which it supposedly described, fell upon me like a thunderclap. Language had seemed completely transparent to me before. I had not thought of it as a model, or a picture of the world; and quite suddenly, under the influence of this man, language became an opaque object of interest in its own right, and its descriptive powers and capacities suddenly became a subject of interest.

From that moment my interest was diverted, to some extent, from the object of science. I became interested in the logical connections between the ideas, rather than in the ideas themselves. With Norwood Russell Hanson, the very notion of an idea itself became completely intoxicating. One would spend hours, sometimes much longer than the supervision was meant to last, simply discussing the nature of perception, discussing the nature of the statement ‘I see a bird,’ discussing whether in fact this is a statement about oneself, or a statement about something going on in the world. And, in doing this, science suddenly reorganized itself in my imagination.

Now, I have been away from both science and philosophy for nearly 20 years. I became a practising physician, and then drifted into the theatre. But when I awake sometimes early in the morning, in those awful, dark hours when one has regrets and remorses for what one might have been, the images both of Mr Pask and of Norwood Hanson stand rather vaguely and accusingly at the bottom of the bed, pointing their fingers at me for having fallen away from the thoughtful creature I might have been, instead of the frivolous flibbertigibbet that I have become.