Category Archives: Books

I think it’s time for another post on Boswell and Johnson. I’ve been marking interesting passages with post-it notes and after I blog on those passages taking them out, so when I see a lot of post-it notes accumulating in the book, that means it’s time to write about it again.

First of all, I can’t resist giving you Boswell’s description of Johnson’s extremely odd mannerisms:

…while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth; sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile. Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale.

Johnson is someone I wish I could have seen. Much if not most of The Life is taken up with accounts of conversations; Johnson, Boswell, and friends sit around and talk about literature and politics and the latest gossip (and they do love to gossip!), and while reading Boswell’s accounts of it all is great, surely it’s nothing compared to actually being able to witness these bull sessions.

Boswell describes Johnson getting angry, violent, and vociferous, but then quickly calming down, realizing he’d gone too far, being willing to make peace with whomever he was angry at. Can you imagine, Dr. Johnson getting furious with you? I’d be terrified.

And, unfortunately, I’d have every reason to be terrified of Johnson if I’d had the chance to meet him because he hated Americans (and, also unfortunately, some of the things he says about women I’m not too keen on):

From this pleasing subject, he, I know not how or why, made a sudden transition to one upon which he was a violent aggressor; for he said, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American:” and his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he “breathed out threatenings and slaughter;” calling them, “Rascals — Robbers — Pirates;” and exclaiming, he’d “burn and destroy them.” Miss Seward, looking to him with mild but steady astonishment, said, “Sir, this is an instance that we are always most violent against those whom he have injured.” — He was irritated still more by this delicate and keen reproach; and roared out another tremendous volley which one might fancy could be heard across the Atlantick.

I don’t remember just what caused this hatred, if it has any explanation at all. From this safe distance in time I can be amused at this moment of irrationality from so rational a man, but I’m still extremely grateful I wasn’t there to witness it. Boswell describes trying his best to calm Johnson down and divert him with some other, safer topic; in fact, he fairly regularly needs to do this. Johnson sometimes seems like a man who needed a little managing.

But the extent of their regard for each other comes through very clearly. Boswell is always praising Johnson to the skies and worrying that Johnson is angry with him, and Johnson clearly loves Boswell in return and tries to reassure him, although somewhat impatiently. This is Johnson speaking:

Nay, Sir, you are more likely to quarrel with me, than I with you. My regard for you is greater almost than I have words to express; but I do not chuse to be always repeating it; write it down in the first leaf of your pocketbook, and never doubt of it again.

And here is Boswell’s justification for recording many little details of Johnson’s life:

I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost. Though a small particular may appear trifling to some, it will be relished by others; while every little spark adds something to the general blaze: and to please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity. Showers of them have been discharged at my “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides;” yet it still sails unhurt along the stream of time, and as an attendant upon Johnson, “Pursues the triumph, and partakes the gale.”

And in another letter Boswell says this:

I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy; and if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory; and, elevated by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety.

What a friendship! I am enjoying reading all the details about Johnson’s life, but I’m enjoying even more reading this record of affection.

I’ve found enough essays I’ve enjoyed in The Best American Essays 2006 to keep me going, although I’ve had lots of grave doubts about the overall quality of the book. My ambivalence has continued with my latest essay “Why Write?” by Alan Shapiro. I found myself irritated with Shapiro’s silly sense of humor through the beginning of the essay, until I got to one extraordinary page that redeemed the whole thing for me.

Maybe something is wrong with my sense of humor, but I found these opening sentences intensely irritating:

Some years ago, I went to a child psychologist. (If Henny Youngman had written this opening sentence, he would have added: “The kid didn’t do a thing for me.” But I digress.)

Anyway, the essay begins with the story of how Shapiro gets diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder as an adult, having been tested when one of his children was diagnosed, after which the doctor tells him that his writing can be seen as a “compensatory behavior” for his disability. In response, Shapiro says something genuinely funny:

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “I write books in order to make up for my inability to remember the names of the people I meet at a party, or because I come home from the grocery store with a red pepper instead of a tomato?”

He goes on from there to consider the various reasons he’s sought a career in writing, since, after all, the money’s no good and fame is so fleeting. After some irritatingly silly joking, Shapiro gets to a serious answer to his question about why he writes, by way of Elizabeth Bishop, and along the way he addresses the question of why we read (it’s a long passage, but a great one):

Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity — the incessant, transient, noisy New York Stock Exchange of desires and commitments, ambitions, hopes, hates, appetites, and interests — has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity’s a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve.

Now as far as writing goes, this passage doesn’t ring true to me, as I can’t really remember ever feeling that absorbed in my writing; or, if I have felt that way, it’s not something that has “stuck,” something I need to return to again and again. This is probably why I tend not to think of myself as “a writer,” although I do a decent amount of it. Shapiro speculates that writers may have a reputation for suffering from melancholy, not because good writing requires sadness and depression, but because after feeling the absorption and attentiveness of writing, Bishop’s “perfectly useless concentration,” their non-writing lives seem lacking and they feel haunted until they can return to that trance-like state.

This passage does ring true to me when I think about reading, however; and I like how Bishop describes both writing and reading as activities that can create this happy absorption. Bishop portrays reading or viewing a work of art as a creative act in itself and her formulation excludes nobody; everybody can interact with art and be self-forgetful for a while.

What really made me happy about this part of the essay, however, were the next lines:

Athletes know all about this nearly hallucinatory state. They call it being in the zone. They feel simultaneously out of body and at one with the body.

Yes, I know exactly what he’s talking about. Sometimes when I’m riding or hiking I feel like a truly whole human being, no separation between my mind and my body. I’m not thinking about what I’m doing; I’m just doing it. I’m just a being walking or riding a bike, wholly focused on the present moment.

And then, to add to all this goodness, Shapiro writes a passage that dovetails beautifully with Litlove’s recent post on the symbolic and the semiotic, the symbolic being straightforward language and the semiotic being the musical, poetic quality of language. Shapiro talks about how infants experience a form of the concentration he has been describing, expressing it through their babbling babytalk. Of his children as infants he says,

He or she would be talking, but the meaning of the words were indistinguishable from the sensation of the sound, and the sound was part and parcel of the mouth that made the sound, of the hands and fingers that the mouth was sucking as it sang.

In other words, the symbolic and the semiotic are one and the same.  And from there, he moves to how we as adults continually seek out this lost relationship to language, the lost connection of the symbolic and the semiotic:

No matter how sophisticated our poems may be, or how deadly serious they are about eradicating or exposing the terrible injustices around us, I still think that we are trying — by means of words, of consciousness — to reawaken that pre-verbal joy, to repossess, reinhabit what someone else has called the seriousness of a child at play. Bishop says this concentration’s useless because it is its own reward, the mysterious joy of it. It is singing for the sake of singing.

Isn’t it beautiful how this all comes together? Writing and reading, and walking and riding for that matter, are ways of finding unity and wholeness — of the body and the mind, of the adult self with the child self. The close of Litlove’s post brings it together wonderfully:

Great writers know how to tap into and express the semiotic in their works, and so what they say speaks to us at a profound level. I like to think of this layer of other meaning, beyond and within communication, as the defining characteristic of the literary. And our ability, from birth, to hear and express it, to tap into it and to play with it, is what makes us all fundamentally literary creatures, in a basic instinctual way.

I can’t let the week end, I think, without giving you some more of the wisdom of Johnson (I warned you a while ago you’d be reading a lot of him, if you stuck around here …). I’ve noticed just how often the subject of melancholy comes up in The Life; Johnson struggled with it frequently and wrote often about how to deal with it. Here is what he writes in a letter to Boswell after Boswell has complained that “his mind has been somewhat dark this summer”:

I am returned from the annual ramble into the middle counties … I was glad to go abroad, and, perhaps, glad to come home; which is, in other words, I was, I am afraid, weary of being at home, and weary of being abroad. Is not this the state of life? But, if we confess this weariness, let us not lament it; for all the wise and all the good say, that we may cure it.

For the black fumes which rise in your mind, I can prescribe nothing but that you disperse them by honest business or innocent pleasure, and by reading, sometimes easy and sometimes serious. Change of place is useful…

I know the feeling of being weary at home and weary abroad, and going back and forth and back and forth — or of being weary of busyness and weary of leisure (my school year and my summer) and going back and forth and back and forth — but what else is there to do but go back and forth and back and forth and be grateful that a change comes around every once in a while? When I think of my own state of mind, I realize that the thing I’m afraid of is not change so much as things staying always the same. It’s good to have a regular change of place or change of pace to look forward to. It’s keeping in mind that change will soon happen and therefore I ought to be content with what I have now that’s hard.

There is also this passage, a little further on:

Talking of constitutional melancholy, he observed, “A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them.” Boswell. “May not he think them down, Sir?” Johnson. “No, Sir. To attempt to think them down is madness. He should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest. To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it maybe attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.” Boswell. “Should not he provide amusements for himself? Would it not, for instance, be right for him to take a course of chymistry?” Johnson. “Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”

Now for serious depression, I don’t think this advice would do a lot of good, but it strikes me as quite right for milder cases of melancholy — it seems to me impossible to “think down” sad thoughts, but diversion more often does the trick. Johnson and Boswell talk about diversions of mind — new things to read and study — and those are wonderful, but if I want to fly from my own mind, there’s little better than doing something with my body, a walk or a ride, maybe. The worst thing is to sit there and stew.

And here’s a small touch of Boswell’s humor:

On Wednesday, April 3, in the morning I found him very busy putting his books in order, and as they were generally very old ones, clouds of dust were flying around him. He had on a pair of large gloves such as hedgers use. His present appearance put me in mind of my uncle, Dr. Boswell’s description of him, “A robust genius, born to grapple with whole libraries.”

I have been reading such good posts on 17C and 18C topics, that I am inspired to add something from my own 18C read, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (I’m speeding my way toward the halfway point right now). First of all, here’s Johnson on literary criticism. When a friend says about a new tragedy called Elvira, “We have hardly a right to abuse this tragedy; for bad as it is, how vain should either of us be to write one not near so good,” he responds with this:

Why no, Sir; this is not just reasoning. You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

There’s a certain amount of sense to this, although I think having tried to write a tragedy might give one better insight into how hard it is to write one. But if we think of writing as a craft that some people have taken special pains to learn, then why not expect the best and be critical if we don’t get it? Johnson’s attitude implies that we can recognize quality in something even if we can’t produce that quality ourselves. I kind of like the idea of writing as a craft that a writer sets out to learn, just as a person might set out to learn carpentry. This strikes me as a very 18C, pre-Romantic way of thinking about writing, and, not having been one to buy into the myth of the larger-than-life Romantic artist (or having been thoroughly disabused of that notion in my education so that I forget ever having believed in it at all), it appeals to me.

And here is a conversation on the difference between Richardson and Fielding (and if you want to know something about the 18C novel, you can’t do better than to read Richardson’s Pamela followed by Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews, which will give you two very different views on what the novel can do, two views that remained in tension with one another for a long, long time):

Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, “he was a blockhead;” and upon my [Boswell] expressing my astonishment at so strange an assertion, he said, “What I mean by his being a blockhead is, that he was a barren rascal.” Boswell: “Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?” Johnson: “Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler. Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all ‘Tom Jones.’ I, indeed, never read ‘Joseph Andrews.'” Erskine: “Surely, Sir, Richardson is very tedious.” Johnson: “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.”

Although I love Pamela and Clarissa, I can see why others don’t — if people don’t read for the story, in order not to feel like hanging themselves, they aren’t likely to read for the sentiment, since the sentiment is much more likely to annoy contemporary readers than please them. The class stuff here is interesting, since Richardson was fairly solidly middle class (although the term isn’t historically accurate) and Fielding was a member of the gentry, and yet it’s Richardson who sounds snooty here. Richardson is not so different from his character Pamela who (according to one interpretation) struggles mightily to raise her social standing. Fielding, with his social standing secure, is freer to write about low life and to be, or appear to be, a rascal. It’s interesting, also, that some in the 18C found Richardson tedious — it’s not as though everyone at the time fell in love with seemingly endless novels with hardly any action.

And one more bit of Johnsonian criticism, reported by Boswell:

I wondered to hear him say of “Gulliver’s Travels,” “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”

After my post in which I complained about the mediocre selection of essays in The Best American Essays 2006, I’ve come across a couple very good ones. One of them is Adam Gopnik’s “Death of a Fish,” which appeared originally in The New Yorker, and which I’d already read there. The essay was good enough to reward a re-reading, and I liked it just as much the second time as I did the first. The essay is about the death of Bluie, Gopnik’s daughter Olivia’s fish; it starts off with these irresistable sentences:

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia’s goldfish, Bluie, died the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie’s life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements — including the problem of consciousness and the plot line of Hitchcock’s Vertigo — that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

Poor Bluie gets stuck in a fishbowl castle and no one and nothing can get the thing out. The family scrambles to keep Olivia from finding out, and the ten-year old son ponders what it means to be a fish: “Does Bluie know he’s Bluie?” The parents wonder what is going on in Olivia’s mind, and this is what Gopnik concludes:

Olivia loved Bluie because it is in her nature to ascribe intentions and emotions to things that don’t have them, rather as Hitchcock did with actresses. She knows that she is Olivia because one of the things that she is capable of doing is imagining that Bluie is Bluie. Though you read about the condition “mind-blindness” in autistic children, the alternative, I saw, was not to be mind-sighted. The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary; to see everything as though it might have a mind. We begin as small children imagining that everything could have consciousness — fish, dolls, toy soldiers, even parents — and spent the rest of our lives paring the list down, until we are left alone in bed, the only mind left.

I love this characteristic of the essay — that it can take a small life event and turn it into an opportunity to reflect on large philosophical issues. The essay can be a way of ordering and shaping life, drawing lines and putting pieces together, connecting large and small, relating the private event to the public concern.

The other essay I liked is Michele Morano’s “Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood.” This has a clever structure that does not feel overly clever or gimmicky; Morano takes nine reasons to use the subjunctive mood in Spanish and makes them the outline for her essay, using her failing relationship with her boyfriend as an example to illustrate each of the nine reasons. As she explains the grammar, she explains the relationship. As she explains the grammar, she writes about what can and can’t be said and known, what is certain (the indicative mood) and what is uncertain (the subjunctive). For example:

In language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two. The indicative mood is for knowledge, facts, absolutes, for describing what’s real or definite. You’d use the indicative to say, for example:

I was in love.
Or, The man I loved tried to kill himself.
Or, I moved to Spain because the man I loved, the man who tried to kill himself, was driving me insane.

The indicative helps you tell what happened or is happening or will happen in the future (when you believe you know for sure what the future will bring).

The subjunctive mood, on the other hand, is uncertain. It helps you tell what you could have been or might be or what you want but may not get. You’d use the subjunctive to say:

I thought he’d improve without me.
Or, I left so that he’d begin to take care of himself.

Or later, after your perspective has been altered, by time and distance and a couple of cervezas in a brightly lit bar, you might say:

I deserted him (indicative)
I left him alone with his crazy self for a year (indicative)
Because I hoped (after which begins the subjunctive) that being apart might allow us to come together again.

Morano’s use of the grammar rules gives the reader some distance from what is a pretty harsh story, and it allows her (her persona) a way of talking about the story that’s not self-pitying or whiny. The distancing tactic keeps the story from sounding melodramatic, but it also increases the power of the reader’s response: the voice of the essay is restrained, held back by the organizing structure, but behind and underneath that restraint is some very powerful feeling.