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

by Henry Hitchings

  Today, popular wisdom relating to such matters has ossified in the elegant and endlessly repeated ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’. I tend to think ‘ars longa’ means ‘It takes a long time to master technique’, yet it can be interpreted as a comment on art’s durability – ‘Art lasts, but you don’t have much time in which to make it.’ Often, though, the ars Sam pictures isn’t longa and it’s the brevity of reputation that strikes him. In Rambler 106 he writes that ‘There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame’ and ‘Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions.’ In the short term these writers command attention – ‘It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose public conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend.’ But the world moves on, and yesterday’s indispensable bestsellers are tomorrow’s charity shop rejectamenta.

  It is with something like this in mind that Sam wonders in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare ‘by what peculiarities of excellence . . . [he] has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen’. ‘The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises,’ he reflects, ‘not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.’ ‘The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while,’ he argues, ‘by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.’ The greatest literature, in this view, grounds us. Its truth, even if delicately or ethereally expressed, is earthy.

  One of his best-remembered comments on the subject, fleetingly mentioned in an earlier chapter, is the terse ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ He said this while discussing with Boswell the fortunes of the more ludicrous sorts of literature. In the long term he was wrong; although Laurence Sterne’s reputation dropped off when he died (and Sam was speaking eight years after his death), his novel has gone on to influence countless other writers and has established itself as a requisite of grad-school lit biz. But what’s interesting here is that Sam is thinking about art’s impermanence, and the attribute he holds responsible for Tristram Shandy’s lack of longevity is its being ‘odd’ – a prankish parody, a morally irresponsible trifle. Oddness means several different things to him: ‘the state of not being even’, uncouthness and impropriety, a peculiarity ‘not to be numbered among any class’ (i.e. a failure to belong to any recognized genre). It was, of course, a quality of which he had direct experience, and, while he can hardly have thought of Tristram Shandy as being much like him, he knew intimately how judgemental society could be about strangeness, whether of appearance or behaviour.

  Besides being odd, Tristram Shandy was a comedy, and Sam was aware that comedy tends to have a short shelf life. We can all name comedies that have aged well, yet there are far more that haven’t, and it is a genre that doesn’t travel freely. After a while, or beyond their original milieu, jokes require explanatory notes, and such explanation is the death of humour. As Sam comments, of the fiddlier bits of Shakespeare, ‘Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils’, and ‘the mind is refrigerated by interruption’. Sterne’s brand of comedy, so determinedly eye-catching and experimental, struck Sam as the very opposite of durable, and its popularity seemed to rest on its author’s relentless pursuit of fame – the decision of a country vicar to convert his existence into what we would now call performance art. In the National Portrait Gallery in London there’s a fine Reynolds portrait of Sterne, which shows him with his finger pressed to the side of his head, appearing to point to his brain. It is a calculated and arrogant pose, a forerunner of today’s glossy, knowing and artfully uninformative close-ups of celebrity. Sam knew the painting and its subject’s half-smile; the one time they met was at Reynolds’s house, in 1761, and Sterne caused offence by showing off a pornographic picture.

  More prosaically, Sam doubted the appetite of either posterity or publishers for a work so in love with typographical experiment. Tristram Shandy prominently featured an assortment of squiggles, a black page, and another page that was curiously marbled (and made the book seem almost inside-out). It projected an air of incompleteness.1 Understandably, Sam failed to picture a future in which readers would delight in the very aspects of Sterne’s novel that unsettled his contemporaries – its indecency, noisiness and disruptiveness, its apparent plagiarism, its playful sense of itself as an objet d’art, and its hospitality to different modes of criticism (which would also have a role in the longevity of some of Sam’s own writings). Besides, people making predictions about the mainstream always forget that there’s another way of staying in the swim: you can slosh down the gutter of time.

  Whereas an artwork’s chance of lasting is a subject for critical debate, the truth of vita brevis is incontrovertible. Sam noted in the Rambler that one might hear the complaint several times a day: Life is short. This was banality itself. When someone says that life is short, it’s evidence not of wisdom or worldly experience, but of their soul having become like a pipe, an organ through which sounds pass smoothly and complacently. In short, ‘no ideas are annexed to the words’. He concluded that ‘So far are we generally from thinking what we often say of the shortness of life, that at the time when it is necessarily shortest, we form projects which we delay to execute . . . and suffer those passions to gain upon us, which are only excusable in the prime of life.’

  But these words, written when Sam was forty-one, were really self-censure. His consciousness of the passage of time was acute; in The Vanity of Human Wishes, ‘Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all the passages of joy’, and in his life of Alexander Pope he comments, ‘He that runs against Time has an antagonist not subject to casualties.’ In prayers dating from 1752 and 1753 he writes of the ‘residue of my life’ (which is shrinking), and in the Rambler he argues that a defining quality of ‘the state of man’ is the ‘thoughtlessness with which he floats along the stream of time’ – a stream that, as he observes elsewhere, is ‘continually washing’ the ‘dissoluble fabrics’ of reputation and fashion.2 The image of death that most impressed him was in Paradise Lost, where the fallen angel Belial speaks of it as like being ‘swallowed up and lost / In the wide womb of uncreated night’.

  In Idler 88 he writes that ‘neither our friends nor our enemies wonder that we live and die like the rest of mankind’; it is a marvel only to us, but when we confront it ‘we find at last that we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past’. When we think of death, we reproach ourselves:

  He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, without any effort for distinction.

  Death is a subject that never quite recedes from view, and as he grows older it nags at him more and more. He understands its levelling effect, for he has seen, more times than he can bear, its power to extinguish all that makes a person notable. Whereas in his early works he pictured heroic figures tussling with the forces of destruction, he would come to regard death as a confirmation of our shared humanity and its fragility. Thinking about death means thinking about what might come after death. It a
lso means thinking about how we might die – where, and with whom – and what we ought to do before we die, and what we might fail to do. For Sam, it was natural and painful to recall the projects he had at some point contemplated but never got round to. Among these were an edition of Chaucer, a collection of proverbs, a sequel to Rasselas, a set of lives of the great philosophers, a history of war, and an account of the ‘revival of learning’ (which we now call the Renaissance). In the 1740s he wrote, in one of the many prefaces with which he furnished other writers’ books, that ‘The only way to preserve knowledge is to increase it’, and in his final decades he appalled himself with the thought that he not done this enough.

  In his later works he often appears either elegiac or on the verge of launching into elegy, and in his letters he repeatedly touches on mortality. Thus in September 1773 he writes from Scotland to Hester Thrale that ‘The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.’ We should be dubious about the words ‘if I remember it’, for surely no one forgets their own birthday, even if they prefer not to be reminded of it, and, as we have seen, this particular one was important to him. But it is true that, past forty, birthdays make us think about our impermanence. As he continues, his self-assessment is bleak: ‘I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain.’ He tries to content himself with the thought that ‘perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted’. This last remark feels throw-away, but it is a powerful idea. A life of perfect ease sounds delectable when you are struggling with countless tasks and trials. But easy living saps the mind’s energy. Affliction is hideous, yet when we are in its midst we can try to see it as a test rather than a punishment.

  His reflections on death were given extra impetus by an incident that occurred in 1777. In May of that year, a clergyman called William Dodd, noted for his emotional style of preaching, was sentenced to death for forging a bond with a value of £4,200. For more than twenty years Dodd had cultivated an image as a man of fashion and substance, pious but also well-connected. To sustain the fiction, he had borrowed heavily, and eventually, under pressure from his many creditors, he resorted to forgery. When the sentence was passed, he made an indirect approach to Sam, whom he had briefly met many years earlier, to speak up on his behalf. Sam condemned Dodd’s crime and his extravagant habits, but thought the punishment too harsh. The offence, he wrote, ‘has no very deep dye of turpitude’ and ‘involves only a temporary and reparable injury’. Besides, he recalled that Dodd had done useful work in promoting the Magdalen Hospital for penitent ex-prostitutes and the rather clunkily named Society for the Relief and Discharge of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts. The man had erred, but his philanthropic efforts surely showed that his being allowed to live would add something to society, not endanger it.

  Sam channelled a lot of effort into Dodd’s cause. He was not alone in campaigning for clemency, but despite several petitions, one of which had 23,000 signatures, no mercy was shown. Lord Mansfield, lord chief justice and the subject of Sam’s joke about the success of Scots who were ‘caught young’, argued that yielding to public opinion would create an unsafe precedent. Three weeks before the date set for his execution, Dodd preached a potent sermon that he presented as his own handiwork. In fact, most of it came from the pen of Sam – though it would be several years before he revealed that it was his. When he reflected on the episode, he was annoyed that Dodd had taken credit for the sermon, believing that in his final days he should have been more particular about such matters. ‘Depend upon it,’ he told Boswell, ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’

  If we turn to the sermon itself, we can see why Dodd might have supposed he would get away with claiming it as his own, for the language is characteristically emotive: he admits ‘the justice of my sentence, while I am sinking under its severity’, speaks to his fellow prisoners of the need to ‘call upon God night and day’, and insists it is essential that ‘when we lament our sins, we are really humbled in self-abhorrence’. But there is a Johnsonian ring in the statement that ‘on the dreadful day, when the sentence of the law has its full force, some will be found to have affected a shameless bravery’: this is ‘not the proper behaviour of a convicted criminal’, for ‘to meet death with intrepidity is the right only of innocence, if in any human being innocence could be found’. The last duties of the criminal, he declares, ‘are humility and self-abasement’. Dodd may have enjoyed saying this, but it was not in his nature to enjoy thinking it.

  Unlike Dodd, who to the very end thought he would be spared, Sam was constantly aware of his own mortality. He was influenced in this partly by his reading of William Law, who advised that one should think each day of death, and partly by his early experience of illness. The body doesn’t lie, and it repeatedly found new ways to make him hear the rumblings of death’s drumbeat. Writing to Hester Thrale in September 1777, he reflected that ‘I have loitered, and what is worse, loitered with very little pleasure. The time has run away, as most time runs, without account, without use, and without memorial.’ A few days later, he wrote to her again. Once more it was his birthday, and he commented that the occasion now seemed to come round more quickly. I think all of us, as we age, develop the impression that time moves faster, but it’s worth adding that people with Tourette’s syndrome appear to have a particularly keen perception of time intervals, which is possibly related to the efforts they are used to making in order to suppress their tics.3

  The tone of self-rebuke is familiar, and in truth he did plenty over this period, not least firing off letters of good counsel to friends. Indeed, the day after writing to Hester Thrale that ‘Age is a very stubborn disease’, he went with Boswell to Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, and some of his remarks on that occasion suggest mischief and gaiety. ‘If I had no duties,’ he said, ‘I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she would be one who could understand me.’ Over the next few days he took delight in explaining the myriad different methods of shaving, in pointing out the deficiencies of his friend John Taylor’s pet bulldog, and in arguing that Garrick, reputed now to have a fortune of £100,000, was for all the acclaim he had received no more praiseworthy than a rope-walker or a ballad-singer (and perhaps less so).

  While Boswell liked to have details of this kind to note down, he wanted Sam to discourse on important subjects, and one evening in April 1778, with the Dodd case still fresh in the mind, he initiated another discussion of death. Sam’s companions on this occasion included Anna Seward, a poet nicknamed the Swan of Lichfield. A friend of Lucy Porter’s and the granddaughter of the schoolmaster John Hunter, she would turn out to be one of Sam’s harshest critics, enraged by the memory of his colossal status and by what she felt was Boswell’s craven idolatry. That evening she was less vigorously opinionated than she would later prove, but asserted that annihilation was nothing to be afraid of, since it ‘is only a pleasing sleep without a dream’. Sam objected: ‘It is neither pleasing, nor sleep . . . The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.’ These were among the lines that most impressed Samuel Beckett, and in a copy I have of Boswell’s Life of Johnson a previous owner has written alongside them ‘Dr J confronts The Void.’

  Over the next few years he often looked into it. To Lucy Porter he wrote on 5 July 1783 that ‘The world passes away, and we are passing with it’. The same day he told Hester Thrale that ‘My organs are yet feeble.’ The spectres of friends’ deaths were crowding in on him. In July the next year he wrote to Joshua Reynolds that he hoped to go to Derbyshire for some fresher air; once there, he felt no better, and in August, hearing that the painter Allan
Ramsay had died at Dover after a grim Channel crossing, he reflected that ‘On which side soever I turn, Mortality presents its formidable frown.’ Old friends had passed into oblivion: ‘That we must all die, we always knew’, but ‘I wish I had sooner remembered it’.

  He had never, of course, forgotten about death. He lived in an age in which attitudes to it became noticeably more dramatic; where previously there had been what the historian Philippe Ariès calls a ‘familiar resignation to the collective destiny of the species’, an understanding of death as something ‘tamed’ by the rituals of piety and as a result ‘banal’, there was now a newly stark sense of death ‘as a transgression which tears man from his daily life, from rational society’, and increasingly the very idea of it was enough to stir extreme emotion.4 Close to his end, Sam was with Hawkins when he spoke of his dread of the ultimate judgement. Hawkins records that ‘with a look that cut me to the heart’ he revealed his fears and finally wondered, ‘Shall I, who have been a teacher of others, myself be a castaway?’

  Sam was quoting St Paul, from his first letter to the Corinthians: ‘But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.’ Right to the end the body seemed to pose a threat; he believed that its needs and impulses would lead him into temptation. What we know of Sam’s body makes this anxiety more upsetting, for it is clear that in his final months the world of the flesh was a source of excruciating pain to him, not of any kind of reward, and that he treated his own person with mortifying strictness. Near the end of his life one of his testicles became so swollen that he took it upon himself to stab it with a lancet under the bedclothes. His autopsy would reveal that one of his kidneys had been destroyed by water pressure and two of the valves in his aorta had calcified; some of the cells in his lungs were so dilated by emphysema that they were the size of gooseberries, and he had a stone in his gall bladder described as being the size of a pigeon’s egg – the last detail uncanny, as in the Dictionary he had referred to bezoar, a stone found in the stomach of a goat, sometimes attaining precisely those dimensions.