'One of the Disadvantages of Wine'

An offhand recounting of a conversation with Dr. Johnson: 

“He has great virtue, in not drinking wine or any fermented liquor, because, as he acknowledged to us, he could not do it in moderation. Lady M’Leod would hardly believe him, and said, ‘I am sure, sir, you would not carry it too far.’ JOHNSON. ‘Nay, madam, it carried me. I took the opportunity of a long illness to leave it off. It was then prescribed to me not to drink wine; and having broken off the habit, I have never returned to it.’”

 

Boswell dates the exchange to September 16, 1773 in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785). The friends are on a three-month journey through the highlands and the western islands of Scotland. They are visiting the home of Lady MacLeod on the island of Raasay. Johnson is sick with a cold and agrees to “drink a little brandy when he was going to bed.”

 

I first read Boswell on Johnson in 1971 at the suggestion of one of my English professors. I was hooked and started a life-long practice of reading and rereading most of what both men had written and much of what had been written about them. In the context of eighteenth-century England, alcohol is a sort of one-word punch line, a joke. Think of Tom Jones, Richard Savage, Smollett’s novels, Hogarth and, of course, Boswell himself. But I never considered that Johnson may have had a problem with alcohol until 1981, when I read Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers by Donald Newlove (1928-2021), who writes:

 

“Great writing about alcohol is an ocean without shoreline and I have a thick notebook of excerpts from world literature to attest to it, a sheaf of quotations to help me keep sober. One of the most stirring recoveries from excessive drinking was made by Dr. Samuel Johnson two centuries ago.”

 

Newlove, a recovering alcoholic, assembles a small anthology of Johnson’s wisdom-from-experience regarding alcohol, drawn largely from Boswell. You’ll notice the absence of sermonizing:

 

“Sir, I have no objection to a man's drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.”

 

“Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.”

 

“Boswell: ‘I think, Sir, you once said to me, that not to drink wine was a great deduction from life.’ Johnson: ‘It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational.’”

 

“This is one of the disadvantages of wine. It makes a man mistake words for thoughts.”

 

It’s testimony to Johnson’s moral stature that most of us remember him as a pillar of sobriety, in every sense, not as a dissolute sot. I’ve never  encountered a single description of Johnson drunk.

 

I’m sorry to learn that Newlove has died. I read when they were first published his novels Leo & Theodore (1972) and The Drunks (1974), the story of alcoholic Siamese-twin jazz musicians. The books were better than that description suggests, and very funny. In 1978 Newlove revised them into a single paperback titled Sweet Adversity. His fiction was important to me when I was drinking and in my early years of sobriety. Consider Newlove an amusing and bittersweet alternative to Malcolm Lowry.