Letters: Lionel Johnson

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 LETTERS: LIONEL JOHNSON Lionel Johnson: Selected Letters. Murray Pittock, ed. Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1988. £12 IN 1904, TWO YEARS AFTER LIONEL JOHNSON DIED—not, as often alleged, after overbalancing on a bar stool in the Green Dragon, nor after falling and fracturing his skull on Fleet Street, nor after being knocked down by a hansom cab while intoxicated; but after a series of strokes—the first selection of his poetry was edited for publication. Eight years later, another selection of his better poems was published. A few years later, in 1915, Ezra Pound, who was at the time a devotee of Johnson's poetry, edited and published a third anthology of his best poems. In 1919, Earl Russell, Johnson's friend and Bertrand's brother, published Some Winchester Letters of the poet. Then interest in Johnson began to fade. In 1953 a ripple of interest followed publication of the late Ian Fletcher's edition of The Complete Poems of Lionel Johnson. Over the next thirty years, Fletcher proved Johnson's most perspicacious and able critic. His persistence helped Johnson assume a prominent role on the larger stage of the Eighteen Nineties, and publication of Fletcher's definitive Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson in 1982 inclined literary historians and critics to consider Johnson worthy of more attention. Johnson's influence on Yeats could hardly be ignored. From Johnson, Yeats openly acknowledged that he first learned about the ideas of Pater and theories of impersonality in poetry. In "The Grey Rock" Yeats commemorated Johnson as one of the most influential poets "with whom I learned my trade." Then, too, as Pound had often declared, Johnson was an able poet in his own right. The impression that Pound received from Johnson's verse was "of small slabs of ivory, firmly combined and contrived." In the "Siena Mi Fe; Dis Fecemi Maremma" section of his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound also alluded to Johnson; but when he did he repeated the tale that Johnson's death was a consequence of his toppling off a pub stool. For most of his thirty-five years, Johnson lived from moment to moment, as Pater had suggested every young aesthete should. Like another Des Esseintes, it eventually became Johnson's habit to sleep most of the day and make the most of the night. The ordinary world about him seemed to hold little of value; so he delved into his books, which he held contained just about all he needed to know about life. Scholar that he was, he one day informed Yeats: "I need ten years in the wilderness. You need ten years in a library." 348 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Today Johnson is often remembered more for the adulation he received from Yeats, Pound, Pater, and Santayana than he is for his own work. Too often he is still dismissed as a typical product of the decadence, little more than a brilliant eccentric. The legends that have grown around Johnson frequently overshadow his achievements as critic and poet. These latest published letters, a small sampling of Johnson's extensive surviving correspondence, bring him into clearer focus. Among them are letters to Elkin Mathews, John Lane, John Todhunter, Edmund Gosse, John O'Leary, Charles Sayle, and Thomas Hardy. Some are short and business-like; others, longer and personal. None is without interest. In several he alludes to such intimates as Dowson, Douglas, Beardsley, Wilde, and Yeats. A few personal letters contain references to his "illness" (as he euphemistically disguised his alcoholism), which took a serious turn in 1892, and interfered with his keeping appointments, answering his mail, and, more important, his creative work. Few of his friends suspected that he daily poured forty ounces of whiskey into his diminutive body. Still, in many letters he writes enthusiastically of his concern for classical scholarship, Irish causes, and Roman Catholicism. Ultra-sensitive about his personal reputation, he was even more concerned about critical reactions to his work. In a long letter to an F. H. Hart (clearly a stranger), who had written to commiserate over a poor review of The Art of Thomas Hardy, Johnson in his reply, as he did so...