Wonderful new book takes you into an exclusive club
On occasion a book can serve as a monument. That’s happily the case with The Club, by Leo Damrosch, the distinguished Harvard historian, who has erected a splendid monument in words to a cluster of outstanding London artists and philosophers who for years gathered together once a week.
Damrosch’s book, formally titled The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and The Friends Who Shaped an Age ( Yale), is a cleverly interwoven story of Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds and some of their friends.
The Club began when Samuel Johnson and the painter Joshua Reynolds invited a few friends to dine together every Friday evening to eat, drink and converse in a private room at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Soho.
There were nine members at their first meeting but the number soon reached 35. Each newcomer had to be endorsed by all the established members and had to be known for his abilities as a conversationalist. All of them called it nothing but “the Club.”
Damrosch makes their meetings, and their lives outside the meetings, into a seamless portrait. He first introduces Johnson and James Boswell with crisp, precise biographies, then depicts each of them as they made their way into the larger group. He transports us back into the world of ideas and arguments, bringing it brilliantly to life. He also shows us how the members looked in their day through 31 colour plates and many black and white drawings.
When the Club first came together, most of these great figures had not yet achieved the greatness that would give them a place in history. Edward Gibbon’s multi- book history of the Decline of the Roman Empire was in his future. The 22-year-old Boswell had been introduced to the 54- year- old Johnson but Boswell did not yet know he had met both his spiritual father and the subject of his famous biography. As for Johnson, he hadn’t yet written his masterpiece of criticism, the Lives of the Poets, which appeared in 1781. And no one fully appreciated the political oratory of Edmund Burke.
Johnson’s ailments necessarily fill several pages. He suffered often from dark, painful depression ( he called it “indolence”) and with “gloom and despair, which made existence misery.” Facial tics embarrassed him. He tended to shout. Boswell had similar troubles. His diary discloses mood swings that indicate ( Damrosch says) bipolar disorder. Alcoholism caused him memory blanks. A fondness for prostitutes brought on venereal disease. At one point he wrote in his diary, “I ranged an hour in the street and dallied with ten strumpets.”
Not all those in the Club admired all the others. Members must often have had their patience tried. Johnson called Adam Smith “as dull a dog” as he had met. Johnson and Boswell both loathed Edward Gibbon and liked to call him “the Infidel.” They knew he was skeptical of the theory that Christianity had spread through Divine Intervention, and questioned the accepted history of the early Church. Damrosch tells us that in writing his multi-volume book on the Decline of the Roman empire, Gibbon managed often to avoid “tedious chronicles of fact” in order to create a lively narrative. We also get an eloquent short biography of Gibbon, including his energetic rescue of his family’s fortunes after his father had all but totally ruined them.
The whole text exhibits Damrosch’s affection for his subjects. He loves being, imaginatively, in the Johnsonian world. He likes its inhabitants, whatever their faults, and enjoys their eccentricities as well as their talents. The one obvious flaw in the book is in the title — “and The Friends Who Shaped an Age.”
These stars of literature and thought did not shape their age — not if you compare them with revolutions, industrial progress and increased literacy. These men did shape the age’s style and some of its thinking, but otherwise that line is an exaggeration. Damrosch has said that the goal of his book is “to make readers today at home in their world and to introduce them to an unforgettable cast of characters.” Making readers feel at home: a magnificent ambition! And that’s what The Club superbly accomplishes.