During this time, though, Johnson performed one of the most amazing feats in the history of journalism. In 1738, the House of Commons passed a law that it would be a “breach of privilege” to publish parliamentary speeches. The Gentleman’s Magazine decided to publish thinly veiled fictional accounts of the speeches, to let the public know what was going on. For two and a half years, Johnson was the sole author, though he set foot in Parliament only once. A source would tell him who spoke and in what order, what general positions they took and the arguments they made. Johnson would then make up eloquent speeches, as they might have been given. These speeches were so well written that the speakers themselves did not disavow them. They were taken as authentic transcripts for at least the next twenty years. As late as 1899, they were still appearing in anthologies of the world’s best oratory, credited to the alleged speakers and not to Johnson.8 Once, overhearing the company at a dinner party raving over the brilliance of a speech by William Pitt the Elder, Johnson interrupted, “That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street.”9
Johnson was living a life, familiar to us now but more unusual in his own day, in which he was thrown continually back on himself. Without a settled trade, like farming or teaching, separated from the rootedness of extended family life, he was compelled to live as a sort of freelancer according to his wits. His entire destiny—his financial security, his standing in his community, his friendships, his opinions and meaning as a person—were determined by the ideas that flashed through his mind.
The Germans have a word for this condition: Zerrissenheit—loosely, “falling-to-pieces-ness.” This is the loss of internal coherence that can come from living a multitasking, pulled-in-a-hundred-directions existence. This is what Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom.” When the external constraints are loosened, when a person can do what he wants, when there are a thousand choices and distractions, then life can lose coherence and direction if there isn’t a strong internal structure.
Johnson’s internal fragmentation was exacerbated by his own nature. “Everything about his character and manners was forcible and violent,” Boswell observed—the way he spoke, ate, read, loved, and lived. Moreover, many of his qualities were at odds with one another. Plagued by tics and mannerisms, he could not fully control his own body. Plagued by depression and instability, he could not fully control his own mind. He was an intensely social person who warned all his life against the perils of solitude, but he was stuck in a literary profession that required long stretches of private time for composition. He effectively lived a bachelor’s life, but he had an enormously strong sexual drive and struggled all his life with what he regarded as his “polluting thoughts.” He had a short attention span. “I have read few books through,” he confessed; “they are generally so repulsive I cannot.”10
Imagination
He was also plagued by his own imagination. We in post-Romantic times tend to regard the imagination as an innocent, childlike faculty that provides us with creativity and sweet visions. Johnson saw the imagination as something to be feared as much as treasured. It was at its worst in the middle of the night. In those dark hours his imagination would plague him, introducing nighttime terrors, jealousies, feelings of worthlessness, and vain hopes and fantasies of superficial praise and admiration. The imagination, in Johnson’s darker view, offers up ideal visions of experiences like marriage, which then leave us disappointed when the visions don’t come true. It is responsible for hypochondria and the other anxieties that exist only in our heads. It invites us to make envious comparisons, imagining scenes in which we triumph over our rivals. The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled. It robs us of much of the enjoyment of our achievements by compelling us to think upon the things left undone. It distracts us from the pleasures of the moment by leaping forward to unattained future possibilities.
Johnson was always impressed, puzzled, and terrified by the runaway nature of the mind. We are all a bit like Don Quixote, he observed, fighting villains of our own imagining, living within ideas of our own concoction rather than in reality as it actually is. Johnson’s brain was perpetually on the move, at odds with itself. As he wrote in one of his Adventurer essays, “We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.”
Johnson did not just surrender to these mental demons; he fought them. He was combative, with others and with himself. When an editor accused him of wasting time, Johnson, a large and powerful man, pushed the man over and put his foot on his neck. “He was insolent and I beat him, and he was a blockhead and I told of it.”
His diaries are rife with self-criticism and vows to organize his time better. From 1738: “Oh lord, enable me…in redeeming the time which I have spent in Sloth.” From 1757: “Almighty God. Enable me to shake off sloth.” From 1769: “I purpose to rise and hope to rise…at eight, and by degrees at six.”11
At those moments when he succeeded in conquering indolence and put pen to paper, his output was torrential. He could produce twelve thousand words, or thirty book pages, in a sitting. In these bursts, he’d write eighteen hundred words an hour, or thirty words a minute.12Sometimes the copy boy would be standing at his elbow and would take each page to the printer as it was done so he could not go back and revise.
His modern biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, usefully reminds us that though Johnson’s output as a freelancer astounds for its quantity and quality, for the first two decades not a single piece of it went out under his own name. This was partly his decision, and partly the rules of the Grub Street press at the time. Even into middle age, he had done nothing that he felt proud of, or that he thought made anything close to full use of his talents. He was little known and also anxiety-riddled and emotionally torn. His life, as he put it, had been “radically wretched.”
The familiar picture we have of Johnson comes from Boswell’s magisterial Life of Johnson. Boswell was an epicurean and an acolyte and knew Johnson only in his old age. Boswell’s Johnson is anything but wretched. He is joyful, witty, complete, and compelling. In Boswell’s account we find a man who has achieved some integration. But this was a construction. Through writing and mental effort he constructed a coherent worldview. He brought himself to some coherence without simplification. He became trustworthy and dependable.
Johnson also used his writing to try to serve and elevate his readers. “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better,” Johnson once wrote, and by maturity he had found a way.
Humanism
How did he do this? Well, he did not do it alone any more than any of us does. Much of our character talk today is individualistic, like all our talk, but character is formed in community. Johnson happened to come to maturity at a time when Britain was home to a phenomenally talented group of writers, painters, artists, and intellectuals, ranging from Adam Smith to Joshua Reynolds to Edmund Burke. Each raised the standards of excellence for the others.