I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated, rather than sated, by these brief writings, and late in 1997, I launched on a three-year project of writing a memoir of my boyhood, which I published in 2001 as Uncle Tungsten. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs, one about the grand science museums in South Kensington, which were so much more important than school to me when I was growing up the other about Humphry Davy, an early-nineteenth-century chemist who had been a hero of mine in those far-off days, and whose vividly described experiments excited me and inspired me to emulation. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them-memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II.
In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon-the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Now out of print, it was edited by Monika Faber and Astrid Mahler and published by Hatje Cantz.
Heinrich Kühn: Hans with Bureau, 1905 from Heinrich Kühn: The Perfect Photograph, the catalog of a recent exhibition organized by the Albertina, Vienna. Private Collection/Peter Ertl/Albertina, Vienna
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