The older I get the more I realise there are many things I have not realised before. And one of them came last week when reading My Youth in Vienna. I did not know that playwright Arthur Schnitzler (author of the wonderful Reigen, better known here as La Ronde, in which every character asks another the time and is told ‘Too Late’), had qualified and practised as a doctor.

How is it there are so many writers who began their careers as doctors, yet so few lawyers who have produced anything approaching great literature? The honourable exceptions are what can loosely be called crime writers, at whom so-called literary critics raise eyebrows. Here (in no particular order) we have Frances Fyfield, Martin Edwards, Alexander McCall Smith, the Michaels Gilbert and Underwood, and, in America, Erle Stanley Gardner, David Baldacci, Scott Turow, John Grisham, Richard North Patterson, Lisa Scottoline and half a dozen others. But ‘serious’ writers?

Well, Henry Fielding (pictured) of course, but after him? Certainly John Buchan. John Mortimer? Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins wrote The Prisoner of Zenda. Washington Irving only just managed to pass law school and Harper Lee dropped out. My recollection is that the once highly popular Louis Auchincloss continued as a lawyer, but by now we are again getting to the ‘who he?’ stage.

But stacked up on the medical side is a formidable team. Anton Chekhov, who actually practised medicine, wrote to a friend, ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.’ Then there are John Keats, Somerset Maugham and Conan Doyle who, apart from creating our Sherlock, wrote some very readable historical novels. And what about Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, Michael Crighton and a favourite of mine, the dentist Zane Grey. Well perhaps his wasn’t great literature but certainly Grey was one of the most popular authors of his time.

Oliver St John Gogarty was a Dublin surgeon and the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Gogarty’s As I was Going Down Sackville Street (Dublin, not London) produced a disastrously expensive libel action. At least literary lawyers should be able to avoid that.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor

Topics