The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (109 page)

In 1766 the Edinburgh life he returned to was a drab contrast to the world of Rousseau and Voltaire. Again he gratified his father by securing admission to the Faculty of Advocates, the Scots bar, preparing for a respectable legal career. For the next twenty years he would carry on a better-than-average law practice, which kept him in Edinburgh. Though his marriage to his cousin Margaret Montgomerie in 1769 disappointed his father by not adding substantially to the family estates, it provided him with a happy family life for a few years. Still the convivial Boswell interrupted the Edinburgh routine with occasional trips to London. After 1773, when he was elected to the Literary Club, he had a reason for regular visits. There Sir Joshua Reynolds presided and Samuel Johnson held court among figures like actor David Garrick, the philosopher-economist Adam Smith, the statesmen Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, and the historian Edward Gibbon. The group dined together at a London tavern once a fortnight during meetings of Parliament. Boswell would come to town during the vacations of the Scots courts, but sometimes a whole year would pass without a London visit. In 1785, after his father, the laird of Auchinleck, had died and Boswell became his own man, he moved to London.

There at the age of forty-five he tried to establish himself as an English barrister while pursuing his ambition for a seat in the House of Commons. Frustrated in both these efforts, he had to satisfy himself with the writing that would make him immortal but would not make him happy. He seemed never to realize the proportions of his achievement, and finally considered himself a failure. His last years in London found him seeking the solace of drink. In June 1793 he was mugged and robbed while he was drunk. This mishap, with the effects of lifelong dissipation in bed and with the bottle, brought on his death in 1795.

Even at this distance, when literary styles have changed and the personalities in Boswell’s pages are no longer celebrities, his book remains endlessly entertaining. Like a good journalist, Boswell had a talent for finding the “peg” that gave Johnson’s miscellaneous conversational comments an enduring relevance. When Johnson was asked his opinion of a book sent him by the author but which he could not recall, Johnson commented on the practice of authors sending gift copies, “People seldom read a book which
is given to them; and few are given. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price. No man will send to buy a thing that costs even sixpence, without an intention to read it.” Or on the perils of conversation:

Reading the
Life
, we have no doubt that from the many celebrities of his acquaintance Boswell’s peculiar talents could not have chosen a better subject. But why did he focus on Johnson when he might have chosen so many others? “The author, Boswell, is a strange being,” Horace Walpole complained to the poet Thomas Gray in 1768, “and … has a rage for knowing anybody that was ever talked of.” But unlike Rousseau, Voltaire, or Paoli, Johnson was neither a romantic nor a heroic figure. Boswell’s interest and his project had grown slowly. In 1768 Boswell asked Johnson if he might publish his letters after his death, and there was no objection. “I have a constant plan to write the
Life
of Mr. Johnson,” he noted in his
Journal
“I have not told him of it yet; nor do I know if I should tell him.” “I said that if it was not troublesome and presuming too much, I would request him to tell me all the little circumstances of his life; what schools he attended, when he came to Oxford, when he came to London, &c. &c. He did not disapprove of my curiosity as to these particulars; but said, ‘They’ll come out by degrees as we talk together.’ ” That autumn (1772) with Johnson on his long-planned tour of Scotland and the Hebrides, Boswell took notes “on separate leaves of paper” in Johnson’s presence. “I shall lay up authentic materials for The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., and if I survive him, I shall be one who shall most faithfully do honour to his memory. I have now a vast treasure of his conversation at different times since the year 1762 [1763] when I first obtained his acquaintance; and by assiduous inquiry I can make up for not knowing him sooner.”

Over the next years Boswell seized every opportunity to collect Johnsoniana. Mrs. Thrale objected to his violating hospitality by his “ill-bred” habit of writing down whatever Johnson said. Edmund Burke complained that Boswell inhibited the “convivial ease and negligence” of the meetings of The Literary Club. Some, like the eminent Scottish lawyer and pioneer anthropologist, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799), simply thought Johnson no
better than a provincial schoolmaster and not worth all Boswell’s efforts.

Still, nothing could dissipate Boswell’s fascination with his subject, nor discourage his efforts to collect every scrap of Johnsoniana. By 1780 he began to see a way of organizing the work. He ceased to be daunted by his earlier difficulty in recalling the “genuine vigor and vivacity” of Johnson’s conversation. “Strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether, I could with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper, the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit.” At the time of Johnson’s death, Boswell had accumulated copious materials—including his own
Journal
and notes since 1763, miscellaneous documents, which he called “Papers Apart,” and Johnson’s own letters to him.

How could he give form to this ocean? How compete with the anecdotal charm of Mrs. Piozzi’s recent book and the others? Following the advice of his sensible friend Edmond Malone “to make a Skeleton, with reference to the materials, in order of time,” on July 9, 1786, he began writing. But it was slow going, and his own intentions were complicated by the competing books. Interrupted by fits of indolence and melancholia, he labored on. For months in 1788 he did not write a single page. But under Malone’s prodding, he had completed a draft by March 1789. The customs of the trade were especially taxing in those days for printers, who would set up the early pages of a book even before the author had written the final pages. The result was costly and sloppy with the author’s last-minute revisions. In February 1791, Boswell was still asking Malone, “Pray how shall I wind up?” The book was in the bookstores on May 16.

Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
displayed a vivid encounter between the demands of truth and the exactions of art. Again and again Boswell claimed that his book would exhibit Johnson “more completely than any person, ancient or modern, has yet been preserved.” “I am absolutely certain,” he wrote to his lifelong friend William Temple in 1788, “that
my
mode of biography, which gives not only a
history
of Johnson’s
visible
progress through the world, and of his publications, but a
view
of his mind, in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be
more
of a
Life
than any work that has yet appeared.” Boswell confessed that he had not included “the whole of what was said by Johnson, or other eminent persons.… What I have preserved, however, has the value of the most perfect authenticity.”

Johnson himself declared that “the biographical part of literature … is what I love most.” But, he explained:

Boswell, on the contrary, was well aware that verisimilitude itself—subtlety “in the Flemish picture I have given of my friends”—demanded something more than precise completeness of the record. “I observe continually,” he noted when he was twenty-nine and only projecting his
Life
, “how imperfectly on most occasions words preserve our ideas.… In description we omit insensibly many little touches that give life to objects. With how small a speck does a painter give life to an eye!” There is hardly a scene or a page to which Boswell has not added the “small speck”—Johnson’s habit of talking to himself, of collecting dried orange peels, of counting his steps into or out of a room, of preferring the sausages of Bologna—all unworthy of a Plutarchian monument but essential to a Flemish portrait.

The obsessive Boswell was peculiarly well qualified to embellish his complete record with these “small specks.” Only in this century have we discovered how obsessive Boswell was. His copious
Journals
, which have established him as a great diarist, have thrown a bright new light on his literary character. His
Life of Johnson
may not, after all, have been his primary personal concern, for he seems to have considered the embodying of his own life in his
Journal
to be his first daily duty. “I should live no more than I can record,” he wrote, “as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in. There is a waste of good if it be not preserved.” He could tolerate even the most unpleasant experience “if only I am to give an account of it.” It seems that he intended this comprehensive
Journal
to remain private. The
Life of Johnson
would be another product of this same obsession with capturing experience by recording it. Which also helps explain the directness, the simplicity, and lack of contrivance in the biography.

In seeking to explain the enduring charm of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
some have looked for “the Boswell formula.” But there is no formula. Instead we must seek the “art” in a work that seems conspicuously artless, that is not even divided into chapters, and simply follows the flow of Johnson’s life day by day. What is ironic in the history of literary creations is that so many centuries should have elapsed before one man devoted himself to make a full report of another. Writers had spent their art on cities, states, and empires, on comedy and tragedy, on the ways of the gods and the absurdities of institutions, before someone tried to record a person in all his idiosyncrasy.

The enduring success of Boswell’s work is precisely in its artless surrender
to chronology. Perhaps Johnson’s lack of any grand public role saved his biographer from the temptation to box his life into exemplary moral categories. By committing the flow of his narrative to chronology, Boswell allows us to share the randomness of daily experience. For example, within the three pages recording Johnson’s life on April 7 through 10, 1775, we hear Johnson on the inauthenticity of the pretended works of Ossian, the ferocity of wolves and bears, the temptations of patriotism, the superiority of Mrs. Abington’s jelly to Mrs. Thrale’s, the virtues of General Oglethorpe, how happiness is produced by the dissolving of present into future, and why there is no justification for poetry unless it is “exquisite in its kind.”

Simply by faithfulness to the full chronological record, Boswell recaptures the manifold qualities, contradictions, evasions, passions, and prejudices of the living person. “But in the chronological series of Johnson’s life, which I trace as distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters or conversation, being convinced that this mode is more lively, and will make my readers better acquainted with him, than even most of those were who actually knew him, but could know him only partially.…”

Johnson was a heroic conversationalist, and conversation is a peculiarly random and serendipitous art. It was in this world of the spoken word that Johnson shone and came alive. “What I consider as the peculiar value of the following work,” Boswell wrote in his foreword, “is, the quantity that it contains of Johnson’s conversation.” Boswell claimed for himself a talent “in leading the conversation. I do not mean leading, as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading, as one does in examining a witness—starting topics, and making him pursue them.”

To ensure the authenticity of his records, Boswell had his own technique, which has not been easily fathomed. If he used “shorthand” it was not the special kind he discussed with Johnson on several occasions but the method of abbreviating words for our own use. At one especially lively conversation, Boswell exclaimed to Mrs. Thrale, “O, for short-hand to take this down!” “You’ll carry it all in your head, (said she;) a long head is as good as short-hand.” The recently recovered
Journals
and
Notes
reveal that, since Boswell, despite Mrs. Thrale’s complaints, only seldom noted down the words when they were uttered, he made his own record as soon as possible thereafter. With his irregular habits of sex and drink, his primary concern—a kind of religion, even more urgent than his duties to his law clients or to his family—was regularly capturing his life in “my Journal.” “Bring that up,” he wrote to himself, “and all will then be well.”

Boswell’s scrupulous regard for authenticity has led a few critics to accuse him of having written a great book by accident. Some of his contemporaries, like the acerbic Fanny Burney, even preferred not “to be named
or remembered by that biographical, anecdotal memorandummer.” The poet Thomas Gray had shrugged off Boswell’s record of his tour in Corsica. “Any fool,” Gray wrote, “may write a valuable book by chance.” Envious critics said that Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
was merely the accidental by-product of the encounter between a naive and obsessive “memorandummer” and a brilliant conversationalist. After Macaulay and Carlyle extravagantly praised the book as both the best biography ever written and the best product of the eighteenth century, others have joined in a rare literary consensus. By the mid-nineteenth century the verb “to Boswellize” had entered the language, describing the effort to make a total record of another person. It was a clue both to the uniqueness of Boswell’s literary achievement and to the disparaging suspicion that once Boswell had shown it could be done anybody else could do it. What it really announced was a modern literary creation—the individual life becoming the raw material of art.