Recent Biographies of Samuel Johnson
This review is from: Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Hardcover)
Samuel Johnson belongs to another age, but his biography by James Boswell will be with us for as long as people are interested in reading about other people. Johnson's literary hits, his poems, plays, and essays, were well known in their time, but are fairly well limited now to academic study only. His splendid dictionary is long out of date, though his lexicographic principles are still regarded as exemplary by editors of, say, _The Oxford English Dictionary_. But in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ we have a memorable character, funny, brilliant, and quirky; it was the first biography that brought forth the subject's personality, and Johnson will live in it forever. Boswell's portrait, for all its depth and magnificence, didn't get everything in. As Jeffrey Meyers, a previous biographer of many literary characters, points out in _Samuel Johnson: The Struggle_ (Basic Books), Boswell only knew Johnson in the latter part of his life, and devotes only a fifth of his biography to Johnson's first fifty-five years. Boswell knew of Johnson's diaries, but barely got a glimpse of them. Boswell was frank about recording his own sexual details in his journals, and knew something of Johnson's sexual enthusiasm, but did not see fit to write about it. He also suppressed details about Johnson's use of profanity, his excesses in eating and drinking, and his lapses into a depression bordering on madness. He didn't know anything of Johnson's fondness for whips, chains, and padlocks to be used upon him sexually. Meyers knows all these things, and tells them, and the result is a detailed, sympathetic portrait that will, of course, never replace the original, but will deepen the appreciation of just how much of a struggle it was to be Samuel Johnson, and how successfully the struggle was waged.
Among Johnson's difficulties was that he was ugly; his face had been scarred by scrofula, which had also left him blind in one eye and deaf. He also had wriggling and obsessive movement. It is possible that he had Tourette's disorder. When William Hogarth first saw him at a distance, he "perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner." Hogarth concluded that he was an idiot, and was astonished thereafter to be addressed by him with surpassing eloquence. It was the eloquence and literary brilliance, of course, that was to be the making of Johnson in London, but only after years of failing as a schoolmaster in his own home region. He took hack work at first, and his peculiar appearance and movements didn't make a difference in his capacity to write, and scholarly and illustrious talkers like Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith easily learned how deep a fund of knowledge and elevated jocularity were within the bizarre-looking person. He worked hard, but constantly reproached himself for indolence. Johnson practiced so many of the Christian virtues (for instance, his household was full of ne'er-do-wells and even practicing prostitutes in whom he took a generous, non-sexual interest), but his religion gave him no comfort, only misery and despair. Johnson had a long-term friendship with Hester Thrale, who had an unhappy marriage. Meyers gives the sometimes circumstantial evidence that Mrs. Thrale engaged Johnson in masochistic play. Such thoughts were completely in accord with his gloomy outlook and unremitting self-reproach. When Mr. Thrale, who was also Johnson's friend, died, many assumed that Johnson and Mrs. Thrale would marry, but she had grown tired of years of tending to his many needs, and married another.
Though we may not read much of Johnson in his original works, Meyers winds up with a summary of Johnson's considerable influence on Austen, Hawthorne, Wolfe, Beckett, and Nabokov. More importantly, of course, because of Boswell we will have some inkling of Johnson's personality and what it must have been like to have been in his presence. Meyers's engrossing amplification of the great original biography puts much of it into a new context, and expands our wonder at Johnson's life and accomplishments.
This review is from: Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Hardcover)
Samuel Johnson belongs to another age, but his biography by James Boswell will be with us for as long as people are interested in reading about other people. Johnson's literary hits, his poems, plays, and essays, were well known in their time, but are fairly well limited now to academic study only. His splendid dictionary is long out of date, though his lexicographic principles are still regarded as exemplary by editors of, say, _The Oxford English Dictionary_. But in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ we have a memorable character, funny, brilliant, and quirky; it was the first biography that brought forth the subject's personality, and Johnson will live in it forever. Boswell's portrait, for all its depth and magnificence, didn't get everything in. As Jeffrey Meyers, a previous biographer of many literary characters, points out in _Samuel Johnson: The Struggle_ (Basic Books), Boswell only knew Johnson in the latter part of his life, and devotes only a fifth of his biography to Johnson's first fifty-five years. Boswell knew of Johnson's diaries, but barely got a glimpse of them. Boswell was frank about recording his own sexual details in his journals, and knew something of Johnson's sexual enthusiasm, but did not see fit to write about it. He also suppressed details about Johnson's use of profanity, his excesses in eating and drinking, and his lapses into a depression bordering on madness. He didn't know anything of Johnson's fondness for whips, chains, and padlocks to be used upon him sexually. Meyers knows all these things, and tells them, and the result is a detailed, sympathetic portrait that will, of course, never replace the original, but will deepen the appreciation of just how much of a struggle it was to be Samuel Johnson, and how successfully the struggle was waged.
Among Johnson's difficulties was that he was ugly; his face had been scarred by scrofula, which had also left him blind in one eye and deaf. He also had wriggling and obsessive movement. It is possible that he had Tourette's disorder. When William Hogarth first saw him at a distance, he "perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner." Hogarth concluded that he was an idiot, and was astonished thereafter to be addressed by him with surpassing eloquence. It was the eloquence and literary brilliance, of course, that was to be the making of Johnson in London, but only after years of failing as a schoolmaster in his own home region. He took hack work at first, and his peculiar appearance and movements didn't make a difference in his capacity to write, and scholarly and illustrious talkers like Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith easily learned how deep a fund of knowledge and elevated jocularity were within the bizarre-looking person. He worked hard, but constantly reproached himself for indolence. Johnson practiced so many of the Christian virtues (for instance, his household was full of ne'er-do-wells and even practicing prostitutes in whom he took a generous, non-sexual interest), but his religion gave him no comfort, only misery and despair. Johnson had a long-term friendship with Hester Thrale, who had an unhappy marriage. Meyers gives the sometimes circumstantial evidence that Mrs. Thrale engaged Johnson in masochistic play. Such thoughts were completely in accord with his gloomy outlook and unremitting self-reproach. When Mr. Thrale, who was also Johnson's friend, died, many assumed that Johnson and Mrs. Thrale would marry, but she had grown tired of years of tending to his many needs, and married another.
Though we may not read much of Johnson in his original works, Meyers winds up with a summary of Johnson's considerable influence on Austen, Hawthorne, Wolfe, Beckett, and Nabokov. More importantly, of course, because of Boswell we will have some inkling of Johnson's personality and what it must have been like to have been in his presence. Meyers's engrossing amplification of the great original biography puts much of it into a new context, and expands our wonder at Johnson's life and accomplishments.
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