I thought, for a time, that I had found my Bofwell.
He was Tommy G. Bofwell, a 6-9 forward out of South Carolina and a 1975 1ft-round draft pick of the Bofton Celtics, an athletic organization whofe doings I followed to a fault.
I was a teenager then, and therefore not faying or doing much that I thought worth recording, efpecially if my parents were going to be privy to the record. But it occurred to me that by the time I reached adulthood, by the time I had exchanged a fafcination with beer and the antics of enlarged men for a life of the mind, the modern-day Bofwell might be perfuaded to follow me around and record obfeffively my witticifms and examples of penetrating infight, much as an earlier Bofwell had done in dogging an earlier S. Johnfon (refulting, of courfe, in ”Life of Samuel Johnfon,” thought among the beft biographies ever).
Alas, my plan-haphazardly-laid, I admit-fell to ruin almost as quickly as the notion of approximating 18th-century typography throughout an entire newspaper story. The 20th Century Boswell averaged 8.4 points per game during his 5 years in the National Basketball Association and then disappeared from public sight, even before I had finished high school. I do not know where he is now, although I suppose he could, even as this is being written, be reveling in the company of a more promising candidate for biography.
Meanwhile, my intellectual blossoming has gone about as well as Boswell`s pro career. The insights I achieve are on the order of discerning that a larger can of supermarket tomato sauce is not always cheaper, per ounce, than a smaller can (although this is often the case). And of my wit, the following can be said: Presenting myself at the threshold of the Algonquin Hotel dining room, I would be ushered to a square table.
Each day, it becomes increasingly evident that I can make no claim to being an heir of any sort to Samuel Johnson, although it is a comfort to realize that, in one respect, he might not think me a complete dolt: ”No man but a blockhead,” Johnson said, ”ever wrote except for money.”
This lack in me is likely more clear to no one than the three University of Chicago scholars with whom I dined recently-at, it should be pointed out, a table with straight edges in the University`s Quadrangle Club.
These men-Gwin Kolb, Stuart Sherman and Bruce Redford-have devoted most of their academic lives to studying Sam (as he signed his letters) Johnson and his era. As I took notes and nodded in a Boswellian manner, they spoke with passion of the things that make this 18th Century Englishman an author for the ages.
”He was the most versatile writer in English literature,” said Redford, an associate professor at work on a 5-volume edition of Johnson`s 1,600 letters, three volumes of which will be published in December. ”He was essayist, poet, biographer, journalist, diarist and letter-writer.”
A portion of Johnson`s epitaph for the writer Oliver Goldsmith-he
”touched nothing that he did not adorn”-could easily be applied to Johnson, Redford said. ”He`s a writer who never shirks the most important issues of life, and he`s a writer that one turns to for clarification and consolation in the most important crises of life,” he added.
”Even a person who doesn`t give a hoot about his writing,” said Kolb, a professor emeritus and editor of a new edition of ”Rasselas,” a moral and philosophical fable Johnson published to make money to pay for his mother`s funeral, ”is sort of fascinated by this man who somehow or other held body and soul together for 75 years.”
Kolb pointed out that Johnson, before his death in 1784, suffered from scrofula (a kind of tuberculosis), shaky mental health, a facial tic, a tendency to talk aloud to himself in public, a stroke, constipation, unrequited love or at least enamorment, and an unceasing guilt at his perpetual writerly procrastination. For good measure, added Kolb, ”it is now believed he had emphysema.”
Yet despite being a virtual one-man medical textbook, he managed to write the great dictionary that earned him the contemporary nickname ”Dictionary Johnson,” Shakespearean criticism and commentary that is still cited, and, as a newspaper columnist, hundreds of essays that sparkle with pearls of wisdom set amid crystalline reason.
And then there was Johnson`s ”Lives of the Poets,” of which Kolb said,
”It is quite remarkable for anybody to have written over 50 lives combining biography and criticism and have those lives and those critical pronouncements still being discussed. I think it was (T.S.) Eliot who said once, `Johnson is a tough man to disbelieve`-though he put it in probably a more polished way than I have.”
Inexhaustible news
That the three chose to talk about Johnson in a club was not, I think, an accident. In his 41,000-definition ”Dictionary,” Johnson defined a club as
”an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions,” and he tended to judge a man by whether or not he was ”clubbable”-which is to say, capable of conducting a conversation and an evening with aplomb.
”Most 18th Century scholars must at some point imagine themselves as gathered around a table, exchanging the high art of conversation,”
acknowledged Sherman, a 37-year-old assistant professor who has recently been passed a baton of some heft, an event which was the erstwhile occasion for our meeting.
After one more issue is published out of Columbia University in New York, Sherman will take over the editorship of the Johnsonian News Letter, an enterprise that turned 50 last year and claims to have been the first such effort devoted to a single writer.
Through the years the newsletter has noted, along with more strictly scholarly doings, that Johnson`s longtime house in London was burned during World War II, but not as a result of a German bomb and, ”fortunately,” not irreparably; that an issue is produced about four times a year, not according to a calendar but to when ”the editor`s file becomes too fat to fit into a drawer”; that a play called ”Bozzy: An Evening of Carnality, Calvinism, Claret and Conviviality with Dr. Johnson`s Biographer” was mounted in Edinburgh; and that ”we know librarians . . . will never forgive us for the inexcusable shift in size from 8 1/2×11 to 5 1/2×8 1/2 right in the middle of volume five. The change was necessitated by our move from Bethlehem, Pa. to New York city, and we are unrepentant.”
It will be, Sherman realizes, an enormous amount of work, but, as the husband of one journalist (the Tribune`s Sharman Stein) and the ”fan” of another, sometime practitioner (Johnson), ”I`m fascinated by the idea of a steady rhythm of writing. Academics don`t usually have that . . . And one of the pleasures of working on it (as a graduate student at Columbia) was that while you work on it, you know about everything that`s going on. It`s not a tiny field, but it`s a finite field.”
Consummate conversation
It can be said that the News Letter, with its, for academia, folky manner, functions as a sort of club, or clubhouse, for Johnson scholars, collectors and the many non-academics who are devotees.
In his day, Johnson cofounded one of the most illustrious clubs ever, calling it, as though the luminaries on its rolls needed no amplification, simply ”the Club.” And indeed, its membership included any number of men who would go on to people encyclopedias: Goldsmith, the actor David Garrick, the economist Adam Smith, the painter Joshua Reynolds, the statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke, the historian Edward Gibbons, and, eventually, the roguish Scotsman and Johnson biographer James Boswell.
Even in august company, however, it was Johnson who dominated, with his talent for cutting a conversation to the bone. ”He talked for victory,”
wrote Boswell.
Indeed, if, in the time of televison, a man of letters can be said to have a public image, Johnson`s tends to be as a sort of precursor to Dorothy Parker: a deliverer extraordinaire of bons mots and a man whom you would not want to debate.
”I think that I would have been very uneasy in the company of this person,” said Kolb, a mannerly Southerner who admits to cleaning up the language when he tells his students of Johnson`s famous pronouncement, related by Garrick in more vulgar terms, that the greatest pleasure in life is
”(sexual intercourse) and the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho` all could not (have sexual intercourse).”
”The initial impression of him, if you weren`t in the circle,” Kolb said, ”would be someone who was arrogant, gruff, positively rude on occasion.”
A wrong turn
There is considerable justification for the view of Johnson as wit and, more specifically, as sharp wit. It was, after all, he who said:
– Hell is paved with good intentions.
– Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.
– I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
– It is better to live rich, than to die rich.
– He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.
Having come up with any one of these things would satisfy many writers, but in Johnson, and especially in Boswell`s ”Life of Johnson,” pithy clevernesses are legion.
And it is due to, of all things, a book review that the image of Johnson as talker more than writer persists. In 1831, Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, published his review of a new edition of the ”Life.”
Kolb summed up the essence of ”that notorious review,” all the more ifluential because a portion of it appeared for many years in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, as follows: ” `The writings: no good, they`re dying, soon to be forgotten. The conversation: wonderful, immortal.` ”
”It`s a brilliant piece of rhetoric, but a total caricature,” said Redford. ”Part of its brilliance is that it doesn`t proclaim itself to be a caricature. You think, `This is internally consistent, and Macaulay has got a finger on the key.` And therefore it stopped several generations of readers from exploring Johnson`s works on their own.”
Since the explosion of 18th-Century scholarship beginning early in this century-an explosion that the founding of the News Letter acknowledged-the academic world, at least, has come to realize how great a disservice Macaulay did Johnson, they said.
”What Boswell did was to give people a sense that behind this formidable writer, there was a man who was tremendously good company,” said Sherman.
”You tumble into Johnson through Boswell and find the company so exhilarating that when you discover there`s more of it-to the tune of 25 volumes by Johnson-you go to it and often end there.
”I would say that the glorius surprise is his immense empathy with human frailty and with capacities for self-delusion. So that when he writes about procrastination or boredom or idleness, the surprise is that someone who is so in tune with these self-disappointments is also writing about them with some energy.”
Fuming over the Falklands
Although he has an image as a Tory and a conservative, Johnson, they emphasized, could be found siding with the Indians in North America and against Britain going to war for mercantile reasons in the faraway Falkland Islands, an essay that was reprinted and widely reread during Britain`s modern Falklands war. And there is, functioning throughout all his work, a compass pointing to moral north, even when he is acknowledging human frailty.
His humanity-and much of what makes him endearing and enduring-is brought out in a most personal way in the melancholy of his celebrated last paragraph of the preface to the dictionary, a work that, like so many of his writings, was, in Kolb`s phrase, ”a bookseller`s project” for which Johnson was the hired pen:
”… The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst
inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. . .
”I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”
So it is with this newspaper story, which I release bearing it some malignity (a favorite Johnson word herein nominated for revival) and fearing that I have not demonstrated the necessary scrupulosity (another one). If you happen to be reading this, Tom Boswell, mark well that for it I got paid.
