Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Can this really bear the weight of interpretation put upon it? Does art not have claims that are independent of the social, historical and economic circumstances in which it was created? I look at the picture again and see only a very pleasant landscape. And yet the art historian’s words return to my mind, like a banal tune that won’t leave one’s brain however much one wants it to.

  The anonymous collector wrote a chapter in the catalogue as well. He describes how he started: ‘One day, I took the leap… and bought a first painting, delivered a few days later by post.’ That is just how my little sailor boy arrived.

  30 - Give Death Its Due

  Ever since I was born about half a million people a year have died in Britain alone, making more than thirty million of them in my lifetime; yet until quite recently I hardly noticed this holocaust around me. Death played no more than a very minor part in the jejune drama of my life; I lived as if exclusively among immortals, where death, if it occurred at all, seemed almost a moral judgment on the lives of the departed rather than a purely natural event in those lives. They must have done something wrong to die.

  Now all that is changing; I have reached an age at which even the deaths of those I have known but slightly affect me more deeply than the deaths of those I knew well affected me, when life without death seemed to be the norm.

  It is partly a matter of numbers, of course; as one grows older, so the number of one’s acquaintances who die grows larger. It is hardly an original thought that age increases the reality of death in one’s thoughts; it is a sad fact of human psychology that what touches one nearest touches one most. (But is it really so sad? Imagine a life in which this was not so. It would be intolerable.)

  The other day I received by e-mail a note that once upon a time might have arrived on thick-wove black-edged notepaper, informing me of the death of a woman who had worked in an administrative capacity in the hospital in which I had worked until my retirement eight years ago. To say that she had not been universally loved by the staff of the hospital would be to put it kindly; most people who had dealings with her, and who were not inhibited by the decent injunction that one should not speak ill of the (recently) dead, would attest to her difficult manner and general obstructiveness. I had little to do with her personally; that little did not encourage me to seek a deeper acquaintance, but rather to avoid her wherever possible. Words such as ‘bad-tempered’ or ‘impossible’ came unbidden to practically everyone’s lips when speaking of her. In short, she was a dragon.

  Oddly enough I met her in another capacity after her retirement. She worked as a volunteer in the courts where I sometimes still appeared as an expert witness, shepherding witnesses in the right direction (literal, not metaphorical). She was all sweetness and light, and I learned, somewhat late in life I must admit (but better late than never), that one should not always judge a person’s character by one’s brief acquaintance with it at work. I suspect now that the ‘dragon’ was such because she had been asked to work at a level beyond her natural capacity, and she sought to disguise her feeling of inadequacy by an artificial fierceness.

  The message that I received was very sad. She had been found at home dead in a chair, after her neighbour had become alarmed by the fact that she had not opened the curtains of her front room. Dragon she might once have been, but she was not the kind of paranoid person who normally left her curtains closed to prevent her persecutors from looking in. She had died in her chair, presumably the night before, probably of a heart attack, though as yet the cause of death was not known.

  Her husband had died before her, as had her brother and sister. There were no children, and no other known relatives. Though no doubt her death was swift, and let us hope painless, its utter loneliness was such as to cause one pain to imagine; and a former colleague of mine pointed out that there was no one to whom we could express our condolences. After a death we need to express such condolences, and it occurred to me then that often the person we are condoling after a death is ourselves as much as those who have lost someone. We try to comfort ourselves knowing that the fate of the departed is our own ultimate fate.

  Another recent death that affected me disproportionately to the depth of my acquaintance with the dead person was that of an elderly woman who worked as a volunteer in a library where I spent three months conducting some historical research. She was there about twice a week and was so self-effacing that I exchanged no more than a few polite words with her at any one time. She was helpful and devoted to the work of the library, and she induced in me a slight sense of guilt that I was by comparison with her brash and self-seeking.

  I asked after her when I returned to the library a few months later to give a talk on the results of my research, to be told that she had died suddenly of a fulminant cancer. I was saddened by the news, much more deeply than my superficial contact with this person, however worthy she might have been, would normally have justified or led me to expect. I genuinely mourned her loss for her own sake, but also for the decay of the memory of a time when I had been very happy and which I had hoped to preserve in my mind uncontaminated by change.

  As a result of these deaths I began to do what I had never done before, to compile a list in my mind of all the people known to me personally who had died. My paternal grandparents died before I really understood that death was not just a temporary disappearance behind a stage curtain, the dead reappearing some time later when they want or are wanted. I was not taken to see them in their last illnesses as (I suppose) deathbed scenes were not deemed suitable for so young a child. As for my maternal grandparents, they died before I was born.

  The first death, then, of which I have some recollection was that of the mother of my then best friend, from whom I was inseparable, when we were about nine. She seemed very old to us then, but I suppose she could not have been much more than forty or forty-five at the most: tragically young from my present point of view. She had a cancer of the breast for which she refused to seek medical attention, having converted to Christian Science some time before; I do not know whether her failure to do so hastened her death or affected the outcome in any way. But I remember her deathbed: the room blacked out by heavy dark red plush curtains that absorbed the sound as effectively as they excluded the light. It was like a death from another age, which I suppose it was, for bourgeois propriety had not yet been quite mocked out of existence.

  Then there was the death of a close friend of mine. He was a year older than I—sixteen. He suffered terribly from intractable asthma which had deformed his chest; in those days, treatment by inhaler had just come into being and he took a drug called isoprenaline which relieved the symptoms but whose dangerous toxic effects were not fully understood. He was a brilliant linguist and I have little doubt that he would have made a mark as an academic despite his inherent modesty which at that time was not yet a severe disadvantage to those pursuing a career. His mother was a widow with another son as different from my friend as possible: he was extremely handsome but something of a waster and it was easy to predict that he would come to a sticky end (unless, that is, he succeeded brilliantly, probably in some activity not entirely respectable).

  I had been away for a couple of weeks and went round to my friend’s house to see him. His mother opened the door. She told me that he had died a few days before of an asthma attack while waiting for an ambulance to arrive (the ambulance telephonist had made all kind of bureaucratic difficulties lasting several minutes before sending the ambulance, which arrived just as my friend died). He had said to his mother, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying!’ to which she had tried to reply with emollient and comforting words. His last words were, ‘Don’t you understand, I’m dying!’

  This was terrible enough, but then my friend’s mother said something that shook me even more deeply.

  ‘Why couldn’t it have been the other one?’ she said, meaning her other son who would never amount to muc
h or be a support to her.

  I was too young to know what to reply to so terrible an exclamation. Did it mean that she believed that there was a providence that demanded the sacrifice of one of her sons, and that it was impossible that both should have survived? Or did it mean, even worse, that she would actually like to be rid of her elder son? Do things said in the extremity of emotion uncover what we ‘really’ think or wish, as psychoanalysts might say? I fled, my mind in a whirl, never to return, too cowardly to face the emotional awkwardness of another encounter. I feel guilty now that I did not go back, for I might have provided some kind of comfort, and also that I so soon got on with my life as if nothing had happened.

  The next death in my life, and the only one for many years, was in my first year at medical school. One of my fellows, much more academically gifted than I, contracted acute leukaemia and died three months later, for in those days treatment was rudimentary and survival very short. I see him now in my mind’s eye, before he was ill, sitting in front of me in a lecture, his straw-coloured hair a bit of a bird’s nest. When he was dying we shied away from him, not knowing what to say and thoroughly embarrassed by the situation. Whether he died alone I do not know. Perhaps he would have had a brilliant career before him had he survived; but at least, like Rupert Brooke in cultural memory, he is eternally young in my memory. Not, of course, much of a compensation for dying so young.

  When I think of these deaths, as I do surprisingly often though without any additional insight into their meaning or significance, I am aware of a gnawing unease. Why was it they, not I, who died aged 45, 16 and 19? Why was it granted to me to live so many years more than they, without having done anything at all to deserve it? Why do I not thank my lucky stars (if that is what they are)? Why, instead, do I complain all the time, of such matters as that the internet connection is a bit slow today? I suppose the answer is that it is because what human beings are like, and must be like if they are to live their lives.

  Though death had until recently had played so little part in my life considering its prevalence, I have always had a fondness for cemeteries, and this has lasted the whole of my life. I happen to write this not more than a hundred yards from what is probably the most celebrated cemetery in the world, Père-Lachaise in Paris.

  Yesterday, being Sunday, I took a walk in it. I did not search for the tombs of the famous, though I was pleased to have spotted that of Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the system of Bertillonage, the system of multiple anthropometric recording that enabled a person to be distinguished with almost absolute certainty from every other human being in the world, used by the police until fingerprinting made it redundant. I noted that his tomb was neglected and overgrown with moss, unlike Oscar Wilde’s, which was covered in lipstick kisses.

  The tomb that most moved me was that of a man born in 1933 who was ‘cowardly murdered’ in 1979. (He was a security guard who carried money into and out of banks.) There was a photograph of him in a ceramic medallion, and a fresh plant placed at the tomb’s foot, that meant he was not forgotten. His widow had put her name under his, with her date of birth, also 1933, but with no date of death. She was waiting, thirty-six years later, to be interred beside him.

  What a wealth of suffering this tomb indicated, but also what nobility!

  31 - Life’s a Swindle

  In my career as a doctor in prison, I met a few swindlers in my time and on the whole I liked them. They had charm and intelligence, which perhaps is unsurprising. It isn’t easy to imagine a charmless swindler, after all; it is almost a sine qua non of the trade. Whether their charm preceded their swindling or they developed it in order to practice their swindling is hard to say, though the former is more likely. Be that as it may, their charm was their stock-in-trade and human gullibility the market in which they sold their wares.

  Though I am a firm partisan of law and order, I admired, albeit somewhat guiltily, the swindlers of my acquaintance, especially if they had swindled on a large scale and had defrauded not individuals but faceless organisations. I know that individual people either owned or paid for those organisations, but somehow it seems less heinous to steal a dollar from a million people than a million dollars from one person. I remember in particular a swindler who had defrauded the exchequer of more than $50 million, the whereabouts of which he refused to disclose to the authorities though to have done so would have lessened his prison sentence considerably. He had worked out what in effect amounted to his rate of pay per year served in prison and decided that it would be worth it, especially as prison conditions in Britain had eased considerably in point of comfort, and he would enjoy a long and golden retirement once released.

  His scheme was so complex that I did not understand it; only a man with a firm grasp of various tax laws and a powerful imagination could have seen the opportunity and exploited it. There was an elaborate trail of falsified invoices and other paperwork that I did not understand and I had seen at once that he was an exceptional man, not what the prison guards used to call ‘your typical con’ [convict], when he entered my room with a volume of Wittgenstein under his arm. Suffice it to say that Wittgenstein was not the favourite reading even of those prisoners who read. Their preferred reading was generally crime novels of the goriest kind.

  The Wittgensteinian prisoner was not ill. It was I who had asked to see him rather than the other way round. I needed to know whether his cellmate, the man with whom he shared a cell, a drug smuggler, was mad, as I had reason to believe. There are few places where untreated madness is more troublesome than a prison.

  As one might expect from a man who read Wittgenstein for pleasure, he was highly articulate. Prisoners often say the most interesting things and their language often has a beauty of its own, but consecutive thought is not the first characteristic of their utterances. A man such as I sometimes felt starved of conversation in the prison and so I kept the swindler with me for longer than necessary just for the pleasure of hearing him speak. He did not disappoint me.

  He was completely unrepentant and was more inclined to pride in his exploit than guilt about it. Who, he asked me, had suffered by it? Large numbers of people had benefited from it, even, because the swindle involved selling goods without tax so that they were cheaper for those fortunate enough to be sold them. The government was deprived of $50 million, it is true, but though this was a large sum for an individual it was small change for the government, an infinitesimal and insignificant loss to its receipts. Besides, the government would almost certainly waste the money; for example, it had spent no less than $20 billion on a unified information system for the health service without anything whatever to show for it, except, perhaps (or even certainly), many millionaire information technology consultants. It is difficult to believe that such waste could have occurred in, or such an outcome could have resulted from, a state of complete ignorance on the part of everyone, without anyone whatever having wished it or at least taken advantage of it.

  Furthermore (he told me), he had used a large part of his fortune, which he refused to believe was ill-gotten, in constructing a mansion in a so-called Third World country. He had thereby stimulated the economy of that country, giving employment to poor people much more honestly than if the government which he had allegedly defrauded had spent the same sums as he in a programme of official aid. Not only would most of the money spent have gone to those administering it, but most of what remained would have stuck to the fingers of the government of the poor country through which it would inevitably have had to be channelled. In other words, his foreign aid was much more effective and less damaging than anything the government could have done.

  I should add that he said all this with a lightness of spirit that was delightful, so that one felt in listening to him that had drunk a glass of champagne. Not only did I not know what to reply to him by way of refutation, but I did not even want to refute him; on the contrary, I was on his side. My slight o
bjection, that I made more for form’s sake than from conviction, that by depriving the government of $50 million he would cause it to seek that sum elsewhere to the detriment of taxpayers, sounded hollow even as I made it. I also tried the argument, without really believing it, that if everyone did as he did the government’s receipts would fall dramatically, with unforeseeable but disastrous consequences.

  ‘But everyone won’t do it,’ he replied.

  This was the most obvious answer to return. To do as he had done would require two qualities (at least two): first the intellect necessary to understand the laws and the gaps in them, an intellect quite out of the ordinary; and second the daring to flout the law in such a fashion.

  Let us suppose that the necessary intellect were to be found in one per cent of the population. Let us suppose also that the quality of necessary daring is not only independent of that of intellect, but is (as seems to me likely) even rarer than that of intellect, say one in a thousand: then not more than one in a hundred thousand people would act as he had done. And if we take into account that nine out of ten people would also scruple to act in this way, for reasons of false moral delicacy, we now find that not more than one in a million would so act. Moreover, of those with the necessary intellect, daring and lack of scruple, not more than one in ten would actually act as he had done rather than in some other way. So now we are up to one in ten million. Therefore to object to his conduct on the grounds that it would be disastrous if everybody did it would be absurd: it would be like keeping pigs locked up because they might develop wings and fly.

  Yes, the arguments were all on his side and he not only had nothing to reproach himself with but was almost a benefactor of society. If his incarceration had cost society a great deal—I have never understood quite why imprisonment should be so expensive—that was society’s fault, not his.