The GOUT
Today I would like to salute some of the diverse and accomplished commenters to My Life and Thoughts, for example Michelle of The Maltese Bacon (a recipe blog—check out this beautiful tomato confit); as well as Gregory Freidin of the Stanford Slavic department (who, in his latest blog entry, shrewdly observes that, even if you live in Gori, you probably don’t hang your portrait of George W. Bush over a sliding glass door).
In this recent, admirably concise comment, Freidin expresses solidarity with my father on the subject of creeping desecularization. Those of you who were disappointed by the Times’s decision not to air my father’s thoughts about creeping desecularization will be relieved to learn that they did publish the very next letter he wrote them, the following week. This letter was in response to “My Literary Malady,” in which novelist Geoff Nicholson mulls over his recent gout diagnosis.
James Gillray, The GOUT (1799)
But I would like to pause here to share with you my all-time favorite gout anecdote…
…which is from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (the graphomaniac Urtext). So OK, Boswell is debating the authenticity of an ode ascribed to the young Johnson, which contains “a passage very characteristic of him, being a learned description of the gout: ‘Unhappy, whom to beds of pain/ Arthritick tyranny consigns.’” A footnote to this (anonymously published) ode specifies: “The author being ill of the gout.”
Now according to Boswell, “Johnson was not attacked with that distemper till a very late period of his life.” So clearly Johnson didn’t write the ode, right? Because it was published back when Johnson was a goutless youth? Ha! Just when you are making such assumptions, Boswell pulls the rug from under your feet:
May not this, however, be a poetical fiction? Why may not a poet suppose himself to have the gout, as well as suppose himself to be in love, of which we have innumerable instances, and which has been admirably ridiculed by Johnson in his Life of Cowley?
Why not, indeed? What a likeable portrait of the young Johnson. ”Bah—I’m not going to pretend to be in love, like that fool Cowley. I’m going to pretend I have a real problem, like… the GOUT!”
I return now to my father’s contribution to the literary gout discourse:
Geoff Nicholson’s wonderful essay lists a number of foods associated “with old school gluttony—goose, partridge, mutton” and so on—that can cause gout. However, he overlooks plumbed, i.e., lead-adulterated, wine and spirits, a well-known cause of gout. The association may also have been noted since ancient times (Soranus of Ephesus, second century A.D.); the aristocrats’ predilection for leaded Portuguese Madeira and other spirits was also satirized by James Gillray. This literary malady was fodder for much satirical literature in the 19th century.
You can tell my father really wrote this letter, because he is really into lead poisoning.
The last commenter whom I would like to acknowledge today is LK (on whose blog you can, for example, listen to an original musical composition in the genre of “progressive trance drum circle,” with beautiful accompanying images of sewing machines). In her comment to a recent post, LK raises the provocative question of whether cat care resembles Gremlin maintenance. And you know what? It does. In certain ways, I would even say, cat care strongly resembles Gremlin maintenance. I will substantiate this claim in the next post. For now you will just have to accept it—as the TA used to say in Vision and the Brain—as dogma.
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Tags: animals, Boswell's Johnson, comparative literature, doctors, glands—diseases, graphomania, music, recipes, reviews