Second Opinions

By R. Z. Sheppard

BOSWELL'S CLAP AND OTHER ESSAYS by William B. Ober, M.D.

Southern Illinois University; 291 pages; $17.50

To sweeten adversity, Shakespeare played up the toad's jeweled eye rather than its warts and bloat. Dr. William Ober, a Boston-born pathologist with an 18th century prose style and a tart Yankee wit, would rather dissect the toad. The eye looks out for itself; the rude and frequently ugly support systems of truth and beauty need all the help they can get. There is, of course, a long history of the artist as freak and invalid: Plato's ideas of divine mania; Philoctetes, the archer of Greek mythology, whose festering wounds made him unfit company; 19th century Romanticism with its conspicuous consumptives; more recently, Susan Sontag's musing on the literary uses of cancer in Illness as Metaphor.

Perhaps because he earns his living examining diseased tissue at a Hackensack, N.J., hospital. Dr. Ober, 59, is less inclined to turn pathology into poetry. But he is certainly interested in how others did it. His collection of essays, subtitled Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions, balances biographical and clinical evidence with psychological speculation and common sense. "We do not test the consecrated wine for hemoglobin content, nor would Careme's recipe for a madeleine give us insight into the workings of Proust's imagination " he writes. "But literature is often a transformation of experience, and it can be illuminating to find out just what the expeirence was and how the writer used it."

Some examples are clearer than others. Keats enjoyed an occasional draft of opium, and, Dr. Ober points out, his imagery can be pharmacologically explicit ("My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains . ."). Restoration Poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, enshrined his premature ejaculations in The Imperfect Enjoyment. The disorder, Ober suggests may have been caused by confusion and guilt: the earl was bisexual.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, an ardent masochist, rhymed about the pleasures of flagellation. Whippings and alcohol distorted his judgment (as E.E. Cummings put it, "Punished bottoms interrupt philosophy"), but Ober believes that the poet's problems began during the first moments of his life. He recalls Swinburne's own statement about having been born "all but dead," and diagnoses brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. Further circumstantial evidence of neuropathology included the poet's small body and outsized head, his tics and excessively nervous temperament. But his talent was not impaired. Neither was his critical acumen, at least when applied to the works of the Marquis de Sade, who was, wrote Swinburne, "like a Hindoo mythologist: he takes bulk and number for greatness... as if a number of pleasures piled one on another made up the value of a single great and perfect sensation of pleasure."

James Boswell, whose recurrent gonorrhea gives this book its captivating title was a glutton for debilitating pleasures. The biographer of Samuel Johnson swilled and swived his way through 18th century London and suffered, by Dr Ober's documented count, 19 acute attacks of urethritis. Just how the clap affected his writing is not readily apparent. More comprehensible are the roots of Boswell's reckless social life, specifically his Scots Calvinist origin with its severe strictures against wine and wenching. For Boswell, the embodiment of this authority was his father, the eighth Lord Auchinleck, a straitlaced, unaffectionate parent and a distinguished jurist who wore his courtroom robes around the house. The case history is not unfamiliar: son seeks the attention of the remote, puritanical father by challenging his values; one thing leads to another; guilt accrues; activities detrimental to health and welfare are pursued; the harmful consequences become a form of self-punishment.

Boswell saw his afflictions as the price of sin. Yet he refused to practice berth control and even patronized brothels, which was tantamount to sexual kamikaze. He died unpleasantly when infection infiltrated and destroyed his kidneys.

Although tuberculosis killed D.H Lawrence, Dr. Ober is more concerned with the writer's psychosexual disorders. A sickly child and youth who was rejected for service in World War I, Lawrence probably doubted his masculinity. In his last years, illness-related impotence may have compounded this problem. Ober thinks that the novelist was a latent homosexual. He cites incriminating passages from The White Peacock and allusions in Lady Chatterley's Lover that Mellors did not limit himself to ordinary heterosexual acts with Lady C. The difficulty with such speculation is that the term latent covers a long and slippery gradient. One might just as casually assume latent homosexual content in the movie Coming Home, that contemporary switch on Lady Chatterley in which the guy in the wheelchair gets the girl.

Despite a reliance on missionary-poisition Freud, Dr. Ober is rarely dogmatic He is frequently humorous. Commenting on the tribulations of Christopher Smart an 1 8th century English poet with an embarrassing compulsion to pray on rooftops, the author observes that "there was very little need for such a muezzin in Georgian London." Disagreeing with a view that D.H. Lawrence celebrated sex alfresco while Americans kept to bedrooms, the doctor notes the abundance of contraceptives in brooks and rivers and concludes that "if Americans are not sylvan cohabitors, they are at least riparian." On Dr. William Carlos Williams, who Ober believes had a block against rewriting: "As a doctor, Williams may have buried his mistakes; as a poet, he published them." On the importance of wit and libertinism at the court of Charles II: "Men rose by their levity and women by their willingness to comply with the law of gravity, shortly to be discovered."

Quite simply, William Ober, M.D., writes better, more delightfully and with greater flexibility than most professional critics. Borrowing from Wallace Stevens, he readily admits that there is more than one way of looking at a blackbird. The bird, of course, never looks back; the causes of art remain aloof, and there is no known cure for genius.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"During the late 1930s and early 1940s one of the common catch phrases was 'Do you like people?' The socially desirable answer was 'Yes, I like people!' We see this attitude reflected in such books as Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes. It was the era of the common man! Predictably William's 'sense of humanity' was an approved value of that particular cultural trend. However, alternative views are possible ... I question whether an indiscriminate liking for people is a virtue ... Yet that may be one reason why Williams went into general practice, and I became a pathologist. He was willing to accept the world and people in it as they were; I reserve the right to review them under the microscope and look daily at their weaknesses, faults, malformations, and diseases."

Predictably Will

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