I just read Paul Johnson‘s book Intellectuals for the third time. It was jolly good.
I just finished Johnson’s book Creators, which I did not enjoy as much but still recommend. On page six, he wrote: "France now has more than 4,000 literary prizes but precious little in the way of literature…"
I spent part of my Sunday morning Googling Paul Johnson.
I found this nasty essay in Salon by Christopher Hitchens:
A decade or so ago, I outed the barking Tory pamphleteer Paul Johnson as an enthusiast or votary of this cult. For evidence, I had no more to go upon than certain suggestive and repetitive elements in his "work."
So it was decidedly invigorating to learn, in the dog days of mid-May, that he had been exposed by his mistress of 11 years, the writer Gloria Stewart, as a spankee:
"Paul loved to be spanked and it was a big part of our relationship. I had to tell him he was a very naughty boy."
A pretty easy task (the second bit, I mean). Johnson has made a career as an especially bilious and persecuting moralizer. His disgraceful book "Intellectuals," a foul-minded assault on the Enlightenment, laid a feverish stress on the private lives of secular and rationalist intellectuals. Rousseau was not only "vain, egotistical and quarrelsome," but he "enjoyed being spanked on his bare bottom." Ibsen "would not expose his sexual organ even for the purpose of medical examination. Was there something wrong with it — or did he think there was?" I don’t need to draw you a picture: With sermonizers like this it’s just a matter of setting one’s watch. Give it just a little time and — presto! We open the tabloids to see their withered haunches bared to the slipper, and the haggard remnants of their Johnsons exposed to the cruel light of day. (Oxford English Dictionary: Johnson. A common surname, used in low slang to designate: a)The penis. b) A man who is kept by a prostitute or prostitutes; a ponce.)
Stewart unmasked Spanker Johnson to the tabloids because she could not bear to read another word of his "family values" tripe in the press. As recently as March, interviewed by Jacob Weisberg for the New York Times Magazine, he had claimed to be an advisor to the late Princess Diana. "Don’t commit adultery," he said, was his "chief advice" to the divine one. When various Tory MPs were found in a trouser-free condition not long ago, Johnson predicted the ruin of the state and said that adultery, especially when committed by those who opposed it in public, should be severely punished.
I found this perceptive 1998 essay in The New York Times Sunday magazine by Jacob Weisberg:
In Britain, Johnson’s guileless name-dropping, his rages about the ”Church of Sodomy,” as he calls the Church of England, and a penchant for self-contradiction have made him a running joke in the press. In the satirical magazine Private Eye, he is referred to as ”Loonybins.” Everyone in London seems to have a Johnson horror story, many of them relating to what one of the English papers refers to as his ”long and barely secret struggle not to succumb to the bottle.” On one occasion, a memorial service for his friend Kingsley Amis, Johnson became so apoplectic at a eulogy given by the leftish journalist Christopher Hitchens that he had to be escorted out. Johnson is said by some to have his temper and his drinking under control these days. His wife, Marigold, recently referred to him as ”far less barmy than he used to be.”
Part of the reason Johnson’s writing is not taken seriously in Britain is that there is so much of it. In the country that invented the term ”hack,” Johnson’s prolificacy is simply astounding. While turning out 1,000-page books every couple of years, he produces a weekly column for The Spectator and regular commentaries for The Daily Mail. On a good day he writes 6,000 words. ”I don’t know how many books I’ve published,” he says. ”I think it’s 34. It may be 35.”
In the United States, and particularly in Washington, where he will appear later this month at the Smithsonian with Gingrich, Johnson has a far statelier reputation. American conservatives know him only as a high-toned historian and intimate of Thatcher’s, not as a gassy columnist horrified by the Spice Girls.
