'A Kind of Representative Figure of His Era'

We gave our sons Hebrew names: Joshua, Michael, David. They roughly translate as “God is deliverance,” “gift of God” and “beloved,” respectively. We are not Jewish and not linguists but we like plain names rooted in tradition, names with an identifiable history traceable, in this case, to the Old Testament. Goofy, whimsical names coined from scratch can backfire. Remember “A Boy Named Sue”? 

In “The Book of Samuel,” an essay he published in New England Review in 2007, the poet Mark Rudman explains why he and his wife also chose a Hebrew name, Samuel (“God has heard” or “name of God”), for their son. Again, the motive was not piety. Rather, Rudman chose the name as an homage to three writers: Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Beckett. Hell of a lineage.

 

Rudman is a little too impressed by Coleridge, whom I tend to think of as a brilliant windbag junkie, the temperamental opposite of one of his co-Samuels, Beckett. Along the way, Rudman’s loosely structured hodgepodge of an essay feeds us snippets of biography, autobiography, history, literary criticism and woolgathering:

   

“We can’t let ourselves forget that Samuel Johnson didn’t write one word of the book he is best known for, Boswell's Life of Johnson. [No kidding?] The fact that he was among the two greatest talkers in the history of England, the other being Coleridge, did little to curb his internal sense of failure, of disappointment. Alongside this lay the fact that Johnson was among the most sociable of men, one who loved nothing more than human company, who hated nothing more than being alone.”

 

Rudman gets carried away and loses the Samuel thread fairly often in his twenty pages. He can’t resist a juicy digression. His essay is peppered with interesting thoughts and linkages but doesn’t really cohere. Like a good self-indulgent academic, he drags in, without a thought for maintaining focus, Saul Bellow, Akira Kurosawa, Nostromo and, inevitably, Walter Benjamin. He really ought to have stuck to Samuel and skipped the Coleridgean blather:

“Each of the Samuels is a kind of representative figure of his era. I have noticed how often people have felt compelled to talk about the three Samuels -- Johnson, Coleridge, Beckett -- and the one I am now going to add -- film director Samuel Fuller. It’s possible that the differences among these figures have more to do with time and place than with the work they produced. Each responded to a necessity that went beyond the confines of the individual and generated a universal appeal that is very difficult to pin down. If Fuller seems a bit outranked here, we have to keep in mind his titanic effect on the imagination of the film directors who came after him.”

 

[Rudman’s essay lent its title to his collection The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination (Northwestern University Press, 2009).]