by Rex Murphy
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 wel
l. 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.
DOGGEREL OF WAR | October 15, 2005
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”:
The bombs go off
The legs go off
The heads go off
The arms go off …
The dead are dust
A man bows down before another man
And sucks his lust.
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.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
These lines, for all their lushness, are a miracle of the lyric form.
Here, by contrast, is Pinter:
Here they go again
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world…
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.
So, when you hear that an eminent poet is “against the war”—or “for it,” for that matter (though, given the tide of fashionable opinion, the latter is less likely)—all you have heard is an opinion of no greater depth or authority than your own, or the doctor’s, or the video jockey’s.
And if the writer expresses that opinion in language that is not clearly, deeply thought and creatively deployed, then you may also take it that it is not the writer, as a writer, you are hearing from, but, more accurately, the writer taking a holiday from his muse for the less demanding exertions of politics.
Which is eminently the case with Mr. Pinter’s poems. I can only hope it is not for them, but for his plays—which constitute what there is of Harold Pinter’s craft—that he won the Nobel.
Poets, writers, musicians and actors very foolishly lay claim to an authority, a moral acuity, on issues of the day they simply do not have. The word “artist” is self-applied these days with a promiscuity that has all but emptied its meaning. I think of that European fraud who packaged his own defecation in tin cans and sold the “product” to the Saatchi Gallery. There are mountebanks by the hundreds who call themselves artists. And then there are too those pop stars—Avril Lavigne, Snoop Dogg, Madonna—who lovingly take the term that used to belong to Beethoven and da Vinci and trowel it on themselves. The opinions of such “artists” are in no way superior to those of the meanest bank clerk. No offence, really, to bank clerks. T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk.
WAR ON TERROR
THEY KILL BECAUSE THEY CAN | July 9, 2005
The organized and premeditated slaughter of innocents is the very signature of terror. In the post-9/11 world, there has been Bali. There has been Madrid. And, two days ago, there was London.
As I write, the death count is around fifty, the number of injured approaches a thousand.
Responsibility for the slaughter and mayhem has not been definitely assigned, but most serious analysis converges on al-Qaeda or one of its European tentacles. The London attack surely bears all the vile stigmata of al-Qaeda’s previous slaughters: pre-planning and co-ordination, a series of explosions within a short time at highly vulnerable sites (the London subway and transport system during morning rush hour) and, above all, great moral carelessness over the “targets.” Al-Qaeda demonstrated in New York on that September morning nearly four years ago that it likes to harvest as many as possible in its murderous schemes. It was but happenstance that the towers were not full, and that a “mere” 2,749 were erased from the book of life, rather than fifty thousand.
Fifty thousand dead wouldn’t have stirred a feather on the conscience of Osama bin Laden and his fanatics, presuming that conscience is a faculty or a concept either he or his followers acknowledge or possess.
The attack on London coincided with the meeting of the G8 leaders. Whatever one’s opinion of the efficacy of these summits, and whatever one’s belief in the professions of intent of the leaders who attend them, both the summits and the leaders occupy a moral universe. They are built around ideas of moral aspiration. They pay homage—whether realized in action or not—to humanitarian ideals. Whatever the shortcomings of individual leaders, and however tormented their progress toward the goals they almost ritually set themselves, these leaders very clearly stand in the sunshine of human political activity.
Terrorists, on the other, dark, hand, have declared the perfect opposite. Death to all outside their own warped mania is all their intent. The terrorist would see the world in ruins, and mutter some perverted hosanna over the spectacle of millions dead, if a ruined world, or millions dead, served his grim and fanatical idea of purpose.
London this week, in a strange and possibly hear
tless way, tells me we’re still lucky. Lucky only in the chilling sense that the dead hearts of Mr. bin Laden and his likes have not yet found the means, or had the opportunity, to deal a blow on the scale that all of us must by now know they would wish to deal.
There is no moral reserve in terrorism. If they could have concluded the lives of all Londoners on Thursday morning, they would have done so.
Fifty, 2,749 or many millions—the totals of the dead, and the totals of the ruptured lives of those who are left to mourn those dead, are as nothing to the terrorist, except that the terrorist always prefers the larger figure.
Terrorism is the awful hybrid of nihilism and fanaticism. It has within its seed something akin to the moral squalor of the Hitlerian period, where lives outside the golden bloodstock of the pure Aryan were as nothing—were seen as second-rate, or brutish, or verminous. Hitler’s was a racist ideology in the purest distillate the world had, to that time, seen. Modern terrorism, if such is possible, may be even more bleak.
The terrorism we are only beginning to comprehend may, for the moment, wear the cloak of a certain religiosity, cover itself with the language and rhetoric of militant Islam. But why should anyone accept Mr. bin Laden’s twisted pieties, his rage against the “infidels and Jews” as anything but (for him) a convenient rationalization? He who murders will not tremble at a lie. What really moves him, or his like, despite the ritual jihadi rhetoric is not yet ours to know.
I suspect it all has less to do with “religious” motives, however base and primitive those be, than they profess. The demonic arrogance of these self-styled leaders is its own motivation. Their mere whim to whip the world to bloodlust and despair betrays the emptiness of no real cause at all. I suspect the religious overlay is a kind of the-atricalism. Nihilism. This is a key component of terrorism, a greater emptiness than normal people are possibly able to contemplate.