Sam and Home

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Two things happened this week.

One is that as a welcome of two friends to the same condo complex that I live in in Ottawa, I visited their place and brought rosé champagne and some homemade pecan shortbread cookies. I also gave them a card — specifically this one from the line of greeting cards I designed based on quotations from Sam and art by artists, friends, and family:

One of my friends read the quotation and wasn’t sure she agreed with the sentiment. We talked about that a little, and didn’t come to any final conclusions — which reminds me of the title of the final chapter from the one novella, Rasselas, which Sam published, in 1759: “The Conclusion, in Which Nothing Is Concluded” — but she thought it might be the categoricalness of it that didn’t sit right with her. That is, that being happy at home was “the ultimate result of all ambition.”

It never occurred to me at the time, though it did for the word prosecution when I was making the card, that part of the issue might have to do with the meaning of ultimate. So, I’ve just looked up that word in Sam’s own dictionary, and it reads: “Intended in the last resort; being the last in the train of consequences.” That definition doesn’t have the same categoricalness about it as the word has for us today. If someone said “Being happy at home is my ultimate goal,” it has more the sense of only than simply final or last. It doesn’t feel as absolute. So that might be what my friend was reacting to.

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The other thing has to do with something you will read more about in this blog (and hopefully listen to on my podcast) some time in August.

I heard back from a query I’d sent to writer Gretchen Rubin about doing an interview of her. I was interested because the book she published in 2012, called Happier at Home, has this for a subtitle:

Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life

There aren’t many books about Sam Johnson, or that mention him prominently, that end up being New York Times bestsellers, so I wanted to talk to her about how Sam fits in with her daily living. I was thrilled to hear back “yes,” and so I’ll be interviewing her by phone mid-August. I’ve started reading her book, and apart from the epigraph (which is a quotation from one of Sam’s Rambler essays), I haven’t come across any references, direct or otherwise, yet. But it’s early going.

Apart from the rarity of seeing Sam’s name on a popular book, the other thing that intrigues me — and one of the things I’ll be asking her about — is that it’s surprising to see him linked to a project that has to do with happiness. It’s not that he was perpetually unhappy, but it’s just not the first thing I think about when I think about him. Perhaps it’s just that I happen to be writing about his death right now, and so perhaps that is influencing me. But overall, when I think of Sam, though, I always see him as someone who wrote and knew about happiness, and certainly had joy in his life, but not as someone who lived a life awash in it.

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There’s an interesting coincidence in that the epigraph from Gretchen’s book and the quotation from my greeting card are from the same Rambler essay, published November 10, 1750. In my podcast this week, I’ll be reading from and commenting on that essay …

Sam Dying

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I happen to be working on the part of the book covering the last two years of Sam’s life. Not only did a lot happen during this time (1783–1784), but there is a fair bit written by various witnesses. During the last year of his life, for example, Sam lost one of his closest friends, Hester Lynch Thrale, because he stubbornly refused to accept the man she had chosen as her new husband. The last letters between them are heartbreaking.

We also know a lot about Sam’s literal last days, more specifically the last three weeks of his life when he was very ill and ultimately died. A friend named John Hoole kept a written account of the visits he paid to Sam and of the conversations between them. It’s all fascinating to read, though you can feel the inexorable decline to death as the details of the visits come through, and as the pages to read in the book get fewer.

A snippet from a page of Journal Narrative Relative to Doctor Johnson’s Last Illness Three Weeks Before His Death, Kept by John Hoole, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Iowa City: Windhover Press, 1972)

He started to get really ill in December 1783. He had the idea to form another club (the Essex Head Club, named after the pub) where he could gather with friends in order to debate ideas over lots of drink and food, but it soon fell apart. He and a couple of the former members of a previous club did have one meeting, but the ambience was a little too placid for Sam. They talked about being old, and the evening not only was too “tender” and “melancholy,” but they just had a meal, finished up with coffee, and broke up early to go home. It wasn’t the robust conversation and debate well past midnight that Sam was used to and preferred.

Things go well for the first couple of meetings, but on or around the night of the third meeting, Saturday, December 13, Sam becomes sick. One source says that he actually suffers a coronorary thrombosis (a clot inside one of the blood vessels of the heart). In any case this is his last Essex Head meeting for the next couple of months, as the illness is serious enough to keep him out of commission. It’s not just the result of eating too much food and having a little too much to drink. He is actually laid up at home, not going out to any club or anywhere, and in painful recovery.

Things are up and down for much of 1784, but the account by Hoole concentrates on visits he made between Saturday, November 20, to the day of Sam’s death on Monday, December 13, around 7 p.m. I quote from Hoole’s account and make some comments in my podcast …

Sam’s Health

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I just received this great, nicely specific book in the mail a couple of days ago, and am hopeful it will provide fairly up-to-date information (it was originally published in 1991) all in one place about Sam’s various ailments. I haven’t started reading yet, but the first chapter is “Johnson’s Medical History: Facts and Mysteries.” There’s also a chapter about (Dr.) Robert Levet, who lived within Sam’s home for many years, and who some considered a doctor, and some considered a quack. Finally, there’s a chapter on “The Practice of Physic” (physic = medicine), which also sounds promising.

It comes at the same time as I am in the middle of reading another pretty specific book, which a well-known Johnsonian scholar, O M Brack — yes, those are his names: the O and M are not abbreviations of something else — has edited in a beautiful edition of only 250 copies (one of which I own!) published by the Windhover Press in Iowa City. The full title is Journal Relative to Doctor Johnson’s Last Illness Three Weeks Before His Death, Kept by John Hoole, MDCCLXXXIV. You can see that the title refers to the year Sam died, M(1)DCC(7)LXXX(8)IV(4), and the last three weeks would have been November 20 through December 13.

The facts are that though he was a big and in many ways robust man through his life, in addition to suffering from depression and anxiety (mental illnesses), he also suffered from physical ailments from birth, in addition to major ones as his body deteriorated in his latter years.

I’m interested in the details of Sam’s death partly for myself, but also because I am anticipating that it will be something that readers of my book will be interested in as well. As in everything in a biography, there has to be a balance, and that balance is subjective. Another writer might see the death as the end of a great life and might not want to dwell on this sadness for too long, and so Sam might be dispatched in half a page. But even from what I’ve read so far about his death, I know I don’t want to be so succinct. Balance. You don’t necessarily want to dwell on all the details, but there are selected ones that can really evoke the deathbed and show the reader something about how Sam’s mind was, how he “handled” dying, what he said, what his last words were, and so on. I don’t feel any need to defend myself about this. If you’re writing a biography, any- and everything that happens in the person’s life has potential for inclusion.

Whether something is included, and the extent to which it is, is a common thing that not only any biographer deals with, but anyone who writes a book — or creates any kind of work — about anything faces. We are used to it in movies, for example. In a single movie, 30 seconds of screen time can cover a decade, and yet 5 minutes might be devoted to, say, a single interaction between two characters in a key scene.

In my podcast this week, I just have a few things to say about Sam’s health and death, but mostly I focus on something I’ve touched on before but have not discussed in much detail. It also has to to with selection, with what to leave in and what to leave out, but applied to my whole book. So: I talk about how one organizes (or at least how I organize) the mass of information about Sam Johnson in order to produce a readable book of a sensible length for the general reader. Want to listen … ?

Sam, Sam, and Technology

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I had a great chat this past Monday with my 11-year-old nephew Sam. He has a keen interest and lots of knowledge about various aspects of computer technology — especially hardware, gaming, and social media — and so we talked about the differences between tech in Sam Johnson’s century and tech in Sam Jones’s century. It was a lot of fun.

The chins of Sam Jones, Sam Johnson, and Wayne Jones, respectively

Have a listen to our conversation.