What a Falling Prof. Was There

by Theodore Dalrymple (June 2014)

On the internet one thing leads to another and I ended up looking also for my student contemporaries with whom I had since lost touch. The internet acts on sleep rather as amphetamines do, that is to say it prevents it. I found myself looking for hours.

I lived as a student in a house in which the physical squalor was equal only to the intellectual ferment. One of my fellow-residents published a paper in Nature before he had even graduated, but we thought nothing of this as an accomplishment simply because he was one of us. Of the four who shared the house, three became eminent professors (one published a paper only last week that was widely reported in newspapers). Of the four, only I failed to become a professor, my career, if such it can be called, having followed an erratic and one might say unserious path. The then girlfriend of one of us became a world expert on an important if declining disease, and many of our friends and associates likewise became professors of some eminence.

Even so, I cannot, as I said, entirely rid myself of the feeling that we amounted to nothing much. The fact that the title of professor, once awarded so sparingly, seems nowadays to be given out like titles of nobility in times when monarchical governments needed to raise money by the sale of such titles, reinforces my belief. It is precisely our generation, after all, that has cheapened that of professor by inflating the numbers of professors along with debt. This title was given so sparingly before our generation’s arrival to maturity that it was a virtual guarantee of genuine distinction in the person upon whom it had been conferred. It is not that there are no professors of distinction left, rather that there are so many without.

I looked up one man with whom I had worked as a young doctor. He was a year or two older than I, and he has been a professor at a university reputed to be one of the best twenty or so in the world for many years. When I first knew him, he and I were at an age when a year or two’s advancement in the hierarchy still seemed considerable, representing a great advance in experience. But I spotted him then for a charlatan, and a charlatan he has remained, at least if a video of him posted on the internet is anything to go by.

He dressed himself with more care than a reigning monarch, his chief concern being to mark himself out from others (not, when you come to think of it, indicative of a very flattering opinion of others). If I remember aright he was much in favour of velvet and corduroy, with unusually-coloured shoes. He wore silk around his neck, semi-cravat and semi-scarf. All his accoutrements, from his pen to his attaché case, were unusual and such as no one else had. He smoked big cigars, which was unusual, not to say unique, at his age and in that milieu, which was medical. I think he wanted to give off the aura of Freud without actually being a Freudian.     

I cannot of course say that he employed it consciously, and personally I rather liked him. But I did not notice much irony about him, or even a deep sense of humour. He once invited me to dinner (he lived in a charmingly bohemian flat, full of ethnoiserie) and he was a generous host and charming dinner companion. After a very good dinner – cooked by his wife of course – he suggested that we listen to some music. He asked me to choose, bearing in mind that he knew nothing later than the Twelfth Century. My knowledge of pre-Twelfth Century music, I am afraid, has since remained as exiguous as it was then, but I admired, in a way, the manner in which he announced the nature of his collection, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to a man of discrimination.

I watched him (on You Tube) give a lecture and laughed heartily. He was not so much serious as earnest. This is a prime distinction which in the modern world is seldom made. There was no hint in his manner of the successful rogue. He was very professorial in manner, to the extent of having a very slight speech impediment of the type that English intellectuals, especially left-wing ones, often have (but proletarians never do). His manner of dress had changed from vaguely Tennysonian to young server in a hip and expensive bar. His hair, which had always been intellectually curly, had now gone white: but he still wore his Isaac Deutscher-type beard. Such a beard, I think he supposed, lent weight to his words, and possibly, from the point of view of others, it did. A bon viveur, he had put on weight.

When he retired, he concentrated on gardening (do really wicked men ever garden?). He wrote a book about an aspect of that delicate, useful and popular art that is acknowledged to be the best available in its field. Then he died, beloved of all.

Old men don’t forget, or at any rate when they don’t they compare. When I compare the two professors I think, with apologies to Hamlet senior:

… what a falling off was there!
From him, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
He made to knowledge, and to decline
Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor
To those of his.

No doubt it is foolish, even dangerous, to found a whole theory of cultural decline upon a comparison of two people, chosen perhaps to prove the pre-determined theory. And yet, and yet…

 

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