Monday, April the 17th, 2006

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Medical Notes on a Mezzotintist

“My lung has just collapsed” is not a statement you are likely to hear spoken, for the simple reason that when someone's lung has collapsed, they will not be able to do much more than gasp for breath. Think of the lung like an airbag which, when punctured, shrivels up with a wheezy noise. This is pretty much common sense and does not require extensive medical knowledge.

Now, imagine for a moment that you do have extensive medical knowledge, that you are, for present purposes, a senior medico in an important hospital. You are sitting at your big desk in your big office, leafing through a sheaf of complicated diagrams which would mean nothing to a lay person. Years of training, and an acute and piercing mind, allow you to interpret the mass of medical information contained in these colourful charts and to reach swift, startling, and expert conclusions. You are about to press a blue knob on the desk console which pipes your instructions to less expert doctors elsewhere in the hospital, when you are interrupted.

A man enters your office unannounced. He is blubbery and shaggy-haired and his clothing is creased and crumpled and he has a woebegone yet desperate air and his face is the colour of tallow and he smells of disinfectant and he says “Doctor, doctor, my lung has just collapsed”.

You look up at him, into his watery eyes, and you press the green knob on your console instead of the blue one, and as soon as you hear the gentle hum that indicates you are connected to the system, you say “Please come and get my brother and take him home”. There is no exasperation in your voice, just inhuman patience and a trace, perhaps, of a love that is fathomless and bold. For you are Doctor Tint, and your visitor is Rex Tint. He is known to the world as a supremely talented mezzotintist. To you, he is a hypochondriac, constantly assailed by phantom maladies and imagined injuries.

He is taken home by paramedics and tucked into bed on the mezzanine floor of his mezzotint-strewn flat, where he falls asleep. When he awakes, there is a chance that he may set to work on his latest mezzotint. Equally, he may be convinced that he is subject to black bile and the flux and hare at high speed back to the hospital, or to a clinic, or to a soothsayer.

Rex Tint has much in common with the current Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who likes to drink Lemsip while he works, because it makes him imagine that he is slightly ill. “I read in a biography of A E Housman that he wrote most of A Shropshire Lad while he had a cold,” he told the BBC, “And I thought, yes, I know about that—that sort of slightly introverted self-pitying mood that a mild illness can give. It is absolutely conducive to poems.”

Rex Tint, however, felt that when mezzotinting, he needed something more than a “mild illness”. He needed to be in trauma, close to death, face to face with extinction. Whether this genuinely improved the quality of his work is hard to say, for so matchless a mezzotintist was he that an open-mouthed gape of awe was—and remains—the only fitting reaction.

Somewhere between Andrew Motion's “self-pitying mood” and the mezzotintist Rex Tint's counterfeit death agony comes Dobson's approach to creativity. He had read about the Vatican's practice of ensuring that the Pope is dead by hitting him on the head three times with a special ceremonial hammer while shouting his name in his ear. If the pontiff fails to respond, he is pronounced dead, and cardinals are summoned from around the world to choose a successor. Dobson was fascinated by this, and whenever he felt a pamphlet coming on, he asked Marigold Chew to beat him thrice on the head with a hammer and shout “Dobson! Dobson! Dobson!”. Nursing a throbbing skull, he would sit down at his escritoire and set to work.

I have not yet decided which of these three methods would suit me best, so I have decided to nurture a slight head cold, feign a collapsed lung, and get bashed on the head with a hammer all at the same time, with a dose of bird flu thrown in for good measure. As the reader, you will be able to judge the success or otherwise of this courageous plan.