The very existence of a Shi’ah majority in Iraq was blandly denied as a figment of my imagination by one “expert” with an international reputation, and Miss Bell and I found it impossible to convince either the Military or the Foreign Office Delegations that Kurds in the Mosul vilayet were numerous and likely to be troublesome, [or] that Ibn Saud was a power seriously to be reckoned with.
These are not the only echoes that come resounding down the years. Official British policy hoped to please all parties and square all circles, with just a hint of traditional divide-and-rule. Bell believed that a state could be created on the foundation of mutual respect, and she was rather partial to the Kurds and the Shiites. She was also very critical of the Zionist idea, which she thought could only increase Arab antipathy and endanger the large Jewish community in Baghdad. As to the prejudices of Sir Mark Sykes, coauthor of the secret deal with France and Russia, she had acquired an early warning. They had met in Haifa as early as 1905, where he had appalled her with his talk of Arabs as “animals” who were “cowardly,” “diseased,” and “idle.” She had also been several steps ahead of him on an expedition to the Druze fastnesses of Lebanon and Syria, and he always attributed her head start to foul play. As he complained fairly comprehensively in a letter to his wife: “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globetrotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!” There seems to have been a hint of fascination in the midst of this disgust. If so, it would have fit with the general predilections of the British, who were fixated on androgyny in the most alarming way. (Their slang word for Arabs was “Frocks,” a means of feminizing the colonial subject that was not quite congruent with the manly skills they were otherwise demanding from the desert warriors.)
Determined to disprove and outlast the Sykeses of the world, Bell made Baghdad her permanent home, helped to organize elections and write a constitution, drew some rather wobbly borders with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, founded the Iraqi national museum, and wrote a study, “A Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia,” that compares well with the best of the Victorian “blue books.” She also nurtured and cajoled King Faisal, who founded a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1921 until 1958—impressive by regional standards. (Faisal was of course a Sunni Arab; the Kurds and the Shiites had both proved too turbulent to be trusted with stewardship.) So, was all her effort at nation building a romantic waste? T. E. Lawrence, who was perhaps envious, partly thought so. After learning of her death, he wrote:
That Irak [sic] state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without.
That might stand as a cynical judgment for the ages, but one can still think of Gertrude Bell in the same company as Wilfred Blunt, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Edward Thompson, and indeed Lawrence himself—English people who thought other peoples, too, deserved their place in the sun.
(The Atlantic, June 2007)
Physician, Heal Thyself
MAKE ANY PRESUMPTION of innocence that you like, and it still looks as if the latest cell of religious would-be murderers in Britain is made up of members of the medical profession. When I was growing up, the expression “Doctors’ Plot” was a chilling one, expressing the paranoia of Stalin about his Jewish physicians and their evil conspiracy; a paranoia that was on the verge of unleashing an official pogrom in Moscow before the old brute succumbed to death by natural causes just in time. Now it seems that there really was a doctors’ plot in London and Glasgow and that its members were so hungry for death that they rushed from one aborted crime scene to another in their eagerness to take the lives of strangers.
The normal human reaction to this is one of profound shock, because of the Hippocratic principles that are supposed to draw certain people toward the noble practice and high calling of medicine. Not only does one want to be able to count on this in the case of any physician consulted by oneself, but one also has the slight expectation that a doctor involved in politics will tend to be actuated by humanitarian motives. Certainly, this used to be true on the left: one of the most powerful magnets drawing members of the middle class toward socialism used to be the experience of doctors in the slums, forced to confront the raw injustice and maldistribution that dominated the life-and-death question of health care. The hero of Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train is such a one, impelled into action by the realization that his patients cannot afford the care they desperately need. Mao Zedong wrote a paean to the Canadian physician Norman Bethune, inventor of the battlefield blood transfusion, who gave up a promising career to help the revolutionary forces in the Spanish and Chinese civil wars. Salvador Allende in Chile, Vassos Lyssarides in Cyprus—these are only among the better-known names of party leaders who won the admiration of the poor by trying to practice what they preached in Hippocratic terms.
Medicine is hierarchic as a profession but democratic in essence: in principle, a doctor may not refuse to treat anyone and must always use his or her best efforts to save life and ward off disease. When we read of doctors who cheat their patients, or who poison them in order to get their property or just for the fun of it, we feel outraged more, perhaps, than we would feel if a lawyer had tried to fleece a client. It seems a deeper betrayal. A doctor as a perpetrator of random murder is a nightmarish figure who has violated a trust.
Yet the dark side of the medical profession is also well-known to folklore. Messrs. Burke and Hare, not always willing to wait for corpses to sell to an anatomy professor, killed to provide the cadavers. A columnist in the Financial Times recently mentioned the names of Josef Mengele and Che Guevara, two physicians who were capable of extreme cruelty. I didn’t think the comparison was fair: Mengele was a sadist in his capacity as a doctor; while Guevara, willing enough to slay what he thought of as the class enemy, did not prostitute his gifts as a doctor in order to do so. Nonetheless, the nasty fact must be faced: torture regimes have always been able to find doctors to advise on torture and even to participate in it, and the experience of Nazism taught us that the profession contains enough perverts who desire the license to conduct ghastly experiments on human subjects and (as with H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau) satisfy an obscene curiosity as to how far they can go. Mengele is not the only evidence that such depraved characters also relish the idea of “practicing” on women and even children.
Still, the aberrant and the sadistic don’t seem to explain the resort to murder in the present case. Nothing was to be gained by it from an experimental point of view, and the opportunities for a gloating vivisection are slim when your bag of instruments is a car full of propane and nails. So, we must look elsewhere for the explanation. Why have doctors apparently become killers in this instance? That’s easy. Because of religion.
You may recall the case of Dr. Baruch Goldstein. On February 25, 1994, this Israeli army physician stalked into the so-called Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, unslung his automatic weapon, and fired into the crowd of Muslim worshippers, killing twenty-nine people of all ages and both sexes before being killed himself. It took no time at all to establish that Goldstein, no mere loner or psycho, had given ample warning of his character and intentions. Army sources reported that he had consistently refused to treat Arab or Druze or any other “Gentile” patients, citing as his authority the halachic law that excuses a pious Jew from coming to the aid of a non-Jew. (The whole appalling story is told in chapter 6 of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky.) In Goldstein’s view, Hippocratic precepts were overridden by Orthodox teaching, and there were a number of rabbis ready to support his stand on the matter. There were also a number of rabbis who decided to consecrate his tomb as a shrine to a brave Jewish martyr, and the children of ultra-Orthodox settlers were seen wearing buttons reading, “Dr. Goldstein cured Israel’s ills.” Now it seems that an Iraqi physician, in the old and famous university town of Cambridge, was so diseased by
his own faith that he advocated even the murder of rival Muslims and showed videos of decapitation to housemates who were so profane as to play musical instruments.
Remember that Stalinism itself was self-defined as “a great experiment” on the human being and that fascists loved to say that they were cutting out the tumors of society and extirpating the “bacilli” that caused disorders in (another revealing phrase) “the body politic.” Even our metaphors of healing can be turned into horrible negations. What is more probable than that the oldest and latest form of totalitarianism, religious mania, will come to infect doctors as well?
(Slate, July 9, 2007)
Edmund Wilson: Literary Companion
Review of Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s and Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s by Edmund Wilson
IN A BEAUTIFULLY turned reminiscence of Alexander Woollcott published in 1943, and originally intended as a defense of that great critic against an ungenerous obituarist, Edmund Wilson managed to spin what he admitted was a slight acquaintance into a charming portrait of a man and of a moment—the moment being the time when both men’s parents were connected with a Fourierist socialist community in Red Bank, New Jersey. Recollections of Woollcott the man of the theater, intercut with reflections on the arcana of the American left, combine to make a fine profile and a nice period piece: journalism at its best. What caught and held me, though, was an episode in the 1930s, when Wilson, fresh from reporting on the labor front for the New Republic, was invited to call on Woollcott at Sutton Place:
As soon as I entered the room, he cried out, without any other greeting: “You’ve gotten very fat!” It was his way of disarming, I thought, any horror I might have felt at his own pudding-like rotundity, which had trebled since I had seen him last.
This, and other aspects of the evening, make clear that Wilson understood why Woollcott’s personality didn’t appeal to everybody. But the preemptive strike on the question of girth also made me realize that there must have been a time when Edmund Wilson was thin.
This absolutely negated the picture that my mind’s eye had been conditioned to summon. Wilson’s prose, if not precisely rotund, was astonishingly solid. One cannot turn the pages of this heavy and handsome set, produced by the Library of America, without a sense of his mass and weight and gravitas. He was the sort of man who, as people used to say, “got up” a subject. The modern and vulgar way of phrasing this is to say that so-and-so reads a book “so you don’t have to.” Wilson, though, presumed a certain amount of knowledge in his readers, kept them well-supplied with allusions and cross-references, and undertook to help them fill in blanks in their education. An autodidact himself, he seems to have hoped to be the cause of autodidacticism in others.
An excellent instance of Wilson as a sort of co-reader, tutor, and literary adviser comes in his successive discussions of Finnegans Wake. In an essay originally included in The Wound and the Bow, titled “The Dream of H. C. Earwicker,” he guides his audience through the extraordinary density and intricacy of the slumber life of James Joyce’s snoring pub keeper. He furnishes handholds and issues both exhortations and admonitions: readers are told, in effect, that there will be passages of extreme difficulty and complexity (and of plain longueur), but they are simultaneously assured that the effort will be rewarding and worthwhile. Footnotes are provided, to point them to a collection of essays published by Transition magazine in Paris, which may help to supply a “key.” A learned reference is made to part 3, chapter 3 of Max Eastman’s The Literary Mind, which, when consulted, discloses Joyce’s rather daunting ambition: a desire that his readers would devote their entire lives to the scrutiny of his work. Almost as if stiffening himself to accept this challenge, Wilson writes:
Just as Joyce in Ulysses laid the Odyssey under requisition to help provide a structure for his Material—material which, once it had begun to gush from the rock of Joyce’s sealed personality at the blow of the Aaron’s rod of free association, threatened to rise and submerge the artist like the flood which the sorcerer’s apprentice let loose by his bedeviled broom; so in the face of an even more formidable danger, he has here brought in the historical theory of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Giambattista Vico, to help him to organize Finnegans Wake.
At first one is inclined to think that Wilson has become infected by the gorgeous prolixity of his subject, then impelled to invoke that old New Yorker injunction (“Block That Metaphor!”), and only then to suspect that he might be doing it on purpose. And notice the introduction of Vico, whose work served as a kind of template for To the Finland Station, Wilson’s grand study of teleology and messianism.
In a subsequent essay, “A Guide to Finnegans Wake,” published in August 1944, Wilson again enlisted his readers in the grand attempt to master the Joycean. This time a new codex, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, written by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, was the spark to his enthusiasm. After advising us that it is better to come to the subject by way of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, he added that the best course of action is to acquire the original, plus “the Campbell-Robinson key,” and
prepare to have them around for years . . . Joyce worked on it through seventeen years, and it is equivalent to about seventeen books by the ordinary gifted writer.
Having thoroughly challenged his audience in this forbidding yet exciting way (and I recommend heartily that anyone hesitating over Joyce follow Wilson’s counsel), he averred that the coauthors of the guide merited “a citation from the Republic of Letters.”
Now, when is the last time that you saw that expression in print? Or that you came across a reviewer who tried to make your reading life more exacting rather than less? It is not easy to imagine Mr. Wilson (he almost invariably alluded to other authors as “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss”) sending in his annual recommendation for the summer “beach bag,” let alone responding to the even more rebarbative notion that people should be more likely to buy and enjoy books at Christmas. His famous preprinted postcard, which he sent out to supplicants of all kinds, showed him massively indifferent to the petty seductions of literary celebrity:
Mr. Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, write articles or books to order, write forewords or introductions, make statements for publicity purposes, do any kind of editorial work, judge literary contests, give interviews, take part in writers’ conferences, answer questionnaires, contribute to or take part in symposiums or “panels” of any kind, contribute manuscripts for sales, donate copies of his books to libraries, autograph works for strangers, allow his name to be used on letterheads, supply personal information about himself, or supply opinions on literary or other subjects.
But if this gives the impression of a sort of Jamesian loftiness, then the idea is counteracted by Wilson’s decision to engage with popular fiction. His contempt for the slovenly and disgraceful habit of “reading” detective stories—especially the dismal pulp produced by Dorothy L. Sayers—was offset by an admiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and by his readiness to respond to the many readers who wrote in to disagree with him.
Anyone who has ever tried to digest The Da Vinci Code, for example, or the Left Behind series, will know that bad writing, aimed at a subliterate audience, is actually much more difficult to read than anything by Borges or Kundera. But a certain populism, perhaps, inhibits critics from saying so. I borrow from Jacobo Timerman’s wonderful remark on scanning the Cuban Communist daily Granma (“a degradation of the act of reading”), and I make a bet that the Left Behind books repose, unfinished, on the shelf along with the seldom-opened family Bible. And I draw confidence from Wilson’s admirable pugnacity in “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” In discussing one of the tales of Margery Allingham, he stated baldly, “The story and the writing both showed a surface so wooden and dead that I could not keep my mind on the page.” He defied his correspondents to disagree with him, and many shamefacedly did admit that they, too, found the stuff bad almos
t beyond endurance, yet clung to it as a pathetic addiction. Generous as (almost) always—he did take a decided whack at the now-forgotten critic Bernard DeVoto (“I hadn’t quite realized before, though I had noted his own rather messy style, to what degree he was insensitive to writing”)—Wilson did show that he could tell gold from dross by praising Raymond Chandler, before ending the essay in this fashion:
And Yet ... Page 16