Hero of the Will

By James Atlas

SAMUEL JOHNSON by W. Jackson Bate Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 646 pages; $19.95

Few books have ever more deserved that worn encomium "long awaited" than Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Samuel Johnson. "Like so many others who have thought to write on Johnson," Bate observed in his earlier book on the subject (1955), "I have found that every year that passes leaves one feeling less qualified to do it." But undergraduates who thronged to his celebrated lectures on Johnson at Harvard would not have been disheartened by such a modest dis claimer. Even so, Bate's biography surpasses every expectation. It is an achievement that rivals Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and Leon Edel's five-volume Henry James in force of insight if not in literary art.

Johnson, of course, owes a large mea sure of his enduring fame to Boswell.

"Weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous" -- as Macaulay described him--Boswell nevertheless produced the most vivid and exhaustive biographical portrait in literature. Modern biographers have before them a daunting monument, the quotable Johnson of old age, living in picturesque squalor, holding forth on any topic. He was "the greatest talker in the history of the English language," Bate claims. And how simple it would have been just to elaborate on that legend: the proud writer dining behind a screen because he was ashamed of his tattered clothes; the compulsive walker in the streets of London who had to touch each lamppost he passed by; the bizarre figure whom Hogarth at first mistook for "an ideot . . . shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner."

Bate has ignored none of these peculiarities, but what fascinates him is Johnson's temperament. By "storming the main gate of experience," Bate writes in a typically vigorous formulation, Johnson managed to resist his own failings and acquire mastery over "the dark, bewildered prison house of the isolated subjective self." His life was a series of afflictions: childhood illnesses that left him half deaf and half blind, recurrent episodes of near insanity, a career at Oxford that ended after a year because he could no longer afford the tuition, marriage to a woman 20 years his senior who died a bedridden alcoholic, years of inconceivably strenuous labor on his famous Dictionary, and in old age, loneliness and poverty. But he be longed among those "great experiencing natures," Bate says, whose lives and works illustrate the resilience of the will.

Bate's Johnson is not without its faults. His overreliance on Freud can become tiresome, and he tends to belabor his evidence. But his commentaries on Johnson's mind are unfailingly ingenious. The severe breakdown Johnson suffered in his 50s, Bate argues, was provoked by "the habit of leaping ahead in imagination into the future and forestalling disappointment"; he had renounced hope, the one virtue he believed essential to life. This sort of intuitive speculation, intimate but never condescending, recalls Johnson's own method in Lives of the Poets. No other biographer of Johnson has meditated so profitably on the qualities that made him "a heroic, intensely honest, and articulate pilgrim in the strange adventure of human life." James Atlas

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