Two Sams

I am reading Loving Dr. Johnson, by Helen Deutsch, who writes the way you would expect an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, to write, or perhaps a little better. Her book is often over-written in a cute, show-off way and it is, of course, clotted with academic jargon, which is unfortunate in a book devoted to a master of English prose. But when I noticed that Deutsch devotes considerable space to Samuel Beckett’s use of Johnson, I skipped ahead and found a few insights into one Sam’s interest in the other. In Beckett’s Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, published in 1984, editor Ruby Cohn wrote of his 12-page Human Wishes:

“Although Beckett filled three notebooks with material for a play on the relationship of Dr Samuel Johnson and Mrs Thrale, only this scenic fragment of 1937 was actually composed. Pauses, repetitions, and formal patterns are strikingly prophetic of his drama to come.”

Beckett was especially devoted to Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations – an unlikely devotion I share, as I share Beckett’s unbelief. Despite obvious differences in religious faith, class, nationality and historical context, I’ve always recognized the philosophical and temperamental kinship between Johnson and Beckett. Deutsch cites a letter Beckett wrote on July 11, 1937, to Mary Manning that James Knowlson quotes in his invaluable biography of the playwright, Damned to Fame:

“There won’t be anything snappy or wisecracky about the Johnson play if it is ever written. It isn’t Boswell’s wit and wisdom machine that means anything to me, but the miseries that he never talked of, being unwilling or unable to do so. The horror of annihilation, the horror of madness, the horrified love of Mrs Thrale, the whole mental monster ridden swamp that after hours of silence could only give some ghastly bubble like `Lord have mercy upon us.’ The background of the Prayers and Meditations. The opium eating, dreading-to-go-to-bed, praying-for-the-dead, past living, terrified of dying, terrified of deadness, panting on to 75 bag of water, with a hyrdacele on his right testis. How jolly.”

The sympathy between two minds, two lives, is obvious. Here’s how Johnson defined “melancholy” in his Dictionary of the English Language: “A disease, supposed to proceed from the redundance of black bile. Quincy. A kind of madness, in which the mind is always fixed on one object. Milton. A gloomy, pensive, discontented temper. Sidney.”