Monthly Archives: January 2010

Daniel Hannan to interview Theodore Dalrymple

Earlier this week, Monday Books announced that Theodore Dalrymple will be interviewed by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan in London on February 23 in an event that will be open to the public. Tickets are for sale on the Monday Books website here (scroll down to the bottom of the page) and include a free copy of Dalrymple’s Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. Dalrymple will also take questions from the audience.

Hannan received much attention last year for a face-to-face dressing down of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the European Parliament. The resulting YouTube video has reached over 2.5 million hits. That’s 6,500 hits for each ton of British gold that Brown (as Chancellor of the Exchequer) sold in 1999 when gold was near its record low.

Tickets are limited, so you are encouraged to buy them soon.

All profits from the event will go to the Haiti Disaster Appeal.

New Dalrymple book: Profeten en Charlatans

Dalrymple has had a new collection of his essays published, this time in Dutch. Amsterdam-based publishing house Nieuw Amsterdam has published “Profeten en Charlatans: Hoe Schrijvers Ons de Wereld Laten Zien” [“Prophets and Charlatans: How Writers Show Us the World”], a collection of Dalrymple’s essays of literary criticism chosen and translated by Jabik Veenbaas. Editor Pieter de Bruijn Kops was kind enough to translate a description of the book for our readers:



Profeten en charlatans, Theodore Dalrymple’s 2009 Dutch language book publication for Amsterdam-based publishing house Nieuw Amsterdam, consists of a selection of 28 essays on literary subjects. They were chosen, translated and provided with an introductory essay by Dutch philosopher, author and translator Jabik Veenbaas. This introduction is titled ‘Theodore Dalrymple en het belang van de literatuur’ [‘Theodore Dalrymple and the importance of literature’]. In it, Veenbaas gives a brief and penetrating analysis of Dalrymple’s unique style and approach in writing about writers, books and the meaning of literature. The essays by Dalrymple have been chosen partly from The New Criterion, in which they were published during the years 1999-2008, partly from one of Dalrymple’s own collections of essays, Not with a Bang But a Whimper. The Politics and Culture of Decline (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2008). In the selected essays, Dalrymple discusses works by writers as diverse as, among others, Burgess, Chekov, Conan Doyle, Kahlil Gibran, Ibsen, Ionesco, Dr. Johnson, Jung, LaRochefoucauld, Kerouac, Somerset Maugham, Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Shakespeare, R.S. Thomas and Tolstoy.


As a collection of essays, Profeten en charlatans has as yet been published in the Dutch language only. All of the essays, except the translator’s introduction, had been published previously – in English that is.


The following essays had been published in The New Criterion, in 1999: ‘Gooseberries’ (‘Kruisbessen’); in 2000: ‘Reticence or insincerity, Rattigan or Pinter’ (‘Terughoudendheid of onoprechtheid, Rattigan of Pinter’), ‘The perils of activism: Ken Saro-Wiwa’ (‘De gevaren van het activisme: Ken Saro-Wiwa’) and ‘W. Somerset Maugham: the pleasures of a master’ (‘W. Somerset Maugham: de genoegens van de meester’); in 2001: ‘Discovering LaRochefoucauld’ (‘La Rochefoucauld ontdekken’); in 2002: ‘Arrested development’ (‘Een tot stilstand gekomen ontwikkeling’); in 2003: ‘Carl Jung: the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy’ (‘Carl Jung: de madame Blavatsky van de psychotherapie’); in 2004: ‘Mr. Hyde & the epidemiology of evil’ (‘Meneer Hyde en de epidemiologie van het kwaad’) and ‘Reflections on the oldest profession’ (‘Enige gedachten over het oudste beroep’); in 2005: ‘Chekov & Tolstoy’ (‘Tsjechov en Tolstoj’), ‘Desert-island reading’ (‘Lezen over onbewoonde eilanden’) and ‘Holmes & his commentators’ (‘Holmes en zijn commentatoren’); in 2006: ‘Out of the time machine’ (‘Uit de tijdmachine’) and ‘The enigmatic R.S. Thomas’ (‘De raadselachtige R.S. Thomas’); in 2007: ‘Pound’s depreciation’ (‘De devaluatie van Pound’), ‘Another side of Paradise’ (‘De achterkant van Paradise’), ‘The false prophet’ (‘De valse profeet’) and ‘Diagnosing Lear’ (‘Een diagnose voor Lear’); in 2008: ‘Ionesco & the limits of philosophy’ (‘Ionesco en de grenzen van de filosofie’) and ‘At the forest’s edge’ (‘Aan de rand van het woud’).


The following essays had been published in Not with a Bang But a Whimper (2008): ‘A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece’ (‘Een profetisch en gewelddadig meesterwerk’), ‘In the Asylum’ (‘In het gesticht’), ‘Ibsen and His Discontents’ (‘Het onbehagen van Ibsen’), ‘A Drinker of Infinity’ (‘Een drinker der oneindigheid’), ‘What the New Atheists Don’t See’ (‘Wat de nieuwe atheïsten niet begrijpen’), ‘The Marriage of Reason and Nightmare’ (‘De verbintenis van rede en nachtmerrie’), ‘The Terrorists Among Us’ (‘De terroristen onder ons’) and ‘What Makes Dr. Johnson Great?’ (‘Waarom is Dr. Johnson groot?’).

Haiti’s Apocalypse

Dalrymple’s eyes, like a great many of ours, turn to Haiti and the terrible suffering there….

No one who has been to Haiti ever loses his interest in the country. It is one of those places that, because of its history, because of its culture, because of its torments, captures the imagination and never lets it go. You respond to it not with tough, but appalled love.
Read the piece in City Journal.

CLASSIC DALRYMPLE: The Wilder Shores of Marx, excerpt (1991)

In 1989 Theodore Dalrymple managed to join up with a group of British communists on its way to the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in North Korea:

The British ‘delegation’ was fixed at 100 and I was accepted as a member because, though neither a youth nor a student, I was a doctor who had practiced in Tanzania, a country whose first President, Julius Nyerere, was a close friend and admirer of Kim Il Sung, Great Leader of DPRK (as the country is known to cognoscenti). It was therefore assumed I was in sympathy with what was sometimes called, rather vaguely, ‘the movement’.

The ensuing trip, one of five to communist holdouts in 1988 and 1989, was recounted in his 1991 book The Wilder Shores of Marx (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere). Throughout two weeks in July of 1989 Dalrymple witnessed an imprisoned nation, attended a mass rally addressed by Kim Jong-Il, and was transfixed by what he saw at Pyongyang Department Store Number 1…

I went several times during the festival to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. This is in the very centre of the city. Its shelves and counters were groaning with locally produced goods, piled into impressive pyramids or in fan-like displays, perfectly arranged, throughout the several floors of the building. On the ground floor was a wide variety of tinned foods, hardware and alcoholic drinks, including a strong Korean liqueur with a whole snake pickled or marinated in the bottle, presumably as an aphrodisiac. Everything glittered with perfection, the tidiness was remarkable.

It didn’t take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways – yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the ‘customers’. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking.

Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty ‘customers’, who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.)

They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that – despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation – they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf.

I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.

I decided to buy something – a fountain pen. I went to the counter where pens were displayed like the fan of a peacock’s tail. They were no more for sale than the Eiffel Tower. As I handed over my money, a crowd gathered round, for once showing signs of animation. I knew, of course, that I could not be refused: if I were, the game would be given away completely. And so the crowd watched goggle-eyed and disbelieving as this astonishing transaction took place: I gave the assistant a piece of paper and she gave me a pen.

The pen, as it transpired, was of the very worst quality. Its rubber for the ink was so thin that it would have perished immediately on contact with ink. The metal plunger was already rusted; the plastic casing was so brittle that the slightest pressure cracked it. And the box in which it came was of absorbent cardboard, through whose fibres the ink of the printing ran like capillaries on the cheeks of a drunk.

At just before four o’clock, on two occasions, I witnessed the payment of the shoppers. An enormous queue formed at the cosmetics and toiletries counter and there everyone, man and woman, received the same little palette of rouge, despite the great variety of goods on display. Many of them walked away somewhat bemused, examining the rouge uncomprehendingly. At another counter I saw a similar queue receiving a pair of socks, all brown like the plastic bowls. The socks, however, were for keeps. After payment, a new shift of Potemkin shoppers arrived.

The Department Store Number 1 was so extraordinary that I had to talk to someone about it. But the young communist from Glasgow to whom I described it simply exclaimed: ‘So what! Plenty of people go to Harrods without buying anything, just to look.’ Nevertheless, I returned twice to Department Store Number 1 because, in my opinion, it had as many layers of meaning as a great novel, and every time one visited it one realised – as on re-reading Dickens or Tolstoy – that one had missed something from the time before.

Department Store Number 1 was a tacit admission of the desirability of an abundance of material goods, consumption of which was very much a proper goal of mankind. Such an admission of the obvious would not have been in any way remarkable were it not that socialists so frequently deny it, criticising liberal capitalist democracy because of its wastefulness and its inculcation of artificial desires in its citizens, thereby obscuring their ‘true’ interests. By stocking Department Store Number 1 with as many goods as they could find, in order to impress foreign visitors, the North Koreans admitted that material plenty was morally preferable to shortage, and that scarcity was not a sign of abstemious virtue; rather it was proof of economic inefficiency. Choice, even in small matters, gives meaning to life. However well fed, however comfortable modern man might be without it, he demands choice as a right, not because it is economically superior, but as an end in itself. By pretending to offer it, the North Koreans acknowledged as much; and in doing so, recognised that they were consciously committed to the denial of what everyone wants.

But the most sombre reflection occasioned by Department Store Number 1 is that concerning the nature of the power that can command thousands of citizens to take part in a huge and deceitful performance, not once but day after day, without any of the performers ever indicating by even the faintest sign that he is aware of its deceitfulness, though it is impossible that he should not be aware of it. One might almost ascribe a macabre and sadistic sense of humour to the power, insofar as the performance it commands bears the maximum dissimilarity to the real experience and conditions of life of the performers. It is as if the director of a leper colony commanded the enactment of a beauty contest – something one might expect to see in, say, a psychologically depraved surrealist film. But this is no joke, and the humiliation it visits upon the people who take part in it, far from being a drawback, is an essential benefit to the power; for slaves who must participate in their own enslavement by signalling to others the happiness of their condition are so humiliated that they are unlikely to rebel.

Copyright 1991 Anthony Daniels. Reprinted with permission.

NOTE: Monday Books has made this book available on iTunes and Amazon as an e-book at a very generous (to you) price. There is so much more of interest in the book than this story. Read how Dalrymple gets arrested and struck with truncheons for photographing an anti-government demonstration in Albania, smuggles banned books to dissidents in the Romania of the Ceaucescu era, and much else.