A Fortunate Man (9 page)

Let me try to explain what I mean by ‘the clerk of the foresters' records'.

‘Where you're different Doc is I know I can say Fuck You to your face if I want to.' Yet the speaker never has said Fuck You to Sassall.

‘You're the laziest bitch I've ever come across,' says Sassall to the middle-aged woman draper whose day is now made. Yet only he can say this to her.

‘What have you got on?' he asks about a menu at a factory canteen.

‘Do you want to start at the top,' answers the girl at the counter pointing to her breasts, ‘or at the bottom?' lifting her skirts up high. Yet she knows she is safe with the doctor.

Sassall has to a large extent liberated himself and the image of himself in the eyes of his patients from the conventions of social etiquette. He has done this by becoming unconventional. Yet the unconventional doctor is a traditional figure. Where Sassall perhaps is different is that traditionally the unconventionality has only allowed the doctor to swear at and shock his patients instead of vice versa. Sassall would like to think that anybody can say anything to him. But insofar as this is true, it confirms rather than denies his position of privilege. To your equals you cannot say anything: you learn very precisely the form and area of their tolerance. The theoretical freedom of address towards Sassall implies his authority, his special ‘exemption', precisely because theoretically it is total. In practice anything unconventional which he says or which is said to him in public is a gesture – no more – against the idea that his authority is backed by the authority of society. It is the form of personal recognition he demands of his patients in exchange for the very different recognition he offers them.

In the village there is a medieval castle with a wide, deep moat round it. This moat was used as a kind of unofficial dump. It was
overgrown with trees, bushes, weeds, and full of stones, old wood, muck, gravel. Five years ago Sassall had the idea of turning it into a garden for the village. Tens of thousands of man-hours of work would be involved. He formed a ‘society' to occupy itself with the task and he was elected chairman. The work was to be done in the summer evenings and at week-ends whenever the men of the village were free. Farmers lent their machinery and tractors; a roadmaker brought his bull-dozer along; somebody borrowed a crane.

Sassall himself worked hard on the project. If he was not in the surgery and not out on a call, he could be found in the moat most summer evenings. Now the moat is a lawned garden with a fountain, roses, shrubs and seats to sit on.

‘Nearly all the planning of the work in the moat,' says Sassall, ‘was done by Ted, Harry, Stan, John, etc., etc. I don't mean they were better at doing the work, better with their hands – they were that – but they also had better ideas.'

Sassall was constantly involved in technical discussion of these ideas with the men of the village. The conversations over the weeks continued for hours. As a result a social – as distinct from medical – intimacy was established.

This might seem to be the obvious result of just getting on with a job together. But it is not as simple or as superficial as that. The job offers the possibility of talking together, and finally the talk transcends the job.

The inarticulateness of the English is the subject of many jokes and is often explained in terms of puritanism, shyness as a national characteristic, etc. This tends to obscure a more serious development. There are large sections of the English working and middle class who are inarticulate as the result of wholesale cultural deprivation. They are deprived of the means of translating what they know into thoughts which they can think.
⁴
They have no
examples to follow in which words clarify experience. Their spoken proverbial traditions have long been destroyed: and, although they are literate in the strictly technical sense, they have not had the opportunity of discovering the existence of a written cultural heritage.

Yet it is more than a question of literature. Any general culture acts as a mirror which enables the individual to recognize himself – or at least to recognize those parts of himself which are socially permissible. The culturally deprived have far fewer ways of recognizing themselves. A great deal of their experience – especially emotional and introspective experience – has to remain
unnamed
for them. Their chief means of self-expression is consequently through action: this is one of the reasons why the English have so many ‘do-it-yourself' hobbies. The garden or the work bench becomes the nearest they have to a means of satisfactory introspection.

The easiest – and sometimes the only possible – form of conversation is that which concerns or describes action: that is to say action considered as technique or as procedure. It is then not the experience of the speakers which is discussed but the nature of an entirely exterior mechanism or event – a motor-car engine, a football match, a draining system or the workings of some committee. Such subjects, which preclude anything directly personal, supply the content of most of the conversations being carried on by men over twenty-five at any given moment in England today. (In the case of the young, the force of their own appetites saves them from such depersonalization.)

Yet there is warmth in such conversation and friendships can be made and sustained by it. The very intricacy of the subjects seems to bring the speakers close together. It is as though the speakers bend over the subject to examine it in precise detail, until, bending over it, their heads touch. Their shared expertise becomes a symbol of shared experience. When friends recall
another friend who is dead or absent, they recall how he always maintained that a front-wheel drive was safer: and in their memory this now acquires the value of an intimacy.

The area in which Sassall practises is one of extreme cultural deprivation, even by English standards. And it was only by working with many of the men of the village and coming to understand something of their techniques that he could qualify for their conversation. They then came to share a language which was a metaphor for the rest of their common experience.

Sassall would like to believe that the metaphor implies that they talk as equals: the more so because within the range of the language the villagers mostly know far more than he. Yet they do not talk as equals.

Sassall is accepted by the villagers and foresters as a man who, in the full sense of the term, lives with them. Face to face with him, whatever the circumstances, there is no need for shame or complex explanations: he will understand even when their own community as a whole will not or cannot. (Most unmarried girls who become pregnant come to him straightway without any prevarication.) Insofar as he is feared at all, it is by a few older patients in whom a little of the traditional fear of the doctor still persists. (This traditional fear, apart from being a rational fear of the consequences of illness, is also an irrational fear of the consequences of making their secret but outrageous and insistent demand for fraternity to doctors who always behave and are treated as their superiors.)

In general his patients think of Sassall as ‘belonging' to their community. He represents no outside interest – in such an area any outside interest suggests exploitation. He is trusted. Yet this is not the same thing as saying that he is thought of or treated as an equal.

It is evident to everybody that he is privileged. This is accepted as a matter of course: nobody resents or questions it. It is part of his being the kind of doctor he is. The privilege does not concern
his income, his car or his house: these are merely amenities which make it possible for him to do his job. And if through them he enjoys a little more comfort than the average, it is still not a question of privilege, for certainly he has earned a right to that comfort.

He is privileged because of the way he can think and can talk. If the estimate of his privilege was strictly logical, it would include the fact of his education and his medical training. But that was a long time ago, whereas the evidence of the way he thinks – not purely medically but in general – is there every time he is there. It is why the villagers talk to him, why they tell him the local news, why they listen, why they wonder whether his unusual views are right, why some say ‘He's a wonderful doctor but not what you'd expect', and why some middle-class neighbours call him a crack-pot.

The villagers do not consider him privileged because they find his thinking so impressive. It is the style of his thinking which they immediately recognize as different from theirs. They depend upon common-sense and he does not.

It is generally thought that common-sense is practical. It is practical only in a short-term view. Common-sense declares that it is foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. But it is foolish only up to the moment when you realize that you might be fed very much better. In the long-term view common-sense is passive because it is based on the acceptance of an outdated view of the possible. The body of common-sense has to accrue too slowly. All its propositions have to be proved so many times before they can become unquestionable, i.e. traditional. When they become traditional they gain oracular authority. Hence the strong element of
superstition
always evident in ‘practical' common-sense.

Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective scepticism, items culled
for comfort from the superficial learning that
is
supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of enquiry, from philosophy.

Common-sense is essentially
static
. It belongs to the ideology, of those who are socially passive, never understanding what or who has made their situation as it is. But it represents only a part – and often a small part – of their character. These same people say or do many things which are an affront to their own common-sense. And when they justify something by saying ‘It's only common-sense', this is frequently an apology for denying or betraying some of their deepest feelings or instincts.