The Unclubbable Man

THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (341 pp.)--Sir John Hawkins, Knt.--Macmillan ($5.95).

Literary feuding, a sport regrettably neglected of late, has a long and splendidly dishonorable history, one of whose darker chapters. concerns Sam Johnson. James Boswell. and a dour magistrate, Sir John Hawkins. Knt.

Four years before Boswell got his book to the printer. Hawkins published an authoritative biography of Dr. Johnson. Johnson's friends and Hawkins' enemies briskly went to work, and six months after the book was issued in 1787. it was torpedoed and sunk. It went out of print, and stayed that way until Bertram H. Davis, who has written his own study of Hawkins' life, edited the present, heavily abridged version.

Truth v. Charity. The ambush was done skillfully: one anonymous paragrapher wrote slyly that a reader "has been for several days afflicted with a lethargy, owing to the perusal of three chapters" of Hawkins' book. The implication is unjust; Hawkins is long-winded but not dangerously sedative, and even the digressions cut out by Editor Davis (an essay on taverns, a list of 14 ways a criminal may avoid justice) sound rather lively. Boswell sums up the remaining objections in the fourth paragraph of his own Life. He charges Hawkins with solemnity and digressiveness (true), inaccuracy (partly true, to about the extent that it is true of Boswell), triviality (mostly untrue), and a "dark, uncharitable cast" of thought (untrue, but understandable).

Hawkins was a prig and a puritan, horrified at Johnson's well-known frailties of flesh and soul. He knew Johnson when Bozzy was still a schoolboy. But Boswell says truthfully enough that "from the rigid formality of his manners, it is evident that [Hawkins and Johnson] never could have lived together with companionable ease and familiarity." When Hawkins resigned from Johnson's famous Literary Club after a short membership. Dr. Johnson wryly pronounced him "unclubbable," and the tag has stuck.

As Editor Davis points out. Hawkins was far less sentimental than Boswell about Johnson's marriage, at 25, to a well-to-do widow almost twice his age. Boswell paints it as a love match; Hawkins accepts without disapproval the more credible view that it was a marriage of convenience. The chilling dispassion with which Hawkins could dissect a friend's motives is apparent in his remarks on the widow's death. Johnson, he reports, showed an inconsolable sorrow, and a return to his lifelong severe melancholy; yet, "I have often been inclined to think that if this fondness of Johnson for his wife was not dissembled, it was a lesson that he had learned by rote, and that, when he practiced it, he knew not where to stop till he became ridiculous." It is easy to see why this jarred Sam Johnson's admirers, but Hawkins was a man who valued truth highly and charity not at all.

For all his solemnity, Hawkins shows himself to be an able literary critic with his observation on Johnson's lifeless tragedy Irene: "It came from the head of the writer, and reached not the hearts of the hearers." Where Boswell blusters a defense of Johnson for accepting a pension from George III after defining pension in his Dictionary as "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country," Hawkins merely remarks that the inconsistency "proves nothing more than that he was not equally wise at all times."

Darker Tone. Despite his lawyerly exception taking, Hawkins had a deep respect for Johnson, whom he describes warmly as "a man endued with a capacity for the highest offices, a philosopher, a poet, an orator, and, if fortune had so ordained, a chancellor, a prelate, a statesman." His own narrow character would not let him love the whole of his friend's; he could neither overlook nor forgive Johnson's slovenliness, his fondness for taverns, his unfailing generosity to spongers, or his belief that money was a writer's only unfailing muse. Partly for this reason, the Hawkins biography is only a respectable minor work compared to Boswell's astonishing portrait.

Yet Boswell's Johnson sometimes seems merely a droll old duck in a coffeehouse comedy; Hawkins' dour view adds a darker tone and, oddly enough, a warmth to the likeness. The unclubbable magistrate saw clearly that Johnson was a brooding, lonely man for whom the long coffeehouse sessions were often the only antidote for savage depression. The knowledge explains what is sometimes puzzling--Johnson's endless eagerness for conversation with the endlessly callow Bozzy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.