An Immense Structure

SAMUEL JOHNSON -- Joseph Wood Krutch--Henry Holt ($3.75).

When England's crusty, sagacious Samuel Johnson died in 1784, he left to posterity the first great English dictionary, a few volumes of poems, essays, literary biography, and a mass of table talk that was the makings of the world's most famous biography: Boswell's Life of Johnson.

"Today," writes his latest biographer, "there is probably no other English man of letters except Shakespeare whom so many people acknowledge as the chief interest of their lives." Johnson groups flourish as far afield as South Africa. Australia; an American Johnson News Letter appears several times a year; more than 100 books have been published in England and the U.S. alone about the 18th Century's rudest man of learning and letters.

Joseph Wood Krutch, biographer-critic (The Modern Temper; Edgar Allan Poe) and drama editor of the Nation, has made one of the most thorough examinations yet of Johnson and his friends. His biography, jampacked with Johnsoniana, is no specialist's study: it is for the general reader, who may find parts of it--such as the chapters on Johnson as critic and philosopher--slowgoing. But he can hardly fail to enjoy the lovingly collected abundance of anecdotes and sayings which are Johnson's rightful claim to fame.

Dogs and Dictionaries. Born (1709) "half-dead," infected with scrofula that almost ruined his eyes and disfigured him for life, Britain's future literary bull of Bashan was raised in the cathedral town of Lichfield, where his father was an impecunious bookseller. Moody, sensitive, strongwilled, young Sam was bitterly ashamed of his parents' struggle to make both ends meet. "Poor people's children," he insisted later, "never respect [their parents]: I did not respect my own mother, though I loved her: and one day, when in anger she called me a puppy, I asked if she knew what they called a puppy's mother."

Six years after leaving Oxford, Johnson married a widow 20 years his senior. When his mother objected, Samuel replied: "I have told her the worst of me; that I am of mean extraction; that I have no money; and that I have had an uncle hanged. She replied that she valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money than myself; and that, though she had not had a relation hanged, she had 50 who deserved hanging." The Johnsons settled in London, were happy when they could see "three dinners ahead." Young Johnson wrote poems, blurbs, biographical notes, prize contests, a weekly column ("The Rambler") for the Gentleman's Magazine. He also became one of Britain's first Parliamentary reporters. Lazy and arrogant, he soon began composing Honorable Members' speeches entirely out of his own head -- taking cars "that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it." When a friend exclaimed that Prime Minister Pitt's latest speech was the best one that he had ever read, Johnson replied: "I wrote [it] in a garret in Exeter Street." Ten years before the birth of Noah Webster, Johnson went to work on his greatest project, his English dictionary.

He blithely guessed it would take him three years, and when a friend pointed out that 40 French Academicians had labored 40 years to write a French dictionary, Johnson boomed: "Sir, forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three is to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." The Dictionary took nine years, and was such a success that the Government rewarded him with a pension of -L-300 a year.

Visitors who flocked to see the now famous author were usually shocked by what they saw. "His appearance was very forbidding," said his stepdaughter, Lucy; "his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye . . '. the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible ... he often had convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, " sometimes "rolled himself about in a strange, ridiculous manner." He wore tattered wigs and filthy shirts ("I have no love for cleanliness"), let his stockings droop around his ankles, ate so gluttingly that his veins protruded and he sweated violently. He could drink 25 cups of tea at a sitting, often gobbled eight peaches as a breakfast appetizer. He swilled his favorite medicine: "Dr. James's Powder for Fevers and Other Inflammatory Distempers." "I mind my belly very studiously," said he, "for I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else." Fears and Friends. After his wife's death, the fear of dying and melancholy made him desperate for human company.

He liked to sit up into the small hours with a brilliant circle of friends -- Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Hogarth -- while James Boswell feverishly memorized his conversation. Johnson ruled the roost with a rod of iron. In return for his wit and brilliant common sense, his friends endured his incredible rudeness and prejudices.

"Sir," he told an admirer, "you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both." To another he said: "I have been thinking . . . what creature you most resemble and 'tis the Rattle Snake : I am sure you have its Attractions, I think you have its Venom, too, and all the world knows you have its Rattle " quot;If I kept a harem," he once mused, "the ladies should all wear linen gowns.

... I would have no silk ; you cannot tell when it is clean." Boswell asked if he might have a job in this strange establish ment. "Yes, sir," roared the doctor. "Properly dressed you would, make a splendid eunuch." Often he took whatever side of an argument promised the most fireworks. When fashionable friends philosophized on the virtues of poverty, Johnson flew into a Tory rage. When someone suggested that poor criminals were better off in not having to suffer the ignominy of public executions, he flared up on the other side: "No, sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. . . . The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession ; the criminal was supported by it." He had no patience with music: "It gives me no ideas, Sir, and prevents me thinking about my own." "Pray, who is Bach, a piper?" In his last years he became asthmatic and dropsical, admitted that he was desperately afraid of being "one of those who shall be damned." "What do you mean by damned?" asked his doctor. "Sent to Hell, sir, and punished everlastingly," roared Johnson. He would glance fearfully at the dial of his watch, which bore the Greek inscription: The night cometh, when no man can work. But on his deathbed his deep piety came to the fore. "I will take no more physic, not even my opiates," he said; "for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded." On Dec. 20, 1784, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph, suggests Author Krutch, might have been taken from an exclamation by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds : "His work is done ; and well has he done it."

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