'A Touchingly Saturnine Person'

“I’ve just finished a careful reading of Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Johnson, and he seems to me easily one of the most admirable men who ever lived.”

Who can argue with that? Johnson is admirable because he’s so much like us, only more so. No saint, often difficult, sometimes crazy, he reminds us that even geniuses are human and all humans are broken. The Johnson admirer is Anthony Hecht, writing to William L. MacDonald on January 21, 1985. A year later he writes to his friend:

“As to [Marsilio] Ficino’s conviction that cheerfulness becomes a philosopher, there is a relevant passage in Boswell’s life of Johnson. An amiable friend of Johnson’s says: ‘You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.’ This has its serious application to Johnson, who was a touchingly saturnine person, often supposing his own sanity was vanishing, and doing arithmetical problems to prove himself sane.”

Hecht had his own bouts with depression and we sense he felt a muted affinity with the lexicographer. Johnson can serve as a reader’s litmus test for human complexity. Who else mingles seriousness and playfulness, gruffness and humility, faith and tortured doubt? Readers who insist on consistency in their fellows are not Johnson’s ideal readers.

“Paralipomena to The Hidden Law” is an essay included by Hecht in his final prose collection, Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (2003). “Paralipomena” is Greek for “things omitted.” Call it a supplemental text, in this case to Hecht’s The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (1993). In the essay he spends two pages examining the “remarkable resemblance” of Johnson and Auden. Both suffered from poor eyesight, held cleanliness in “utter disregard” and were inclined to choose, in the words of Bate, “the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.”

Both Auden and Johnson held (with Hecht again quoting Bate) a “lifelong conviction – against which another part of him was forever afterwards to protest – that indolence is an open invitation to mental distress and even disintegration, and that to pull ourselves together, through the force of attention and the discipline of work, is within our power.” They shared a belief that “effort in daily habits – such as rising early – was necessary to `reclaim imagination’ and keep it on an even keel.”

Both were furious workers, utterly dedicated to the Protestant work ethic. That may sound square, repressed, bourgeois, whatever the cant term is. But concentrated work, mental or physical, is a tonic and relaxant. Idleness is corrosive of well-being.

Both writers were indifferent to their surroundings. Hecht writes: “In addition, Bate wrote, Johnson `was able to distinguish between “loving” and “being loved” and to value the first without demanding equal payment through the latter,’ while Auden wrote, `If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.’” Johnson and Auden maintained, in Bate’s words, that “the ‘main of life’ consists of ‘little things’; that happiness or misery is to be found in the accumulation of ‘petty’ and ‘domestic’ details, not in ‘large’ ambitions, which are inevitably self-defeating and turn to ashes in the mouth. `Sands make the mountain,’ [Johnson] would quote from Edward Young.”

Hecht’s argument  is convincing. These are some of the reasons I love not only Johnson and Auden, but Bate and Hecht.

Hecht died on this date, October 20, in 2004, at age eighty-one. That was a rough year for poets and readers. Along with Hecht we lost Donald Justice, Thom Gunn and Czesław Miłosz.

[See my review in the Los Angeles Review of Books:  “The Dramatis Personae of Our Lives”: On “A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald.”]