Father in the Looking Glass?

by Theodore Dalrymple (January 2016)

Recently I have been told by two people whom I had not seen for a long time but who knew me when I was much younger that I now strongly resemble my father, not only physically but in my gestures and my expressions, my tone of voice and so forth. I was, of course, completely unaware of this. Though I held my tongue, my resemblance to my father did not altogether please me, for more than one reason.

My father was in several respects an admirable man. He was extremely intelligent and even talented (the two are not at all the same). He composed and recorded some charming children’s songs and held engineering patents though he was not trained as an engineer.

He started a business from scratch which was successful in a small way and would have been much more so if it had not been for two of his characteristics, one of them by no means bad and the other that finally laid waste his life.

The quality that finally undid him was his intolerance of any human relationship of equality. He could not support that anyone should be his equal. Even the most trivial of conversations was for him a matter of establishing a hierarchy, with him at the top of it. The only question he ever asked himself was Humpty Dumpty’s: who’s to be master? And it had to be him.

It may seem strange in the circumstances that he did not see in the making of money the means to power, all the more so as he was, in theory at any rate, a Marxist. But in fact he was content to exert his power and domination over a small circle of people around him, rather than over larger numbers of those whom he could not see and with whom he had no contact. He needed a few actual human beings to dominate concretely: power in the abstract was of no interest to him.

There was a corollary to his urge to domination: an inability to praise unreservedly, and this inability inhibited his pleasure even in small things, which he could never admit. He honed in on faults or deficiencies, often imaginary, more accurately than any drone so far developed. A soup or other dish was always lacking in some ingredient or other, or alternatively contained too much of such an ingredient. Even for politeness’ sake he could not say that something was delicious or beautiful and leave it at that: he had to add a commentary on how it could have been better, if only this or that had been added or subtracted. He did so with the air of a man of the most refined taste, which he certainly was not, and who was so attached to truth that he had to speak his mind: privately, though, he was almost totally indifferent to aesthetics. He believed in Marxist use-value in the most literal sense. A rubber band was for him superior to Rembrandt.

I thought the inability to praise unique to my father until I unexpectedly came across an almost perfect analysis of it in the character sketches that the painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, wrote about some of his eminent friends, including the poet, playwright and doctor, Oliver Goldsmith: 

It must be confessed that whoever excelled in any art or science, however different from his own, was sure to be considered by him as a rival. It was sufficient that [the rival] was an object of praise, as if he thought that the world had but a certain quantity of that commodity to give away, and what was bestowed upon others made less come to his share.

That was my father exactly: just as his Marxism caused him to believe in the zero-sum nature of an economy, despite the evident untruth of this as exemplified by his own life and career, so he believed it was with praise and merit: the more for someone else, the less for him. He was like a critic who would say that because Durer was a great painter Chardin could not have been such.

In Goldsmith, apparently (at least according to Reynolds), the trait was harmless, almost innocent: 

This odious quality, however, was not so disagreeable in him as it generally is in other people. It was so far from being of that black malignant kind which excites hatred and disgust, that it was, from its being so artless and obvious only ridiculous.

I could not see the innocence of it in my father. Incessant carping about things he didn’t care about in the least caused distress to others and brought him no joy: and as a result of observing him I resolved never to complain of small things, a resolution, like most resolutions, imperfectly kept, but nonetheless still present to this day in my mind.  

I think this is false because it mistakes the nature of infinity. Infinity minus one is infinity still. People make the same mistake when they suppose that rules of grammar constrain free expression because they limit what can be said by prohibiting certain constructions. But this does not in the least reduce the number of things that can be said, which remains infinite. To prevent me from becoming x does not force me to become y.

But when I say that it is good I am not merely saying, or I hope that I am not merely saying, that it produces a certain reaction in me. I think or hope that I am saying something about what inheres in the work itself, just as my father thought that the wrong degree of saltiness inhered in the soup and depended not merely on his estimate.

Dogmatism is the reaction of those who want to know best but suspect that the metaphysical foundations of their supposed knowledge are shaky. Ambiguity disturbs them: how can there be rational criticism, for example, founded on argument and evidence, when at the same time there is no disputing taste? The solution to the tension is to stand behind a stockade of indubitable truth.

I am indeed my father’s son.

 

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Out Into the Beautiful World from New English Review Press.

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