'Domestic Privacies"

Marilyn Sides won this reader’s heart in the third paragraph of her 2018 essay “The Consolations of Literature,” when she refers to Dr. Johnson as “grand master of English prose.” She also practices what Anecdotal Evidence preaches: “the intersection of books and life.” We might think of her essay as an exercise in applied literary studies rather than the more fashionable and boring theoretical school. Sides’ mother is dying and she awaits the inevitable telephone call. In the meantime, she teaches selections from Johnson’s work to a class of undergraduates. She writes: 

“One of Johnson’s most quoted aphorisms: ‘Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ Standing up, in one hour and thirty-five minutes, before twenty students to discuss Johnson can feel like a form of public hanging. So I concentrate my mind. First, lower expectations. I’m a pinch hitter for the eighteenth-century survey; the expert is on sabbatical.”

 

An appealing quality in an essayist or memoirist: self-deprecating humility. With a braggart, an egotist, we quickly lose sympathy. Of course, every writer is an egotist. Some recognize it and carry on. Others nourish it because they have nothing else. Sides reviews the reading list for her impending lecture, including The Rambler No. 60:

 

“Johnson is fascinated by the incidents ‘of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory and are rarely transmitted by tradition’; the ‘invisible circumstances . . . more important than public occurrences’ that make ‘a life’ come alive. . . . Point out Johnson’s insistence on the greater importance of ‘domestic privacies’ over ‘those performances and incidents, which produce vulgar greatness.”

 

Shes proceeds with a thematic collage of texts from the assigned works by Johnson, including the “Life of Pope,” one of his small masterpieces. Her mother, like Johnson, she tells us, accepts the reality of hell:

 

“My mother did believe in hell, though I’m pretty sure she didn’t feel in much danger of ending up there. (But my young nephews, if my sister didn’t baptize them, that was another story!) I think she simply didn’t want to die or die without a fight. Johnson’s ringing challenge to death upon his deathbed was hers, too: ‘I will be conquered, I will not capitulate.’

 

“I suddenly laughed and cried. Samuel Johnson and my mother, so unlike in temperament and talents, were yet very much alike. Both so long tortured and let down by the body, yet for that very reason, both seasoned warriors of the drawn-out battle. Although dying for decades, they insisted on persisting, preferring to remain alive as long as possible in the world they so passionately embraced.”

 

More than three-hundred years after Johnson’s birth, a reader discovers a shared humanity. Johnson embodies such humanity. He is like the rest of us, only more so. He accepts and celebrates his commonality, as he does in his “Life of Gray”:

 

“In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

 

Perhaps my favorite among all of Geoffrey Hill’s books, the one I return to most often, is The Triumph of Love (1998), in which he echoes the title of Sides’ essay. See this passage from CXLVIII, narrated in the tongue-in-cheek voice of Hill the schoolmaster:

 

                                                “I ask you:

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad

and angry consolation. What is

the poem? What figures? Say,

a sad and angry consolation. That’s

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry

consolation.”

 

[Sides published “The Consolations of Literature in the Fall 2018 edition of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics.”]