A Fortunate Man by John Berger

Author:John Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

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.

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