Once more ’round the blockhead

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one. — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack for the year 1734

Now jump ahead four decades. To April 5, 1776, to be precise.

The great literary critic and curmudgeon Samuel Johnson and the diary-keeping lawyer who would become his biographer, James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, were discussing whether Johnson should write a book about Italy.

Conceding that he would be happy to earn some cash from such a project, even if he felt he could not easily make a book out of it, Johnson made a provocative observation: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

Boswell disagreed, arguing that people sometimes write for fame, duty or pleasure rather than a paycheque. But was Dr. Johnson — who was also a poet, essayist and groundbreaking lexicographer — correct in his dismissive diagnosis?

The obvious answer is no.

The less obvious answer is: he had a point.

Writing is one of those activities that people claim to undertake for noble reasons until somebody asks whether they would continue doing it if nobody ever read the result. At that point, the noble reasons tend to scatter rapidly, like sparrows when a toddler at a picnic decides to get generous with a slice of bread.

There are certainly some writers who write for pleasure. There are writers who write because they have something important to say. There are writers who write because they believe civilization itself depends on their thoughts being arranged into paragraphs.

And there are writers who write because the rent is due.

Johnson had in mind the last group, although he may have been unfair to the first three. The real genius of his remark is that it turns writing into a kind of economic diagnosis: if you write without being paid, you are either unusually virtuous, unusually desperate for attention, unusually optimistic … or quite possibly (but not unusually) a blockhead.

The trouble is that Johnson himself rather complicated the argument.

He wrote some pretty fine poetry that he himself, doubtful of his own abilities, didn’t hold in high regard. He wrote sparkling essays. He is regarded by many as the greatest literary critic ever to write in English. He compiled a witty dictionary, which is not normally regarded as an activity undertaken by people who have recently decided they have too much free time.

Sample definition: Lexicographer — A harmless drudge.

Johnson wrote because he was interested in ideas, because he was intellectually restless, because he wanted recognition and, yes, because he needed the money. In other words, he was what a fractious Montreal sports reporter whom I once had the uneven pleasure of editing used to haughtily refer to (usually in reference to himself) as a (rhymes with clucking) professional.

Professional writers tend to have a peculiar relationship with money. They need it and work hard for it, while sometimes feeling that mentioning this fact somehow cheapens the work.

A plumber does not say, “I repaired your toilet, but I really hope you understand that my deeper motivation was artistic fulfilment.”

A dentist does not announce, “I filled your cavity because I have always been fascinated by the human condition.”

And nobody pays a tax accountant and then says, “Please don’t let the money corrupt your passion for Form T4.”

Writers, however, are expected to pretend that money is merely an unfortunate side effect of publication, like a toe infection or a subscription to the National Post.

In last year’s Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, novelist Margaret Atwood writes of the attitude authors faced in the 1970s when she was involved in helping to create the Writers’ Union of Canada, shortly to be followed by the Writers’ Trust:

At one point, we picketed Parliament because print overruns in the States were being sold in Canada as remainders, with nothing going to the writers. We scored a meeting with the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. The minister’s response was, “Don’t you want the public to have cheap books?” Then, as now, many thought writers shouldn’t be paid, since they enjoyed what they were doing. (So, bank president, you like your job? Then no money for you.)

It’s an inescapable fact of human nature, of course, that some people write in the hope of becoming famous. The beloved pose that a onetime small-town typesetter named Samuel Clemens adopted as the legendary American humourist Mark Twain — with the signature white suits and the knack for cutting one-liners — was a master class in 19th-century public relations.

In his 1946 essay Why I Write, Eric Blair listed “sheer egoism” and the “desire to be regarded as clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death” as the first and most powerful motive driving him to write. Which, along with wishing to protect his family from potential embarrassment for writing firsthand about poverty, is why we know Blair today as a distinct English authorial persona: George Orwell.

Ernest Hemingway built his larger-than-life public image around masculinity and adventure; William Faulkner and John Steinbeck both cared deeply about their critical reputation and standing among both their peers and the public.

Johnson himself understood fame perfectly well. He knew that authorship could turn a person into the sort of grand public figure that he became, which in the eighteenth century was somewhat like becoming famous on social media except that there were no social media, photographs were unknown, and getting cancelled required considerably more effort than posting an ill-advised emoji.

People also write out of a sense of duty. Good journalists have always written primarily to inform the public of important trends and events. Parents write letters to their children because saying “I love you” aloud would be emotionally unbearable. Some people write because to do so helps clarify their thoughts.

Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing, what it means.”

Isaac Asimov: “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

David McCullough: “Writing is thinking.”

Thinking things through to their logical ends can be pleasurable. But thinking deeply requires concentration and writing for pleasure sounds lovely until you actually try it. The first five minutes are wonderful. You have an idea! You are a genius! Words are flowing! You are basically Milton with a way better optometrist.

Three hours later you are staring at a sentence containing the phrase “however, on the other hand” and realizing you could have more profitably spent that time arranging your old Herman’s Hermits 45s in alphabetical order. Paradise lost.

For all that, Boswell’s objection to Johnson’s cynicism seems sound and even salutary. Writing is not always a transaction. Often it is a compulsion, a vocation, a form of play or an attempt to make sense of a world that refuses to come with an instruction manual.

Johnson’s larger point, however, might have been that writing for money is not something of which a serious writer should be ashamed. Indeed, money has one significant advantage over fame, duty and pleasure: money can be exchanged for groceries. Fame cannot. Duty cannot.

Pleasure, admittedly, can sometimes be exchanged for groceries, but usually only indirectly and often after several unpleasant conversations with the tax authorities. Or the vice squad.

For his part, James Boswell had no financial guarantees or assurances that his Life of Samuel Johnson would make a farthing. He self-published the two-volume quarto a decade after Johnson’s death, entirely on his own dime at his own financial peril.

Boswell had been dogged by debts and personal struggles throughout his life, and might have claimed a prize spot in the torturous history of blockheadedness had the work fallen — like David Hume’s philosophical masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, half a century before — “dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” (Hume’s description.)

Happily, The Life of Samuel Johnson was hailed immediately as a commercial and critical tour de force. The combined profit generated from the first two editions ran to roughly £2,500, which at the end of the 18th century was equivalent to more than half a million Canadian dollars today.

“The act of writing is an act of optimism,” playwright Edward Albee wrote in his 2005 collection, Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Richard Albee. “You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter.”

This is the Golden Rule of writing, even if 99 times out of 100, the literary gods swipe the ball from the kicking tee just before an aspiring writer’s feckless foot follows through.

While writing Johnson’s biography — which he might never have had time to undertake had his attempts to try his luck at the English Bar and to stand for Parliament not been such dismal failures — Boswell’s health began to falter due to venereal disease(s) and his years of heavy drinking. He was 54 when he died in 1795, a scant four years after finally enjoying the one major triumph of his life.

Good grief.

As the well-meaning but hapless Peanuts character Charlie Brown, consistently derided as a blockhead by one Lucy van Pelt (as well as by her largely forgotten predecessor, Violet Gray), was regularly heard to declaim: “AAAAAUUUUGGHH!”