`Purple Patch'

Thanks to Rus Bowden, via Frank Wilson, for letting us know about “Purple Patch,” a literary feature in the Daily Times of Pakistan, based in Lahore. If I understand it correctly, “Purple Patch” is a venue for literature in the broadest sense, publishing brief essays by contemporary writers, including Andrew Delbanco, Melville’s most recent biographer, but also older work by W. Somerset Maughm and, most intriguingly, Samuel Johnson. This past Saturday, the Daily Times ran an excerpt on poetry from The History of Rasselas, the Prince of Abyssinia.

Who can imagine an American newspaper publishing an extended passage from Rasselas, even though it long ago entered the public domain and would cost nothing to reprint? Imagine the possibilities: Montaigne, Swift, Thoreau and Henry James – in the newspaper! Most American papers routinely squander newsprint on horoscopes, bridge columns and mediocre comic strips. Why not something more wholesome?

I’m not surprised that Pakistani editors picked Rasselas, which Johnson wrote and published in 1759. As W. Jackson Bate notes in his great life of Johnson:

“Its appeal was almost immediate. Within the next generation the book was being read – and has continued to be read – in every part of the English-speaking world. It has been estimated that an English or American edition has appeared almost every year since it was first published.”

And here is Bate’s explanation for the book’s sustained popularity:

“….the main reason Rasselas quickly became – and remains – the classic it is, though the time he devoted to it was so short (less than the time devoted to any other classic in the history of literature, for which we know the actual timetable, except the `great odes’ of Keats), is that here we have distilled, in this brief, richly brooding story, so much of the total character of mind – the power of subsuming, the sweep and readiness of intellect, the appealing humanity, the general style and tone – of one of the most refreshingly practical of reflective natures ever to write about human experience.”

Lucky Lahore readers!