8.
The Black Dog
One day in class, John Adams, in his characteristic manner, veered far from the text of the Preface to Shakespeare and told us about Dr Johnson’s particular compulsion. Back in the 1970s, we didn’t have the technical term OCD. The story is told in the famous biography. Johnson told Boswell that he was inordinately fond of orange peelings:
BOSWELL And pray, Sir, what do you do with them? You scrape them, it seems, very neatly, and what next?
JOHNSON Let them dry, Sir.
BOSWELL And what next?
JOHNSON Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.
The original observation of this peculiar habit had been at the Club, where the Doctor met with his cohort of friends. Bozzy had consulted all who survived, and they had confirmed his own memory of how the Doctor had frequently been observed squeezing the juice of fresh Seville oranges into a drink that he had made himself, then putting the remnants in his pocket. It had been on the morning after an especially raucous carousing at the Club that Bozzy had plucked up the courage to ask the question. He had seen on the table the spoils of the previous night, some fresh peels nicely scraped and cut into pieces. He pressed Johnson further, but the big man refused to reveal what he did with them. The inquisitive Boswell did discover that twenty years earlier Johnson had recommended to a certain Miss Boothby that dried orange peel, finely powdered, taken in a glass, was a serviceable remedy for indigestion. Which was one of his many ailments. But no one ever saw him drink such a concoction himself.
JA invited speculation around the class. Assorted preposterous usages for dried orange peel, some of them unprintable, were duly weighed and rejected. We were left with a mystery. And then we saw what JA was getting at: this was how we should read literature, Shakespeare especially. There isn’t a solution. A great literary work is made of striking images and ideas, painted in evocative prose or verse. As critics, we carve them into little pieces, as Johnson did with his orange peelings. But we don’t then give a simple answer. The carving-up serves to sharpen our attention, but we shouldn’t look for a particular use of what Adams called ‘the disjecta membra, as Sherlock Holmes or Samuel Beckett might have put it’. However, by thinking deeply about the language of the texts we were studying (‘and perhaps learning some quotations to use in the exams’), we would carry their insights with us, as Johnson carried his orange peelings in his pocket as a mundane talisman, giving us a perpetual resource for enjoyment and endurance.
I liked this idea of words as a resource that you could carry around in your pocket. I wondered if anyone had ever written a book that gathered all the wisdom to be learned from a lifetime of reading. What would a full complement of literary orange peelings look like? Dr Johnson gave me an answer.
He struggled to get out of bed in the morning. This was a symptom of what he called his ‘black dog’. He described the condition memorably in a letter to Hester Thrale in 1783:
When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it. From breakfast to dinner he continues barking … After dinner, what remains but to count the clock, and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect? Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this?
Modern psychiatry has a term for the advent of the black dog: Major Depressive Episode. According to the bible of the profession, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, such episodes involve the presence of five or more of nine symptoms during the same two-week period and representing a change from previous functioning. For there to be a formal diagnosis, symptoms one and/or two – Depressed Mood and Diminished Interest or Pleasure in Life – must be present, along with some of the following: Significant Weight Change; Insomnia or Hypersomnia; Psychomotor Agitation or Retardation (which is to say anxious restlessness and involuntary movements); Fatigue or Loss of Energy; Feelings of Worthlessness or Inappropriate Guilt; Diminished Concentration or Indecisiveness; Recurrent Thoughts of Death.
When the black dog came calling on Dr Johnson, it drove out all his pleasure in conversation, company, tea, entertainment and everything else; his weight ballooned; he couldn’t sleep; he was afflicted with a perpetual nervous tic; he lost the prodigious appetite for work which awed all who knew him; he tormented himself in prayers and meditations wracked with feelings of worthlessness and inappropriate guilt; he lost concentration, became indecisive and thought obsessively about death. In every symptom, a textbook presentation.
According to Boswell, there was a single book that gave Johnson the will to get out of bed at a reasonable hour. It was one that described the very condition with which he wrestled all his life: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. I imagine Johnson fiddling with the orange peelings in his ample pocket as he imparted to Boswell, who suffered from severe bouts of depression himself, a valuable piece of advice about how to keep away the black dog that he had found in this book: The great direction which Burton has left to men disordered like you, is this, ‘Be not solitary; be not idle.’ He added that the advice should be modified to the effect that those of an idle disposition should not be solitary and those who are solitary should not be idle.
The ‘direction’ quoted by Johnson comes from the last page of Burton’s compendium of psychiatric lore, first published in 1621 under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, and revised and expanded on many occasions before the author’s death in 1640. Its full title was The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Partitions, with their several Sections, Members and Subsections, Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. As Andreas Vesalius had revolutionized the understanding of the body’s physical anatomy by opening cadavers and cutting them up, so, two generations later, Burton, an Oxford don who spent almost his entire life in his study and his university’s great libraries, set out to anatomize the human mind.
I found out about Johnson’s love of Burton around the time that Sarah Jane called off the love affair in which I’d pushed too hard because of my reading of Helen Thomas’s memoir. Right, I thought, literature got me into this mess, so can it get me out of it? Hall’s second-hand bookshop gave me what I needed: The Anatomy of Melancholy reprinted in three musty-smelling Everyman Library volumes, with torn yellow dust jackets, tiny print and great swathes of Latin. Much skimming would be required.
I very much liked the account of Burton’s method given in the Everyman Introduction:
The Anatomy looks like a crude assembly of quotations and is indeed a vast mobilization of the notions and expressions of others, yet it is not they but the rifler who is revealed on every page, it is he, not they, who peeps from behind every quotation … He is an artist in literary mosaic, using the shreds and patches he has torn from the work of others to make a picture emphatically his own. Books are his raw material. Other artists fashion images out of clay, contrive fabrics and forms of stone, symphonies of words, sounds, or pigments. Burton makes a cosmos out of quotations. He raids the writings of the past, which he often finds neglected or in ruins, and reassembles them in a structure of his own, much as the ruins of Rome were pillaged by the builders of the Renaissance and worked into the temples and palaces of a new civilization.
That’s the kind of book I would like to write one day, I said to myself. A collage of quotations.
The Editorial Introduction was followed by Burton’s own Preface. Which went on for 120 pages. The gist of it seemed to be that we are all mad, all foolish, all so carried away with passion, discontent, lust, pleasures that we hate the virtues we should love and love the vices we should hate. But then Burton explains that he wants to distinguish between these everyday follies – that is to say, the behaviour of those of us who are metaphorically mad, lightly mad, or in disposition stupid, angry, drunken, silly, sottish, sullen, proud, vain-glorious, ridiculous, beastly, peevish, obstinate, impudent, extravagant, dry, doting, dull, desperate, harebrain, etc. (which is to say, all humankind) – and the symptoms of those who are suffering from the disease of melancholy.
I was tempted to give up after this looping and digressive preliminary address to the reader, but fortunately the main text was preceded by a wonderfully detailed flow diagram, with dozens of arrows, offering a summary guide that allowed one to pick out the bits that sounded most interesting. Symptoms of melancholy? Hollow eyes, much trouble with wind and a griping in their bellies, belching, dejected looks, tinnitus, vertigo, lightheadedness, little or no sleep, terrible and fearful dreams, continual fears, griefs and vexations, headaches, and an inability to go about any business. Strange behaviours of the melancholiac? Fear of walking alone, fear of small, enclosed rooms. Not daring to go over a bridge, come near a pool, rock, steep hill, lie in a chamber where cross-beams are. This was a veritable seventeenth-century Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Flicking through the second volume, devoted to cures for melancholy, I found a few tips for my own dejection over the end of the affair with Sarah Jane. The starting point, Burton suggested, should be improved diet. He recommended such meats as are easy of digestion, bread of pure wheat well-baked, water clear from the fountain, wine and drink not too strong, together with plentiful fish, herbs, fruit and root vegetables. No snacking, he adds, and not overmuch of any one dish. I tried vainly to persuade my mother to make some changes in the weekly cycle of shepherd’s pie, baked beans on white toast and toad in the hole. Burton continued with a long digression on the subject of air, in which he discoursed, in the learned free-form manner of JA in the classroom, on everything from the merits of building houses on higher ground with a good view, to the importance of opening and closing windows, to the recreational benefits of a landscape that is rather hilly than plain, full of downs, a Cotswold country, as being most commodious for hawking, hunting, wood, waters, and all manner of pleasures.
Then there was a chapter called ‘Exercise Rectified of Body and Mind’. Though warning against the dangers to the body caused by exercising to excess, Burton (surprisingly for a sedentary Oxford don) regarded physical activity as crucial to mental health: exercise is much conducing to this cure and to the general preservation of our health. Sport is good for the body – country pursuits are ideal, he says, but every city has its several gymnics and exercises, while dancing and singing are also commended. And it is equally important to exercise the mind: Burton helpfully suggested playing chess, going to the theatre, museums and art galleries, and above all reading everything you can lay your hands on, especially the classics.
The next necessity for the rectification of the mind, he said, was friendship. I was lucky in that regard, having Karim and Chris and the future spymaster Jonathan Evans as confidants. And the best cure of all, Burton claimed, is humour. If you can find a friend who makes you laugh, mirth will purge melancholy. My memory of sixth form is indeed of constant laughter, in class and out of it. The school was divided into houses, named after famous figures from Kentish history. (Mine was Wordsworth: the poet’s brother Christopher was rector of a parish just outside Sevenoaks and sent his son to the school, where, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘he began to show his taste for Latin verse and cricket’.) My housemaster was Ian Huish, the funniest man I’d ever met, who started every day by reading out the notices in a voice that was a pitch-perfect parody of the school’s registrar, a former Royal Air Force squadron leader for whom two o’clock in the afternoon was always fourteen hundred hours and the CCF was the backbone of the school.
It was in the third volume that I found what I was looking for: the cure for ‘Love-Melancholy’. Burton discovered its symptoms in numerous ancient and modern literary works: as the poet describes lovers: love causeth leanness, makes hollow eyes, dryness … lovers pine away, and look ill with waking, cares, sighs. In Hamlet, Polonius is convinced that Hamlet has been driven mad with love, because of the behaviour that Ophelia describes to him: Hamlet has appeared in her closet, dishevelled, pale and sighing, his socks around his ankles. Burton offered an entire literary casebook of lovers in distress, demonstrating how being unrequitedly in love can quickly lead to loss of appetite and of sleep. In so doing, he could as well have been describing me after Sarah Jane sent her ‘Dear Jon’ letter.
As cures for ‘Love-Melancholy’, Burton offered me a typically practical set of suggestions: throw yourself into your work, improve your diet, take exercise, share banter with your friends, do everything you can to avoid seeing your lost love, travel, keep thinking about the freedom enjoyed by people who are single, and, for the particular benefit of men, spend time with other beautiful women so the one who has rejected you will not seem so special. Several of these remedies proved effective. I would put Simon and Garfunkel on my portable record player and repeat a line from their song ‘I Am a Rock’ as if it were a mantra: I have my books / And my poetry to protect me. Then I would read, read, read. Hiding in my room, I touched no one and no one could touch me. I determined to work so hard that I would follow my father and my brother to Cambridge. I became such a swot that Hurdy compared me to Harry Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1: he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.’
The suggestion of spending time with other beautiful women was less effective, mainly because all the prettiest girls were out of my league. With one girl, by coincidence also called Jane, I tried to relive the romance I had shared with Sarah Jane: walking in Knole Park as deer rustled in the dusk while we plunged into the bracken for ardent kisses followed by laughter at the penalty of mosquito bites, then strolling home as slowly as possible under the stars with our hands interlocked. But neither the romance nor the laughter returned. Jane phoned the next day to say that she was in agony with the bites and didn’t think it would be a good idea to see me again.
It was with despair – the extreme of melancholy that can end in suicide – that Burton concluded his vast book. This struck home. There were so many lives of quiet desperation even in prosperous, middle-class Sevenoaks. One day around this time, I came home from school to the smell of woodsmoke, a police car parked in front of a house four doors up the road, and my mother ashen-faced. A neighbour, who to me had always seemed perfectly cheerful, had left a note on the kitchen table for her husband saying, ‘Don’t go into the garden, just call the police.’ She had then immolated herself on an autumn bonfire.
When the black dog weighs upon you, you struggle to do anything. Voracious reader and furious writer that he was, Dr Johnson was so often overcome by the forced idleness of melancholy that he tried to turn it into a virtue. JA explained that one of the pen names under which he published his essays was ‘The Idler’.
‘Why so?’ Because, Johnson wrote, Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler … as peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy. ‘This is probably true for a class of idlers such as your good selves,’ said JA. ‘When someone is asked at the immigration desk whether the purpose of their visit is business or leisure, and they reply “business”, they are not then asked, “What is the ultimate purpose of your busy-ness?” If they were, I doubt that many would say with Jeremy Bentham, “To increase the sum of human happiness.” For most of us, the honest response would be “I pursue my business, make myself busy, to earn enough money to look after my family and to find a little time for idling” – whether that be pottering around the garden or perusing the Sunday newspaper.’
So perhaps the point of reading is that it is a very good form of idling. To enjoy a book is to add to the Idler’s enjoyment of life. That would certainly be the main point of the paperback novels most of us read while lounging by the swimming pool in the sunshine on our well-earned summer holiday. The airport bookstore provides fast food to the Idler. But what kind of books offer the most nutritious diet?
Johnson gave his answer to the question in number 84 of The Idler, published on Saturday, 24 November 1759: Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life. Or, as he said to Boswell when they were on their tour to the Hebrides, I esteem biography as giving what comes near to ourselves, what we can put to use. And the best kind of biography, he claimed, is autobiography: Those relations are commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story. The reason for this, he explained, is that biography can give us examples of what makes people happy and what makes them unhappy, and there is no better person to give an account of that than the person who has been through the experience.
Had Dr Johnson written his own Life, James Boswell wrote on the first page of the book that laid the foundations of modern biography, had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited. But he didn’t. Instead, we have the imperfect telling of his life by Boswell – which still happens to be one of the most rewarding examples of biography that has ever been written. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. lives through the immediacy of the narrative voice, the presence of the biographer himself. There is no attempt at objectivity, no desire for balance or comprehensiveness. Because the book is more like a dialogue with Johnson – much of it is a record of his conversations – the reader has the feeling of being in the room, joining the club, sharing the stories, reasoning and feeling, joshing and idling, alongside the subject himself. Boswell brings back to life the laughter and the friendships that kept Dr Johnson from despair.
Yet our teachers at school were none too keen on biography. We were taught to focus on the text, not the author. We learned about ‘the intentional fallacy’. Sometimes, the rule was broken. You can’t really understand the leap from John Donne’s youthful erotic verse to the Holy Sonnets of his later years without knowing that he himself made a distinction between Jack Donne, lad about town, and Dr Donne, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. But in the case of Shakespeare, his impersonality, his elusiveness, was the thing. Every action, every opinion in the plays belongs to the character, not the dramatist. He never gets into his pulpit, as the later Donne did. If a character starts preaching at you, their sermon is almost bound to be undone by experience. All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, intones the well-meaning but ineffective cuckold Albany in the final scene of King Lear, And all foes / The cup of their deservings. At which point Lear enters bearing the dead body of his daughter, most undeservedly murdered.
Sermons are intended to give answers to the meaning of life. Plays are there to pose questions. Like the one that Lear addresses to his dead daughter:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all?
There is no answer to that, which is why the end of King Lear was too much for Johnson to stomach.
But a moment later, the loyal Earl of Kent steps forward. Hapless Albany has proposed that, following all the carnage, Britain should be jointly ruled by Kent and Edgar. Given that the treachery and civil war began with a division of the kingdom, this proposal to crown two new kings simultaneously does not seem a very good idea. So Kent gracefully takes his leave:
I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me, I must not say no.
Is he, like Gloucester and Lear before him, undergoing a heart attack? Or is he intending to commit suicide? Either way, he is answering the call of death out of loyalty and love towards Lear. There is no answer to the question about the dog, the horse, the rat and the dead daughter, but in its witness to the force of loyalty and love, even this play that seems to foreshadow the promised end of everything can enable its readers – and its spectators – better to endure life.
With the assistance of Burton and Boswell, Dr Johnson had given me another prescription. Like all Oxford dons in the seventeenth century, Burton was ordained in the Church of England. He accordingly urged his readers towards orthodox Christian faith and hope as the antidote to despair. But, with supreme honesty, he acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining hope and staving off despair, especially when one is lonely. That is what led him to end The Anatomy of Melancholy with the memorable advice that meant so much to Dr Johnson:
As thou tenderest thine own welfare in this and all other melancholy, thy good health of body and mind, observe this short precept: give not way to solitariness and idleness. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle.’
The avoidance of solitude needs love; of idleness, work. Burton’s prescription for a good life was in this respect an anticipation of Leo Tolstoy’s in a letter to his fiancée: One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.
For Burton himself, as for Dr Johnson, the work was literature: he said that the purpose of writing The Anatomy was by being busy to avoid melancholy. The book was the cure for the disease that it diagnosed.
Of the several kinds of melancholy depicted on Burton’s title page, mine was that of the Inamorato with hat pulled down upon his brows (middle left)
Public domain image from the author’s collection