'The Censure of Knaves and Fools'

“Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sense of gloomy wretchedness.” 

And that’s just from the introduction to his Life of Johnson. Anyone who dismisses James Boswell as a sort of idiot savant, “a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect,” as Macaulay famously wrote of him, is naïve about human nature. Boswell is describing Dr. Johnson’s father, Michael (1657-1731), an excellent bookman, a good father and a poor businessman in Lichfield.

 

I found the Boswell passage above in a most unexpected place: as the epigraph to David Mamet’s most recent book, Everywhere an Oink Oink (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which carries one of those fashionably long subtitles, presumably concocted by an editor: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood. I like Mamet’s prose. He’s a master of the American Demotic. He’s funny, smart and uninhibited. I’ve never seen one of his plays on the stage but I enjoyed three movies he wrote and directed: House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997).

 

I haven’t yet started reading the book but I wanted to see if Mamet develops the Boswellian or Johnsonian theme. In the index there is a single reference to to Johnson -- nine paragraphs of footnote on Page 174.The first begins “For the artist all criticism is devastating . . .”  Here’s part of the fourth:

 

“Samuel Johnson said the censure of knaves and fools is applause: a phrase rendered in the vernacular as ‘Fuck ’em all but six for pallbaearers, and fuck them, too.’”