Loving Dr. Johnson (review)

Helen Deutsch's Loving Dr. Johnson is a well-researched, perceptive, and innovative contribution to Johnson Studies. Dr. Johnson would hate it.

Part appreciation, part autopsy, this book recounts the history of the posthumous Johnson—both the history of his body (and its famous dissection) and the history of the idea of Johnson (and its famous anecdotes). In her account, Deutsch uses a confessional first person in the service of what she calls "a turn away from the certainty of linear argument and toward . . . literary anecdotal logic of association, allusion and affection" (7). Deutsch pulls apart and then reconstructs the beloved Johnson, stitching this recollection to that anecdote, this recalled incident to that bon mot, and shows those who profess to love Johnson that the object of their affection is a "literary simulacr[um]" (12). Yet for all that, Deutsch loves Johnson too, and it is this book's shameless emotionalism that sets it apart from other monographs on the The Great Cham—for all the analysis in Loving Dr. Johnson there is none of the world-weary cynical hypertheorizing one finds in so many reconsiderations of canonical figures. Deutsch, despite her Jane Gallop-style fascination with anecdote, makes no attempt to "reify" Johnson for the modern graduate student, or read him against some grain, or indulge in the Derridian metaphysical encounters with Boswell. Indeed, despite her profession that she is eschewing the "certainty of linear argument," Deutsch is too much of a Johnsonian to escape what was once called Reason, and the book's filmy allusiveness and piling-on of anecdotes can't bury—gasp!—a thesis: The "ambiguity, multiplicity and surprising continuity of Johnsonian desire" (20) acts as a preservative for the precious, anecdotal image of the man, an image so freighted—with Englishness, authority, reason, masculinity, and tradition—that our love cannot help but find expression in the academic-literary industry that has grown up around his bones.

Chapter One, "Johnsonian Romance," considers the literal autopsy of Samuel Johnson. As was the case with Albert Einstein, there was a great deal of curiosity about what the innards of a genius looked like, and when the surgeon James Wilson dissected Johnson's body on December 15, 1784, witnesses were present to attest in the Gentleman's Magazine that Johnson possessed, literally, the "very best Heart at present existing" (45). Wilson's own transcribed oral account of the operation (ah, Boswell!) lived on in various reprintings, becoming a key piece of the Johnsoniana, full of intimate details for those who are fascinated by Johnson's physical body. The term "dissection" is important to Deutsch; it provides her with a conceit through which to read the Johnsonian anecdotes—the removal and minute examination of a small part of the larger body is a recurring theme in Loving Dr. Johnson. Just as the autopsy itself was justified so that, as Thomas Tyers observed in 1785, "the dead may sometimes give instruction to the living" (56), anecdote becomes the method whereby Boswell, John Hawkins, and Hester Thrale Piozzi were able to expose "private and petty details" (65), fragmenting Johnson (just as the surgeon removed his organs) so that we might retain his presence even in death.

Chapter Two, "Style's body: The Case of Dr. Johnson" is less successful. Here, Deutsch draws a parallel between Johnson's living body with its "tics" and "gesticulations" and his writing style, arguing that Johnson's "verbal mastery" stands in relief when up against his "bodily incongruity" (102). This point has been made by many, from Boswell to Leslie Stephen to Walter Jackson Bate to John Wain, so Deutsch, caught in the polarities of the conceit, strains to find Johnsonian writing that resonates with the motion of the Johnsonian body. This is done with a reading of the couplets in The Vanity of Human Wishes as "meaningful and meaningless repetition" (75). But the leap from Johnson's physical quirks to his poetics is one made on faith. Even the author's ingenious argument—"Vanity makes us aware of the inadequacy of its...