Hello again,
My early years in New York were not exactly suffused with references to Samuel Johnson. One of the few times I can remember him coming up in an actual human conversation took place in the early ‘90s when I was going out with a guy who, as a college student, had been nominated for a Rhodes scholarship. As part of the process, he had been subjected to a barrage of pretentious questions from a panel of people at a hotel in Connecticut. One of the questions these people asked him was, did he want to be the Samuel Johnson of his age?
I thought a lot of things upon hearing this. I thought it suddenly seemed quite possible that students from Harvard, where my boyfriend had gone to college, learned more impressive stuff than students at other schools. I thought, no wonder I never got a Rhodes, or even a Rhodes interview, or even an interview for a Rhodes interview. I thought, if anyone asked me that, my only possible response would be, “Huh?” (As it happened, he didn’t get the Rhodes–he did want to be the Samuel Johnson of his age, or he didn’t, I can’t remember, but it was the wrong answer–but went on to live a fulfilling and successful life anyway.)
Six years ago, I moved to London. And suddenly, my life was no longer a Samuel Johnson-free zone. Dr. Johnson, as he’s always referred to with reverence among his spiritual and national descendants here, was quoted often, particularly his lines about London (“When a man his tired of London he is tired of life”) and about marriage. (Of a man’s second marriage, after the end of his unhappy first one, Johnson said it was “the triumph of hope over experience.”) And whenever the newspapers printed lists of all-time favorite books, The Life of Samuel Johnson invariably was included.
Now that I know more about him, I realize that his psychological influence on the British intelligentsia– the male ones, that is–still casts a long shadow down through the centuries. (I’m going to make sweeping generalizations about an entire group of people here, but of course, so did Johnson.) The model of him sitting around at a pub or a dinner table holding forth on one topic after another–bang, bang, bang, as if the topics are targets and his job is to knock them from the air with his verbal rifle, one deft shot at a time–seems deeply embedded in the psyche of Brits of a certain ilk. They love to score verbal points and to argue late into the night in a much more antagonistic (and drink-fueled) way than I’m used to. They’d rather be interesting than agreeable.
These men are also inclined to argue for the sake of argument, as an intellectual exercise, as Johnson does. (He even admits to Boswell that he’s not averse to arguing the side of a point he doesn’t believe in, just to prevent the conversation from lapsing into tedious agreement.) Older men who are considered witty and amusing can also get away, as Johnson did, with being total slobs–dressed in slovenly clothes, behaving boorishly, exhibiting unspeakable personal hygiene. They can be sloppy and rude and spill things and make pests of themselves. They can be rude in print and supercilious in person, but it doesn’t matter as long as they are sharp and funny and quotable.
But Johnson is also a man for his times, and even in today’s London he would run into trouble because of his political incorrectness. I use that loaded term deliberately. It’s been so overrused in the United States that the New York Times doesn’t let us employ it, except in extreme cases (or in direct quotations). In Britain, it’s constantly bandied about by the right–as a bogeyman that has suffused society, turning it into nation of people forced to use euphemisms and scared to tell the truth about foreigners, welfare recipients, criminals, minorities, women, etc. Johnson, I’m sure, would be feted here by the Euroskeptic Tories, not only for insisting on speaking Latin when he was in France but for what they would consider his thoroughly welcome penchant for speaking his mind, for dispensing insults like pleasantries, and for daring to express outrageous opinions–like the conviction that women who had affairs, even if their husbands had been cheating on them for years, were no better than whores.
For any time, Johnson was a rare creature, though: a sublime conversational performer who was also a true intellectual. There are lots of things that thoroughly irritated me about him. But in the end, I liked the man who, as he related in a letter to a friend, reacted to the temporary loss of his ability to speak after a minor stroke by thinking in Latin:
I was alarmed, and prayed God, that however he might afflict my body, he would spare my understanding. This prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse. The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good: I made them easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.
What else does he do, in his final, painful, dying months? He keeps a journal of his ailments, in Latin, and he passes the time by reading Euripides. Now there’s a Rhodes scholar.
This has been great fun–can’t wait to see what we turn up next.
Sarah
