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

by Henry Hitchings

  But that day in August 1763, he had another redoubtable thinker on his mind. As he and Sam strolled to the beach in Harwich, they discussed what Boswell took to be the philosopher George Berkeley’s belief that matter does not exist. (In fact, Berkeley, a pious and scholarly Irish bishop, argued something a little different: that the attributes we ascribe to objects exist only in our perceptions.) Boswell reports that ‘though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it’. Then: ‘I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”’ The last four words are the bit that people remember: plenty have regarded this as an example of Sam’s common sense, and plenty have seen it as absurdly pudding-headed.

  The way the story is repeated, especially by incredulous philosophers, it’s as if Sam thought that by seeing the stone move he’d proved that it existed. But he knew more than the episode, as commonly reported, makes it appear. He was aware that Berkeley had attributed a special importance to our sense of touch, and he was familiar with the writings of David Hartley, who had argued that the contraction of our muscles, when we exert ourselves against resistance (whether it’s a dumb-bell or a large stone), delivers the essential properties of matter to the mind. A different reading, then, is that the stone moved Sam, and the proof for him of its independent existence was its power to repel his foot. His response to Boswell will always be cherished by people who think of philosophy as disingenuous sophistry, and others will see in it a peculiarly English refusal to engage in abstract thought.

  The phrase ‘I refute it thus’ is indelibly associated with Samuel Johnson, and its appeal lies in its vim, the impromptu snap and vigour of defiance. Though this is only one of his modes, it has defined his posthumous reputation because it produces such quoteworthy lines, so many of which are putdowns. For instance, there’s the more obviously flippant remark he is supposed to have made to a fan of Berkeley’s ideas: ‘Pray, sir, don’t leave us; for we may, perhaps, forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist.’ Of a tiresome person he could say, ‘That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one’; of a poor piece of roast mutton, ‘It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest’; of the witty, shy politician Dudley Long, ‘He fills a chair’; of two poets whose merits were being compared, ‘There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea’; and of the Giant’s Causeway, ‘Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.’

  For some, comment of this kind is rudely dismissive and warrants no analysis. Yet for many it’s attractive, because it deals succinctly and decisively with matters we’re used to hearing discussed in a long-winded or woolly fashion. This is the legislative Johnson, who closes down a debate not because his mind is narrow, but because he knows that humanity’s great enthusiasm for discussion is matched by a great desire for finality. We can make any of his ‘closing’ judgements our own, recycling or modifying it, pretending that it’s something we’ve invented or making a show of having encountered and remembered it. Utterances of this kind are most enjoyable, I think, when they come from a person and a time far removed from us. Vividly durable, they function like a bridge: we not only see a remote moment, but find ourselves in it, laughing, observing. My hunch is that everyone who reads the story of Johnson kicking the stone pictures him doing so, pictures being present (the image is a little hazy – details of attire and hairstyle remain vague), and hears in ‘I refute it thus’ – specifically in Boswell’s italicized thus – another word, ouch, or perhaps, in the idiom of the day, hegh. The episode may not help us understand the intricacies of philosophy, but it makes us feel close to him.

  27

  In which at last we attend to the life and loves of Hester Thrale, a foisonous fund of Anecdote

  Those curious about Sam, in his own lifetime and ever since, are nourished by the impression of his being a person remarkable in his humanity and in the breadth of his achievements. Yet there is also a nagging sense of his strangeness – his being not just Mr Oddity, a living anthology of mannerisms, but also more than a little weird about family and friendship, women and sex. For anyone interested in Sam’s stranger aspects, the place to look has long seemed to be his close friendship with Hester Thrale. When she documented their relationship, it was under the title Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, and alert readers would have been reminded of Sam’s definition of anecdote as ‘secret history’.

  Samuel Johnson is a figure wrapped in anecdote. He lived in an age when it was in vogue as a form of entertainment, an accessory of smart conversation, and stories about him circulated widely because he was a celebrity. Not in quite the modern sense, admittedly, since he was renowned for his accomplishments, rather than as a result of frenzied self-promotion or being the child of someone famous. But people who knew him wanted to tell stories about him – partly for the sheer pleasure of doing so and basking in the warm light of his vitality, and partly because the very fact of their having such stories to tell was proof of their intimacy with the great man. Meanwhile, those who didn’t know him delighted in these stories, which gave them access to his mystery and spoke vividly of life’s charm and peculiarity. So the stories multiplied, and, as Sam commented, their effect was inhibiting: ‘I am prevented many frolics that I should like very well, since I am become such a theme for the papers.’

  When Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson came out in 1786, readers pounced upon the book, for it was widely understood that he had bared himself to Mrs Thrale as to no other. The public’s expectations of an intimate portrait, containing major revelations as well as a fresh instalment of Sam’s sharp remarks and wise observations, meant that within six weeks of publication the Anecdotes had sold around 5,000 copies – a high figure at a time when a season’s leading bestseller would sell 10,000. The Monthly Review in May 1786 commented that ‘The name of Thrale had been long made known to the public’ and readers were therefore likely to ‘expect great entertainment’. In the opinion of its critic, the Anecdotes contained ‘much that ought to have been suppressed’ and risked leaving the reader ‘disgusted with egotisms’.1 Frankly, this is the kind of bad review that prompts sales rather than discouraging them, and it reinforced the impression that Hester Thrale had had unusually privileged access to the private Sam.

  Besides the Anecdotes, there is ample evidence of their closeness. More than 370 of his letters to her survive, whereas we have a record of only one of his letters to Tetty (in which he speaks of her being ‘exposed by my means to miseries which I could not relieve’). Their exchanges bear out the truth of John Donne’s delicious line that ‘more than kisses, letters mingle souls’. Though some of what passed between them was banal, he would often write to her warmly, in a relaxed and affectionate style, and she responded volubly. ‘Your letters,’ he could say, ‘give me a great part of the pleasure which a life of solitude admits.’ Once, when he felt she had gone too long without writing to him, he prodded her about this ‘omission’ before launching, half in self-pity and half with an appropriate sense of the absurd, into ‘the history of one of my toes’.

  In person, as on the page, Hester Thrale was lively. Petite (she stood just 4'11"), with a birdlike angularity and oddly large hands, she combined wit, attentiveness and practicality. When Arthur Murphy introduced her to Sam in January 1765, it was just fifteen months since she had wed Henry Thrale, a rich brewer with twin weaknesses for food and philandering, but already she was eager to compensate for the frustrations of her marriage. Sam was the remedy – entertaining, knowledgeable, appreciative. Soon he was a frequent visitor to the Thrales’ townhouse. This stood next to the brewery in the ominously named Dead Man’s Place in Southwark, a district for which Henry that year became the MP. But it was at their villa six miles south-west of town that he found a sanctuary. Streatham Park, built in 1730, stood in 109 acres lined with English elms, and there w
as room enough for him to be assigned his own apartment there, complete with large bed and mahogany bidet.2

  For all his quirks, Sam was a reassuring presence. While Henry appreciated his guest’s varied conversation and would eventually find him an ally in both politics and business, Sam thought Mr Thrale skilful in trade and sound in understanding, a man of some scholarship and firm principles. On the last point he was wrong, but their friendship burgeoned, and all the while he and Hester could share their secrets, in the course of which he proved particularly good at listening to complaints that her husband preferred to brush aside. The Thrales’ children came to think of Sam as a most welcome component of the household; in the words of his biographer Walter Jackson Bate, they treated him as ‘a combination of friend and a sort of toy elephant’.3 He was also a project, a grand charity case in which Hester could invest her energies. Despite being more than thirty years Sam’s junior, she was as much a mother figure to him as a surrogate daughter, taking responsibility for keeping him in good health and entertaining him. That could mean supplying him with pineapples and strawberries or providing mental stimulation. Towards the end of his life he reflected on her kindness and with raw emotion thanked her for having ‘soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched’. His true mother had done less.

  Hester Thrale was his confidante and supervised him in his more man-childish moments of helplessness, but that was not all. Rumours circulated that they were sexual partners, with one newspaper reporting that ‘an eminent brewer’ had grown ‘very jealous of a certain author in folio, and perceived a strong resemblance to him in his eldest son’.4 Sam shrugged aside this scurrilous chatter, but the letters that passed between the two of them contained hints of an unusual rapport: he called her his ‘dear mistress’, and she referred to him as ‘my inmate’.

  During a spell spent at Streatham Park, he entrusted her with a padlock. When her effects were sold in 1823 this was among them, along with a note reading ‘Johnson’s padlock, committed to my care in 1768’. Did she have to chain him up, or was the padlock a symbol of his slavish devotion, of passions best kept out of sight? If she shackled him, was it to satisfy masochistic cravings? The subject has attracted speculation. In June 1773, Sam wrote a letter to her in French – the language of both love and diplomacy, as cliché would have it, and also of course one that the family servants weren’t likely to understand. In it he showed sensitivity to her difficult domestic circumstances (her mother was dying at the time), while also expressing unhappiness about having to spend so much time in a state of ‘solitude profonde’. The letter can be read as an elaborate piece of politesse, but it is a key document for anyone looking for the suppressed eroticism in their relationship, and some of his imagery is of a kind that excites the literary historian’s inner Freudian analyst, especially when he refers to her holding him ‘dans l’esclavage’ (in a state of slavery). Her reply is disconcerting, too, informing him that ‘If we go on together your confinement will be as strict as possible’ and ending with the injunction ‘do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the rod enough’. One recent biographer has offered the tame theory that Sam may have thought he needed to be restrained with a padlock and fetters because he was afraid of sleepwalking. Another concludes, less cautiously, that it is ‘not surprising . . . that a man tormented by lifelong sin and guilt would seek penance and want to be gently whipped’, a performance that ‘both satisfied and punished his sexual urges’.5

  Purchasers of Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson didn’t know about the padlock, but they expected some special matters of the heart to be unclasped by Mrs Thrale. In fact, by the time the book came out, this was no longer her name. Henry Thrale died in 1781 of a stroke (‘I never had such a friend,’ declared Sam), and in July 1784, having secured her future by selling his brewery for £135,000, Hester married again. Her new husband was Gabriel Piozzi, a musician from Brescia who had lived in London for around eight years. She had originally met Piozzi through Charles Burney, and soon afterwards recruited him to give singing lessons to her daughter Hester Maria (known as ‘Queeney’, much admired by Sam, and later the wife of a distinguished Scottish admiral). The relationship with Piozzi deepened, and though she knew that marrying him would be controversial, she believed she could introduce him into polite society.

  Sam was appalled by her choice of second husband. Besides being a singer, Piozzi was a Roman Catholic, which by the prevailing standards of the day made him a thoroughly unsuitable match. Since he was an Italian, malicious observers also assumed that he was oversexed and that the widowed Mrs Thrale’s enthusiasm for him was shamefully sensual. Sam made his feelings plain in a letter written on 2 July, accusing her of having ‘forfeited your fame, and your country’ as well as having ‘abandoned your children and your religion’. ‘You are ignominiously married,’ he thundered, and many others agreed, with her rival literary hostess Elizabeth Montagu declaring, ‘I am myself convinced that the poor woman is mad.’ Yet even as Sam condemned her choice, he tried to give her practical counsel, and near the end of his final letter to her, six days later, he revealed his vulnerability, writing that ‘The tears stand in my eyes.’

  Once it became clear that she was not going to be persuaded, Sam was done with her. The rupture was complete and irreversible. If he chanced on one of her old letters, he destroyed it. ‘I have burnt all I can find,’ he told Fanny Burney – though a few that he didn’t immediately discover he later deliberately preserved. ‘I drive her quite from my mind,’ he insisted, and Burney was struck by his vehemence. She had often been at Streatham when Sam was in sportive mood and the company feasted on venison, pineapples, nectarines and ices. But now he was dining on bitterness: ‘I drive her, as I said, wholly from my mind.’

  This turn of phrase, tellingly in the present tense rather than the past, will be familiar to all of us from conversation with people who are not in fact able to expel their past loves from their thoughts. His letters to Hester Thrale are his record of what he called ‘a little paradise’ – of Streatham Park and its peaceful rural atmosphere, but also of the idyllic nature of his conversation with someone who understood him, got his references, and appreciated his ironies and wordplay. ‘A friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life,’ he had written to her in November 1783; now, in his disappointment, he could not simply shake off something that was part of the fabric of his existence. In truth, her marriage to Piozzi may have hastened his death. He had nursed a fond hope of being her second husband, and she had shocked him by preferring a simple man to a complicated one.

  These events, seen from a distance, naturally lend themselves to the sympathetic novelist or dramatist, and in the 1930s another Sam, Samuel Beckett, researched and began work on ‘Human Wishes’, a play he never completed that took its name from Samuel Johnson’s best-known poem. The idea was to start with the death of Henry Thrale and end with the death of Johnson. Beckett, who said half-jokingly that one could write fifty plays about Sam’s life, was not the first person to hit upon the idea of dramatizing episodes from it. In 1923, the Philadelphia book collector A. Edward Newton had published Doctor Johnson: A Play, in which Fanny Burney refers to Hester Thrale as ‘licentious’ and Johnson corrects her – ‘Why no, Fanny, do not say so. That she should prefer the company of Signor Piozzi to that of a very sick old man is but natural, as it is perhaps but natural that the sick old man should have resented it.’6

  If Beckett was aware of Newton’s efforts, they could hardly have deterred him. Doctor Johnson: A Play is the overegged confection of an excitable bibliophile. Beckett was drawn to Sam for less quaint reasons. It is no great surprise that such a chronicler of failure and resilience – later the author of the line ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ – should have been attracted to a writer so ravaged by ailments and so eloquent about bleakness and yet also about hope. He was particularly taken with Sam’s statement that ‘Life is a progress from want to want,
not from enjoyment to enjoyment’, as well as with his remark, of Brighthelmstone Downs in Sussex, that it was a place ‘so truly desolate that if one had a mind to hang one’s self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope’. This looks ahead to Waiting for Godot, in which Beckett’s characters Vladimir and Estragon, rough-hewn counterparts of Johnson and Savage, contemplate hanging themselves from the one sad tree that’s available to them.

  ‘It’s Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me,’ said Beckett several decades later. ‘And if I follow any tradition, it is his.’ What he had in mind was the solitary misery of a writer plagued with unwelcome thoughts, able to admit his susceptibilities, bent on self-analysis and stunningly articulate about his doubts and pains. For Beckett, ‘doped and buttoned up in sadness’, the author of Rasselas and the Rambler was the poet laureate of death and despair, as well as a master of language, balance and paradox, able to make art out of equivocation.7 There could be no better inspiration for Beckett’s devastating brand of tragicomedy, summed up in his play Endgame, where one character remarks that ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ and another that ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.’