N MEDICE AND LETTERS
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others.
No doubt I shall be accused of prejudice in favour of my own profession. To demonstrate that I am an unbiased critic, however, I shall cite the work of a doctor who wrote very badly, execrably in fact, the late Dr David Cooper. He was an associate for a time of R.D. Laing, the talented but wayward and self-destructive psychiatrist, and during the Sixties and Seventies of the last century his ravings in book form had a vogue that was (how can I put this kindly?) disproportionate to their intellectual and literary merit.
I suspect, though of course I cannot prove, that he owed much of his success to his appearance, which was that of a rock star turned Old Testament prophet. How could someone with such a beard be other than profound? Tolstoy, Rasputin and the Mahaishi Mahesh Yogi played the same trick. It seems to work every time.
His writings are not so much an elucidation of anything as a mood statement, which perhaps is not altogether surprising because he was drunk so much of the time. Insofar as any definite ideas can be deduced from his words, they are that capitalism is responsible for all the ills of the world, that the family acts as capitalism’s unpaid policeman, and that come the revolution (the real, authentic revolution, that is, not the stunted Russian affair) life will become one long orgasm.
At his most limpid, Dr Cooper wrote like Dave Spart, the revolutionary whose immortal thoughts used to appear in the pages of Private Eye. Here is a specimen, selected for its unusual comprehensibility: ‘In the capitalist countries, we fight against the mystifications of capitalist censorship of the mass media and the educational processes (especially in “advanced liberalism”) and the ideology of familialism (you can get paid if you make children to become cheap sources of labour, the supply of increasingly necessary unemployed manpower, or conditioned to become psychiatric victims, delinquents, cannon-fodder for capitalism, mercenaries for those “men” whose strong fascist businessmenlike faces express the tragedy of their violent, violating impotence).’ Dr Cooper had evidently discovered the secret, not of eternal youth, but of eternal adolescence.
I, on the other hand, must be getting older, and therefore more forgiving. Dr Cooper died of a heart attack at a comparatively early age, and when I look at a photograph of him — so earnest, so entirely lacking in irony or humour, so angry — I cannot but feel sorry for him. I don’t want to sound Freudian, but what exactly did his parents do to him that he should hate the family so?
I am united to him, however, by a fear which causes me to judge him rather less unkindly than I might otherwise do. His writings, into which he poured himself however drunkenly, were clearly of great importance to him, yet they are completely worthless (though perhaps they will one day be of interest to historians of irrationalism).
Is not the worthlessness of what we do the secret fear that unites all scribblers?
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