The Brothers Boswell (42 page)

“And now, O my journal,” James wrote that night in celebration, “are thou not highly dignified? Shalt thou not flourish tenfold? No former solicitations or censures could tempt me to lay thee aside.”

But disguise was now precisely what Johnson recommended. He persuaded James to trace back through the pages of his journal and systematically blot out anything that might contradict the story they were both now engaged in telling. Doubts about my sanity were to be erased. What few footprints I had left in James’s book were to be swept unceremoniously away.

And further, Johnson insisted that James write up the events of July 30 from beginning to end, as he had originally planned, but in a calm narrative vein, recounting their trip down the silver Thames and a quiet evening together at the Turk’s Head, with no mention of their being interrupted, no mention of threats or accusations or violence or bloodshed.

No mention, in a word, of me.

Anyone reading the entry in my brother’s journal today can only come away with the impression of a lovely afternoon at Greenwich, followed by talk of books in a little coffeehouse down the Strand, talk that stretched agreeably into the late hours. An exquisitely English day, in short.

And this is what Johnson seems to have had in mind. That in the pages of his journal, James might cast a spell restoring his new King to all his former glory, and a quiet, decent English splendor to the world itself.

It was a fair compromise, I have come to suppose: my life, my freedom, in exchange for having my name stricken from the only record of the Boswells that will probably ever be kept.

There was a time when such a prospect would have enraged me; it was, after all, a much less systematic revisionism that had so angered me originally. But by the time I left Plymouth several years later, in 1766, I found it impossible to understand how a series of scratchings in a book, or the lack of such scratchings, could once have wounded me so deeply. I wanted nothing more than retirement, at that point, nothing more than to leave the company of those afflicted by disorders I no longer shared.

Nothing more than simple quiet.

My brother sensed this about me, I believe. For all of his selfish use of the talent, he had always the power to look into men’s hearts and read what was written there. He sensed that while I remained exhausted in my emotions and my thoughts, and always physically somewhat weak, I was mad no longer. Some years later, doctors at the hospital in Newcastle would second this opinion.

And so James conceived and executed the single most charitable act he would ever accomplish, either as Laird or as a literary celebrity in his own right: James took me from the hospital at Plymouth, where I might well have spent the rest of my days, and he opened his own home to me at Auchinleck.

He opened the circle of his growing family as well: his wife Margaret, his sons Sandy and Jamie, and his two pleasant girls, Veronica and Effie. I was there when little Davie died only days after his birth; both Margaret and James cried on my shoulder that night.

Still, I was never treated entirely as an uncle, and I never sought such closeness. My place in the circle was more like that of a lodger of whom the family has grown fond: never forgotten at the table or at holidays, but watched half-consciously, as even the most welcome guests in a home are watched.

By tacit agreement, James and I never again spoke of Samuel Johnson, and he never offered to show me his journal or any of the other works he was ever to compose about the man. Another fair compromise.

In the summer of 1774—when Johnson finally made the trip to Scotland that he and James had first discussed that night long ago at the Turk’s Head—I remained in the country while James met his mentor in Edinburgh. When their travel plans called for them to visit my father at Auchinleck, I removed myself by roundabout route to the city.

After they had gone on to the Hebrides, Margaret and the children and I followed their progress across a map hung for the purpose on the wall of James’s study.

When Johnson died in 1784, James put the entire family in bombazine and crepe, but it was understood that I would dress as always. Again, these arrangements seemed to me not provocation, but the enduring rhythm of our lives, a way for all to go on.

When James came finally to inherit, I too moved back into the New House in Ayrshire that my father had built with so much pomp. There it was that Margaret died in the summer of 1789, while James was away on legal affairs in London. Along with the overseer, I began the preparations for her funeral and helped to manage the house until James and the boys could reach Auchinleck.

And when James himself passed away six years later, again in London, and Sandy had inherited, he came to me one morning and asked for help in putting his father’s library into some sort of order. I think in a way he meant to ease the awkwardness of the situation, his stepping into the role of Laird while his once-mad uncle watched from the sidelines. Sandy had his father’s easy grasp of humanity, and it was like him to consider my feelings.

But the task itself was very real: James was notoriously chaotic in his affairs and in his scholarship, and the room off the library at Auchinleck where he wrote was hopelessly disordered. Sandy knew nothing of what had transpired thirty or more years before with Dr. Johnson, and so he made no stipulations of any sort, but charged me with sorting and categorizing all that I found.

What I found, of course, was the single largest collection of
Johnson artifacts the world will ever know. Thousands of letters, journal entries, engravings, sketches, books, pamphlets by, to, about, and concerning Samuel Johnson. For one who had been all but forbidden to speak or read about the man for the bulk of his adult life, it was an almost overpowering experience.

In Plymouth I had become convinced that the memories of Johnson and me together in London were entirely false, and that they were in fact a warning sign from a mind teetering disastrously close to the brink. We had never been close, I came to realize; we had never met, in fact. I had confused the lark and Johnson, somehow, for reasons I will never entirely understand. And I always held it as a first principle thereafter that allowing myself to wander down those roads again would represent the most dangerous sort of self-indulgence.

But everyone was dead now, I told myself, everyone who had played even the smallest part in those events, both real and imagined. Everyone was dead and buried in the cold forgiving earth, with the exception of myself.

And so I began to read.

For some weeks I simply read every day, careless of any attempt to make meaning or order of what I read. My eyes would begin to strain, and I would realize that the sun had gone down. It had been a long while since I had so given myself to the experience of words on a page, to the sheer enchantment there.

I lingered over
The Life of Johnson
for a solid two weeks, morning to night, prowling through the notes, hauling the fat volumes with me throughout the house, reading as I took my porridge in the morning and my negus at night. James had spoken of the work in my presence a thousand times—his masterpiece and a book he loved like his own offspring—without ever once offering me a copy.

And now I could read it, at my leisure.

I am not ashamed to tell you that I cried over that exquisite book, more than once. For my brother was a genius, and what he could
read in other men’s hearts, the welter of emotion that he found there, he could also commit to paper, in a way that always eluded Johnson himself.

But eventually I commenced the task of separating all of the various manuscripts chronologically, beginning with work actually by Johnson. And it was only then that I came across an oddity.

Among James’s books was a volume by a Miss Williams, the same blind woman Johnson visited each evening, no matter how late, before himself retiring. It seems the woman had some literary pretensions of her own. An attached note in James’s hand explained that Johnson not only helped Miss Williams edit and sell the collection—
Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, by Anna Williams—
he had helped to fill it out with a small piece or two of his own. The publication date of the volume was 1766.

One of the several pieces Johnson contributed was a strange, bittersweet tale called “The Fountains.”

It is the story of a girl named Florette, who rescues a trapped songbird, only to find that the bird is in actuality a pisky queen. And the queen, Lady Lilinet, offers her two magic fountains by way of reward, one sweet and one bitter. The first will grant her any wish; the second has the power to call that same wish back when it proves tragically unwise. Of course, each of Florette’s several wishes comes true, but in ways Florette could neither have predicted nor desired. Finally the very process of wishing itself seems to drain the life from her.

And in the end she dies with a last kiss from the pisky queen.

It was undeniably the very story I once woke to find Johnson writing late one night in 1763, at the small table in my room at the Starr Inn, on the top of Fish Street Hill, in the shadow of London Bridge.

A memory of Johnson and me together that I have assumed to be false for the last three decades.

And yet, if Miss Williams’s little volume did not appear until
three years after the night at the Turk’s Head Inn—three years after I was forbidden Johnson’s works—there would seem to be no way for me to have known the odd little story in the first place, other than from the mouth of the author, who had in fact not yet committed the thing to paper.

It is a neat little paradox, in short.

Still, the nagging questions to which it gives rise might once have staggered me, for it seems at least narrowly possible that Johnson was indeed one of the men I met on London Bridge, though not the last and perhaps not the most important; that his anger and his indignation were in part the most desperate sort of pretense; that what he felt for me, what we felt for one another, did manage to find expression in some fragment of his life’s work after all.

It is possible, that is to say, that even after leaving Plymouth for the last time, I may have spent the bulk of my life continuing to mistake truth for madness, and madness for truth.

These possibilities are a great deal to contemplate here in seclusion at Auchinleck, in my bed at night, or on the very long country walks I have come to favor, the twelve miles out to the post office in Ayr, for example, and the twelve miles back again. They are a great deal to put right in one’s mind.

Because there is also the countervailing possibility: that the simple act of coming into contact with Johnson’s papers again, after all these many years, has again disordered my reason as I have always feared it would.

But these considerations cannot consume me. Not at this point in my life. Not with a new century just on the verge of wiping clean the sins of the old.

Books sustain me, as well. For there on James’s shelves stand countless works of biography—his own, Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
, and many more. It was always his greatest enjoyment, and one I have come to myself late in life but with great passion. In addition to James’s own version of Johnson’s life, I have read Mrs.
Thrale’s, and that of Sir John Hawkins. These three books I feel as though I could never read thoroughly enough. They cannot help but contradict one another, of course, and yet they are all three captivating in their own ways.

For each of their versions of the man is as true as any other, no matter which volume weighs or sells the most. They are each but stories, tales. Each an imaginative sketch from a different vista.

Even James’s journal, his biography of himself, betrays staggering contradictions as one reads from day to day, let alone year to year.

And in that way, biography has provided me with a comfort in my later years of the sort I was never able to discover in the Bible my mother gave me as a boy. Not the lie of fixed character that any biography tells in its own right, but the truth of multiplicity that they tell when taken together.

There are many Samuel Johnsons, that is to say. And it matters little which one considers first or last, I have decided. One of these men loved my brother, and one of these men loved me, and the memory of each is sacred in its own regard.

John Boswell, Esq.

Auchinleck Estate

Ayrshire

February 1798