Lives of the Poets

Scanning the shelves of poet's biographies, it is the two of John Donne that catch the eye as among the most memorable so maybe it's best to have a life to write because not many are as vivid as his. Edmund Spenser is the 'biggest' name missing. I might find one one day but have not much interest in the poems. Ezra Pound isn't there, either, but that's because I want as little as possible of him in the house and so read the library's copy. Samuel Johnson is not primarily remembered for his poems, admired though they were. He was an assiduous critic and essayist but mainly a 'writer' and thus had an go at every available genre. If Irene had been more successful he might have been a dramatist but he had to find a more suitable outlet for his energies.

David Nokes's Samuel Johnson, a Life, a bargain in Chichester's excellent Oxfam bookshop, will be filed in the burgeoning Johnson section, not least because the poetry biography shelves are full but it takes high rank in its division not only having such a personality as its subject but for being exemplary in how it is done. Re-reading John Wain's account is some way down the 'to do' list.

Nokes is well-organized. As in Katherine Rundell's Donne, the chapters are themes in themselves rather than simply episodes but the balance achieved between detail, primary sources, narrative and commentary is ideal. He compiles an intimate portrait of Johnson as both the very public man whose movements where reported in the press like those of royalty are, and the private man who might not have wanted his most precious thoughts and feelings to be examined with quite such diligence. It's best not to make oneself of quite such compelling interest if you don't relish such attention, as the likes of Philip Larkin and Rosemary Tonks, as well as J.D. Salinger and R.S. Thomas, might also have reflected but it's not easy to be famous and not famous at the same time. Johnson didn't always want his first appointed biographer, Boswell, to follow him around quite so conscientiously. It might prove better for poets of the e-mail age in which the hard copies of letters won't be kept and available for later scrutiny if they'd rather not have their lives reconstructed pixel by pixel. However, since he is so eminently readable, I will obtain a Selected Letters if not the several volumes extant for those who want every last word. What I find difficult to concieve, as I did with Balzac, for example, is how anybody can have a life when they spend so much of it writing.

It wasn't always easy for Johnson who was by no means an overnight success and tried various options before becoming celebrated in his lifetime. It's a bit of a game in such a life identifying where the tipping point comes between having great potential and realizing it. Hard work was a part of it for Johnson whereas it is a matter of conjecture what apprenticeship Shakespeare served before the first mention of him in London is already Robert Greene's resentful mention of the upstart. But celebrity having been achieved and, on the evidence of his essays, it was to be desired, it doesn't have the deleterious effect it has on some artists's work. It was a serious business for him and he cared about the work more than he cared about the living and the reputation it afforded him.