Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (14 page)

The problem is there in the opening phrase: “To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others.” Students and devotees of Samuel Johnson, of whom the number is many and blessed, will already know that Boswell is not puffing here, not overstating the challenge of his undertaking.

It is easy to understand the force of Boswell’s apprehension. He’s following a form Johnson pioneered, and in addition he’s setting his prose alongside Samuel Johnson’s. Those are the anxieties contained in the phrase about writing “ … the Life of him who excelled all others …” and plainly confessed as “arduous” and possibly “presumptuous.”

However, what Boswell’s phrase does not extend to, or passes by, was the deeper challenge that faced him, and all who have followed him—for there have been many, many biographies of Johnson. Johnson’s whole
oeuvre
is in varying degrees
auto
biographical.

Everywhere in Johnson’s multifarious output, even in the
Dictionary
(see: patron, oats) Johnson is unwinding the story of himself. Boswell knew that it was not just that in undertaking Johnson’s life he was competing with a literary giant who had set the standard for writing the “lives of others” but in great measure he was competing at a much more essential level: competing with Johnson himself in the writing of Johnson’s life.

The point holds for all biographers since. Anyone who writes a life of Johnson competes with Johnson. But, and what a but it is, that same anyone is competing with the one man who knew him better than any other, had a stenographer’s grasp of the very idiom of his conversation, and who for nearly twenty years was so much an intimate as to be a “secret sharer” of the great man’s moods and manners, his great undertakings, his social life, his depressions and confessions. He is competing with the
most vivid biography of the most vivid literary figure that English literature possesses.

Surprisingly this has not daunted periodic retellings of Johnson’s life, right up to this present day. But these considerations do place a frame around our evaluations of any life of Johnson other than Boswell’s. They must do something other than Boswell. Perhaps they will offer something of a Johnson
vade mecum
, a convenient and fluent digest of the salient facts and episodes of his life, together with an appreciation of the major works. They may “reset” Johnson for our time, as I think Walter Jackson Bate did a generation ago in his
Samuel Johnson
. Or they may set as their purpose, purely to introduce Johnson to those who have not fallen under his influence, serve as appetizer, as it were, to Boswell’s incomparable narrative.

It is on these grounds that I approach the two new lives, occasioned by the 300th anniversary of Johnson’s birth:
Samuel Johnson: A Biography
, by Peter Martin; and Jeffrey Meyers’s
Samuel Johnson: The Struggle
.

I can recommend them both for providing a clear unrolling of Johnson’s early personal history, for filling that one partial void in Boswell’s opus. His school days, the picture of his father the bookseller, his early and tumultuous brief stay at Oxford, some early flirtations—both books give a fine account of this relatively neglected period. They are similarly fine in giving something of the flavour of the gritty London of the period when Johnson, as a young man, went to seek his fortune and make his name. Readers of Johnson’s
own
Life of Savage
(the ill-favoured bastard, persecuted friend and fellow poet, who was Johnson’s companion during the early bleak, hungry days in the great capital) will have already tasted some of that flavour but both Martin and Meyers capture its tone and texture, and are particularly good in retailing just how difficult, and precarious, was Johnson’s effort to break into the jobbery of a writer’s life.

We appreciate something of Johnson’s quite ferocious determination from their pages. They both put into fine relief how often the young Johnson’s pride was at war with his wish to succeed. It was a mark of his flinty character than never deserted him. Johnson’s relationship with booksellers alternated between testy courtship and fits of vehement defiance.

They are both good too in moving through the progress of Johnson’s career. The notice given to
London
by Pope (mentioned above), his gradual acquisition of reputation, the epochal delegation of booksellers to commission him for the great
Dictionary
his undertaking of the
Rambler
essays, the completion of the
Dictionary
, academic acknowledgement from Oxford University in the form of an honorary degree; the story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke both admiration and wonder.

How strange a man Samuel Johnson was. His physical deformities (I do not think the term too strong) from
childhood tormented him. His (once acquired) intense Christianity haunted him all his life with a sense of something close to his own worthlessness, and with a
timor mortis
, fear of death, that was almost medieval in its morbidity. He castigated himself for sloth, irresolution, and idleness yet was—look at any good library shelf—a prodigy of laborious achievement.

He was the most generous, or perhaps better, most charitable of men. He housed six poor souls in his own lodgings for most of his life. [There’s an example of a “response” to homelessness.] Yet he was alive to slights, perceived and real, with a sensitivity that is still painful to read about. He could be furious and a bully in conversation, yet always alive to the real needs of others. He rescued authors from debt, visited friends in prison, and ghosted material for fellow “hacks” to boost their fortune or gird their esteem.

This is but part of the picture of Samuel Johnson, and both these new books are dutiful in presenting it anew. There is much more of course. And if there are readers who have not yet taken Johnson into their personal library, who have not made themselves familiar with the great essays, the
Lives
, or the poems and of course the
Dictionary
, then either of these books is better than serviceable. Yet, I recur to my opening thoughts, there is still, and always, Boswell. It is in Boswell that Johnson, despite the critical hail that has fallen on his head from Macaulay’s vituperate essay to the present day, that Johnson really lives.

The presence of Boswell has driven every subsequent biography to do something new. Scholarship has added much that is worth the telling. And English criticism still engages, has always engaged, with the many ardent judgements on taste, poetry, prosody, the act of writing, that run through the entire corpus of Johnson’s writing. Early in the last century T.S. Eliot wrestled with Johnson, as did somewhat later, F.R. Leavis, and closer to our own day the wonderful Harold Bloom sends almost as many “hosannas” Johnson’s way, as he does to his idol Shakespeare.

In these two most recent efforts what may be new is the concentration on the very personal, the attempt to render what Johnson thought, felt (or, speculatively) experienced in his relations with Tetty, his wife, his dalliances—if that they may be called—with the various women he met throughout his life, and most particularly his long relationship with Hester Thrale, the wife of his (informal) patron, the beerseller Henry Thrale.

In Martin’s book there is far too much of a speculative knowingness. We are told what we cannot know—what Johnson “must have felt” how “his pride would not have borne it.” The psychologizing is wearying. It extends to Tetty’s son Jervis, imagined as viewing Johnson’s courtship of her mother and recoiling from it: “At eighteen he was old enough to see the overtures of this strange looking interloper only seven years older than he as a humiliation and a grotesque absurdity.” What a pudding this whole sentence is. It is, at the kindest, novelistically toned speculation.

Meyer has made the bigger splash however with ruminations on a possible sadomasochistic relationship between Hester Thrale and Johnson, speculations on whippings and handcuffs, all of which have very much an
au courant
air about them, and should do something to lift
Samuel Johnson: A Struggle
on to the tonier afternoon TV therapy gropes.

I do not think there’s a need to tease an interest in Samuel Johnson. If we merely sample his own writings we will quickly sense the extraordinary individual behind them. For there’s enough of Johnson in Johnson’s own writings to whet the appetite to read him. That will motivate most people to wish to read further.

And that, lest we forget, is—finally—the largest merit of any biography of him, even Boswell’s, the reading of Johnson’s writings. He is a writer of at times unsurpassed exactitude and analysis. Read the essay on Shakespeare. He has an almost unsurpassed mastery of architecturally structured sentences, immense symmetries of phrase and rhythm, that roll with an eloquence almost departed from the English language.
Rasselas
is a dull story told in brilliant, beautiful sentences. His feel for words, his grasp of the multiple levels of each particular word’s meaning, rivals the range of Milton’s prose or Macaulay’s.

Read the great Preface to the
English Dictionary
. He is greatly underestimated for his cleverness and humour, and not sufficiently regarded as one of the most affecting writers in the language. His words on hearing of David Garrick’s
death, how it “eclipsed the gaiety of nations” are both profound and beautiful.

We do not need stray speculation, knowingness, or exotic sexual gossip to lead us to Johnson. But perhaps when one is, as every biographer of Johnson must be, in competition with Boswell, something “new” must be tried. What was not new in both these books works very well. And it was like a light on every page when Johnson himself was quoted. And that is the essential allure of the both of them. Psychologizing and sexual speculation aside, whatever brings a new reader to that unmistakable voice and emphatic, animated, inspired prose is a good thing. Which is of course what that first and still best recorder of the magnificent life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, accomplished, with such inimitable brilliance, so long ago.

I have been reading some poems on the Iraq war by this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Harold Pinter. They are called poems only by courtesy of how they look in print. Any talented fifteen-year-old could write as well. They are short, blunt, angry and perfectly pleased with themselves. The following excerpt will give a little of their flavour. It’s from a poem of 14 lines called “The Special Relationship”:

Others are rougher, use the almost obligatory raw language that accompanies protest these days, and convey a fierce zeal against America and George Bush.

I can very easily see that if someone shares Mr. Pinter’s view of that war, then reading Mr. Pinter’s poems will produce a delightful sensation—but not the delightful sensation that accompanies genuine poetry. It is, rather, the sensation of being confirmed in a view already held.

Mr. Pinter’s verse operates as an endorsement to feelings and attitudes already fully developed in those readers who agree with him. It is not exploratory. As such, the works are much closer in category to slogans than poems. I am not saying that they should be condemned for that reason. The people who vehemently oppose the Iraq war, and who despise Mr. Bush and much of present-day America, have every right to be pleased when a famous playwright confects odd pieces of near-doggerel that echo their anger and are packaged as verse.

But I do not think they should be confused with
poetry, nor are they, even on the most elastic and forgiving understanding, even near relations to literature.

It is worth noting that, before winning the Nobel this week, Mr. Pinter had achieved another distinction for his war poems. He won the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, which is, I think, unfortunate. For Wilfred Owen was a real poet—and if Mr. Pinter’s winning of that award does nothing else, if it points people to that somewhat neglected genius of pity and poetry, why, then it is a very wonderful thing indeed.

Owen, unlike Mr. Pinter, struggles upward toward his subject. One may almost see him craving to find the unique set of words, the singular rhythms and images, which alone can attempt to communicate the desolation, horror and pity of his vast subject.

It is worth anyone’s while to go to one of Owen’s most familiar poems, the inevitably anthologized “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” and see how the tenderness of Owen’s language actually intensifies the horror of what he is recording.

These lines, for all their lushness, are a miracle of the lyric form.

Here, by contrast, is Pinter:

The difference, I think, is clear and simple. Harold Pinter is performing politics. Wilfred Owen is writing poetry.

The idea has been about for some time now that writers, in particular, have some special authority, which endows them with a finer moral insight than the general run of people.

Of course, this isn’t true. Writers are as stupid and as smart, as craven and brave, no more and no less, than any other set of people. W.B. Yeats was occasionally silly, Ezra Pound could be an intellectual monster, Owen was, as I have said, a genius of pity, and Wallace Stevens, when he wasn’t writing poetry, was much like any other insurance agent.