'Varied, Inconsistent and Unpredictable'

Thedore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple, blog-like premise: he writes about the books he has been reading. What might be an exercise in self-indulgent tedium in the wrong hands is a sort of brain scan of an intelligent man’s sensibility as he reads. Dalrymple is well-read, widely traveled, witty and endlessly curious. His prose is notable for its clarity. As a retired prison doctor, he knows intimately a stratum of life most of us will never know. His sympathies are broad. Among his chief interests are medicine and crime. He makes an excellent companion and articulates his bookish reactions conversationally. He’s more storyteller than critic. 

His latest book chronicle, The Strut and Trade of Charms (Mirabeau Press, 2025), takes its title from “In My Craft and Sullen Art” by Dylan Thomas. In a brief note preceding the text he tells us the only purpose such books have is “to please myself  in the hope of pleasing a few others, and perhaps to demonstrate that human life is so infinitely varied, inconsistent and unpredictable that no mere theory could explain it or catch it in the coarse mesh of its net.” Dalrymple is no theoretician and isn’t afraid to say when he doesn’t understand something he encounters.  

 

Most of the books and writers he reads were previously unknown to him and to me, though he does read Robert Graves and Vernon Scannell. One of the most intriguing-sounding titles is Classic Descriptions of Disease (1932), written by the American physician Ralph H. Major (1884-1970). Both of us use the third edition from 1945. The book is almost seven-hundred pages long and weighs 3.25 pounds, according to the bathroom scale. Dalrymple describes it as “a compendium of classic, usually first or early, descriptions of disease, combined with brief biographical notes on their authors.” Most of the entries are written by physicians but a few are the work of such literary figures as Martial, Thucydides, Boccaccio and Pliny the Elder. Take tetanus. The first source cited by Major is Hippocrates (c. 460 BC-c. 370 BC), who writes:

 

“The master of a large ship mashed the index finger of his right hand with the anchor. Seven days later a somewhat foul discharge appeared; then trouble with his tongue--he complained he could not speak properly. The presence of tetanus was diagnosed, his jaws became pressed together, his teeth were locked, then symptoms appeared in his neck: on the third day opisthotonos [uncontrolled flexing of muscles in the neck and back] appeared with sweating. Six days after the diagnosis was made he died.”

 

I’m reminded of John Thoreau Jr., Henry’s brother. On New Year’s Day in 1842, he nicked the tip of his left-hand ring finger while stropping his razor – a minor wound we would wash and bandage. Eight days later it had become “mortified,” meaning the tissue had turned black and necrotic. On the morning of January 9, John’s jaw stiffened and by that evening he suffered the convulsions associated with lockjaw. A Boston doctor examined John and concluded he could do nothing for him. No one could have until the vaccine for tetanus was developed in 1924. John, 27, died on January 11 in the arms of his helpless brother.

 

The disease is caused by the bacteria Clostridium tetani, commonly found in soil and dust. The rate of the disease in the century since the vaccine was introduced has dropped by ninety-five percent. Dalrymple writes of the Major volume:

 

“Such had been the rapid progress of medical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that many of the entries must have seemed rather more recent or contemporary in 1932 than they do now.”

'The Self-Appointed Guardian of English Literature'

One is always in danger of being perceived as a fuddy-duddy. Speak admiringly of rhyme in poetry or elegant prose in fiction and risk being called a reactionary (which I was just yesterday) or an old fart (which happened last week). Stevie Smith diagnoses the type in “Souvenir de Monsieur Poop” in her second collection, Tender Only to One (1938). Her poem begins: 

“I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature,

I believe tremendously in the significance of age;

I believe that a writer is wise at 50,

Ten years wiser at 60, at 70 a sage.”

 

Smith wrote that the year she turned thirty-six. Age has little to do with such things. There are youthful prodigies and late bloomers among writers and readers. It’s not a matter of combatting the prevailing critical and popular fashions. It’s more a matter of articulating one’s standards for work new or old that compels us to reread it.   

 

“But then I am an old fogey.

I always write more in sorrow than in anger.

I am, after all, devoted to Shakespeare, Milton,

And, coming to our own times,

Of course

Housman.”

 

There are worlds of hard-won irony in those lines. Later in the poem Smith writes: “(When I say that I am an old fogey, I am, of course, joking.)”

'The Worst of Bores'

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life. Universities are infested with people who take themselves very seriously. Couple that with arcane academic specialties, undergrown senses of humor and advanced political thinking and you have an epidemic of tedium. Exceptions? Of course. I know some very bright, conversationally gifted people on campus as well. Theodore Dalrymple diagnoses the bore with precision: 

“Of course, the true bore, like the true eccentric, doesn’t know or even suspect that that is what he is. The eccentric does strange things because to him they are the most natural things in the world to do. The true bore doesn’t know that he is boring others because what he says is so very interesting to himself, which is why at dinner parties my wife sometimes has to kick me under the table.”

 

In Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (2002), N. John Hall tells us the essayist read the transcript of a radio broadcast, “The Road to Happiness,” by that well-known, high-minded bore Bertrand Russell: “Russell is a bore; but he is a bright bore, which is the worst of bores.”

'A Veritable Swiss Army Knife of a Book'

One needn’t be a literary populist, jettisoning all critical values, to understand that especially when young we read certain books for the pure escapist bliss of it. In my case, before and during puberty, that meant fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells and, best of all, Jules Verne. Putting aside the will to impose arbitrary genres on books, what these writers guaranteed this young reader was adventure. Around the same time I was first reading Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) for similar reasons. Boys, certainly, and, presumably, at least some girls, enjoy tales of adventure -- of survival, courage and resourcefulness. Kafka comes later. 

A reader of Anecdotal Evidence, Thomas Parker, teaches fourth grade in Los Angeles and recently read Verne’s The Mysterious Island (L'Île mystérieuse, 1875). I remember my mother taking me to a matinee of the film version of the novel, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen and a score by Bernard Herrmann, in 1961. Naturally, I remember most vividly the giant crab scene. Around the same time I read the Classics Illustrated comicbook adaptation of the novel, and within a year or two the novel itself. Thomas’ review of Verne’s book, “A Boy Scout’s Handbook: The Mysterious Island,” is published on the Black Gate website and is one of the most entertaining things I’ve read online in a while.He writes with enthusiasm without a hint of sub-literary slumming:

“As for books, I recently read something that would definitely make the real desert island cut — Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. It’s a veritable Swiss army knife of a book, full of useful hints and practical advice, whether you want to lower the level of a lake, make nitroglycerin, cook a capybara or construct a seaworthy, two-hundred-ton ship from scratch. It’s a book no Boy Scout should leave home without.”

 

I had forgotten that the novel and movie begin in the United States during the Civil War. That would have been a further inducement to this young reader/viewer, as 1961 was the centenary of the war’s beginning and I was obsessed with it. All the characters are Americans, which I had also forgotten. Like Odysseus, the survivors, led by Cyrus Smith, embody mêtis, what we would characterize as cunning intelligence. They even construct a ship and christen it the Bonadventure. (Edmund Blunden’s 1922 travel journal is titled Bonadventure, after the ship he sailed on.) Thomas acknowledges (as every reader should, though some will not) that The Mysterious Island was written 150 years ago and its author may not have shared our enlightened moral values. Thomas’ conclusion is worth quoting at length:

 

“[T]he thing that most marks The Mysterious Island as an artifact from someplace far, far away is an attitude and an assumption — every page shines with an optimism and unalloyed faith in reason (and faith in faith, too — the colonists frequently offer up thanks to their Creator) that have become increasingly alien in this decidedly non-Vernian far future that we’ve wound up living in. When was the last time you read a six-hundred-page book without a single cynical word in it?

 

“More than the complete harmony and lack of conflict between the men (there are no personal problems on Lincoln Island — all problems there are mechanical), more than the island being presented as a delightful puzzle to solve or an enormous toy box to open, more even than the total lack of the female sex (that not one of these supposedly grown men sees as a problem or even notices!), it’s this fresh, optimistic view of the world (call it naivete if you will) that marks The Mysterious Island as fundamentally a boy’s book. That doesn’t mean it’s valueless, though, even for non-adolescents.

 

“Verne’s sunny view of the world and of our place in it may not be strictly realistic, but it is undeniably pleasant, and even inspiring and possibly useful. We’re all shipwrecked somewhere, aren’t we, and when you find yourself cold and wet and shivering on the beach, you can curl up and cry and start dying of exposure or starvation… or you can inventory what you’ve got in your pockets, survey the landscape, and get to work. In fiction or in life, it’s not a bad philosophy, and there are worse tools to have in your box than L’Île mystérieuse.

 

“So just ask yourself — WWJVD? (What would Jules Verne do?) The sooner you get that telegraph built the better.”

 

How pleasant to read an account of a reviewer enjoying himself while reading a book. Some of us still remember those days and don’t condescend to our younger selves.

'Responsibility to the Accurate Word'

Working in newsrooms for twenty-five years taught me to buffer against distractions. Newsrooms are noisy places – police scanners, televisions and radios, often acrimonious arguments between editors and reporters. You have interviews to conduct and deadlines to meet. To demand silence would probably get you canned so you learn a little discipline, seldom a bad thing. Shifting to universities, where I worked as a science writer for almost twenty years, felt like retiring to a monastery. I always had an office of my own – a monastic cell with a door I could close when not wishing to be bothered. Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) writes in a 1982 essay: “We all need silence -- both external and interior -- in order to find out what we truly think.” 

Hazzard isn’t peddling New Age bromides. My experience suggests interior silence is even more important than the external sort, and harder to come by. Some minds are like Act II, Scene 2 of King Lear – much commotion, little repose. That was me when young. No wonder I got little work done. Writers are unlikely hybrids of selflessness and selfishness, and tend to learn things slowly, if at all. One year earlier, Hazzard had published her masterpiece, Transit of Venus (1980), a rare twentieth-century novel written by, for and about adults. She continues:

 

“The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. . . . I have come more and more to value the view of Ortega y Gasset that ‘without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.’ However passionate the writer's material, some distance and detachment are needed before the concept can be realized. In our time, the writer can expect little or nothing in the way of silence, privacy or removal from the deafening clamor of ‘communications,’ with all its disturbing and superfluous information.”

 

Even truer than it was forty-four years ago. Hazzard quotes from Ortega’s The Dehumanization of Art (1925): “In the world today, gentlemen, a great thing is dying—it is truth. Without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.”

 

One would take Hazzard less seriously if she weren’t so accomplished a writer. She probably sounds old-fashioned to some readers. She concludes:

 

“There is at least one immense truth which we can still adhere to and make central to our lives -- responsibility to the accurate word. It is through literature that the word has been preserved and nourished, and it is in literature that we find the candor and refreshment of truth. In the words of Jean Cocteau, the good and rightful tears of the reader are drawn simultaneously by an emotion evoked through literature, and by the experience of seeing a word in place.”

 

[Hazzard’s essay is collected in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays, 2016.]

'We Must Examine and Fix What Ignorance Is'

A thoughtful, well-read reader has taught me a new and useful word: agnoiology. It’s a straight borrow from the Greek word for “ignorance” and means, according to the OED, “the study of the nature of ignorance or of what it is impossible to know.” It entered English in 1854, coined by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64). In the Age of AI it seems important to know this word, which first appears in Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysics: 

“We must examine and fix what ignorance is—what we are, and can be, ignorant of. And thus we are thrown upon an entirely new research, constituting an intermediate section of philosophy, which we term the agnoiology or theory of ignorance.”

 

Colloquially, people call others “ignorant” when they disagree with them or find them unsophisticated. It’s a handy word in the arsenal of snobbery. More formally, ignorance is the absence of knowledge. I am ignorant of the rules governing football and irregular French verbs. In theory, I could learn both bodies of knowledge but have no desire to do so. I’m content with my ignorance. Ferrier distinguishes the “unknowable” from the “unknown.”

 

In her 1899 monograph on Ferrier, published in the “Famous Scots Series,” Elizabeth Haldane quotes the philosopher stressing “the use, indeed the absolute necessity, of a true doctrine of ignorance.” Haldane writes:

 

“There are, Ferrier says, two sorts of so-called ignorance: one of these is incidental to some minds, but not to all—an ignorance of defect, he puts it — just as we might be said to be ignorant of a language we had never learned. But the other ignorance (not, properly speaking, ignorance at all) is incident to all intelligence by its very nature, and is no defect or imperfection. The law of ignorance hence is that ‘we can be ignorant only of what can be known,’ or ‘the knowable is alone the ignorable.’”

 

If I understand Ferrier’s epistemology correctly, ignorance ought to be an inducement to humility. Not only is there much we don’t know, but even more we can’t know. Listen to commonplace conversations and notice how often people make categorial statements concerning things they know nothing about. We all do it on occasion. Some make a career of it. Ignorance, in the conventional sense, is a goad to learning. Remember Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision” in Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1983):

 

“ignorance about those who have disappeared

undermines the reality of the world”

'More Recent Misjudgments'

“My past literary judgments sometimes embarrass me.” 

My friend, a man of roughly my age, has just reread Conrad’s Under Western Eyes after first reading it six years ago and finding it “failed to engage” him. Now he judges it “gripping--well plotted, suspenseful, psychologically acute, uncommonly intelligent, wise.” I share that judgment of Conrad’s later “political” novels, including The Secret Agent and especially Nostromo. My friend is not alone. I’m ashamed and somewhat baffled by my previous lapses in literary taste and judgment. My friend is not referring to our reactions when young and still bookishly feckless. “I was, in knowledge and experience,” he writes, “a different person then. I'm referring instead to more recent misjudgments, ones for which I don’t have the excuse of youth.”

 

When young I claimed to like a lot of dubious, ephemeral stuff, especially among contemporary writers – Alexander Theroux, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth and others. You see the pattern, heavily bent toward “experimental” post-modernists, often difficult to read, explicitly denying readers' traditional novelistic pleasures, often unabashedly boring. That’s a clue as to my youthful motivations. I was masquerading as a connoisseur of the avant-garde. The last thing I wanted to be known for was unhip, middlebrow tastes in books. What other reason could there be for reading Gaddis’ unreadable JR or McElroy’s Women and Men besides snobbery? Consuming such books was an act of bravado, a public proclamation that I was no philistine.

 

The reverse judgment was also true. Certain writers I didn’t dismiss but found lacking – what? Excitement? Critical endorsement? Formal challenges? Among them now are some of my favorite writers – Willa Cather, George Eliot, Ford Madox Ford. There were writers I ignored or was unaware of until recent years, and now admire and enjoy – Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Francis Wyndham, Ivy Compton-Burnett. I misjudged the overall career of Walter de la Mare, pigeonholing him as a children’s poet. Memoirs of a Midget is now among my favorite novels, as is Maurice Baring’s C. Some loves have remained unchanged since I was young – among Americans, Vladimir Nabokov, William Maxwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud and, of course, Henry James.

 

About the Conrad, my friend writes: “Beats me how I could have missed its excellence the first time around, let alone found it uninvolving. Must have been distracted.”