Freya Johnston
TOILET HUMOURS
Samuel Johnson: A Life
By David Nokes (Faber & Faber 415pp £25)

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Dr Johnson once lamented that 'no man leaves his eloquence behind him'. And yet, thanks to his friends, hundreds of the Great Cham's forceful one-liners survive. We know what he said about cucumbers (good for nothing), Scotland (not worth invading), France (worse than Scotland, apart from the weather), happiness (most likely to be found in a pub), and patriotism (last refuge of a scoundrel). But early memoirists were just as keen to preserve the oddities of Johnson in private: his greed, benevolence, and terror of death; his laziness and hardened tea-drinking; his burnt wig, his three-legged chair - and his flatulence. This last ailment makes several irruptions into David Nokes's readable and imaginative new biography. 'My nights are flatulent, and unquiet', writes Johnson in 1772; three years later, he is frankly complaining to the same correspondent that 'I cannot get free of this vexatious flatulence' - indeed, 'I am almost convulsed'.

Nokes adopts as the epigraph to his book Johnson's advice in Rambler no 60 that 'the business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness ... and display the minute details of daily life'. As Johnson well knew, the minute details of daily life could shape an author's character in print. What of the connection, for instance, between his tortured bowels and his sketch in Idler no 74 of 'an intellect defecated and pure'? Here, Johnson depicts the 'true art of attention' as necessarily preceded by a thorough evacuation. Nokes suggests that the essay in question is 'capable of interesting psychoanalysis', but - perhaps because his predecessor Walter Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson (1978) opted for a determinedly Freudian reading of its subject - he does not pursue the matter.

There might, however, be a case for discerning in the hard words, syntactic delays and studied entanglements of Johnson's prose traces of the gruelling physical obstructions he suffered. Perhaps this is one reason why Samuel Beckett, who also catalogued agonies of the bowel, reportedly said that 'it's Johnson, always Johnson, who is with me'. A process of accumulation tending to painful blockage and eventual release typifies Johnson's sentence structure, as it governed his swollen, dropsical body (he once claimed to have 'emitted in about twenty hours, full twenty pints of urine'). The same pattern describes the way he worked: long periods of idleness and agonised procrastination finally yielded, when a deadline was imminent, to bursts of Herculean productivity. Generally sedentary, Johnson now and then indulged in spurts of physical action: sprinting, leaping over gates, and rolling down hills. Here, then, life and writing serve to inform one another. But the risk of allowing them to do so is that knowledge of the life gets in the way of the writing; indeed, that the writing becomes no more than evidence to support a version of the life.

The engrossing story of Johnson's combative, stricken and triumphant career is now better known than anything he wrote. Recent versions of that story, which are numerous, are eager to discuss what even James Boswell had to conceal from his public: Johnson's enormous sexual appetite, his violent mood swings, and possible sado-masochistic tendencies. Nokes's is the third biography published to mark the tercentenary of Johnson's birth, and it focuses primarily on human relationships and personal trials. Like Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson (2008), it delivers a harsh verdict on Johnson's wife Tetty, portraying her as a randy, corpulent widow whose chief attraction was her cash. Indeed, Johnson's attention to money turns out to be a leitmotif of the book: as Nokes demonstrates, he tended to revert to intricate calculations whenever despondency loomed, but he usually got his sums a little wrong.

Samuel Johnson: A Life richly evokes, through some grim local details, the urban settings - Lichfield, Oxford, and London - with which Johnson was most familiar. It is no mean feat to convey the excitement of discovering Latin grammar, but Nokes manages just that with his account of Johnson's effortless supremacy at school, and the associated dread of exposure: in later life, Johnson remembered that he would run up a tree in order to avoid being shown off to visitors. He devoured books, skipped lectures at Oxford, and sank repeatedly into periods of 'vile melancholy'. Fame took decades to arrive and by the time Johnson had attained a measure of financial security, Tetty was dead.

'The value of every story', said Johnson, 'depends on its being true.' And the best true stories of all were biographies, a kind of writing he celebrated time and again for 'giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use'. Johnson undertook little research when he composed his Lives of the Poets, but he included in his portraits of fellow writers some meticulous adjustments of probability - even when considering those (such as Swift and Milton) to whom he felt an instinctive aversion. Amongst his favourite words are 'perhaps', 'often', 'sometimes' and 'almost'. Nokes is not so scrupulous. Johnson may or may not have had Tourette's syndrome: Nokes simply tells us that he did. He remarks that 'distinctions between Johnson fact and Johnson the biographer's fancy must be borne in mind'; nevertheless, he shifts without warning between a narrative deriving from the known facts, and semi-novelistic sketches of thoughts and feelings - such as those of Frank Barber, Johnson's black servant. In a short interlude on Barber's early life in Jamaica, Nokes tells us how, as a slave, Frank dreamt of 'the warm syrupy taste of molasses and the sun through the coconut palms above Spanish Town'. Such unacknowledged speculation seems better suited to (say) Beryl Bainbridge's fictional take on Johnson's ménage, According to Queeney (2001), than it is to a biography.

David Nokes offers no fresh critical interpretations of Johnson; he treats Rasselas, a vigorous, bleak and witty road novel, as a problematic repository of its author's 'obsessions'. Given Johnson's hope that biography might instruct and appeal to everyone, it seems a pity to identify his works as - above all else - symptoms of an odd sensibility: it makes them less invitingly applicable to the rest of us.