AN OPEN LETTER TO WRITERS AND THINKERS

AN OPEN LETTER TO WRITERS AND THINKERS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 30, 2010

“Sincerity is to speak as we think, to do as we pretend and profess, to perform what we promise and really to be what we would seem and appear to be.”

John Tillotson (1620 – 1694), English Archbishop of Canterbury

* * *

In my peripatetic reading, it occurred to me how fallible and vulnerable writers and thinkers are to the narrow limits of perspective and ambience.

If you have never stared at a blank page or computer screen, stirred by the demons boiling in your subconscious to be expressed, it is perhaps difficult to understand the folly of writers and thinkers so inclined.

What they produce is a product limited to the learning and, yes, yearning hose demons generate.

What prompted this missive were two things: Hillary Spurling’s PEARL BUCK IN CHINA (2010), and the latest declaration on medicine out of Great Britain that ADHA is, genetically based, as many scientists have insisted, having little to do with diet and nutrition or the parenting skills of parents. This puts a cloud over psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago established in the 1930s.

* * *

Pearl Buck is best known for her novel, "The Good Earth” (1931). She is author of over one hundred works of literature. Biographer Spurling claims she is not read today. She doesn’t defend Buck’s 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, which critics found ridiculous, but suggests criticism that her writing was parochial and her style pedestrian was pretty much on the mark. Buck was as popular in her day as Stephen King is in ours, and nearly as wealthy.

Critics have often chided King for not writing “a piece of literature.” He confesses, “I write as well as I can” on every book. Will King be read in seventy from now?

The answer perhaps is limited to where society and culture will be at that time. I read “The Good Earth” when I was a boy and it has stayed with me ever since. The book describes in a pastoral sense the cycle of birth, marriage, and death in a Chinese peasant family. It is written realistically without any attempt to awaken sympathy for any of the characters. It must have been the right medicine for me at the time because I have a similar orientation now when I write fiction.

* * *

Bruno Bettelheim has even fared more poorly. After reading several of his works (The Uses of Enchantment, The Empty Fortress, A Good Enough Parent, and Freud & Man’s Soul), I admit to being captivated by him as a writer. Then I learn in two biographies (The Creation of Dr. B, and Bettleheim, A Life and a Legacy) that he has had a somewhat checkered career from his alleged days in a concentration camp during WWII.

Bettleheim operated the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago from the 1930s to the 1980s, where he treated children with autism and schizophrenia with psychotherapy and behavior modification.

Three quarters of a century later, although such treatment and therapy continue in some form, these diseases have become centered more on neurology and genetics. Diet, nutrition, a controlled environment, parenting skills and psychotherapy are no longer as popular as they once were.

Was Bettleheim a scoundrel or a fraud? I choose to think he did the best he could with the limited knowledge that he possessed and was then available. It is hard to imagine now, but in his day Bettleheim was a giant in his profession.

* * *

Earlier I mentioned the horror of the blank page. Anyone who has attempted to write and publish anything knows of what I speak. But there is a greater horror if that is the proper word, and that is not being able to release the demons in the mind that refuse to dance across the page.

The art of literature or the philosophy of thought can wake the mind with contours no more determinable than those of consciousness.

Take Kary Mullis. He is the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). Thanks to him a drop of saliva can determine our DNA. His discovery has changed forensic science. Yet he writes that natural DNA was a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of his car in the dark, when it came to him on the open road, not in the laboratory.

Mullis is off beat to say the least and shows this in his book about the discovery, “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” (1998).

Writers and thinkers know just because there is a sudden transformation that is committed to paper or the computer it doesn’t mean that it was easy or that it will endure. Such a life is a narrative of vitality and fear, but also hopefully, of a vision. Writers and thinkers know that what surfaces is more than life, but also tragically confined to it. In the end, they do the best that they can often in the caldron of despair.

* * *