Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  To slavery he devotes not more than six pages of his 346. There is, it is true, a chapter devoted to ‘Nigger anecdotes,’ but only two and a half pages long. Its general tone can be gauged by the following:

  The American negroes generally are extremely simple-minded, but very witty and amusing, apparently happy all day long, gleesome as kittens, especially when off to a fight or a fire…

  When the author visits a tobacco plantation in Virginia, he expends more pages on the care and cultivation of the plants than on the condition of the slaves, though he pronounces himself against slavery on grounds of principle. But the whole question is of no greater interest to him than the lunatic asylum of the town of Taunton, for example, or of the sewing-clubs established by the rich to assist the poor: the Peculiar Institution is for him just one among many. There is nothing to suggest an awareness of the cataclysm that was only four years off when the book was published.

  There is surely an instructive lesson here. Alfred Pairpoint, to judge by his book, was an average man except, perhaps, in his determination to see his words, very ordinary as they were, between covers. His thoughts and feelings and prejudices were those of an ordinary man, neither particularly clever nor particularly stupid, neither outstandingly observant or penetrating, nor outstandingly blind or lacking in penetration. In this respect, he resembles most of us: and he had absolutely no conception or inkling that the most destructive war since the Napoleonic era was about to break out. Such blindness to the future seems to be the permanent condition of Mankind: and those few who, like Sir Isaac Newton, have seen a little further than others (perhaps as much by luck as by judgment, for where millions guess the future some must be right), are rarely attended to or their correct prognostications taken as the basis of action. Our ignorance of the future is not only our permanent burden but also the glory of our lives, for it makes our engagement with the world permanently necessary. If we knew everything our lives as conscious beings would be intolerable.

  The very ordinariness of Alfred Pairpoint and his thoughts makes his conclusions about slavery all the more poignant. He has two pages of nineteen on the slavery question in his last chapter, where he writes:

  Example, there is no doubt, goes further than precept in such a question; - and it would be as well, if those who look so piteously on slavery, and conjure up, like Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, such harrowing scenes to enlist the sympathies of their country, would themselves show a little charity towards their sable brethren, and not exclude them, like lepers, from society. The places of amusement… the tables at hotels, the public conveyances, nay, even the houses of prayer, frequented by the white American, are shut against the negroes; - nay, so inveterate is the prejudice against them, that white children will shun little curly-headed niggers in the street, as if the very sight of them were pollution, and as for sitting down in the same school-room with them, the idea would be preposterous. Thus, in fact, the coloured population in Northern Cities, though free, are as much under a bane, as if they were labouring in the cotton-plantations of Louisiana; and, until the Abolitionists set about reforming themselves in this particular, they are only injuring the cause and the race that they are professing to serve. If the black people are to be set free, let them be treated as brethren with the same rights, capacities, and responsibilities as the white population; - to advocate abolition on any lower principle than this, is a delusion and a fraud, - an insult to the common-sense of the whole civilized world.

  And here, a propos of nothing except perhaps the present economic crisis, I cannot forebear from quoting the words of Daniel Webster that Alfred Pairpoint quotes on the subject of money:

  Of all the contrivances for cheating the labouring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper-money, - the most effectual invention that could possibly have been devised for fertilizing the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow; and light, on the nation at large, would be the oppression of despotic tyranny and excessive taxation by comparison with those of a fraudulent currency and depreciated paper.

  Let us now leave Pairpoint and progress to a nearby town whose second-hand bookshop made the first I have described seem palatial by comparison. The aged owner sat at his untidy desk awaiting customers, not very hopefully it seemed to me. He sat in front of the shelves that bore his more valuable stock which he allowed me to look over, judging that I was not a likely thief. You may judge of the scale of his commercial operations when I tell you that I bought a first edition of Aldous Huxley’s novel Antic Hay for $15, a price for which he all but apologised; and I also bought, for $1.50, a first (and as far as I know only) edition of the co-operative effort of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, who by then had returned to his pre-Great War surname of Hueffer, anti-German feeling having subsided somewhat, published in the year of Conrad’s death, 1924, and titled The Nature of a Crime.

  It was written many years before publication, and both authors claim in the preface not to remember how it came about.

  The story (which Stefan Zweig would have written better) consists of pre-suicide letters of a man to the great love of his life, a woman who, however, has married someone else, called Robert. The author of the suicide letters is a financier whose defalcations are about to be exposed. Hitherto greatly respected as an enormously rich man of great financial acumen, the source of his fortune is embezzlement of funds from a trust of which he is a trustee. He is reprieved at the last moment from the need to commit suicide when the beneficiary of the trust withdraws his demand for accounts and unwittingly gives him the chance to make good the losses.

  It is difficult to tell which pages or paragraphs are by which author, and it would hardly be worth the effort to establish it. What most interested me as a doctor in the story, however, is the fact, rather abruptly introduced, that Robert, the husband of the narrator’s love, is addicted to chloral hydrate, a hypnotic and sedative still in use, albeit steeply declining, when I started my career.

  The passage by which I was impressed was that in which the narrator claims to be in the process of curing Robert of his addiction. This passage shows that Conrad or Hueffer (or both) had a better instinctive grasp of the nature of addiction, including its pharmacology, than most addiction doctors.

  I told you… that Robert is almost cured. I would not have told you this for the sake of arrogating to myself the position of a saviour. But I imagine you would like the cure to go on and, in the case of some accident after my death, it might go all to pieces once more. Quite simply then: I have been doing two things. In the first place I have persuaded your chemists to reduce very gradually the strength of chloral, so that the bottles contain nearly half water. And Robert perceives no difference. Now of course it is very important that he shall not know of the trick that is being played so beneficently on him – so that, in case he should go away or for one reason or another, change his chemists, it must be carefully seen to that instead of pure chloral he obtains an exactly diluted mixture. In this way he may be brought gradually to drinking almost pure water.

  However, the authors are aware that merely stopping the drug is not enough:

  But that alone would hardly be satisfactory: a comparatively involuntary cure is of little value in comparison with an effort of the will. You may, conceivably, expel nature with a fork, but nothing but a passion will expel a passion. The only point to be proved is whether there exists in your husband any other passion for the sake of which he might abandon his passion for the clearness of vision which he always says his chloral gives him.

  In this comparatively short passage, the authors have demonstrated that they understand two things about addiction that doctors so often neglect, even if they sometimes pay lip service to them: first that the physical aspect of addiction is frequently trifling, second that it is a man’s outlook on life that plays the determining role in his ‘recovery’ from his addicti
on. And neglect of these two things leads researchers in the futile alchemical quest for the philosopher’s stone of addiction, the treatment that, without any desire or effort on the part of the addicted person, will ‘cure’ him as antibiotics cure infections.

  I will continue to haunt provincial second-hand booksellers in England as long as they continue to exist.

  26 - Boxing Clever

  Many years ago, more indeed than I care to number, I had a discussion with my fellow-students that had a permanent influence upon my views and attitude to life. It concerned, of all things, the ethics of professional boxing, a subject to which until that moment I had not given a moment’s thought. But youth is an age at which it is felt necessary to have a strong opinion about everything, and mere ignorance is no bar to passionate advocacy. The same is true, of course, of journalists. There is nothing like passionate ignorance to keep one young at heart.

  Needing to take sides in the discussion, for silence was not then in my nature, I found myself echoing, or rather parroting, the views of Dr Edith Summerskill. She was a Labour Member of Parliament who ran and was principally known for a campaign to outlaw professional boxing. She was, I think, a brave woman, for her campaign was not popular among her political party’s supposed constituency, the proletariat, and even excited some ridicule among them; but those were the days when there were still some politicians who fought for what they thought was right rather than for what was expedient in the careerist sense.

  While many sports were dangerous, I said, boxing was the only one whose object was physically to incapacitate an opponent and even injure him. It often resulted in chronic brain damage such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia pugilistica, or punch-drunkenness, to the great economic and emotional cost of those who suffered it and those who cared for or looked after them. It exerted a brutalising effect upon spectators (here I spoke from neither experience nor information). And practically no one would go in for it who was not driven to it by desperate social and economic circumstances, so that to do so was not really a free choice at all.

  I recalled my assertion about the brutalising effects of boxing as a spectacle when I attended the one and only professional boxing tournament I have ever attended as a spectator. It was in an industrial town that had once had a rather grand Victorian centre, but which had been destroyed by a combination of economic decline and modern town planning. The hall in which the boxing took place was large and dismal.

  The draw of the evening was a world championship fight (the champion was a local boy), but before that there were many fights to sit through between young hopefuls on the one hand and ageing no-hopers on the other. I had not appreciated until then just how boring a brutal spectacle could be. The journeymen boxers grunted their way round the ring, taking swipes at each other that rarely connected, though occasionally they did. Sometimes blood would spurt from one of their noses and spatter the spectators close to the ring. It was then that I was glad not to have bought one of the ‘better,’ which is to say the ringside, seats.

  The boxing fans waited for the world champion as fascists waited for the arrival at a rally of their leader, which is to say with mounting tension. And when the champion boxed, even I, who am no aficionado, could see that he was possessed of a completely different order of skill. He danced elegantly round the ring, and when he threw a punch it connected exactly where it was intended to; but he gave the impression of doing it more to score points than to inflict harm on his opponent. Even if I could not agree that boxing was a noble art, let alone the noble art, I saw that there could be great skill in it.

  But what I most remembered of the evening was a spectator in front of me, a man from the look of him who was not himself much given to athletic pursuits. When one of the journeymen boxers caught another full on the face, drawing blood, the man in front of me rose excitedly to his feet and screamed ‘Kill ’im! Kill ’im!’ I had the impression that he meant it in no very metaphorical sense, and that he would have been quite content to see a man beaten to death before his very eyes.

  Be that as it may, the question arose in my mind as to whether the coarse brutality of his sentiment was caused by the spectacle, or rather he attended the spectacle because of his coarse brutality. Probably the relationship was dialectical: appetites are not so much fluids in a closed space waiting to be released as propensities that grow with their satisfaction. My guess, or prejudice, is that attendance at coarse spectacles makes people coarse; and Lord Macaulay’s famous remark, that the Puritans hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators is not quite as damning of the Puritans as might be supposed.

  I suspect, though I cannot prove, that boxing also exerts a brutalising effect upon its practitioners, contrary to those who believe in the hydraulic theory of human aggression. I once had as a patient a young man whose girlfriend told me that until he took up kick-boxing he had been kind and considerate, but that thereafter he became aggressive, bad-tempered and violent. Other interpretations of the story than mine are possible, and stories of a decline in violence towards others are sometimes told of those unruly youths who take up boxing. The possibility remains that the same activity has different effects on different people: where the evidence is equivocal, one does not so much suspend judgment as believe what one wants.

  In my discussion all those years ago, however, I did not emphasise the allegedly brutalising effect, both on spectators and practitioners, of boxing. Rather, my main argument was the supposed inability of professional boxers to choose their career rather than be chosen by it as an inevitable consequence of their social and economic circumstances.

  One of my interlocutors, a young man much more mature than I (and now an eminent surgeon), granted that most—though not all—professional boxers emerged from the poorest section of society. But that, he said, was not enough to establish my point. Not only were some professional boxers not of the lowest class, but the vast majority of the lowest class were not professional boxers. To regard professional boxers as virtually inanimate products of forces acting upon them was not generous, but to deprive them of their humanity, that is to say their powers of conscious agency. True, their decisions were affected by their circumstances: but whose are not? They chose, and chose freely.

  I saw at once that he was right; that my attitude was condescending and dehumanising. But of course I did not change my opinion there and then, by admitting that he was right, rather I cleaved to it all the more obstinately. Schopenhauer has many eloquent pages on the purpose or end of argument or discussion being victory rather than truth, the latter being but a weapon, for the achievement of the former. But it does not follow from this that there is no point in discussion (other than victory): for truth seeps through the mind like damp through a wall, and eventually conquers it. I lost the habit, common among those of intellectual bent, of seeing my fellow beings as objects rather than subjects.

  Not many years later, it so happened, I had as a patient the widow of a former world champion boxer. She was approaching seventy and her husband’s career had been mainly pre-war. By the time the war was over he was past his peak and his career, at least as a boxer, was never so glorious again.

  To my surprise, his widow was an elegant, mannerly, intelligent, cultivated and articulate woman, and in her recollections of her husband (which I encouraged, as much for my own sake as for hers) she managed to convey the same qualities in him. It was clear that she had loved and even revered him; she said that he was what one might not have expected in the milieu of professional boxing, and what to her was the highest term of praise, a gentleman. I was moved by her love for him, but also saddened by it, for it was clear that her happiness consisted of living imaginatively in that past. It is a stage of life that comes to us all, and sooner than any of us thinks.

  Her husband had clearly been a most remarkable man. Born into a working-class mining family, he
had used boxing as a means of making his way in the world. He was adulated in the area of his birth, without such adulation in any way turning his head. In those days, there was little in the way of medical supervision of boxers: a man could fight until his brain was destroyed if he wanted to and no one stopped him. In his great book, Organic Psychiatry, Lishman says of the characteristic brain damage caused by boxing:

  Severe examples date mostly from boxing careers pursued before the second world war when medical control over boxing was less rigorous than at present. Fair-ground booth boxing appears to have been especially hazardous.

  My patient’s husband had indeed started out as fairground-booth boxer, and in his time must have had more than a thousand fights, at least four hundred of them professional in the full sense. By luck and no doubt by skill he had avoided all brain damage; he had been a man interested in literature and other quiet intellectual pursuits.