After much checking and cross-checking, pulling drawers open and closed with exasperated sighs, the librarian returned to the counter. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but that title you requested is currently with another reader.’
Damn. ‘I don’t suppose you could tell me his name, could you? So that perhaps I could see if he’s finished with it?’
The young man glowered, apparently weighing which would be more effort, acceding to this request or denying it and then having to argue over his decision with this troublesome-looking Englishman. He lingered for a moment longer, then went back to the card index and finally to a large ledger. Eventually he returned wearing an expression James had seen many times before. It said, I shouldn’t really be doing this, but…
‘I have the name, but this is rather-’
‘Of course. I’ll be extremely polite.’
‘All right. The book you requested is currently on loan to a reader whose desk number is four hundred and seventy-three. He’s a member of the faculty. His name is Dr George Lund.’
Chapter Thirty-six
As a young man, James had never had much of a poker face. His parents and their Quaker friends were straightforward, honest people and so he had never learned to dissemble. Only at Oxford did he start to understand that the face of the sophisticated man was opaque, but even then he was not much good at it. It was only after Spain that he became adept at hiding his feelings. Which is what he did now, as he showed what he hoped was no response at all to the words he had just heard from the librarian. Instead, he turned around and walked unhurriedly over to the section of the room where the desks were numbered four hundred and above.
So Lund had been down this exact same path just before his death, investigating the Dean and his ‘latest thinking’. James counted the numbers of the desks as he passed them: four hundred and sixty-five, four hundred and sixty-six…
There it was, four hundred and seventy-three. James hesitated before sitting down, feeling a shudder of the dead man’s presence. On the desk were two books, as if their reader had simply stepped away for a cup of coffee. As James sat down, he felt certain: it was something Lund had found in these books that had made him half-crazed with fear — and set him on the path to his death.
James picked up the first volume, which appeared to be an anthology, a series of short papers on eugenics. He flicked through it, turning the pages fast, desperate to find something he might latch onto. Maddeningly, there was neither a contents page nor list of contributors, nor any kind of printing history. Perhaps this was not a published book at all, but rather a collection of monographs that some institution — maybe Yale itself — had bound together.
There was, however, no shortage of familiar names. Indeed, to James’s surprise, most of the authors seemed to be drawn from socialist circles back home. He had heard half of them lecture in person; the other half he had read. Here was George Bernard Shaw, arguing that if democracy were to be saved it would be by a Democracy of Supermen: The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man. James skipped over the next bit, picking out only the sentence in which Shaw argued that the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.
There was an editorial from the New Statesman of 1931. The magazine reckoned that the only people who could possibly oppose the eugenic vision were traditionalists and reactionaries, too selfish to see that their desire to have children should take second place to society’s need for an improved breed. Or as the New Statesman put it: The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.
Here was that economist chap, Keynes, whom everyone so admired, putting the case for widespread use of birth control, because the working class was too ‘drunken and ignorant’ to be trusted to keep its own numbers down. And look at this, Grey’s big pal, William Beveridge, Master of University College, arguing that those with ‘general defects’ should be denied not only the vote, but ‘civil freedom and fatherhood’.
Next James came to a short essay by Harold Laski, who had once sat between James and Florence at high table: The time is surely coming in our history when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself. And on the very next page, JBS Haldane. Harry Knox was always quoting Haldane, James remembered, chiefly because the eminent scientist and socialist supported the Republic in Spain. Here he was sounding the alarm: Civilization stands in real danger from over-production of ‘undermen’.
James was tearing through the pages now, trying to find a reference to McAndrew or something else that might have caught Lund’s eye. It was as if the dead man were right in front of him, James shaking his corpse, trying to get him to spit out what he had meant to say.
Next there was a paper on the sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce, with a long passage on the Brock report on the subject, commissioned by Britain’s health minister in 1934. Apparently the eugenics crowd were delighted that Brock recommended exactly what they had been calling for: a campaign to encourage voluntary sterilization. There was an editorial of warm support from the Manchester Guardian, praising Brock for backing the sterilization ‘the eugenists soundly urge’. On the next sheet was a table of recent statistics, showing which countries were already leading the way. Curtis had been right: Germany apart, the United States was ahead of the pack, having sterilized thirty thousand of the mentally ill and criminally insane by 1939, mostly against their will.
Come on, come on, James thought.
He flicked through a few more pages, coming across Bertrand Russell, star philosopher and another one of the Greys’ high table chums. It seemed the great man had dreamed up a rather elaborate wheeze to improve the quality of the nation’s stock. He wanted the state to issue colour-coded ‘procreation tickets’: anyone who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way people of high-calibre could be sure their blood was mixed only with those of similar pedigree. Why risk contamination by those whose blood might be dangerously proletarian, foreign or weak? Just check their ticket!
James was shaking his head at the arrogance of it all when he came across an essay suggesting that the problem was not that the poor were having too many children, but that they were having the wrong kind of children. The solution was a programme of artificial insemination, aimed at impregnating working-class women with the sperm of men blessed with high IQs. There was a quotation from that queen of the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb, explaining why her sort were worth reproducing in the greatest possible numbers, describing herself as ‘the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world’. Sounds just like Virginia Grey, James thought.
By the time he came to the end he was trembling with fury and loathing for these people and their contempt for anyone they deemed a lesser mortal than themselves. He pictured them all, sitting together in an Oxford college no doubt, deciding who was fit and who was unfit, who worthy and who unworthy, who shall live and who shall die. He hated them and their eugenic creed with the very core of his being.
He forced himself to focus. What had he discovered, except that Britain’s greatest progressive bigwigs were as steeped in eugenics as the luminaries of Yale? Surely this could not have been what had so agitated Lund? What had the man been trying to tell him?
James had one more flick through the collection of papers. He was looking for pencil marks, some sign, however faint, that would reveal what had caught Lund’s attention.
The funny thing was he saw it so fast he thought he had imagined it. He had to turn back through the pages slowly to pick it up again. He almost smiled to himself at the joke of it. What he was looking for was not in the text at all. It was in the footnotes — and one of James’s greatest vices as a scholar was his aversion to reading footnotes. But there it was, with the faintest pencil mark alongside it.
I am indebted to the enthusiasm and support of two scholars, whose shared interest in this subject is not only a model for further eugenic study but for future academic collaboration across the Atlantic: Prof Bernard Grey of Oxford University and Dr Preston McAndrew of Yale University.
James fell back in his seat as if he had been shoved into it. He let out no sound, but his mouth had fallen open. And then he cursed himself — for not seeing it sooner, for failing to grasp what had been in front of his nose
