Notes on Dead End Reading

The Pilgrimage to Parnassus; The Return from Parnassus (c. 1598-1602)

A series of plays put on at St John's College, Cambridge around the end of the Elizabethan period, as part of their Christmas festivities, though they are not about Christmas. They are about a couple of students who decide to make their way in the world as poets, and the predictable indifference, humiliation, and poverty that befall them when they set out to do this. There is some comfort in being reminded that the problem of impractical young people with liberal arts degrees leaving school without any prospects for obtaining an income, nor any realization of how one might ever go about developing any did not just spring up in the last 20 years. Maybe these kinds of schools, which ironically seem to be most emotionally necessary as a pleasant refuge during youth from the otherwise pitiless business of real life for the less successful of their graduates, will continue to sputter along in some form, in spite of even the most well-meaning, though mistaken efforts to kill them off and spare these more hopeless graduates from what is perceived to be the source of all of their perceived subsequent misery.

The plays themselves are hard going at times to read--I guess they have not been edited so as to be made intelligible to modern readers, assuming that can be done, and there are lots of references to people and inside jokes and slang that doubtless meant something to the assembled audience but can signify nothing to me. There are numerous references to contemporary as well as historical English poets (i.e. Chaucer), including Shakespeare, which accounts in some part for its historical interest. Shakespeare is identified only as a poet and the author of the Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. His plays I did not notice as being referenced at all, though even by 1598 a good part of the comedies and histories would already have been written.

It could be interesting if it could be made more intelligible, I guess, though even most of the experts seem to be of the opinion that only the middle play (the first part of The Return) contains any real literary value.

Philippics--Cicero (44-43 B.C.)

This was the first Cicero I had ever read, and I am well into my forties. My education has been light on the Romans, so he is not the last of them that I have yet to read either (all in translation, of course, which I know scarcely counts anyway). These writings, being purportedly the transcripts of orations, are much different in tone from those of other classical authors with which I am familiar, having much more raw agitation and hostility in them. Of course Cicero here is an active partisan politician who has to sway the wavering opinions of, if not precisely a mob, a body of senators. I suppose I was expecting the style of delivery and the subject matter to be grander, less earthbound.

The Young Cicero Reading--Vicenzo Foppa (1464)

The fourteen Philippics are denunciations of Mark Antony, who at this time following the assassination of Julius Caesar was out of the city seeking military allies and in Cicero's opinion carrying on the worst of the dead Caesar's transgressions against the traditions of the old Republic. It is a different view of Antony than we usually get from both classical and post-renaissance literature. His arrogance, which in other depictions is usually presented with a heavy emphasis on vanity, here is expressed as of a more dangerous and willful quality. He is ambitious, a driver of events and a leader, of sorts anyway. I didn't previously think of him (based mainly on Plutarch and all the Shakespeare and Cleopatra plays) as a man capable of rousing this degree of anger and condemnation as a main target in himself, separate from his association with other people or events that are greater than he is.

I did not read this all that well. I suppose it is possible that the entire book is not great as a whole (various of the individual Philippics, especially the second, seem to be considered more important than the whole collection), maybe the translation did not perfectly capture the mood of high excitement and historical seriousness. I also have the sense that the Orations against Catiline (which Cicero himself, reliving that glory, references dozens of times in the course of the Philippics) are the essential Ciceronian reading. In any case he demands a more serious consideration than I seem to be able to give him at present.

Ben Jonson's Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden (1618-19)

There is not much conversation here, on Drummond's part anyway, and what was recorded was mostly snippets--what would become popularly known as table talk--of Ben Jonson's observations, which amounted to 58 printed pages, most of which were more than half taken up with footnotes. The impression given is that there was not much in the way of give and take between Drummond and his guest, but that their talk consisted mostly of Jonson making pronouncements in a vaguely bullying manner. I don't remember much of this, either. Obviously I have reached the point where it is pointless for me to read any more. I am struck by so little of it, and as you can see I have trouble even putting my most simple general observations into words at this point. But I would have to take up some other pursuit to fill the time--I still can't just spend all my waking hours doing laundry and dishes, but maybe I am being ground down to the state where that is all I will be capable of doing--and I still desperately want to have some communication with the reasonably intelligent (and socially relevant) part of the world, and I don't know how else I can achieve this than by some attempt at producing content.

Drummond of Hawthornden

Tour of the Hebrides--Boswell (1773)

Not included in most editions of the Life of Johnson, this comparatively under-celebrated work is a book-sized bonus treat for people like me who are fans of this lively duo and their exploits in the social and literary society of their day. Johnson wrote his own account of this famous trip as well, which is one last further treat for me to look forward to, assuming I ever get around to reading it.

This is the edition I read.

I ordered my copy of this book online, and as sometimes happens with older memoir-type books, the edition I received was not the edited and polished standard one that all of the professors and other critics who have promoted the book as great are primarily thinking of, but the rougher version of the tour as it appeared in Boswell's journals. Nothing was left out as far as the major episodes of the trip went; on several occasions where pages of the journal had gone missing, the editors filled in the missing parts with the text from the printed Tour. These finished excerpts were far superior from a reading standpoint to the journal account, giving off much of the same high-spiritedness and humor of the Life itself, and I kind of wish now I had abandoned my edition entirely and found a copy of the traditional printed Tour. The journal was by no means a bad read, and almost certainly was more representative of what the trip was like on a day to day basis. There were numerous passages in it detailing parts of the trip where Johnson especially was bored and restless on account of the inferior level of education and dull conversation of many of the people they encountered, which provoked in him some rather harsh and decidedly unforgiving observations with regard to the limitations that several of their hosts and new acquaintances had revealed. My impression from the scholarly notes is that most of this material was either left out of the published version, or softened so as to appear more in a humorous and flattering light. And I think this was a good idea, as much of the special quality of these Johnson books come from the atmosphere of heightened intellectual alertness and drama that the scenes in them evoke. The life and conversation in them is far more entertaining and captivating than anything that ever occurs in real time, while plausibly resembling reality (if nothing else, the contrast between the journal and the published book reminds the reader of the art that is essential even in the production of a ostensibly non-fiction account to give it this sheen of heightened reality); but I realize more and more that it is these appearances of life heightened and made more consistently intense and significant and exhilirating that I seek in reading and other artistic entertainment.   

Was Andrew Jackson a Good President?

(The malware crisis seems to have abated? I will try it.)

(The last sentence was earlier in the week. It seems to be back now. Unfortunately I have already started the next post on this account).

(This assumes that any president has ever been, or could be good, which the free and untamed men of the internet and elsewhere would knowingly insist has never occurred).

It seems like no one whose authority would be credible ever wants to come out and say definitively 'yes' or 'no' to the question above. If there is a consensus among learned people concerning the matter, I couldn't tell you what it was, though my sense is that they probably think he was too important in too many ways to be dismissed, but are uncomfortable to appear to extoll him too much, if at all. He was obviously a man of superior energy and leadership capability who set the country on a distinct path in its youth that it may not otherwise have embarked on so thoroughly, and which in world-historical political terms reaped astonishing benefits in terms of power and affluence, and whose personal character influenced and colored that of the nation itself for generations after his own time. He is a man however who always made the more delicate-spirited members of the intellectual class uncomfortable to contemplate, and today not merely his racial attitudes but his extreme personal harshness generally make it difficult for us to regard him as a person to whom we owe any homage at all, let alone consider him one of the greatest of all our countrymen. Yet for all that we want to think we have moved beyond needing this type of character at this stage of our history, it is hard to read about him and not be struck by the thought that we could sure use someone--provided he or she was on 'our' side--to emerge from the population in our own time who was possessed of certain of his qualities, namely the purposefulness and decisiveness in action, and the ability to lead and inspire and represent some vital segment of the population.

In reading over old historical accounts of Jackson--most of the history books in my library date from the 1940s to the 60s--one is struck by the pervasiveness of the word 'hate' in describing Jackson's attitude on any number of issues. He hated Spain. He hated Eastern bankers, and urban sophisticates generally. He hated John C. Calhoun. He hated the assumption of privilege where he considered it to be unearned (I know everyone hates this, but Jackson actually called people on it). He had a volatile and explosive temper. He fought duels and had men hanged, in his military career, with a minimum of deliberation or anguish. His racism, if that word even begins to describe his attitude towards black people and Indians in the context of contemporary enlightened thought, along with the other negative qualities enumerated above, will probably be the dominant ingredients in any consideration of his career for a large proportion of the modern educated population. That he was the most popular, galvanizing, and perhaps the most fearless political leader of his age (though it seems to have been an age that from our vantage was unusually blessed, or cursed, with fearlessness) perhaps comes to seem trivial in comparison.

His energy and personal popularity remind me of Theodore Roosevelt, who remains a fairly well-liked figure in our history, in spite of, and doubtless in some cases because of, his by our standards more outrageous bloviations about race, the place of women, manliness, and the like. Both men became the political champions of movements that perceived, almost ferociously, to have righteousness and the tide of history on their side. Edman (Irwin, early 20th century psychologist), made a few observations about Roosevelt's career in his book (Human Traits and Their Social Significance, 1920):

Under the section "Pugnacity as a beneficent social force":

"Part of Theodore Roosevelt's power was in his picturesque phrasing of political issues as if they were great moral struggles. No one could forget, or fail to have his heart beat a trifle faster at Roosevelt's trumpet call in the 1912 campaign: 'We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.'...Astute political leaders have not failed to capitalize the fighting instinct, and any social project will enlist the wider enthusiasm and the more energetic support if it is hailed as a battle or fight against somebody or something."

And later on, under the section "Enthusiasm" ('Enthusiasm is as ubiquitous a word in writings about Theodore Roosevelt as 'hate' is in those about Andrew Jackson):

"Leaders of great movements who have been successful in controlling the energies and loyalties of millions of men have been frequently men of this high and contagious voltage. It certainly constituted part of Theodore Roosevelt's political strength, and, in more or less genuine form, is the asset of every successful political speaker and leader."

Jackson appears to have partaken in his time of these qualities also. It is clear, by the way, that while I have some difficulty conceiving of how emotions were communicated to his base of support in those remote times with its technologically primitive media and means of communication, that the communication may have been more effective, and acted more vigorously upon those receiving it, than what prevails in our time. His ascent, and the multitude of deeds of derring-do that marked the way, I still find, when I think about it in the habitual and predominant way of narrative in which I consider things, to be a thrilling and inspiring story taken in its own simple context, and a testament to what men growing up with the freedom of self-determination that existed on the old frontier could make of themselves. His personal determination to break up the big banks (and the imposition of regulations which, if I understand correctly, lasted well into my own lifetime), ultimately successful, to anyone living through these times cannot fail to make an impression. This policy is often blamed for the Panic of 1837, a depression which brought about real hardship in the years right after Jackson left office, and most money-savvy people in today's world I sense highly disapprove of Jackson's views on economics. Most of the midcentury histories seem to be of the opinion that this action benefited the country in the long run. I am sure something of this sort is what most diehard liberals were imagining/hoping that Obama or the Clintons were going to do to the health insurance companies. Many people seem to think we are entering a centuries long period where corporate interests will be incontestable and lord over the common people with an iron and pitiless sway, and certainly they seem to have developed more sophisticated mechanisms for making sure no one acquires the political strength to restrain them, but at bottom all of these entities are just people, and eventually someone, or some faction, will emerge who is strong enough to contend with them on behalf of the interest of the public, or some section of the public that is rising in strength, and one or other of these powerful interests will have so long outlived its usefulness as to be mortally weakened in spite of all appearances. Shocks and dislocations need not always be generated from one direction...

Obviously I have not come any closer to understanding whether Jackson was a good president or not, because I no longer know my own criteria for judging such matters.

I was rereading some Boswell lately, and came across this passage that, sadly, fairly well describes myself these days:

"Johnson lamented to Mr. Hector the state of one of their school-fellows, Mr. Charles Congreve, a clergyman, which he thus described...'He confesses to one bottle of port every day, and he probably drinks more. He is quite unsocial; his conversation is quite monosyllabical; and when, at my last visit, I asked him what o'clock it was? that signal of my departure had so pleasing an effect on him, that he sprung up to look at his watch, like a greyhound bounding at a hare.' When Johnson took leave of Mr. Hector, he said, 'Don't grow like Congreve; nor let me grow like him, when you are near me.'"

Not that the malware infection has come back, after a two day virus, this may again be the last post on the site. I will have to see how things stand when I take up my next topic.

Ambrose Philips--First Pastoral (1709)

Samuel Johnson, when given the task of writing the life of Ambrose Philips, dispatched of the subject--and dispatched is definitely the operative word--in eight pages. Of the Pastorals, he says they "might have long passed as a pleasing amusement, had they not been unhappily too much commended"; of Philips's career as a whole, that "he has added nothing to English poetry, yet at least half his book deserves to be read." Philips was friends with and of the same (Whig) political faction, passions being especially feverish at the time on both sides, as Addison and Steele, who praised and promoted his literary efforts in the Spectator and other of their papers. From around 1709-13 he was "high in the ranks of literature. His play (The Distressed Mother, "almost a translation of Racine's Andromaque") was applauded; his translations from Sappho had been published in The Spectator; he was an important and distinguished associate of clubs witty and political...", and for a time the mortal archenemy of the then very young and brash Pope. His fame faded quickly. He brought out a couple of tragedies in 1722, The Briton and Humphry Duke of Gloucester, the first of which, Johnson wrote in 1778-9, was "now neglected" and the second "only remembered by its title." In 1726 Philips took a position as Secretary to Lord Chancellor in Ireland, and went on to be a Prerogative Judge and an MP for Ireland--all patronage jobs, of course, before returning to his native country a year before he died of a palsy at age 74 in 1749. He does not seem to have added much substantial writing to his corpus during the last 27 years of his life.

Picture 1. There are no pictures of Ambrose Philips in circulation on the internet that I can find. A search for his name turns up these girls, among other unrelated things. I have a tendency to linger sometimes over the biographical details of such writers as I come across who once had a name and for a time a not insignificant place among the leading lights of their day, but had already faded into near total obscurity in the consciousness of the world long before they died. That I have read Philips's short book--the whole poem is about 20 pages long--myself is a matter of mere dumb luck. There is a passage from the poem in the GRE book which I take my reading list from which is not identified--the purpose of the question is to identify what type of poem the various selections are, lyric, elegiac, pastoral, etc. If it weren't for the internet, which the book I use predates, I would never have found out where it was from, and indeed, could not have read it, for I have never seen a copy of it in print anywhere, and the copy which is reproduced online looks to be the edition which Johnson wrote the prefaces for (I would link to it, but the URL is the length of a city block). While it is a much abused work, and probably not really worth reading unless you are undergoing a kind of lifelong graduate program in English literature, I liked it. To read it is not to get an especially vivid picture of a singular personality, or even of an historical period, but it does help to fill in one's sense of what the background was like, and against and out of which the striking literature and historical movements of the time arose.

A small selection of my favorite lines:

45-6: "The jolly grooms I fly, and all alone/To rocks and woods pour forth my fruitless moan"

73-76: "Nor will I cease betimes to cull the fields
Of every dewy sweet the morning yields:
From early spring to autumn late shalt thou
Receive gay girlonds, blooming o'er thy brow."
In Facebook parlance, I noted that I liked this.

53-4, we get the usual stuff of the genre, though the forgiving reader welcomes it as an old acquaintance so long as it is one he only has to come across once in a while:

"Thy virgin-bloom will not forever stay,
And flowers, though left ungather'd, will decay..."

A couple I found humorous:

23-6: "And now the moon begins in clouds to rise;
The brightening stars increase within the skies;
The winds are hush; the dews distil; and sleep
Hath clos'd the eyelids of my weary sheep..."

105-8: "O, killing beauty! and O, sore desire!
Must then my sufferings, but with life, expire?
Though blossoms every year the trees adorn,
Spring after spring I wither, nipt with scorn..."

A little of this is rather pleasant in small doses, with one's ice cream or snifter of brandy before bed.

Picture 2. This is the Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street in Mayfair, London, where Philips was, and I presume still is, buried, though you never know (Laurence Sterne's grave, for example, was relocated in the late 1960s when they paved over the cemetery where he had orignally been laid). I haven't been there, but either the angle is good or that is one nice-looking street for modern-day London.

In the competitive and manly world of 18th century English poetry, Philips was given the appellation of "Namby-Pamby" for the apparent low levels of testosterone that fueled most of his work, especially his lighter verses. The bestower of this appellation most scholars believe now to be Henry Carey, a work of whose we will be getting to ourselves very shortly. Johnson seemed to think it originated from Pope, or his circle. Pope, you will recall, was around 4 foot 8 and a very fragile 90 pounds or so at his most robust, but the vitriol he was capable of extending towards his rivals certainly belied this apparent disadvantage. Philips, while an inferior poet, at least did not suffer these insults like a wuss. Johnson notes that "Of his personal character all I have heard is, that he was eminent for bravery and skill in the sword, and that in conversation he was solemn and pompous". Oh, and he "hung up a rod at Button's (presumably a coffeehouse), with which he threatened to chastise Pope." Pope then called him a rascal in print. Time, however, has rendered these once raging animosities rather quaint. It is true though, in most fields, that it is a good sign of health when the most prominent people in it are dissing their rivals incautiously and giving them derogatory nicknames. The most prominent ornery person in this regard on the comptemporary scene is probably the critic William Logan, but one doesn't even see him threatening to club Billy Collins outside of Fitzgerald's pub or wherever the poets go nowadays. There are a lot of angry contemporary poets, it is true ("I long to murder the anonymous white male sitting beside me"), but their open anger at least seems to be directed out towards society and the anonymous inchoate masses rather than towards each other--one can't alienate one's network for grants, awards, teaching posts, fellowships, and the like, I suppose.

"Men sometimes suffer by injudicious kindness; Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends, who decorated him with honorary garlands, with the first breath of contradiction blasted." (Johnson again).

I do owe this to my friends, that if I make myself ridiculous it is entirely my own doing. They have no part in it whatsoever.

Travels of a Born Tourist: EXCURSION Lichfield, Staffordshire, England

I arrived in Lichfield in the late afternoon of July 5, 2001. As I was returning to London the next evening to fly out on the 7th, the day in Lichfield was to be my last in the country, and as of today, still the last day I was anywhere abroad, not counting Canada. I came by train from Nottingham via Birmingham on one of those old clanking lines that reminds one somewhat of Thomas the Tank Engine. I know it is fashionable to eviscerate the British rail system, but except for excessive overcrowding on some of the trains in and out of London and the inconvenience that one can no longer store one's bags in lockers at the stations I do not have any great complaints with it. I am a train romanticist and am not much concerned with how up to date or efficient facilities and services are. Indeed the less up to date such things are generally the better as far as I am concerned.

Lichfield City train station I do not remember well, but it did not impress me as having a bustling air, and when one leaves it to go towards town the streets and the area around it are sleepy compared with other towns similar to it in size and historical import in the southern part of the country. I have not been in the north, which I imagine as being even sleepier. Lichfield of course is a cathedral city, though its current population is only around 25,000, which means that the spires of the cathedral are more or less visible the whole of the approach to town, which relieves the need to carry or refer to a map every two blocks. During the whole of the previous two weeks it had been extremely hot--85-90 degrees with 90% humidity, no serious air conditioning or even fans anywhere with the exception of one chain pub in Hucknall (the town where Byron is buried)--and finally that afternoon the heat broke, the sky grew overcast, and I could walk around in long pants with a moderate degree of comfort.

On the approach to town there was a mural on a long wall/fence of the kind that people frequently walk past in Britpop music videos in various degrees of angst that depicted Johnson and Boswell and was adorned with a couple of the great man's famous Lichfield quotes, the one about the residents of the city being the genteelest and speaking the purest English, and the other about how in his day all the best people in town got drunk every night. I took this as a good omen.

I had no accomodation reserved ahead of time. I like to think of myself as a disciple of the Dickens/Balzac method of travel, where one can arrive at 7 or even 11pm in London or Paris with a shilling in his pocket and find an inn both with a vacant bed and that is just about to serve dinner, or at least soup, at a table set for 14 fellow wretches. However the tourism boom of the 90s killed off even approximations of this technique, at least in the most popular destinations, and of late even I have taken to reserving spots well in advance and from across the ocean for my one and two star accomodations, which any real traveller or sophisticate would have to confess is pushing well into the regions of absurdity. As for Lichfield, however, I was confident that its fairly low profile in the game of tourism would make the competition for beds less grueling than it has become elsewhere. It being our last real night in the country as well, and I and especially the lovely Mrs Bourgeois Surrender having endured no air circulation and bad water pressure through most of the trip, I was prepared to be a little freer in my expense than is my habit. Having gotten therefore to the center of town, just around the corner from Johnson's house actually, the aforementioned lady suggested we look into what seemed the best, and turned out to be in any case the most historic edifice in town, the venerable George Hotel, which I later learned was the very same in which the opening scenes of The Beaux' Stratagem were set:

(Now I have to stop and tell my great Farquhar story, and really, how many people do you find nowadays who have a great Farquhar story? Many years ago now, when I had recently graduated from college and still lived close enough to Washington, D.C. to find my way into a house party in that town once in a great while, some friends I had took me to the house of this girl, who was one of those girls I have written about elsewhere that when guys like me are in high school they think they are going to be hanging out with all the time once they are in college and travelling and living the twenty-something hipster urban lifestyle, and then actually meet an example of three or four times in their entire life. She was a kind of groovy Jewish [I think] girl, medium height, normal, proportionate figure [this was by no means a common occurence among my youthful feminine acquaintance] long brown hair that curled at the tips, smart of course, a face moppetlike enough both to be interesting to me and to ensure that she would not be completely monopolized by aggressive Republican types. She had on a black dress, and I can tell you that this was not the same black as they wear either in New York or Spain, but a very particular D.C. style, which is long-sleeved with a knee length skirt and of a kind of tempera paint/Michael's Craft Store shade of black that brings one to mind of a Halloween witch's costume. I like the look however. This girl also had matching black little witch shoes on which she had sprinkled some glitter, which at the time just blew me away.

I should note here that I am telling a story, and in no way should the reader interpret my compliments to mean that this lady was more desirable than Mrs Bourgeois Surrender, nor that I imagine her husband, if she has one, which she probably does, is today a happier man than I am as a result of his selection. I am merely saying that long ago she once brightened what was shaping up as a dreary evening [I do think it may even have been raining] and had probably been a dreary couple of months, considerably, and that I was most appreciative of that at the time. Now to return to the account:

As I was looking over her bookshelf, I could not help but notice that she had the Oxford edition of the plays of Farquhar, which had no connection with any other book that was on it. I knew very little about this author, but I knew that he was most unusual reading for social butterfly, witch-dress wearing Washingtoniennes in the mid-90s. I had to know who the Farquhar fan was. Best of all, I had something to say to this woman that was a matter of genuine interest to me but was not obvious and did not center upon the desperate desire I was feeling to grope her, which was very exciting to me. She had never read Farquhar, she told me. Had I? No. No. Just heard of him. Old English writer. Born in Ireland, Northern Ireland actually. Died at 30. Her mother was the editor of this edition, she informs me. Really? (I am always astounded to come into contact, even at second hand, with people who have published books, especially scholarly ones). Yes, would you like to look at it? Oh, of course, I said, and dutifully turned over the pages and checked out Mama's notes, though daughter did not linger long with me. However there was one happy note, that the next day some members of this same party reconvened at a restaurant for breakfast and the Farquhar girl sat at the same end of the table as I, there was I think but one person between us and this was around a corner too. I never saw again, however.)

Though the outside of the George is apparently authentic dating to its days as a carriage inn, it is now part of the Best Western chain and the inside looks like any of their other hotels. The rate quoted me on my first entering was 125 pounds, at hearing which I mumbled thank you and turned to leave again, at which the desk clerk, having an idea now what sort of man I was, called me back and said that as the hotel was nearly empty they could give me a room for 85. As this was not impossible, and it seemed to me it would be bad form to sniff at an immediate 32% reduction (what was I expecting, to be invited to stay for free?) I took him up on it. Now I am going to attempt to show you a picture of me in the room, which is considerably more upscale than my typical accomodation. I am still at the stage of development where if my room has a minibar, I indulge feverishly in its contents:

This post was left unfinished.............................I am posting it October 15, 2007

Thoughts on Boswell

Boswell's reputation--he was once called the stupidest man ever to write a great book--is well known. Indeed I suspect he was a more likeable man in person that he comes across in print--or even than he came across in person to many people who ran across him. The publication of his journals with the salacious details of his adventures with women of the town, which as you can imagine have not been neglected by modern scholars, when contrasted with his strident and at times rather buffoonish adherence to conservative positions and religious propriety in his published writings, does not contribute to his making an attractive figure in the eyes of posterity. Even the portraits and drawings of him which remain make him look a little ridiculous, some no doubt by design; he is often drawn as stiff-necked man of unimposing height with a three-cornered hat rather overwhelming his oddly bland-featured, unprofound face. Even when he complains of melancholy, it appears he is really complaining of boredom, for he only appears to be afflicted by it when he has to work or is apart from the social life of London. When he is at a dinner party or a romp he always seems to be in excellent spirits, which certainly is not usually the case with people given to what I would consider severe fits of depression.

On the other hand he had some genuinely unique qualities in an author, as well as good luck in his subject, that served him well in his undertaking. He obviously had what we would now call personality, and if his learning was considered only so-so among the highest circles, he must have possessed a fair degree of amusing quick-wittedness at least, as he maintained intimate ties with a very intellectually and socially demanding crowd for many years. He reminds me in many ways of one of my own old friends, who was not the most diligent student but was intelligent, witty, had legitimate and serious intellectual interests if not the work ethic to make a figure in academia, loved pleasure and had the ability to converse with almost anyone who had some interest in common with him in an entertaining manner regardless of background. I suspect Boswell had many of these qualities. Boswell also seemed to have the combination, very rare among educated men in our time, of social skills without needing to be the Great Man or the center of attention in every instance. By all appearances Johnson loved him, a little bit like a son perhaps, as much or more so as a comrade or fellow adventurer in the life of the mind, as well as the life of the world. I cannot think of another prominent biographer (though I am sure there must be some) who held such personal status in his relationship with his subject. Of course it helped considerably that Johnson was so socially accessible for a great man, and not too much committed to grand undertakings as to sever his connection to the activities and rhythms of ordinary but still vital life, as great people often appear to be today.

I was surprised in reading the book at how much attention was given to Johnson's illnesses and the rather excruciating treatments he underwent in the last few years of his life, which demonstrate if nothing else how much it takes to kill a human being, or at least one with a strong native constitution. These accounts take up a sizable portion of the book.

The passage where Johnson takes his last leave of Boswell in the carriage the summer before his death and totters solemnly down the alley to his apartment is extremely affecting and in fact caused me to cry a little. The only other time tears have overcome me in such reading is during the deathbed scene in Don Quixote, which is interestingly another book largely about the friendship of grown men, one of whom is this case is known mainly for his addiction to reading. I wonder if I sense some kind of void in my own life. Certainly the vigor and largely shared spiritedness of the Johnson/Boswell relationship accounts for the success of that work down to our time above any other feature.

There was one more topic I wanted to address with regard to Johnson. There was a recent novel (1999) called England, England by Julian Barnes, the premise of which is that some large swath of old Blighty has been turned into a historical theme park with thatched roofs, afternoon tea, cricket, black cabs, etc, which naturally all the tourists, as well as many English people, prefer to the real, modern, relevant, messy England that exists outside the park. Among the attractions of the park is an actor in the character of Samuel Johnson that drinks with the tourists in a traditional pub and presumably regales them with colorful examples of English wit. The choice of Johnson for this character is quite an interesting, and a telling one. One could readily think of other possibilities for this entertainment: Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Tennyson, perhaps a Byron character who drank and seduced women, maybe even a watered-down Americanized or globalized Shakespeare. All of these authors have been or remain to a certain degree popular abroad, especially perhaps in America, often as much for their personalities or what they represent as for a deep understanding of their work. Johnson, who is often viewed in the U.S. as something of a counterpart to Benjamin Franklin, who was his exact contemporary, appears to have attained somewhat to this iconic status without his work or his nature being particularly well known, and even among those who have studied him, I suspect our author Mr Barnes would say, many rush to make a claim of intellectual and temperamental affinity with the man that is, to say the least, most implausible. Many of the famous quotes--"A man who is tired of London is tired of life"; "to be a hero, one must drink brandy"; "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"--are deployed quite frequently, and often by people who give little indication of either deep learning or interest in the subjects addressed (And regarding the London quote: it is 230 or so years old. London happily remains a vital place, but I'm sure somebody once said the same thing about Babylon). What is more, I sense that Johnson's status, or maybe it is just the sense of his relevance, is at an all time low among his own countryman, who seem to see him, especially when repeating one of his aphorisms, as much a blubbering, sententious old fool as one of the sages of the nation. When I went to Johnson's birthplace the man working at the desk (there is some kind of tension going on between me and the people who work at these museums; See "The Game of Art, Part I) asked me why Americans liked Johnson so much, and said that Americans were the only people who ever came in the place. He did not betray any warm feelings for the great lexicographer himself. I had not been aware of this phenomenon at the time, and had to say that I knew nothing about it, that I was merely a fan of an old book. But going back to the Barnes novel, I think there is a sense that Johnson, who once represented something substantial and real, has been allowed to become via certain American and global, Non-European appropriation of the stories and the mythology of European and more specifically English literary and cultural history a cartoon figure of a literary man, by a world that hasn't the foggiest idea of what that entails. I have certainly felt a part of such processes myself, though in fairness these have also always been present in literary history, and the English of Johnson's time into the Romantic and Victorian periods, vis-a-vis the Greeks and Romans and their primitive forbears in Britain, were among the more extravagant makers of caricatures who ever lived, yet still produced worthwhile achievements of their own driven by these imperfect understandings of the past. We like in our age to have, or have access to, full philosophical and historical understanding of figures and societies of the past; that an artist need only detect something beautiful or noble in the composition of a story or a ruin and have it still be of great value to him, and direct him to interesting and pleasing works of his own though at a far remove from intellectual pureness or authenticity as regards his influence, seems to be a difficult idea for us to accept. However I think there is evidence that our non-acceptance of it is strangling our ability to see ourselves as artistic beings and to "create" new works certainly in the traditional forms.

This idea is not really brought to a conclusion but I am tired now and wish to let it go.

Reflections on Johnson 2

Johnson being now established as one of my very favorite authors, I was especially excited when I returned to London in 2001 to finally go and see the house in Gough Square where I could imagine myself imbibing something of the atmosphere of 18th century London, which I consider myself as being able to do without too elaborate a concatenation of circumstances. I entered Johnson's Court and found the house, along with the famous statue of Hodge the cat (though Hodge almost certainly never lived in the house at Gough Square). However it was closed for renovations. We eventually carried on to Lichfield, where Johnson's birthplace was open, and which I will recapitulate in a later section.

In 2004 I 'studied' the Preface to Shakespeare and the poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes". (I have read other essays and poems of Johnson's too for purposes of general amusement, without attempting, I suppose, to engage them as objects of study. I am especially fond of "The Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane Theater, 1747", though I like all his poetry generally.) This is from the notes I took on the Preface at the time:

Clear and even inspiring little treatise on the excellences and spirit (best spirit) of literature. Humor and wisdom augmented by learning and understanding are so much more attractive than mere dogged cleverness. He is able to admire and appreciate Shakespeare while still relating to him as a man, acting himself a man and giving the reader the benefit of the doubt as to being something of the kind as well. This in large part accounts for his (Johnson's) attractiveness as a writer. For W.S.'s excellence does lie primarily in his naturalness and liveliness rather than as a chiseled, precariously preserved intellect of the high modernist/post-modernist model.

I will add that in his prose, though Johnson says many times that the object of writing is to instruct and inform, he does not to my mind ever come across as condescending to his reader, certainly compared to almost all modern writers, though I am aware he had somewhat of this reputation in his own time. However, I think perhaps due to the rigor and high quality of his social intercourse, he was able to develop a style in which he is able to imagine and address the reader as a person at a level of understanding and knowledge comparable to himself, or at least to that of people who were actually his friends. American writers in particular, many of whom probably have gone through their entire lives without having a natural, easy social type conversation as an equal with another human being on the intellectual matters most dear to them, are prone to write as if most readers were not merely idiots, but scarcely conceivable to the author as members of the same human species. They write ever for authorities instead of for men and women.

As a poet I do not think it can be said that he is underrated or undervalued, his poetry still being readily available in print, but it (the poetry) is also not much talked about. His longer efforts build up a tremendous head of steam and pull one along through them with great force. In his best poems his lines, images, narrative and ideas are in each separate part almost uniformly strong, which is an exceedingly difficult effect to produce. A comparable strength of intellect and handle on the form of a poem and the English language as well as the histories of both combined in the same author is rare. Stevens or Pound would be the most recent English language poets that I would confidently say had similar levels of skill in all these various particulars. I suppose it is true that Johnson lacks sublimity, which is not an inconsiderable deficiency, though many of his points are notable for the elegance of their conception (as well as the force of their execution).

I was going to reproduce some favorite quotes from the Preface that I notated but I am not at home and I left the book there so I will skip it and move on to something else.

Reflections on Johnson 1

Having finished the Life of Johnson on Sunday, I am going to clog up cyperspace a bit with my own history with this legendary duo. Parts 1 and 2 will be devoted to me and Johnson, Part 3 to Boswell, and Part 4 to a account of my 2001 pilgrimage to Lichfield, perhaps even with my very own tourist photos if I can figure out how to do that.

I do not remember exactly when I became conscious of the figure of Samuel Johnson. He was not particularly well-known or prominent in our household, and I don't think it was much before I was twelve or fourteen that I became aware that he was the subject of a famous, but very long and very old biography, and I still did not have any idea why anyone would have written about him anyway. This was before I had even read Dickens or knew any basic English history, so the impression I had of Johnson, if any at all, was that of a stuffy, scholarly type from a faraway time and place. His very name struck me, in the early 1980s, as hopelessly and embarrassingly whitebread (mine being nearly as bad in that regard I was extra sensitive about the matter). He aroused no interest in me. I am not sure how much my father knew about him, but as his tastes ran more towards political history, war, exploration, etc I am pretty certain he hadn't read either Johnson or Boswell. I remember asking him once who Samuel Johnson was, since the Life was a part of most series of classics that I liked to collect at flea markets and the like at that time, which he scoffed at dismissively, saying "No one reads that anymore," adding too that Johnson had not liked Americans, which, being a great patriot, especially where the generation of the founding fathers is concerned, he took as a personal offence. I have heard him on other occasions denounce English books of the period as being unreadable because there is "too much damn Latin" in them, which would certainly apply to Boswell, though he never failed on the other hand to extol the likes of Jefferson and Hamilton on the grounds of their superior learning and deep understanding of the Greek and Roman classics compared to modern leaders.

Having passed through high school without ever perusing a page or handling a volume of either Johnson or his biographer, I proceeded on to a college that if it is well-known for anything is well-known for an almost perverse and willfull anachronistic biblophilia, where I don't believe I heard either the name of Johnson or Boswell uttered once in four years, though the English literature section of the library at least had much material on and many editions of the works of both. Since I killed a lot of time in that section over the years after dinner waiting for it to be late enough to start drinking it is probable that I at least looked into one or other of the books then, though I do not remember anything gripping me. They had the Yale edition of Johnson's complete works with illustrated plates on the title pages. I remember looking at the famous Reynolds portrait of the elephantine Johnson in one, and in another I believe an illustration of the great man leaving the drawing room on the occasion of his perceived snubbing by Lord Chesterfield (seeing as I am referring to this episode 250 years after the fact, by way of an artwork, is it any wonder why otherwise rational people harbor ambitions of literary fame?).

I graduated, and then began my current reading list the year I was 24, though it would yet be 4 years before I would get to anything by Johnson. When I was 26 I finally made it to London for the first time, where, in wandering about the City, I could not help taking note of the signs for Johnson's house in Gough Square, though not having read him at the time I did not venture to even look at the house, intending to preserve that pleasure for a time when it would have more moment to me, though even then I still did not have a clear idea of the massive figure Johnson still makes in the English literary imagination. In 1996 the London of my imagination was primarily Dickensian, with a little Bloomsburyan/Edwardian channeling around Hyde Park and Marylebone and Victoria, and what I knew from the Restoration and 18th century authors coming to life only in the City churches and oddly enough in walking along the banks of the river. Finally, on March 6, 1998, I commenced reading The Lives of the English Poets.

The Lives of the Poets is one of the most entertaining, as well as instructive books, both historically and literarily speaking, that I have ever read. By instructive I do not mean that Johnson is the most accurate recorder of facts or that his criticism is perfect upon all occasions. He does something that is perhaps equally as important, demonstrates what a collectively shared history and literature of an outstanding quality means to a society, and the men in it, over a fairly extended period; that England would not be England, and all that proceeded from this circumstance even after the age of Johnson, without its poets; and that any human mind ignorant of poetry and the poetic heritage of his own language at the very least can make little claim to wholeness.

Here are a few favorite quotes and word choices/phrases from the Life of Cowley:

'the mist of panegyric'
'The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.'
'the morose Wood'
'the courtly Sprat'
'...instead of seeking shelter in America, wisely went only so far from the bustle of life that he might easily find his way back, when solitude should grow tedious.
'a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets'
'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor.'
'...the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.' (regarding the thoughts of the metaphysical poets)
'nature and art are ransacked'
'wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature'
'Their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before'
'confused magnificence'
'A lover, burnt up by his affection, is compared to Egypt'
'The lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws of augury and rites of sacrifice'
'Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?'
'A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but that it may not want its due honor, Cleveland has paralleled it with the sun.
'Their expressions sometimes raise horror, when they intend perhaps to be pathetic.'
'unnecessarily and unpoetically subtle'
'I know not whether Scaliger himself has persuaded many readers to join with him in his preference of the two favorite odes, which he estimates in his raptures at the value of a kingdom.'
'His elegy on Sir Henry Wotton is vigorous and happy, the series of thoughts is easy and natural, and the conclusion, though a little weakened by the intrusion of Alexander, is elegant and forcible.'
'even the morality is voluptuous'
'Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable.'
'sluggish frigidity'
'The same thought is more generally, and therefore more poetically, expressed by Casimir'
'The rights of antiquity were invaded, and disorder tried to break into the Latin'
'Every reader feels himself weary with this useless talk of an allegorical being.'

I will break this post off here.

Another Johnson Interlude

An interesting contrast to the authors discussed in the last post, here is a very brief assessment (in a footnote nonetheless) of Johnson's romantic character:

"Let not my readers smile to think of Johnson's being a candidate for female favour; Mr Peter Garrick assured me, that he was told by a lady, that in her opinion Johnson was 'a very seducing man.' Disadvantages of person and manner may be forgotten, where intellectual discourse is communicated to a sensible mind..."

He goes on to relate some tidbits regarding Johnson's proclivities for a couple of ladies, the perhaps overly pious Hill Boothby, for the notice of whom he engaged in an unfriendly rivalry with George, Lord Lyttleton (the Poetaster), and the delightful Miss Molly Aston, all rather moving and at the same time ludicrous in its own way as all romantic attachments I suppose are.

Literary Interlude

For about the past month I have reading Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, as may have been discerned by several references on this blog. I am generally only able at this time to read 25-30 pages of literature a day due to my young children, the constraints of paid employment and so forth though to be honest I do not mind going at a leisurely pace through such books. I have been wanting to read this book, and to have read it, for many years, especially since I read some of Johnson's own work and visited his birthplace at Lichfield, but I waited for its turn to come up on my list. I intend to write a couple of long and indulgent essays with regard to my thoughts about these men and books later on, but being now a little more than halfway through I wanted to put down some impressions I have had.

Before the age of 17 or so I had no real sense of what made a book Great or not great, though I was interested in the idea that certain books were supposed to be better than others, and sought them out. Still, I primarily judged them by how amusing I found them. For about 10 years starting around age 17 I became more receptive to the qualities of a Classic and I was frequently, for the lack of a better expression, deeply impressed by many masterpieces I came across in this time. Since turning 30, however, I have found much abatement in the intensity of these experiences. I believe that in part this has to do with the anticipation I have for Classics now. When I read Plato or War and Peace as a 20 or 23 year old I had no expectations of what I was going to get. I knew nothing substantial about either the authors, or the contents or nature of the books. I had done enough reading however, and was at a receptive enough age that I was conscious of my understanding of the possibilities of life, of language, of morality, of virtue, constantly expanding and improving. I had the good fortune to encounter very many excellent works before this sense of expansion and improvement began to be exhausted.

I was 34 when I finally got around to tackling Remembrance of Things Past. We had translated the first couple of pages of Swann's Way in my college French class, when I had been very innocent even of mainstream canonical literature and susceptible to its impressions, and I was anticipating an elevating experience of the first order. And indeed I did get one; only, to my mind, confined to particular episodes and isolated images. As I read further and further into it I thought the book repeated itself too much and could have easily lost 500-1000 of its 3000 pages without regret. It is still a superior book, full of brilliant dialogue and many unforgettable scenes and images that I will carry with me forever. The hotel and beach at Balbec, the conversation of St-Loup and Monsieur de Charlus, the sight of the airplane over the bluff where they have taken an outing, the earnest digression over whether the fashions people wear to go motoring will improve--these are all wonderful delights for people like me who to a certain extent live to find life portrayed in such terms. Yet I could not help throughout having a nagging sense that I had missed the great point, the real brilliance of the whole. The parts about the book I found to be enjoyable were nothing that would excite a real philosopher or intellectual much, and yet such people have been excited by the book. I understood it as an attempt to transform actual human experience, through the ostensible vehicle of the memory, as wholly as possible into art. He succeeds in this to a high degree too, though like all literary authors he can only rise to such heights as his imagination ultimately will bear him, and his imagination at times is unable to support his memory. Still, there is imagination of such an extent, and so relatively near to our own time, as to induce an acute nostalgia for the manner of life which it describes. I feel its absence heavily in my own life, for all the prodigious goods and achievements that our society has produced just in the short span of my adulthood. I genuinely find it rather depressing however to live in a society where the smartest and wisest people are reckoned to be economists, and the sign of an educated man is the ability to think like one as closely as possible. As a civilization, what we once sought with art we are apparently now going to attempt with biology, the results of which I am somewhat curious to see, though the early returns as regards things like plastic surgery and steroid enhancement do not indicate that we stand to gain as much wisdom or aesthetic sensibility as might be hoped. And while cognitive enhancements sound tantalizing, what does this mean? I have read something of the contents of computers being downloaded into people's brains, which has if any advantages a utilitarian one, though I suspect most people would just as soon do without it, and I have also read about gene selection or upgrading for IQ (and I suppose other vital qualities like willpower, energy level which are the supports of the thriving intellect). I have a lot of skepticism about this though, for reasons which I hope will be hinted at in my bit about Sam Johnson, which I will get to now.

To return to an earlier theme, Boswell's Johnson is one of those Classics--and there aren't too many left for me at this point--that I really anticipated as possibly affecting my life even at age 36 before I read it. I still felt that, despite everything else I have read over the last 12-20 years, I could not fully consider myself really and truly a serious devotee of English Literature, but that having read this book, I would really be pretty much there. I had quite loved what I had read of Johnson's own writing (perusing his Preface to Shakespeare the other day I was struck by how many of his points I had internalized and put forth in my own recent essay about that author), and this was supposed to be better than any of his work. As such, I found myself on page 400, enjoying the reading but at the same time ominously questioning whether this were really one of the Greatest Books of All Time, or, as the dust jacket of my edition states, one of the four pillars of the literary tradition of the anglophone world, along with the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and the Pilgrim's Progress. The book is dependent on the vividness of the Johnson character and the particular milieu that he inhabits for its charm, and it takes a long time for that to begin to be established, a lot longer, to be honest, that most modern readers are probably willing to endure, especially if they have no extensive familiarity with or affection for 18th century England and its literature and culture, or if they are women (this is a man's book about men). A lot of very great books build themselves up so slowly and so minutely such that their greatness does not really seize you fully until you are 700 or 800 pages in. I suppose this harbors ill for the continued significance, or assuming this to be already gone, revival of literature as a major force in the lives of the best minds of the future.

There are certain periods in English history--the Elizabethan, the 18th century, the Greene-Waugh-Powell-Orwell between the wars generation--when the nation's educated classes burst forth with a particularly attractive combination of confidence and wit vis-a-vis both other nations and the weight of history. In these eras even the national efforts in music and painting are not regarded with the same oppression of inferiority that they inspire in other periods, and likewsie the general system and results of the national education do not produce the sense of horror and despair (mainly regarding the rest of one's fellow citizens). Whenever I read an author from one of these periods I always regard it as an antidote to the damning, dismissive, insuperably learned and logical works of modern Germanic authors which I have an unhealthy attraction to and which nearly convince me that there is absolutely no point in continuing to live, for the likes of me especially (this may enhance their value in the minds of some readers). Here is Boswell on Good Friday in London, 1778:

"It was a delightful day: as we walked to St Clement's church, I again remarked that Fleet Street was the most cheerful scene in the world. 'Fleet Street (said I) is in my mind more delightful than Tempe.' JOHNSON. 'Ay, sir; but let it be compared with Mull.'

There was a very numerous congregation to-day at St Clement's church, which Dr Johnson said he observed with pleasure."

It is a simple passage, but it gave me a certain joy and restored to me a hopefulness about the prospects of life that I rarely find even interspersed in the writings of modern intellectuals. It even inspired me to seek deals for a brief jaunt to London to restore my spirits in the Boswellian fashion (I can't go, but Go-Today.com has some excellent combined air and hotel packages for the budget tourist, especially when one factors the price of London accomodation [Poor Uncle Giles from Powell would be hard-pressed even to maintain his shabby hotel room in Bayswater nowadays]. Round-trip flight, transport to and from the airport and 6 nights hotel for $500-$600 a person for a double, $700-$800 for a single through the winter). Of course there are the passages where Boswell defends the African slave trade, and Johnson offhandedly dismisses the Indians and Chinese as barbarians, and the indigineous peoples of America and the East Indies as savages, where the collective feminine intellect is regarded as incapable of undergoing serious study or thought; these positions will surely render the book's authentic delights impenetrable to most modern readers, as probably the positions staked out by many of the modern European as well as various anti-western intellectuals render their particular glories impenetrable to me. And I do doubt whether Boswell or Johnson, remarkable as the latter was, have a universal appeal, but merely a limited one, to a type of person whose cultural position in the world, at least, appears to be on the decline.

The other observation I wanted to make was that much of the appeal of Johnson is that he leads what we would call a collegiate lifestyle while being undoubtedly a serious and substantial adult in his society. By this I mean he rises late, lives with a number of housemates who are not related to him, lingers over meals and sits late into the evening talking with friends and various interesting people, spends several hours every day in a library or other study, as well as walking in town, has the time in the summer to go touring or stay with friends for weeks or months at a time. This is not apparently an uncommon lifestyle among European and Middle Eastern intellectuals even today, and I must say I am a little jealous of them, as I have not been able to do most of these things, and the others only in severely truncated spaces of time, in many years. Of course I went to the writer's conference, but I failed to make any figure there and was disappointed in the social aspect of the thing.

I will close this too long essay (my inability to be concise has already been my death, and I must accept the fact) with some more wisdom from Johnson.

"You may be wise in your study in the morning, and gay at a company at a tavern in the evening. Every man is to take care of his own wisdom and his own virtue, without minding too much what others think."