Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

A brilliant man of humble origins, who is barely remembered and less appreciated, Johnson wrote the most famous of English dictionaries, and a wealth of other critical and creative contributions, despite struggling with both poverty and a range of health conditions.

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, son of a bookseller, on September 18, 1709.  He was a sickly baby who contracted scrofula, which left him with physical scars.  Being touched by Queen Anne – the famous and mythical cure  for “the king’s evil” – did not help him.  He was also blind in one eye and had poor hearing, perhaps as a result of contracting tuberculosis from his nursemaid.  But his most prominent disability, which became more obvious as he grew up and which ruined his attempt to earn a living as a school teacher, has been posthumously diagnosed as Tourette’s syndrome.  Johnson was famous for his tics and gesticulations. William Hogarth described him "shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner" and concludes that he was "an ideot".  Johnson was also reported as making odd clucking and whistling sounds, and exhibiting obsessive compulsive behaviour.  Throughout his life, particularly towards the end, he suffered periods of depression. As Lennard Davis writes "If Johnson had lived during the twentieth century, he most probably would have been institutionalised, given shock therapy, or more recently put on a regime of antidepressants."   Davis is surprised that his contemporaries wrote about him as "a brilliant man who had some oddities rather than as a seriously disabled person".

As a child, Johnson displayed prodigious intellect, benefitting from the easy availability of books in his father’s shop.  But poverty undermined his opportunities for formal education.  He was unable to spend long enough at Oxford University to gain a degree, for example.    In 1737 he moved to London, where he made a living as a journalist and man of letters.

Johnson’s literary output was diverse and influential: an edition of Shakespeare, critical essays on English poets, together with political and religious writings.    Johnson was a Tory, but also a committed Anglican, who behaved in a notably Christian way.   For example, he was very hospitable to friends, several of whom lived with him in his penurious and eccentric household.   He was an opponent of slavery, and expressed some progressive views about women’s equality – although not consistently.  In his magazine, The Rambler, and in his comments – such as "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization” – Johnson  demonstrated a social conscience, which coexisted with his support for social hierarchy. 


Samuel Johnson was one of history's great tea drinkers, consuming dozens of cups each day.  Reviewing a book critical of tea, Johnson described himself as "a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals only with the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle scarcely has time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning".  Johnson was also particularly fond of cats, such as the famous Hodge, memorialised in a London statue.  

In 1735, he had married the widow of a friend, Elizabeth Porter, known as Tetty: she was more than 20 years older than him, but they had a tender relationship until her death in 1752.  Despite the bereavement, the 1750s were Johnson’s most successful decade.  After nine years work, he completed his famous Dictionary,  with its 42,773 entries. It was not the first, not the longest, not the most accurate English dictionary, but it became the one which defined the language.  His innovations were to include words that ordinary people used, together with 100,000 quotations showing their usage.  During this period, he also he wrote the essays in The Rambler and The Idler, and his novel, Rasselas.  Finally in 1762,  his labours were rewarded with the grant of a government pension. 

Soon afterwards, he met James Boswell, a young Scotsman who was to write the famous biography of the man who thanks to him became known as Dr Johnson.  It was from the record of his brilliant conversation preserved through this Life that so many of those memorable quotations derive: “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”; “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. It was Johnson who called second marriages “a triumph of hope over experience” and who said "The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."

On December 13, 1784, Samuel Johnson died as a result of a stroke, after a period of illness and depression.  Widely acclaimed as a critic as well as a lexicographer, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Further reading
Lennard Davis "Dr Johnson, Amelia and the discourse of disability", in Bending Over Backwards: disability, dismodernism and other difficult positions, New York University Press, New York, 2002.

Links

Samuel Johnson’s house        

Johnson quotations                 

The Dictionary                       

Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793)

Maverick scientist, jobbing medic, sometime political philosopher, eloquent journalist, impassioned political activist – Marat was multifariously gifted but brutally extreme.

He was born in Neuchatel, son of a Sardinian religious refugee, but left for the bright lights of Paris, where he studied medicine.  He moved to London in 1765, where he began to write philosophical essays.  By 1770, he had shifted to Newcastle, where he probably worked as a vet, and was inspired by the radical MP John Wilkes.  Working mainly in Newcastle’s Central Library, fuelled by black coffee and deprived of sleep, he wrote Chains of Slavery (1774) over a three week period.  The British government went to great lengths to suppress circulation of the book - an original copy of the libertarian tract is still available in the Literary and Philosophical Society. Switching back to medicine, a work on eye diseases won Marat an honorary medical degree from St Andrews University.

Armed with this qualification, Marat returned to Paris, where he developed a lucrative medical practice working for the aristocracy, the proceeds of which allowed him to explore scientific research.  During the 1780s, he published a translation of Newton, was visited several times by Benjamin Franklin, was turned down for membership of the Academie des Sciences, but continued researching and writing, not just on science but also on political issues.

With the beginnings of the French revolution, Marat turned full time to political agitation, publishing his own paper from September 1789, which became named L’Ami du peuple: by contrast, he branded those with whom he disagreed “enemies of the people” and attacking everyone in authority.  Consequently, he was constantly in trouble.  


Appearing on one occasion before the Commission of Police, Marat said:

“Gentlemen, these are the disagreeables we have to put up with in the passage from slavery to liberty. Do you really believe that a Revolution such as this could accomplish itself without some misfortunes, without the shedding of some drops of blood? I entertain no hostile design against you, but had I to choose between my duty to the Commission of Police and my duty to liberty, my choice would be already made”

His words won over the Commission, which even offered him a coach to take him home.

At one point he overstepped the mark and was forced to flee to London.  Another time, he successfully appealed to the police to shut down those who were producing counterfeit versions of his paper to discredit him – an oddly legalistic move for a revolutionary.  At various moments, Marat had to go into hiding:  “exposed to a thousand dangers, encompassed by spies, police-agents, and assassins, I hurried from retreat to retreat, often unable to sleep for two consecutive nights in the same bed.”   Less romantically, he spent time in cellars, sewers and even a quarry.  


It was during this period that he contracted his famous skin disease, posthumously diagnosed as dermatitis herpetiformis.  His symptoms included itching and weight loss, together with headaches and insomnia.  Neither the debilitating disease nor his general appearance - "short in stature, deformed in person, and hideous in face" – were an obstacle to him marrying a young woman, Simone Evrard, who was a member of his typographer’s family.

In September 1792, he endorsed and encouraged the actions of the revolutionaries who dragged more than a thousand of their royalist enemies from the prisons to massacre them:  “What is the duty of the people? The last thing it has to do, and the safest and wisest, is to present itself in arms before the Abbaye, snatch out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly to wish to give them a trial! It is all done; you have taken them in arms against the country, you have massacred the soldiers, why would you spare their officers, incomparably more culpable? The folly is to have listened to the smooth-talkers, who counselled to make of them only prisoners of war. They are traitors whom it is necessary to sacrifice immediately, since they can never be considered in any other light.”

Jean-Paul Marat was elected to the Convention in 1792 as one of the Paris representatives.  There was an outcry when he came to the Convention, three quarters of the delegates declaring themselves to be his enemy, accusing him and Danton and Robespierre of aspiring to become a triumvirate of dictators.  In response, he stated:

“In order to better serve the country, I have braved misery, danger, suffering, I have been pursued every day by legions of assassins; during three years I have been condemned to a subterranean life; I have pleaded the cause of liberty with my head on the block!”

Marat was very active during the first half of 1793 in opposing the Girondins, the more moderate faction in the assembly, whom he considered enemies of the Republic, and who had done their best to remove him from influence or put him on trial.  He was quoted as saying “I believe in the cutting off of heads”.  Finally, in May the Girond fell, fleeing to the provinces or facing arrest in the capital.  Now the Jacobins were in charge, and the notorious Committee of Public Safety came to power.  Soon after, Jean-Paul Marat himself retired from public life, considering his political objectives achieved, and suffering from his worsening skin disease.

At this stage of his life, Marat would work in the bath, immersed in hot water, a handkerchief soaked in vinegar tied around his head, writing on a board placed across the copper tub.  It was there that a Girondist sympathizer, Charlotte Corday, came to talk to him on 13 July.  After a discussion of supposed counter-revolutionaries in the Caen region, she took out a kitchen knife and stabbed Marat in the heart.  Calling out to his wife for help, within seconds he was dead.

Once assassinated, Marat was sanctified by the revolution, as painted by Jacques-Louis David. In churches, his bust replaced the crucifix.  His remains were placed in the Pantheon with the inscription: “Like Jesus, Marat loved ardently the people, and only them. Like Jesus, Marat hated kings, nobles, priests, rogues and, like Jesus, he never stopped fighting against these plagues of the people.”  

However, within six months, the apotheosis of Marat and other fallen revolutionaries was reversed: the remains were reburied in ordinary cemeteries and his glorious reputation was soon replaced by almost the opposite assessment – that he was a blood-thirsty demagogue who was to blame for the outpourings of revolutionary violence.  He certainly used his extraordinary powers of propaganda to whip up fervor.  Yet he seems also to have had a genuine commitment to liberty, great political insight, and a wide ranging intelligence and charm.  Brilliant but brutal, disabled yet tough as nails, perhaps Dr Jean-Paul Marat was the eighteenth century’s equivalent of  Dr Enesto “Che” Guevara?.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

"O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you & I would have ended my life — it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me."

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of romantic music is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which finishes with the great Ode to Joy, Schiller’s verses about international harmony set to a memorable and moving tune.  Even when poorly played, as when I saw it recently at Geneva’s Victoria Hall, it’s an amazing work of great power, requiring an enlarged orchestra and several choirs.  Yet when it was premiered on 7 May 1824 to a tumultuous reception, it is said that Beethoven, his back to the audience, had to be turned around to see the applause which he had been unable to hear, being totally deaf by this point in his life.

Born in Bonn, he was the son and grandson of musicians, and was soon recognized as having innate talent himself.  His upbringing was chaotic, his mother died, and his father's music teaching was brutal.  Because his father was also a feckless drunk, Beethoven looked after his two younger brothers and supplemented the family income by playing in the court orchestra.   By 13, he had published two sonatas and attracted support from the Elector of  Bonn.   Thanks to this assistance, in 1792 Beethoven went to Vienna to study with Haydn.  He quickly established a reputation as a piano virtuoso, and from 1795 began publishing his own compositions, soon earning enough from them to cover his living expenses.  After 1800 there followed the works of his middle period, known as his “Heroic” period, which comprised the great symphonies, piano sonatas, the violin concerto and the opera Fidelio.

But aged 26, at exactly the same time as his career began to took off, Beethoven began to lose his hearing.  As he explained to a friend: "I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession it is a terrible handicap."  He was not just hard of hearing, he also suffered from tinnitus, a perpetual and distracting ringing in his ears.   No wonder that his first thoughts were of suicide, as he explained in letters to his brother.  In the Heiligenstadt testament, written on 6 October 1802, he talks about his loneliness: 

"O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad 
experience of my bad hearing, and yet it was impossible for 
me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf." 

But he changed his mind, and decided instead to dedicate his life to music: he had seven more symphonies to come at this point in his career.  After 1811, he never played in public, and by 1814 he was totally deaf, unable to hear either music or speech.

A side effect of Beethoven’s deafness is that more is known of his everyday life than of those of his contemporaries.   If you wanted to talk to Beethoven, you wrote down your questions or comments in a bound volume – a Conversation Book – of which 400 were known to have been filled in, although 264 were later destroyed.   The surviving Conversation Books give a unique insight into his discussions with friends and colleagues.

Beethoven seems to have been a rather irascible character.  He refused to play if people were not paying attention.  He had no respect for rank.  The Archduke Rupert was forced to announce that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven.  But nevertheless, Beethoven had a close circle of devoted friends who supported him.  He fell in love with aristocratic ladies on several occasions, but unfortunately as a commoner he had no hope of marrying one of them.

In the years after 1816, Beethoven was sick and produced little.  But he recovered, and another period of amazing creativity followed, partly influenced by renewed study of Baroque masters such as Bach and Handel.  In this last phase of his career, he composed the late string quartets, Missa Solemnis, Diabelli Variations, and the Ninth Symphony – all while completely unable to hear a note.

From 1825, when he was completing the string quartets, Beethoven was again seriously ill.  He died on 26 March 1827, following hepatitis.  His funeral was attended by 20,000 people, among then Franz Schubert, who was one of the torchbearers and who was himself to die the following year.  Ludwig van Beethoven's life may have been frustrating and troubled, but his work puts him into the first rank of composers, alongside Bach and Mozart.

Janet Frame (1924-2004)

The Lagoon, Janet Frame’s first volume of short stories, sat on my shelf for years.  Only when I visited Dunedin, her home town, did I discover that it was that book, or rather the prize awarded to it, which saved the author from a lobotomy.

On my last flight back to Europe from New Zealand, I read To the Is-Land, Frame’s account of her upbringing in rural Otago, memorably filmed by Jane Campion in An Angel At My Table.   Her father worked on the railway, while her mother was of the Christadelphian faith.  There were many children, and the family was poor: the book is full of vivid descriptions of rural escapades, school traumas and family mishaps.  It also describes Janet’s emerging literary talent, first expressed via poems in the local paper -   she was also very good at maths.

Janet Frame also describes the traumas of her youth: her brother developing epilepsy, and her sister Myrtle drowning in the local swimming pool. Later her sister Isabel was also to drown. Ironically,  the young Janet herself longed to be disabled: “I perceived that in a world where it was admirable to be brave and noble, it was more brave and noble to be writing poems if you were crippled or blind than if you had no disability.  I longed to be struck with paralysis so that I might lie in bed all day or sit all day in a wheelchair, writing stories and poems”.   

Frame attended the Dunedin College of Education and the University of Otago, where she trained as a school teacher.  Home life was difficult, due to the conflict between her epileptic brother and her father, who thought George could overcome the seizures if he tried.  Frame’s teaching placement at a Dunedin school was disrupted when she attempted suicide, and she was later confined to a psychiatric ward, and then in Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where she remained for eight years. 

The Lagoon was published in 1951, while Frame was still a patient.  Subsequently she was discharged and lived with another writer, Frank Sargeson, in Auckland.   Her first novel, Owls Do Cry, was published in 1957.  Later, she spent time in Europe.  In London, she had a recurrence of depression and began psychoanalysis.   A steady stream of novels continued to be published through the 1960s and 70s.  Many of them contain accounts of mental illness, or descriptions of eccentrics, dreamers and nonconformists, such as this story published in The New Yorker . She continued to spend time in Europe and also America, where she visited various artists colonies and developed close friendships with other writers and artists.  She returned to New Zealand in 1963, and lived a rather solitary life in various towns on North Island. 

"When you bring home a shell treasure from the beach, you shake free the sand and the mesh of seaweed and the other crumbled pieces of shell and perhaps even the tiny dead black-eyed inhabitant.  I may have polished this shell of memory with the application of time but only because it is constantly with me, not because I have varnished it for display."


In the 1980s, she produced the three volumes of autobiography for which she is perhaps best known: by this time she was acclaimed as New Zealand’s greatest living writer.  As well as many national awards and honours, she was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. 

Janet Frame died, aged 79, in 2004.   In the wonderful Scribes bookshop in Dunedin, I bought her final collection of poems The Goosebath (so called because her manuscripts piled up in an old tin bath): it was to win her, posthumously, New Zealand’s top poetry prize.

Janet Frame’s  mental illness was never clear: the initial diagnosis of schizophrenia was disproven.  In her memoir she wrote: ''Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?''.  She always felt very different from other people.   She found friendships difficult, and everyday life very stressful.  Interactions with her family were particularly difficult. More recently, it has been claimed that she might have had high-functioning autism, but this suggestion has been rejected by her literary executor.

“I can’t camp here at the end.

I wouldn’t survive

unless returning to a mythical time

I became a tree

toothless with my eyes full of salt spray:

rooted, protesting on the edge of this cliff

-       Let me stay!”

Nicholas Owen (c.1550-1606)

"I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular." Father Gerard

Richard Coles, singer, broadcaster and vicar, keeps his fans and friends intrigued by sharing the stories of a series of “saints for the day” – not pious hagiography but tall tales of extraordinary lives, which is how I discovered this intriguing individual. Nicholas Owen was possibly a dwarf – certainly extremely short – and had a series of other health problems, such as hernia and a crippled leg. The latter because a horse fell on him, and the broken leg was never properly set (disability was presumably much more common in the Early Modern period). The hernia was an injury caused by Owen’s work as a carpenter.

But no ordinary carpenter: Nicholas Owen was a Catholic, a lay Jesuit, at a time when his religion was proscribed in England. He was born in Oxford, and apprenticed as a carpenter, like his father Walter, later becoming a servant to Henry Garnett, a Jesuit who employed Owen to do some covert carpentry. Known to other recusants as Little John, Owen travelled around the country by night, and did his work secretly, because he was a builder of priests’ holes, secret compartments in the houses of the crypto-Catholic gentry.

Whereas previously, these refuges were no more than holes in the floor, Owen built every one differently, and each more ingeniously than earlier examples. Despite his physical limitations, he labored with masonry and carpentry and trompe l’oeil effects. Over thirty years, he is known to have built at least 100 priest-holes, expertly hidden from the eyes of Pursuivants (anti Catholic agents) by false fronts, secret trapdoors, covert stairs or underground passageways. He was arrested several times, for example in 1594, when he was released after a wealthy Catholic family paid his fine. He is also said to have helped Father John Gerard to escape from captivity in the Tower of London in 1597.

For his efforts, Nicholas Owen was later canonized by the Catholic Church. Apparently, he began each building project with prayer and Eucharist. Sadly, his piety was not enough to protect him from the forces of Puritan law and order: he was arrested in Worcestershire in 1606, when anti-Catholic feeling was at a height in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Hearing of the capture, one of the Privy Councillors said: “Is he taken that knows all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.”

Nicholas Owen was taken first to the Marshalsea Prison, and then to the Tower of London, where he was tortured on the track. This, apparently, in contravention of the medieval tradition that “maimed people” were not to be exposed to torture. Nevertheless, Owen named no names – even though he would have certainly known hundreds of Catholics and their networks of support. He made a confession of his own activities, but without incriminating anyone else. With no skilled accomplice to break him out, he died in the Tower on March 2^nd 1606, disemboweled: the authorities later claimed that he had done the deed himself. A jailor admitted to one of Nicholas Owen’s relatives that in fact his hands were so damaged by the end that he could barely feed himself. So perished the man whom the Rev Richard Coles has labelled the patron saint of Illusionists and Escapologists.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

“The history of the universe...is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.”

If I ever had to choose my favourite author, it would be a difficult thing to decide between PG Wodehouse and Jorge Luis Borges. And I would defend the contention that they have much in common. Borges is one of the most Anglophile of foreign writers, with his love of Kipling and Shakespeare and Chesterton. His plots are ingenious, as are those of Wodehouse, although of course Borges is by far the more cerebral writer. Each mastered the short story – none of Borges’ works are longer than 14 pages. Borges is continually quoting from others, in a way that is almost as arch and witty as Wodehouse. Wodehouse created a series of fictional settings – the world of Blandings, the world of the Drones, the world of the Anglers’ Rest – albeit they are ultimately one continuous unreal world. Borges was forever creating different worlds, each more intriguing and mysterious than the last.

As a resident of Geneva, I take pleasure in the fact that Borges spent much of his youth in this city, and came back at the end of his life. One of my first excursions here was to his grave, in the Cimetière des Rois in Plainpalais. I had forgotten to bring flowers, but felt that some tribute was in order. So I slid my old Cambridge University Library card, which I had carried around with me for 25 years, into the earth of the grave. It’s no longer there: it was retrieved, along with the other gifts left by fans, and ended up in Buenos Aires, which is how I once happened to be profiled by an Argentinian newspaper: my suitably Borgesian anecdote, and no less true for that.

Borges was born in Buenos Aires, son of a lawyer and a woman descended from a long line of freedom fighters, both of whom spoke and read English as well as Spanish. Borges’ paternal grandmother was from Staffordshire. For all of these reasons, Borges may not have been exaggerating when he later said that as a child he had not at first realized that English and Spanish were separate languages.

With his younger sister Norah, Borges invented imaginary friends and games and adventures, roaming the library and garden of the house. He later described his father’s collecton of 1000 books as “the chief event in my life”. He was a shortsighted and bookish child, who did not attend school until he was nine. It was always thought that Jorge would become a writer, and it was at that age that his Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” was published in the local paper. By twelve, he was reading Shakespeare in English.

When Borges was 15, his father was forced to retire due to his failing eyesight, and the family moved to Geneva so that he could consult an eye specialist. For four years, the children attended College Calvin. Here, Borges discovered French Symbolist literature, Schopenhauer, Walt Witman, and even made a few friends. When Borges was 20, the family returned to Buenos Aires, where he talked, read, and wrote poetry: his first collection was published a few years later. He had a brief involvement in politics, but his enthusiasm was soon eroded when his chosen hero revealed himself to be out of touch and ineffective, and was replaced by a series of repressive military juntas.

During his twenties, Borges devoted himself to writing stories and articles for magazines, strange surreal stories such as those in A Universal History of Infamy, with his trademark blend of fact and fiction. To make ends meet, he became a municipal librarian, where he led a “menial and dismal existence” with unprepossessing colleagues. He seems to have spent much of his time in the basement, reading or translating the books.

A turning point came in 1938 when first his father died, and then Borges developed septicaemia after a minor injury, which nearly killed him. After he recovered, and fearing that he could no longer write, he produced “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”, the first of the ingenious and highly original stories for which he is best known, always based on a fantastic intellectual conceit, in this instance borrowed from Thomas Carlyle. He has been claimed as one of the forerunners of Latin American “magic realism”, but he also influenced the fantasy and science fiction genres. In lighter vein, Borges would publish spoof stories co-written with his friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares (author of The Invention of Morel, one of the most perfect and haunting novels ever written, in my opinion), using the preposterous pseudonym H.Bustos Domecq. I was delighted to find an English edition of these stories in a Greenwich Village bookstore last year.

After Juan Peron was elected in1946, Borges was made “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets” – in response to the series of political articles he had been writing criticizing the rise of fascism. Borges was a liberal, anti-fascist, but equally anti communist. He was soon fired, observing: “dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers.” Instead, he became a lecturer in literature, with a police informer attending every lecture. In 1955, the political situation changed again: under a more progressive government, Borges was appointed as Director of the National Library. The following year, he was made Professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

Long before, the blindness which had afflicted his father had turned out to be hereditary. In his 20s, Borges had the first of multiple operations for cataracts, none successful. By now he was completely blind, hence his comment: 

“I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.”

Blindness was one of the reasons that he returned to poetry, a form which is easier to compose entirely in one’s head, and retain in the memory. In an interview he said:

“…in a certain way there is a purification in the blindness. It purifies one of visual circumstances. Circumstances are lost, and the external world, which is always trying to grab us, becomes fainter.”

Also at this time, he also developed his love of Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature. For two years at Cambridge, I followed the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic tripos, and was therefore delighted to find the inscription from the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon on Borges’ grave in Geneva.

In 1961, Borges shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett, and from then on became a global literary superstar, travelling to the United States and to Europe: he was translated into English particularly after 1967. His first marriage, to an old friend Elsa Astete Millan, was not successful. He then took up with one of his students, Maria Kodama. She was an Argentinian of Japanese origin, who began as his secretary and ended up as his wife.

The return of Juan Peron in 1973 meant that Argentina was again uncomfortable for Borges. He said in an interview: “Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I’ll be glad I’ve lost my sight. Well, they can’t humiliate me as they did before my books sold so well.” 
The political situation, together with the death of his mother at the age of 99, meant he again spent more time abroad. With Kodama, he compiled a travel atlas of his writing and her pictures. Finally, on June 14 1986, aged 86, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer, back in Geneva.

Like Wodehouse, Borges is one of a kind, a writer who is widely admired, but is impossible to imitate (as I know to my cost, having tried to copy both). Both led quiet lives (although Borges’ contained rather more sex and romance). Each has suffered from being regarded as a conservative, or worse. On my desert island, I would turn to Wodehouse for relaxation, Borges for stimulation, but I would derive an equal enjoyment from each of them. As the epigraph to this entry shows, Borges, like Wodehouse, had an effortless ability to phrase a sentence – but whereas Wodehouse’s are merely sublimely amusing, those of Borges are always provocatively intelligent.

Links

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946)

"Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint, I have started on a self-portrait. This way the model is always available, although it isn't at all pleasant to see oneself." - letter to a friend, 1921

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of one of Finland’s most famous painters, whose long career spanned phases of Realist, Romanticism, Impressionism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism and Abstraction. Across Finland, there will be events and exhibitions to mark her life and work. The fact that she succeeded as a disabled woman artist, in an era where female creativity was rarely celebrated, is truly a cause for celebration.

None of this might have happened had she not falled down stairs and broken her hip as a four year old. As a result, she ended up with a limp. She never attended school, and was left with limited mobility. But being housebound meant that she could concentrate on drawing. By the time she was eleven years old, she had enrolled at the Finnish Art Society – five years younger than the other students. Although the death of her father from TB left the family poor, she continued her studies, despite the disapproval of her mother. Rather than tackling “feminine” themes, at this time she opted for large scale historical paintings.

She then moved to Paris for further study, funded by a grant from the Russian Imperial Senate (Finland being part of Russia at this time), travelling around Europe and trying to promote her career. In 1885 she came close to marriage, but her fiance’s parents thought her bad hip was caused by TB and discouraged the match. Perhaps being single meant she could concentrate on painting, but she wanted to have a child, and even tried at one stage to adopt.

Problems of health and poverty took her back to Finland in 1890. She lived with her mother, whom she looked after till the latter died in 1923. However, she also continued to paint, and taught at the Art Society Drawing School. However, in 1902, her poor health forced her to resign from her teaching position. In this phase of her life, her work moved away from the larger scale and historical style, towards depicting inner experience in an intimate style. Finally, she was rediscovered by art dealer Gösta Stenman, after which her career took off. In 1917, Schjerfbeck finally had her first solo exhibition. From this point on, her career went well and the days of poverty were over. She spent the last two years of her life at a santorium in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, where she died on January 23 1946.

It’s easy, as with her biography, to see Schjerfbeck as a sad and crippled figure, but actually in her life she showed huge resilience, and finally achieved the success she hoped for. Well into her 80s, she continued to paint her marvelous self-portraits: she was working energetically to the end.

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