Up to the Minute with Samuel Johnson

I have just received a letter from an amiable Canberra Quadrant reader whom I have not met. How do I know she is amiable? Because this is her second letter of recent years, approving some of my somewhat spotty writings. Such trifles as mine can hardly present much challenge to a reader so formidably equipped as she, for she has recently completed the reading, in Latin, of all twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid. It took her four years, and she says she did it because she was determined to. Well done! But even at the instant of raising my hat to her, a vague unease on my own account clouded the air: in neither moral nor in scholarly terms am I really a fit and proper associate for this paragon in Canberra.

About twenty-five years ago, when for the second time in my life retirement seemed to loom, I bought a set of the complete works of Samuel Johnson, LLD (1709–84), in eleven fat volumes. Bound in sober dark brown cloth, unadorned, they look not unlike the Doctor himself. They occupy over half a metre of shelf space, a fac simile edition presenting all the charms and quirks of an eighteenth-century typesetter. “There,” I thought, “sits at least some insurance against the ennui of an idle old age.”

Life—I thank God for it—has proved anything but boring, but I am nevertheless ashamed to have completed the reading of only four volumes. The tougher moral fibre of my Canberra friend would have achieved a lot more than that.

I was taken captive by Samuel Johnson in 1939, when I was sixteen, and in my last year at school. A couple of small and battered secondhand copies of selections from Johnson’s prose (all of two shillings’ worth in the old Eastern Market) were the instruments which made me cry “kamerad”, throw aloft my hands, and enter into seventy years of contented literary bondage.

A commitment to read the works of Doctor Johnson is not a light one, nor was it taken so. For example, my daughter Sally, concerned by the sheer dead-weight of each 500- to 600-page volume, gave me a newfangled device called a “Bookseat”, which I heartily commend to any inveterate bed-reader. It is a soft suede cushion of eccentric pyramidal shape, cunningly crafted to sit atop the belly at your own comfortable visual distance. Here it holds your book steady and unwavering, with merciful release from bruised abdominal muscles (all right then—fat) and strained hands, elbows and shoulders.

Johnson’s depth and range of learning and understanding were remarkable. His great Dictionary (published 1755) made him widely accessible, and many more knew him from his magazine journalism, and from his reports of debates in the House of Commons. But, 250 years later, the reason he continues to fill overflowing columns in the dictionaries of quotations lies elsewhere: Johnson was truly a great soul; he felt for, and he spoke to that unchanging core of basic human nature which, through the ages, keeps the world one.

Take an elementary example: he was much annoyed by twee, tedious and trivial “gastronomic” chatter about the immense culinary virtues of the cucumber. He felt, no doubt, as some of us do today at weekends, when we are swamped by vapid tripe overflowing from the colourful “gourmet” weekend supplements, and “foodie” television programs. Enough! Thundered Johnson in 1773: “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing.” Vital for the preservation of Johnson’s eternal presence is not simply his honest thoughts, but also his blunt, universal (and often very funny) way of putting them.

On the shelf directly below Johnson stand what I believe to be the full collected works of another boundlessly esteemed author, George Orwell. These, indeed, are no imposing uniform edition, but are mostly such copies of a wild heterogeneity of imprints as I have been able to assemble for myself since 1942. Yet only today, preparing this article for Quadrant next year, did I grasp in what a close apposition the lifelong Tory Johnson and the lifelong “Leftie” Orwell stood, each to the other. Wrote Johnson: “What the public thinks long, it thinks right”; both men, within the broader framework of life, were democrats, not tyrants, and forthrightly spoke the truth, as they truly saw it.

So many and so striking are the congruencies between Johnson and Orwell, as they offer us their conclusions about human affairs, that one may well believe that the real world out there, beyond the window and under the sky, has not changed at all—only the language we use to describe it.

Orwell’s excoriations of the shallow, corrupt and treacherous politicians of our time remain familiar, but had not Johnson perfectly described them all in 1775?: “politics are now nothing more than a means of rising in the world” for those who “ask no questions but the price of votes”.

Then as now, the service of women in the offices of the church was keenly debated. Perhaps here the temptation of a witty answer led Johnson into the apparent position of a patronising misogynist. One of his best-known quotations, unfortunately, runs, “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Very funny, and very naughty. Far, far from being a bed-hopping Don Juan, Johnson revelled in lively and intelligent female company, and loved the society of a woman who could both translate Epictetus and make a pudding.

Many Australian public (and even not-so-public) ceremonies are now under legal compulsion to include in their proceedings a “welcome to country” formality of respect to the supposed previous Aboriginal residents. These, in many cases, are the inventions of (white) hangers on, trying to justify their employment in the thriving “Aboriginal industry”. They have no traditional or cultural authority whatever, and are baffling and embarrassing to Aboriginal people who encounter them. But, at all costs, make sure that your own golf club complies, or you could cop a hefty fine. This procedure is very, very odd indeed. But we may hope that it will not long endure. Does not Samuel Johnson himself assure us, “Nothing odd lasts”?

Without trespassing into the territory of Nostradamus, I became fascinated by the almost gnomic fashion in which, so often, Johnson’s insight would prefigure actual facts of Australia’s recent history. “Why, sir,” pronounced Johnson, “most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” How could Johnson have foreseen it all? The Pink Batts; the Education Revolution; the wholly non-productive Minerals Tax; the hilarious Cash for Clunkers bribe for old motor cars; even the political improvement of new texts for the formal toasts to be moved in Naval messes: they must be traditional but modern, acceptable to feminists, but not too blatantly politically correct. Since 2009, an almost unsupportable weight of naval gold braid has laboured over this mighty issue of defence and national security.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith shows a natural “progressivist” distaste for decisions of actual blood and iron (“Why is HMAS So-and-So too rusty to go to sea?”), preferring life-and-death hand-wringers of true social concern, like manners in the Mess. Assiduity of admirals over this matter will have earned them far more in the way of ministerial good-conduct marks than curing the endless operational problems of our Collins-class submarines.

But wait: while the loyal and laborious attention of naval senior staff was thus distracted, thieves took advantage of their preoccupation, meanly and unfeelingly, to help themselves to generous supplies of light arms—rifles, revolvers, sub-machine guns—from one of our naval patrol boats in Darwin. Will the next outbreak of organised bikie violence have been armed through the Navy’s preference for social niceties over seriously running the service? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised.

During 2012, no single political topic can possibly have received more total attention than the relative merits of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard to be our country’s prime minister. It has enjoyed vast space in the print media, flickered constantly from the television screens, blasted forth from the radios. Media commentators were never stuck for a topic. Forever unknowable must remain details of the exchanges in the caucuses, councils and committees of the Labor Party itself, let alone the pregnant private exchanges from behind discreetly cupped hands: “Julia or Kevin? Kevin or Julia?”

What comfort Doctor Johnson had been offering them, all the years since 1783: “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedence between a louse and a flea.”