`Read Him'

When I left a job to take another in 2001, friends made a going-away gift of Peter Martin’s A Life of James Boswell and, as a perfect redundancy for my shelves, the brick-like Everyman’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which has since become my reading copy. This juxtaposition of books and lives points out the peculiarly symbiotic relation between Boswell and Johnson in literary history, and the disparities in their accomplishments and reputations. For all his drinking and whoring, Boswell was a conventional man distinguished only by devotion (hardly disinterested) to Johnson and his biographical labors. For everyone who reads a Rambler essay or one of the Lives of the Poets, I suspect a book club’s worth of readers takes on at least selections of the Life of Johnson. In his just-published Samuel Johnson: A Biography, Martin offers a common-sensical corrective:

“The best way to get the measure of Johnson is to read him. I have often thought that if I were stranded on a desert island, in addition to the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare I would wish to have with me a complete run of Johnson’s moral essays, especially those from the Rambler – almost 450 of them in all.”

This good sense and good taste comes on the fifth page of Martin’s introduction. Johnson is a rare writer whose life and works are equally compelling and rewarding. He is a hero to many, as few writers are. He is what we aspire after as writers and people. Martin’s “desert-island” supplies are mine precisely. One of the standard, wise-guy responses to this parlor game is to suggest a manual on ship-building, or water purification, or edible wild plants. I can handle some of those necessities but how long could I survive – or wish to – without emotional, aesthetic, moral and spiritual sustenance? Those are the needs Johnson reliably supplies. I’m reminded of what Robert D. Richardson wrote in his biography of William James:

“For all his grand accomplishments in canonical fields of learning, James’s best is often in his unorthodox, half-blind, unpredictable lunges at the great question of how to live, and in this his work sits on the same shelf with Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson.”

I’m surprised when readers and critics are put off by Johnson’s reputed stuffiness or Latinate pomposity when he’s the most human, dependable and brother-like of writers. Here’s Martin again:

“When one reads Johnson, one is struck by how modern he is. Far from being rigidly conservative, backward-looking and authoritarian, he is one of the most advanced liberals of his time. Author of some of the greatest critical writing ever written, his natural instinct was to prick bubbles of pretension and nonsense – what he called `cant,’ `a whining pretension to goodness’ – under whatever labels or in whatever institutions they flourished. The anger and defiance in writing often make one wince – a feature of his persona which has not been sufficiently stressed by biographers. He had a sharp tongue when he detected humbug, flimflam, smugness and insincerity, and sent many home licking their wounds. Interlopers, pompous hypocrites, people in power, the chattering aristocracy and irresponsible newspapers were certain to provoke his indignation and mockery. He was empirical, downright, willing to argue, brave, and deftly and sometimes severely humorous. He could be every bit as funny as modern humourists, savouring a comic thought like Oliver Goldsmith’s vanity over his new purple coat for hours afterwards, his laughter filling a room and echoing along the streets.”

These are some of the reason I’ve been looking forward to reading Martin’s new life of Johnson though I’ve read Boswell’s and Bate’s several times each, as well as those by Wain, De Maria, Lipking and Kaminski, among others. One never tires of him.