BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Club’ by Leo Damorosch

OPINION:

THE CLUB: JOHNSON, BOSWELL, AND THE FRIENDS WHO SHAPED AN AGE

By Leo Damrosch

Yale University Press, $30, 473 pages

They don’t make clubs like they used to. Nearly 50 years ago, I remember hearing about a fellow member of the National Press Club who, though quite well-heeled, put up one of his houses as security in a high-stakes poker game, lost it, but still lived to play many another hand in what was then the bustling club card room.

The Press Club is still with us, but the card room — and the high-rolling members who frequented it — are long gone. So are the days when its bar was open until two in the morning and a lively crowd of bureau chiefs, foreign correspondents, columnists and even the occasional radio or television pundit, could regale you with journalistic war stories going back as far as World War I.

I vividly remember one old-timer describing a long-ago evening when early ASCAP members, including founder-composer Victor Herbert, were impressed by a young composer who played a few of his compositions on the club piano. The consensus was that the boy was going to go places. The name of the “boy” was George Gershwin, and he certainly did.

These vignettes highlight four of the principal functions that gentlemen’s clubs performed in their heyday. They were places where like-minded men of the world got together for gaming, eating, drinking and conversation, the conversation usually playing a large part in the guzzling, gorging and gambling as well. Changing lifestyles, suburban living and a general decline in the old social graces that could make even a gentleman lush good, fairly literate company, have all contributed to the decay of club life.

Nowadays it is almost impossible to imagine a single club in which, once a week, some of the world’s most brilliant statesmen, literary figures, legal minds, artists, physicians and historians would routinely join each other at table to enjoy a long evening of food, drink and conversation. Yet that is what happened every week for several decades in Georgian London at the Turk’s Head Tavern, original headquarters of what, with apologies to the late Saddam Hussein, one might have described as the “Mother of All Clubs.” Its members simply called it The Club; it didn’t want or need a fancier name.

Founded in 1763 by Samuel Johnson, of dictionary fame, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait artist of the day, its members would eventually include Edmund Burke (the foremost parliamentary orator of the age), economist Adam Smith (“The Wealth of Nations”), historian Edward Gibbon (“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”), poet, novelist and playwright Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick (the greatest actor and director of his era) and a loose-living, manic-depressive young Scots barrister by the name of James Boswell, whose obsessive note-taking would preserve the intellectual spark and conversational sparkle of The Club for posterity.

In Harvard Emeritus Professor Leo Damrosch, The Club has finally found a gifted modern scholar capable of bringing to life the brilliant, quirky set of Club members who truly were, in Mr. Damrosch’s words, the “friends who shaped an age.”

His own informed, graceful style is worthy of his brilliant cast of characters and makes “The Club” a pleasurable as well as an edifying read. We get to know and love the twitching, squinting, whiffily unhygienic but incredibly learned and conversationally indomitable Samuel Johnson thanks to Mr. Damrosch’s insights and judicious selection of quotes. The same applies to the rest of the stellar cast which includes several women who, though not members of The Club, were witty, accomplished ladies who won the affection and esteem of Johnson and the rest.

Johnson himself once argued that, “Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat[en] and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” Thanks to the copious eyewitness accounts of Boswell and others, Leo Damrosch has given us a literary achievement that the learned Dr. Johnson thought was impossible.

Savoring the pages of “The Club” one comes close to experiencing the exuberance described by Boswell in his account of a few hours spent with his mentor at the home of the Mrs. Hester Thrale, Johnson’s closest female friend: “I was kindly welcomed. In a moment [Johnson] was in full glow of conversation, and I felt myself as if brought into another state of being I shall ever recollect this scene with great pleasure.”

Many readers will feel the same way about this book.

• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.