Chutzpah in speculations

Report of a literary literary pathologist

BOSWELL'S CLAP AND OTHER ESSAYS: Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions, by William B. Ober, M.D.; Southern Illinois University Press, 291 pp., $17.50

Dr. Ober's profession is pathology. He also is an amateur, in the original meaning of that word, of literature. Here he combines his interests to write of what ailed some authors' minds and bodies, to discuss two doctors who turned to writing (Chekhov and William Carlos Williams) and to examine such questions as "Madness and Poetry" and "Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning?"

Ober's methods fall far short of the scientific and he is certainly guilty of chutzpah in trying to psychoanalyze authors, especially figures of the dim and distant past, on the basis of the art they created. However, he has the grace to admit

he is speculating. Those speculations are often intriguing, he often makes a persuasive case and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Ober, head of pathology at Hackensack (N.J.) Hospital, uses

of his erections." And he writes, "As a doctor, Williams may have buried his mistakes; as a poet he published them.”

Boswell left a full account of his activities so Ober has sound ground

'As a doctor, William Carlos Williams may have buried his mistakes; as a poet he published them'

medical terms (these essays first appeared in medical journals) but they can be deciphered from the context.

He's a keen critic who can deliver a punchy one-liner like "Pornography is the art of the impossible." He is inclined to suspect that D. H. Lawrence "did not have the courage

for his belief that Boswell died of complications resulting from at least 19 attacks of gonorrhea. Other authors left no such complete

record.

In an amusing sidelight, Ober says army officers of Boswell's day frequently decorated their condoms with their regimental colors. Bos-

well, who sometimes donned "armour" before engaging in sexual intercourse, remained a civilian, his father having frustrated his wish to buy a commission.

Ober believes Swinburne suffered brain damage at birth and developed a taste for flagellation as a result of caning at public school.

In the essay "Lady Chatterley's What?" Ober writes that D.H. Lawrence was not only tubercular but also a latent homosexual whose heterosexual libido was waning to the point of impotence, thus leading him to compensate by creating the "always potent, sexually agile" Mellors, the gamekeeper. Authors had better take care in creating fictional characters if they are going to be held to account for them by the psychoanalystic techniques of an Ober.

Did Socrates die of hemlock poisoning? Yes, but Plato did not provide an accurate description of the symptoms, perhaps censoring them out in order to present an idealized version of the death. Walter Berkov

National Gallery of Scotland

James Boswell, painted in 1765 by George Willison in Rome.