On the writer Paul Johnson (1928–2023)
Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece that appears in the current issue of National Review.
If he had written only histories, he ought to be known as a great historian. If he had written only biographies, he ought to be known as a great biographer. If he had written only essays and columns — you get the picture.
His bibliography tells me that he wrote two novels, in 1959 and 1964. I can’t imagine they are bad.
In his biography of Mozart, he writes that the composer “had the great gift of being able to start as soon as he sat down to write, as well as terrific powers of concentration.” He further writes that Mozart’s life was “crammed with creation.”
Am I comparing the author, Paul Johnson, to Mozart? No. Yes. Kind of. For years, David Pryce-Jones and I said to each other, “Paul is a kind of genius.” We eventually dropped the “kind of.” In his ability to absorb vast amounts of information, and analyze it keenly, and write about it with sweeping and felicitous style, Johnson was . . . a rare one.
Often, he has been compared, not to Mozart, but to another Johnson: Samuel. Each was protean. Each was universal and, at the same time, very English.
William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that Johnson was liable to be underrated, or taken for granted, because he was so routinely excellent. “His performances are unvaryingly (boringly?) extraordinary,” he wrote. WFB went on to say that Johnson had had “as productive a literary-analytical career as any in modern times.” And he said that in 1994, when Johnson had about 20 more writing years in him.
Like WFB, Johnson wrote 50-plus books and thousands of articles. Few subjects were off-limits. He wrote big books and little books, Brucknerian symphonies and graceful gavottes.
One day at lunch, he asked me, out of the blue, “Which is the best of the Bruckner symphonies?” I said I thought No. 9, because, even though incomplete (the composer died before he could finish it), it embodies everything great about Bruckner. Johnson beamed at me and said, “I agree.” For a Johnsonian like me — that was pleasing.
You want a short piece? In the days since Paul Johnson passed away on January 12, at 94, I have re-read some of the letters I’ve saved. In August 2007, he wrote, “I have decided that Brahms’s Intermezzo in B-flat minor, Op. 117, No. 2, is the finest short piece of piano music I know of.” Solid choice.
As a biographer, he could slip into the skin of people — he could understand them, whether he liked them or not. King Tut, Picasso, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Dante, Napoleon, Jane Austen, Hitler, Mae West . . . he captured essential things about them.
In his late seventies and eighties, he wrote short biographies of, among others, Washington, Churchill, Socrates, Darwin, and Jesus. This last is dedicated, “To my mother, Anne Johnson, who first taught me about Jesus.”
He was born in 1928. His father, William, was the principal of an art school. At age ten, Paul decided that he would go to Magdalen College, Oxford, when the time came — and, lo, he did. His tutor was the historian A. J. P. Taylor. “He made people excited by history,” Johnson would later write.
Another comment on Taylor, from Johnson:
Once, while I was reading my essay, he suddenly snapped, “What, precisely, were the provisions of the 1909 Lloyd George budget to which you refer, so grandly and glibly?” I failed to give a satisfactory reply and got a tremendous rocket: “Never make a generalisation you can’t instantly substantiate by a concrete, detailed, and accurate example.”
One more comment from Johnson, on Taylor:
You arrived at his house, Holywell Ford, in the grounds of the college, on the dot of the hour, never a second before or after, and the typing within stopped and a growly voice said, “Enter!” Then you got a full, crowded hour and left again on the dot. The typing (of a Sunday Express diatribe, probably) resumed before you had closed the door. You got your money’s worth. I once heard him say, “I always give good value” — whether for books, articles, tutorials, lectures, or TV programmes.
Johnson always gave good value too.
In 1958, he married Marigold — Marigold Hunt, she was. Her father, Dr. Thomas Hunt, was a physician to Churchill, among other notables. Johnson cites him in his life of Churchill.
After reading the book, I said to Paul, “You say that Churchill worked in bed until noon, and so do I. That’s the only thing we have in common.” “He really worked, you know,” said Paul. “So do I!” I protested. (It was true, at the time.) (It’s not that I don’t work anymore. I just don’t do it in bed, till noon.)
As a young man, Johnson worked as a journalist in Paris. One day, de Gaulle conducted a press conference, in which he promoted his vision of Europe: “l’Europe des patries” (“the Europe of the fatherlands”). He said he wanted “l’Europe de Dante, de Goethe, et de Chateaubriand.” The young Englishman — redheaded — piped up, “Et de Shakespeare, mon général!” De Gaulle was taken aback. He then shrugged, Gallically, and said, “Oui, et de Shakespeare aussi.”
(I wish you could see Johnson do the shrug — reenact it — and imitate the words.)
In those days, Johnson was associated with the Left. He was the editor of The New Statesman from 1965 to 1970. He was later associated with the Right. He wrote a column for The Spectator for almost 30 years (1981 to 2009). But he was always his own man: a champion of freedom, a foe of tyranny, a defender of high culture.
Not that he didn’t write about “low” or “common” things. I once read a column by him about doing the dishes — or “washing up,” as he put it, Britishly. He loved that activity. I loved the column.
Young people often said to him, “I want to be a writer.” He would reply, “Well and good. But the work is not for everyone. You have to spend a lot of time alone. Because books and articles don’t write themselves, you know: You do.” I thought of that when I read an interview with Alice Munro, the great Canadian short-story writer, who had stopped writing in her early eighties. “Perhaps, when you’re my age,” she said, “you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It’s like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable.”
“Write short sentences,” Johnson would say — “and then throw in a long, curling one.” He loved his work. Loved it and needed it, I would say. “After a hard day’s work, you should be grinning with relish.” I loved that line, from Paul. (I can’t say I always grin with relish, or grin at all.)
Do you know about Johnson and the rhino? I’ll quote from a column he published in Forbes magazine, in 2006:
There’s a certain rule in life that I’ve found worth considering. It particularly applies if you’re confronted by a crisis. I call it the Rhino Principle.
. . . the rhino is single-minded. When it perceives an object, it makes a decision — to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.
Some more:
Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard — something I do well, as I’ve practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: “Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That’s what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle.”
Of his pal Mozart, Johnson writes, “Worry about what he had written was unknown to him, and there was never a case of endless revision in his entire œuvre.” I bet you that was true of Johnson, too.
The book for which he is best-known is Modern Times. I read it in its first edition: A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1980s. It was published in 1983, when I was a freshman in college. It left a stamp on me — and many, many others. The book struck me as simply . . . true.
I will tell you a couple of stories about Modern Times. I know a husband and wife who, before they were married, read it out loud together. They thought that this was an important exercise, as well as an enjoyable one. Some years ago, a young friend of mine told me that he was required to read the book before beginning an internship at the Wall Street Journal. A smart requirement.
In 1976, Johnson published A History of Christianity. About ten years later, he published A History of the Jews. I have not read the first book. (I like the idea that many Johnson books still await me.) I read the second, and I can tell you that it is a masterpiece. Speaking personally, it caused something like a revolution in my understanding of many things.
Paul Johnson, by the way, was one of the greatest philosemites in Christendom.
In 2013, I was at dinner with some friends in New York and said I was about to go to London. The reason: to participate in an event involving Paul Johnson. A friend said, “You mean the Paul Johnson who wrote the history of the Jews?” “One and the same,” I said. “A great book,” replied my friend.
Let me mention that this friend is not on the right, at all. I mention it because the obit in the New York Times was headed, “Paul Johnson, Prolific Historian Prized by Conservatives, Dies at 94.” He is prized by conservatives. And others.
How he loved America, this Englishman did. In 1997, he came out with his History of the American People. Another great book. Critics said it got details wrong, and they were right: This one was a House member, not a senator, and he came from this state, not that one. But on everything big, everything overarching, everything ultimately important? Great.
“The Atlantic Ocean is more narrow than the English Channel,” Johnson would say. He felt closer to America than to Europe. I also heard him say, several times, “The day I start worrying about America is the day that people from all over the world cease wanting to go there, to become Americans.” George W. Bush has his own version of this: “The lines to get into America are long.”
Bush, incidentally, bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom upon Johnson in 2006. They liked each other a lot.
Curiously, Johnson was not as celebrated in his country, Great Britain, as he was in the United States. His son Daniel — an excellent and well-known writer himself — once said that Paul was “a prophet without honor in his own country.” Nonetheless, Paul Johnson impressed himself on not a few Brits.
In his later years, he wrote such books as Creators, Heroes, and Humorists. He had a special appreciation of humorists. It is so important to let the world laugh, he said. In his Mozart bio, he writes,
One of the most endearing things about Mozart is that he saw music and laughter as inseparable. Nobody took music more seriously. Nobody got more jokes out of it. He had a wonderful gift of timing . . .
He planned to write a book called “Monsters,” about really bad guys. He had a number of candidates in mind. One was Edward Said, the Orientalism man. Said was no Stalin, let’s say. But Johnson once referred to him — in print — as a “malevolent liar and propagandist, who has been responsible for more harm than any other intellectual of his generation.”
When the book about baddies kept not appearing, I asked Johnson, “Where is it?” He said that he had decided not to write it. At this stage of his life, he said, he wanted to spend his time on more pleasant subjects.
At National Review, we counted it a privilege to publish Johnson. He was certainly a treat to edit. He was the last person I ever knew — or the only one? — to refer to the country whose capital is Beirut as “the Lebanon.” (Edward Said would have loved that one.)
Paul was a treat to talk to, too. “Tell me about Princess Diana,” you’d say. And he would. He had tutored Diana in history, and royal history, in particular. He said that she described herself as “thick as two planks.” But she wasn’t. She was very clever. Also, said Paul, she had beautiful handwriting. And she was extraordinarily “intuitive.” She could read a person instantly, and bond with that person.
His father’s son — the son of an art-school principal — Paul was a painter. And not just of rhinos, on postcards. One of his big, big books is Art: A New History (2003). Paul recommended painting as a cure for depression. Or as a relief from depression. And it had to be watercolor. Why? Because you have to concentrate totally on what you’re doing. You can think of nothing else. Otherwise, the paint runs.
He once took me out into his studio, or cottage, in the backyard — to pick out a painting of his from a bursting portfolio. I set aside about five. “How about one of these?” I said. He answered, “Oh, you have a very good eye indeed. They’re the best. I don’t think I can part with any of those.”
But then I chose one I liked a lot — an abstract opus, musical-seeming. It has a hint of a treble clef in it. It’s called “Listening to Schumann,” and it hangs on my kitchen wall.
Vikram Seth, the Anglo-Indian novelist, once wrote, “Music is dearer to me than speech.” I think the same was true of Bill Buckley, and it was possibly true of Paul Johnson.
Let me quote him on Mozart again:
He had misfortunes and many disappointments in a life of constant hard work lived at the highest possible level of creative concentration. But his warm spirit always bubbled. He loved his God, his family, his friends, and above all, his work — which he equated with God-service . . .
There is a lot that is applicable to Johnson in that. Was he a saint? No. His detractors will be quick to tell you that. But what good he spread.
“He was an adornment to society.” “He added to the gaiety of life.” Johnson would use those phrases, about the recently departed. He was an adornment, sure, and he added to the gaiety, sure — but he was also a great teacher, through his writings, and he means a lot to many of us, his readers. I will never forget him. I think of him often — on any number of subjects.
Right now, I can hear his voice, over the phone — across the (narrow) Atlantic: “Happy Christmas!” “Give Bill Buckley my love!” “God bless you.”
In 2012, he appeared on Desert Island Discs, the BBC Radio show. The guest, or “castaway,” names eight tracks that he would take with him to a desert island. The first piece of music that Johnson named was Ave verum corpus, that sublime motet of Mozart — a prayer. His final selection was an American popular song, from 1919 (by Kern & DeSylva). He said it sums up his “view of life.”
Look for the silver lining
Whene’er a cloud appears in the blue.
Remember, somewhere the sun is shining,
And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you.A heart full of joy and gladness
Can always banish sadness and strife.
So always look for the silver lining
And try to find the sunny side of life.