The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  The Old Bunch is a reminder of why novelists were once regarded as gods—gods in the sense of being omniscient. It also reminds us that novelists of any earlier time had larger ambitions than they do in our day, when they are often content to write about people who, like themselves, live more in their minds than in the world. One Levin character, the sculptor Joe Freedman, asks, “Why did one get sidetracked with some shred of truth, with religion or love, politics or surrealism, but so few seemed to keep themselves open for the whole bitter truth of the human race?” The Old Bunch, Meyer Levin’s neglected masterpiece, is, finally, a reminder that nothing less than “the whole bitter truth of the human race” was once the subject of the novel.

  Life of Johnson

  (2015)

  The world’s greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least seventeen bouts of gonorrhea. The biography is of course James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Biography is its genre but sui generis is its form and content. Nothing like it came before and nothing like it has appeared since. Biography we call it, but in some ways it also qualifies as an autobiography of its author, who regularly obtrudes in its pages and may even be said to be its secondary subject. Donald Greene, the American scholar of eighteenth-century literature, proposed that the book’s true title should have been Memoirs of James Boswell, concerning his acquaintance with Samuel Johnson.

  Adam Sisman ends his excellent book Boswell’s Presumptuous Task by noting that “though the Life of Johnson was a pioneering work which opened up new possibilities for biography, it was also unique: never again will there be such a combination of subject, author, and opportunity.” Boswell was twenty-two, Johnson fifty-four when they met in 1763. Johnson was widowed from his beloved, nineteen-years-older-than-he wife Tetty; Boswell was the unanchored and still disappointing oldest son of the Scottish laird and magistrate Lord Auchinleck. Famous both as a talker and as the author of the Rambler and Rasselas and his Dictionary, Johnson was already everywhere recognized as a great man. Upon meeting him, Boswell must have sensed that this large, strange, twitch-and-tic ridden man was his passage to a permanent place in literary history.

  Boswell saw not merely a great subject in Samuel Johnson, but an exemplar, a teacher, a reality instructor, for the two men were vastly different in outlook, stability, and above all good sense. Johnson came to love Boswell—he called him “a clubbable man”—without ever quite treating him as an equal. “You are longer a boy than others,” he told him when Boswell was in his mid-thirties. In Johnson’s eyes, he would remain a boy, always in need of straightening out, through their twenty-one-year-long relationship, which ended with Johnson’s death in 1784 at seventy-five.

  An habitual keeper of journals, Boswell wrote down nearly everything he heard Johnson say or that was said about him. Before setting out to write the biography of Johnson, Boswell, in 1785, published his Tour of the Hebrides, his trip to the western islands of Scotland with Johnson, at the end of which he announced that he was planning to write a full life of Johnson. Boswell had been collecting Johnsoniana—journals, notebooks, letters, anecdotes supplied by friends—for years. He also wrote under the lash of two competing biographers, that of Sir John Hawkins, who was Johnson’s official biographer, and that of Mrs. Hester Thrale Piozzi, in whose home Johnson was long a welcomed and intimate guest.

  Boswell’s Life of Johnson was the first biography to attempt to probe the inner life of its subject, while also considering his writings and his standing as a public figure. Johnson himself, who wrote Lives of the Poets, felt that the inner failings of a biographical subject should not be ignored. Boswell set out to write not a panegyric but a full portrait of the great man in all his weaknesses, failings, faults, and oddities, of which Johnson offered a rich smorgasbord. He did so, however, only against the larger view of his subject’s grandeur. Boswell adored Johnson, and his self-appointed assignment in writing his biography was to show that he was greater than his intellectual bullying—his so-called “bow-wow way”—prejudices, lassitude, general slovenliness, and sometime crushing temper. He claimed, correctly, that in his book Johnson was seen “more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.”

  At the heart of Boswell’s biography was Johnson’s conversation, both that to which Boswell was privy and that reported by others. Over the twenty-one years of their relationship, Mr. Sisman speculates, Boswell met with Johnson on roughly four hundred days. Whenever he did, he prodded, he fairly goaded him into conversation on what he hoped would be propitious topics. Well worth the effort it was, for Johnson was studded with “genuine vigour and viviacity” and larded with “the exuberant variety of his wit and wisdom.” In its slightly less than half-million words, the best things in Boswell’s biography are Johnson’s many mots. So greatly did these capture the fancy of Boswell’s readers that he was accused of having people “talk Johnson.” To this he replied: “Yes, I may add, I have Johnsonised the land, and I trust that they will not only talk, but think, Johnson.”

  One encounters all the famous Johnsonisms in Boswell’s biography, from “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” to “One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thought.” to “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Anthologies of Johnson’s sayings have been published. In Boswell, though, one sees the great talker dans combat.

  Johnson’s many distinctions are always of interest, such as that between intuition and sagacity, or between talk and conversation, or between doctrine contrary to reason and doctrine above reason. He prefers the Irish over the Scottish because “the Irish are a very fair people—they never speak well of one another.” He regularly pulls back the curtain on pretense: “Depend upon it,” he tells Boswell, “that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.” He thought the situation of the Prince of Wales “the happiest of any person’s in the kingdom,” for he had “the enjoyment of hope, the high superiority of rank, without the anxious cares of government. . . .” He lambasts Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and prefers Richardson’s novels over Fielding’s.

  Oliver Goldsmith said that “there is no arguing with Johnson; for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” Although not said in response to this, Johnson held that “every man has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.” Alexander Pope, Boswell notes, is said to have been a less than brilliant conversationalist, adding: “In this respect Pope differed widely from Johnson, whose conversation was, perhaps, more admirable than even his writings, however excellent.”

  Early in his biography, Boswell remarks that he is firmly of the opinion “that minute particulars are frequently characteristick, and always amusing, when they relate to a distinguished man.” In the hands of an artful biographer, these minute particulars, like so many well-placed dots in a pointillist painting, conduce to provide a satisfyingly full picture. So it is with the Life of Johnson. Boswell shows us his gruff table manners, how he walked, his laugh (like that of a rhinoceros), his terror of death, his immense, one can only call it his Christian, generosity to the poor and those defeated by life.

  Some have found Boswell slavish in his admiration of Johnson. Macaulay called him “servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic . . . always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spat upon and trampeled.” Boswell’s wife said of the relationship: “I have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by a bear.” If Johnson put up with Boswell’s sometimes doubtless cloying sycophancy—“Sir,” he at one point tells him, “you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of them both”—his doing so paid off handsomely. Without James Boswell’s biography, Johnson’s reputation would not stand anywhere near as high as it does today. A great biographer was requir
ed to show us how great a man Samuel Johnson was.

  Part Five

  Hitting Eighty

  Hitting Eighty

  (2017)

  Not to be born is best, when all is reckoned,

  But when a man has seen the light of day

  The next best thing by far is to go back

  Where he came from, and as quick as he can.

  Once youth is past, with all its follies,

  Every affliction comes on him,

  Envy, confrontation, conflict, battle, blood,

  And last of all, old age, lies in wait to besiege him,

  Humiliated, cantankerous,

  Friendless, sick and weak,

  Worst evil of all.

  —Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles§

  I shall soon be hitting 80. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that 80 will soon be hitting me. Eighty, a stately, an august age, but a preposterous number nonetheless. Beginning a job at Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1965, a document from the Personnel—not yet Human Resources—Department informed me that my retirement date would be 2002. The date, 2002, with its ridiculous futurity, caused me to smile. Well, 2002 is long since here and gone. The minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, even the years pass by at roughly the same pace. It’s only the decades that seem to fly by.

  Mine has been an immensely fortunate life, though, as Solon warned Croesus, never declare your good fortune until your last breath is drawn. This richest of men, king of Lydia, Croesus lived long enough to see the death of his son, the suicide of his wife, and the fall of his kingdom to the Persians. I have no kingdom to lose, and though I have over the years undergone some of the standard sadness—divorce, early death in the family—I have much for which to be grateful. Still, as Polybius, the Greek historian of Rome, had it: “Fortune is envious of mortal men, and is most apt to display her power at the very point where a man believes that he has been most blessed and successful in life.” This is why I remain a fully paid-up subscriber to the Knock-Wood Insurance Company, from which I carry a long-term policy. If you’re interested in such a policy yourself, contact my agent, Keina Hura.

  I drew excellent cards in life, both personal and historical. Personally, I was born to generous, intelligent, and honorable parents, who provided economic security and early gave me the gift of freedom to discover the world on my own. Historically, my generation was too young for the Korean War, too old for the Vietnam war, and lived through a period of continuous economic prosperity in the most interesting country in the world. Ours was a low-population generation—children born toward the end of the Depression—so that colleges and universities wanted us, and we evaded the mad, sad scramble to gain admission to those schools that the world, great ninny that it is, mistakenly takes to be superior.

  Ours was also the last generation to grow up eager for adulthood. After us, thanks to the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, staying youthful, forever youthful, was the desideratum; juvenility, not senility, as Tom Wolfe (a member in good standing of our generation) noted, was to be the chief age-related disease of the future. We, though, wanted to grow up, some of us perhaps too quickly. Many of us entered into marriages and had children in our early twenties. Philip Larkin spoke for us when he said that he gave up on Christianity upon learning that, in the afterlife, Christians would return to childly state. Larkin’s own childhood was less than happy; besides, he wanted the accoutrements of adulthood: long-play records, liquor, beautiful women, keys.

  My generation grew up with memories of the country’s one good war—World War II—hummed the sophisticated music of the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter, and found rock ’n’ roll trivial, if not laughable. We learned about charm, our ideal of sophistication, and much else from the movies. We smoked cigarettes, drank Scotch and bourbon, and ordered dry martinis, went to work in suits, a small number of the men among us wore serious hats. We carried handkerchiefs. No one born after 1942, a contemporary of mine declared in a generalization that has held up nicely under my random sampling, carries a handkerchief. In the early 1970s, when I began teaching at a university, after the sixties had brought down the wall of formality, the first decision I faced was whether to teach in tie and jacket or jeans and open-collar shirt. I went for the tie and jacket; it felt more natural. Besides, by my thirties I owned no jeans.

  My generation also had the good fortune to be around for the impressive advantages in technology, not least medical technology, which has led to the prolongation of life. Among these advances, none has been more radical than the advent of the so-called Digital Age, that most mixed of mixed blessings. I have friends, contemporaries, who have decided to take a pass on everything to do with computers, tablets, smartphones—who needs a car, is their reasoning, a horse is good enough—and live, so to say, pre-digitally.

  I am not among them, yet I remain impressed by the sheer goofiness of much that appears online, which I have seen described as “a vanity press for the demented,” and where the law of contradictions has been banished. One day, Googling myself (that new and necessary and slightly obscene-sounding verb when used reflexively) I discovered that I was simultaneously a homophobe and an old poof.

  I’ll accept the “old” part. One of the dangers of being old—for the moment setting death aside—is that one tends to overvalue the past. Machiavelli, in his Discourses on Livy, writes: “Men do always, but not always with reason, commend the past and condemn the present . . . [and] extol the days when they remember their youth to have been spent.” Santayana holds that the reason the old have nothing but foreboding about the future is that they cannot imagine a world that is any good without their being in it. The temptation, when among contemporaries, is to lapse into what I call crank, in which everything in the past turns out to have been superior to anything in the present. Not true, of course, but oddly pleasant to indulge—even though one knows, as Noel Coward, who later in his life himself indulged in crank, had it, “There is no future in the past.”

  The detractions of old age are obvious: The lessening capacity for the active life, the weakening of the body, the diminution of sensual pleasure, the irrefutable nearness of death. Toss in memory loss and you get diminishment generally. Cicero, whose own old age was not lived at the Ritz—he was forced into exile and murdered by order of Marcus Antonius, his decapitated head and right hand hung up in the Forum—claimed that “older people who are reasonable, good-tempered, and gracious bear aging well. Those who are mean-spirited and irritable will be unhappy at every stage of their lives.” Yet Schopenhauer, that never-less-than-impressive grouch, held that “we shall do best to think of life as a desengaño, as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce.”

  At 80, I remain, if not I trust entirely illusioned, still amused by the world. I find myself more impressed than ever by the mysteries of life, not least among them unmotivated altruism. In its elusiveness, human nature remains for me endlessly fascinating. No greater spectacle exists than watching it play out at endeavors high and low. I have a friend who reports that, every morning, his 88-year-old mother-in-law wakes and mutters “shit,” cursing because she hadn’t died in her sleep. I once read a letter from a man of 71, sent to my physician, saying that he had had enough of life and had decided to forego chemotherapy for stomach cancer. At 80 I find I haven’t had nearly enough of life, and each morning upon waking, mutter “Thank you.”

  Part of my good fortune has been my health. (“So long as you have your health,” the old Jews used to say—correctly, it turns out.) Several years ago I had heart-bypass surgery, and occasionally my immune system, betraying its name, lets me down. The most recent instance was my contracting a skin-blistering condition called (and best pronounced in a W. C. Fields accent) Bullous Pemphigoid. Apart from a five-minute stretching exercise in the shower, and the normal walking-about on errands, I
do no formal exercise. I have friends my age contemplating triathlons, or who play tennis, singles, for 90-minute stretches. My own greatest athletic accomplishment at 80 is that I can still put on my trousers while standing up. When others speak of staying in shape, I wonder what shape it is precisely they have in mind.

  Gradual loss of memory, short- and long-term, is a well-advertised part of the deal in aging. Isaiah Berlin, in a letter to a friend on his forthcoming 80th birthday, writes: “But 80 is enough—now the decline—the order is one forgets names, then nouns, then everything: gagahood—the end.”

  This, however, if my own experience is any guide, is to make things appear more drastic than they are. True, one occasionally walks into a room in one’s own apartment and requires a few seconds to remind oneself what it was, again, that brought one there. The title of a movie, the name of the author of a book, the quarterback who succeeded Joe Montana for the San Francisco 49ers elude one, though through the good offices of Google they may be recaptured quickly enough. One of the side benefits of memory loss is that, after a five-or-so-year hiatus, one forgets the plots of most movies and can see them again as if afresh.

  Still, evidence regularly crops up suggesting my generation is about to hear the Great Publican’s call, “Time, gentlemen, time.” I go to lunch with a friend who tells me that he has had a pacemaker installed. Another friend is recovering from bypass surgery. An old college roommate informs me that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. A boyhood pal has had two unsuccessful spinal surgeries and a prostate operation. We grow old, we grow old, we shall soon wear a lot more than our trousers rolled.