Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Before that date (which of course is approximate rather than definite) tombstones of children were restrained and dignified. After that date, they became vulgar and sentimental, with emotionally cheap and slushy inscriptions. Moreover, the tombs of the children were now often surrounded by toys, cakes, dolls, clothes, plastic windmills, football shirts, cards covered in cellophane and so forth, that have usually rotted by neglect in our less than clement climate. It was as if people were no longer content to grieve privately, but had to manifest their emotion to all and sundry, as if they could feel nothing unless others could see by the ornaments of a child’s grave that they were grieving. Others see me feel, therefore I feel. One could even detect a form of competition between the grieving parents, to see which of them could festoon the graves with the most extravagant decorations as if this would prove that their grief was the deepest, their loss the most deeply felt. In other words, they were not just experiencing an emotion, they were experiencing themselves experiencing an emotion, deriving a pleasurable self-righteousness from it: the very soul of kitsch.

  In the beautiful cemetery of a town called Yeovil—pronounced Yo-ville, but that my satellite-navigation system, not altogether without justification, pronounced You-evil—I noticed the contrast of this kitsch with more genuine emotion. A very young child died and was buried in the cemetery 1964 and I noticed two years ago that the parents (I assumed it was they) had placed a single fresh flower in a vase by the little tombstone that gave nothing but the child’s name and the dates of its all too short existence on earth. I was much moved that these parents were still grieving—in a private, undemonstrative and dignified fashion—47 years later. How young and fresh and full of hope they must have been when their child was born, and now they must have been in their early seventies! Of course they had got on with their lives in the meantime, but a grief must always have been just below the surface of their daily existence and I suspect that the child who died was their only child. At any rate, I happened to go to the cemetery two years later and found another fresh flower in the vase at the grave. A grief borne for 49 years, and I imagine nobly borne.

  The contrast of the single flower in the vase with the sound of the plastic windmills turning in the wind and the sight of the dirty, sodden and neglected teddy bears on the more recent graves of children could hardly have been more striking. It was as if two vastly different civilisations had met in the same place; one that valued dignity and depth, and the other shallowness and a meretricious show of emotion.

  Another cemetery that I came to like was that of Llanelli in South Wales. Llanelli has always had a rather poor reputation from the purely aesthetic point of view, not surprisingly perhaps in view of its principal economic activities of the past two centuries, mining and steel-making, which do not make for beauty; but nowadays the mines and the steelworks are shut and the main industry is the administration of economic decline. It is a sad and forlorn place, but I came to like the people. They started conversations at bus-stops and when they learned I was a doctor asked my medical advice which I gave them cautiously so as not to contradict their own medical advisers. More than once I met an old coal miner, a widower in his late seventies, at the bus-stop from which both he and I took the bus into town. It is highly probable that his political ideas were very different from mine, but one feels an instinctive respect for a man who has spent his life down the pits (they closed for good just as he reached retirement age). He went every day at lunchtime down to the centre of the town, and every day he was dressed immaculately. His starched snow-white shirt was dazzling; he wore a striped tie and a smart blazer; the crease of his trouser legs was sharp and his black shoes were polished. Not for him the deliberately torn jeans of spoilt youth trying, from pseudo-sympathy with the unfortunate, to look poor; he did one good to look upon, for his smartness of dress was a triumph of the human spirit. It was not vanity, it was self-respect, and one could go a hundred miles without (alas) finding its like.

  I used while I was in Llanelli to go to the cemetery on fine days and there lie on the grass between the tombstones with a book, usually poetry (a feeble gesture in the direction of Romanticism), and almost invariably fall asleep under the sun. One day I woke up from my brief nap and to my surprise saw a woman in her fifties nearby dressed in the Punjabi Moslem costume of the salwar kameez. I was doubly surprised, first because hardly anybody, apart from me, seemed to visit the cemetery, and second because the last person I should have expected to see among the tombstones was a Punjabi woman. She was carrying a bunch of flowers.

  She asked me, in English that she had obviously learned too late in life to master throughly, whether I knew where the grave of Margaret Davies was. Margaret Davies is not exactly a distinctive name in Wales and besides I had not committed to memory the whereabouts of hundreds or thousands of graves. But I said I would help her try to find it.

  As we searched I asked her why she wanted to find it. She said that she had come to Llanelli from Pakistan as a young woman, and had lived next door to Margaret Davies. Margaret Davies had been very good to her and had become her friend. Then she, the Punjabi woman whose name I never learned, moved away. She had come back on a visit and learned that in the meantime Margaret Davies had died and was buried in this cemetery; she wanted to leave flowers on her grave as a token of gratitude and remembrance.

  I was much moved by this story, the story of two ordinary people (for such I assumed they were) using their common humanity to overcome potentially bewildering and frightening difference. It must, after all, have been almost as difficult for Margaret Davies to be suddenly confronted by a Punjabi neighbour as for the Punjabi neighbour to have been suddenly translocated from the Pakistani Punjab to Llanelli.

  When one hears a story like this, one is immediately prey to a certain kind of sentimentality. Why cannot everyone be like this? Why can’t we all just get on together, allowing what unites us to be more important than what divides us? Why is there not universal and perpetual peace rather than widespread conflict? Surely, left to their own devices, and uninflamed by ideologues and political entrepreneurs, people would just find a modus vivendi? In East Africa, I had spent three months living in the home of a Punjabi Pakistani family without the faintest hint of conflict over anything. Perhaps there was a subject or two we avoided, but there always are subjects that are best avoided when people live in close association.

  To the questions above I do not think any definitive answer can be given. Unfortunately men—and it is usually men—are often seized by the idea that they know the one way to live, that is to say the answers to all the difficult problems of human existence that are consequent upon the possession of consciousness. I know this in part from the inside: I have in my life sometimes been seized by it myself. I always feel ashamed, and miserable, after I have had an attack of dogmatism, especially as I have so many times resolved never to have another.

  What is possible, though by no means guaranteed, between individuals, however, often turns out to be impossible or at any rate much more difficult between groups. Perhaps the good Margaret Davies would have felt very differently if her entire street had been suddenly inhabited and taken over by large numbers of Pakistani Punjabis. Then she would have moved away and quite probably have felt embittered at the loss of the world she had known. Be all that as it may, Llanelli will remain forever associated in my mind with its cemetery, and with Margaret Davies and the Pakistani Punjabi lady who wanted to put flowers on her grave.

  There was another little incident that engraved itself upon my mind in Llanelli. My wife and I used to go to an Indian, or rather Bangladeshi, restaurant there, largely faute de mieux. It was not well-patronised, and often we fell into conversation with a young waiter there of Bangladeshi descent (the lives of waiters have long fascinated me). He spoke with a Welsh accent, and we asked him whether he had ever been abroad and if so where to.

  ‘I went to Bangladesh once,’
he said.

  ‘Anywhere else?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to England.’

  That’s real integration for you: a Llanelli man, born and bred, who thinks of England as a foreign country. For a brief moment I almost felt optimistic.

  20 - Non-Linear B

  Such was the state of historical knowledge, or perhaps I should say ignorance, of my young patients that I was most favourably impressed whenever a young man deduced by his own unaided efforts that there must have been a First World War because there had been a Second.

  However, everyone’s knowledge is always finite, while everyone’s ignorance is always infinite: so the comparatively learned have little cause to look down their noses on the unlearned because of their ignorance, which after all is only equal to their own. Indeed, in so far as one of the objects of learning is the attainment of wisdom as well as mere knowledge for its own sake, pride in learning is especially vulgar and reprehensible. The learned above all people should appreciate the eternal appropriateness of modesty.

  Therefore I do not blush to record that I once made a deduction very similar to that of my patients who concluded from the fact that there had been a Second World War that there had been a first: namely that, if there had been a Linear B script of Minoan writing there must have been a Linear A. Of neither did I know anything.

  Nevertheless, the phrase ‘Linear B’ that has always resonated in my mind in a way that the phrase ‘Linear A’ has not. Is it merely that the former is more euphonious than the latter? Or could it be a faint echo from my very early childhood, not so much a memory as a shadow of a memory, when Linear B was first deciphered and the man who did it enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, sudden fame and prominence? Could it be that, when I was 3 years old, everyone talked about it and that it left some very faint residue in my mind?

  The decipherment of Linear B was a tremendous intellectual achievement of the kind completely beyond my powers, or the powers of an almost incomparably enormous proportion of mankind. Linear B was a form of writing found on tablets at Knossos in Crete in the early part of the last century by the distinguished archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. The writing consisted of 89 characters, spindly in form, some of which clearly resembled ideograms. They were of pre-Homeric date; what sound the characters represented, what language whose written form they were, was completely unknown. There was no Rosetta stone to assist in the decipherment of the writing; it resembled somewhat writing discovered in Cyprus, and later some very similar inscriptions were found in Greece, but otherwise there was no clue.

  The man who deciphered Linear B was called Michael Ventris. The brilliance of his achievement, a combination of dogged persistence, great learning and well-informed leaps of the imagination, was recognised at once: the BBC, for example, asked him to give a talk on the radio as soon as he had deciphered Linear B (which certainly would not happen nowadays).

  Ventris’ story is a most interesting and indeed moving one, of triumph and tragedy intimately comingled. Personally, for reasons that I cannot fully explain, I find such stories greatly more affecting than those of men who move from triumph to triumph and who, after initial success, are the precise opposite of Lot’s wife and never look back.

  Ventris was born into a family in which privilege and tragedy, convention and rebellion, were in constant tension, a tension which proved in his case to be a highly creative one, though also with an ultimately tragic outcome.

  Ventris’s father was an army man, as was his grandfather; but his father never reached the rank (general) of his own father. Already, in that fact, one senses deep if unexpressed misery and disappointment: perhaps it is easier to be the successful son of a failed father than the successful son of a more successful father.

  In any case, Ventris’s father suffered from tuberculosis and went with his wife to live in Switzerland where Ventris was brought up for the first part of his life. Born in 1922, he was a brilliant linguist both by natural endowment and circumstance, and learnt French, German and Swiss German; his mother was Polish, the daughter of wealthy landowners, and Ventris learnt Polish from her. Later in his life he added languages to his repertoire as others buy appliances. He was able to correspond with Swedish academics in their own language and to write to Russian emigrés in Russian. He received a classical education at a relatively unconventional school called Stowe.

  His mother moved in artistic circles, and Ventris grew up with Picassos on the walls of his home. From this he developed a taste for modernism which influenced (balefully, in my opinion) his choice of career. Of reserved and modest demeanour, even as a child, his appearance became that of an extremely refined man. Physiognomy is an inexact science, no doubt, but no one who saw him could have doubted his high intelligence and intellectual ability.

  Tragedy, though, irrupted into what might otherwise have been a gilded youth. His father died of his disease in 1938, when Ventris was 16; two years later his mother committed suicide by overdose of barbiturates, depressed by the war, the destruction of her country and the loss of income from her family estates.

  Ventris joined the RAF and became a navigator for bombers. This, of course, was extremely dangerous work; the death rate in Bomber Command was very high. After the war he worked in Germany as an interpreter, but he soon resumed the architectural studies that he had started on leaving school. His mathematical and logical mind led him to think of architecture in principally intellectual or abstract terms, although he was also driven by an ideologically puritan loathing of decoration, which was deeply conventional at the time though not recognised as such (it can take a number of years, even decades, for ideas that take themselves to be revolutionary to be recognised as conventional). I have seen only one of his buildings, the house that he built for himself and his family, and the fact is that Venturis was a bad architect. Intellectual brilliance is not an advantage in arts when not allied to other qualities; if Ventris had been born in another age, with other conventions, he might well have been a very good architect.

  He first became interested in the problem of Linear B at the age of 14, when he heard a public lecture by Sir Arthur Evans who had discovered it. After the lecture, Ventris asked him, ‘Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, Sir?’ He was gripped for the rest of his life and worked at the problem intermittently but with great concentration, doggedness and determination. His first paper on the subject was printed when he was only 18 years old, in the premier American archaeological journal of the time.

  At first Ventris thought, and hoped, that Linear B might be a form of Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language about which little was known. He hoped this was so partly because it would be one in the eye for the theory, then prevalent in much of Europe, that all that was valuable in culture was of ‘Aryan’ origin. The temptation to think that everything good or valuable in the world must emanate from people related in some way or other to oneself is very tempting; it might be interesting for a scholar one day to trace the history of this persistent and pernicious temptation in all its myriad or hydra-headed forms, whether religious, cultural, political, economic or artistic.

  But Ventris was a man who could overthrow his own ideas, a virtuous characteristic that is by no means common. By a series of brilliant deductions and leaps of the imagination he was able to show incontrovertibly that the language of Linear B was a form of early Greek. Of course, just because something is incontrovertible does not mean that it will not be controverted; there was some fierce rearguard opposition to him by people who, perhaps, were infuriated that a mere amateur had succeeded where they, the professionals, had failed.

  World renown came to Ventris very suddenly: in those days celebrity was less independent of achievement than it is now. But Ventris was not interested in fame or fortune and his end was tragic. Only four years after his great achievement, aged 34, he was killed in a motor accident. In the middle of
the night, on a journey whose purpose was unknown, he drove at full speed into a truck parked at the side of a road and was killed instantly.

  A man of emotional detachment—such detachment might seem a wise precaution if you lose your parents early and are sent to war with a high chance either of being killed yourself or seeing everyone around you killed—Ventris was somewhat estranged, or at any rate distant, from his wife and children. (Tragedy continued to haunt the family: his son Nikki died of a heart attack aged only forty.) He had solved the problem that he had set out to solve half his then lifetime before; Linear B inscriptions turned out not to be very interesting from the literary point of view. He had alighted on no similar project upon which to engage his great intellect, and his prospects as an architect were limited.

  There has been speculation as to whether or not he committed suicide, whether his death was truly an accident. The driver of the truck insisted that his lights were illuminated and that there was no reason, therefore, why Ventris should not have seen it clearly. This does not settle the matter; accidents occur by inattention as well as by circumstances such as invisibility.

  I think that Ventris did commit suicide. His mother did so and suicide runs in families. Two weeks before he died he wrote a letter to the editor of the Architects’ Journal which is clearly that of a very depressed man. The owner of the Journal, the Architectural Association, had earlier awarded Ventris a fellowship which he still held, and Ventris wrote:

  I have had a couple of weeks abroad, and had a chance to get into perspective the hash that I’ve been making of your Fellowship; I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s quite unrealistic for me to pretend to you or to myself that I’m going to be able to finish off the work in the way that it should be done… you’d be justified in writing me off in a way that will make it difficult to hold up my head in the ranks of architects again, and bring pain to my family. All I can ask you is to temper your justified anger with a little compassion.