On the Morality of Authors

 There was something people used to say at the Dr Johnson House that I found myself saying sometimes, that we were lucky as a museum to not have to apologise for Samuel Johnson. This phrase usually came up when talking about the relationship of Samuel Johnson and Francis Barber, unlike many museums we didn’t have to apologise for being involved with the slave trade, on the contrary, Johnson was one of the earlier protestors against and left much of his money to someone born a slave.

It’s not the whole story though. The relationship between Johnson and Barber wasn’t always the smoothest, he was overbearing in general, especially to those he cared for and he steered Barber into life paths against his will. What’s more, the house itself is literally built with a consequence of slavery. The floorboards are American red woods which were used as ship’s lumber to weigh it down on the return leg of the triangular trade, probably stacked in the same hold that held the slaves.

Another way we felt we were lucky to have Johnson was his attitude to women’s education. It’s an  odd thing, one of his most famous quotes is denigrating a woman preacher, but many of his other actions show a keen support for intelligent women. He helped market women’s writing, regarded Elizabeth Carter as something of a role model, came up with a plan of education for Hester Thrale’s daughter, Queeney. Even his jabs at Scotland fall more into the category of jokey banter than actual invective.

But why do we need our writers and historical figures to be good?

Writers are a famously anti-social bunch of people and many lived incredibly messy lives and held incredibly messy views. Goldsmith was an early abolitionist who wrote under the patronage of the very slave-positive Lord Mayor of Bristol. Smart’s Jubilate Agno is full of misogyny (much of which is being worked through as the text progresses.) Some of the best writers, like the Scriblerans, are essentially writing on ‘the wrong side of history’, upholding the traditional practices of patronage over commercial literature. Essentially, they gate-keep public expression as something for the wealthy and educated.

Boswell does some terrible things, dressing up as a commoner so he can rape a prostitute in front of an audience on Westminster Bridge. Casanova is a seducer, conman and attempted murderer, Smollett used the funds of his wife’s sugar plantation to set himself up a gentleman, Fielding may have groomed his housekeeper, Thomas Day specifically educated a young girl to become the perfect wife… the list goes on.

Just before I fell into my eighteenth century hole, I very nearly fell into a seventeenth century one (a time period I still find very interesting). This was because of another Samuel, Samuel Pepys. I have, and have read, the complete unabridged diary which I read with great pleasure and occasional alarm. He was so open to life, to new ideas and experiences - and he was a complete shit. A creepy, pervy little man who used his position of power to grope as many poor women as possible. The more I’ve become aware of this side of him, the harder he is to read.

Yet, how terrible many of these people are (or more accurately, how terrible some aspects of them are) I still read them. Casanova is a pretty awful person but he is a very entertaining one. In general, I’d prefer to read something about, or by, someone deeply flawed and interesting than someone boring. Not that immorality makes someone interesting, a person who will predictably do the most selfish thing is deeply boring also. 

An aspect of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that taught me a lesson for writing and life is the way his character’s greatest flaws have the same source as their greatest virtues. Anna’s strong emotional life powers her best and worst moments, as does Karenin’s logical detachment. Similarly, both Pepys and Casanova are powered by their hunger for experience - it leads them to create joyful, expansive visions of life at the same time it leads them to use other people (particularly women) as means to experience new things. (Incidentally, I’m with Kant, people should always be ends in themselves and never means).

One of my favourite books is Arieh Sachs’s Passionate Intelligence. It argues that one of the key themes of Johnson’s writing, and a key drive in his life was the urge to blend the power of imagination (which Johnson saw as inherently selfish) with the steering power of reason (which is universal but a little inert). This blend Sachs calls ‘Passionate Intelligence’. Like most of Johnson’s ideas, it’s not a new one. Plato talked about the driver steering the white and black horses on the same path - the idea of reason being the reins for passion is a common one.  Of course, he failed to enact this ideal but he tried, and I think that’s why Dr Johnson’s house is lucky to have him. 

Ultimately, worrying about the morality of other people, especially long-dead people is a fruitless endeavour. The only morality we have control over is our own. We need to be aware of who influences us and how. we also need to be open about the flaws of the people we study just as we need to be aware of our own. I’d like the joy and openness of Pepys, the hope of Smart, an awareness of my own absurdity and contradiction like Goldsmith and the passionate intelligence of Johnson - but I have to accept that I am me, with all the benefits and constraints that entails. 

Trying out Youtube's 'Inspiration' feature.

 I've had a little poke about on AI now and again. I know it's awful but I can't help being nosy. This time I discovered a feature on Youtube that gives you ideas for a video, structures it and provides thumbnails. I gave it a little go.

Review: The Ladies by Doris Grumbach

 The Ladies of Llangollen were a pair of Irish heiresses, with a twenty year age-gap, who set up house together in a Welsh valley. There, they lived a quiet and domestic life, slowly improving their home and gardens, keeping to themselves, whilst wearing a masculine coded uniform of riding habits, white powdered hair and top hats. They became famous, ending up having lots of famous visitors who often left little gifts. 

The Ladies is a novel that retells these events and, while it teases out some of the tensions within The Ladies’ lives, it never fully goes beyond being a retelling to a fully alive, flesh-and-blood novel.  Events are rejigged, the point of view does delves into Eleanor and Sarah’s heads, but it never seems to grow from someone telling the reader their version of the events into a shaped and compelling work of literature. Their story is fascinating, and that made the book an enjoyable read, but it was (presumably) more accurately, and more engagingly told in Elizabeth Maven’s The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship.

Part of my ambivalence about the book is the use of tense. It swaps between past and present tense, seemingly at random. There are no chapters in the book but it’s split into four sections, yet the tense isn’t consistent within these sections. Going back to the book and skipping through to when the tense changes, I think any part about the two Ladies on their own or together are in present tense, and the parts when they are with someone else are in the past. If this is true, I think the idea is that when they are together, things are more intense and immediate but washed out when their essential togetherness is watered down by the presence of someone else. If so, it’s an interesting idea, but it comes across as muddled.

The Ladies have represented a lot to people. To the age they lived in, they were either ‘damned sapphists’, as Hester Thrale called them, or a symbol of a pure romantic friendship to be celebrated. Certainly, they saw themselves in a tradition of Rousseau and sought to bring a cosy, homely quality to their lives, especially expressed by their garden. To many queer people today they represent an ideal, a happy and fulfilled domestic life. Anne Lister even went to meet them to see how a same sex ‘marriage’ could work. The Ladies themselves were indignant about any sexual aspersions being cast on them, but Grumbach’s novel centres their sexual life as the anchor of the relationship, with their shared bed being a separate and better world. (That said, it’s never an explicit book).

The most interesting thing the book does, is poke some criticisms into the life the Ladies built together. Their cosy life of reading, sewing and walking in the gardens is one that has been celebrated as ideal. Personally, it seems like a very heaven to me. However, the book pulls at a divide between the home they built in Wales and a sense of exile from their families in Ireland. There’s a sense that the very routine and domestic life they lived also served as something of a prison.

The most novelistic parts of the book happen at the beginning, where the Ladies formed their relationship, prepared an escape, made it and then were captured before making an arrangement to be allowed to go off together. The characterisation of Eleanor’s parents and Sarah’s gropey guardian are often stronger than the characterisation of the Ladies themselves. It’s quite a gripping beginning.

The flattest section is at the end, entitled ‘visitors’, which is largely a description of all the people that visited their houses and the Ladies’ slow decline. The book starts to come to a conclusion about their relationship at this part, and it’s an interesting an nuanced one. Their relationship was intense and fulfilling but in being so central to them it trapped them together and denied them access to the rest of the world. It seems their relationship was enough for them, which is brilliant, but if it hadn’t been, it would have been a slow suffocation.

Personally, this book has reenforced me an important lesson as I am writing a book featuring real historical people. That the book needs to be a novel as well as a retelling.

Overconsumption and my Book Habit

 I'm currently unpacking and organising my books in order to create my dream house-library, so I've turned it into a little video about my book consumption habits.