This
is one Midlands writer, John Wain (1925-1994), honoring another in Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography,
published in 1962 when Wain already
had five novels, two story collections and two volumes of poetry in print. The passage
quoted is drawn from the chapter describing his wartime years at Oxford University.
Johnson, too, attended the school, but could afford only one year of study,
though in 1775, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate. Like Johnson,
Wain was born into the lower-middle class in a working-class neighborhood,
sensitizing him to class differences on both sides. He grew up during the Great
Depression, relieved only by the war. Wain continues the account of his Oxford
years:
“I
would murmur to myself. As if they were lyrics poems, sombre fragments of his
lay sermons. `Life is everywhere a state in which there is much to be endured,
and little to be enjoyed.’ [Rasselas, Chap. 11] `So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural
desires, that one of the principal topics in moral instruction is the art of
bearing calamities.’ [The Rambler #32] But it was not his gloom alone that made Johnson a hero to me. It was his
tragic gaiety.”
Wain’s
understanding of, and kinship with, Johnson is profound. In that last sentence
he echoes Yeats: “They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; / Gaiety
transfiguring all that dread.” When readers tell me Johnson is dull and depressing,
I know that life for them must be dull and depressing. Like Shakespeare and
Tolstoy, Johnson is life, the whole
contradictory mess, heaven and hell mortally mingled. Wain goes on:
“Amid
all this settled conviction of hopelessness, he was sociable, welcomed friends,
reveled in talk, devoured books. All this I did too. No wonder I took over his
attitudes en bloc; but they were the wrong attitudes. Brave, dignified, and
admirable in his case, they were foolish and even cowardly in mine. When Johnson
wrote the sentences that rang in my head, he was old, racked with diseases,
emotionally shattered by the deaths of those he loved, with nothing ahead but a
failing of powers and a death that might or might not appear as a merciful release.
Such a man would make himself ridiculous and contemptible by counterfeiting
youthful abandon; but it was just as absurd for me, at the age of twenty, to
adopt his granite attitudes.”
Call
it premature stoicism or affected philosophical armoring – the disease of
bright, self-pitying young people. We wear it like an unearned trophy of war. If
we’re fortunate, life or at least an uncommonly honest friend will knock it out
of us. Johnson wasn’t Johnson when he was twenty. He had to wait for the
appropriate time to become himself, and the outcome was never guaranteed. Wain is
inverting Johnson’s observation in The Rambler #50:
“If
dotards will contend with boys in those performances in which boys must always
excel them; if they will dress crippled limbs in embroidery, endeavour at
gaiety with faltering voices, and darken assemblies of pleasure with the
ghastliness of disease, they may well expect those who find their diversions
obstructed will hoot them away; and that if they descend to competition with
youth, they must bear the insolence of successful rivals.”
Wain
takes the title of his autobiography from Dryden’s drama Aureng-Zebe (1676):
“None
would live past years again,
Yet
all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And
from the dregs of life think to receive
What
the first sprightly running could not give.”
[In
1973, Wain published a play about his hero, Johnson
is Leaving, and edited the anthology Johnson
as Critic. In 1975 he repaid his literary debt with Samuel Johnson: A Biography.]
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