The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life

by Henry Hitchings

  One might expect him to be an advocate of systematic reading, but his approach appears more relaxed, even capricious. It’s fine to start a book in the middle, and you should read what you want, not what you feel you ought to read: ‘If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.’ The flipside of this is, naturally, that ‘What is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention’ – a statement that chimes with modern insights about the relationship between reading, pleasure and memory, not least the idea that when one reads with pleasure one’s avidity has an erotic quality, a sense of being on the very edge of reality and of our cognition being a function not only of the mind, but also of the body.

  In descriptions of his behaviour, the parallels between reading and eating are apparent: Sam consumed books hungrily, chewing and digesting their ideas, sometimes swallowing them whole yet sometimes pausing to savour their sweetest parts and perhaps to roll a particularly delicious phrase upon his tongue. But he had a taste for dry, bulky fare, and the list of his favourite authors includes figures whose works one is now unlikely to find outside a university library: Hugo Grotius, Angelo Poliziano, Joseph Justus Scaliger. His appetite for the more solid and juiceless sorts of literature was strong. He was capable of ignoring the scenery in the Hebrides because he was utterly absorbed in an obscure 1619 treatise about ‘the nature and use of lots’ (i.e. using objects such as sticks or paper slips to choose a person for a job or resolve a dispute), and he surprised his university tutor by breaking a long silence with a quotation from Macrobius, a far from well-known Roman writer of the fifth century. In fact, Macrobius, with his broad range of interests that included astronomy, geography and the importance of the number seven, was a model of the kind of reader Sam wanted to be: an omnivore who could participate with rigorous intelligence in the arguments of every work he ingested.

  The truth is that he read in different ways for different purposes. We all do so, but tend to have a limited awareness of this divergence. Robert DeMaria distinguishes Sam’s four approaches: he read curiously, entering into a ‘dreamlike state of enjoyment’ as he allowed himself to become completely engrossed in a book; perused texts for answers to specific questions that were preying on his mind; practised ‘hard reading’, the close and critical study of intellectually demanding material; and engaged in ‘mere reading’, which involved scanning a newspaper or some other ephemeral publication ‘without the fatigue of close attention’, for, as he remarked, ‘the world . . . swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read’.1 His attitude to reading is liberating and inspiring: he champions it, appreciates the range of forms it can take, and does justice to the truth of readers’ experience.

  Boswell recalled his uncle describing Sam as ‘a robust genius, born to grapple with whole libraries’, and the choice of verb is apt, for Sam handled volumes unsentimentally. On one occasion Boswell found him putting his books in order, wearing ‘a pair of large gloves, such as hedgers use’. He certainly wasn’t one of those book lovers who purr over exquisite bindings. Although he did care about the quality of the ink and paper, he concerned himself far more with what was inside books, and sometimes his urgency in seeking out their choicest parts became a churlish roughness. He surrendered a handsome copy of Demosthenes’s speeches because he could see that it was ‘too fine for a scholar’s talons’. Garrick reported lending him a ‘stupendously bound’ volume of Petrarch and being horrified to see him toss it over his head onto the floor. In light of this, we might expect him to be addicted to inserting comments in his books, arguing with authors or their printers, but his marginalia are sporadic. Scribbling in the margin disrupts the flow of reading, and Sam usually prefers immersion to the herky-jerky progress of the chronic annotator. Or rather, he wants to do what he can to make immersion possible.

  One of his liberating beliefs about reading is that you don’t have to persevere with a book that’s boring you. He drove home the point when asked about Elizabeth Montagu’s An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, which he had not read all the way through: ‘when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery’. Hester Thrale recorded his exclaiming ‘How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page!’ One of the reasons for this was the abundance of hack work. When volumes are cobbled together in order to make money, the results are often tawdry. In the Idler he wrote, ‘The continual multiplication of books not only distracts choice, but disappoints enquiry’, and his distaste for hastily produced dross persists in a remark commonly attributed to him, which even if it’s apocryphal captures his manner: ‘What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.’ His ideas about pleasure will be the subject of a later chapter, but in the context of examining what he has to say about its connection with reading, I’m put in mind of one of the fictional correspondents he introduces in the Rambler. In the midst of a discussion not of books but of wit, this character makes a simple, sharp statement about the chancy alliance between writer and audience, reflecting Sam’s profound experience of both sides of that relationship: ‘The power of pleasing is very often obstructed by the desire.’

  16

  A chapter that reflects on the uses of Sickness, and of Patrons

  The Dictionary was not only the culmination of a remarkable programme of reading, but also a treat for those who shared Sam’s sense that a reference book could be a work of literature. Dictionaries are, to paraphrase Umberto Eco, encyclopedias in disguise, and this one, besides its obvious role as a guide to English vocabulary, is an anthology of literary extracts, an educational primer, a history (or museum) of learning, and a time capsule that enables us to picture the age in which Sam lived. It is also full of hints about the story of its own making.

  No definition in the Dictionary tells us more about that story than that of patron: ‘One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.’ This was a dig at Lord Chesterfield, who had neglected his role until shortly before the volumes’ publication. When at last he wrote the first of two pieces in support of the Dictionary, in November 1754, he explained that no one involved in its making had offered him ‘the usual compliment of a pair of gloves or a bottle of wine’. Dodsley, he added, had not ‘so much as invited me to take a bit of mutton with him’. His tone was embarrassingly trivial. ‘I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language,’ he condescendingly declared, to ‘Mr Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship’. Part of the problem was that he was so used to his role as a paragon of polite learning – a man flattered by anyone with a product to push – that he had become a parody of graciousness. In private, Sam expressed disgust: ‘I have sailed a long and painful voyage round the world of the English language; and does he now send out two cock-boats to tow me into harbour?’ At length, in February, he responded to Chesterfield in stinging terms. The contents of his letter soon got out, generating welcome publicity. It remains a masterpiece of controlled anger:

  I have been lately informed by the proprietor of the World that two Papers in which my Dictionary is recommended to the Public were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the Great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

  When upon some slight encouragement I first visited your Lordship I was overpowered like the rest of Mankind by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish . . . that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending, but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the Art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly Scholar can possess. I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased
to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

  Seven years, My Lord, have now past since I waited in your outward Rooms or was repulsed from your Door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of Publication without one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before . . .

  Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my Labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known, and do not want it.

  I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

  Sam’s letter is a trumpet blast: authors need no longer be subservient to vain benefactors. Yet it is also a more personal statement. When he tells Chesterfield that ‘The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind’, he is dismissing not the whole principle of patronage, but specifically Chesterfield’s failure to make good on his side of the bargain. Instead of being timely, his patron’s notice has been delayed ‘till I am known, and do not want it’. The key word here is known. When Sam signed the contract for the Dictionary, he was an obscure figure, but by 1755 he has a reputation and a public. He no longer needs to profess obedience to Chesterfield and to refer to himself as this lofty figure’s ‘delegate’. What’s more, he no longer thinks of English as something that can be fixed (screwed in place, that is, and mended), and that makes Chesterfield, with his enthusiasm for sending the language to school, seem like yesterday’s man, priggish and unenlightened. The antipathy would cause Sam to remark, ‘This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords’, and some twenty years later it would yield a memorably tart Johnsonian putdown: when Dodsley’s brother James published Chesterfield’s letters, which were meant to teach valuable lessons about self-reliance and the art of social success, Sam commented that they could inspire only ‘the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master’.

  More immediately, Sam grasped that he was under an obligation not to his neglectful patron, but to the project’s commercial backers and to the public, as well as to himself. Yet after seeing off Chesterfield, he wobbled. In the weeks preceding the Dictionary’s publication his letters referred to its appearance and possible reception with a mixture of coolness and pride. They included snippets of Latin that, while coming naturally to someone of Sam’s erudition, still look revealingly pedantic. I’m reminded here of how I felt when waiting for the publication of my first book, which was in fact about the Dictionary. Waiting is a skill – one that I was then very far from having mastered (and something that in the thirteen years since I’ve in truth become only a little better at). Several emails from that time betray my fluttery state of mind and my need to make light of it. In one of them I refer to my book as a ‘tome’. I suppose I was trying to mask my anxiety with a bit of jokey formality, but the email’s recipient put me straight: ‘Your use of the word “tome” can fuck right off.’ Reviewing Sam’s phrasing, I think I can hear the same effortful note. When he writes that the Dictionary is ‘Vasta mole superbus’ (‘Proud in its great bulk’) and that ‘My Book is now coming in luminis oras’ (‘into the realms of light’), one detects something other than ironclad confidence. In reaching for a grandiose phrase, he is caught between mocking authorial pomposity and subscribing to it.

  Sam found, as countless others have, that the moment when he was expected to feel pride instead proved disappointing. A sense of anticlimax attends the completion of any large project, and this seems especially true of books. Some authors, adept at self-promotion, can pretend that the work they have just completed and now set before the public is the most important thing in their lives. Most are unconvincing. Reaching the shore, Sam could look back on the way in which he’d first approached the journey: ‘I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature.’ These, he now knows, ‘were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer’. He sounds like the PhD student of cliché, who imagines that before embarking on their thesis they can devour acres of books, write a novel and learn a couple of languages, but discovers that the reality of scholarship is a little less sexy.

  The preface to the Dictionary is eloquent and poignant. ‘I have protracted my work,’ Sam writes, ‘till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.’ Here we have the classic psychology of the envoi. Anyone who has toiled on a vast project will know that, no matter how much pleasure and relief they derive from its completion, self-doubt and despair accompany closure. For many people these will be dwarfish presences, easily brushed aside. But there is nothing strange about looking upon an achievement and thinking ‘Was it worth it?’, ‘Is it good enough?’, ‘Couldn’t I have got it done sooner?’ and ‘Will others care about this as much as I do?’ There is nothing strange, either, in sending one’s work out into the world frigidly rather than fervently – ‘Do I still care about this . . . as much as I did, or should?’ And of all the questions that shadow the end of a big task, none is more blue than the simple ‘What next?’

  For Sam, the answer was especially glum: he fell sick, wheezing his way through an eight-week bout of bronchitis. He was experiencing what we now call ‘the let-down effect’, the physical low that we plunge into not during a period of strain, but once it has ended. On his sickbed he learned of a rumour that he had died. He would live for another twenty-nine years, but would be plagued increasingly by rheumatism, gout and dropsy. Persistent difficulties with breathing were matched by a fear of being crushed, and his Dictionary definition of nightmare – ‘morbid oppression during sleep, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast’ – is one of many images he conjures that relate psychological stress and the experience of physical stress. As his ailments multiplied, he waged an ever more furious campaign against them, dosing himself with all manner of purgatives and diuretics. Insomnia made him feverish by night and lethargic by day. He was bled for problems as diverse as flatulence, a cough and an eye inflammation.

  That sickness makes it harder to be successful is no one’s idea of a startling revelation. Yet its disruptiveness can add something to our self-knowledge and our insights into the world around us. A particularly striking statement on this theme occurs in Ecce Homo (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of ‘how one becomes what one is’ – a work of self-justification dressed as autobiography. As a philosopher often labelled a nihilist, Nietzsche isn’t someone we’d expect to find useful in this context, but long experience of ill health made it possible for him to reflect on the uses of adversity: ‘It was as if I discovered life anew, myself included; I tasted all the good things, even the small ones . . . I turned my will to health, to life, into my philosophy . . . the years when my vitality was at its lowest were when I stopped being a pessimist: the instinct for self-recovery forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement.’1

  Even when ill health doesn’t have this paradoxically elevating effect, it’s an education in resilience, adaptability and hope. It makes us think that we are being punished, that we have an enemy within us, and that we are guests in this world, but it also obliges us to examine our priorities: what do we most want to achieve, and what would we like our legacy to be? In the Rambler Sam remarks that ‘sickness shows us the value of ease’ – with ease here signifying something more like
‘neutrality’ than ‘comfort’, and its value being the freedom to do all that one knows one can do. More strikingly, in his short life of Herman Boerhaave, a Dutch physician whose work he admired for its simplicity and rigour, he refers to the ‘opportunities of contemplating the wonderful and inexplicable union of soul and body, which nothing but long sickness can give’. As so often in his writings, what appears to be a generalization is grounded in autobiographical truth; he has known long sickness and its opportunities, and his experience of navigating suffering can be an inspiration to anyone who’s sick.

  17

  An essay, or ‘loose sally of the mind’, upon the methods of a moralist, in which are considered prose style and its higher functions

  Today the word moralist has unappealing connotations. I find myself picturing a shrivelled martinet who takes grim satisfaction in stamping out fun, or a fire-and-brimstone politician who’ll soon be caught with his pants around his ankles. For a more mature perspective, I might quote Francis Bacon’s sixteenth-century observation that moralists ‘appear like writing-masters, who lay before their scholars a number of beautiful copies, but give them no directions how to guide their pen or shape their letters’.