ANTHONY DANIELS

ALIAS THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The Proper Procedure

2017

EIGHT OF TONY’S BOOKS are on my shelves, most of them credited to Theodore Dalrymple, his favorite nom de plume. All are marvelously idiosyncratic, the work of someone closely observing the human comedy while himself standing apart from it. A prolific journalist as well, his articles are usually about behavior consistent with the doctrine of original sin. The prose has two registers, one of which is controlled mockery of the many who ought to know better; and the other is the warning that things are awful and we have yet to see how much more awful they will become. In many respects he is the Charles Dickens of the modern age.

A doctor by profession and resolutely curious by instinct, Tony has made himself familiar with all the ills to which everybody is heir. Work or foreign travel familiarized him with every sort of pain and failure. In Liberia at a time of anarchy, he happened to see thugs sawing the legs off a grand piano, an example of cultural barbarism so extreme that nothing could ever be done except report it. By the time he was employed as doctor and psychiatrist, first in Birmingham’s City Hospital and then in its Winson Green Prison, he had every reason to subscribe to the credo of the genuine conservative, namely that the veneer of civilization is frighteningly thin, hard to create but easy to destroy.

In the early 1990s, Tony made his mark with a short pithy column for the Spectator, afterwards collecting the whole lot into a book, If Symptoms Persist. “For David and Clarissa, in praise of the modern world, Theodore” is what he wrote with typical gamesmanship on the title page of my copy, following up in the foreword on the very next page with what he really thought: “I am convinced that the poverty of spirit to be found in an English slum is the worst to be found anywhere … for sheer apathy, for spiritual, emotional, educational and cultural nihilism and vacuity, you must go to an English slum. Nowhere in the world – at least in my experience – are people to be found who have so little control over, or responsibility for, their own lives and behaviour.” Worse still, they are under the illusion that others, “the Social, the doctor, the Housing, the Council” will come to the rescue and “make them whole” as he puts it.

A good twenty years later, he went over this ground once more in The Proper Procedure, a collection of short stories. The opening passage of the opening story goes, “Life in Percy Bysshe Shelley House, a concrete tower opposite its identical twin, Harold Laski House, was growing more and more intolerable.” Note the compressed suggestion of the multiple horrors of town planning, bureaucracy, contemporary architecture, cultural pretension and elitist patronizing of the uneducated masses. What a wonderful satirical effect the juxtaposed names of Shelley and Laski have! The very next paragraph gathers speed: “What a country! The people couldn’t even speak or spell their own language properly, and hardly knew that any other languages existed. They knew nothing of their own literature and cared even less; their pleasures were coarse and brutish, their food revolting, their manners, if such you could call them, appalling. It was not so much that they lacked refinement, these people; rather they hated refinement and persecuted it wherever they found or even suspected it.” No wonder Tony wrote for me on the fly-leaf above his signature, “Something to quell your optimism, if ever you feel any.” Several generations of intellectuals have succeeded in imposing their belief that the collective is superior to the individual. They have encouraged inspectors, social workers, administrators, planners, civil servants and indeed virtually all employees of the state to redesign our culture, what’s left of it, to adapt the title of one of Tony’s books. The unrefined men and women whose sad fate so upsets Tony are victims of theories developed in libraries and now being tested to destruction. Who would have thought, Tony put the question in one of his articles, that within a few years of the conclusion of the Cold War Britain would have undergone so much creeping Sovietization. Intellectuals come standardized these days, they have much the same education, much the same friends, much the same experience from which to draw much the same conclusions, with the witless togetherness of herd animals. And who could conceivably have imagined that someone defending old civilized ways of living would necessarily be compelled to go against the grain.