Alasdair Gray - Poor Things

When you come home you will find Dr. Vic’s latest pamphlet awaiting you. It is an insane blend of ideas culled from Malthus, D. H. Lawrence and Marie Stopes. She blames herself for the Great War because she bore too many sons and did not cuddle them enough. She asks working-class parents to reduce future armies by having only one child. She wants them to make it feel infinitely precious by having it share their bed where it will learn all about love-making and birth control by practical example. In this way (she thinks) it will grow up free of the Oedipus complex, penis envy and other diseases discovered or invented by Doctor Freud, and instead of fighting with siblings will play husband-and-wife with a neighbour’s child. She is now quite sex-mad — an erotomaniac, to use the older term — and tries to hide it under prim language which shows she is still, at heart, a subject of Queen Victoria. Cuddles is her word for love-making, she calls fornication wedding. Yet she once had an excellent mind. I wish her poor little husband had not died. I think he kept her stable between her embarrassing affairs with Wells and Ford Madox Hueffer. And of course the loss of her sons hit her hard. The last six years have damaged all but the strongest minds.

The Clydeside Independent Labour Party socialists also disliked A Loving Economy. Tom Johnston, reviewing it in Forward , said:

Victoria McCandless M.D. wants working-class parents to increase the value of their children’s labour by going on a limited form of birth strike. In this year of lock-outs and reduced wages —a year when working-class movements everywhere are pressing the government to abolish unemployment by work rationing — such a demand from a good comrade is a frivolous distraction. Hunger and homelessness must be tackled now, not postponed to a future generation.

Clergymen of every Christian church denounced the book for the birth control proposals, but it annoyed advocates of birth control by saying commercial contraceptives were unhealthy. Said Dr. Victoria:

They fix the minds of the users upon the genitals, so distract them from cuddling. Cuddling is like milk. It can, and should, nourish our health from birth to death. Wedding is the cream of cuddling, the main delight of our middle years (if we are lucky) but it is not different from cuddling. Yet all our teaching — alas, even the teaching of the good Marie Stopes —makes it different by separating it and advertising it as a rare commodity. That is why uncuddled men fear sexual love or treat it as a smash-and-grab business.

So although Victoria McCandless placed advertisements for A Loving Economy in the major British newspapers it had only two favourable notices: one by Guy Aldred in an anarchist periodical, one in The New Age by the stone-carver and typographer, Eric Gill. Beaverbrook took a hint from the churches and enlarged the circulation of the Daily Express by a successful campaign to deprive Victoria McCandless of her clinic. Here is an extract from an article headed LADY DOCTOR ORDERS INCEST:

We all know what a mother’s boy is — an effeminate little pansy who wants everyone to admire him yet is too cowardly to strike a blow in his own defence. If Dr. Vic has her way all British boys from now onward will be turned into exactly that sort of whining cissy, but before she corrupts our children she must corrupt their parents. This is exactly what she is trying to do.

Two days later this appeared:

DOCTOR VICTORIA PRESCRIBES NATIONAL SUICIDE

If the Dr. Vic’s “sex through a sheet” method becomes popular (and it may — she has spent a fortune advertising it) in a few years every British male of military age will be outnumbered by the Catholic Irish. If it becomes fashionable throughout the civilized world we will be overwhelmed by the Bolsheviks, the Chinese and the Negroes. It cannot be coincidence that she is a close friend of John Maclean, the Bolshevik Consul General in Britain. It cannot be coincidence that she was one of the “pacifist” harpies who would have been awarded an Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm if his hordes had succeeded in placing him on the British throne.

Soon after came:

DR. VIC’S BOLSHEVIK CHARITY!

The most sinister figures in the twentieth century are people with unearned incomes who, under the guise of socialism, use their money-bags to spread discontent and evil practices among the poor. The Express has discovered that for the last thirty years Victoria McCandless, the Bolshevik doctor, has been secretly teaching what she now openly preaches. At her so-called “charity” clinic in a Glasgow slum she has taught thousands of poor women to defy nature, the Christian faith and the law of the land: we refer to something graver than her ridiculous “sex through a sheet” idea. We mean abortion. That is what her “Loving Economy” comes to in the end.

The Express reporters had no proof that Dr. Victoria performed abortions. They did, however, produce two former employees of the clinic who swore she had trained women to perform abortions on each other, and this resulted in a public prosecution. The prosecution failed (or did not completely succeed) because it was proved that the two employees had been to some extent bribed by the Daily Express , and were also mentally retarded. Campbell Hogg, the procurator fiscal, tried to make something of this last point during his cross-examination, and very nearly succeeded:

CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless! Have you trained many mentally retarded women to assist you?

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: As many as I could.

CAMPBELL HOGG: Why?

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: For reasons of economy.

CAMPBELL HOGG: Oho! You got them cheaper?

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. The accounts of the clinic show they were paid as much as cleverer nurses. I was not talking about financial economy but social economy — loving economy. Many people with damaged brains are far more affectionate, if given the chance, than many we classify as “normal”. They can often be taught to perform the most essential nursing tasks more efficiently than cleverer people — people who want to be doing more ambitious things.

CAMPBELL HOGG: Things like writing books on Loving Economy?

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. Things like acting the buffoon in a court drama set up for the amusement of the gutter press.

(Laughter in court. The sheriff warns the accused that she is in danger of being held in contempt of court.)

CAMPBELL HOGG (forcibly): I suggest that you deliberately choose cretins for your helpers because sane people are unlikely to believe what these say about your clinic!

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You are wrong.

CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless, have you never (think hard before you answer) have you never given your patients instruction which would help them abort an unwanted baby?

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I have never given instructions which could hurt their mind or body.

CAMPBELL HOGG: The answer I want is “yes” or “no”.

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You will get no more answers from me, young man. Go and teach another older person their job. Try an unemployed engineer — one who fought in the war.

(The sheriff warns accused that she must answer the procurator, but can choose her own words.)

VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I see. Then I repeat that I have taught nothing which can hurt mind or body.

Since the trial was in Scotland the jury was able to bring in a verdict of not proven, and did. Dr. Vic was not struck off the British medical register, but not declared guiltless.