The reason I didn't want to write about Johnson was that he was an extremely morbid person. In fact he stands for everything I object to about Western culture: academic thinking and writing, traditional religion, Intellectualism, dogmatism, guilt, self-judgment, worries about the after-life, and despair. Johnson was probably insane and yet he is a figure whom the English consider a model of practical common-sense, wisdom and sanity!
My purpose here is to show up why Johnson was insane and what lessons we should draw from that.
Here are samples of his madness:
1. His appearance frightened people. He was seriously overweight with bad facial scars, talked to himself and was constantly twitching, muttering and suddenly shouting out loud. It's probable that he had Tourette's syndrome.
2. He was an obssessive-compulsive. Meaning he walked along the street counting the paving stones. If he made a mistake he had to go back and do it all over again. On one occasion he was seen bouncing over a door-step like a kangaroo so as not to have to step over it the wrong way.
3. He had at least two nervous breakdowns - one at age 21 and the other at age 55. During the 2nd breakdown he was discovered crawling along the floor after a priest begging to be given back his sanity.
4. He was plagued by major depressions throughout his life, in which he imagined that he was damned and cast into hell-fire for all eternity.
5. His marriage - to a widow twenty years older than himself - was a failure. Partly due to the fact that he spent all her money and he was himself almost unemployable, earning very little money, she became an alcoholic and they lived apart. After her death he again became morbidly depressed.
6. He was terrified of being left alone. It was for that reason he would talk until dawn with people he had just met rather than go home. That's one reason why the conversations recorded by Boswell take place at night.
7. His mood swings were extreme to say the least. In the course of one evening he might get melancholy and withdrawn, then jolly, then, verbally assault a fellow guest, then obsessional, then depressed.
8. He was plagued by fantasies of sado-masochism, in which he was soundly whipped by one of his closest female friends. This friend (Esther Thrale) was asked to keep handcuffs, chains and other 'restraints' in her home in a locked drawer should he require 'chastisement'.For the sake of balance it could be mentioned that he wrote some good poems, a few good essays, a half-good novel and some witty biographies of the English poets. He was also that first to produce a dictionary of English and was himself the subject of the greatest biography in the English language (written by James Boswell - a friend who was both a sex addict and an alcoholic whom Johnson -characteristically - both loved and despised).
In the next article I will explain what drove Johnson insane and what people with similar problems can do about it,
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