So writes Alexander
Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and leader
of its Conservative Party. I have no stake in British politics (or American,
for that matter), but a man who can revel in Dr. Johnson and associate him with
the spirit of fun (that is, of the eighteenth century) may have a reasonable
chance to at least be entertaining. Perhaps he will also revive the line of PMs
(Disraeli,
Churchill, Thatcher) who could
write with memorable flair. Johnson devotes a chapter to the other Johnson in Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who
Made the City That Made the World (Harper Press, 2011).
Johnson’s
Johnson is a study in self-projection. Johnson I is what Johnson II hopes he
will become – courageous, outspoken, defiantly independent, compassionate, witty
and pugnacious. He is “the great harrumphing voice of political incorrectness,
a literary John Bull, whose views today would be considered outré to the point
of unacceptability.” Johnson idealizes Johnson’s bluntness and willingness to
insult the conspicuously stupid and intellectually or morally crude. “For all
their famous hypocrisy,” Johnson II writes, “the British also love a person who
seems honest about his pleasures, however vulgar.” Can you think of an American
politician willing to write like this, assuming he could? But after all, “Beneath
the veneer of blustering intellectual intolerance, he was, in fact, a terrific
old softie.” We would like to assume that every literate person has read
Johnson I. It appears Johnson II actually has, and thought about what he read:
“Who reads Rasselas, his allegorical yarn about a
prince of Abyssinia? He wrote one play, a tragedy called Irene, in which the heroine was garrotted on stage in the final
act, provoking such howls of merriment that it folded after nine days. TS Eliot
argued that he should be ranked among the major English poets, and yet there
cannot be an A-level student who studies ‘London’ or ‘The Vanity of Human
Wishes’. His essays were hailed as masterpieces then and ever since, and yet
they are exactly the kind of volumes that council libraries are selling off for
10p or sending to landfill. As for his poems in Latin and Greek, I expect their
audience in modern literary London is exactly nil.”
4 comments:
I liked his generalization about the Victorians, from the same book.
"Perhaps because they lived more obviously in the shadow of death, the Victorian seem more gluttonous for life than we are today. They got up earlier, they walked greater distances, they cooked more complicated meals. They wrote bigger novels, they scribbled longer and more confessional diaries, they grew bushier beards and moustaches than any previous generation. They were more scandalised and more hypocritical and therefore (arguably) more excited about sex, and they had more children. They did more watercolours and they played more pianos and generally busied themselves more in the lives of others--especially the less fortunate--than the middle classes of modern Britain."
I like this guy.
A post on the P.G. Wodehouse Society blog also praises Boris:
Date: Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 11:01 AM
Well, an old boy from our school is now the new PM of the UK. Hail Boris!
In the absence of original Wodehouse, we are now left with two Wodehousean writers/speakers: Stephen Fry and Boris Johnson. We can look forward to some interesting speeches and phrases from the new PM.
Here is one from his acceptance speech yesterday:
"And we are once again going to believe in ourselves and what we can do and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self-doubt and negativity."
Both he and Fry have been responsible from some real juicy ones in the past. Here's to many more.....
Thanks for the recommendation. A few highlights of this entertaining book:
p37,Chaucer: podicinist = professional farter
p 87, “we know next to nothing about Shakespeare … Every fact or factoid is a frail peg from which is suspended a vast duffle coat sodden with conjecture, pockets stuffed with surmise.”
p133, Samuel Johnson's wife’s bosom was of more than ordinary protuberance … “Why did he call her “Tetty”? You don’t have to be Freud to have a stab at that one."
p244, "In 1870 Royal Doulton produced the porcelain toilet, on which filth could more easily be spotted." [Part of the battle against water-borne disease and contamination.]
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