Samuel Johnson, by W. Jackson Bate

...Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit...

...Ludwig van Beethoven was only fourteen when Johnson died, but over the next forty years he was to live out an inner life in many ways astonishingly similar to Johnson's, except that his music has filled civilization with an even greater wonder and awe than it was given even Johnson to inspire...

...It is true that four-fifths of Boswell's great biography deals with only the last twenty-one years of Johnson's life, and that the carefully composed sequence of immortal scenes, like a series of painted 18th-century "conversation pieces"—Johnson at the Thrales, Johnson at "the Club," Johnson at home with the curious menage of down-and-outs he took under his protective wing—does leave an enormous amount of his life in shadow, or omitted altogether...

...Johnson's father Michael, the bookseller, was an almost uncanny prevision of Hardy' s Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge: a successful and popular sheriff of the little provincial town of Lichfield, who made so lavish an affair of the conventional inaugural party for his fellow citizens in the year of Johnson's birth that subsequent sheriffs could not afford to keep the tradition up—but who then fell on ever harder times, and into an ever blacker melancholy, until when Johnson was twenty-two, he died virtually bankrupt...

...It's obvious from the interviews he's given in the last few years that he doesn't like being stuck in the image of funnyman, and this portentous film could be his revenge...

...It was a wretched little hovel of earth, I think, and for a window had only a small hole, which was stopped with a piece of earth, that was taken out occasionally to let in light...

...My answer to that question, as will become clear in the course of this review, is mixed...

...Johnson would not hurt her delicacy, by insisting on seeing her bedchamber, like Archer in The Beaux Stratagem...

...The Court is to be bound, not only by the general principles expressed in constitutional provisions, but also by the specific applications of those principles as intended by the framers...

...When the lesser men of these past twocenturies have died—the Napoleons, the Hitlers—they have left behind (because they externalized their battles) only a dark, mysterious void...

...As countless others observed, his twitchings, scruffy appearance, dirty clothes, talking to himself, compulsive counting of paving stones and measuring out of the floor with his foot, must have made him one of the most strikingly eccentric great men in history...

...To contemplate the constant battle that must have been involved in winning such high spirits from such a sea of inner darkness fills one with awe...

...Johnson wanted to see the inside of the...

...Yet this is the same man who Fanny Burney said "had more fun...

...as, for example, when Hogarth first saw him at Samuel Richardson' s "shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange, ridiculous manner...

...It is at tithes pretty laborious...

...and love of nonsense about him than anybody I ever knew" ; the man who escaped from his horrendous physical, mental, and spiritual agonies by turning himself into one of the funniest and most gregarious talkers of all time...

...that which, despite all the stuff about the "super-ego," not only gives us the most revealing historical perspective on Johnson, but is the real reason why (quite apart from the wit and the majestic splendor of the best of his writings) we find him so strangely haunting a figure in our own time...

...A mark of the difficulty this poses is that Bate so often has to refer to "the famous story" of this, or "the well-known episode" of that...

...hut, which was very primitive—a fire of peat, with smoke going out of a hole in the roof...

...but when he gets out of the sight of his tutor, I'll warrant you he'll spare no woman he meets, young or old.' " "No, sir (I replied), she'll say 'There was a terrible ruffian who would have forced me, had it not been for a civil young man who, I take it, was an angel sent from heaven to protect me.' " Dr...

...Similar precautions may soon have to be taken in respect to the writing of lives of Samuel Johnson, the most traversed mountain in literature...

...We dismounted, and we and our guides entered the hut...

...ferred, but there are compensations in Interiors...

...According to Berger, the Court should look to the text of the Constitution and the record of the Convention or Congress which proposed it, ascertain the "original intention," and enforce it...

...When poverty perforce drove the young man down from Oxford without a degree, he entered on five years of a depression so suicidal and catatonic that he would sit staring for hours at the Lichfield town clock "without being able to tell the hour...

...Let me begin with, as it were, the dispraise...

...I thought here might be a scene which would amuse Dr...

...In places one feels, as one English reviewer has pointed Christopher Booker is a frequent contributor to the London Spectator...

...This was the man who wrote: How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure...

...One wonders why Woody Allen chose to make his first non-comedy so relentlessly humorless...

...Obviously by far the greatest obstacle in writing a full-scale chronological biography of Johnson—as opposed to a "study" or critical appraisal—is simply that so much of the story is familiar...

...a man who, at the age of forty-nine, was challenging Vansittart to climb over a high wall with him after a convivial evening at All Souls...

...BOOK REVIEW Government By Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment Raoul Berger / Harvard University Press / $15.00 Stephen B. Kanner Er decades the conservative press attacked the decisions of the Warren Court, but in the past few years the tide has turned...

...His most recent book is The Neophiliacs...

...Perhaps, too, he felt that what he had to say was too important to joke about...

...She thought this meant Johnson wanted to go to bed with her...

...And Gordon Willis' cinematography, combined with the production design of Mel Bourne, is exquisite...

...From the moment when old Dame Oliver finds him crawling across .the street at the age of three or four, and the half-blind little boy brusquely brushes away her offers of assistance, Johnson is determined to fight out the great battle of life inside himself...

...Indeed, for some forty years now, ever since Hugh Kings30 The American Spectator October 1978 mill's fascinating little anthology, Johnson Without Boswell, it is probably true to say that the chief driving force behind Johnson studies has been to show just how very different a figure emerges when the over-painting by Boswell is stripped away (a dissimilarity at times almost as great and shocking as the difference between those cozy, rubicund, 18th-century engravings of "Dictionary Johnson" and the famous Knole portrait by Reynolds, showing Johnson without his wig—a fierce, aquiline, tormented face of haunting power...

...or consider the Court's constitutional basis 32 The American Spectator October 1978...

...Obviously, behind all the plod and repetition of his prose, it was really this which inspired Bate too, as when he argues in his introduction that, at the very deepest level, we respond to the life of Johnson because it is like a parable of what all our lives might be: the story of a man who, by courage, by laughter, and against seemingly insuperable odds, finally wins through to that "triumph of honesty to experience that all of us prize"—perhaps the only prize worth winning on this earth...

...For all itsallusions to Bergman and Chekhov, its highfalutin talk, its rampaging angst, Interiors is an empty film...

...It is my final tribute to Professor Bate's account of this stupendous man that, when I read the pages describing his death, a tear came into my eye...

...Four years before Johnson's death, Jeremy Bentham wrote his Principles of Morals and Legislation (which was eventually to be published in that momentous year, 1789...

...out, that one is reading the notes for a book rather than the book itself...

...Their books have all been respectfully received, without exactly setting the Thames alight or persuading us that we now have such an entirely new perspective on the great Doctor that we shall never see him in quite the same light again...

...I lighted a piece of paper and went into the place where the bed was etc...

...As one contemplates this half-deaf, irritable, tortured, intensely moral figure, his sufferings shot through with rough humor, with his often rather pathetic attempts at loving kindness, and above all his supreme conviction that ultimately man has to fight the only battles which count within himself, one may be reminded of another giant of_ that time who went on even more gloriously to give the lie in the name of an ultimate sense of reality to all the immature fantasies of his age...

...This- was the man who was to convey toposterity an impression of almost unbearable suffering, as he toiled through the years of Grub Street hackwork, wandering the streets with his friend Richard Savage, often sleeping rough—the years of his extraordinary marriage to little Tetty, seventeen years older than he, the "little painted Poppet, full of Affectation and rural airs of Elegance," who in her later years "was always Drunk and reading Romances in her Bed, where she killed herself by taking Opium...

...Only a year before the meeting with Boswell, Rousseau had published his Social Contract...

...Berger's approach—what Philip Kurland calls the "Delphic Oracle" view of the Court as expositor of pre-existing law—contrasts sharply with the "Platonic Guardian" view...

...There is the germ of an idea—the contrast between the order of the family's life before Page lost control and the disorder of their present plight (represented by recurring shots of the raging ocean)—but it never grows into something more...

...But my curiosity was more ardent...

...Yet it remains that Professor Bate does put his finger firmly on the most important psychological fact about Johnson...

...Do such eulogies as that of Robert Penn Warren ("bids fair to be unsurpassed by any biography of our time") justify Bate's own claim of Johnson that "it is only within our own generation that we have at last begun to discover his real greatness" ? Has Bate really found something new to say about Johnson...

...In the age of Rousseau ("a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society") and Voltaire ("Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them"), Johnson stood in precise and mighty opposition to a tendency which was about to sweep the world on a scale such as he would never have conceived possible...

...force the Constitution, to announce the pre-existing law...

...The anti-Court literature now appears in the pages of the Nation, Saturday Review, and the New Republic, excoriating the Court for getting tough with criminals, restricting forced busing, and denying access to federal courts...

...t was out of the agony of this lifelong struggle that Johnson won what was to be the very cornerstone of his moral outlook on the world—his conviction that it is within each of us that the real struggle of our lives is decided...

...But he would not "hurt her delicacy" by enquiring further...

...Johnson, looking about the hut, asked where the old woman slept...

...Needless to say, this procedure would invalidate the decisions on school desegregation, reapportionment,and the rights of criminal suspects that are the legacy of the modern Supreme Court...

...In his latest book, Raoul Berger attempts to reclaim the terms of this debate...

...But it remains that, in a full account of the life, the author inevitably has to deal with many scenes and episodes which Boswell has already described unforgettably...

...Under the latter, the Court uses ambiguous terms in the Constitution—due process, equal protection—as convenient touchstones to invoke and legitimize "basic shared national values," the "felt necessities of the time," or concepts of "fundamental fairness...

...That is why, when Johnson died, so great was the pulse of vitality which flowed through him, those who were left were stunned...

...In the past few years alone, we have seen John Wain, Christopher Hibbert, and Peter Quennell all clambering round this same mighty, well-trod rock...

...This was the man who said, "most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things...

...who, when visiting Devon with Joshua Reynolds in his fifties, said to a pretty young girl at a fashionable garden party, "Madam, you cannot outrun men," and, kicking off slippers "much too small for his feet," proceeded to "leave the lady far behind him," leading her back by the hand with "looks of exultation and high delight...

...So ludicrous a notion amused Johnson greatly...

...it is of no moment to the happiness of an individual...

...Still to ourselves in every place consign'd, Our own felicity we make or find...

...And that is the fact that, from his earliest years, Johnson is determined never to externalize the cause of his sufferings...

...And it is in his picture of those crucial early decades that Professor Bate's exhaustive familiarity with the subject first strikes gold...

...The climactic sequence—Page's suicide—is dramatic and moving, mostly because something is finally happening...

...Johnson is dead...

...I said it was he who alarmed the poor woman's virtue— "No, sir (said he), she'll say 'There came a wicked young fellow, a wild dog, who I believe would have ravished me, had there not been with him a grave old gentleman, who repressed him...

...Despite the fact that Prof...

...First, Bate: Leaving Inverness on horseback, they rode south along Loch Ness, and at one place saw an old woman at the door of a hut...

...I knew again what Gorky meant when he said of Tolstoy, "I am not an orphan on this earth so long as this man lives on it...

...Nevertheless I do believe that today, thanks in part to Bate's efforts, we may stand on the edge of a radical reappraisal of Johnson—and above all that we may begin to understand why his almost timeless, legendary figure has such a peculiarly haunting appeal to our own confused times...

...Nevertheless, there is much more to writing a life of Johnson these days than just rehashing Boswell...

...But Berger defines the original intention much more narrowly than other strict constructionists...

...A single-minded attack upon the leading con, stitutional decisions of the past thirty years, Government By Judiciary compels us—particularly those of us who accept any of those decisions—to examine the central question: Flow should the Supreme Court interpret the Constitution...

...In Rousseau and Bentham (indeed, even implicitly in the Declaration of Independence), it was proclaimed that human happiness could be achieved by political means, that the causes of most human ills did not lie within us, but outside us...

...When the guide translated this into Erse, she became very indignant...

...He is simply not equipped to give us a proper psychoanalytic account of Johnson's manic-depressive condition—just as another of his attempts at a psychological theme, his presentation of Cornelius Ford and Gilbert Walmsley (two strong influences on Johnson in adolescence) as "role models," is pressed much too far, as though he were desperate to tell us, "Look, I have found something new...

...Compare this flat and, as it turns out, even slightly inaccurate retelling with the wit and delicacy of Boswell's original: When we had advanced a good way by the side of Lochness, I perceived a little hut, with an old-looking woman at the door of it...

...It was Johnson's ruthless honesty, born out of self-knowledge, which led him to such an awareness of our proneness, as human beings, to indulge in the wishful thinking and fantasies which are merely futile and temporary diversions from the true cause of our distempers and frustrations...

...and who, on a famous occasion even later still, when aroused by the steepness of a hill in Derbyshire, emptied his pockets and rolled down, "turning himself over and over until he came to the bottom...

...This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a being, was truly ludicrous...

...In this pursuit-, the Court often ignores what the framers intended or even twists their meaning through inaccurate and casual history...

...In Marx, in Freud, in almost every philosopher and thinker who has shaped western attitudes over the past two hundred years (with one or two towering exceptions, suchas Dostoevsky), we find this same overpowering drive to offload the blame for all our guilt, our pain, onto others, onto society, onto our parents, onto political structures, onto our material circumstances...

...BOOK REVIEW Samuel Johnson W. Jackson Bate / Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich / $19.95 Christopher Booker The sport of climbing Everest has become so popular these days, we are told, that to forestall overcrowding on the South Col it is necessary to book one's place in the queue several years in advance...

...and "I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government or another...

...Johnson was curious to know where she slept...she answered with a tone of emotion, saying...she was afraid we [my italics] wanted to go to bed with her...

...But the shadows were gathering...

...Let us go to the next best—there is nobody...

...What emerges with unprecedented force from these earlier chapters is a sense of the terrifying intensity of Johnson's lifelong inner struggle—from those infant years when scrofula left the ungainly little boy scarred, half-blind, and half-deaf...

...Bate has been lecturing on Johnson at Harvard for thirty years, has already written one book on the subject, and regards all the immense volume of work he has hitherto published as merely "a preparation for this biography," it is not an unalloyed triumph...

...Consider the constitutional grounding the Court provides for its "right to travel": "the Court has no occasion to ascribe the source of this right to...a particular constitutional provision...

...In recent months, however, the reception accorded on both sides of the Atlantic to the vast new 640-page life of Johnson by Professor W. Jackson Bate of Harvard has held out the promise that this time things really may be different...

...He recently completed a clerkship with Judge Joseph T. Sneed of the U.S...

...No one has ever been so fiercely realistic about our human capacity for self-deception: "Sir, are you so grossly ignorant of human nature, not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles without having good practice ? " ; "Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia...

...This was the man, tortured and sexually frustrated, whose journal records an almost lifelong succession of vain resolutions, a pathetic determination to mend his ways, not to be slothful, to get up early, to say his prayers, to fight against "idleness, vain terrors, loose thoughts," which was to continue to the very year of his death...

...The rest is gratuitous words, words, words—or, as Jordan ordan says of a novel he's reviewed, form without any content...

...It was from these years that dated Johnson's remarkable mannerisms which were to astonish people for the rest of his life...

...Let's go in" said he...

...And I must confess that Professor Bate's somewhat turgid attempt to dress up this struggle with psychoanalytic jargon about the conflict between Johnson's "super-ego" and his"ego" is at times downright embarrassing...

...If so, then this is undoubtedly a major literary event...

...The American Spectator October 1978 31 Now, not the least remarkable thing to consider about this fearsome sense of realism is the time when Johnson was alive...

...If there was one belief which was to characterize western civilization with ever increasing force from the time Johnson passed away, it was that most human suffering is caused by external factors...

...and both sides rarely stop to consider whether their preoccupation with results can be harmonized with the Court's alleged function—to enStephen B. Kanner is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School...

...In the middle of the room or space...was a fire of peat, the smoke going out of a hole in the roof...

...However Boswell—his own curiosity now aroused—lit a piece of paper and poked his head into the place, behind a wicker partition, where she slept...

...Page gives a harrowing portrait of a woman on the edge, and Stapleton, as the "vulgarian," lends the film its only spark of life...

...The only way a man can rise to truly superhuman size is through the battle within, to find his true, inner self...

...Johnson and I afterwards were merry upon it...

...From this background, Johnson's schooling was dominated by incredibly hard work, which eventually took him to Oxford, in the words of a Fellow of his college, "the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there...

...Yet, despite this shift, the terms of the debate still derive from the fifteen years of the Warren Court and the liberalizing influence of the legal academic community: For both liberals and conservatives assume the Court should be judged by the policy implications of its decisions...

...The Constitution is thought to be sufficiently unspecific to permit the judiciary to elucidate changes over time in the content of basic rights...

...On the eve of the French Revolution and the age of Romanticism, European civilization stood on the verge of one of the most astonishing and fundamental shifts in collective consciousness in history—the keynote of which was to be an almost exact reversal of every truth about human nature and experience which Johnson had fought through to with such remorseless honesty and pain...

...In the famous words of William Gerard Hamilton on that day, "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up...

...If so, he was wrong...

...Most important of all, perhaps, in building up our new and deeper view of Johnson has been the bringing ilto much sharper focus of the early part of his life—the sufferings of childhood and the long anguished years of drudgery and obscurity, which only really began to come to an end with the publication of the Dictionary in 1755, when Johnson was already in his forty-sixth year...

...and even when he does take the risk of covering the same narrative ground as Boswell, he often does so with an almost wearisome air, as can be seen from placing side by side these two descriptions of a comparatively trivial incident during the famous tour of Scotland in 1775...