Rx for morality

Ethan Canin is a physician-turned-writer whose award-winning fiction focuses on the personal: characters forced to confront themselves as they make moral choices under duress. That theme is strong in “The Emperor’s Club,” a new movie based on the title novella in his story collection “The Palace Thief,” in which a classics professor tangles with an unscrupulous, overprivileged student.

You wrote “The Palace Thief” eight years ago, but the ethical questions -- issues of lying, cheating, backbiting -- seem particularly apt today. Not just on the political front, your initial thrust, but on Wall Street as well.

True. This is a movie about integrity -- not just honesty but being true to yourself. Once you start lying you can’t stop and, at the top, they lie all the time. You don’t have to be a close reader of the paper to realize that we have a major problem. Companies such as Enron, Tyco, Merrill Lynch -- I could name 10 more -- are so immersed in ambition that they’re searching for the unattainable. An executive is unhappy earning, say, $120 million because the guy at AT&T; makes $140 million. Money and power are like cocaine -- you can never have enough.

Your character Prof. Hundert says his classroom is a “tribute to the lofty ideals of man.” Are you, like he, one of the dwindling number of idealists?

I’m a Jew -- and, since we endured such a calamitous event 60 years ago, it’s hard to think idealistic thoughts. The world, in the end, is a mean place, and I’m less morally sure than Hundert. Like him, however, I’m unable to be a judge or a cop. As a doctor, I didn’t turn in people wanted by the police. Nor could I hand out a speeding ticket. Fortunately, there are people who can, or it would be chaos out there.

Corruption, you maintain, is inherent in any elite -- including the medical world.

Harvard Medical School is the pinnacle of medical education, full of people so taken with the trappings of prestige and power that they do what it takes to get in -- and stay in. My class was rife with secret despair. If you’re happy with yourself, you don’t have to be head of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Still, I do renew my license each year. Writing and medicine tap different parts of me -- the dreamy and the analytical.

Was leaving medicine a moral test, of sorts?

Leaving the most stable profession for the least stable was a huge risk, but I knew my writing career would be over if I stayed. My ambition was to move people, to finish a book, and I wouldn’t do that unless I needed money. I still don’t have the confidence that I can make a living writing fiction. Depression, not overconfidence, is my problem. As it says in the film, “the end depends upon the beginning.” You can learn how to head off problematic areas of character, but people, essentially, don’t change.

You once said that there’s a bit of evil in every man. Still think so?

I don’t know what “evil” means. The term is too simplistic. As [President] Bush defines it, it’s “someone else’s self-interest instead of our own.” That said, I’m an animal like anyone else. And, as Goethe said, “I’ve never heard of a crime I couldn’t imagine committing myself.”