`The Almost-Twin of Making-Do'

Dave Lull sent me a brief story from 2004 about the poet Kay Ryan, which includes this passage:

“Ryan’s work is often compared to Emily Dickinson’s; her poems are seldom more than 100 words long. `Something can be a few words on the page and expand in the mind and the ear,’ she explains. `I have a strong affinity for Dickinson.’

“Who else? `I love to read Philip Larkin. I love Robert Frost. I love the prose of Samuel Johnson. I love the Greek writer Cavafy. I love Steve Smith, the British writer -- she’s very funny, very wry.’”

Our tastes in writers, except for Frost, converge. I’m impressed by her mention of Johnson, the only writer she cites specifically for prose. His concision, humor and moral depth make him an ideal prose model for poets – and the rest of us. I would expect myself to expect others to share my enthusiasms – that’s my self-centered nature – but instead I’m surprised. The day Dave sent the Ryan piece, a reader in Philadelphia wrote, near the middle of a lengthy e-mail:

“Beckett I prize above all writers, just as I prize Samuel Johnson above all other men. `The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope,’ Johnson wrote in Rambler essay number 2 (I quote from memory). In his essay titled `On London,’ Max Beerbohm wrote, `Dr. Johnson had a way of being right – but he had a way of being wrong, too, else we shouldn’t love him quite so much.’ In the mid-seventies I bought, for $70, the 16-volume Grove Press edition of Beckett’s Collected Works. (I now own the new four-volume edition.) Those books, and Johnson’s Idler, Adventurer, and Rambler essays, have sustained me through adulthood.”

Another unexpected convergence: My essential writers, reliably sustaining, are Johnson and Beckett, and Beckett shared a similar devotion to Johnson. He spent years, on and off, researching and writing a play, his first, about Johnson’s supposed unrequited love for Mrs. Thrale. Ultimately, he abandoned Human Wishes, and only a fragment survives, but in the working notebooks Beckett kept of the project, scholars have found this hand-written paraphrase of a passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“Much as he dreaded the next world he dreaded annihilation still more. `Mere existence’ he said on one occasion `is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain than not exist.’ He went on to say, in answer to an objection that was raised, `The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.’”

Beckett found the familiar Beckett themes already latent in Johnson. In her biography, Deidre Bair quotes a letter Beckett wrote in the sixties: “They can put me wherever they want, but it’s Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me. And if I follow any tradition, it is his.”

In one of her poems, Ryan distantly echoes Beckett’s well-known conclusion to The Unnamable: “Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” Here’s “Hope”:

“What’s the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope –
the almost-twin
of making-do,
the isoptope
of going on:
what isn’t in
the envelope
just before
it isn’t:
the always tabled
righting of the present.”

Johnson often wrote of hope, and often with two minds. In addition to the Rambler citation quoted by my Philadelphia reader above, he wrote in the Adventurer No. 69, on July 3, 1753:

“I am afraid, every man that recollects his hopes must confess his disappointment; and own that day has glided unprofitably after day, and that he is still at the distance from the point of happiness.”

He had written, 17 months earlier, in the Rambler No. 196 (Feb. 1, 1752):

"We naturally indulge those ideas that please us. Hope will predominate in every mind, till it has been suppressed by frequent disappointments."

Beckett wrote in Company: “Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken.”