Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Now my main regret about my dinosaur stage is that it did not last longer, go deeper and leave a richer residue of knowledge. I was thinking this as I went looking for fossils on the land around my house in France. Really I am very ignorant of palaeontology: when it comes to the Ammonites and the Trilobites I am a little like Disraeli’s wife, who could never remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans. I think the Trilobites came first—I conceive of them either as the wood lice of their time (though, of course, they were marine, and I vaguely remember putting wood lice into water to see how long they would survive in that medium, ostensibly to see whether they were indeed like Trilobites, but really to inflict suffering), or as a defeated tribe in the Holy Land, as in ‘And the Ammonites rose up and smote the Trilobites.’

  When it comes to nature, it is not that I have lacunae in my knowledge, but rather knowledge (and very little of it) in my grand Lacuna.

  It is too late now to fill the grand Lacuna. Alas, the awareness that one does not have an infinitude of time before one comes too late in most people’s lives to repair the damage done by laziness, insouciance, and the thousand other natural vices that flesh is heir to. I know that there are some people of whom this is not true, who have lived constructively from their earliest childhood (just as there are some people who have always used their money wisely, never having frittered a penny, and who as a consequence can face their old age without financial anxiety): but they are not many, and I am not sure a world composed only of such people would be a better one.

  Still, I wish I had pursued nature study (as it was then called) with more concentration, application and determination than I did. Then perhaps I would be able to answer questions with ease such as the following, that came to me quite unbidden recently: where do the butterflies that flutter all day around the lavender bushes outside my window go at night? They disappear some time before sundown as if in response to an order. Do butterflies sleep? Do they have enough mental activity for their rest to be called sleep? Do they go to their rest as individuals or collectively, and if collectively do they roost according to their various species? How do they avoid night predation? Surely lepidopterists must know the habits of the creatures they catch and collect: they are not just, well, butterfly-collectors, who merely hope for a full set issued by Nature as philatelists hope for full sets as issued by the Post Offices of countries long ago and far away (lepidopterists of my acquaintance are obsessional). How would one go about discovering the nocturnal habits of butterflies, or would one have to rely on chance observation? Could one follow butterflies to their lairs at close of day?

  These questions, not very profound and perfectly obvious, occurred to me after I had observed these creatures with delight for several years. The butterflies of Europe are not very numerous as to species (by comparison with the tropical world), nor are they dramatic in size or colour, but they are, if I may so put it, tasteful. The largest and flashiest of them, the swallowtails, are creamy coloured with black markings, and their red and blue spots are restrained: there is no iridescence in the butterflies of Europe. Most of the butterflies are pure white, white with black markings, black with white stripes, or yellow. There are a several rust-coloured types, again with black markings, that make me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem (that I was taught at school two or three years after the dinosaur broadcast, an epoch in a child’s development):

  Glory be to God for dappled things –

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow…

  The only blue butterfly is tiny, not more than half an inch in wingspan, the blue of its wings matt and pale, the underside ‘all in stipple upon trout that swims,’ to quote Hopkins again; a very shy butterfly this (we anthropomorphise even insects, and I even feel a little sorry for a drab and undistinguished wood-brown butterfly, so much less pretty than the others), that folds its wings modestly as soon as it lands and never stays for very long, as if it felt it had no real right to stay among its bigger brethren, of whom it cannot be afraid because they have no means of attack.

  In fact there is something ungraspable about the beauty of butterflies; their season is short, but more importantly even the tardiest of them do not stay longer in one place than a heart-stopping phrase of Mozart or Schubert, that would allow us to examine and—we suppose—fully to absorb their beauty, digest it and make it part of ourselves as we digest meat and potatoes. Of course one can take photographs (infinitely better than pinning them, etherised and dead, to a board), but the living qualities of butterflies, their peaceful flitting from flower to flower, their floating on the air, their rhythmic opening and closing of their wings in a breathing movement, is a large part of their beauty for us. We love them on the wing, but in the very moment of our appreciation there is decay, and thus melancholy. Everything is transient and fleeting; the wish that joy could last for ever is impossible of fulfilment. Another of Hopkins’ poems begins:

  Margaret, are you grieving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  And ends:

  It is the blight man was born for,

  It is Margaret that you mourn for.

  Why, when I had spent many hours happily (though idly, from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis) looking at the butterflies on my lavender bushes, did the question of where they went after dark never occur to me before? It is not that I had not noticed that they disappeared within a short space of time more or less together, like unionised workers walking off the job when a strike is called.

  The reason is that I simply took the way things were for granted, without thinking why they were as they were. Of course we have to do this for most of our lives: we cannot be paralysed by curiosity. And yet the opposite extreme, the habit of taking everything for granted, never wondering about anything, is one of the worst fates that can befall a man (if taking everything for granted can be called a fate rather than a decision). To walk in a world devoid of mystery is to embark on a voyage that is as tedious as it will appear long.

  It seemed to me, from talking to many of my patients, that that was the kind of journey upon which they were embarked. They had been relieved of the requirement to take an interest in their surroundings that the often painful necessity to wrest a subsistence from them conferred, for their subsistence was assured; on the other hand, they had not been encouraged to develop or had not attained the mental attitudes to find the world of inexhaustible interest. The result was a kind of ontological boredom: they were bored with being, with existence itself. To this boredom there were two possible responses (other than to revise their attitude to the world, of course): the first was a listlessness, conducive to the grossest overeating and chronic hypnosis by television, and the second was an attempt to overcome boredom by the introduction of drama, no matter how destructive, into life, which was thereby turned into a soap opera. Better pain and misery than waking anaesthesia.

  Pasteur said that fortune favoured the mind prepared; but minds, except perhaps for very rare exceptions, do not prepare themselves but have to be prepared. Do we do our best? Do we even try?

  23 - Gossamer Wings

  There are moods and times of day when one wants to read something intelligent but undemanding, and for this purpose there is nothing better than the literary essays and biographies of Sir Edmund Gosse. Once regarded as a colossus of literature, or at least of literary criticism and scholarship, he is now almost forgotten except for his memoir of his relationship with his father, Father and Son, which is indeed one of the most touching evocations of a highly unusual childhood known to me.

  In a mood recently to read intelligently yet without undue effort, I picked up one of Gosse’s many books of essays, Critical Kit-Kats (a Kit-Kat, Gosse informs us in his preface, is a ‘modest form of portraiture, which emphasises the head, yet does not quite exclude the hand of the sitter’). And indeed, the essays in the book are modest portraits of various writers, in which
sketches of the life are interspersed with critical judgments of their achievements.

  The first of the essays is about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and in particular her Sonnets from the Portuguese. In this essay, Gosse made himself party to the fraud carried out by his friend Thomas J. Wise, whose career the first line of the Dictionary of National Biography summarises as having been that of a ‘book-collector, bibliographer, editor, and forger.’ Wise made a speciality of producing spurious first editions, privately-printed in very small numbers to raise their desirability and hence their price among bibliomaniacs, using his renown as a bibliographer to authenticate them. His most successful forgery was a supposed early and privately-printed edition of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which ironically would now command a very high price indeed. (There is no doubt, alas, that the two words ‘and forger’ in the DNB’s description of him add immeasurably to his interest as a man. Who would not rather read about a book-collector, bibliographer, editor, and forger than about a mere book-collector, bibliographer, and editor? One begins to see that the sociologist, Durkheim, was not entirely wrong in believing what at first seems to be counter-intuitive, namely that societies need criminals, who do indeed serve an important social function. Whether we need quite as many criminals as we actually have is, of course, another matter entirely.)

  Anyway, in his essay about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gosse relays a false story about the origin of the supposed early private printing of the sonnets, which was actually produced by Wise about forty years after the date inscribed on the title page. Gosse calls it ‘a very pretty episode of literary history,’ though in fact it is more like an amusing episode in the history of fraud. Gosse says that Elizabeth’s husband, Robert Browning, told a friend the story that he, Gosse, is about to relay to the world for the first time, with the injunction that it should not be published before his, Robert’s, death. The friend to whom Browning vouchsafed the story was almost certainly none other than Thomas J. Wise, who was not a friend of Browning at all but rather a very slight acquaintance of his. Even this degree of intimacy was the result of Wise’s pushiness rather than any desire on Browning’s part for contact with him; but by the time Wise told Gosse the story, there was no one still alive who could contradict him. The editor of Wise’s letters to John Henry Wrann, the Chicago businessman to whom Wise sold most of his forgeries at very high prices, believes that Gosse was Wise’s accomplice rather than his dupe; but this is most unlikely. Gosse, I think, would simply not have thought it possible that Wise, a learned and respectable man of business, was lying to him or making use of him.

  Be this as it may, when Gosse turns from spurious biographical detail to literary criticism, he begins, somewhat ironically in the circumstances, by saying:

  Sincerity, indeed, is the first gift in literature, and perhaps the most uncommon.

  By one of those strange associations of ideas that to me is delightful (I cannot speak for other people) I was taken back more than quarter of a century to a conversation I had in Guatemala, around which I was driving at the time in a white pick-up truck. I gave a lift to an American hitch-hiker who told me that he had just been visiting an artist friend of his in Guatemala whose work, he said, was great because it was so sincere.

  In those days I was somewhat more combative in conversation than I am now, and to illustrate the point that while sincerity might be a necessary condition of great art it was certainly not a sufficient condition, I replied (or in words to this effect), ‘There are many sincere artists, but there is only one Mozart.’

  The proper part of sincerity in life, and perhaps in art, is a complex one; hard and fast rules are easy to come by but difficult to justify. Certain kinds of brutes believe that sincerity is always saying what they truly think; but if this is sincerity, then clearly it is not always a desirable quality (at least if the contents of my thoughts are anything to go by). When we disguise from someone a truth that can only be painful and not at all useful to him, we may sincerely wish him well, but still our words are not sincere; while to tell him that truth on the grounds that sincerity is a virtue is merely a manifestation of sadism.

  I suppose by insincerity, then, we mean the quality of saying or doing something that corresponds at no level of analysis to one’s true beliefs, feelings or desires. But then the problem arises as to what are a person’s true beliefs, feelings or desires. Not only may people (including, dare I say it, ourselves) harbour contradictory beliefs, feelings and desires, but there is no decisive test as to what constitutes true or real in this context. If you say that you want to give up smoking and I point out that you never make the slightest effort in that direction, you can perfectly well retort, ‘Yes, but I still want to.’ Actual conduct is not an infallible guide to inner states of mind—one might add Thank goodness, for if it were such an infallible guide human intercourse would lose all possible interest and mystery.

  If the sincerity of others and even of ourselves in the ordinary business of life is not easy to assess or to prove, then, a fortiori, it is even more difficult to assess the sincerity of art. And yet we do so regularly, relying largely on our instinct to do so. Who, for example, could believe that Jeff Koons is sincere in anything except a desire for fame and fortune? We should suspect those themselves of insincerity who claimed to believe him to be sincere. (The very verbiage of so much art criticism causes us to suspect that it is writing by frauds of frauds for frauds.)

  In his essay Gosse makes the point clearly that while sincerity is the first quality in literature, it is certainly not the last:

  It is not granted to more than a few to express in precise and direct language their most powerful emotional experiences.

  He continues:

  The attempt to render passion by artistic speech is commonly void of success to a pathetic degree. Those who have desired, enjoyed, and suffered to the very edge of human capacity, put the musical instrument to their lips to try and tell us what they felt, and the result is all discord and falsetto.

  Sincerity, then, is no guarantee of accomplishment; nor is failure a sign of insincerity, for with true humanity Gosse insists that:

  There is no question that many of the coldest and most affected verses, such as we are apt to scorn for their tasteless weakness, must hide underneath the white ash of their linguistic poverty a core of red hot passion.

  This is so not only in poetry, but in all fields of artistic and even of intellectual endeavour, particularly of a philosophical nature. Many of us must have been blinded by what we considered or hoped was an original insight, only to discover later that someone had thought precisely the same in 395 BC or AD 17. Our belief in our own originality, then, which was sincere at the time, turns out to have been a manifestation of our ignorance of all that has been said and thought before us, and the cause of initial exhilaration more properly a cause of lamentation and regret.

  There is nothing of the sneer in what Gosse writes, however; rather of humane understanding. And this is only appropriate, because his own volumes of verses, On Viol and Flute, Firdani in Exile, and other Poems, King Erik and In Russet and Silver, are now as forgotten as any in the language. When he praises the work of others, though, I think there is no mistaking (as likewise there is no proving) his sincerity. Of EBB’s sonnets he says:

  Many of the thoughts that enrich mankind and many of the purest flowers of the imagination had their roots, if the secrets of experience were made known, in actions, in desires, which could not bear the light of day… But this cycle of admirable sonnets, one of the acknowledged glories of our literature, is built patiently and unquestionable on the union in stainless harmony of two of the most distinguished spirits which our century has produced.

  In the subsequent essay in Critical Kit-Kats Gosse praises Keats in a similarly sincere way. The essay is actually a speech he made in 1894 at the dedication of a monument to Keats donated by American admirers of the poet.


  [His reputation] rests upon no privilege of birth, no “stake in the country,” as we say; it is fostered by no alliance of powerful friends, or wide circle of influences; no one living today has seen Keats, or preserves his memory for any private purpose. In all but verse his name was, as he said, “writ in water.” He is identified with no progression of ideas, no religious, or political, or social propaganda… We honour, in the lad who passed so long unobserved…, a poet, and nothing but a poet, but one of the very greatest poets that the modern world has seen… Shall I say what will startle you if I confess that I sometimes fancy that we lost in the author of the five great odes the most masterful capacity for poetic expression which the world has ever seen?