Johnson's rhino

One of my longtime favorite writers, historian and journalist Paul Johnson, died earlier this month aged 94.

I discovered his work in grad school when I read his notorious volume of character studies, Intellectuals, a searing takedown of destructive know-it-alls from Rousseau onward. My appreciation deepened not long before I got married and began teaching with A History of the American People, a massive narrative account of the origins, founding, and ups and downs of the United States written explicitly as an answer to the mendacious Howard Zinn. These two books demonstrate Johnson’s foremost gifts—polemic and grand narrative, the one with sharp elbows and cutting voice and the other with wide, eager eyes trained on far horizons.

In the first years of my marriage and teaching I enjoyed Johnson’s late-career venture into short biographies of great historical figures: Jesus, Napoleon, Churchill, Darwin, Socrates, Washington, Mozart. I have especially fond memories of Eisenhower: A Life, a little book I smuggled into the warehouse area of the sporting goods store where I worked to read furtively during the rare downtime of the retail Christmas season. My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was supplementing my adjunct paychecks from two colleges and a once-a-week tutoring gig. Stealing away to be with Ike for a page here, two pages there, and in Johnson’s brisk and elegant prose, was a great encouragement amidst the cold, the customers, and all the uncertainties of that time.

But I noticed after I finished Eisenhower that no more Johnson books were forthcoming. I looked off and on for years, checking in on Johnson via Google and hoping always for a newly announced title. I regretfully concluded that he was in decline. His death a few weeks ago makes my memories of those books all the more special.

Of the obits and appreciations published after Johnson’s death one stood out to me: a shambling, unstructured, and therefore endearing reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. Amidst the anecdotes and interesting tidbits (at Oxford, Johnson studied under AJP Taylor) Nordlinger included a mention of Johnson’s “Rhino Principle,” which Johnson explicated in a 2006 essay for Forbes. Here’s the principle:

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn't been. Why not? Because 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.

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.”

And the crucial point:

Now, the Rhino Principle may not produce the perfect book, but it does produce a book. And once a book is drafted, it can be improved, polished and made satisfactory. But if the Rhino Principle is ignored, there is no book at all.

Like Johnson’s Ike in the chilly shipping area of the Academy Sports warehouse, this was precisely the encouragement and inspiration I needed right now, and I’m grateful to Johnson for it.

To the ranks of the great proverbial possessives out there—Buridan’s ass, Morton’s fork, Hobson’s choice, Chesterton’s fence—let us add Johnson’s rhino.

Paul Johnson, journalist, critic, commentator, controversialist, and guide to the epic sweep of the past, RIP.