literary prejudices” must finally “decide all claim to poetical honors”—Virginia Woolf recreates the unsuccessful party. “Nobody spoke. Everybody waited for Dr. Johnson to begin. There, indeed, they showed their fatal ignorance, for if there was one thing that Dr. Johnson never did, it was to begin. Somebody had always to start a topic before he consented to pursue it or to demolish it. Now he waited in silence to be challenged. But he waited in vain. Nobody spoke. Nobody dared speak . . . Dr. Johnson sank into silent abstraction and sat with his back to the piano gazing at the fire.” For those familiar with Johnson’s figure, the silence seems incongruous; for almost whenever we read about Johnson we hear of what he said. Boswell once “complained of having dined at a splendid table without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered,” to which Johnson replied, “Sir, there seldom is any such conversation.” Yet that scarce conversation is
prized, remembered, and recorded; and that scarce conversationalist who seems to leave behind as a trail these sorts of conversations is remembered and mythologized. This description of the failed dinner bears an uncanny resemblance to Woolf’s account of another awkward pause among the friends who would later become the Bloomsbury group, Woolf’s own literary circle. “They came in hesitatingly, selfeffacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing. None of our old conversational openings seemed to do . . . Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. We sat and looked at the ground.” The “silent abstraction” of Johnson seems intimately connected to the description of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, or Saxon Sidney-Turner folding their long tweeded limbs into the worn armchairs of
Illustration by Amy Lien
the harvard advocate
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