A while back I became aware that there was no quick cure for my living alone and being alone much of the time. To mitigate the loneliness, I looked for some books that might give some insight on turning the negative state of loneliness into the more profound positive state of solitude. Back then I didn’t really find what I was looking for, but now I have come across this book, which though flawed (by flawed I mean that I don’t agree with everything the author says) is close to what I was looking for.

Johnson makes a compelling case for the solitary lifestyle; in fact, he gives the name solitaries to the individualistic people he profiles. Besides telling of his own life lived in solitude, in separate chapters he writes about Henry David Thoreau, the painter Paul Cezanne, poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, the novelist Henry James, Eudora Welty, Nobel Prize-winning Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore, Black writer Zora Neale Hurston, Rod McKuen and Nina Simone, and photographer Bill Cunningham. I am most familiar with the work of Thoreau, Whitman, Dickenson, and Tagore, but all of Johnson’s profiles and explanations shed light on the role of solitude in the life of artists. Johnson also often mentions Thomas Merton, the author and Trappist monk; the abbey Merton lived at was near Johnson’s family home in Kentucky, and the monks, including Merton, knew the family personally.

After a chapter about his own background, Johnson starts off with a study of Thoreau, claiming that though Thoreau was not a cloistered monk he lived a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience (to his conscience) without the trappings of ordinary religion. For me as a young writer making a decision to head off on the road seeking my own unique voice, Thoreau’s Walden was certainly of extreme importance. And Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” is one of my all-time favorite poems. About Whitman Johnson writes that he “came gradually to understand, the solitary’s challenge is the conversion of loneliness into solitude.” In his explanation of Whitman’s and Dickenson’s distain of conventional marriage, Johnson says that they instead embraced “a literary polygamy as vast as their readerships.”

This brings up one of my disagreements with a conclusion that Johnson repeatedly expresses: that conventional marriage is a hindrance to wholeness and creativity. I was married for twenty-five years and wrote some of my best and most heartfelt books during those years. I can think of countless artists who were married but still managed to find time for solitude and the creation of great work. I think too that Johnson sometimes tries to over-explain the reasons for artists choosing solitude: their sexual predilections, for instance, or their racial or cultural backgrounds. Sexual orientation is incidental to creative solitude, as is, ultimately, race, nationality, gender and other such considerations. The fact is, in my opinion, artists seek out solitude to clear their minds for creative endeavors regardless of their backgrounds. I also believe that Johnson puts too much emphasis on celibacy. He writes that “the solitary foregoes openness to one for openness to all.” For me, though, and I think for many creative people, the patches of temporary celibacy in my life were always involuntary; I have derived intense creative energy from sexual relationships – whether long-term or short.

Still, Johnson is much more often right than wrong in his expostulations. Consider this gem: “Capitalism tells me I will find myself in things – I will locate myself, literally and psychologically, in and with my phone – when what my solitaries have taught me, again and again in their different ways, is that if I want to find the self, give it away, again and again, until there is no more left.” Or this, concerning Van Gogh’s mindset: “One understands being an artist as not about making product for a market but as a way of life.”

In the final chapter, Johnson sums up his ideas with great skill, making a strong case for what he refers to as secular monasticism. Did this book help to assuage the pain of my loneliness? Maybe not. However, it brings my solitude into clearer focus as a thing of value to be treasured and not despised. In time, perhaps, I will be able to better see it in that light.