'An Assembly of Good Fellows'

Boswell in a footnote to his Life of Johnson: “Johnson, however, declared I should be a member, and invented a word upon the occasion: ‘Boswell, (said he) is a very clubbable man.’” 

I forget the word clubbable exists though I’m fond of unclubbable, which should not be understood as a synonym for anti-social. My sense is that clubbability was more common in the past. In his Dictionary, Johnson rather attractively defines club as “an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.”

 

After the war, my father and his high-school friends formed a social club called the Royal Azures  -- beer, a picnic in the summer, gifts for the kids at Christmas. Both of my parents, whom I never think of as notably social, were for many years loyal members of bowling teams. Though not formally organized as clubs, they played canasta with one group of friends and poker with another. The only organization I’ve ever joined was the Newspaper Guild (AFL-CIO), and that was mandatory. I once interviewed Dan Quayle during a breakfast meeting of the Kiwanis. The intensity of the clubbing instinct varies significantly.

 

On this date, March 10, in 1711, Joseph Addison in The Spectator published an essay about the vogue for clubs in England. “Man is said to be a Sociable Animal,” he writes, “and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we take all Occasions and Pretences of forming ourselves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the name of Clubs.” Addison’s tone is amused but not exactly satirical. He assumes people with common interests, however trivial, will gather. Here is my favorite among his examples:

 

“I know a considerable Market-town, in which there was a Club of Fat-Men, that did not come together (as you may well suppose) to entertain one another with Sprightliness and Wit, but to keep one another in Countenance: The Room, where the Club met, was something of the largest, and had two Entrances, the one by a Door of a moderate Size, and the other by a Pair of Folding-Doors. If a Candidate for this Corpulent Club could make his Entrance through the first he was looked upon as unqualified; but if he stuck in the Passage, and could not force his Way through it, the Folding-Doors were immediately thrown open for his Reception, and he was saluted as a Brother. I have heard that this Club, though it consisted but of fifteen Persons, weighed above three Tun.”