Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  The title story is very long, actually a novella rather than a mere short story, as suggested by the subtitle and Other Stories. It is not one of the author’s best known works, but it is a surprisingly subtle and moving exploration of the consequences of sincerity and insincerity, and of mistaking one for the other. But as with impulsive purchase of most books, I bought it because of the first page or two, which I read standing by the shelf. In these pages, Huxley provides a typology of bores:

  The word ‘bore’ is of doubtful etymology. Some authorities derive it from the verb meaning to pierce. A bore is a person who drills a hole in your spirit, who tunnels relentlessly through your patience, through all the crusts of voluntary deafness, inattention, rudeness, which you vainly interpose – through and through till he pierces you to the very quick of your being. But there are other authorities, as good or even better, who would derive the word from the French bourrer, to stuff, to satiate. If this etymology be correct, a bore is one who stuffs you with his thick and suffocating discourse, who rams his suety personality, like a dumpling, down your throat. He stuffs you: and you, to use an apposite modern metaphor, are ‘fed up with him.’ I like to think, impossibly, that both these derivations are correct; for bores are both piercers and stuffers. But they are characterized by a further quality, which drills and dough-nuts do not possess; they cling. That is why (though no philologist) I venture to suggest a third derivation, from ‘burr.’ Burr, bourrer, bore – all the sticking, stuffing, piercing qualities of boredom are implicit in those three possible etymologies. Each of the three of them deserves to be correct.

  In Huxley’s story two of the characters are bores, though of different types: Herbert Comfrey ‘who attached himself to any one who had the misfortune to come in contact with him… and could not be shaken off,… a burr-bore, a vegetable clinger;’ and John Peddley, his brother-in-law, ‘an active bore, an indefatigable piercer, a relentless stuffer and crammer… with a genius for dullness that caused him unfailingly to take an interest in things which interested nobody else.’

  The reason that Huxley’s typology struck me so forcefully is that I am always afraid not of boredom, but of being a bore; no, it is worse than that, I often am a bore, and manage to combine all three types—of piercing, stuffing and sticking—in my own single person. Sometimes, for example, when embarked upon a subject in which I am interested but others present are not, I positively pour out statistics to prove my argument (some, but not all, genuine), and continue even after my wife has kicked me, with increasing force, under the table. At other times, when I have nothing to say, I stick to people to make up for it, despite any signals they might have given of a desire to get away. It is unfortunately not true that a bore never knows that he is being boring; he is often only too aware of it, and his persistence is actually only a vain attempt to redeem himself, to prove that he is interesting, to earn the esteem of him whom he has so far bored. But the spiral is always downward, never upward.

  It is because I am aware of the agonies of being a bore that my emotions are so engaged by the memory of my wife’s uncle, a man whom I never met. He was, apparently, extremely boring, in the way that I fear that I am often boring. He married at a time when arranged, or at any rate strongly-advised, marriages were still quite frequent among the French bourgeoisie; his bride was a young woman with a lively mind but no economic prospects. The man who asked for her hand was a good prospect, economically, by no means a bad character, and so her parents suggested that she accept him; and she did.

  Alas, he was the kind of person, by no means infrequently encountered, whose first reaction to Versailles was to wonder how it was swept; Mozart made no impression on him at the Paris opera, but the problem of cleaning the central chandelier did. Unfortunately, he was unable, or had not enough insight, to keep his banal thoughts to himself. It was so bad that, at home, his wife turned the volume of the radio up to drown out what he was saying, though apparently he never noticed.

  My wife’s sympathies were with her poor aunt, but mine were with her uncle. (I suppose, in reality, the two of them were to be pitied, but it is very difficult to be equally sympathetic to both parties of an unhappy couple). I am seized by a heartfelt sorrow at the thought of the good and kind man whose departure from the world meant only that his widow could at last turn off the radio.

  In company, I often feel as if everything I say must be sparklingly interesting or I must hold my tongue. This is because, in our egotistical age, we fear to be thought boring far more than we fear to be thought bad. As a result, I veer between inappropriate loquacity and compete silence. That is why I read Huxley’s opening paragraph with a sense of appalled recognition.

  12 - Time Past

  There are some people whose imagination and emotions are stirred more by the past than by the future, and I am among them. We to whom time past is more important than any time to come are not world builders, we improve nothing; on the other hand, we seldom destroy anything. We tend to pessimism rather than to optimism, or at any rate to expectations that are not extravagant; supposedly imminent solutions to life’s problems, after all, seem never to arrive, and disillusion is more common than fulfilment of promise. A disappointment anticipated is a disappointment halved; pessimists are therefore happy in the long run, or happier than optimists.

  When, as sometimes happens as I get older, I lie awake at night unable to sleep, my mind returns to episodes from my past. As to the future, I can seldom think further ahead than the next article I am to write. I can dwell for any length in my sleeplessness only on the past.

  From time to time, for reasons that I cannot explain, an episode returns to me from when I was almost sixteen. I was hitch-hiking in Scotland with a French friend; it now seems almost incredible that two boys of such an age should have been allowed by their parents to fend for themselves in this fashion, when communications were so much more difficult. We had a tent, and camped by the side of the road wherever we were when night fell. It wasn’t comfortable—tents in those days were not the suburban home from home that they are now—and many a time the rain leaked through the canvas because we had touched it on the inside, which meant that we lived in a state of chronic dampness. We thought nothing of it.

  In those innocent days, it never crossed our minds that those who picked us up might harm us, or the minds of those who picked us up that we might harm them. When we arrived late one night in a northern English industrial town and could find no accommodation we went to the police station where we were allowed to stay overnight in the cells; in the morning the police brought us bread and tea. How gentle the world seemed then, when people trusted one another!

  This is a reminder that wealth and its consequent increased range of consumer choice (which have increased enormously since then) are not the same as freedom tout court: youngsters today do not have the freedom that we had, when no one thought it was negligent of parents to allow us to do what we did. Whether the anxiety of parents that would prevent them from allowing children to do as we did is objectively justified by the condition of the world, or whether the manacles are mind-forged is beside the point: an important freedom has declined greatly.

  My friend and I were in a remote part of Scotland where sheep were grazed. We had been given a lift by a newlywed couple on their honeymoon. As we drove round a corner on a hill, there was a sheep by the side of the road that had been severely injured in a collision with a previous vehicle (few and far between in these parts). The sheep’s guts had spilled out of its open belly, but it was not dead; it was still kicking convulsively if feebly.

  The bride let out a cry of distress; she asked her young husband whether he had seen the sheep that was still alive. He said that he had seen the sheep and that it was dead. Then he turned to me and said, ‘It was dead, wasn’t it Theodore?’

  I too had seen that it was alive; it took me a fraction of second to realise that the husband was not makin
g an enquiry into truth, but trying to reduce his wife’s clearly mounting distress.

  ‘Yes, it was dead,’ I said.

  This calmed the bride, who concluded what she wished to conclude, that she must have been mistaken. And immediately afterwards I felt a great pride: pride that the groom, clearly an educated and intelligent man, had felt sufficient confidence in my intelligence and savoir-faire to ask me (at my age!) his question and that I would appreciate its real significance. How mature and sophisticated I felt, how proud that I had passed the test and come up to his expectations!

  I have replayed the incident in my mind many times since, perhaps because it was the high-point of my psychological acuity. But there are other reasons too. I often wonder what happened to that young couple whose path I so briefly crossed. Their love was young and tender; the groom’s protectiveness towards his bride would now, perhaps, be unfashionable, but seemed to me then (and now) to spring from unselfconscious love and a plain sense of duty. They were young and just starting out in life; they would now be in their early or even their middle seventies. I remember hoping at the time that their love would survive, because my own life at the time had been so singularly lacking in tenderness, so completely loveless; and that if it did survive it would be reassurance that lovelessness was neither inevitable nor the normal state of mankind (for it is easy for young people to suppose that their experience of life is all the experience that life can afford).

  This tiny episode was also important because it taught me, very vividly, that the truth, or rather telling the truth, was not always a virtue, that other considerations might trump it morally. Kant, of course, would have said that I was wrong not to tell the truth about the sheep; but this seemed to me then, as it has seemed to me since, only to show that Kant was mistaken. I had enough insight even at that age to appreciate that telling the truth in such circumstances might easily spring not from a disposition to truthfulness based on an ethical principle, but from sadism, a pleasure in causing dismay for its own sake.

  It also taught me the inescapable necessity for paternalism in human relations: not, of course, on every occasion, or invariable, but sometimes, on occasion, as suggested by judgment. As a doctor I have never forgotten this, though paternalism has become almost a dirty word in medical ethics. There must, of course, be a presumption in favour of truth-telling, but like almost any other principle it much not be made into a categorical imperative or, to put it more crudely, a fetish.

  I have an example in my own family history of a surgeon who acted in a way that would now be deemed ethically reprehensible, and perhaps even actionable, but which seems to me to have been in the very highest tradition of his profession. His name was Cox, and I don’t know whether he is still alive: by now he would be very old. I thanked him insufficiently at the time.

  I was in Africa when I telephoned my mother (by no means the easy thing to do then that it is nowadays). She was about to go to America on a visit, but she told me that she had been bleeding intestinally. I told her she must abandon her visit and see a surgeon at once, which she did.

  It was cancer; she underwent an operation within the week. I returned home before the operation.

  My mother said that she wanted nothing hidden from her; she wanted to be told everything, and made me promise that I would hide nothing. She exuded a kind of pride in her own rationality.

  After the operation, the surgeon spoke to me. Whether he was franker with me than he would have been with a son who was not a doctor I do not know; but he told me that, while he had excised all the cancerous tissue that he could see macroscopically, histology demonstrated that my mother’s prognosis was very bad. There was an eighty per cent chance of recurrence within a year.

  I told the surgeon that my mother had made me promise that I would tell her everything. The surgeon said that, on his estimate of my mother’s character and personality, this would not be a good idea. He advised me against this course of action; and since he was clearly a man of experience and integrity, I took his advice.

  My mother asked me, when she had recovered sufficiently from the operation, what the surgeon had said. I told her that, as far as he could see, he had cut out all the cancerous tissue. This was the truth, but of course not the whole truth, and I rather dreaded further questions, to which I might have to reply with outright lies: and I might not prove to be a very convincing liar. My mother was perfectly well aware that removing all cancerous tissue to the naked eye was not the whole of the matter, but to my surprise—and relief—she enquired no further. Despite her protestations beforehand, she did not want to know everything.

  In the event, she lived another nineteen years without recurrence and relatively free of anxiety about her cancer because the surgeon had ‘cut it all out.’

  I was very impressed by the surgeon. It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that he had acted as the very model of a fine medical practitioner. He was technically accomplished, it goes without saying; the operation went smoothly, with no avoidable complications. But more than that, he had given consideration to my mother as a person, as a human being; and on the basis of limited acquaintance with her—at most, a few examinations in the clinic—he had come to a shrewd and, I believe, accurate assessment of what was best for her, better indeed than my assessment. Surgeons are often accused of being brash, mere technicians without human subtlety, but this was certainly not the case with him.

  From the standpoint of modern medical ethics, he committed two cardinal sins: he broke medical confidentiality and he was not entirely truthful with his patient. If he had acted in accordance with modern precepts, or obsessions, he would have done neither; with the peculiar result that, if he had acted ethically, he would have acted worse.

  I assume that the surgeon, who is a hero to me, acted differently according to his assessment of the clinical situation confronting him: that breaking medical confidence and untruthfulness by omission were not fixed principles with him that he applied in every case. But this is surely very unlikely.

  Instead, his understanding of the requirements for human decency was much more sophisticated than that of modern medical ethics. He understood that people generally live in a social situation, not as isolated beings, and that it is sometimes right for relatives to know more about an illness than the ill person him or herself. And I am sure that he knew that truthfulness can descend into indifference to suffering or even to sadism. To try to force people to know what they do not want to know can be cruel, and often ineffective into the bargain.

  I thought of the couple in Scotland again last night and what became of them. They are forever fixed in my memory because of that one episode. It is surprising how egotistical memory is: if I met the couple again I would be surprised to discover how they had aged, as if my memory of them had preserved them from all change ever since. Not long ago the distinguished actor, Marius Goring, died; I had seen him at Stratford as Angelo in Measure for Measure more than forty years earlier, when he was middle-aged, and I was almost outraged to discover that forty years later he was not as I remember him in his burgundy velvet tunic, but was 85 years old. My having seen him was thus not as important to him as it was to me.

  But when I recall the couple in Scotland, I still feel a certain pride at my moral intuition.

  13 - Portuguese Men-Of-Art

  Recently I stayed in a flat in Paris for a few weeks that belonged to a friend’s sister who had died not long before aged seventy-six. It is a strange and slightly unsettling experience to move into the home of someone who has died not long before and many of whose effects are still present: the ordinary effects of day-to-day living (little labelled pots of tarragon and paprika, for example) as well as the records of a lifetime (holiday photos and the notes taken more than fifty years before as a student of pharmacy). There were little lists of things to do, telephone numbers, books of recipes, and a tiny box of postage stamps fo
r letters that will now never be written. Who in such circumstances would not reflect upon his own mortality and then, with a faint sense of guilt as if to do so were to demonstrate a lack of proper feeling, get on with his own life as if nothing untoward had happened? If we are still in good health, do we not continue to feel that there will always be a tomorrow for us, even though we know intellectually that there will not? And are we not aware of a slight moral superiority over the dead, a sense of complacency, as if our continuation in life were a sign of our own cleverness or virtue rather than the mere consequence of having been born years later than the deceased?

  Among her books were manuals of English, dating from the time when she was in her forties. I suspect that she had always resolved to learn our language and had made intermittent efforts to do so, but never really succeeded. Such, at any rate, is the history of my own struggles with German, among several other languages.

  She had been something a traveller, and likewise among her books I found a book about Portugal that dated from 1956. It was by an author of whom I had not heard, Yves Bottineau. I assume that she had been to Portugal about then, for her books about Iceland dated from the same era as her photographs of her trip there. I leafed idly though the book about Portugal, but with growing interest. I largely ignored the text, it was the photographs that captured my imagination. They were beautiful, but they were also photographs of beauty, natural but above all man-made.

  Having just said that I largely ignored the text I will nevertheless quote a sentence from the first page:

  This country, which enjoys in the eyes of the tourist the reputation of being a paradise, is in reality a very human land, that is to say nuanced…