Not tired of this life

We know a great deal about the clubable, august, witty side of Johnson in his later years of celebrity, from a rival no biographer will look forward to competing with, Boswell’s Life and his journals. Three-quarters of Boswell is devoted to Johnson’s last 20 years. The challenge for a biographer is to bring the early ones to life. Peter Martin has written a very smart and well-researched book, having wisely taken the precaution of writing a life of Boswell first. Maynard Mack once observed that Johnsonians can play Twenty Questions with each other — I seem to remember that his example was ‘What was the name of the cat before Hodge?’ To my surprise, Hodge — the one that Johnson was so keen not to offend with his reflections on the characters of other cats — finds no place in Martin’s biography. But I’m sure he could answer the question, if pressed.

Most of all, we see in Martin’s book someone who is only vaguely and intermittently shadowed in Boswell, an ugly, sickly, awkward young man with a ridiculous accent and repulsive tics, with no money, connexions or elegance to commend him, nothing but good sense and a huge intelligence to get him to where he wants to be. There are a number of stories very much like this in English literature — I was sometimes reminded, of all people, of Hardy’s story. Martin brings this unfamiliar Johnson to anguished life, and when, on the verge of the publication of the Dictionary, Johnson writes that famously dismissive letter to his would-be patron, Lord Chesterfield, the reader feels the years of struggle which have justified the magnificent brush-off. ‘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?’ As Martin says, here is the ‘Magna Carta of the modern author, the public announcement that the days of courtly letters were at last ended’. You feel, too, having read an account of this inspiring life, that Johnson, of all men, was the man to put it into words.

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