Dalrymple on his experience in the criminal justice system and the ubiquity of CCTV’s in modern Britain:
In most of the trials in which the accused was convicted and there was video evidence, the accused would have been convicted on other grounds anyway. In the modern state, intrusion on privacy is its own justification, just to let us know who’s boss.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine argues that hospitals should do more to fight the dangers of obstructive sleep apnea. But do what exactly? Nobody knows, says Dalrymple. But whatever it is, you can bet it will be expensive.
When my father was born, in 1909, the infant mortality rate in his borough of London was 124 per thousand. The infant mortality rate of present-day Somalia is about 105.
Two years after my father was born, when the infant mortality rate would not have declined by very much, an anthology titled Innocence and Death, edited by M. V. Dent, was published. It consisted of prose and poems written on the occasion of the death of young children. The editor in his preface wrote:
In the whole gamut of human suffering there is no sorrow so poignant as the death of a little child… There is a certain sad comfort in the fellowship of grief, and the following extracts in verse and prose may, I hope, be of some value to sorrowing mothers.
Throughout the book, there is an unresolved dialectic between personal grief at the loss of a child and consolatory religious acceptance that all is for the best, that death being the common lot of all, it is perhaps a blessing in disguise for a child to have departed this life before having tasted its bitterness:
Weep not because this childe hath dyed so young,
But weepe because yourselves have livd so long…
These are the first lines of Mistress Mary Prideaux by William Strode (1601 – 1645), and they are typical.
Five of the authors in the anthology were doctors, Henry Vaughan (1621 – 1695); Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894); John Brown (1810 – 1882), who was buried next to his daughter who died in infancy; Robert Bridges (1844 – 1930) who, as physician to the outpatient department of Great Ormond Street Hospital, must have been well-acquainted with the early death of children; and William Henry Drummond (1854 – 1907), a professor of hygiene and medical jurisprudence in Canada, whose first child died within hours of its birth.
Dr Vaughan’s poem, The Burial of an Infant, is true to the consolatory theme of the book:
Sweetly didst thou expire: thy soul
Flew home unstain’d by his new skin;
For ere thou knew’st how to be foul,
Death wean’d the from the world, and sin.
Dr John Brown writes that the thoughts of a bereaved mother and her dead infant son are:
Not all sad, for well they know
Far above the sky
In the bosom of their God.
Dr Drummond (one of the best-known Canadian poets) writes in his Hymn upon the Innocents:
First sacrifice to Christ you went,
Of offer’d lambs a tender sort;
With palms and crown you innocent
Before the sacred altar sport.
Dr Holmes is slightly more pagan. A dead little girl lies in a graveyard, where her remains support new life:
At last the rootlets of the trees
Shall find the prison where she lies,
And bear the buried dust they seize
In leaves and blossoms to the skies,
So may the soul that warmed it rise!
Only Dr Bridges, with the greatest experience of infant death, is truly pessimistic:
Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard
of, fail us.
In none of the poems is there a sense that anything might one day be different, that such premature death might become a rarity. But then, of course, poets are metaphysical, not epidemiological; they still use the death of children as a subject of meditation.
Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels
Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak must be laughing right now, says Dalrymple at his Hilarious Pessimist blog. Morsi’s democratic mandate sure didn’t last long:
Ex-president Morsi believed he was legitimate because he had more votes than his opponent, but this is a very crude way of defining legitimacy. On such a view, a legitimately elected leader can do anything he pleases provided only that carries majority opinion with him at election time. This is the royal road to electoral dictatorship.
At the Hilarious Pessimist, Dalrymple tries to understand the world of modern fashion:
The female models looked as though they had been kept in a cellar for ten years by a Bluebeard figure: they were painfully pale, like axolotls, and on the verge of fainting from hunger. Their clothes were such as you might expect to result from putting a variety of fabrics into a food mixer. I have never since seen anyone wear such clothes in any other place or situation. What can the economics be of all this?
At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple highlights “the potential for tyranny” of a “seemingly humane theory”, that of punishment as therapy:
The peculiarity of this approach is that it allows every man a rape or many rapes – indeed many crimes of any description – provided only that experts determine that he will now desist, for prognosis is everything and justice nothing, in the sense of retribution for past misdeeds, nothing. Even if prognosis were a science much more accurate than it is or ever likely to be, this would do tremendous violence to our sense of justice. If you believe in the therapeutic theory of response to crime, you would have set Heinrich Himmler free, had he survived, because it was unlikely in the new political circumstances that followed military defeat that he would ever have committed similar crimes again.
Everybody loves football in Britain. At least, they say they do.
The enthusiasm for football is indeed a religious enthusiasm, albeit with rituals that leave much to be desired from the aesthetic point of view. And no one dares criticise the Church of Football. Even I tend to preface my slight dissent from the church by prefacing my remarks with, ‘Of course, there is nothing wrong with the game itself…’
It is not merely that one reveals oneself as a bad person when one admits that one is uninterested in the game, the kind of person in short who has no empathy with the great mass of mankind; but that, per contra, by claiming to be interested in the game one establishes one’s virtue, one’s deep sympathy for the great mass of mankind.
Having reached the age of cancer, ever more of my acquaintances seem to be coming down with it. When they are very ill I am unsure whether they would find a visit intrusive or comforting, or even whether my delicacy in this matter is more for my sake than for theirs. Do they want me to come or not? The gesture of taking grapes to the dying can seem so eloquently futile.
William Saroyan (1908 – 1981), the American author of Armenian descent, died of disseminated cancer of the prostate. A year later his son, Aram, also a writer, published a memoir of his father’s last illness. It is extremely painful reading because Saroyan had been so impossible a father, fanatically determined to keep his children at arm’s length and inclined to insult them in the crudest possible way. For almost all of his illness, which was short, he was cruelly determined not to be reconciled with his children.
Saroyan, whose work is now little read on account of its tendency to sentimentality, was a man deeply venerated by Americans of Armenian extraction, and the success of his books, many of them set among the Armenian immigrants of California, was world-wide. He lauded the capacity of love and humour to overcome adversity, a very popular theme in the years of the Depression, but he was an abominable husband. He married when he was 35 and his bride was 17; he married his wife twice and divorced her twice in quick succession, abandoning the children almost entirely, and gambling and drinking his money away. His literary portrayal of his wife was scandalously unfair, and he always regarded himself as her victim. He left practically nothing to his children in his will.
His son attributes William Saroyan’s inability to love anyone in particular, despite his literary paeans to the power of such love, to the death of his father from appendicitis when he was only three, after which his mother sent him and his brother and sister to an orphanage for five years. Any attempt thereafter at intimacy enraged him, presumably because he so feared abandonment. But a vice that is explained does not become any the more likeable.
One of Saroyan’s plays, Don’t Go Away Mad, published in 1951, is set in a ward in a hospital in San Francisco in which all the patients are suffering from unspecified but fatal diseases. One of the characters is Buster, who says that he misses his son. Another of the characters asks him when he last saw him:
Two years ago, when he was almost five. His mother left me then… I wrote to my wife and asked her please to let me see my son, but she never answered my letters, so one night I went to the bar on Ortega Street to speak to her. She made fun of me in front of everybody.
This is an almost mirror-image of the truth.
In the introduction to the play, Saroyan asks ‘Is there no behaviour that is not theatrical?’ and replies ‘I believe there is no such behaviour; it is simply that of acting of some people is more tolerable than that of others.’ His own was often intolerable; he affected the greatest agony when his daughter, then a little girl, put medicine on his athlete’s foot.
It is not easy to like a man who did that. But when his son learnt, after years of estrangement, that his father was dying, ‘I saw, clearly, right way’ that such things ‘were no longer significant.’
Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels
A little formality in a novel from the 1950’s reminds Dalrymple of how times have changed:
Throughout the book, Grant addresses Carradine as Brent, and Brent addresses Inspector Grant as Mr Grant. This was all perfectly natural at the time, though their relations were very friendly.
I lived through the great transition. I remember when my best friend’s mother asked me to call her by her first name. I found it not only impossible to do so, but that I could not even think of her by her first name. Many years after her death I cannot remember her first name. For me she is and will always be Mrs …….
One does not, perhaps, expect many writers to have been executives in shoe retailing chains, or many executives in shoe retailing chains to have been writers, but Arthur Maling (born 1923) was one such. Whether he wrote his thrillers to escape the humdrum, or was an executive in order to fund his writing, I do not know (a surprising number of writers worked in banks or insurance offices); but his books are written in a finely-chiselled style.
On the cover to the British edition of Schroeder’s Game, published in 1977, are printed in bold lettering the following words:
In the U.S.A. there is no NHS; & the background to this novel is a collection agency for hospitals’ out-patients bills – very big business indeed!
The eponymous Schroeder is the founder and chief executive of the agency, Mutual Claims, of Phoenix, Arizona, who tries to conceal losses he has made on bad real-estate investments by a system of fraudulent accounting that allow him to post bogus profits. Those who try to expose what is going on soon end up dead, shot by paid Mexican assassins. The suspense is not in the discovery of the villain, but in the means of finding his comeuppance.
Schroeder’s company has several branches, and the fact that their computers communicate with one another at a distance is relayed as a matter for astonishment. Future generations will no doubt find the concept of public telephone booths, in which the character’s calls are forever being cut short for lack of coins to insert, as mysterious as we now find technical details of the harnessing of horses. And the world of 1977 was one in which long-distance calls were not just made, they were first ‘placed.’
One of the characters who try to expose Schroeder’s defalcations is Tom Petacque, a stockbroker who raised funds for him before he realised that he was a crook. Unfortunately, Tom is psychologically rather fragile, and needs the support of a psychiatrist, Dr Balter, as does the narrator of the book, Tom’s partner in the brokerage, Brockton Potter.
In those days, of course, anyone who was anyone in New York had his psychiatrist, and Dr Balter fits the bill admirably:
He paused to light a cigar. He smoked them all day long.
The ash fell with equal regularity on to his bow tie: thirty-five years ago that was taken as an indication of Freudian wisdom and penetration rather than of slovenly indifference to his own health and that of others.
The trust placed in the ability of psychiatrists to predict and heal was as superstitious as that accorded to miracle-working icons in previous times. Yet another of the partners in the brokerage firm relates how his alcoholic mother came to a sticky end:
His father had refused to let her go to a psychiatrist. With the result that in a drunken haze she’d accidentally fallen down a flight of steps and been killed.
The inference is clear: if she’d seen a psychiatrist she would have stopped drinking and not fallen down those steps.
These days, I suspect, we are less sanguine: we have more psychiatrists, and more drinking, than ever before.
Although 1977 is not an historical epoch ago, it was a different world: of, among other things, martinis at lunch and barbiturates at night. Nowadays, we destroy ourselves differently.
Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels