`A Pitfall Covered With Flowers'

Theodore Dalrymple devotes a lengthy essay in City Journal to one of his heroes, Samuel Johnson. In a mendacious age, it’s hard to imagine a more pertinent and less fashionable writer. Like many of us, Dalrymple loves equally Johnson the man and Johnson the writer:

“When I look at Johnson’s death mask, I think I see something of his tremendous character and intellect in the huge and craggy features, a rough nobility and a profundity of being, a face that bears the same proportion to the average human visage as the Himalayas do to the Cotswolds: but of course I recognize the objection that I find reflected there only what I was predisposed to find.”

We can think of Johnson as a litmus test of humanity. To embrace him is to recognize ourselves in him. He was profoundly flawed. His company was alternately charming and impossible, depending on his internal climate of the moment. He was like us, but infinitely more articulate and gifted, as Dalrymple suggests:

“What Johnson said of the London of his time, that it contains all that human life can afford, seems also true of his own life. Johnson is a good but flawed man, always trying to be, but not always succeeding in being, a better one: he is proud, he is humble; he is weak, he is strong; he is prejudiced, he is generous-minded; he is tenderhearted, he is bad-tempered; he is foolish, he is wise; he is sure of himself, he is modest; he is idle, he is hardworking; he is opinionated, he is consumed by doubt; he is spiritual, he is carnal; he is hopeful, he is despairing; he is skeptical, he is credulous; he is melancholy, he is lighthearted; he is deferential, he is aware that he has no superior in the world; he is clumsy of body, he is elegant of mind and diction; he is a failure, he is triumphant. We never expect to meet anyone who, to such a degree, encompasses in his being all human vulnerability and human resilience.”

Coincidentally, I thought of Johnson the night before I read Dalrymple’s essay, while reading “Parker’s Back,” Flannery O’Connor’s final story. At the age of 14, O.E. (Obadiah Elihue) Parker sees a tattooed man at the fair, and the sight transforms his life:

“Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”

Self-absorbed and always self-seeking, Parker has never indulged in a self-reflective thought. He moves by instinct, following obscure impulses as they lead him. In his Rambler essay for July 9, 1751 (No. 137), Johnson wrote:

"It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of inquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate inquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing; and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties."

Parker certainly sleeps in “the gloomy quiescence of astonishment,” at least until he crashes a tractor into a tree and instinctively yells, “God above!” I’m not describing influence; more an elective affinity. O’Connor knew and admired Johnson, especially his Lives of the Poets. His name shows up five times in her published letters, The Habit of Being, always in a positive light. We know from Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being, edited by Arthur F. Kinney, that her personal library included Dr. Johnson’s Prayers (edited by Elton Trueblood) and a two-volume Lives of the Poets, as well as Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Johnson and O’Connor would have agreed that evil was a mystery to be endured, not a problem to be solved, and that self-delusion is endemic among humans. On April 14, 1750, Johnson wrote in The Rambler (No. 8):

"When a man finds himself led, though by a train of honest sentiments, to wish for that which he has no right, he should start back as from a pitfall covered with flowers. He that fancies he should benefit the public more in a great station than the man that fills it will in time imagine it an act of virtue to supplant him; and as opposition readily kindles into hatred, his eagerness to do that good, to which he is not called, will betray him to crimes, which in his original scheme were never proposed."