`A Good Damner'

On the same day a reader asked why I hate William Hazlitt I started listening in the car to a seven-cassette recording of A.J. Liebling’s collection of boxing essays, The Sweet Science (1956). In fact, I love Hazlitt’s essays if not always the man. He was a prickly character fueled with bile and emotional immaturity (Keats called him “a good damner”), who compromised his gifts with political doltishness. Hazlitt admitted, “I am not in the ordinary sense of the term a good-natured man,” but he was author of some of the best prose in the language, sentences charged with his favorite critical encomium – “gusto.” His 1822 boxing essay “The Fight” was much admired by Liebling. In my first Anecdotal Evidence post, I included a passage from “The Fight” as an invitation to readers:

“…we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

What confused my reader was a post I had written in July – lightheartedly, I thought – in which I confessed to sentimentally favoring Lamb over Hazlitt. Some readers, it seems, wish to impose a rigid consistency on literary tastes: “Proust or Raymond Chandler. Kay Ryan or Elizabeth Bishop. You can’t have it both ways.” Well, yes I can. In fact, I have no choice: Art is not a democracy. It’s ruthlessly unfair, its gifts meet no quota scheme and are distributed without regard for tender feelings. Art is fickle and so are its consumers. Without shame it encourages promiscuity. Only in art, in fact, can one be at the same time promiscuous and faithful. I can love the poems of Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill – who detested each other – and it’s nobody’s damn business.

Few writers are at once so beguiling and irritating as Hazlitt, and I look forward to reading Duncan Wu’s new biography, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. The reviewer for the Independent, Jonathan Wright, says:

“Hazlitt will always be a writer's writer. We love the fact that he had to scratch for a living and we appreciate the image of him frequenting a coffee house on Chancery Lane, making his daily meal out of cold roast beef and apple tart. We are happy for him when, after a commission came in, he treated himself to a pheasant or a brace of partridges. We admire his intellectual curiosity as he walks 200 miles to hear Coleridge preach. Most of all, we adore how he writes. For all his faults, his quirky, bombastic, soaring prose is unsurpassed in the canon (assuming such a thing still exists) of English literature.”

Hazlitt’s undoing as a writer and man was peevishness and, not coincidentally, politics. The young, impatient, headstrong and intolerant are drawn to radicalisms of various stripes, right or left, with their simple, usually violent solutions. Oddly – but not unexpectedly for so volatile a sensibility – Hazlitt eviscerated Shelley with words that apply with damning precision to his own testy personality. I know an English professor, long retired, who lobbied me to reevaluate Shelley, but all his arguments came down to political, not literary, values. I wish I had known Hazlitt’s demolition at the time:

“Whatever shocked the feelings of others conciliated his regard: whatever was light, extravagant and vain was to him a proportionable relief from the dullness and stupidity of established opinions. The worst of it however was, that he thus gave great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet, jostle – and confirm one another…”
There’s nothing new about writers sparring. In his introduction to The Sweet Science, while extolling the pioneering fight writing of Pierce Egan (Hazlitt’s contemporary, author of Boxiana) Liebling writes:

“Egan was the greatest writer about the ring who ever lived. Hazlitt was a dilettante who wrote one fight story.”