Adscititious Johnson

I was never persuaded by John Peel's adage that he was more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that that he had. Even aged 6 I don't know if I could have been persuaded to trade Silence is Golden, Move Over Darling and She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah for the promise of The Well-Tempered Klavier. One can't be convinced by something one doesn't know about.

By a certain age one will surely have found one's way to most of what one would like. One thing leads to another until surely the Known must be impregnable to any challenge from the Unknown. And yet, getting into Donald Rumsfeld territory, how could we know. Certainly, being introduced to the music of The Magnetic Fields just at the age when I thought pop music was over extended my pop life and they entered the very top echelon of my favourite things but even then I wouldn't have swapped Tamla Motown, T. Rex, Bowie, Al Green and reggae for them.

Similarly, there must still be writers I've not read that would be added to my Premier League if I found them but I wouldn't abandon James Joyce, for Dubliners, Rosemary Tonks, for her Baudelairean ennui, Larkin for his downright common sense, etc. It wasn't as if I didn't know about Dr. Johnson but I'd read more about him than by him and gladly accepted Robbie Coltrane in Blackadder as a beginner's guide.

Although it was only a few weeks ago, I already can't remember what prompted the recent reading of the Lives of the Poets. It's highly likely to have been an item at Anecdotal Evidence , perhaps the finest of literary 'blogs', that provides something good every day and today, as it quite often is, cites the good doctor. The Lives were a revelation, as below on the 'Dr. Johnson' tab, and led immediately to Selected Essays which is 550 pages of literary joy. To those who've read them, a recommendation would be as useful as one for The Beatles, or tipping Red Rum for the National, but not everybody will have and if you haven't, you must. It is never too late to find a new enthusiasm and I'm very glad I found out in time.

One could call him a philosopher in the way that Alan Partridge, when asked to name a philosopher, said, 'Peter Ustinov', but he is such in the ways that Montaigne or maybe Marcus Aurelius are, not demolishing the rickety systems of previous generations of thinkers only to replace them with flawed edifices of their own, impenetrable, dense with jargon and eventually falling back on 'a priori' assumptions or turning out to be circling around nothing at all. I have a lot of time for Sartre but not so much the free will or the support for the Soviet Union and I'm sadly not one of the six people in the world said to fully understand Derrida. For all their sophistication, that sort of philosopher makes a poet seem as practical as a plumber in comparison.

 

Dr. Johnson is a moralist, Anglican and Tory but one mustn't let our prejudices from 250 years after the fact blind us to the way he saw through superficial human frailties, not least that,

What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught...men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

He finds Abraham Cowley 'never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within'. He notices 'a man writes much better than he lives'. On our tendency to give away secrets, he realizes that,

most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance,

that, yes, they would prefer to show they know a secret and that they lacked the integrity to keep it than maintain the virtue of discretion.

The Essays is a book where one regularly has to stop to make a note of page numbers and, a rare thing for me, one that it is a pleasure to take time over, re-read paragraphs for pure enjoyment and to see how he did it and relish the language. Few books provide quite such a guarantee that every page is worth reading, not least, indeed, for being 'reminded' as much as informed but that it was 'ne'er so well express'd', which were Pope's words, not his. 

Perhaps it is to Dr. Johnson's advantage, or mine really, that C18th Lit was the period I missed out at university. While 'education' can enhance and encourage appreciation, it can also ruin it and it's a good thing to come to these essays in a better position to simply enjoy rather than have to encounter them on a compulsory reading list. They are thus not a duty like Middlemarch first was, that it took me some decades to return to and like much better. 

I want to do a Top 6 Writers just so that I can put him in it but it would be unfair to leave out any of Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Larkin, Camus, Ovid, Rosemary, maybe still Thom Gunn, and the boy from Stratford amongst others from such a crucial list only to honour him.

 

A biography of The Waste Land by Matthew Hollis will be on its way when released, as will new poems by Sean O'Brien in November. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, is on the waiting shelf as well. But with Rassellas due here, too, and a logistical project in hand of where the Johnson section can be accommodated in a suitably eminent position on the shelves, the lives by Boswell and John Wain as well as Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings will be re-read with new enthusiasm. So there is an Autumn programme in place even if it makes me sound like a 1973 schoolgirl wrapped up in her devotion to the Bay City Rollers.