In an op-ed on FoxNews.com, Dalrymple doesn’t mince words in explaining the actions of Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz:

Andreas Lubitz was not depressed, he was of bad character, for the improvement of which there is no drug. He was an angry narcissist, murderous at least as much as he was suicidal.

Suffering reverses in life, Lubitz sought revenge on what he thought was an unjust world. Many people like him who commit suicide, or try to, imagine a continued shadowy existence after their deaths in which they are able [to] witness the doleful effects that their death has had on others, and they enjoy the prospect. He didn’t want to slip away quietly, he wanted fame, even if it were only notoriety.

If he had killed himself by jumping from a building, say, which requires no more courage than crashing an airplane, no one would have heard of him. By crashing his plane, everyone has heard of him. The 149 people were sacrificed to his wounded vanity and his desire for fame.

John O’Hara (1905 – 1970), the American novelist and short-story writer, was the son of a surgeon, Dr Patrick O’Hara. The father wanted the son to follow in the profession, but he would have none of it, even rejecting his father’s offer of $10,000 (a lot of money in those days) if he would do so. O’Hara junior said that he wanted to be a writer; his father said that no good would come of it.

O’Hara’s father died leaving the family impoverished, and it was this, O’Hara always claimed, that prevented him from going to Yale. Whether he would have gone if his father had lived is doubtful; he had been expelled from three schools for bad behaviour. But he resented it for the rest of his life.

O’Hara’s bad behaviour also lasted. He was a snob and a social climber, but also a nasty drunk inclined to bullying and violence. One critic said that no one who knew him ever liked him, although others have denied this. It is rare for anyone to be disliked by everyone.

Critical opinion is divided over the value of his work, some calling it little more than pulp fiction, but John Updike equated him with Chekhov. Certainly O’Hara himself had few doubts: he thought he ought to have won the Nobel Prize and arranged for an inscription on his tomb that he was the finest and most truthful writer of his age.

His first book, Appointment in Samarra, a fine portrayal of self-destruction, is regarded as his best; it was followed by his first collection of short stories, The Doctor’s Son, in the title story of which the great ’flu epidemic of 1918 in his home-town, Pottsville, is depicted with such accuracy that many of the inhabitants were not pleased. The doctor of the title is O’Hara’s father, who works himself to the point of exhaustion, though really he can bring little more than succour.

By 1956 O’Hara had mellowed a little, and his novella, A Family Party, consists entirely of the speech made at the retirement dinner of Dr Samuel G Merritt, who has worked as a doctor in the town of Lyons, Pennsylvania for forty years. The speech is made by his best friend, Mr Albert W Shoemaker, but is not without an undertow of acid, despite the predominantly elegiac tone. After an enumeration of the doctor’s virtues, we expect some final and dramatic revelation of a serious moral lapse or crime.

There is revelation, but of tragedy. Shoemaker speaks of Alice, the doctor’s wife, who is absent from the dinner. She had two children, one stillbirth, one premature. After the second, ‘her strength must have been more seriously affected than anyone realized’ and ‘she was subject to depression.’

In and out of a private hospital, she returned one day:

Sam brought a trained nurse back and we all made believe that the nurse was there to help Sam in the office, but then I guess the truth got to be known publicly when what we all know happened. One of her moods of depression and she jumped out of the second-story window. Broke both her legs, one arm.

For twenty-five years she has been asylum-bound and the doctor on his own.

There is an interesting period detail in the tale of quiet heroism. O’Hara wrote it at the height of the craze for frontal leucotomies, and Shoemaker says credulously:

Now they have operations that they can cure the kind of illness Alice had, but they didn’t have them then…

In New English Review Dalrymple analyzes the definitions of evil, love and (below) psychopathy offered in the poems of Robert Graves (the author of I, Claudius who considered himself mostly  a poet):

In other words, [the litterers] knew perfectly well that what they were doing was wrong, but chose to do it anyway.

The people who behave in this way, I suspect, are not at all the type of people I have described above. They are far too numerous for that, and if all the people who did it were true psychopaths the murder rate would be a hundred or a thousand times higher than it is. Having more of a choice, then, than those who suffer from congenital moral insanity, are they in fact worse people than the latter? Their crimes are less serious but more numerous. How many small crimes make a large one? If there is no common unit of badness, so that, for example, one murder without extenuation would equal a thousand Hitler units, while dropping a chocolate wrapper would equal one Hitler unit, such that a thousand dropped wrappers would equal one murder, how could one ever compare, at least scientifically, the badness of acts? If the answer is moral intuition, the door to relativism is opened: for my moral intuition is not the same as yours and may even be diametrically opposed to it. Whose intuition is to prevail? And yet, when we say that a certain action is bad, we are not merely saying I don’t approve of it: we believe, on the contrary, that we are making a judgment that corresponds to a reality independent of our mental state.

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple makes a point about many of those putative nationalist movements in Europe which I had not heard before: they are really covers for a more centralized and powerful European Union.

All the nationalisms that threaten to break up long-established states – Scottish, Catalonian or Flemish – seems strangely in favour of ever-closer European union (another cant term for construction). Independence, however, makes sense only where there is a strong degree of sovereignty, but European construction or ever-closer union means ever-less sovereignty for national states until it disappears altogether. The nationalists appear to want to jump out of what they think is a frying pan into the fire.

Meet Yanis Veroufakis, Greek Minister of Finances and the man Libération calls “the pop-star of the left”: Just another rich and privileged politician pretending to be something he is not.

In fact, Mr Veroufakis is that most conventional of figures, the adolescent who cannot bear to be fully adult, who wants to be 18 to 20 forever. In a few years’ time, indeed, we shall see the first eighty-year old adolescents. I don’t envy the geriatricians of the future.

Read the rest at Salisbury Review

Unknown playwright Stanley Houghton wrote several excellent works, and might have achieved greatness if not for an early death. But in New English Review Dalrymple wonders if the rapidity of social change in the century since he wrote his plays makes them unintelligible to younger viewers:

But of course its emotional impact depends entirely upon the playgoers’ ability to understand and even empathise with the assumption that for an unmarried girl to spend a weekend with a man is a terrible scandal that will permanently damage or ruin her reputation. Without this premise, all the agonising will seem pointless, rather as arcane theological disputes of the fourth century AD seem to unbelievers. Suffice it to say that the prevailing sexual mores of 1912, when Hindle Wakes was written and first performed, were not those of a century later, to put it mildly; and though, allegedly, we live in a multicultural age, which in practice means that we like lots of different kinds of food, I am not sure that an age of Facebook and Twitter is one that it propitious to the grasping of outlooks other than one’s own. So absorbed are we in the vast continent of the present moment that we are increasingly unable to travel imaginatively to the foreign land of the past.

Wordsworth considered the sublimity of nature in his poem Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, but on a present day visit to the ruined abbey, Dalrymple encounters modern intrusions into its serenity and finds that the world is too much with him:

I doubt that in 1798, the date of the poem, there would have been a notice informing him that ancient monuments can be dangerous, followed by an enumeration of the various hazards consequent upon visiting them, with little schematic pictures of these hazards to aid those lacking in reading comprehension. For example, there were “uneven, steep or narrow stairs” with a man falling backwards to the ground. Another man fell forwards down the “Unexpected drops,” and a second man backwards because of “Uneven and slippery surfaces.” Then there was a man who hit his head on the “Low headroom,” clutching it in pain afterwards, and another man clutching his head because he had failed to take account of advice to “Let your eyes adjust to the darkness.”

Left alone in a small, private library for a few minutes… Such are the small pleasures of a person possessing curiosity and imagination.

There was obviously enough in that one room to stimulate a person for a lifetime, especially with the help of the internet. Now more than ever is what Pascal said true, that all of Mankind’s problems derive from our inability to remain alone quietly in a room.

Read the piece here

Michel Houellebecq’s new novel posits a Muslim political party winning power in France. Dalrymple says that such a scenario is very unlikely but notes that such a party has just been formed:

…the Union des Démocrates Musulmans Français (UDMF), which has only 900 members—200 joined after the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the publication of Soumission—but 8,000 “sympathizers.” The UDMF will run candidates for eight of the 2,000 available seats in the forthcoming local elections.

Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple examines the public reactions to two earthquakes: London in 1750 and Lisbon in 1755. Why was the reaction to the London earthquake (there were actually two that year) so desperate and fearful even though the earthquakes were relatively mild? Because one’s reaction depends largely on one’s perspective, and he quotes Rousseau’s famous reply to Voltaire on the same subject:

I cannot refrain, Sir, from remarking on the striking difference
between you and me on these matters. Full of glory and
disillusioned by vain triumphs, living in the seat of
abundance and sure of immortality, you philosophise serenely
on the nature of the soul, and if you suffer in body you have
Tronchin as doctor and friend; nevertheless, you find nothing but
evil on earth; while I, an obscure, poor man, tormented by an
illness without cure, meditate with pleasure in my retreat, and I find
that all is good.

Read it here