The Lady Fern reads Samuel Johnson and tells me about Scotland

Marieke of The Lady Fern has been reading Samuel Johnson and doing something I wish I could:  comparing Johnson's view of Scotland with today's Scotland, with her own.  She helps me with something I have been thinking about in my own reading of Scottish literature, most of which is hardly Scottish at all. 

Of all the Scottish writers I came up with when I launched the Scottish Reading Challenge, I think exactly none are Highlanders.  The funny thing about Scottish culture - I mean Scottish culture now, Scottishness, like Marieke writes about here - is that so much of it is derived from the Highlands.  The tartans, for example, and the tree-throwing competitions are from the Highlands.  Or, what I really mean, Scottishness is now a blend of Highland and Lowland culture and institutions.  It was not always so.

Many of the key Scottish writers of the 18th and 19th century - here's what I find interesting, I guess - were actively stirring the pot, creating the blend.  I recently read Kidnapped (1886), one of Robert Louis Stevenson's four Scottish novels.  The basic story is about a Lowlander thrown into the Highlands, into Highland politics and legends and geography.  The Lowland norm is contrasted with the Highland extremes, some of which are admirable, some not.

Kidnapped is a boy's adventure novel, but it's entwined in a curious way with Scottish literary history.  The hero's Highland trek begins in the Hebrides, where he crosses paths with Boswell and Johnson (or, since the novel is set in 1751, they cross paths with him).  Stevenson borrows an actual inn that was also used by Walter Scott in The Antiquary (1816), which I hope to read soon, and one episode involves an encounter with a son of Rob Roy.  Scott's first novel, Waverley (1814), also includes some Lowland-Highland contrasts, so Stevenson is going back to the beginnings of the Scottish novel.

I don't want to say what I think Stevenson is doing with all of this - I had better read Catriona and The Master of Ballantrae first.  I just want to note that Lowlanders Scott and Stevenson are moving Highland history and culture into a more general Scottish culture. 

I've wandered off from The Lady Fern's posts.  She has a cluster of quotations of Johnson's, including his harping on the lack of trees and comments on the rain and the ubiquitous oats, and a most interesting comment on Johnson's fear of the Scottish landscape.  He was upholding the official aeshetic tastes of his time, that the Picturesque was admirable and untamed wilderness was scary.  Not just his time - almost 100 years later, Ruskin, throughout Modern Painters, assumes that mountains are terrifiying.  It's just around this time that mountain climbing becomes a lesiure activity.  Has anyone read Edmund Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871)?  Whymper essentially invents modern mountain cliimbing, in spite of - or is it because of - the multiple fatalities in his conquest of the Matterhorn.  Mountains are scary!

It was wonderful how well time passed in a remote castle, and in dreary weather.

I've neglected the Scottishness of Boswell and Johnson's visit to Scotland.  The point of the trip was, after all, to see Scotland, romantic Scotland - clans and storms and two-handed swords and the like.

They visited at an interesting time, when parts of the Highlands were emptying out because of mass emigration to America, and when the English laws meant to prevent a repeat of the 1745 Jacobite uprising* had really done their job.  The political and military power of the Highlander chiefs had been destroyed, the modern world of laws and trade had penetrated the farthest Scottish outposts, and the old way of life was dying.  Johnson wanted to see feudal Scotland, but he only got a glimpse.  It was nearly gone.

But they did stay in Dunvegan Castle (see the post's title, from Boswell, 17th September), and met Flora MacDonald, one of the rescuers of Bonnie Prince Charlie.  Johnson in fact slept in the same bed as the Young Pretender.  They listened to Gaelic poetry, heard traditional songs, and watched traditional dances.  Actually, the corpulent Johnson watched - Boswell danced.

Johnson was famous for his endless curiosity.  He asked about everything - how shoes were manufactured, whether islands had rats or rabbits, why Scotland had so few trees (sort of a running joke with Johnson), how oat cakes were made.  This is just before his praise of Scottish breakfasts, which "must be confessed to excel us."  Unfortunately, "[t]hey pollute the tea-table by plates piled with large slices of cheshire cheese, which mingles its less graceful odours with the fragrance of the tea."

Plus, the travelers visited caves and ruined churches and Celtic stone circles and all of the stuff that any of us would visit.  They were tourists.  I've never been to Scotland, except in books.  Johnson's and Boswell's books are good ways - the only ways - to visit a part of Scotland that has vanished.

*  See Waverley (1814) for the details.

My mind was filled with many ideas of London, which relieved me from care.

The Life of Johnson (1791) is such a big brick of a book.  Unless the reader is lucky enough to find the postern unlocked, long books, really long books, require strategies and schedules and siege tools and, sometimes, explosives.  I say this as someone who has read Clarissa and Gibbon and Vasari and War and Peace, and who has been eying The Tale of Genji.  It's not just a matter of time.  I understand that.

One reason Boswell's The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1885) is so useful is that it is a secret passage into The Life of Johnson.  Actually, as it stands now, it is a section of The Life.  Biographer Boswell takes Johnson's life up to August 1773 and then refers readers to the earlier book, which they all would have read anyways.  After a testimonial or two about how very, very good that book is, we find Johnson back in London, "ready to begin a new journey" (letter of Nov. 27, 1773).

So we see why I so strongly urge readers new to Boswell, or to Johnson, to read the Hebrides journal first.  It is not an annex to the bigger book, but an essential piece.  Technically, it is written very much in the manner of The Life.  Boswell requires several hundred pages to bring Johnson's life up to the crucial date of May 16, 1763, when Boswell met Johnson:  "I shall mark what I remember of the conversation."  He continues the practice, every chance he gets, for the next twenty years.  The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides is the most concentrated period, ninety-four days in a row.  The reader who finds Johnson too platitudinous or Boswell too toadying - well, I don't know what to tell him.  No, I do - stay away from The Life of Johnson.  For the reader who finds Boswell and Johnson genial, there are thousands of pages more.

Many thousands.  mel u has called his reading of the complete set of Bowell's journals one of the great reading experiences of his life.  I know what he means.  I sometimes struggled, after finishing a volume, to not immediately start the next one.  The whole thing now reads like an impossible modern novel.  The central character, so to speak, is a brilliant creation, so to speak.  Boswell is a high-spirited depressive, a vain man who is not afraid to look ridiculous, alternately ambitious and lazy, a genuinely loving bad husband.  Wanting celebrity himself, he spends his life collecting celebrities.  Bizarrely, completely improbably, this results in one of the monuments of English literature, and, in the journals, an additional shelf of worthwhile books. 

The first journal, the London Journal, is fortunately the best one.  It's a young-man-in-the-city classic (the post's title is from Dec. 1, 1762).  Free from his father, free from his studies, Boswell goes to the theater, dines, chases celebrities, chases a job, and chases women.  The Sex Scene (what? Jan. 12, 1763) is hilarious.  "The description is faint [not that faint!]; but I surely may be styled a Man of Pleasure."

It was here, in the London Journal, that I first met Boswell.- Johnson I already knew.  It seems odd, but since then I have read maybe three times as many pages of Boswell than of Johnson, many of them admittedly about Johnson.  But still. 

Boswell and Johnson for the non-Boswellian and non-Johnsonian

I could not have asked for a better first entry to the Scottish Literature Challenge than this post on James Boswell's The Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides (1785) by mel u at The Readling Life.  His post fills in a lot of the background of Boswell and Samuel Johnson's travels through Scotland and the Hebrides.  It reminded me that my recent reading of the book, like his, was a little different than that of many readers.

Mel and I both read the books as longtime friends of Boswell, and I do not simply mean that we were both rereading.  I'll start speaking just for myself here.  When I first read Johnson's book, I had already made my way through hundreds of pages of Johnson (the Oxford Major Works), plus a half dozen volumes of Boswell's journals, which include many detailed recollections of Johnson.  Johnson's voice and personality and quirks were well known to me.  Boswell's, too.

A reader approaching Boswell without this background - for which there is no need! - may be surprised at what he finds.  In this book about travelling in the Hebrides, why, exactly, is there so much discussion of London stage-acting, or the quoibles of Oliver Goldsmith, or Dr. Johnson's opinions about a book of sermons?

Johnson's account of the trip, Journey to the Western Islands (1775), is a more typical 18th century travel book.  He intersperses the chronological journey with historical and moral observations.  Although I think the book is a first-rate way to encounter Johnson's writing, the book is not really about him.  He is contributing to our knowledge of the world and our understanding of the way we live through the details of the lives of the Hebrideans, the materials from which their spoons are made and the price they get for the kelp they gather. 

A younger Boswell had written a travel book of his own, the Account of Corsica; The Journal of a Tour of that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli (1768), which made him mildly famous.  I have read part of this book - the good part, I am tempted to say, the part after the semi-colon in that odd title, the modern part, the part that is not about Corsica at all, but about Boswell.  Dr. Johnson thought so, too:  "Your History is like other histories, but your Journal is in a very high degree curious and delightful."*

By 1773, the time of the Hebrides trip, Boswell better understood his true gifts.  "Sir, you have but two topicks, yourself and me.  I am sick of both,"**  Johnson once groused.  The Hebrides journals has three topics, but the Hebrides are perhaps the least important.  The book is Boswell's first publication of what he called "Johnsoniana."

Marieke at The Lady Fern has said that she would like to read Boswell soon.  I hope she does.  She has been to many of the islands in the books.  She may or may not be so interested in the Johnsoniana.  But that makes me all the more interested in what she, or other readers, think of the travel portions of these old travel books.

A commenter at The Reading Life pointed out these barely believable National Geographic photos of the Hebrides, by photographer Jim Richardson.  I should mention that many of the photos are of the Outer Hebrides, so are not in Johnson's or Boswell's books.

*  Life of Johnson, September 9, 1769.

**  Life of Johnson, May 1776.

A lot of great books do not have sympathetic characters - plus, my bibliography

I tried to do some genuine research for Sympathetic Character Week, to try to shape my rhetoric, if nothing else.  Besides Wayne Booth's book, enormously helpful, and to which I'll return later in the week, I did not have much luck.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose; How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland;  How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster: these all seemed like good candidates.  None mentioned the issue at all, and the reason was clear enough.  None of them took the question seriously.  Of course you don't dismiss a book because you don't like the characters.  Now get back to work!

The same person who suggested the spot-on yet off-point Freud essay led me to Samuel Johnson's Rambler #4, (1750), on the "new realistic novel."  Anybody want to defend this position:

There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes, and whom scarce any villainy made perfectly detestable, because they never could be wholly divested of their excellencies; but such have been in all ages the great corrupters  of the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be preserved than the art of murdering without pain.

Or more concisely: "It is therefore not a sufficient vindication of a character that it is drawn as it appears, for many characters ought never to be drawn" (emphasis mine). I think that cat is pretty much out of the bag by now.

Virginia Woolf always comes through for me.  From "How Should One Read a Book" (1926):

Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticising and judging.

Sympathizing with whom, one should ask?  Woolf is clear enough, but we'll return to that on Friday.*

So (again excepting Booth) none of these books were that helpful.  One argument, my strongest, is perhaps so obvious that no one bothers to make it: a lot of great novels (stories, poems) have characters with whom no sane, mature person should sympathize.  And another swath of books is constructed independently of our concept of sympathy.  You shouldn't like them, you shouldn't want to be their friend, you shouldn't wish them well.  You should wish some of them ill, frankly. 

One group of books is more or less Modernist; the other is more or less pre-modern.  Pre-modern first. One reason we call Don Quixote the first novel is that we've hijacked it, turning it into a novel, and one way we did that was by learning to sympathize with the travails of Our Lord Don Quixote.  My understanding is that at the time it was generally read as a collection of side-splitting cruelty, an early Three Stooges. Ha ha - poke him in the eye again!  We aren't capable of reading it that way any more; sympathy is a powerful thing.

But what to do, then, with Egil's Saga, about a sociopathic Icelandic poet, or Grettir's Saga, about the last of the monster-killers, who is something of a monster himself?  So much pre-modern and early modern literature was created under entirely different assumptions of the reader's response.  Sometimes, a sympathetic response works; sometimes we have to find another way in to In Praise of Folly or The Lusiads or Orlando Furioso.

Now, the Modernists, deliberately working against sympathy: Charles Baudelaire titles one of the Paris Spleen prose poems "Let's Beat Up the Poor."  Or how about the poem "Against Her Levity," one of the six banned poems from The Flowers of Evil, in which the speaker expresses his desire to copulate with a wound he has made in his lover.  Yuck! Baudelaire's art presents a challenge to the notion of sympathy.

Every third French writer seems to ends up following in his path: Rimbaud, Ubu Roi, the Dadaists and Surrealists.  Icy Gustave Flaubert, contemptuous of his own characters -- not that you have any obligation to read Madame Bovary like he wanted you to (and let's revisit Flaubert in a couple of days).  And it's not just France:  As I Lay Dying.  The Castle (he's never going to get in).  The Voyeur.  Beckett, or Bernhard, or Borges ("I sure hope that nice Pierre Menard finishes his Don Quixote book.")  There are exceptions on this list - see Beckett's heartbreaking Krapp's Last Tape.  Surrealists aside, I haven't even mentioned the genuinely avant garde stuff, mostly because I'm not sure I want to call any of it "great."  Additions to this list, or the one above, most welcome.

One could make a much longer list of wonderful Modernist books that do depend on some type of sympathetic relationship between the reader and the characters.   That is, and should be, the norm.  But there's this other world, too.  What should one tell the reader who refuses to look into Wuthering Heights because the characters are unpleasant?  Stay away from all those other books?  Or, try another approach - it's a lot more pleasant than it looks.

* In fairness, I should mention that Woolf called this essay "a lecture, for schoolgirls," which suggests a certain amount of contempt.  In more fairness, those schoolgirls were undergraduates at Yale.

English poets and their English cats - also, a hare, and a tortoise

Thinking about literary animals, I have wandered into 18th century England, when the poets either had cats, or wrote about them, or both. Here's Thomas Gray, for example, writing about Horace Walpole's cat, Selima:

"Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause."

That's from "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat" (1748), and the cat is peering into a "tub of goldfishes" (hence the reflection), so you can see where this is going. The only phrase that looks to me like an original description of a cat is the "conscious tail"; otherwise, its just a catalogue description.

Christopher Smart does a lot better, in the justly famous "My Cat Jeoffry" section of Jubilate Agno (written 1759-63, published 1939):

"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself."

Then follow the ten steps of Jeoffrey's self-grooming, not so different from what a ethologist might write: "For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. \ For fifthly he washes himself \ For Sixthly he rolls upon wash." Then there's the consummate description of a cat: "For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery." I find Smart's poetry very difficult, in general, but this is real observation.

I always assume that William Blake's "fearful symmetry" and so on in "The Tyger" is based as much on an actual housecat as on an imagined tiger, but I don't really know. Who else is there - oh yes, Samuel Johnson's Hodge, who "shall not be shot," but I don't know of a poem about Hodge.

William Cowper could hardly have kept a cat, since it might have endangered his prescious hares. In the third book of The Task (1785), after denouncing hunting, Cowper writes:

"Well, - at least one is safe. One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar, she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine." (lines 334-341)

But there is not much real account of the hare in The Task, unlike in Cowper's "Epitaph on a Hare" (1783):

"His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching showers,
Or when a storm drew near."

Well that's odd. There's another 18th century English critter who behaves similarly, Gilbert White's tortoise:

"No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain; for though it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner." (Letter XIII)

Now that's the kind of writing I like, the tortoise who behaves like a fine lady. I actually have not read White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). I encountered the tortoise in an anthology, although I have no idea which, or of what (here?). White was a pioneering naturalist, a genuine scientist, so he falls into a different category than Gray and Cowper and so on. I think that's where I'll wander tomorrow.

My favorite Dr. Johnson poem, and more dactylic hexameter

The Wikipedia entry for dactylic hexameter includes two English examples. One is from - hey, look at that - Evangeline, the (sort of) famous first line:

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks"

The encyclopedist actually breaks up the line into its six feet, which is very handy, since it has 17 syllables divided into six parts. But I don't care about that. What I really liked was the second, unsourced, example:

"Down in a deep dark hole sat an old pig munching a bean stalk"

Could the wikipedist have made this up herself? She has the nerve to say that the line has an "absurd meaning." I understood it perfectly. Also, I kind of like it.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Dr. Johnson poems, said to be an impromptu composition:

I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

Johnson meant this, can you believe it, as an example of bad poetry. It rhymes, it scans, yet it is bad. Johnson wanted to differentiate bewteen simple and simple-minded. I dunno. With a diet of Lear's nonsense, children's poems, and William Carlos Williams's delicious plums, I may have developed a taste for the simple-minded.

You can treat this is like a statement of disclosure. Don't take my opinions about poetry too seriously. I like "I put my hat upon my head."