This year marks the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, and in honor of that occasion, the Huntington Library has staged a new exhibition honoring the 18th century lexicographer, a man of letters who wore a wig, drank port and addressed his friends as "Sirrah."
The other day, I went to San Marino to immerse myself in the vastness of Johnson's literary production and to read his stirring, inexorable prose, often in its first editions. In the process, I rediscovered Johnson not only as a great moralist and profound humanist but, to the surprise of someone who lives in a city that had not even been imagined in Dr. Johnson's time, as a firm cultural backboard against which to bounce ideas about cities and the society they engender.
Johnson, I concluded, could have lived happily in Los Angeles. It's true he might have felt a bit out of place at the Huntington reception honoring his work. It is hard to imagine the stout, massive Johnson, in wig, waistcoat and breeches, perched on one of the Huntington's delicate folding chairs, downing chicken pesto sliders in the setting sun and sipping at a plastic cup of cold California white. But he was an inspired dinner guest, which matters in L.A., a place of dinner parties.
He had, like many in our city's social vortex, an overwhelming ambition to participate and to dazzle as well as an intense desire to please, his clumsiness turned into grace by his brilliance, his secret despair wrought painstakingly into humor.
Of course, he was always more so than any of his contemporaries: more intelligent, more intellectually devastating, sharper, more penetrating and far better spoken. The English language was a handy weapon for him, and he was quick to wield it.
He was a country boy, like so many who come to L.A. to make a name for themselves. After leaving Oxford for lack of funds, Johnson the dropout spent about a decade roaming through London, destitute, sometimes homeless, trying to carve out a life for himself, publishing for a pittance in Grub Street rags.
He'd made a fast friend out of the soon-to-be-legendary actor David Garrick, and eventually the two of them, along with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter, founded a club, a salon that eventually included the novelist Oliver Goldsmith, the philosopher Edmund Burke and his biographer, James Boswell, among others. The club was, wrote Walter Jackson Bate, the Johnson scholar, "the most remarkable assemblage of diverse talents that has ever met so frequently for the sole purpose of conversation."
