After the Concert

Who wrote the following paragraph, which seems to me quintessentially representative of the author’s sensibility and style?

“The second half of the concert was given over to a performance of Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler’s last song cycle, which seems to me perfectly poised between the grandeur and pettiness of human existence, between resignation and protest, ecstasy and misery. It accords well with the mood of one whose intimation of impending cultural catastrophe coincides with his own declining vigor: in short, with the mood of someone like me.”

Faithful readers know my enthusiasm for the work of Theodore Dalrymple, dba Dr. Anthony Daniels, the English essayist and retired physician whose latest piece, “Out of the Time Machine,” appears in the June issue of The New Criterion. Unfortunately, the essay requires payment to be read online, but I suggest you buy the magazine at the newsstand for a mere $7.75.

The essay is not about Mahler or his “doom-laden apprehensions,” though actually I suppose it is. Dalrymple leaves the concert and steps “into the night of an English provincial city.” This is not insignificant, for the concertgoers have entered a “different, alien, and hostile world” consisting of “untold thousands of young people, dressed with a voluntary uniformity, [who] paraded themselves, raucous, drunken, exhibitionist, and volatile.” Every honest reader has shared the experience. Wednesday afternoon, crossing a parking lot and holding my youngest sons’ hands, I was headed for the entrance of my barbershop, when two punks standing at a bus stop began staring at us menacingly, five yards away. One, in camouflage pants, sleeveless t-shirt and bandana, began slamming a trashcan with a stick, never taking his eyes off us. Both leered. I walked a little faster and I don’t think my sons paid much attention, but life was coarsened by degrees and now I fear a little more for my sons and the world they will inherit.

Dalrymple’s nocturnal intimidation sets him to thinking of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The older, more civilized folk who enjoy Mahler become the Eloi; the drunken, threatening horde, the Morlocks. One of Dalrymple’s boldest gifts at a writer is fearlessness in pointing out the obvious. More putatively sophisticated commentators would dismiss the Wells template as simplistic. Dalrymple is as sophisticated a writer as is working today, but he doesn’t give a damn about appearing superficially simplistic. He’d rather be right.

Of course, I read The Time Machine and Wells’ other “scientific romances” as a kid, sixth grade to be precise, right after Jules Verne and just before Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed George Pal’s film version from 1960, with Rod Taylor as The Time Traveler, three years before he showed up in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remember the rapidly changing scene in the dress shop across the road from the Traveller’s laboratory as he first experiments with the machine. I also recall the sound of sirens, echoing the “duck-and-cover” drills we rehearsed in school. In the movie, everything turned cheesy once the Eloi and Morlocks showed up. But I never thought of the story as a metaphor for our era.

Dalrymple never writes straightforward literary essays or book reviews. A book is an opportunity to probe the rapidly degenerating human condition. I hope an enterprising publisher some day collects his literary essays in a volume of their own. I also admire the way Dalrymple moves seamlessly and convincingly from a personal experience to a more general observation about the world. This looks simple – speaking as someone who has often tried the same shift in focus, with varying degrees of success – but in fact it is difficult to do without forcing too great a burden of significance on an event that may prove to be, after all, merely a trivial irritant, a pet peeve rather than a symptom of the Decline of the West. But Dalrymple’s method is subtler than that. The persona he adopts is part Everyman, part Jeremiah, and he’s not afraid on occasion to make himself look silly or pompous. But he remains a deadly serious writer. Near the end of the essay, referring to the antagonism between Eloi and Morlock, he writes:

“Is not the passion for ease and security as the summum bonum of human existence the explanation for Europe’s current combination of terrestrial immobilism and subterranean violence, a potentially terrible violence that is waiting to erupt through the calm crust of its society?” `