His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisseum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.
This image has such power that it resonates through the entire biography, representative not simply of Johnson’s moral struggles, but of a whole Augustan culture soon to be beset by the wild beasts of Romanticism, of Rousseau and his hirsute crew.
It may also suggest how biography offers a shapely doorway back into history, seen on a human scale. Carlyle called history the sum of innumerable biographies; a view profoundly opposed to the current statistical sweepings of economic history and sociology. But if one wants to understand, say, the impact of the French Revolution on English society, what better way than to read William St Clair’s The Godwins and the Shelleys? This is a precise, but enthralling account (written incidentally by a senior member of HM Treasury) of the wild entanglements of two families of radical writers, between the 1760s and 1820s, who engaged with Continental enthusiasms at every level, from philosophical treason to efficient birth-control.
Even the most recherché fields can be illuminated by light from this human doorway: the complex development of Romantic music in David Cairns’s rumbustious Berlioz, or the arcanae of early-twentieth-century philosophy and logic in Ray Monk’s patient, limpid Ludwig Wittgenstein. It does tell us something crucial about the delphic, regimented and numbered propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, to discover it being drafted in the forward observation post of the Austrian artillery on the Russian Front in summer 1916, under heavy fire.
But above all, modern biography continues the Boswellian inquiry into the quiddity of human nature: what motivates us, what forms or splinters character, what gives self-identity, what brings intimacy. At a recent Biography Conference at Oxford, I was asked by a marriage-counsellor how well the biographer could ever discover the truth about married couples – when she herself often wondered, after extensive confidential interviews, if two partners were really living with the same spouses, so different were their accounts of each other.
This provoked animated discussion, which Margaret Boswell and Tetty Johnson would have enjoyed. But the short answer was to read something like Nigel Nicolson’s account of his parents in Portrait of a Marriage, followed by Victoria Glendinning’s generous, all-embracing life of Victoria Sackville-West. Such biographies, with the comprehending perspective of time, and the multiple intelligence of diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographical fiction from both sides (and from outside), move far beyond banal bedroom truths about a relationship. The biographer may simply be in the position to know more, and more variously. In this subtlety, and this relativity, biography is post-Freud and post-Einstein.
Indeed, biography can provide a kind of ethical mirror, in which we can see ourselves and our lives from new angles, with sudden force. Such ‘mirrors’ can have great influence over current movements: it is impossible to imagine the development of Feminism over the last twenty-five years, without the rediscovery and reinterpretation of such exemplary existences as those of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, Dorothy Wordsworth, Zelda Fitzgerald, or indeed Vita.
Nor is the biographic form itself static. Boswell had already tried many narrative modes to bring Johnson to vivid, complex, front-of-stage life. His dramatized conversations drew on the conventions of the Restoration comedy-of-manners (often using himself as foil and butt); his handling of Johnson’s correspondence is partly inspired by Richardson’s epistolary novels; his use of the Diaries and Prayers establish a Johnsonian inner voice from the Protestant tradition of solemn meditation.
Similarly, modern biographers experiment with the modes and conventions of truth-telling. Andrew Motion used the Forsythian interplay of a family saga to present three generations of The Lamberts. Ian Hamilton explored the limits of investigative journalism, and legal confrontation, when actually blocked by his own subject, in the sardonic, self-questioning, cautionary tale, In Search of J. D. Salinger. Peter Parker sensitively used a minor, tangential life of J. R. Ackerley to illuminate a whole literary period (and also another dog’s life). Marina Warner re-examined a celebrated historical figure in terms of the legends and archetypes, transforming her through centuries, in Joan of Arc. Alan Judd brought his skills as a novelist to bear on the enormous series of displaced, fictional autobiographies that made up the apparently impenetrable, shape-shifting, comic epic of the life – or lives – of Ford Madox Ford. My own Footsteps is an attempt to explore the vertiginous experience of biographical research itself, through perilous time-warps of self-projection, solitary travel and the peculiar infatuations of the wandering scholar.
It is finally an unmistakable sign of the times, that modern novelists have themselves begun to respond to this challenge of the biographer invading new territories, so close to their fictional heartlands. They are decidedly en garde. The ‘biographer’ has indeed become a recognizable fictional type, often rapacious or self-deluded, but treading close upon the heels of the novelist in the search for shy, retreating, human truth.
In Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, in Penelope Lively’s According to Mark, in William Golding’s The Paper Man, or in A. S. Byatt’s aptly named Possession, fictional biographers pant along the trail of fleeing authors – physically breathless and metaphysically outmanoeuvred – but memorably alive and relentless. Some even have fast cars. Here parody and polemic are surely a form of grudging tribute: the biographer has come of age, and demands the keys to the house of literature.
And that age, in my view, is still a golden one. It is still largely unhampered by critical theory, still flourishing outside the groves of academe, still maverick and impassioned, still genially in touch with a general readership. The godsons and goddaughters of Boswell have reason to be modestly rampant. Boswell once announced, in another of his delirious moments (he was in Cornwall, under heavy rain), that he preferred to be known as plain ‘Mr B the biographer’, than as ‘Sir James B the High Court Judge’ (which indeed, he never was). A delusion of grandeur, no doubt. But in celebrating his bicentenary, many readers may indulgently agree with him.
BOSWELL AMONG THE TULIPS
WHEN YOUNG JAMES BOSWELL arrived in Holland in August 1763 at the age of twenty-two, his first impulse was to commit suicide. When he departed ten months later something much more alarming had occurred: he had fallen in love – or half in love – with a Dutch girl more intelligent than he.
After a respectable education at Edinburgh University, studying under David Hume, Boswell had run riot for a year in London, fathering an illegitimate child and flirting with deism, gambling and dreams of military glory. His redoubtable father, Lord Auchinleck, had called an abrupt halt to this dangerous libertinage and, recalling his own youthful sojourn at Utrecht (the Boswells had distinguished Dutch relatives in their Scottish ancestry), he despatched his prodigal son for a period of moral improvement among the Calvinist worthies, burghers and professors of the United Provinces. He was to acquire tone and intellectual rigour at the famous Law School in the cloisters of the huge, shadowy cathedral of Utrecht.
Arriving in the Hague from Harwich, Boswell embarked alone on a sluggish canal boat drawn by lumbering carthorses for the nine-hour journey to Utrecht, suddenly overcome by his ‘own dismal imaginations’. His whole life seemed to grind to a gloomy halt amid these intolerable, green, empty flatlands. In Utrecht, at the Castle of Antwerp Inn, he was given an attic bedroom packed with ancient, dark wood furniture. There he was served a dry meal on a polished tray.
At every hour the bells of the great [cathedral] tower played a dreary psalm tune. A deep melancholy seized upon me. I groaned with the idea of living all winter in so shocking a place. I thought myself old and wretched and forlorn … All the horrid ideas you can imagine, recurred upon me. I was qu
ite unemployed and had not a soul to speak to but the clerk of the English [Presbyterian] meeting … I thought I should go mad … I went out into the streets, and even in public could not refrain from groaning and weeping bitterly … I took general speculative views of things; all seemed full of darkness and woe.
Such was Boswell’s introduction to the improving delights of Holland.
He thought desperately of going to Berlin, Geneva or Paris, ‘but above all of returning to London and my dear calm retreat in the Inner Temple’. Escape seemed the only alternative to madness. He seized upon an American doctor he found in the doorway of the inn and accompanied him on a rapid tour of Gouda, Amsterdam and Haarlem. On returning to Utrecht he was again overcome by horror and fled to Rotterdam half-determined to re-embark for home. He wrote to his old friend George Dempster (a Scots lawyer and Member of Parliament eight years his senior) who was in Paris, and, ‘irresolute and fickle every hour’, begged him to rendezvous immediately at Brussels. Answering this cri-de-coeur, Dempster flung himself into the next mail coach and covered the 186 miles from Paris in thirty hours, only to find that Boswell, overcome by guilt, had returned to Rotterdam, having finally resolved ‘to go up to Utrecht for a week, and force myself to study six hours a day during that time’. If that failed to steady his nerve – well, he would try Leiden.
Dempster sent him a gentle letter of advice, based on his own superior experiences. To start with, he must accept that the glooms of British academia would be a ‘a joke to Utrecht’. He must crack the conundrum of Dutch money and Dutch language. He must resign himself to the inspiring company of ‘Dutch professors in tartan nightgowns with long pipes’. Like a good Christian, he must consider Utrecht as a vale of tears which would lead eventually ‘to a better life in another country’. He must regard Holland as ‘the dark watery passage which leads to an enchanted and brilliant grotto. For such is a French academy …’ Meanwhile, to ward off Calvinistic gloom: ‘I should think you might amuse yourself in acquiring the French, keeping a journal and writing to your friends, and debauching a Dutch girl.’ He must grow immune to silence, smoking, dullness and stinking cheese, and ‘try to Dutchify your immortal soul’.
Boswell duly survived his first week in Utrecht, taking lodgings in the north-east corner of the cathedral square in Keizershof buildings, and hiring a Swiss manservant, François Mazarac, who was a paragon of punctuality – ‘I am quite ready to lay a bet on him against all the clocks in the country.’ By the end of September he had established a proper Dutch routine of severest virtue, combining classical French and legal studies with a little billiards and fencing by way of recreation. He was up at six-thirty a.m., read Ovid until nine, Tacitus till eleven and attended Professor Trotz’s lectures on Civil Law at midday. In the afternoons he walked briskly round the tree-lined boulevard of the Utrecht Mall, bowing to the academical worthies, did a two-hour French conversation class and dined with the Reverend Robert Brown, an English pastor, and his family, practising Dutch. In the evenings he wrote a one-page essay in French or Dutch, a ten-line verse stanza, and composed entries in his daily journal and letters to his friends, who were properly amazed at this transformation.
There were one or two suspicious anomalies in this spartan perfection: he slipped out to a Dutch tailor and ordered two dazzling suits, ‘of sea-green and lace, and scarlet with gold’ for future parties; and his fencing-master turned out to be ninety-four years old. His early rising produced curious effects:
As soon as I am awake, I remember my duty, and like a brisk mariner I give the lash to indolence and bounce up with as much vivacity as if a pretty girl, amorous and willing, were waiting for me.
(Early rising was always a delicate subject with Boswell, and he once considered patenting a device for tilting his bed into a vertical position, so that he slid out painlessly from under the blankets on to the floor.)
Lord Auchinleck wrote to congratulate his son on his resolutions and advised him to study the management of cattle and the Dutch ‘contrivance for making their dung in no way offensive to them’, and also to cultivate the society of Count Nassau, a prime mover in the Utrecht beau monde.
By October, Boswell was so spiritually well-regulated that he drew up at immense length a philosophical resolution about his future life, grandly entitled ‘The Inviolable Plan’, in which he determined to forswear all excesses and mould himself into a ‘Christian gentleman’, distinguished lawyer and Scottish paterfamilias. He promised himself to consult this document frequently and stick faithfully to all its commandments. Dempster now recommended the exemplum of Dutch society: ‘Examine their industry, their commerce, the effects of frugality, freedom and good laws.’
Boswell had studied the English travel literature about Holland, notably the Observations on the United Provinces by the seventeenth-century British ambassador to the Hague, Sir William Temple; and the popular volume on the Netherlands in Thomas Nugent’s The Grand Tour (1749). A vivid stereotype of Dutch virtues emerges from these works: stolid, hard-working, earthbound, egalitarian, commercially-minded, hygienic and irremediably dull. Temple summed it all up in a diplomat’s measured and crafty formula, carefully dispensing praise with one hand and withdrawing it with the other.
Holland is a country, where the earth is better than the air, and profit more in request than honour; where there is more sense than wit; more good nature than good humour; and more wealth than pleasure; where a man would choose rather to travel than to live; shall find more things to observe than desire; and more persons to esteem than to love.
But it was Thomas Nugent’s comments on Dutch domestic life which particularly intrigued Boswell, whose Inviolable Plan included the search for a virtuous wife:
The women have the whole care and management of their domestic affairs, and generally live in good fame; a certain sort of chastity being hereditary and habitual to them. They are more valued for their beauty, than their genteel carriage. A great many of them understand trafick [trade] as well as the men; and it may be said, that most of them wear the breeches.
They were, in short, the opposite of French women (who haunted Boswell’s wilder dreams), and allowing for the breeches clause, were tantalizingly marriageable. This solemn thought gradually came to occupy Boswell, the reformed rake and earnest student, a good deal.
In mid-October the Utrecht social season opened, and Count Nassau held the first of his grand soirées. A certain shift in moral priorities now emerged in Boswell’s outlook.
Dress in scarlet and gold, fine swiss, white silk stockings, handsome pumps, and have silver-and-silk sword-knot, Barcelona handkerchief, and elegant toothpick-case which you had in present from a lady. Be quite the man of fashion and keep up your dignity.
But he still urged himself to be sober and serious. ‘Don’t think it idle time, for while abroad being in good company is your great scheme and is really improving.’ These exhortations now become a regular chorus in his memoranda for the journal, summarized by the repeated word retenue – prudence and restraint.
Always try to attain tranquillity … Learn retenue. Pray do. Don’t forget The Plan … The more and oftener restraints, the better. Be steady.
It was in this mood that James Boswell met the first of his Tulips, the colourful Dutch ladies who would hover entrancingly before him, blooms to be plucked – as he thought – for the greater improvement and decoration of the Boswellian pasture. Here, as he hoped, was the true meaning of his Dutch cultivation. Here the traveller would become a truly European gentleman.
She was the Count’s younger sister-in-law, la Comtesse Nassau, a glamorous and elegant lady married to a septuagenarian husband and renowned for her charm, her boredom and her love affairs. The inflammation greatly improved Boswell’s French and his self-esteem. He was soon crowing in his letters:
Our noblesse are come to town and all is alive. We have card-assemblies twice a week, which I do assure you, are very brilliant, and private parties almost every evening. Madame la Comtesse de
Nassau Beverweerd has taken me under her protection. She is a lady that, with all your serenity, would make you fall on your knees and utter love speeches in the style of Lord Shaftesbury’s Philosophical Rhapsody, and that would please her exceedingly, for she delights in Shaftesbury’s benevolent system. I really trembled at the transition which I made last week. But I have stood firm …
During the next few weeks Boswell danced attendance on the thirty-year-old Comtesse, his dry academic days alternating with glittering candle-lit evenings. He encouraged himself with ethical instructions: ‘La Comtesse is charming, delicate, and sentimental. Adore her with easy affability, yet with polite distance, and acquire real habits of composure.’ But he began to suspect that Thomas Nugent had not entirely understood the intriguing charms of Dutch women. He steadied himself by writing essays on the ‘horrible fogs and excessive cold’ of the climate; he tested himself by refusing to have a fire in his rooms until November, ‘studying three or four hours on end shivering like an Italian greyhound’; and he sobered himself writing notes on the eccentricities of Professor Trotz – his fund of historical anecdotes and his memories of Friesland that made Utrecht sound like the centre of world civilization and ‘the seat of felicity’.
The airy gallantry of the Comtesse did not however solidify into a flirtation. Unknown to Boswell she was involved elsewhere and duly produced an illegitimate child the following year. Though he upbraided himself – ‘no love; you are to marry’ – he also admitted that he was ‘sorry somehow’ that his virtue was ‘not to be put to the trial’. The Comtesse did on the other hand rapidly introduce him to Utrecht society and even drew up a list of eligible ladies for Boswell’s edification. From November onwards the names of two other Tulips began to sprout regularly in Boswell’s memoranda: Madame Geelvinck and Mademoiselle de Zuylen. One of his earliest memories of the latter was of her playing an expert game of shuttlecock.
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