In Praise of Folly

The Blind-spots of Our Mind

Theodore Dalrymple

• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781783341412
• eBook ISBN: 9781783341429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Travelling to the hard-living Dylan Thomas's Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple considered along the way another foible – the folly of eminent people. Praised for their attainments in one area, high-achievers are more often than not prone to unexpected failings elsewhere. Enter a large cast of anti- and vivisectionists, surgeons, theologians, philosophers, admirals, judges, astrophysicists, Nazi-leaning homoeopaths, and writers such as D.H.?Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, and Conan Doyle. In his pithy and amusing style, Dalrymple casts a sobering light on an insuppressible trait of ours – the fallibility of the human mind.

1 Everywhere is Interesting: ‘I’ve been to England’

 

On a trip to hard-living Dylan Thomas’s hometown Laugharne in South-West Wales, I wanted to consider the folly of eminent people. My wife, who is also a psychiatrist, travelled with me from Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and Laugharne is on the estuary of the Tawe, Carmarthenshire. Dylan Thomas lived there at the idyllic Boathouse, perched on the river bank, for four years before his death. In another life, I would like to have been a bohemian myself and I always visit the pretty churchyard where he is buried. Serendipitously, the journey also passes by a number of second-hand bookshops, another obsession of mine.

My work has been, and still is, my greatest pleasure and there is no greater good fortune in life than this, perhaps. But it does mean that other kinds of enjoyment seem both unimportant to me and an interruption. We decided nonetheless to take a couple of days off and the fact that our roof had recently leaked and an old garden wall nearly collapsed may well have encouraged us. We chose the destination both for sentimental reasons and because we knew that there are few more beautiful drives in the country. Within a few hundred yards of our door, we are in the lovely Shropshire countryside; and the beauty continues with scarcely a break for a hundred and forty miles.

The sentimental reason for the trip was that we had already spent several months in Carmarthenshire. After her hospital consultancy, my wife spent a few months of each year occupying locum posts, and she had twice occupied them in Carmarthen. I always accompanied her and made what life I could wherever she went. I did not find this at all difficult, for the one lesson I have distilled from life is that everywhere is interesting. And South-West Wales is far from the least interesting place in the world.

Generally we stayed in hospital accommodation and sometimes it was dismal—in Yeovil, pronounced You-evil by the lady in our satnav, there were even bedbugs. But, though it was not of the standard of comfort or grace to which we had become accustomed, it was strangely liberating. In the first place, it took us back in time to when we were students and this in itself was pleasing. But in the second, it simplified life greatly by depriving us almost completely of household responsibilities. If something went wrong, there was someone on hand to fix it at no cost or irritation to ourselves. There was even someone to make our beds and clean our rooms. The kitchens were generally communal and we seldom availed ourselves of them, eating in restaurants instead. I, at any rate, felt free as a bird.

The first time my wife was employed in Carmarthen we stayed in the town itself, in a house on the grounds of the former mental hospital, now used for NHS administration after the original patients had moved out. But between her first and second period of employment in Carmarthen the house had been sold off and so we had to stay in hospital accommodation in Llanelli, a town of ill-repute.

Coal and steel towns are never pretty, but there is something peculiarly dispiriting about a steel town once the coal and steel have departed, as they now have from Llanelli. To the casual observer, the town’s main economic activity of late seems to be the administration of unemployment and the recycling of government appropriations. In so far as there is any private economic activity at all, it is the expenditure of those subventions in the kind of chain stores that disfigure every British shopping district. Appearances, however, may be deceiving.

Dispiriting as Llanelli appeared to be at first sight, I was happy there (as, I think, I could be almost anywhere). I liked the people: they had more than the usual small-town warmth and friendliness. At bus-stops they would strike up a conversation with me as if it were the most natural thing to do, rather than an intrusion on privacy. They seemed interested in me, perhaps because not many strangers take buses in Llanelli. When they discovered that I was a doctor they asked my medical advice, which was flattering. To judge from overheard conversations, illness, doctors and hospitals were subjects of even greater interest to them than for most of mankind.

Three encounters of our time in Llanelli have stuck in my mind. At one of the bus stops I used to meet a man, a widower, in his middle seventies. He was going into town for his regular lunchtime pint of beer and he was always immaculately turned out for the event. He wore a blazer, grey trousers and highly-polished black shoes. His shirt was starched white, perfectly ironed, and he wore an elegant blue-and-red striped tie. He was splendid to behold, especially in the general sartorial slovenliness and bad taste that prevailed in Llanelli.

He had been a coal miner all his life, and his retirement coincided with the closure of the last coal mine. He seemed to have escaped entirely the occupational diseases of coal miners, and though to most of us the prospect of working down a pit all our life would be appalling, he had enjoyed his work and said he would not have done anything else.

His smartness of dress was not vanity but practical philosophy. Self-respect (he told me) required that he looked smart when he was in public. He dressed not for himself but for others, and it would be morally wrong to be an eyesore for them. It was therefore the reverse of egotism: rather, his attention to dress was a social virtue. It could not, as a widower, have been easy for him—I did not enquire what help, if any, he received.

On fine days—and in my memory there were many—I would go to my favourite place in the town, the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Felinfoel, and lie in the grass to read between the gravestones. Whatever we may think of the Victorians (Holy Trinity is a Victorian church), no one can deny that they were good at cemeteries. Their gravestones—pillars, angels, gothic arches, restrained and formal religious inscriptions—are infinitely more pastoral than our polished slabs that look like upright sections of the tops of kitchen islands, inscribed with carved golden lettering saying something like: Goodnight, Dad. The churchyard was a romantic place, deserted and perfectly peaceful, and generally it was poetry that I read there, before swiftly falling asleep.

One afternoon I woke from my sleep and to my surprise saw a middle-aged Punjabi woman dressed in salwar kameez nearby. She was carrying a bouquet of flowers. When she saw that I had woken she approached me and asked in imperfect English whether I knew where the grave of Margaret Davies was. Although I had in fact walked round the churchyard several times, reading the inscriptions, I had not committed the names to memory: and Margaret Davies, after all, was a common name hereabouts. I excused myself with the usual apology that I was not from here, but I offered to help her find it.

As we searched together, unsuccessfully in the event, I asked her why she sought for the grave. She told me that when she had first come to Britain, many years before, she had lived in Llanelli next door. Margaret Davies had been very nice to her. Since moving away from Llanelli she had heard that Margaret had died and was buried here. She wanted to put flowers on the grave in remembrance of her neighbour’s kindness.

An even finer instance of integration followed soon afterwards. My wife and I ate in restaurants, but the choice in Llanelli was not large and we went frequently to an Indian restaurant—not because it was of exceptional quality, but because, like Mount Everest, it was there. Most of the time it was not well patronised, and we fell to talking to the waiter, a young man of Bangladeshi descent, but with a strong Welsh accent. We asked him in the course of one conversation whether he had ever been abroad.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘Where?’ we asked.

‘I’ve been to Bangladesh,’ he said.

‘Anywhere else?’

‘Yes, I’ve been to England.’

2 Natural Selection: The Staffordshire Bull Terrier

 

We set off at the appointed time—appointed by ourselves, that is. We have not mastered the art of travelling light and even a day trip seems often to end up more like moving house than a little jaunt. My wife envisages disaster en route and therefore takes clothes in case we are away for longer than planned. I take books enough to last a lifetime.

Our first destination was Ludlow, twenty miles from home, to have lunch with friends. They used to live in the tiny village of Stoke St Milborough, a few miles from Ludlow, in a lovely ancient cottage that approximated to everyone’s dream of the English countryside. The path leading to the front door was through an avenue of old apple trees. On a fine day, it was impossible not to think there of Rupert Brooke: ‘all evil shed away… dreams happy as her day… in hearts of peace, under an English heaven.’

Life is never like that, at least not for long. The garden in which the cottage sat was on a slope through which ran a babbling brook. Babbling, that is, until it roared after a downpour of rain and flooded the garden, which always required some kind of repair afterwards. Moreover, in hard winter weather the roads to the house became impassable. No doubt this would all be charmingly isolated for a young couple, to be recalled with nostalgia in later years how they were cut off in winter. But my friends were no longer young.

Earlier ages might have had their culture and cultivation, but we have cookery. One of the things about England whose passing I do not in the least regret is the food of my childhood and youth: the overcooked meat, the colour of the flesh of the corpse I dissected during my medical studies, and the vegetables seemingly boiled days in advance as if flavour were a bacterial poison to be neutralised by prolonged heat. Then there were the terrible things eaten as puddings that caused foreigners to exclaim, ‘does one eat it or has it been eaten?’ British cooks fought against flavour and triumphed turning meals into a regrettable necessity.

Since the age of spam and semolina, the population seems to have divided in two, gastronomically as much as economically. There are those, probably the more numerous, who subsist on fast food of meat-ish material fried in dubious oil and served with enigmatic sauces. And there are those who eat with discrimination so that many provincial towns and cities have excellent restaurants where once there was a culinary desert.

Ludlow is, for its size, probably the best town for restaurants in the country, if not the least spoilt. My friends chose a café open only for lunch. Being a simple place, the staff did not give you the impression that they were casting their pearls before swine. One of the attractions, apart from its food made entirely from local ingredients (the quince jelly was by far the best I have ever had), is that the café overlooks the banks of the River Teme, by a weir. The Teme is a salmon river and, in the season, returning salmon supposedly leap the weir to reach their spawning ground.

Deep inland as the town is, I found this not entirely easy to believe; but then, towards the end of our meal, I saw a salmon try (unsuccessfully) to clear the barrier. My first thought was that I had imagined it, that it was a figment of suggestion, for we had been talking shortly before of salmon and how a ladder had been built into the weir to make life easier for the fish. My friend said that someone had calculated that each salmon in the Teme cost the country £8000 to encourage, protect and preserve.

The episode brought back a memory of childhood. I saw a fox in our London garden when I was about nine or ten and rushed excitedly to my father to tell him what I had seen. He did not believe me; on the contrary, he thought I was being foolish or mendacious. But shortly afterwards there were reports of an invasion of foxes into urban areas, and now it is said that there are more urban foxes than rural ones. It taught me a good and a bad lesson—most lessons are both—confidence in my own judgment, and overconfidence in my own judgment.

The fleeting sight of the salmon leaping was to me both joyful and reassuring. Perhaps it was one of those consolatory intimations of immortality of which Wordsworth speaks:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will not grieve, rather find

Strength in what remains behind…

The life history of the salmon (and that of the eel) seems not merely remarkable to me, but astonishing and mysterious. Can the theory of natural selection by means of tiny increments of advantage in survival caused by random genetic mutation explain their convoluted life cycle?

It is not that I have any better explanation to propose but not having a better explanation is not enough to make the offered explanation true. On the one hand natural selection has always seemed to me circular. Some creatures survive better than others because they are fitter in their circumstances, their fitness being proved by the fact they are there. And the ease with which the theory explains almost any conduct of any creature, however different it is from that of a similar creature, seems to me not a strength but a weakness.

On the other hand, it is obvious that life on earth has changed and is changing, and that selective pressure can bring about rapid changes. As any book about the different breeds of dogs demonstrates, it is not only in their appearance but in their character that they vary. Selective pressure, in this case from dog owners, can bring about rapid differences in the populations of the breeds. A breed that was rarely seen until recently, the Staffordshire bull terrier, is now very common, at least in those areas of our town and cities where men (and increasingly women) want to look tough. Thus, animal selection tells us something about the direction of human society, too.

3 Shame: A Most Democratic Institution

Another source of consolation in Ludlow, apart from its beauty and the far-sighted decision of its council not to permit chain stores to set up in its main streets, is the presence of Mr Trevor Lloyd, bookbinder. Mr Lloyd has a workshop there of an old-fashioned type whose atmosphere conveys immediately craft of the very highest order, workmanship approaching the status of art. Everything is unhurried, attention to detail is meticulous, taste is impeccable, nothing is merely good enough. Mr Lloyd is famous in the little world of bibliophiles. He is spoken of with awe by other bookbinders, and I have heard him described on more than one occasion as the finest in Europe, if not the world.

On this occasion, I resisted the temptation to visit him. He had had a couple books of mine for more than a year, but ‘genius,’ said Carlyle, ‘is an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ It does not follow, of course, that an infinite capacity for taking pains is genius, but our world of mass convenience is not propitious to the exercise of that infinite capacity. In Bridgnorth market there is a man who has a stall of old tools, a hundred years old or more. These tools were certainly utilitarian but at the same time fashioned with an instinct for form, so that an ebony-and-brass spirit level, for example, is an object of enduring beauty. Whoever made it concentrated deeply on its form; whoever owned it treasured it. What is conveniently and immediately replaceable, on the other hand, is easily taken for granted.

Mr Lloyd, who was once a school teacher, has been a bookbinder for many years. If you take an unusual book to him he knows its history at once, not just the history of the contents but of the actual copy in hand, deduced from the slightest clues. I once took to him a copy of Henry Edwards Davis’s An Examination of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of Mr Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in Which His View of the Progress of the Christian Religion is Shewn to be Founded on the Misrepresentation of the Authors He Cites, interleaved by a contemporary anonymous handwritten commentary favourable to Davis’s aspersions on Gibbon’s character and honesty, as well as a copy of Charles Bell’s A Dissertation on Gunshot Wounds. The first was published in 1778 and the latter in 1814, but both had since undergone philistine rebinding. Davis had been rebound in shiny boards of shocking pink that could not have been altogether easy to find. As for the book by Bell, the re-binder had no respect for its physical quality, including the magnificent though melancholy drawings by the author (surgeon, anatomist, neurologist and artist, the first describer of the palsy that bears his name) of those wounded, fatally, by gunshot. When Mr Lloyd returned the books to me, they were once again in exquisite bindings appropriate to the year of publication.

The books he had of me latterly for restoration were a splendid folio prayer book of 1693, and Jeremy Taylor’s XXV Sermons Preached at Golden-Grove: Being for the Winter Half-year, Beginning on Advent-Sunday, untill Whit-Sunday. On seeing these books, Mr Lloyd, not unreasonably, asked me whether I was religious, or specially interested in religious books.

It is curious that it is more damaging socially these days to be thought religious than to be thought the opposite, and I found myself anxious to disavow any tendency to piety or religion. Pious is more likely nowadays to be used as a term of abuse than of praise, having the connotation of unctuous hypocrisy rather than of virtue. I am indeed still free (if that is the word) of religious belief, but I have no hostility to religion, at least not of the milder sort, and have no desire to rid anyone of what I think are their illusions; all the more so since I cannot claim to have a consistent or fully-formed philosophy of life myself. I no more know where the world came from or why there is something rather than nothing than that I can speak Amharic.

Moreover—and this has come as something of a surprise to me—I have developed a sympathy for the writings of the English divines, not only because of their movingly sonorous prose, but also for their often-generous sentiment. There is something consolatory in the words, even when you do not believe in the doctrine behind them. They seem somehow to go deeper and to call us to, whatever we may believe, reflect upon the limits of our own lives. Here is a passage chosen at random by letting the book fall open:

‘The effect of this consideration [the suffering attendant on human existence] is this, that the sadnesses of this life help to sweeten the bitter cup of death. For let our life be never so long, if our strength were great as that of oxen or camels, if our sinews were strong as the cordage at the foot of an oak, if we were as fighting and prosperous people as SicciusDentatus[a Roman tribune, fifth century BC], who was on the prevailing side in a hundred and twenty battles, who had three hundred and twelve public rewards assigned to him by his generals and princes for his valour and conduct in sieges and sharp encounters, and, besides all this, had his share in nine triumphs; yet still the period shall be that all this shall end in death, and the people shall talk of us awhile, good or bad, according as we deserve, or as they please, and once it shall come to pass that concerning every one of us it shall be told in the neighbourhood, that we are dead.’

Death, Taylor reminds, is the most democratic of institutions; and he reminds us also, in his The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), from which I have just quoted, of our ineradicable frailty that should be sufficient to induce a degree...

Table of contents

• Omslagssida
• Titelsida
• Copyright-sida
• Previous Praise
• Dedication
• 1 Everywhere is Interesting: ‘I’ve been to England’
• 2 Natural Selection: The Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• 3 Shame: A Most Democratic Institution
• 4 Pain in the Room: Shocking Pink
• 5 Bullying: Guinea Pigs
• 6 Heredity: Twisting Round a Stick
• 7 Insanity: Paler in the Shade
• 8 Religion: Strange Positions
• 9 Free Will: Headless Frogs
• 10 Respect: Our Own Book
• 11 Change: A Pugilist at Work
• 12 Love: Chien professeur
• 13 Suffering: Drought and Leanness
• 14 ‘I feel it more’: D.H. Lawrence
• 15 Politics: Trinidadian Oranges
• 16 Causality: Kindred Delusions
• 17 Siren Questions: Delia Bacon
• 18 Coincidences: Oversmoking
• 19 Metaphysics: More Moral Children
• 20 Genius: The Indoor Aquarium
• 21 Goodness: The Conquest of Britain
• 22 Truth: Criticism that Truly Stings
• 23 Consciousness: ‘I say, Jeeves’
• 24 Excess: Holy Fools
• 25 Roles: Dylan Thomas
• 26 Hellfire