Paging Dr. Hart

I've written before about Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962), the transgender radiologist, novelist, and medical researcher from the Pacific Northwest. Today I'm reporting back on his novel The Undaunted (1936), a rich historical document with a couple of flagrant self-inserts and an obsessive preoccupation with meat.

The Undaunted is a novel about medical research and infighting among doctors. Richard Cameron (40ish, tall, suffers no fools, grins on every page) is a passionate researcher bent on finding a cure for pernicious anemia, an invariably fatal vitamin deficiency. Hart's plot is ripped from the headlines, as the cure for this form of anemia had only been discovered a decade earlier. (The treatment involved eating a pound of liver every day. The researchers won a Nobel Prize.) Cameron races against time to discover the cure, manages his colleagues' envious attacks, falls in love, and looks out for his friend Sandy Farquhar, an itinerant gay radiologist whose history of being outed and ousted closely parallels Hart's own.

Hart draws Cameron as an ideal, both intelligent and wise, meeting life's challenges with sarcastic confidence. His flaws – a tendency to overwork, a weakness for beautiful design, an outsized but not misplaced self-esteem – closely resemble the kind of job interview answers you're supposed to avoid. Farquhar, on the other hand, is a hard filament in a burnt-out bulb. After a lifetime of homophobic discrimination, he's held on to his ideals, but not to his self-worth, and his complex friendship with Cameron reminds him of what he stands for but also what he can't be. (Both men have Scottish names – Hart is an avid Hibernophile who often mentions Scottish ancestry as a source of a doctor's good qualities, a medical stereotype he must have inherited from the Victorians. In the world of The Undaunted, the best thing to be is a Scot. The worst thing to be is a vegetarian.)

Hart builds his book around lectures and soliloquies. Characters discourse endlessly about liver and stomach acid, and their struggle to prove their hypotheses without tipping off their rivals takes up much of the story. There are loving details of how Cameron fools vegetarians into drinking meat extract and deploys his best Dr. House impression on anemic women with a secret addiction to paté, which contribute to the book's strangeness to a modern reader. The Undaunted was a bestselling technothriller about cutting-edge medicine, sold on the strength of its laboratory scenes (as the contemporary Times blurb on the back of the novel's reprinting will attest). All those details appears so medieval to us, though, that the book slips weirdly into genre territory.

As you can imagine from my description, it's also quite dated, which I'd like you to read as value-neutral. Outside of academia, we don't often read the novels that haven't stood the test of time, and so we get used to seeing the '20s and '30s as the decades of Fitzgerald, Wharton, Isherwood, Steinbeck – as if there was something genius-making in the water back then. There wasn't, of course. There have always been ordinary books, and the 1930s vision of "ordinary" can feel far more alien to us than Dubliners or The Big Sleep. Hart's literary intelligence is clearly formidable; he was talented in many fields, possessed the iron will he needed to live as a man before testosterone was widely available. His research into the X-ray diagnosis of tuberculosis – given, in the book, to Farquhar – was groundbreaking. He is not, however, a great prose stylist or character artist, with the honorable exception of a few remarkable scenes featuring Farquhar (especially a sequence in which he goes to a concert so bad that it pierces the veil). Hart's writing is solid, sincere, and shamelessly didactic. The twist is that this, the didacticism, is what makes the book an astonishing read.

Because when Dr. Cameron isn't talking about disease, he's talking about life. He climbs his soapbox every other chapter and soliloquizes for pages on end, laying out what is very obviously Hart's own view of the world. Humans are cruel, he says, and what's more, they're getting worse. As doctors, we will not always find satisfactory answers to the question of why we save lives only to return those people to the constant violence of society. Your closest colleagues will try to hold you back from your work. If you don't learn to find them ridiculous, if you don't pull a touch of arrogance around you like a cloak, you'll never achieve anything. The most meaningful thing a person can do is medical research. Life is astonishingly short, and there's nothing much afterward – it's not even that research will save lives and win you fame, it's that it's the only honorable profession, full stop, the only one that really forces us to hold ourselves to the highest standard. We must struggle each day to know who we are and why we're here. Otherwise, we risk becoming one of the many cynical grotesques who populate Hart's vision of the medical profession. Hart articulates this vision with bitter humor. He knows he's doing it, he has command of himself, but the book is a cry from the heart.

I genuinely don't believe that the above is "a reading" of The Undaunted. There is no question that Hart is putting his own deepest, most private beliefs in Cameron's mouth. The book's characterization is much too simple, virtually unicellular, for it to be otherwise – these characters are not complex, and heroism, tragedy, and villainy are clearly delineated. They are allegorical figures. In their ideals and anxieties, Farquhar and Cameron contain all of Hart, or at least all the Hart he was willing to show.

The book has a degree of trans subtext, but it's buried deep. Farquhar has many things in common with Hart, but a complex gender isn't one of them. The jokes about men and women (and the touch of man-of-lesbian-experience vibes – informed descriptions of women's outfits, a surprising hunted anxiety that underlies Cameron's attraction to women, h a n d s) are so sly as to be almost illegible. To me, the moment with the most trans resonance is Cameron's decision to have his foot amputated. He's suffered a recurring bone infection since his time in the trenches of WWI, and the long-term prognosis is poor. Cameron chooses the stigma of visible disability (no laughing matter in an era of eugenics) rather than live with pain that disrupts his work, and like all of his choices, this is presented as courageous. In this single moment, I think I see a flash of Hart's pride in having done the difficult thing that made him a target. In this book, lies are corrosive, shame is crushing, but wounds heal in sunlight. Better stigma than pain.

I went into The Undaunted hoping to learn a little more about Hart – not biographical details, but something about his spiritual life, which most writers give away freely. I didn't expect him to be quite so generous. Authors write for many different reasons; Hart wrote in order to educate the public and articulate his vision of a good life in a fallen world. Through the mirror of a book, a figure emerges: a small, worn-looking man looking through round spectacles, analyzing, judging, describing what he admires and what he hates. Confident in his intelligence but exhausted by the way the world gets in his way. I know that a book is a mirror, and that part of what I'm seeing is myself, but it's a two-way mirror; that's why I can see Hart's faint outline, looking eerily back at me.