Theodore Dalrymple : An Imaginary “Scandal” (Droll. For lirerary types only.)

If a prisoner walks into my consulting room in the prison with a stick, he’s a sex offender; if he has gold front teeth, he’s a drug dealer; and if he’s reading Wittgenstein, he’s in for fraud: for it is virtually a law of our penal establishments that fraud and philosophy are what literary theorists like to call metonymic.

When you work in a prison as I do, white-collar criminals come as something of a light relief. At last someone with whom you can have a disinterested, abstract intellectual conversation! No more talk about alcoholic mothers, brutal stepfathers, and terrible childhoods as the fons et origo of car theft: it’s straight to the meaning of life, the social contract and the metaphysical foundation of morality (they always say that there isn’t any). It’s almost like being a student again, up till three in the morning, trying to work out what no man has ever worked out before.

The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.

“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”

He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.

I feel more or less the same about literary fraud (I am, of course, talking of the fully conscious variety, not the other kind, which is far too commonplace to be interesting). We all have our favorites in this genre: Napoleon liked his Ossian, but my favorite is Rahila Khan. She deserves to be more widely known than she is, for ultimately her fraud was no fraud.

"Droll?"

It's a masterpiece and a "MUST READ!"

Thank you for posting it and [Just this once, you understand!!?] forgive me for posting the whole piece, which, had my search not turned up your excerpted post, I was just about to post elsewhere.

Blessings -- B A

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

An imaginary “scandal”
by Theodore Dalrymple

If a prisoner walks into my consulting room in the prison with a stick, he’s a sex offender; if he has gold front teeth, he’s a drug dealer; and if he’s reading Wittgenstein, he’s in for fraud: for it is virtually a law of our penal establishments that fraud and philosophy are what literary theorists like to call metonymic.

When you work in a prison as I do, white-collar criminals come as something of a light relief. At last someone with whom you can have a disinterested, abstract intellectual conversation! No more talk about alcoholic mothers, brutal stepfathers, and terrible childhoods as the fons et origo of car theft: it’s straight to the meaning of life, the social contract and the metaphysical foundation of morality (they always say that there isn’t any). It’s almost like being a student again, up till three in the morning, trying to work out what no man has ever worked out before.

The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.

“Did you have to pay the money back?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”

He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.

I feel more or less the same about literary fraud (I am, of course, talking of the fully conscious variety, not the other kind, which is far too commonplace to be interesting). We all have our favorites in this genre: Napoleon liked his Ossian, but my favorite is Rahila Khan. She deserves to be more widely known than she is, for ultimately her fraud was no fraud.

Her oeuvre is very slender: a single paperback volume of 100 pages, entitled Down the Road, Worlds Away. It was published in 1987 by the Virago Press, a feminist publishing house founded in the 1970s that is now owned by TimeWarnerBooks, and it appeared in a series called Virago Upstarts—that is to say, parvenu termagants. You are never too young to resent.

“Virago Upstarts is a new series of books for girls and young women… . This new series will show the funny, difficult, and exciting real lives and times of teenage girls in the 1980s.” No prizes for guessing the reality of the real lives, of course: and Rahila Khan gives us “twelve haunting stories about Asian girls and white boys … about the tangle of violence and tenderness … in all their lives,” written “with hard-eyed realism and poignant simplicity.”

As for Rahila herself, she was born in Coventry in 1950, lived successively in Birmingham, Derby, Oxford, London, and Peterborough, married in 1971, and now lived in Brighton with her two daughters. She began writing only in 1986 (presumably when her daughters demanded less of her time), and in the same year six of her stories were broadcast by the BBC. Virago accepted her book, an acceptance that, in the words of Professor Dympna Callaghan, Professor of English at Syracuse University and author of a Marxist analysis of the exclusion of women from the Renaissance stage, “seemed to fulfill one of Virago’s laudable objectives, that of publishing the work of a diverse group of contemporary feminist authors.”

A literary agent contacted Rahila Khan by post and asked to represent her. Until then, Miss Khan had refused to meet in person anyone with whom she dealt, or even to send a photograph of herself: but she agreed to meet the agent who wanted to represent her. The agent was surprised to discover that Miss Khan was actually the Reverend Toby Forward, a Church of England vicar. (He has recently been installed as canon residentiary and preceptor of Liverpool Cathedral, and his latest publication—he is now an established children’s writer under his own name—is entitled Shakespeare’s Globe: An Interactive Pop-Up Theatre.)

Needless to say, the revelation of Rahila Khan’s true identity caused both hilarity and anger. The publisher, Virago, felt that it had been made a fool of and was the victim of a distasteful hoax, pulped the book soon after its publication and turned it into an expensive bibliographical rarity (my own copy is in excellent condition but for the yellowing pages that emit an acrid, throat-catching smell which so many British books, printed on the cheapest and nastiest of paper, nowadays emit after a few months of existence). Virago asked Reverend Forward to return the advance he had been paid and to pay for the cost of the printing. He did not accede to the request.

Virago felt it necessary to stand by its purely literary judgment, namely that the stories were written “with hard-eyed realism and poignant simplicity”—it had to do so, or it would justly have been accused of applying double standards to work by Asian women and white men, which would have revealed a frankly racist condescension. But Virago decided that politics in this instance was the better part of literature, and was more important, indeed, than whether the book had anything worthwhile or important to say. It therefore refused to sell any more copies of the offending work. This, as we shall see, was ironic, because the author was drawing attention, not before time, to the truly oppressed condition of certain women, a condition in which one might have supposed that feminists would be interested. The personal identity of the author thus came to be all-important just at the very moment when, elsewhere in the literary world, the death of the author was being confidently announced.

Academics and intellectuals found the affair painful to elucidate. If it were true that the balkanization of literature was justified by the supposition that only people who belonged to a certain category of people could truly understand, write about, interpret, and sympathize with the experiences of people in that same category, so that, for example, only women could write about women for women, and only blacks about blacks for blacks (the very careers of many academics now depending upon such a supposition), how was it possible that a Church of England vicar had been able, actually without much difficulty, to persuade a feminist publishing house that he wrote as a woman, and as a Muslim woman of Indian subcontinental origin at that? Was he not in fact telling us, as presumably a good Christian should, that mankind is essentially one, and that if we make a sufficient effort we too can enter into the worlds of others who are in many ways different from ourselves? Was he not implying that the traditional view of literature, that it expresses the universal in the particular, was not only morally and religiously superior, but empirically a more accurate description of it as an enterprise than the view of literature as a series of stockades, from which groups of the embittered and enraged endlessly fired arrows at one another without ever quite achieving victory?

The confusion that the affair sowed was evident in the clotted prose that it stimulated. Here is Professor Callaghan again in her essay, “The Vicar and Virago”:

As we saw in the Vicar and Virago Affair, the problem of identity is exacerbated to the point of hypervisibility in the relation between the cultural inscription of race as color and the erasure of race in the dominant construction of white identity. Whites are feverishly clutching at their/our ethnicities—and everyone else’s—and are threatened by the knowledge that the racially hegemonic invisibility so long cultivated may now spell disappearance. In its worst manifestations, this becomes neo-Nazism, but even at its best, this attempt to register whiteness as a racial identity risks reproducing the notion of race as an objective (rather than socially constructed) spectrum of human identity. “Equalizing” racial categories will only succeed in suspending the history of racism and making whiteness, as opposed to white privilege, visible.
The great advantage that Reverend Forward enjoyed over his publishers and critics was that he knew what he was talking about and they didn’t. His critics probably assumed that, as a vicar of the national church in seemingly terminal decline, he was an otherworldly scion of the English country gentry in its last gasp, who could therefore be expected not to know much about anything, and was at best a figure of fun. But from the moment I started to read the stories in Down the Road, Worlds Away (and the title itself should have given a clue to the book’s serious intent, capturing in five words a very important element of modern social reality), I understood that the author was not in any sense perpetrating a hoax, much less a fraud. He was writing in earnest, and not satirizing anyone. For what he described in his stories was only too familiar to me from my work as a doctor, and no one could write so clearly of such matters without a deep sense of purpose.

The Reverend Toby Forward, as it happens, is not the scion of privilege, even of privilege in decline; his biography in outline followed that of Rahila Khan’s very closely. He was born in Coventry in 1950, and did live for many years in the cities of the English Midlands. He did marry in 1971, did have two daughters, did start to write in 1986, and did live in Brighton at the time the book was published.

The Reverend Forward’s knowledge of the kind of people I have been treating as a doctor for many years came to him by a different route from my knowledge of them. It so happens that I have worked in the very same area that the Reverend Forward writes about, where his father was a publican. Both his parents, who were working class, left school when they were fourteen years old. They lived in slum areas of the unlovely cities of the Midlands, and he himself went to schools in which half the pupils were of Indian or Pakistani descent. His early life was lived in precisely the social environment depicted in Down the Road, Worlds Away: that is to say, in a society in which a nihilistic and entirely secular white working-class culture was thrown into involuntary contact with a besieged traditionalist Indian culture in which religion, particularly Islam, played a preponderant role.

Oddly enough for a book supposedly by someone called Rahila Khan, the five stories about white boys are narrated in the first person, while the seven about Muslim girls are in the third person. The editor at Virago solicitously (and by letter) “wondered whether this represented your feelings about the place of Asian women particularly in Britain, that the sense of ‘otherness’ is still so great that it feels still an impossibility to write in first person as opposed to third.”

Now that we know the true identity of Rahila Khan, the explanation is rather clearer. The Reverend Forward had experienced the life of white working-class nihilism himself, and was therefore able to depict it in the first person, while his depiction of the life of the Muslim girls was based on close observation and imaginative inference. Interestingly, however, no one criticized Rahila Khan, while she was still thought to be a Muslim woman, for having written about the lives of white working-class boys.

The stories about the boys reveal a world in which high intelligence is a disadvantage and even a danger. Having no vision of a better life instilled at home, and being given none by a society that has now all but officially adopted an ideology that refuses to recognize a higher and a lower among human activities and aspirations, young boys who possess intelligence and spirit are driven to rebellion in a wholly destructive and self-destructive way. The narrator of the stories loves his mother, but only his mother, and she soon dies of cancer, after which he is unable to approach the rest of the world other than with violent bravado. In one story, he attends a clandestine dog-fight that symbolizes the brutality of life in a British slum, a fight that is described by the vicar with such terrifying clarity that one assumes it is a memory rather than an invention. The final story narrated by the white youth concerns a car thief, Mickey Singh (a Sikh who has thrown in his lot with the white working-class “culture”), who lets a young neophyte called Patch drive a car he has stolen. Patch is so called because he has a black patch over his eye to cure his squint, and is (possibly as a consequence) a weakling in a social environment in which weakness or any kind of disability is mercilessly mocked and exploited—and who therefore wants to steal a car to prove himself. He crashes the car and is killed. Mickey Singh, who survives unscathed, is sent to prison, where the narrator visits him.

They shouldn’t have put him in prison. Not just for taking cars, not even after Patch died. I went to visit him. He was different. He looked good. He was calm and relaxed. I don’t know. He seemed to have got something. Usually if I want something I go out and get it, but I don’t really know what I want yet. But Mickey, he’s got something he wants, now, and I want that.
The doom of an entire class, composed of millions of people, is most sensitively captured here (for, significantly, it is the last word of the white youth that we read in the book). The “just” of “not just for taking cars” is absolutely accurate: my patients in the prison often say “just for cars” when I ask them why they are in prison. The narrator’s admiration for Mickey, and desire to be like him, is also entirely accurate. In the area in which I work, quite a few young people tattoo themselves with a blue spot on the cheek to make it appear that they have been incarcerated in young offenders’ institutions, whose inmates tattoo themselves in this fashion, even though they have never been so incarcerated. For them, though, the blue spot is a badge of honor, and moreover a talisman in an environment in which toughness is the highest good and tenderness and solicitousness for others mere weakness. With neither sanctimony nor censoriousness, the vicar succeeds in condemning a heartless way of life, in which other people are but instruments to be used for short-term material or sensual advantage, a way of life that has no charms and has nothing whatever to be said in its favor.

The vicar’s understanding of the tragic world of Muslim girls living in British slums, caught between two cultures and belonging fully to neither, possessing little power to determine their own fates, seems to me to be equally accurate. Indeed, he explores this world with considerable subtlety as well as sympathy.

The girls are vastly superior, morally and intellectually, to their white counterparts. Their problem is precisely the opposite of that of the white youths: far from nihilism, it is the belief in a code of ethics and conduct so rigid that it makes no allowances for the fact that the girls have grown up and must live in a country with a very different culture from that of the country in which their parents grew up. In the eyes of their parents, the girls are easily infected with, or corrupted by, the dream of personal freedom, and since the only result of such personal freedom that the parents see around them is the utter disintegration of the white working class into fecklessness and slovenly criminality, where every child is a bastard and families are kaleidoscopic in their swiftly changing composition, they become even more rigidly conservative than they might otherwise have been. They cling to what they know, as to a plank in a storm at sea.

The fathers of the girls are good according to their own lights; they are kindly and loving, but not unconditionally so. The condition of their continuing affection for their daughters is automatic, unthinking obedience. The girls are brought up in a micro-totalitarianism, in which everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. Since such a system is strong but rigid and brittle, the slightest sign of disobedience, or even independence of thought, is treated as a serious danger signal, that if allowed to go unpunished could destroy the whole culture.

In one of the stories, a father who had hitherto been kindly to his daughter, Amina, showers blows on her when he discovers that she has a book by D. H. Lawrence in her bag, given her to read by her English teacher after she has expressed an interest in literature.

Her father complains to the school about the teacher’s conduct, and the headmaster replies to him in a pusillanimously emollient way. But Amina continues to admire and be grateful to the English teacher, who “at least … was one person who knew how she felt and who respected her.”

The story ends tragically, however, when she overhears him talking to another teacher near the end of the school term.

“Only a few days, thank God. What a hellish term.”

“Glad it’s over?” his colleague had asked, with little real interest.

“Fifth form lessons are always a pain. Most of them never want to learn. D’you know, this year I nearly got the sack.” And he began the tale of Amina and the book. As he told it, the colleague’s interest became genuine.

“Why did you do it?” the other teacher asked at last. “These Paki girls never come to anything. It’s a waste of time sticking your neck out.”

In a tragic and terrible moment, Amina realizes that she can expect no real help from white society, while she is completely alienated from her own. She is alone in the whole world, but without any means to cope. The story helps us to feel for ourselves her hermetic isolation in a crowded world.
This passage, in my view, demonstrates that the Church of England vicar (the very term arouses sniggers in the intelligentsia) has understood something important, because he is concerned for the welfare of people other than himself, whom self-aggrandizing middle-class feminists still consider to be below their august notice. It is not optimistic in a facile way, because the teacher’s observation, that “these Paki girls never come to anything,” is all too often accurate, in that it recognizes both their superior potential and the social pressure on them that prevents them from coming to anything. Quite apart from anything else, Down the Road, Worlds Away confronts intellectuals with an uncomfortable truth: you can’t be a multiculturalist and believe in the legal equality of the sexes. To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute. Think not that the Reverend Forward is come to send complacency among intellectuals, but thought. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to like it.

In the subtlest of the stories, “Winter Wind,” a Muslim girl called Fatima is allowed by her reluctant father to go with pupils from her school to the theater, to see a production of As You Like It. He allows it only because the play is a set text for her English exam, and Fatima is a good pupil. She looks forward to the play with great anticipation. For her, “it was as exciting as a journey to another world.” By now, we realize that this is the literal truth.

In the theater, she sits next to Colin, a white boy who lacks “the prowess and the personality to make a success in the adolescent world.” She communicates her enthusiasm for Shakespeare to him, which is itself both accurate and ironical in its observation. The irony lies in a Pakistani girl conveying a love of Shakespeare to a boy of purely English origin; the accuracy lies in the unfashionable understanding that high culture has a powerfully liberating effect upon the unfree and the downtrodden, which is why the intelligent among them, like Fatima, so powerfully crave it.

Here again, the story does not end on a note of facile optimism. Colin and Fatima become lovers; before long, she is alone in labor in the maternity ward. We assume that by now Colin has lost interest in her, and all her father’s apprehensions about allowing her to go to the theater—a symbol for Westernization—turn out to have been justified. In effect, she has joined the white underclass of single mothers, to whom she is morally and intellectually superior, and without being white. Once again, the fate of a Muslim girl torn between a fundamentally indifferent West and an uncomprehending, unforgiving East is not an enviable one. And of course, her father will not interpret the fulfillment of his worst fears to have been the natural consequence of his own rigid adherence to the traditions he tried to impose on her in an alien land.

This is all uncannily accurate: I have seen it many times in my own hospital. Indeed, I have seen far worse things, tragedies to break the heart. My young Muslim patients, for example, all know of girls who have been killed by their own fathers and brothers when they refused to accede to a forced marriage to their first cousin back home, or to a man four times their age. So why, considering the comparative mildness of the abuses revealed in his stories, did the Reverend Forward feel it necessary to use a pseudonym? For that’s all it was, a pseudonym, not an attempt to make a fool of anyone.

He told me that he resorted to his pseudonym because he did not want to receive letters of rejection in his own name, which would somehow be more wounding to his pride than rejections send to Rahila Khan. But he also realized that Rahila Khan would be more likely to get a hearing than the Reverend Forward, and he felt that he had something important to say that ought to be heard. He had already sent his stories about working-class boys to the BBC under another pseudonym, Tom Dale, while he sent the ones about the Muslim girls as Rahila Khan. The BBC had treated the two writers quite differently: kind and considerate to Rahila, brusque and even rude to Tom. He learned his lesson.

Unfortunately, the ensuing furor over his identity and whether, again in the words of Professor Callaghan, “the appropriation of subordinate identities by privileged whites demonstrates that endeavours to compensate for the exclusion of racial ‘minorities’ from the means of literary production can become the very means for continuing this exclusion,” obscured the importance of what he was trying to say. Indeed, one might even interpret the furor over these matters as a displacement activity of the intelligentsia, who wanted to avoid having to think of the very difficult and real problems that he had raised in his stories, and which are so distressing to contemplate.

A Marxist interpretation of the response to the Reverend Forward’s pseudonymous activities (incidentally, he has also written as a gypsy, Judy Delaghty, as well as a book of the replies he received from Anglican bishops when he wrote them spoof letters as Francis Wagstaffe, and published as The Spiritual Quest of Francis Wagstaffe) would be as follows: he has demonstrated that it is possible for a person with one identity to enter accurately into the experience of people with quite another identity. Since the existence of so many posts in the humanities departments of our universities depends on precisely the opposite assumption, and since the holders of those posts are so intensely second-rate that they would not otherwise occupy such pleasant billets, it was necessary to obscure the significance of his work by means of an ideological smokescreen. Only thus could the economic interests of the holders of pseudo-academic pseudo-positions be protected. The real fraud was in academia, not in his pseudonymity.

When the Reverend Forward adopts a pseudonym, it is clearly for a serious purpose. We are increasingly unable to make the distinctions between seriousness and earnestness, on the one hand, and lightheartedness and frivolity, on the other. The academics are earnest without being serious, the Reverend Forward lighthearted without being frivolous. I am certain that he is right that we can enter into the experience of other people. I confirm this each time I ask a Muslim patient who is resisting a forced marriage whether her mother has yet thrown herself to the ground and claimed to be dying of a heart attack brought on by disobedience. However miserable my patient may be, she laughs: for this is precisely what her mother has done, and it comes as a great relief to her that someone understands. (Most such patients marry in the end, though, or leave home and are horribly exploited by members of their “community” who consider them little better than prostitutes.)

The Reverend Forward does not make the mistake of believing that his ability to enter into the experience of others is infinite. He said to me that, while he could easily put himself in the place of a girl being forced to marry against her will, he could not put himself in the place of a father who killed his daughter for disobeying him. And then he added that, as the father of two daughters, he could easily enter the experience of a man who killed his daughter’s boyfriend.

Humor, fearlessness, seriousness, and honesty: the qualities that are hated with an equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universities. There lies the real literary scandal of our times.

Theodore Dalryple is a doctor, an author, and a contributing editor of City Journal.

From The New Criterion Vol. 23, No. 9, May 2005

© 2005 The New Criterion www.newcriterion.com

The URL for this item is: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/may05/dalrymple.htm

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