The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  In the surviving fragment of ‘Human Wishes’, Beckett depicts the fractious mood among Sam’s fellow lodgers at Bolt Court, north of Fleet Street, one April evening in 1781. The subject of death is uppermost. Elizabeth Desmoulins accuses Anna Williams of ‘the peevishness of decay’, and the retired prostitute Poll Carmichael (whose habits of thought Sam once described as ‘wiggle-waggle’) quotes a sermon on the theme that ‘Death meets us everywhere’. Neither Sam nor Hester Thrale appears. It is clear from his notes that Beckett regarded these two as horribly and fascinatingly mismatched, and that he wished to portray Sam caught between the clamour of sociability and the torment of solitude. It’s hard to guess, on the basis of only a chunk of the first act, exactly how the play might have developed, but his notes indicate that he was interested in Sam’s final decline and the notion of a great man suffering at once an excess of other people’s attention and a dispiriting neglect.8

  Beckett referred to his fascination with the subject as ‘my Johnson fantasy’. One of his most astute readers, Frederik N. Smith, suggests that the preparatory work done for ‘Human Wishes’ heightened the playwright’s sense of the tragic nature of Sam’s life, with the result that ‘the declining Johnson became for him a sort of metaphor of Western man, academic and witty, alone, afraid of dying and yet intrigued by his own physical deterioration’. Unusually, Beckett was interested in Samuel Johnson the writer before he became interested in Samuel Johnson the man, but when he latched on to details of the life he responded to the image of a ‘learned mind fastened to a body plagued by physical ailments’, and, even as he was abandoning ‘Human Wishes’, he could write of beginning to grasp how his research ‘coincides . . . fundamentally with all I shall ever write or want to write’. Although he never put Sam onstage, many of the characters in his plays and novels feel Johnsonian: intellectually and morally powerful figures who are skilled conversationalists yet also dishevelled and even grotesque, liable to have trouble with their legs or their hearing and to be afflicted with other unfashionable illnesses.9

  While occupied with ‘Human Wishes’, Beckett wrote to the poet Thomas McGreevy of his sense that Sam was ‘rather absurdly in love’ with Hester Thrale. He went on to say, ‘It becomes more interesting, the false rage to cover his retreat from her, than the real rage when he realizes that no retreat was necessary, and beneath all, the despair of the lover with nothing to love with.’10 The last words here reflect Beckett’s belief that Sam was impotent – an ‘aspermatic colossus’ like Lord Gall in his 1933 story ‘Echo’s Bones’. For Beckett, the presence of Henry Thrale had made this impotence irrelevant, but Henry’s death changed that, and Sam, in protesting that he was driving the widowed Hester from his mind, was like a man embarrassed to find himself flexing a muscle that he knows doesn’t work.

  For Hester Thrale, now Hester Piozzi, there was no question of trying to drive Johnson from her mind. She began the Anecdotes a few weeks after his death, while still on a continental honeymoon. It was a project for which she had long been preparing. One wonders how Mr Piozzi felt about her being so involved in transcribing memories of a man who had plainly thought he was a piddling nonentity. But he seems not to have taxed her on the subject, and their trip ended up lasting more than two years: she wrote that living in Venice was akin to visiting the moon, but the months she spent with Piozzi were more like an escape into sunshine.

  This was just as well, because Sam’s friends shunned her, believing she had treated him shabbily, and when they later ventured into print she appeared in an unfavourable light. Hawkins’s biography was explicit about the anguish her second marriage had caused, and hostilities intensified in March 1788 when she published her correspondence with Sam. Boswell was aggrieved, but the most accusatory voice was that of Giuseppe Baretti. Her relationship with him had long been strained, and now he attacked her in the press, suggesting for instance that one of her sons had died because she’d insisted on his being dosed with quack medicines. In private he was even more outspoken, spattering his copy of the Johnson correspondence with marginalia such as ‘You lie’ and ‘Impudent bitch!’

  Yet while Hester Piozzi capitalized on her deep knowledge of Sam with a less than ideal degree of tact, and while her editorial practices were sometimes geared to making herself look as good as possible, the rancour directed at her was tinged with envy. Her enemies were shocked to discover that someone had known their friend better than they had. Though they damned what they claimed were mistakes and fanatical acts of self-justification, the truth was that the letters revealed a relationship both playful and profound. Arthur Murphy, writing in the Monthly Review, declared that they ‘are often in the language of the heart’ and ‘We here see Dr Johnson, as it were, behind the curtain . . . retired from the eye of the world, and not knowing that what he was then doing would ever be brought to light’. In short, ‘We see him in his undress.’11 This wasn’t the slovenly undress of a person confused by ardour or madness. Rather, it suggested openness and trust, respect and intellectual sympathy. Sometimes it is hard to digest the idea that another person has had such special access to a friend of ours, and in this case there was an added element of professional rivalry, with Sam’s biographical legacy not just a matter of honour, but a gold mine.

  28

  Some ruminations upon scepticism, amid which appear the names of both Sir Thomas Browne and Scratching Fanny

  The mythic Johnson, a creature established in the popular imagination by the 1770s, is assertive, fond of generalization and capable of dismissing things with a rugged forcefulness – an idea because it is a ‘violation of established practice’, a companion because ‘there is nothing conclusive in his talk’, the novel Tristram Shandy because ‘Nothing odd will do long.’ But the ‘assertive’ Johnson is also the sociable Johnson, keen on debate, eager to challenge others and to be challenged. When he issues what looks and sounds like a cast-iron edict, it is in the hope of further discussion.1

  As he engaged in debate or brooded over some fashionable new idea, he often hesitated to accept what others were blithely willing to embrace. With this in mind, Hester Thrale recalled that ‘Mr Johnson’s incredulity amounted almost to a disease’. She makes it sound as though he refused to accept all but the most basic facts of life; in reality, he was simply inclined to prefer hard evidence to enthusiastic reports. In the Dictionary he defines incredulity as ‘hardness of belief’. By this he means a disinclination to believe things readily, although he manages to make it look more like a position of adamantine conviction. The same term occurs to Boswell, who on one occasion complains that ‘He did not give me full credit when I mentioned that I had carried on a short conversation by signs with some Esquimaux, who were then in London’. Continuing his account of Sam’s unconvincedness, Boswell writes, ‘No man was more incredulous as to particular facts, which were at all extraordinary,’ adding that no one was ‘more scrupulously inquisitive, in order to discover the truth’. What begins as a snapshot of the wounded pride of a young man not given credit for his accomplishments ends up as a vision of Sam’s rigorous concern with veracity.

  Perpetually striking a note of scepticism can make one pretty bad company. No one enjoys talking to a person whose default mode is to challenge every statement they make. (I’m reminded of a fellow student when I was at university, who would face down even the most humdrum observation with a self-satisfied ‘Can you justify that?’ This was bearable when debating points of politics, but not when you were saying you preferred brown toast to white.) Yet scepticism is an instrument for finding the truth. It functions like a scalpel: it pierces the flummery of careless assertion and probes the adequacy of our grounds for belief.

  People often speak of cynicism when what they are describing is an instance of scepticism. To be cynical is to insist on finding the worst explanation; Sam defines it as ‘having the qualities of a dog; currish; brutal’. By contrast, scepticism is a wish to have things explained. The cynic thinks that everything is rotten; the sc
eptic sees a shiny exterior, is aware that it may be a facade masking rottenness, is aware that it may be nothing of the sort, and wants to know more. That scepticism gets folded into cynicism, as if some poky subset of it, seems to be a sign that it is out of fashion. It’s seen as an insult to the ‘Can do’ mentality – as a mechanism for blocking positivity, a retrograde influence. Sceptic suffers from the company it keeps: I most often encounter it in stories about climate change sceptics, and the term is surely worth reclaiming from this degrading collocation. But it is the activity of scepticism that really matters. A world in which one can’t ask questions and check how things work (or if they work) is a place of real danger.

  A complicating factor here is the existence in philosophy of a specialized meaning for scepticism. It is the doctrine that we cannot attain real knowledge of any kind, a school of thought initiated in Greece nearly 2,500 years ago by Pyrrho, who argued that, since we can’t know the truth and our senses are untrustworthy, we should suspend our judgement about all things. Sam encountered the arguments of Pyrrho through later writers, including Sextus Empiricus and the Swiss theologian Jean-Pierre de Crousaz. He has these in mind when he writes his Dictionary definition of sceptic (or as he prefers, with an eye on the word’s Greek root, skeptick): ‘One who doubts, or pretends to doubt, of every thing.’ His own interrogative scepticism differs from this agnostic stance. It has as its motto not the bleak ‘No one knows anything’, but a more urbane ‘Are you sure?’ He is suspicious of received wisdom, and he often questions the adequacy of his grounds for holding the beliefs that he does. ‘Human experience,’ he told Boswell, ‘is the great test of truth.’ Time and again it is at variance with bloodless theory, and as we seek a richer appreciation of life we have to embrace contradiction, seeing it as a vital instrument of our quest for understanding.

  This was one of several points of intellectual kinship with Sir Thomas Browne, a writer whose language and experiments fascinated him. Browne was a medical man, a moralist and natural historian. He was also the originator of many useful words – among them amphibious, anomalous, electricity, hallucination and medical. In his most intriguing book, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, he examines the ‘vulgar errors’ of his contemporaries. Among these are some laughable popular beliefs about animals: elephants have no joints, peacocks feel shame when they see their own legs, storks will live only in countries that don’t have a monarchy, hares are hermaphrodites, and badgers have legs shorter on one side than the other. Browne seeks up-to-date testimony about matters he is unable to examine personally, but aims to scrutinize whatever he can – he keeps a deathwatch beetle in a little box in order to hear the ticking sound it makes, and is intrigued to see what happens when he puts a mole, a viper and a toad in a single glass (the mole comes off best). His methods are patient, and when he finds that a common belief is wrong he is civil and witty about it, rather than gloating.

  Sam wrote a short life of his fellow sceptic, published in 1756 as a preface to a new edition of Browne’s Christian Morals. In portraying him, he seems to shed some light on his own character, as when he refers to the ‘troublesome irruptions of scepticism, with which inquisitive minds are frequently harassed’. In admiring Pseudodoxia Epidemica as a work that emerged ‘not from fancy and invention, but from observation and books’ and ‘arose gradually to its present bulk by the daily aggregation of new particles of knowledge’, he sounds as though he is recalling the labour involved in his own recently completed Dictionary.

  Other details of Browne’s life and work call forth pointed comment. Struck by Browne’s failure to write about the years he spent studying abroad, he notes that ‘those who are most capable of improving mankind, very frequently neglect to communicate their knowledge’. In another apparent dig at the torpid culture of universities, he observes that ‘scholastic and academical life’ is ‘very uniform’ and affords ‘more safety than pleasure’. Discussing Browne’s style, he commends his having ‘augmented our philosophical diction’ – as he too had done in the Rambler and the Dictionary – and he identifies the fearlessness required to write distinctive prose, describing Browne’s ‘forcible expressions’, verbal flights of fancy ‘which would never have been reached, but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling’. He also applauds his ‘exuberance of knowledge’, but notes that it sometimes ‘obstruct[s] the tendency of his reasoning’, and when he turns to Browne’s highly unusual exploration of cosmic geometry, The Garden of Cyrus, he remarks on the profligacy of writers who channel their energies into producing jeux d’esprit: performances of this kind are the ‘sport of fancy’, and ‘It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to show how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little.’

  This last statement puts me in mind of Sam’s rather obtuse line on Gulliver’s Travels – ‘When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.’ What others find ingenious he dismisses as mere tricks of perspective. In the case of The Garden of Cyrus, where Browne writes about the ‘quincunx’ that he again and again finds in art and nature, the problem is that the author has become so obsessed with observing this pattern (⚄) that he sees it in everything. The mixture of scholarly digging and freewheeling, meditative prose is even more eccentric in Urn Burial, a survey of funerary customs which elicits the splendidly blasé judgement that ‘Of the uselessness of these inquiries, Browne seems not to have been ignorant’. Sam is unimpressed by ‘speculatists’, overelaborate philosophers ‘who strain their faculties to find in a mine what lies upon the surface’. He prefers the less arcane manner and matter of Pseudodoxia, in which the rhetoric, though elaborate, less often eclipses the scientific curiosity.

  At the heart of Johnsonian scepticism is a sense of both the ubiquity of falsehood and the limits of what we know. When he writes in the Lives of the Poets that ‘The basis of all excellence is truth’, he is making a specific point about the empty mediocrity of love poetry that’s not actually occasioned by love. But it is a broadly revealing statement. Sam knows how many professions of love are made by people who feel none of love’s power, and he knows as well how high a proportion of them convince their recipients. In more general terms: the world is full of suave falsity, and it’s easy to drift along in its current. Yet to achieve anything of consequence we need to anchor ourselves on solid ground, and we must be vigilant to tell the difference between solidity (which can seem dull) and bullshit (which can appear comfortably fluid or deceptively substantial). To sustain the metaphor, perhaps a bit parlously: we should look to see what’s below the waterline.

  Sam is especially suspicious of systems and schemes that relieve people of the need to think for themselves. Extreme philosophical positions belong in this category; they strike him not as courageous, but as affected and absurd. ‘Of the numberless projects that have flattered mankind with theoretical speciousness,’ he writes in Adventurer 45, ‘few have served any other purpose than to show the ingenuity of their contrivers.’ To Boswell he observed, of philosophers whose ideas seemed a mixture of wilful cleverness and vanity, ‘Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.’

  In fact, the philosophical aberration that drew this pleasantry was scepticism, but it was a particular brand: that of the philosopher David Hume, who argued that our experience of the world is only a series of impressions. Sam regarded Hume as a destructive writer, obsessed with the fallibility of our faculties and the incoherent nature of the mind (to Hume a mere ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions’). Although Hume actually rejected the more hardcore forms of scepticism, Sam was troubled by his readiness to cast a shadow of doubt over basic principles such as our understanding of cause and effect.

  His own version of scepticism was moderate and localized. One occasion when it served an immediately practical purpose was in 1762. In January of that year a London newspaper, the Public Ledger, published several items that mentioned the activities of a poltergei
st known as Scratching Fanny – and later more widely known as the Cock Lane Ghost. According to the paper, a young Norfolk woman called Fanny Lynes had fallen for a certain William Kent and, after they moved to London, had been persuaded to represent herself as his wife; Fanny soon became pregnant, and the couple’s deception was identified by their Clerkenwell landlord, Richard Parsons, who argued with his lodgers over money matters and later, when Fanny died, supposedly of smallpox, spread the rumour that Kent had murdered her. Excitement around the story arose from one particular detail – Parsons claimed that since Fanny’s death his property had been haunted. Fanny’s ghost made strange knocking and scratching sounds, and at several seances held there had communicated with his young daughter, conveying the information that Kent had indeed poisoned Fanny. People curious about the phenomenon flocked to the house. Eventually, under the leadership of a local clergyman, a commission investigated, and Sam was part of this. The commission discovered that the ghostly noises were made by Parsons’s wife Elizabeth, who was surreptitiously knocking on a wooden board.2

  Sam was proud of his involvement in exposing the deception. His approach here was similar to one he had often adopted as an essayist: to confront the seductions of facile or fantastic explanations, to challenge scaremongering and the hysteria of the press. As he had commented in a book review as far back as 1742, ‘Distrust quickens . . . discernment of different degrees of probability’ and ‘animates’ the search for evidence. The reference to different degrees of probability is key; he was conscious of how many people were terrible at estimating the likelihood of events, and had observed occasions on which unscientific credulity made it easy for criminals and charlatans to succeed. His awareness of these problems never let up. One of his reasons for being interested in biography was that it is an education in what’s probable: learning about other lives improves one’s understanding of what might happen in one’s own. In thinking about people and what it’s plausible they may have seen or done, a constructive scepticism is a corrective to the hyperbole, presumptuousness and spiralling caprice of public opinion.