`Does He Move You?'

An anonymous reader writes:

“I am in the midst of a Samuel Johnson bender and was wondering what your take is on Dr. Johnson. Do you like him? Does he move you? (I have just finished Bate's biography of Johnson and found the overview of Johnson's work on Shakespeare amazing.)”

Lucky fellow. A Johnson bender is my kind of dissipation. Almost two years ago, in the first post I wrote for Anecdotal Evidence, I described Johnson as “one of the tutelary spirits of this blog,” and hardly a week has passed without the great man making an appearance. I went on to quote Boswell quoting Johnson in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

So, Johnson helped name this blog, and his preference for anecdotes over “system” continues to inform it. That goes to the heart of my attraction to Johnson – his bluffness, common sense and distaste for pretension or any species of bullshit (one of his definitions for cant is “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms”). Writing about books ought to be a straightforward business, a sharing and fine-tuning of enthusiasms and aversions. For me, that has always been the case. I never aim for theoretical consistency. Reading, first and always, is about love, and there’s no figuring that out. For Johnson, the membrane between life and letters is highly permeable. Consider his July 18, 1780, letter to Hester Maria Thrale, better known as “Queeney,” when she was not yet 16 years old:

“When you read alone read diligently, they who do not read can have nothing to think, and little to say. When you can get proper company talk freely and cheerfully, it is often by talking [or blogging] that we come to know the value of what we have read, to separate it with distinctness, and fix it in the memory. Never delight yourself with the dignity of silence or the superiority of inattention. To be silent or to be negligent are so easy, neither can give any claim to praise, and there is no human being so mean or useless, but his approbation and benevolence is to be desired.”

Imagine, as a teenager, having received such a letter -- to be treated with such respect and devotion, to be told without pussyfooting or condescension that “they who do not read can have nothing to think.” An obvious truth but one ignored by too many parents, teachers and others purporting to be allies of children. That’s another reason for loving Johnson – his alacrity to teach, to share his experience, strength and hope, with a teenage girl or a middle-aged man. “Do you like him? Does he move you?” The questions are well-intentioned but inadequate. W. Jackson Bate, Johnson’s second-best biographer, put it like this, and try to think of another writer about whom the same might be said:

“One of the first effects he has on us is that we find ourselves catching, by contagion, something of his courage. .... Johnson, time and again, walks up to almost every anxiety and fear the human heart can feel. As he puts his hands directly upon it and looks at it closely, the lion’s skin falls off, and we often find beneath it only a donkey, maybe only a frame of wood. This is why we so often find ourselves laughing as we read what he has to say. We laugh partly through sheer relief.”