'Nobody to Witness Its Effects Upon Me'

Johnson, Boswell and friends met for dinner at the Crown and Anchor on April 12, 1776. Among the topics of conversation was the evergreen favorite “whether drinking improved conversation and benevolence.” Sir Joshua Reynolds maintained it did. Johnson replies:

 

“‘No, Sir: before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority, have the modesty not to talk. When they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous: but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.’”

 

My experience confirms this. In conversation, the only thing more insufferable than a know-it-all is a drunken know-it-all. Alcohol creates experts. Otherwise modest fellows suddenly start thinking they know what they’re talking about. When one or more meet, arguments ensue, fistfights, bail bondsmen. Reynolds disagrees and Johnson replies:   

 

“‘No, Sir; wine gives not light, gay, ideal hilarity; but tumultuous, noisy, clamorous merriment. I have heard none of those drunken,—nay, drunken is a coarse word,—none of those VINOUS flights.’”

 

And Reynolds responds more personally: “‘Because you have sat by, quite sober, and felt an envy of the happiness of those who were drinking.’”

 

It was the late novelist Donald Newlove who first suggested to me that Johnson may have been in his earlier years an alcoholic or at least a “problem drinker” (that anxiety-easing euphemism). In Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981), a meditation on the writing/alcohol connection, Newlove 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.”

 

To clarify that he is not issuing a blanket condemnation of alcohol or its effects – basically, not wishing to sound like a moralistic wet blanket -- Johnson says:

 

“Sir, it is not necessary to be drunk one’s self, to relish the wit of drunkenness. Do we not judge of the drunken wit, of the dialogue between Iago and Cassio, the most excellent in its kind, when we are quite sober? Wit is wit, by whatever means it is produced; and, if good, will appear so at all times. I admit that the spirits are raised by drinking, as by the common participation of any pleasure: cock-fighting, or bear-baiting, will raise the spirits of a company, as drinking does, though surely they will not improve conversation. I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten.”

 

I knew guys who were diffident dullards when sober and sparkling entertainers when drunk, at least for a short time, until the demons took over. Some recognized their transformation, drank greater quantities and more often,  and turned into bums or wet brains. Fellow drinkers deemed them weaklings, failed drinkers. Alcoholics are hard on their own kind. Johnson describes my style of drinking:

“‘Sir, I do not say it is wrong to produce self complacency by drinking; I only deny that it improves the mind. When I drank wine, I scorned to drink it when in company. I have drunk many a bottle by myself; in the first place, because I had need of it to raise my spirits; in the second place, because I would have nobody to witness its effects upon me.’”

 

I’m reminded of a wisecrack attributed to Dylan Thomas: “An alcoholic is someone who drinks as much as I do whom I don’t like.”