My affections lie with the periodical essays, whose moral subject matter is generally even more off-putting to potential readers. I’m always moved by the sheer humanity of his writing; the prose is architectural, grave and measured, but glows like cut sandstone at sunset. Thus, from Rambler 134 on the perennial topic of procrastination and idleness:

Among all who sacrifice future advantage to present inclination, scarcely any gain so little as those that suffer themselves to freeze in idleness. Others are corrupted by some enjoyment of more or less power to gratify the passions; but to neglect our duties merely to avoid the labour of performing them, a labour which is always punctually rewarded, is surely to sink under weak temptations. Idleness never can secure tranquillity; the call of reason and of conscience will pierce the closest pavilion of the sluggard, and, though it may not have force to drive him from his down, will be loud enough to hinder him from sleep. Those moments which he cannot resolve to make useful, by devoting them to the great business of his being, will still be usurped by powers that will not leave them to his disposal; remorse and vexation will seize upon them, and forbid him to enjoy what he is so desirous to appropriate.

We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.

Like her, my first thought with regard to Obama was his grasp of register; an apprehension which, to be done properly, must always be both conscious and unconscious.

I don’t know at what point it became clear to me that life’s escape velocity marks something profoundly banal, an overwhelming sense of just-can’t-be-doing-with rather than a doing, but it’s not a sensibility that bears long acquaintance. Perhaps you can take pictures, compare for critical purpose with ‘negative sensibility’, get the full range of ‘[a]t the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a “criticism of life”‘… at bottom is the bottom, and it’s where writing stops.

Poetry as data. Visualise, make concordances, chew it up. Skirt sacrilege.

But this is more a continuation of the ‘post-fame’ musings. There are a few standard narratives of the literary career: the one-hit wonder; the prodigious beginning, slump and re-emergence, sometimes repeated in cycles; the late flowering; and of course, the ‘early, middle, late’, in which an writer’s final works, often tendentious and exasperating, are given particular attention (I blame you, Beethoven).

Those narratives are usually established well after the fact, though not always, and the search to impose a career path on living authors makes me glad that my studies are largely confined to those long gone, spared the indignity of the Sunday-sheet backscratchers trying to pad their reviews with a couple of grafs on ‘development’.

I suppose the question in all literary careers, for writers as well as for those who read and study them (often two separate disciplines, alas) is ‘how much is enough?’ It was the late Tony Nuttall — damn, how out of it was I to miss his obituaries? — who first drew my attention to a now-favourite passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which the young George III contrived an encounter with the great man in the Queen’s library:

His Majesty enquired if he was then writing any thing. He answered, he was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must now read to acquire more knowledge. The King, as it should seem with a view to urge him to rely on his own stores as an original writer, and to continue his labours, then said ‘I do not think you borrow much from any body.’ Johnson said, he thought he had already done his part as a writer. ‘I should have thought so too, (said the King,) if you had not written so well.’—Johnson observed to me, upon this, that ‘No man could have paid a handsomer compliment; and it was fit for a King to pay. It was decisive.’

Knowing the tensions inherent in Johnson’s attitude towards writing (here, and see what the refresh button brings) drives home the poignancy of this exchange. Necessity unlocked capability: the jobbing early works to survive, the subscription works to justify the monies paid, and Rasselas, most famously, to pay for his mother’s funeral and settle her debts. It casts a sober eye at his contemporaries’ talk of original genius; his work, like so many great writers, is spring-wound-tightly stuff.

Sometimes it’s easy enough to know, as writer and reader, when all has been said. (I do wonder, though, how many great extended careers have been forestalled by an over-generous early advance. Note to publishers: multi-book deals, and deliver the big money late.) Not always, though: and great writing summons an appropriate appetite for more, even if the writer may not always be capable, or know his true capabilities. Then comes the dance of expectations, as we prepare for a career to take a certain next step only for it to throw us off balance, rendering our mental narratives fiction.

Like I said, it’s easier to wait until they’re dead.

The other? From time spent in the company of a cat.