'Once Read, Always Known'

“He is almost as important to me as Shakespeare, and I think of him almost as the second most important writer in English, absurd as that might sound.” 

I am always surprised and gratified when someone expresses a conviction I thought was mine alone, as though my privacy had been wire-tapped with my approval. Literature is a public art, only fulfilled when writer and reader collaborate, yet our understanding of books, the way we claim some as our own and cherish them, is utterly subjective. Their status in our lives is a private preserve beyond mere opinion, fashion and criticism.

 

Henry Oliver is writing, of course, about Samuel Johnson. What other writer in English might be fitted into his formulation? For some, Keats or Dickens, I suppose. Perhaps Swift or Austen. Let it go at this: such devotion and identification is always rare. It’s more than “liking” a writer or being a “fan.” Oliver writes:

 

“As with the greatest poets, there are lines of Johnson’s that I have never forgotten, even though I never tried to remember them. He has the quality of the highest writing: once read, always known. He is known to me like a real person and I keep the images and ideas of him that I have accreted over the years with me wherever I go.”

 

What such writers share is a universal humanity that might be appreciated by any reader, combined with some personal quality – a moral stance, a way with words, learning out of the ordinary – that sounds a chord within us. They inspire the love and loyalty we might feel for flesh and blood. Oliver tells us Johnson thought books “ought to be useful to life.” But not in some reductively utilitarian sense:

 

“Thus,” Oliver writes, “his aphorisms: ‘Books without knowledge of life are useless; for what should books teach but the art of living?’ and ‘The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.’ These ideas stand bright and clear against all the great mass of critical and scholarly writing that has been produced in the English tradition since Johnson.”

 

I can no longer read my Penguin paperback edition of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) I was assigned by an English professor in 1971. The pages are brown and brittle, the spine is broken and the whole mess is held together with a rubber band. I keep it for sentimental reasons, as one of my entrées to Johnson’s work. The same professor introduced me to Boswell’s Life. Some years ago I acquired Vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, in the “Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.” It’s a sturdy hard cover, built for rereading.

 

I love the exchange in Chap. 11, “Imlac’s Narrative (Continued)—a Hint of Pilgrimage.” Imlac tells the prince, “There is so much infelicity in the world, that scarce any man has leisure from his own distresses to estimate the comparative happiness of others.” He enumerates “the particular comforts of life” enjoyed by Europeans. Rasselas replies: “They are surely happy who have all these conveniences, of which I envy none so much as the facility with which separated friends interchange their thoughts.” Imlac gets the last word in the chapter: “The Europeans are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed,” which suggests the human condition has changed very little after three centuries.

 

Start anywhere with Johnson. You can hardly go wrong. I might suggest a selection of his periodical essays, especially The Rambler. Or his version of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Or browse in his Dictionary. “This is supposed to be an introduction to Johnson,” Oliver writes, “but you do not need a guide to his works, or a list of which order to read them in. You need to find your own way.

 

This Friday, September 18, we will observe Johnson’s 317^th birthday.