Monthly Archives: December 2012

Miss Whiplash and the Claim Farmers

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Dalrymple works frequently as an expert witness in British criminal and civil trials, and he seems to be writing more frequently on what he sees there. Probably his best and most comprehensive piece on the subject is an article in the just-released Winter 2012 issue of The Salisbury Review, in which he says the British court system is increasingly corrupt:

The corruption that our tort system both encourages and depends upon is not only that of liars, swindlers and blackmailers, though there are plenty of those about, but of a much more insidious kind, both intellectual and moral, in which clever, honest and conscientious men can apply their often very great intelligence to the unintended task of corrupting society and even human character.

One of many entertaining examples:

In another case, a man claimed that an injury left him unable to concentrate, and a psychologist testified that tests demonstrated that this was so and that therefore he would never work again. The man gave evidence in the witness box – examination-in-chief and crossexamination – for a day and a half, without the slightest loss of concentration, having mastered the papers of his own case that were several volumes long. The court believed the psychologist rather than the evidence of its own eyes and ears, and it is difficult to explain this other than by a corporate desire to keep the whole corrupt system going.

Read it here.

A disgruntled carer

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Dalrymple introduces another undeservedly forgotten writer in this British Medical Journal column (subscription required):

Literary fame—like every kind I suppose—is not necessarily proportional to the worth of the work, and therefore the name of Elizabeth Berridge (1919-2009) is not as widely known as it might be. Observing the small change of life with minute attention, and extracting from it all its significance in prose of exemplary precision, she combined dispassion with compassion, while avoiding cynicism and sentimentality.

Silence of the Feminists

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In City Journal, Dalrymple writes again of a young Muslim woman treated almost as a slave by her family and notes the apathy of feminists:

The British courts recently asked me to prepare a report on a young Muslim woman of Pakistani descent, and to do so I had to visit her at home. I spoke to her in a room in which a television screen as large as a cinema vied for predominance with embroidered pictures of Mecca and framed quotations from the Koran.

She told me a story with which I was only too familiar. One of eight brothers and sisters, she soon discovered that, while her brothers could do anything they pleased, including crime, she and her sisters were expected to lead spotless lives of infinite tedium and absolutely no choice. At 16, without her consent, she was betrothed to be married to a first cousin in Pakistan, whom she had never met and did not wish to meet…

Read the rest here

Kinds of monsters

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This British Medical Journal piece (subscription required) covers Stephen Crane’s novella The Monster.

One night Dr Trescott’s house burns down. Henry Johnson, a black servant, heroically rescues the doctor’s son from the fire, but in the process is badly burned. Dr Truscott nurses him back to life but unfortunately Henry’s face “has simply been burned away.”

….

The doctor takes Henry into his rebuilt home. From then on his practice declines. From having been the most sought after doctor in the town, he becomes the least. A delegation of prominent citizens asks him to put Henry into an institution, but the doctor refuses. The story ends with his wife crying over the teacups: none of the ladies of the town will attend her at-homes any more, and she has laid out the tea things in vain.

Crane is generally considered one of the first modern US literary realists, but of course he is also a symbolist, as all realists are. The symbolism lies in the choice of the aspect of reality that is portrayed. You don’t have to know much to know what is symbolised in The Monster.

His Inhuman Elegance

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Dalrymple has written a short obituary of Oscar Niemeyer, an architect and communist whose work Dalrymple says “lacks human warmth”, an outcome that he connects with Niemeyer’s ideology. I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph:

Niemeyer was by all accounts a charming man, and he never used his fame or position to accumulate a fortune, as he could easily have done. He was disinterested. Like many architects of the twentieth century, he built for humanity; as for men, he knew them not.

Read it here

Dalrymple interview at The Coffee House Wall

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There is a great deal here I’d like to quote. Though it is brief, this is one of the best, most revealing interviews of Dalrymple I’ve seen, and it provides answers to some of the more common, and more central, questions about his beliefs.
To what extent, as an atheist, do you ascribe value to the Judeo-Christian tradition? Is this a necessary foundation of Western civilization?
It seems to me obvious that western civilisation is Christian in origin, and those who decry Christianity are in effect decrying western civilisation. I say this as someone who is not myself religious. I believe it is possible for some people to live without religion, but probably not for whole peoples to live without it. To have a sense of transcendent purpose without religion necessitates a political ideology (which is likely to be very bad), or a belief that one is contributing to a culture. Without this, one is living in an eternal present moment, without past and without future.
Have we seen a different type of person arise in the West, as Mr. Boot proposes? How else would you explain that the virtues of respect, duty, deference and self-sacrifice seem to have been universally derided if not abandoned?
Certainly I am worried about a shallowness in the human personality that, if I may so put it, appears to be deepening. Even such things as the electronic media of communication, for those unfortunate enough to have been brought up with them, seem to hollow out human relations, making them extensive rather than intensive. As to derided ideas such as humility, proper deference and so forth, I think we live in an age of inflamed egotism, and of individualism without individuality. Never has it been more necessary, and at the same time more difficult, to mark yourself out as an individual. The slightest subordination in any circumstances is therefore felt as a wound, because the ego is so fragile, and relies on such props as the brand of trainers you are wearing.

On the Legalization of Drugs

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Few Dalrymple articles have received such uniformly negative comments as this one. There seems to be growing momentum (in Britain and the U.S. certainly) on behalf of drug (or at least marijuana) legalization, so that opposition to legalization is cause for outrage even among readers of the non-liberal City Journal. Most of those readers, by the way, seem to have missed Dalrymple’s contention that, like the abolition of speed limits, drug legalization would cause greater harm to third parties.

Shipboard confidences

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The 1931 novella Confidence Africaine (African Secret), by Nobel Prize winner Roger Martin du Gard, prompts these thoughts in Dalrymple’s BMJ column (subscription required):

Does illness have a meaning beyond itself? For most of history, people have thought so. It was a divine or other vengeance, a punishment for wickedness, individual or collective. The purely naturalistic attitude to illness is psychologically difficult to maintain consistently. Even the most thorough of rationalists, struck down unexpectedly by malady, are inclined to protest that they did not deserve it, and that they had no bad habits, exercised vigorously, and ate fresh food, for example.

Banal memories of fatwa

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Given Salman Rushdie’s personality and the quality of his writing, reviews of his works can be a great deal of fun to read, and probably to write as well. Dalrymple’s review in the New Criterion of Rushdie’s new memoir of his time spent under threat of death is no exception. I am tempted to quote only this passage: “unfortunately Rushdie’s book is long and he is not a good writer”. But here’s more:

it [is] worth quoting from the preface to [Arthur] Koestler’s account of his time under sentence of death. “The main difficulty,” he said, “was the temptation to cut a good figure.” This is a thought whose concision and precision is quite beyond Rushdie’s powers; and when Rushdie feels that he cannot cut a good figure, as when he recounts his issuance of a grovellingly insincere recantation of his supposed apostasy, he cannot bring himself (as would be natural) actually to quote it. What Rushdie does not realize is that no one with any imagination would blame him for it; here truly was an instance where, if things had been different, things would not only have been different but very different. Anyone can understand how a man under a real threat of death might recant ignominiously in the hope of living longer. As Koestler says, “To die—even in the service of an impersonal cause—is always a personal affair”: another of his many thoughts that is worth more than the whole of Rushdie’s 656 pages.
 
To judge by his writing, Rushdie thinks in clichés. I opened the book at random and found the following:

He was deliberately trying to up the ante, and so far the Iranians were hanging tough and refusing to fold. But there was only one way to go now.

Perhaps a desperate need to escape a mind full of clichés explains the exaggerated imagery of much of his writing, the magic realism with both the magic and the realism removed (in contrast to that of his most ill-chosen, because inimitable, model, Gabriel García Márquez). With him, unlikelihood serves for imagination and emphasis for force.

Why second-hand bookshops are just my type

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More on the pleasures of the second-hand book shop:

The Rev Thomas Dibdin tells the story in his book The Bibliomania, or Book-Madness: History, Symptoms and Cure of this Fatal Disease (first edition 1809, 87 pages; second edition 1811, 782 pages) of a bibliomaniac who, on his deathbed, excitedly sent out for books from the catalogue of a bookseller, his obsession keeping him happy until the very moment of his death. Alas, his library of 50,000 books was sold posthumously for a third of what it cost him; but if the really important business of life is to die well, then no better death could be imagined…

Customers of second-hand booksellers, such as I, are also a rum lot. What kind of person spends two-and-a-half hours in a shop and then havers indecisively over whether he really wants a copy of Augustine Birrell’s (unjustly) forgotten essays marked at £3? If he fails to buy it, he will regret it the moment the shop has closed or he can’t get back to it. If, on the other hand, he (and customers are almost always he) buys a book that his wife will find outrageously expensive by comparison, say, with a pair of shoes, or even a single shoe, he will ask the bookseller to rub out the price. All booksellers are so familiar with this pattern that they are ready with their rubbers even as their customers buy.

Dalrymple at the Telegraph