Therefore Choose

By Keith Oatley

On a summer visit to Germany, George, a young medical student at Cambridge, meets Anna von Kleist, whose intellectual force, beauty, and self-assurance smite him full in the heart. It is 1936. Hitler is already in power, and a shift has occurred in Germany that Anna, George, and their friend Werner have not fully grasped. Europe is on the cusp of war when the three find themselves in a painful love triangle that plays between England and Germany. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, they must choose and live with the consequences of their choices. Reviewers have compared Oatley's pure, spare prose with that of A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. In Therefore Choose, his intimately rendered characters draw us irrevocably into their quest for meaning, hope, and understanding in a world diving headlong into chaos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Nov 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780864926906

Keith Oatley

Reviewers have compared Keith Oatley's pure, spare prose with that of A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. In Therefore Choose, his intimately rendered characters draw us into an intense quest for meaning in a world diving headlong into chaos. Oatley is the author of two highly acclaimed novels: The Case of Emily V., which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and A Natural History. Professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, Keith Oatley has long been fascinated with the way humans communicate ideas and emotions. His numerous publications on the subject include Emotions: A Brief History and Understanding Emotions.

Book preview

PART 1

MOBILIZATION

1

Anyone in Cambridge will tell you where Trinity College is. Then, through the Gatehouse, and past the Fountain in the middle of Great Court, is the Dining Hall. In it, George stood in a line of undergraduates, facing another line across a long oak table, waiting for grace to be said. He was a little taller than those who stood next to him, and his brown hair was slightly too long, but otherwise he looked much like his companions.

Benedic, Domine, nos et dona tua … The words were intoned by a scholar who stood near High Table.

Grace, thought George — gift — a lovely idea, now the signal to start eating.

Grace finished with a sudden hubbub of voices and a scraping of benches on the flagstone floor as everyone sat down. It was the start of Michaelmas term, the year was 1935, and George was beginning his third year as an undergraduate. If one were to go back a hundred years, the clothing would no doubt be different but the young men would be much the same, the ritual much the same, as if this were a certain thing that people do in a certain society, as if this were the way it should be.

As George sat down, he noticed, next to him, a man wearing a tweed jacket under a new gown.

I don’t think we’ve met, said George.

Werner Vodn, the man said. From the University of Munich.

He had light brown hair, and an open face that reminded George of a Holbein portrait. He turned towards George and shook his hand.

George Smith. I’m pleased to meet you, said George.

This is good. Not all are pleased to meet people from Germany at this time.

Hitler, meinen Sie, und die Nazis?

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

I speak German a bit, said George. But I hope Hitler isn’t the whole of Germany.

George learned German and French at school because he liked the teacher. For two summers he spent time in Germany on exchanges. He also spent a summer in Paris. Languages occupied him, and he was good at them. They were bridges to other worlds, which drew him towards them. They were escapes from an enclosed upbringing. The mental bridge he built to Germany was to a world of deep scholarship, beloved of his teacher, absent from his family, present in Cambridge.

I am from the southwestern part, from Konstanz, said Werner.

You can take time off from your own university?

I came to attend Wittgenstein, he said.

Philosophy! said George. I’m just a medic, I’m afraid. Anatomy, physiology … largely without intellectual content.

He is a great man. ‘The proposition is a picture of reality.’

How do you mean?

"It’s a quotation from his book, the Tractatus. He has numbered all the propositions. This is number 4.01."

I see.

I hoped for a room in Whewell’s Court, near him, said Werner. But this is not possible. I am in Great Court.

Your English is very good, without an accent.

My grandmother is English, my mother’s mother. She came from Godalming, and when my grandfather died, she lived with us, from when I was young. I was her favourite. I think she was lonely. We spoke together in English, and she read to me.

And you took it on, and started to read in English yourself?

My grandmother bought me this jacket. Harris Tweed. She thought it would help me fit in.

How is that working?

They both laughed.

It’s your strongest point, literature, he said. Your music is not so good. There is Handel, of course, but when you look into him, you find he was German.

He smiled, trying to see if he could provoke George a little.

To be at Cambridge. This was a thought to which George would return as he regarded the courtyard through the window of his room or as he walked from the college to a morning lecture in the Downing Site. He was a medical student, and on his first day as an undergraduate, his supervisor in Anatomy had taken a piece of paper and had drawn for him in pencil a little map of the route from the college to the Downing Site. He did this for everyone he supervised.

George attended lectures assiduously. He had bought himself a set of notebooks with stiff board covers, one for each subject. He was good at taking notes, although he never read them again. He put what was said into his own words, and this seemed to enable him to remember everything necessary without having to read those stultifying textbooks that medical people produced. On the days when there were lectures, with two of his notebooks under his arm, he would walk along the narrow pavement of Trinity Street, past the solid walls of Gonville and Caius that looked as if they had been there forever. Each year a new set of students would walk these pavements.

He’d walk past the front of Great St. Mary’s, then glance across the road to King’s College Chapel. How to describe it? Thousands of people must have tried. But describe the chapel in a way that’s fresh. Someone called it a giant sow on her back with her feet in the air. What did Flaubert say? If you don’t have any originality, you must find some. All right, don’t say anything about beautiful perpendicular stonework, or tracery in the windows, or pinnacles soaring towards the sky.

Originality, said George. How can one know? What about this chapel? Rather than straining for the heavens, what would the building be like if it were something for people who live here on earth, whose idea wasn’t the unattainable but the finite? George thought he’d write that down when he got to the lecture theatre, in one of his notebooks in the place where he jotted down turns of conversation, fragments of description. These notes were at the back of his notebook, but not at the very back, which was left blank in case anyone opened it accidentally.

George walked on, along King’s Parade, past the window of the gentlemen’s outfitter. In the window were gowns and other university-looking garments — attire, that’s what they’d be called. An outfitter’s shop, like his father’s. Now he was outside looking in rather than inside looking out. What would his father have thought?

Your father would have been proud, his mother said when he got a scholarship. She meant she was proud. She didn’t know much more about Cambridge than the boat race of which one read each year in the newspaper, and for which everyone, of course, had a preference, dark blue or light blue, Oxford or Cambridge. But she knew, too, that Cambridge was the route to success in life. It was an idea she cherished. It let her know she’d done well as a mother: her son was hoisted up the social scale.

In front of King’s, George would cut left through to Free School Lane, then to the Downing Site, to Physiology or Anatomy, to hear about acetylcholine or Malpighian corpuscles.

Cambridge. What could be better? The only problem was physiology, and anatomy, and pathology, and … The problem was medicine. Did he want to spend day after day surrounding himself with disease, listening to people talk about their lumbago? Working in a hospital then, a surgeon perhaps, but he wasn’t especially good with his hands.

George didn’t feel settled in what he’d chosen to do. But the route he’d taken at school didn’t fit him for anything else. Medicine wasn’t so bad. He had a good memory, which seemed to be the necessary ingredient, and his courses left time for reading, and for writing.

When he was at school, he longed to be here, at Cambridge, but could not imagine it. As soon as he arrived, it became familiar, not because he knew its intricacies, but because it seemed right.

George and Werner developed their relationship mostly in English. Though George had made close friendships in his first two years, in his last year at Cambridge, Werner became his most intimate friend.

Werner had a sweet nature. He had a talent for immersing himself wholeheartedly in whatever he did. He immersed himself in Wittgenstein. Part of why George liked him so much, although he didn’t think of it in this way at the time, was that he immersed himself in George. There was nothing overtly sexual, though what does one say when friends achieve the closeness of lovers? Werner let George know he was completely interested in him. He wanted to be with him, wanted to know what he thought, wanted to spend hours in conversation.

Werner was also a pianist. Sometimes George would go with him, to listen, in one of the common rooms where there was a decent piano that was kept in tune.

Music would not be the same without Bach, Werner said. One could lose most of the rest, but not Bach.

Why lose them?

Pre-eminence is important. German culture is very substantial. In visual art we have Dürer, in theology Luther, in philosophy Kant and Hegel, in mathematics Leibniz, in physiology Helmholtz, in physics Planck and Einstein. It’s only in literature we are somewhat behind. Our foremost man there is Goethe. He’s good, but he is not Shakespeare.

George wanted to laugh. You make it sound like football.

One wants the best.

Not much chance for people like me, then.

Don’t make light of it. One wants to get to the bottom of things, to the roots. That’s the essence of German scholarship. That’s what the great man does. Not frippery, like the French. And to know one has got there, and to say so. To say, ‘This is it.’ The very foundation.

Between lectures, sporadic bursts of reading, and occasional writing, George would walk round the town, not aimlessly, but not purposefully. It was something that he had done since he came up. Turn left outside the college, down to Magdalene Bridge. That was one of his routes. Brown water slid past below and people inexpert with poles tried to steer the punts they had hired. Wander into Magdalene to gaze at the beautiful Pepys Library, think of all those books that Pepys used to own, preserved here. Then back towards the centre of town, past the Round Church, the brotherhood of Knights Templar, Crusaders. Past Sidney Sussex, Oliver Cromwell’s college.

Cromwell achieved things, thought George, things of substance … Up there to the left, King Street, the King Street Run, drink eight pints in eight pubs, the sordid side of Cambridge, written on the grimy wall of a pub urinal: Don’t drop your fag-ends down here, it makes them damp and difficult to light again.

Werner’s ability to immerse himself, thought George. How does he do it? Why don’t I have that? Application. Being a doctor must be all right, doing good in the world. Scientific medicine, antiseptic surgery, no longer the age of bloodletting. Dissect the whole human body. In the dissecting room, students grouped themselves around cadavers, paupers brought in to be preserved by having their blood replaced with formalin, unclaimed for burial by anyone, donated for medical students to learn anatomy. Donated by whom? By the state? The formalin and the human subcutaneous fat would get on labcoat cuffs, get under fingernails, get on the dissection guide, get on Abercrombie as he would prod at the body he was supposed to dissect, while between thumb and forefinger of his left hand he held a pair of fine forceps in which his cigarette was wedged.

The thorax. So, you’ve dealt with the diaphragm, said the demonstrator. If you feel up there, into the rib cage … Mr. Smith! Yes, put your hand right in, don’t be timid, you can feel the lower lobe of the lung, consistency of a woman’s breast. D’you feel that?

Induction into the brotherhood of medical practitioners.

Chekhov did it, became a doctor, thought George. Is there a better way to observe the human race, the rich, the poor, people at every stage of life’s procession? Chekhov had no trouble selling his stories. Another rejection this morning. Been writing for what, three years? What have I got to show? Serious stories, only two, in never-read magazines. Chekhov wrote stories for newspapers, hundreds, things he thought were junk, to make money to support his parents because his father’s shop failed. How did he get from that to being a genius? To the greatest stories ever written?

On an afternoon when the town was busy, George walked along Market Street, back towards his college. A woman with a canvas shopping bag was walking in front of him. She stopped suddenly, and to avoid bumping into her, George, who was not paying enough attention, stepped to his left and bumped instead into a ragged old man.

Watch where you’re fuckin’ going, the man said.

The old man staggered, looked as if he might fall.

I’m sorry.

Fuckin’ toff.

George was five foot ten. The man was a head shorter. He recovered, glared.

Fuckin’ undergraduate. Think you own the place?

I’m terribly sorry. Are you all right?

Do I look all right? Sod off.

George was not a toff, but he was shocked at how the man spoke to him, a man who looked as if he would soon be donating his body to science, to be perfused, preserved, dissected. Would that make a story? Class antagonism, shame, the dissection room.

Why am I in medicine? thought George. Because I don’t have the courage to cast off and write. I say it’s what I want to do. But I don’t do it. At least I can earn my living by doctoring. Lots of people have done that, got qualified, earned their living, then decided to write: not just Chekhov, but Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Alfred Döblin. After the soft consistency of the formalin-preserved lung, the human condition.

2

Now in his last year at Cambridge, George had found he could keep up with the cleverest people, and he’d started to construct for himself a certain confidence, a trait his upbringing had not endowed him with. What was it they said? An Oxford man enters a room as if he owns it. A Cambridge man enters a room as if he doesn’t care who owns it. Or was it the other way round?

In George’s first year, everything had an excitement to it: a room in college, an atmosphere of intellectual engagement, meeting new people. Some of the people were of a kind he had never encountered before. On his staircase, Fothergill was in the room opposite. He was reading Moral Sciences, the Cambridge name for philosophy. I’d be more interested in Immoral Sciences, he said. He was amiable enough and — never listening to a word George said — would chatter if they happened to emerge from their rooms at the same time. Mainly what Fothergill chattered about was sex. If you could have a woman who really loved you, or a tart who really knew her job, which would you choose? Fothergill’s only other topic was his horse, kept in livery somewhere at an inconvenient distance. He was one of those people who go automatically from public school to Cambridge without any interest in what university is about.

In the room above George on the staircase was Spavins, a lugubrious man, who wore a cardigan, and whose hair was already thinning although he couldn’t have been much more than twenty. He was reading Theology. George thought he must want to become a bishop.

But on the top floor was Bailiss, reading History, heading — as he hoped — for the civil service. George and he became friends as soon as they met. He was one of those people for whom Cambridge seemed the natural element, energetic though never seeming to be in a hurry, knowledgeable but often making fun of what he knew.

Don’t call me Bailiss, he said. And I won’t call you Smith. It’s too much like school.

Peter Bailiss was interested in politics, but he spent a good deal of time delving into odd sects.

The Muggletonians, said Peter. There’s a fine name for a group.

I’ve never heard of them.

I grew up as a Quaker, said Peter. The Muggletonians tell everyone that they should be egalitarian and pacifist. But they hate the Quakers, who believe much the same thing. They refuse to proselytize, so it’s astounding there’s any left.

Why are you interested?

These political movements, utopians really. They’re curious distillations of the way people think. People get an idea about how to live and then they take it as their right to tell other people what to do.

Isn’t that what politics is about? said George.

And what about the Oxford Group? They’ve got it down to four principles, or is it three? ‘Absolute chastity, absolute purity, absolute truthy.’ There’s a chap on the other side of the quad. He’s one of them. You must have seen him. He doesn’t walk so much as scuttle: not very tall, short dark hair, always wears a suit. If you listen to him it boils down to not doing anything rude to yourself in bed at night.

I don’t think I’ve seen him.

They want to take over the world. First they’re going to get hold of all the top people, to induct them into the Principles. That’s why that chap’s at Cambridge: to nobble future cabinet ministers. Problems of the world? Solved.

You’re looking for something to join and haven’t quite found it yet?

Sometimes I think about the Party, he said. But they’ve not got it right either.

The Party?

Communist Party … I mean, Marx is right that there’s an essential bit about relations between employers and workers. But then they want to kill all the class enemies: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Violence justified with a metaphor from cooking breakfast.

Is that what they say?

You’ve heard them. Makes them feel they’re in the right, for when the Revolution comes.

What George felt was that he’d come from a backwater.

The Communists hold quite good meetings. D’you want to come to one next week? About what’s going on in Spain.

In first-year Physiology, George had found he had to do practicals: perform experiments in the form of class exercises. People were paired off, and George’s partner was Douglas Hinton, a rather intense person who would peer at George across the top of his spectacles. George was rather awed by him, but the two of them got on. George sensed that Douglas was somewhat lonely, and that he valued the friendship. He knew what the experiments were about, and would show George the manipulations. Then they’d call the demonstrator, who’d ask a few questions, get out his list, and tick their names off. Then they could go.

These class exercises, said Douglas as they left the Physiology Building. "Supposed

Reviews for Therefore Choose

[mynovelthoughts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The year is 1935 and George is a reluctant third year medical student at Cambridge with ambitions to become a writer. One day, George meets Werner Vodn, a German studying philosophy, who George becomes close friends with. In the Summer of 1936, George travels to Germany with Werner, and meets his friend Anna, the editor of a distinguished literary magazine, with whom George begins an intense relationship.Therefore Choose is a powerful novel by Keith Oatley about the consequence of choice. On the brink of war, George chooses to continue his life in England rather than follow his heart and stay with the woman he loves in an increasingly hostile Germany.There are several powerful scenes in this novel as George witnesses the travesties of a concentration camp, and the mental destruction of one of his closest friends. I think that Therefore Choose explores a unique perspective of the Second World War; how do people relate in the aftermath when they were on opposite sides?I highly recommend this novel - it is an engaging and thought provoking meditation on what it means to choose.