`The Knowledge Which Experience Must Confer'

The library at the university where I work recently acquired the new four-volume edition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, edited by Roger Lonsdale and published by Oxford University Press. It’s a beautiful, formidable work of scholarship, and carries an equally formidable price tag: $595. Johnson was paid 200 guineas to write it, and without the library I would never have been able to read it.

Returning to my office with the hefty volumes, which strained the seams of the canvas sack I use to carry books, I remembered an essay, “Paralipomena to The Hidden Law,” by the late Anthony Hecht, included in his final prose collection, Melodies Unheard. “Paralipomena” is Greek for “things omitted.” We might call it an addendum or supplemental text, in this case to Hecht’s The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden” (1993). In the essay, Hecht addresses issues he felt he had neglected in the earlier volume, and it has the feel of an old man’s digressive, slightly neurotic and quite rewarding grab bag.

For instance, Hecht spends two pages examining the “remarkable resemblance” of Johnson and Auden – a resemblance that had never occurred to me, though Hecht marshals a great deal of evidence: Both suffered from poor eyesight, held cleanliness in “utter disregard” and were inclined to choose, in the words of Johnson biographer W. Jackson Bate, “the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.”

Both Auden and Johnson held (with Hecht again quoting Bate) a “lifelong conviction – against which another part of him was forever afterwards to protest – that indolence is an open invitation to mental distress and even disintegration, and that to pull ourselves together, through the force of attention and the discipline of work, is within our power.” They shared a belief that “effort in daily habits – such as rising early – was necessary to `reclaim imagination’ and keep it on an even keel.”

In short, Johnson and Auden accepted what is called, often dismissively, the Protestant work ethic. To many contemporary sensibilities, that must seem impossibly square, repressed, bourgeois – whatever the cant term is. But I know from hard experience that concentrated work, mental or physical, is a tonic and relaxant. Idleness is corrosive of well-being.

Both writers were indifferent to their surroundings. “In addition, Bate wrote, Johnson `was able to distinguish between “loving” and “being loved” and to value the first without demanding equal payment through the latter,’ while Auden wrote, `I equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.’”

Johnson and Auden maintained, in Bate’s words, that “the `main of life’ consists of `little things’; that happiness or misery is to be found in the accumulation of `petty’ and `domestic’ details, not in `large’ ambitions, which are inevitably self-defeating and turn to ashes in the mouth. `Sands make the mountain,’ [Johnson] would quote from Edward Young.”

The examples Hecht cites are among the reasons I love not only Johnson and Auden, but Bate and Hecht. They lend me courage – an old-fashioned way to read. Recently I discovered a blog, Spurious, whose author writes lengthy, eloquent posts, though I’m not always certain I understand what he is trying to express. We share enthusiasms – Bernhard, Handke, Sebald, Pessoa – but I suspect Johnson and Auden are not among his. He wrote in a post titled "A Metaphysic":

“But then I also asked – and ask today – whether those who seek from literature a clue as to how to live, how to act, how to experience the contingency of the world, can only ever be too close to what they are compelled to love.”

Well, yes. I suppose I am close to the writers I admire, those who have taught me how to live. I need such experience, strength and hope. Is that “too” close? I have never been able to think of a good novel, poem or essay as exclusively a “text,” cloistered away from life, unanchored to a particular life. Every literary work at its heart is autobiographical, though not in a literal, banal fashion, and not in ways we the readers, or he or she the author, could ever document. Spurious inspires critical self-examination. Is what Johnson wrote of Milton -- “He had read much and knew what books could teach; but had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer” -- also true of me? I don’t think so. Books, too, are experience.