'An Author Who Inspires Such Perennial Affection'

“This impossibly erudite, overbearing, tender, and anguished man lived in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with himself which only disciplined labor could allay but never completely still.” 

In their moral and emotional complexity, certain lives resemble the finest novels – those by Tolstoy, for instance. Consider my reader in Scotland who wrote this week to tell me he is reading War and Peace again after forty years. He might be describing his reaction to events in the lives of family members or close friends:   

 

“Today I took a boat from Tarbert to Lochranza in Arran to visit an old friend. It was an hour and a half both ways. . . . I read the hunting scene of the Rostovs one way and the visit to the Uncle’s house on the way back. . . . As I read on the way home the description of the Uncle’ s house, the serfs, the Lady of the house, the music and dancing, and above all the marvellous Natasha; all of this was so perfect and real that I couldn't stop the tears falling. I have not experienced reading like this since my youth. These characters were more real to me than the people around me.”

 

Thoughtful readers of Tolstoy – or James, or Proust -- know the feeling. In the passage at the top, Eric Ormsby is describing Dr. Johnson in his review of Johnson on the English Language (eds. Gwin Kolb and Robert Demaria Jr., Yale University Press, 2005). It’s a book I ordered when it was published, despite the $85 price tag. Johnson’s abiding interest among modern readers can be attributed, in part, to his literary gift but also, thanks largely to Boswell, to his life and personality which defy ready understanding. In his review Ormsby writes:   

 

“I’ve loved Johnson’s writings and – presumptuously enough – Johnson himself, as he comes through in the biographies of Boswell and Walter Jackson Bate, for as long as I can remember. He’s an author who inspires such perennial affection.”

 

Why is this? Few are inspired to such love for other writers, even great ones like Swift and Landor. The answer, I suspect, is not entirely flattering to Johnson’s readers. Johnson was like us, only more so. He could be ferocious. His fear of death was overpowering. He was ungainly, as inelegant in manner as his prose was elegant in its gravitas. Johnson was sick, guilt-ridden and depressed, but equally hard-working (though sorely tempted by idleness), gifted and compassionate. He recognized his weaknesses and wrestled with them daily. His life was laborious, not easeful. This accounts for Johnson’s enduring attractiveness to us as man and writer. With his wracked sense of humility, he never claimed to transcend the human lot. His weakness was ours. He was like us, but brilliantly, articulately so.

 

Boswell recounts a breakfast on Jun 11, 1784. Johnson is seventy-four and had suffered a stroke one year earlier. He has just told his friends he once contemplated assembling an anthology of prayer accompanied by an essay on the subject, and his tablemates encourage him to take up the task:

 

“He seemed to be a little displeased at the manner of our importunity, and in great agitation called out, ‘Do not talk thus of what is so awful. I know not what time God will allow me in this world. There are many things which I wish to do.’ Some of us persisted, and Dr. Adams said, ‘I never was more serious about anything in my life.’ JOHNSON: ‘Let me alone, let me alone; I am overpowered.’ And then he put his hands before his face, and reclined for some time upon the table.”

 

Johnson died on this date, December 13, in 1784 at age seventy-five.