He saw her again on the eleventh, when she was in ‘a fever of spirits’, as was he. On the twelfth he met her at her music master’s, where she played delightfully and then took him for a walk. ‘I was touched with regret at the thought of parting with her. Yet she rattled on so much that she really vexed me.’ It was all very confusing to Boswell.
On 14 June, he again leapt into his chaise to take his final farewell at Zuylen. Once more the talk was of husbands: of Boswell’s ideals of deference and Zélide’s notions of freedom. Their conversation was inconclusive. ‘I owned to her that I was very sorry to leave her. She gave me many a tender look. We took a kind farewell, as did all the family.’ They had agreed to write secretly to each other, and that evening Zélide began a long letter to pursue him into Germany. ‘I find you odd and lovable,’ she wrote succinctly. Meanwhile back at Utrecht the Scottish chaplain observed: ‘It is lucky that you are no longer together; for you would learn her nonsense, and she would learn yours.’ Boswell manfully agreed.
On the eve of Boswell’s departure from Utrecht, old Lord Marischal, who had evidently heard a great deal of Zélide, mischievously announced that he would be fascinated to visit Zuylen himself. Accordingly Boswell found himself one last time at the castle. With curious Dutch formality, they all sat round drinking tea in the open air, while the swallows spun round the moat and along the darkening colonnades of beech. Boswell drew Zélide aside, and she whispered, ‘Are you back again? We made a touching adieu.’ Then she gave him the letter, which he was told not to read until he was actually and really going.
Zélide seemed much agitated, said she had never been in love, but said that one might meet with un homme amiable, etc. etc. etc. for whom one might feel a strong affection, which would probably be lasting, but this amiable man might not have the same affection for one. In short she spoke too plain to leave me in doubt that she really loved me. But then she went with her wild fancy, saying she thought only of the present moment.
All was confusion and Boswell told himself she was ‘a frantic libertine’. In the circumstances, it was a conclusion of the most perfect irony.
It was dusk when they rose to leave. Zélide gave Boswell her hand, and in the half-light of that Dutch still life, he thought he could glimpse a painterly luminescence: ‘The tender tear stood crystal in her eye. Poor Zélide!’ Or rather, poor Boswell.
The next day he left for Germany.
Boswell and Zélide never met again, although they corresponded in a desultory fashion over the subsequent four years. Boswell did finally propose marriage, and Zélide, inevitably, turned him down.
DR JOHNSON’S FIRST CAT
IN THOSE DAYS, I often used to hold conversations with Mr Boswell about the great Doctor. We would lounge in the little pannelled backroom of the Mitre tavern on Fleet Street, and warm our porter by the sea-coal fire. Mr Boswell was then in his biographical pre-eminence, and sported extravagant silver buckles on his shoes. He was much inclined to reminisce about his long-departed friend, and took much pleasure in what he called a two-bottle talk, when he would hang his wig upon the bench-end and refer to it with his eye, very quick and bright and mischievous.
I was then a mere law-student at the Inner Temple, with a shabby cupboard above the great clock. But young and bookish as I was, Mr Boswell was kind enough to call me one of the ancient fraternity of night. Indeed he seemed to relish company in those after-hours, and treated my half-sovereigns in his fine, free clubbable manner. ‘Let us lucubrate upon the unaccountable laws of human nature,’ he would say.
One of his most curious revelations concerned Johnson’s cats. They were creatures upon which the great Lexicographer, as is notorious, doted with uncommon tenderness. But Mr Boswell was always very uneasy in their presence, since – as he said – they had an air of contemptuous knowledge. If they chose to tell us what they knew of mankind, we should all be confounded. Besides, they were very lascivious creatures and would fawn upon Johnson’s great bulk with an unbecoming intimacy.
The most celebrated of these feline companions was one Hodge, a large uxorious tabby-cat, for whom Johnson would purchase oysters in Houndsditch market. Mr Boswell has dedicated a famous passage in his Life of Johnson to this familiar, which he once recited to me with a nice turn of Scotch emphasis. ‘I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “why yes Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.” ‘
Mr Boswell ended this recitation with a kind of speculative hum, which was peculiar to him, half humorous and half doubting, as if there might be more to be said on the matter. His quick eye referred to the wig hanging between us, and the empty goblet at his side. I made the necessary adjustments, while he leaned forwards and very delicately prodded the fire with the iron poker, as I was afterwards pleased to think, like a man dipping his quill into the embers of memory that were still hot. ‘Yes,’ he murmured into the glowing coals, ‘there were other cats whom he liked better.’
There followed, over several evenings, a strange testament (if I may so term it), which I piece and plot together as best I can, being wholly without Mr Boswell’s biographical arts. Sometimes we sat at our accustomed fireside, and sometimes we sauntered about the courts and alleys off Fleet Street and the Strand, where Johnson himself had so often roamed in the night and where, as Mr Boswell said, we might yet accompany him in his earliest solitude.
For we had to go back, said he, to the time when Johnson first arrived in the great city: a solitary, friendless young man of twenty-seven years, without profession and without resource, a mere schoolmaster from the provinces, whose literary powers lay undiscovered and unsuspected. ‘To be sure,’ said Mr Boswell, ‘he was a married man; and yet’ – here with great emphasis – ‘he was not a man who had found his Muse. I mean, Sir,’ he added with his quick bright candid glance, ‘he had not found the English Language which he loved.’
I was to recall too, he continued, that Johnson was a fearsome figure to behold. Tall, bony, scarred by scrofula on his neck, half blind in one eye, and subject to convulsive twitchings of his face, he was divorced from all the elegant departments of life. The schoolchildren mocked him behind his back, the ladies retreated twittering behind their fans, the very dogs barked at him in the street. (Here the hum sounded briefly.) Johnson’s was a life radically miserable, and subject to a religious melancholy that no human tenderness had relieved. The hand had not reached him, the touch of nature had not found him, that might release him into life.
I was surprised by Mr Boswell’s strength of feeling at this juncture, and how his voice echoed round a darkened courtyard off Fetter Lane. A passing nightwatchman raised his lantern at us, and the bars of light and shadow swung across us like a dungeon grid in Newgate. We saluted the old man with his cudgel, and pursued our way in gloomy silence towards Fleet Ditch.
But you cannot mean, I asked at length, that it was the friendship of a cat which saved the great Johnson for the world? The speculative hum again sounded at my side, followed by something like a sigh. ‘Ah,’ said Mr Boswell after a long interval, ‘it was fair Esther and the cat. I have read his private memorial on the matter, and you perhaps might peruse his Dictionary. For that, after all, is the truest memorial of all.’ But no more did he say that night, and for many nights after he drank his porter and talked of other things.
I had learnt from Mr Boswell that in matters of the heart, a merest hint might contain a whole history; a precedent worthy of all Blackstone’s Laws. Accordingly I rummaged through the great leather folio of Dr Johnson’s English Dictionary, and was again astounded by the felicity of his definitions, the scope of his learning and the charm of his illustrat
ions. ‘Lexicographer’, he records in a famous entry: ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’
Yet I found little to my biographical purpose, except a growing sense of wonder that the task had been achieved at all. Indeed, it was a monument of intellect, a survey of the expressive world entire! How Johnson ever assembled that great compendium in his attic at Gough Square, forty thousand words brought sparkling into the light new-minted, struck me as both a miracle and a mystery renewed. It was the labour of five long and lonely years. And the cant phrase echoed in my mind, it was a labour of love.
Of course, in my probings and peerings, I turned upon the word ‘cat’. Johnson records it with noble gravity, ‘a domestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned of the leonine species’. So a creature with the heart of a lion. And he adds an illustration from the naturalist Peach: ‘A cat, as she beholds the light, draws the ball of her eye small and long, being covered over with a green lense; and she dilates it at pleasure.’
‘You must comprehend’, said Mr Boswell suddenly one night, ‘that Esther was blind.’ It was a wintry evening, and the rain beat against the casements of the Mitre and rattled the panes in their lead. Outside the dung-cart men swore and sang with uncommon energy. We trembled upon the lip of a third bottle, and Mr Boswell’s buckles winked and shone as he stretched his legs towards the fire. ‘It was her blindness that let her see him; and let her hear him. And she it was that first touched the spring.’
He pulled from his waistcoat a tiny pocket book, with a silver clasp. ‘These are his own memorials, from his earliest days in London. They record his first lodgings, up one pair of stairs, near Covent Garden, indeed an incommodious address. It was the house of one Norris, a fellow country man, a Lichfield man.’ Then he read gravely, as one who reads the Scriptures. ‘Norris the staymaker – fair Esther with the cat – a guinea at the stairs – Esther died.’ He closed the little book, and sat gazing at me with the hum much in evidence, his eye very bright and inquisitive. ‘Fair Esther with the cat, you see? And she died. But the cat,’ and here he shook his head with a kind of impatience, ‘the cat did not die, you comprehend?’
I did not see, I did not comprehend, and for a while there was a long silence between us, and Shakespeare’s phrase came to me: ‘like the poor cat i’ the adage.’ At length I observed to Mr Boswell that this matter of Esther and the cat was not in his great Life of Johnson, and I wondered at the omission. He laughed, and replied that there was much in any Life that was omitted, and there indeed lay a curious common-law of biographical truth. ‘What we do not know, we may yet feel; what we leave in shadow, may one day shine out upon us yet. I was uneasy at my suspicions, I did not think them worthy of him. But come now, you must judge for yourself.’
Then he told all he guessed of that strange history. He told me how Johnson in his loneliness had conceived a great tenderness for fair Esther; and how she, being blind, had not feared to caress and console him. She did not see the poor monster, she heard only the marvellous man. It was with her that his wondrous powers of speech, his marvellous generosities of language, were first unfolded and displayed. It was from this time that his essays, his poetry, began to pour forth upon the press. ‘He was, Sir, like a man released from his dungeon, a man who has found himself in the light, and who begins to walk abroad with his natural gait, and see the world around him, and find it answerable to his words and thoughts.’
And then came Esther’s death from a fever, swift as an arrow from heaven, and the darkness closed upon him again. He buried her in the little graveyard of St John’s Clerkenwell, hard by Albion Place, where you may find it still, beneath a flowering almond tree. And so he was left with nothing but her little cat, the sole companion and confidante of all those precious hours, who still touched his breast and gazed upon him in the dark with pleasure. ‘And what that cat meant to him,’ said Mr Boswell in a low voice, ‘who can tell? Perhaps only the others that came after it.’
It was, to be sure, a strange history, and I have told it with some haste and confusion, for on that night the third bottle was well upon us, and if I mistake not, a fourth too. Mr Boswell was talking like a man who dreams, and nodding at his wig, as if to say, ‘You hear me Sir, you hear me all the while.’
We ventured out at last into the street. He took my arm, and we progressed with solemn ceremony down towards old St Paul’s, and then with a sudden fanciful digression into the shadows of Bolt Court. ‘Quite like old times,’ he hummed, leading the way forward over the accumulated rubbish of the day. We reached Gough Square, and stood respectfully upon the gleaming cobbles, gazing up. The windows of Johnson’s erstwhile attic were quite dark.
But is this story never to be told? I inquired of Mr Boswell through the wind and rain. Is Esther to have no monument? ‘She has it, far better than I could contrive, far better than any wild biographical surmise of mine. She has it in his great Dictionary. Every word brought into the light is her monument. Every word is the great Johnson’s act of love for her, shining in the dark.’ We stood steadily for a moment in this solemn reflection and the wind whipped and pawed at our coat-tails.
I could not forbear one further question of the wise biographer. ‘And the cat, Sir, what of the cat?’ Then Mr Boswell said the most curious thing of all. ‘If I know anything of the English race, Sir, and their infinite respect for their literary authors, a cat, Sir, a very fine cat indeed will have a monument in bronze, a statuette in bronze, eternally eating oysters upon this very place.’ Then he hummed, a very long Scotch hum, that seemed to spread far into the London night. ‘But, Sir, it will not be the right cat, all the same.’
A bronze statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge was erected in Gough Square in 1997.
Acknowledgements
I A Romantic Premonition
Thomas Chatterton: first published in Cornhill Magazine, 1970
II Lost in France
Monsieur Nadar: first published in The Times, 1974
Gautier in London: first published in The Times, 14 June 1975
Poor Pierrot: first published in The Times, 10 January 1976
Inside the Tower: first transmitted on BBC Radio Three, 31 October 1977
III Five Gothic Shadows
The Singular Affair of the Reverend Mr Barham: first published In The Times, 22 December 1978
The Reverend Maturin and Mr Melmoth: first published in The Times, 7 February 1981
M. R. James and Others: first published in The Times, 1974
John Stuart Mill: first published in The Times, 28 July 1979
Lord Lisle and the Tudor Nixon Tapes: first published in Harper’s magazine, New York, August 1982
IV A Philosophical Love Story
The Feminist and the Philosopher: a condensed version first published as Introduction to A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark/Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, Penguin Books, 1987. This expanded version was translated into Dutch and published as De feministe en de filosoof, Contact, 1988.
V Shelley’s Ghost
Scrope’s Last Throw: first published in Harper’s magazine, New York, April 1977
To the Tempest Given: recorded on 27–28 August 1992 and first broadcast on BBC Radio Four on 10 September 1992
VI Escapes to Paris
Scott and Zelda: One Last Trip: first published in The Times, 22 March 1980 (with acknowledgement to Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith, Mary Hemingway and Charles Scribner’s Sons for quotations from copyright material, and thanks to Jean Preston, Curator of Manuscripts, Princeton University Library
A Summer with the Novelist: taken from a selection of pieces first published in the Daily Telegraph during summer 1994
Voltaire’s Grin: first published in New York Review of Books, 30 November 1995
VII Homage to the Godfather
Boswell’s Bicentenary: first published in The Times, 11 May 1991
Boswell
Among the Tulips: first published in Granta (1992) Extracts from Boswell’s journal are reprinted by kind permission of Edinburgh University Press
Dr Johnson’s First Cat: first broadcast on BBC Radio Four, Book at Bedtime, March 1999
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Ackerley, J.R., 376
Ackroyd, Peter, 373
Ainsworth, Harrison, 141
Alderson, Amelia, 203, 213, 257
Amsterdam, Boswell in, 378, 394, 395–7
Analytical Review, 201, 213, 214
André, Marc, 335
Angel, Mrs (Chatterton’s landlady), 44, 48
Anker, Bernhard, 246
Anne of Cleves, 187
Anti-Jacobin Magazine, 212, 265
Aristotle, 353
Arnold, Matthew, 33
Arnold, Thomas, 371, 372
Arouet, François, 347
Ascot Races, 68, 72–3
Astell, Mary, 213
Auchinleck, Alexander Boswell, Lord, 377, 379–80, 393
Avignon, 182
Ayer, A.J., 361
Backman, Elias, 236, 238, 240, 241, 255
Ballance, Mrs (cousin of Chatterton), 12, 25, 46
balloons, 65
Balzac, Honoré de, 60, 104
Banville, Theodore Faullin de, 60, 63
Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 370
Barber, Francis, 369
Bardot, Brigitte, 341
Barham, Alderman Richard Harris, 139, 143
Barham, Dalton, 145
Barham, Richard Harris, 139–48; Baldwin, 144; ‘Bloudie Jack’, 147–8; The Ingoldsby Legends, 141–3, 148; ‘The Leech of Folkestone’, 146–7; My Cousin Nicholas, 144; ‘Nell Cook!’, 147; ‘The Trance’, 145–6
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