After the ball was over

Craig Raine

THE LE !MRS OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, VOLUME IV, 1782-1784 edited by Bruce Redford Clarendon, QS, pp. 462

'The testicle continues well,' writes Dr Johnson to his intimate friend, the Reverend Dr Taylor in December 1783.

One of my unrealised projects, when I worked as a publisher, was the Faber Book of Ageing. It was to have included Michelangelo's equation of elderly respira- tion with a torpid, autumnal fly in a leather sack; Yeats's 'Slow decay of blood,/ Testy delirium/ Or dull decrepitude'; Wallace Stevens's unforgivingly vivid 'We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed'; Betjeman's 'My head is bald, my breath is bad'; and Forster's documentary dismay recorded in his Journal for 2 January, 1925: `famous, wealthy, miserable, physically ugly . . . stomach increases, but not yet visible under waistcoat. The anus is clotted with hairs, and there is a great loss of sexual powers . . . . ' Undoubtedly, Dr Johnson's testicle would have found a prominent place in such an anthology.

At first, surgeons thought it was a hydro- cele. On examination, however, they pro- nounced it a sarcocele and pierced it exper- imentally:

The experiment was made about a month ago, since which time the tumour has increased both in surface and in weight, and by the tension of the skin is extremely tender, and impatient of pressure or friction. Its weight is such as to give great pain, when it is not suspended, and its bulk such as the com- mon dress does but ill conceal, nor is there any appearance that its growth will stop. It is so hot, that I am afraid it is in a state of per- petual inflammation.

The chirurgeon's knife was poised to remove the tumour when, abruptly, the experimental incision re-opened and fluids began to evacuate. The predicted danger of gangrene disappeared and the testicle ceased to mirror the craze for ballooning which raged in the world outside the sick- room.

A difficulty with my projected anthology was that potential editors seemed sceptical about the tonic and stoical and humorous values which I imagined would inhere in the collection. To a man almost they found the concept depressing - except for Anthony Burgess, who could envisage, as well as decrepitude, a kind of wry passion. In the end, though, even he decided that ageing wasn't something it was possible to focus on: it was too close for that. The idea languished when he dropped out of the jogging.

Johnson, though he was terrified of dying, brings to the business of affliction the objectivity of arithmetic. Writing to Mrs Thrale's daughter, Hester, Johnson manifestly prizes clarity above almost every other virtue: 'You will find yourself to think with so much clearness and certainty that the pleasure of arithmetick will attract you almost as much as the use.' It is this arithmetical objectivity which Johnson brings to that troublesome testicle: I now no longer feel its weight; and the skin of the scrotum which glistened with tension is now lax and corrugated.

Glistened.

More than physical unwieldiness and decay, Johnson feared mental debility. This volume of impeccably edited letters begins with Johnson's doctor, Dr Laurence, suffer- ing a stroke which left him half paralysed. To the daughter Johnson writes: If we could have again but his mind and tongue, or his mind and his right hand, we would not much lament the rest.

Accordingly, the high point of these letters, if that doesn't sound too paradoxical, is Johnson's own stroke which he describes in two letters that rival Orwell's famous assertion (in Homage to Catalonia) that being wounded is a very interesting experi- ence, well worth retailing.

The stroke deprives him of speech:

As it is too early to send [his letter] I will try to recollect what I can that can be suspected to have brought on this dreadful distress.

A minute account of his medicines and complaints follows. Two days later, he writes to Mrs Thrale, disclosing that his immediate worry was for his mental facul- ties:

I was alarmed and prayed God, that however he might afflict my body he would spare my understanding. This prayer, that I might try the integrity of my faculties, I made in Latin verse. The lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good, I made them easily, and concluded myself to be unimpaired in my faculties.

The letter continues in the same calmly curious vein: 'I had no pain, and so little dejection in this dreadful state that I won- dered at my own apathy.' He takes wine to restore his speech. It is unsuccessful. He retires again to bed - 'and, strange as it may seem, I think, slept.' Later, he notices that, writing, his hand tends to make the wrong letters.

There is something candidly heroic as well as tedious in Johnson's meticulous and repetitive catalogue of his ailments, as cor- respondent succeeds correspondent. The last two years of his life are an epic of blis- terings, blood-letting, costiveness (castor oil and klyster pipes), dropsy (diuretics, included vinegar of squills, turpentine and Spanish Fly), toothache, opium-taking, asthma, insomnia and flatulence. From this ordeal Johnson emerges with dignity and real moral distinction - a man capable of facing fear itself fearlessly, with open eyes.