Life of Johnson

The greatest achievement of Samuel Johnson, the most famous man of English letters, was the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, a task that he accomplished almost single-handedly.

He is also remembered for:
• his essays in two periodicals, The Rambler and The Idler
• an influential edition of the plays of Shakespeare
• a series of biographical and critical sketches called Lives of the Poets
• a novel called Rasselas, which he wrote in a week
• a travelogue called A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

But that’s not all. He was a celebrity in his own time, not just as a literary figure, but also as a conversationalist who could deliver incisive, well-formed sentences on any subject, and so loved verbal combat that people were sometimes were afraid to open their mouths around him. He had an almost oracular status.

Johnson achieved fame despite the handicaps of poverty and ill health. He was afflicted with scrofula, gout, dropsy, depression, asthma, weak eyes, and odd compulsive behaviour later diagnosed as Tourette’s Syndrome. He was forced to leave Oxford without taking a degree due to lack of funds, and later in life was arrested for non-payment of debts.

When he was 53, Johnson met a young Scottish man named James Boswell, and they formed a deep and lasting affection for each other. "Bozzy" immediately began recording Johnson’s conversation with the ultimate aim of producing a biography. The result is a work that has transmitted Johnson’s fame through the centuries.

Life of Johnson

First published in 1791, Boswell’s work has been called the most famous biography ever written. It's also one of the longest -- my edition clocked in at 1400 pages, not including an 90-page index. There are some rather dry stretches, due in part to issues that are no longer relevant, and to a style of writing that can be pompous and long-winded. And at times Boswell injects more of himself into the book than is warranted. For example, he launches into a lengthy defense when Johnson criticizes his Latin.

What I enjoyed most about this book was seeing Johnson's human side, particularly his wit, courage, and generosity. This great grotesque man is worthy of our respect and study. I was left with a desire to dig deeper into his writings, and to read a more modern biography.

In search of the latter I found this excellent article in The New Yorker.

Life of Boswell

Boswell was a likeable but somewhat aimless fellow, who during the course of his life met some of the greatest minds who ever lived. He was literally a student of Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow. During his travels on the continent he met Rousseau and Voltaire. Back in England, as part of Johnson’s circle of friends, he was on familiar terms with Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was also acquainted with David Hume and Laurence Sterne, and chatted with Captain Cook at a dinner party.

Thus it comes as something of a shock to learn that Boswell was a compulsive drinker, gambler, and fornicator. He was also a failure as a lawyer.

Open Net

In 1977 George Plimpton put on the pads for the Bruins in a pre-season game against the Flyers. He was 50 years old and could barely skate.

The team welcomed him by cutting the bottom out of his underpants and applying a smelly substance to the rest of his clothes.

As coach, Don Cherry serves up lots of colourful quotes, especially when talking about hockey legend Eddie Shore, who once called a meeting with players and their wives and ordered them to cut out the sex.

He would tie his goaltenders to the crossbar to keep them from going down, and make them practice alone in an empty arena, without a puck. He told a player who was in a slump to part his hair on the other side of his head.

Other observations recorded by Plimpton:

Phil Esposito on Gilles Gratton: "The craziest player we ever had. Spaced out. One night he wouldn't play because the moon was in the wrong part of the sky."

Don Cherry on Boom-Boom Geoffrion: "He referred to himself by his nickname. In a restaurant, he'd announce, 'Boom-Boom is pleased. Boom-Boom likes this chicken.'"

John Wensink on Keith Magnuson: "The poor man. He ran into one punch after another."

What Bobby Orr's knee looked like: "A bag of handkerchiefs."

And my favourite, from a fan: "It's hard to throw an octopus with pinpoint accuracy."

A fast, entertaining read.

True Grit

The novels of Charles Portis are alike in their southern voice and setting, their humorous dialogue and eccentric characters.

Where True Grit differs from the others is that it takes place in the past -- during the 1870s after the American Civil War.

It's an anti-western.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father has been shot down by a hired hand named Tom Chaney.

She sets out after him with a Texas Ranger named LaBeouf (pronounced "LaBeef"), and a one-eyed federal marshall named Rooster Cogburn, who eats corn dodgers and drinks "double-rectified busthead."

On one level the book reads like a YA novel, particularly at its climax, which involves a cave inhabited by bats, snakes and a skeleton.

But it is rescued from this one misstep by great dialogue, Mattie's pungent observations, and an ending that is far from treacly.

A sample:

I sat at one corner of the table between her and a tall, long-backed man with a doorknob head and a mouthful of prominent teeth. He and Mrs. Floyd did most of the talking. He traveled about selling pocket calculators. He was the only man there wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. He told some interesting stories about his experiences but the others paid little attention to him, being occupied with their food like hogs rooting in a bucket. "Watch out for those chicken and dumplings," he told me. Some of the men stopped eating. "They will hurt your eyes," he said. A dirty man across the table in a smelly deerskin coat said, "How is that?" With a mischievous twinkle the drummer replied. "They will hurt your eyes looking for the chicken." I thought it a clever joke but the dirty man said angrily, "You squirrelheaded son of a bitch," and went back to eating.

The book contains laudatory quotes from Esquire, The New York Times, The Saturday Review and from Jonathem Lethem, Roald Dahl, and Walker Percy (the man who saved A Confederacy of Dunces from oblivion).

Weird and Tragic Shores

The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer

Great title for a fabulous book about a self-made man from Cincinnati who becomes obsessed with the Arctic. In 1860 he mounts a one-man expedition and heads north by bumming a ride on a whaler.

He spends eight years living among the Inuit, first on southern Baffin Island, where he is astonished by tales of Frobisher's visits three centuries before, then on the Arctic mainland where he is thrilled by stories that a few men from Franklin's lost expedition may have survived long after the rest had perished.

Hall returns to the US something of a celebrity, meeting President Grant and Lady Franklin. He writes a book, Life with the Esquimaux, and mounts a new expedition, this time with government backing.

It is a bitter disaster. He dies claiming he's been poisoned, and half the company is marooned on an ice floe for over six months.

This book is a rarity in that it contains much original research without sacrificing readability. It is topped off by the author's visit in 1968 to Greenland, where he exhumes Hall's body. Analysis of hair and fingernail clippings reveal that Hall had ingested toxic amounts of arsenic. Loomis carefully works out the ramifications of this discovery.

Ebierbing and Tookoolito

As remarkable as Hall's story is, equally affecting is that of Ebierbing and Tookoolito, an Inuit couple he met on Baffin Island. They were to remain his companions for the rest of his life. They accompanied him to the US, then back to the Arctic on his second and third expeditions. It was Ebierbing's skills as a hunter that enabled 19 people to survive for the six months they spent on the ice floe drifting south.

Their story is worthy of its own book.

Nostromo

A Tale of the Seaboard

Reading this book, I imagined it as a dark hulk steaming slowly and irrevocably toward a hidden shoal, while the author moved among the passengers and crew, holding up a lantern to illuminate their faces, one by one. The ending arrives with the force of a Greek tragedy.

The novel takes place in Costaguana, a fictional and politically unstable Central American country. Its greatest resource is the blood-soaked San Tomé silver mine, now the focal point of a revolution. Rebels attack Sulaco, a port near the mine, but are overcome at the last moment, allowing the province to separate from Costaguana and become an independent country.

Nearly everyone in the book is tainted by the mine's silver. It becomes a barrier in the marriage of Charles Gould, the administrator, and drives Sotillo mad with greed. It assists in the suicide of Decoud, who fills his pockets with ingots before shooting himself in the chest and falling overboard. Finally, it turns the heroic and incorruptible Nostromo into a skulking thief, resulting in the ruination of the only family he has known.

The book is thus a morality tale about the corrupting influence of material wealth, and a warning about the dangers of imperialism. (Costaguana is partially modeled on Panama, which separated from Columbia in 1903 with the encouragement of the USA. Nostromo was published the following year.)

While the novel is considered one of Conrad's best, it contains an amazing number of improbable events. For example, when Nostromo is charged with spiriting silver out of town to keep it from falling into rebel hands, he collides with Sotillo's ship, the very one he is trying to evade. Even more unlikely, a stowaway on Nostromo's boat is borne away clinging to Sotillo's anchor. These events, together with an unlikely last-minute love affair, contribute directly to Nostromo's downfall.

But that's not all -- several ironies underscore the improbabilities. Nostromo is a surrogate son to old Viola and his wife, and unofficially espoused to the older daughter Linda. Yet he ignores a deathbed request made by Viola's wife (fetch a priest) due to the urgency of transporting the silver out of town; and though he is not present, the woman's last words are addressed directly to him (save the children). Instead he uses Viola and the two girls as a cover for spiriting away the stolen silver, in the course of which he develops a sudden infatuation for the younger daughter, Giselle, and ends up being shot by old Viola, who mistakes him for another suitor, who just happens to be Nostromo's protégé.

There are more improbabilities, too many to be unintentional. It is Conrad stacking the deck against Nostromo, implying that no matter what he does he cannot escape his doom. The question then becomes, can we accept as accurate Conrad's portrait of human existence? Are the improbabilities merely an artistic shaping of events in order to contain his vision within the covers of a book? Or is the vision itself inaccurate, warped by Conrad's gloomy view of life?

Either way, the novel is a gothic edifice.

Internet Cafe

Silverland

A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals

"A typical old Irish Leftie" is how Dervla Murphy was once described.

A grandmother in her 70s, she embarks upon her second journey through Siberia. She travels alone, speaks no Russian, and stashes money in her vagina.

This trip seems a little grimmer than the first one. The openness and generosity of many people are counterbalanced by the rudeness and xenophobia of many others. The word "Nyet!" is heard far too often, and there are sad examples of poverty, alcoholism, bureaucratic tangles, and "pollution on a truly sinister scale." Towards the end of the book she is robbed at gunpoint.

Murphy is an engaging, well-read, and plain-speaking traveller. She suffers the occasional hangover, provides apt historical asides, and collects interesting observations from others, such as support for the US invasion of Iraq, the reason for gigantism in Soviet architecture, and the opinion that Russia is "too big for democracy".

For me, two lines sum up the book:

I met no one who could honestly express optimism about Russia's future. Siberia's uninhabited vastness mesmerizes me; as I write these words I long to return.

Details

1. Silverland is a companion volume to Through Siberia by Accident, which recounts the author's abortive attempt to bicycle through the Russian Far East in 2002. She returned in 2004, drawn by Siberian hospitality and such natural wonders as Lake Baikal (a "Hallowed Sea").

2. She travels almost entirely by train -- from Cologne to Moscow with an awkward interruption in Belarus, then over the Urals with stops in Severobaikalsk, Tynda, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, and Vanino. Her return journey takes her through Khabarovsk, Ulan-Ude, and Rostov-on-Don, with a final week in St. Petersburg.

3. She airs some personal views. Bicycle helmets are "wimpish," the IMF has caused "despair and death on three continents," and crematories release dioxins into the air and mercury vapour from dental fillings. She recommends a "woodland" burial -- no coffin, just a winding-sheet of wool or cotton.

4. The book contains a map, bibliography, and four pages (eight sides) of B&W photos.

More Quotes

electric "butter-lamps" tea sweetened with blackcurrent jam the sordid engine room of the capitalist ship that notorious Soviet mix, zealotry and incompetence a society dazzled by but not fully comprehending the workings of capitalism

A Hero of Our Time

The prose in this slim volume is as clear and bracing as a mountain stream.

The book presents five episodes in the life of a Byronic character named Pechorin. The unusual narrative structure allows us to see him first through the eyes of other characters, for whom he is a cipher.

The core of the book, both in terms of length and psychological depth, is the fourth episode, "Princess Mary," which is told in Pechorin's own words. He describes himself as a "moral cripple."

The final piece, "The Fatalist," has an eerie Poe-like quality to it, describing a man with "the mark of death" on his face.

Now examine the cover of the novel above. This is a portrait of Lermontov. Do you see the mark of death on his face?

Lermontov was a soldier as well as a Romantic poet -- brave, dashing, and equipped with a lethal wit. He was twice exiled to the wild Causcasus region, once for a poem he wrote on the death of Pushkin, and the second for fighting a duel. The character of Pechorin is clearly modelled on himself.

Byron (the name comes up several times in the book) was an important influence. Another was Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Pechorin and Onegin (both characters named after rivers) are similarly bored but dangerous men. Both kill a friend in a duel.

The duel in A Hero of Our Time is impossibly Romantic. It takes place on the ledge of a cliff against a backdrop of mountains. Even a wound is likely to prove fatal. A coin is flipped to see who will shoot first. The men are positioned six paces apart, so that a miss is highly unlikely.

Like Pushkin, Lermontov himself was killed in a duel. He died in 1841, the year after A Hero of Our Time was published. He was only 27.

Mikhail Lermontov was the greatest Russian poet of his age, after Pushkin, and his influence on later Russian writers has been great -- Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pasternak.

The Rat

It takes considerable skill to pull off such a fantastic and convoluted work as this, but Grass is equal to the task. The book is far richer than any brief summary can indicate.

Narrative duties are shared by the author and a rat, while another character, Oskar Matzerath, pipes up now and then to suggest how the novel should proceed. There are several plotlines that twist, double back on themselves, and branch out in truly amazing directions.

Really Big Spoilers

1. The narrator gets a rat for Xmas. It speaks to him in dreams and explains how rats survived the Flood and what really happened at Hamelin. Eventually rats cause WW3 by infiltrating the computers of Eastern and Western powers. The only human to survive is the narrator, who is orbiting the earth in a space capsule. Meanwhile the rats prosper, though their fur has turned green. Eventually a new species of rat appears -- with blue eyes, blond hair, and a penchant for marching in columns.

2. The narrator convinces Oskar to make a film about the plight of dying forests. Oscar is a successful producer whose company, Post Futurum, "pre-enacts" future scenes -- "prevision" or "clairvoyant film" it's called at one point. While visiting Gdansk to celebrate his grandmother's 107th birthday, WW3 takes place. His withered remains and those of his grandmother are treated by the rats as relics.

3. The narrator's partner, Damroka, and four female shipmates (all of whom were romantically involved with the narrator in the past) embark on a scientific journey to count jellyfish in the Baltic Sea. A talking flounder directs them to the submerged city of Vineta, but just as they reach it they are incinerated by an atomic blast.

4. Fairy tale characters take up the plight of the dying forests. They travel to Bonn to appeal to the Grimm Brothers who head up the Ministry of Medium-Term Forest Damage. Rumpelstilkskin drives a car that runs on witch piss. Other characters include Little Red Cap, who pops in and out of a wolf's zippered belly, and Snow White and her sex-crazed dwarfs. They take the Chancellor prisoner in a fairy tale fashion, but eventually are crushed (literally) by the military.

5. A painter named Lothar Malskat successfully completes a magnificent art forgery in a Lubeck cathedral. The narrator compares him to two "political forgers," Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht, leaders of the postwar Germanies. Grass writes:

That was the era of winking, of appearances, of whitewashing. In the decade of innocent lambs and clean bills of health, of murderers holding public office and Christian hypocrites, no one wanted to know too much, regardless of what happened.

6. Oskar returns from Gdansk to celebrate his 60th birthday. The party is attended by the narrator and Damroka.

Notes

Reading this, I imagined a resemblance between Grass and another famous writer. The avuncular mustaches, the similar war records (each captured by the other's army and held as a POW), a taste for the fantastic, the use of recurring characters, and the importance of WW2 as a central theme, especially in their most famous works, Slaughterhouse-5 and The Tin Drum. Both grappled with political and moral issues. Both were graphic artists.

Oskar Matzerath is the protagonist of Grass's first novel, The Tin Drum.

Damroka and the talking flounder are characters who first appeared in The Flounder (the only other novel by Grass that I've read). So too a woman named Ilsebill, after whom the boat in this book is named.

Lothar Malskat is not a fictional character.

The cover image is a fine pen-and-ink drawing by the author.

Gunter Grass won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.

Other Ratworthy Books

Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle - During a lab revolt, an insane rat becomes an apologist for animal testing.

The Papers of Andrew Melmoth by Hugh Sykes Davies - A scientist disappears into the sewers where he has been studying rats.

King Rat by China Mieville - A young man in London discovers he's part rat.

Daybreak 2250 AD by Andre Norton - One of her earliest and best YA books. After a nuclear war, rats have mutated into creatures that walk on their hind legs, wear loin-cloths, and wage war on humans.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Wilson - A personal investigation into the life of the modern rat.

The Cyberiad

Tales for the Cybernetic Age

In this collection of whimsical nonlinear tales, vanity gets a pair of friendly rivals into a number of ridiculous predicaments, often at the expense of a good shellacking.

Trurl and Klapaucius are "constructors," but everything they build has unforeseen effects or does not work properly. Some of their contraptions are:
-an electrobard
-a kingdom in a box
-a probability amplifier for summoning up dragons
-a machine that can create anything beginning with the letter n.

While not all the tales are equally good, the language throughout is imaginative and fun. There are photon schooners, ion crumpets, antimatter sabres, and three Voltaic brothers. There is also a Battery Age and an Empire of the Cold Welders. Someone wears a semi-permeable cummerbund. Another is "innocent as a brand new fuse."

As the stories progress it becomes apparent that Trurl and Klapaucius are robots, and gradually a serious, if not bitter, undertone creeps in. In the penultimate story a philosopher describes the utter failure of robotkind's godlike powers to bring peace and happiness to the universe.

The last tale in the book (and the only one that does not include Trurl and Klapaucius) concerns a princess who spurns "every suitor who seeks her radioactive hand." She will marry no one but a human. Infatuated, a neighbouring prince dons a disguise that is "flaccid, drooping, doughy." His description of human customs is hilarious.

Misc

The Cyberiad was first published in 1967. This edition was translated by Michael Kandel, and illustrated with delightful line drawings by Daniel Mroz. There is no introduction or afterword, which could have illuminated some of the challenges in translating Lem's prose, which contains many made-up words.

The book's subtitle might easily have been Don Quixote in Space, for the tales take place in an "age of electric errantry." Indeed, Lem uses the same word as Cervantes when he describes these adventures as "sallies."

The author, a famous and prolific Polish writer of SF, passed away in 2006. His work has been compared to that Kafka, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams.

Official website