Belated Birthday

Monday was Samuel Johnson’s 297th birthday, a date I forgot until Garrison Keillor reminded me as I was driving to work. Naturally, Johnson would have forgiven my forgetfulness because, as he wrote in a Rambler essay, “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”

That’s my preferred Johnson – the forgiver of human frailty whose ready sense of forgiveness was rooted in a profound awareness of his own failings. Johnson always felt like a failure. To understand this feeling in purely psychological terms, as we moderns tend to do – as though human nature were a schematic diagram of pathology – is a reductive mistake that leaves out the moral and spiritual components of Johnson’s elusive personality. When he wrote in another Rambler essay, “A man writes much better than he lives,” he wrote as a man deeply suspicious of his own accomplishments as a writer.

To be human is to be divided. It’s a sloppy, inconsistent business, and a lot of work. John Wain, one of Johnson’s best biographers (has any writer been blessed with so many good ones?), is especially insightful about the tensions that make up Johnson as man and writer:

“The fact that his parents were incompatible did not prevent him from marrying in his turn. Even the fact that he had been unjustly beaten at school did not lead him to maintain that schoolboys should not be beaten. And here, already, we see a pattern that was to persist . Johnson, as an individual, was highly independent and unbiddable. He did not fit smoothly into any system. Intellectually, on the other hand, he approved of systems. Free of an starry-eyed notion of the natural goodness of man, he insisted on the need to keep up the outward forms and conventions that act as some check on man’s natural lawlessness because he felt its power in his own anarchic impulses.

“In this we see something of Johnson’s generous self-forgetfulness, his power to reach intellectual conclusions on impersonal grounds. Most people are entirely lacking in this quality.”

A uniquely illuminating relation exists between Johnson’s life and work. In the contemporary, self-infatuated sense, he was the least autobiographical of writers. When we know something of his life, however, the work glows with a new and compelling significance. It seems earned, like this passage from an Adventurer essay:

“To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next, is to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.”