Ten Years in the Tub (25 page)

This last letter was to the Chief Obstetrician of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, after Johnson had discovered that it was not the hospital's policy to allow fathers to attend a birth. It's the “However” kicking off the second paragraph that's such a brilliant touch, drawing attention as it does to the absurdity of the contradiction. “I can understand you keeping out the riff-raff, your Flemings and your Amises and the rest of the what-happened-next brigade,” it implies. “But surely you'll make an exception for a genius?” In the end, it's just another variation on “Don't you know who I am?”—which in Johnson's case was an even more unfortunate question than it normally is. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows now.

Johnson had nothing but contempt for the enduring influence of Dickens and the Victorian novel; strange, then, that in the end he should remind one of nobody so much as the utilitarian school inspector in the opening scene of
Hard Times
. Here's the school inspector: “I'll explain to you… why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact?… Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere what
you don't have in fact. What is called Taste is only another name for Fact.” And here's Johnson: “Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.” Like communists and fascists, Johnson and the dismal inspector wander off in opposite directions, only to discover that the world is round. I'm glad that they both lost the cultural Cold War: there's room for them all in our world, but there's no room for
Mystic River
in theirs. And what kind of world would that be?

September 2004

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
20,000 Streets Under the Sky
—Patrick Hamilton

     
  
Unnamed Literary Novel—Anonymous

     
  
The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1

     
  
Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton
—Nigel Jones

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
The Midnight Bell
—Patrick Hamilton

     
  
Blockbuster
—Tom Shone

     
  
We're in Trouble
—Chris Coake