Johnson's Rasselas - 250th anniversary

[Alan Brody]

It might be worth noting that this is the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's novel "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia", the work that Orson Welles quoted from in his speech for the AFI lifetime achievement award, one of the most high-profile speeches of his career. As part of the speech he offered an abridged version of this paragraph:

"Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left. Those conditions that flatter hope and attract desire are so constituted that, as we approach one, we recede from another. There are goods so opposed that we cannot sieze both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either. This is often the fate of long consideration; he does nothing who endeavors to do more then is allowed to humanity. Flatter not yourself with contrarities of pleasure. Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of Autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of Spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile."
Samuel Johnson,
"Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia" (1759)

Samuel Johnson is most famous as the creator of the most esteemed of all English dictionaries in the 18th century, but he was also an early leader of the abolitionist movement in England, another reason why Welles may have admired him enough to quote him on such an important occasion. Rassalas was his only novel. I confess I've never read it, but it concerns a young prince who escapes from a life of pampered but stupefying luxury in order to experience both the highs and lows of life. The prince's gilded bondage in a palace has been compared to Xanadu, the prison-like pleasure dome in Coleridge's Kubla Kahn, which also inspired parts of Citizen Kane.

[ToddBaesen]

Thanks for posting that background, Alan, as I had no idea who Samuel Johnson was! Which is why Welles remains so fascinating. His work continues to reveal new layers of ideas and meaning many years later...

I wonder how many people in the room during Welles speech were just as baffled about who Samuel Johnson was. They probably thought he was some hack writer, like Christopher Marlowe, who was most likely a Communist!

The entire Welles AFI speech can be read here:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=46


ORSON WELLES: This is Samuel Johnson on the subject of what he calls “Contrarieties.”

“There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both and in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself,” he says, “with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can at the same time fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.”

Well, this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you who are paying me this compliment and with me who have strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I’m alone in this or unique. I am never that. But there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of ours who still trudge stubbornly along the lonely, rocky road and this is, in fact, our contrariety.

[Alan Brody]

I had no idea who he was either, until recently. I stumbled on an article about him in the Arts & Letters Daily and remembered the name from Welles's speech. September 18th was actually the 300th anniversary of Johnson's birth, so he was about 50 when he wrote Rasselas. I also just happened to recently listen to the 12th Night Mercury LP at Store Hadji's Museum of Orson Welles site, and was pleasantly surprised to hear, at the end of the program, Welles doing a funny impersonation of Johnson reviewing a performance of 12th Night from 1741. Welles describes him as the "absolute dictator of literary London" around that time.

I'm glad you provided the link to the whole AFI speech. I guess he must have meant the mouth and source of the Nile when he said-

Let us raise our cups then standing, as some of us do, on opposite ends of the river and drink together to what really matters to us all. To our crazy and beloved profession. To the movies. To good movies. To every possible kind.

[Glenn Anders]

Alan: The fact that Toddy should never have heard of Samuel Johnson or RASSELAS does not surprise me, even though he and I last met at Rasselas, a trendy bar in San Francisco's Blue Note Jazz District. [How could he have forgotten that fact? He's either being modest or . . . It's the Gimlets!] But I'm a little shocked that you would be unfamiliar with Samuel Johnson, the first great English critic, a wit, a man who prided himself on his learning, a shaper of the English Character, inventor of the English Dictionary, a pioneer novelist, and subject of what is often regarded as the greatest biography in the English language (by James Boswell, who took the notoriously gouty and xenophobic Johnson on a walking tour of Boswell's home country, Scotland).

I must admit that it has been decades since I actually read RASSELAS, but my impression, then and now, suggests that the novel is an intellectual meditation about life based on a fascination with the Upper Nile, and the story of Gilgamesh or perhaps that of Siddhartha.

If you should wish to test the callow judgment of my youth, you and Toddy may read the whole of RASSELAS online:

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Te ... selas.html

I warn you, at 50 chapters, it may be hard going. Welles' snippet is much more to the point.

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

I appreciate the link, although I couldn't get through Candide, so I probably couldn't get through this one either, especially online. But you're right Glenn, we should know who Samuel Johnson is. Unfortunately, when you grow up through the American public school system, as I did, you tend to think that history began on July 4th, 1776. I didn't even know what the word "enlightenment" meant until after I had graduated from college with a bachelor's degree (in Computer Science, so my contact with history and great literature was limited). I guess that's where Orson Welles comes in, thankfully.

That's very interesting about the jazz club being named Rasselas. Johnson's novel was revered by abolitionists, and according to one website, many emancipated slaves took the name Rasselas after the Civil War. America's greatest artistic contribution to the world, Jazz, was created and developed by their descendants. BTW, just out of curiosity, do you know what the correct pronunciation of the word is?

[Alan Brody]

I take that back, Glenn. I forgot that you can adjust the size of the text online to suit your preference. I started reading it and, a few chapters a day, think I might be able to make it through. Thanks.

[ToddBaesen]

Johnson observed that Falstaff made himself necessary to Prince Hal “by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter.”


A quote from the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK review of SAMUEL JOHNSON: A LIFE. Now the Welles attraction to Johnson's work becomes even clearer.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books ... &ref=books

[Glenn Anders]

Indeed, Toddy, as I read earlier today the notice you cite by Harold Bloom, I could not but reflect that in your doughty, may I say, dogged devotion to distracting and vivifying our own Mr. Lawrence French, when terrible need overtakes him, you may simulate both his Falstaff and his Boswell!

Ave at que vale intolerancia de la lactosa, Toddy!

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

That's an interesting article, Todd. I like that phrase describing Johnson's 'Falstaffian vitalism', although I'm not really sure what that means exactly, since 'vitalism' seems to be more of a biological term. Bloom also wrote a fascinating introduction to the two parts of Henry IV, which includes this comment that shows him in line with Wellesian thinking:

"Just as Shylock was ordered immediately to become a Christian, so Falstaff is enjoined to become 'more wise and modest...presumably to get as close to God as Henry V now is. Squadrons of scholars, old-style and new, offer apologies for Henry V, while assuring us that...order is in order, Henry V is an ideal monarch, the first authentic English king, the very model for Shakespeare's own political ideal.
On the not unlikely grounds that Shakespeare was more Falstaffian then Henrican, I join the now derided "humanist" critics, including Dr. Samuel Johnson, in dismissing this idea of order as irrelevant nonsense. To reject Falstaff is to reject Shakespeare."

Bloom's intro later compares Falstaff to Montaigne's Socrates. Montaigne was also one Welles's favorite writers and was not only a huge influence on Shakespeare (especially the soliloquies) but is also generally credited with the invention of the "First Person Singular" form in literature.
BTW, Who does this picture of Socrates remind you of?

[NoFake]

Where did you find that picture of Socrates, if I may ask?

[Alan Brody]

http://www.chrishorner.net/?tag=socrates

[NoFake]

That's nothing short of uncanny. (Unless it's a contemporary sketch by a Wellesian.)

[Alan Brody]

That's possible, but then there are these busts, which I would assume come from the classical era:



I should also mention that the Bloom article mentions Samuel Johnson together with yet another Welles favorite, Oscar Wilde. Bloom says Johnson and Wilde's Lady Bracknell are both 'legatees of Falstaff's amazing resourcefulness of speech'.

[NoFake]

This is the first I've seen any of these. The Socrates sketches and busts I remember seeing never brought Welles to mind, but these -- not just the physiognomy and facial hair, but the expressions in the eyes and mouth -- and I don't want to go overboard here, but the resemblance is remarkable -- almost could have been drawn or sculpted from life. I'm amazed nobody's noticed this before. Thanks for bringing these to our attention.

[Alan Brody]

It is an eerie resemblance, isn't it? Of course, if you google Socrates you'll find many different images, most of which don't look like Welles- one has him looking more like Jesus, which calls to mind Benjamin Franklin's statement that his two role models were Jesus and Socrates. According to Frank Brady, Welles considered making a film of Franklin's life as a followup to Kane, and wound up playing him onscreen in two different movies. One website says Franklin and Samuel Johnson did meet once, but as Johnson was a Tory, he said he had no desire to know Franklin better. However, they did both have Socrates in common.

"I have Socrates on my side. It was his labour to turn philosophy from the study of nature to speculations upon life, but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off attention from life to nature. They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do good and avoid evil."
Samuel Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets)

In Wiki it describes Socrates as a 'one man democratic agora'. One could probably say the same thing about Welles and all the others mentioned in this thread.