The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  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:

  Goldsmith should not be forever attempting to shine in conversation: he has no temper for it, he is so much mortified when he fails. Sir, a game of jokes is composed partly of skill, partly of chance. A man may be beat at times by one who has not the tenth part of his wit. Now Goldsmith’s putting himself against another, is like a man laying a hundred to one who cannot spare the hundred. It is not worth a man’s while.… Goldsmith is in this state. When he contends, if he gets the better it is a very little addition to a man of his literary reputation: if he does not get the better, he is miserably vexed.

  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:

  Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian: for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

  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 no
t 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.

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  The Heroic Self

  THE self that Boswell chronicled was notable for its wit and oddity, but had nothing of the heroic. The sovereign metaphor for modern man’s heroic aspiration and frustration remained the medieval legend of the megalomaniac Dr. Faustus. Goethe, who gave this spirit its enduring form, was himself an allegory of modern frustration, of limitless hopes and limited achievement. He was unsatisfied in love, experimental in all the arts, skeptical of all philosophies, yet hoped finally to grasp the world through science. In a Europe dividing into national languages, specializing Science into sciences, he stood for the universal man. Also in the modern mode he was the celebrity sage, known across Europe less for what he did than for what he was or was reputed to be.

  At the age of twenty-five Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) became notorious in 1774 for his short novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the form of letters it tells how the eager Werther falls hopelessly in love with Charlotte, already betrothed to Albert. In Albert’s absence Werther can enjoy her company only for a few weeks. On Albert’s return Werther withdraws, Albert and Charlotte are married, and Werther in despair ends his own life with a pistol. “I am not the only unfortunate,” wrote the young Werther. “All men are disappointed in their hopes and cheated out of their expectations.”

  This spirit that luxuriated in its own misery and was already beginning to stalk Europe found a voice in Goethe’s little book. It became “Wertherism,” the self-indulgent melancholy of youth. Concocted of the German ingredients of Weltschmerz (pain or dissatisfaction with the world) and Ichschmerz (pain or dissatisfaction with the self), it had wide appeal. Two years earlier Goethe had already promoted the closely related Sturm and Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, which had taken its title from a drama of the American Revolution by a German playwright who had been a childhood friend of Goethe. Inspired by the love of nature and by Rousseau’s writings, the “Wertherites” rebelled against literary conventions. Their mentor Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) drew them to Homer, to Gothic architecture and German folksongs. Shakespeare was their idol and they called for a German counterpart. Goethe had attracted attention by his try at Shakespearean grandeur in his play Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Götz of the Iron Hand) (1773) about a sixteenth-century German Robin Hood.

  Enthusiasm for heroic folk figures like Götz was one thing, suicide quite another. And Goethe’s Werther seemed to prescribe suicide as a way of joining the international community of Weltschmerz. At the request of the theological faculty in Leipzig, where the book had been published, it was promptly banned by the City Council, and its translation even in Denmark was prohibited. Across Europe despondent young men, not quite suicidal, showed they were with-it by wearing Werther’s blue frock coat, buff waistcoat, and yellow breeches. Tea sets showed scenes from the novel, ladies perfumed themselves with Eau de Werther, wore Werther jewelry, Werther gloves, and carried Werther fans. Poems, plays, and operas about Werther appeared in London and Vienna. The vogue survived long enough to evoke Thackeray’s own mock “Sorrows of Werther,” which ended:

  Charlotte, having seen his body

  Borne before her on a shutter,

  Like a well-conducted person

  Went on cutting bread and butter.

  The tie of Werther to the cult of suicide was not entirely imaginary. In January 1778 Christine von Lassberg, deserted by her lover and with a copy of Werther in her pocket, drowned herself in the river Ilm behind Goethe’s house in Weimar. Journalists and novelists somehow tied all current suicides to Werther.

  The story of the novel was rooted in the facts of Goethe’s personal miseries. In the spring of 1772 when he visited Wetzlar, forty miles north of Frankfurt, he had been cap
tivated by the bright and beautiful nineteen-year-old Charlotte (Lotte) Buff, then engaged to her fellow townsman Christian Kestner. Goethe took a liking to Kestner and in what Goethe later described as “a genuine German idyll” the three enjoyed that summer together. When Goethe declared his love to Lotte, she rebuffed him and he left Wetzlar precipitately. His farewell note to her ended, “I am alone now, and may shed my tears. I leave you both to your happiness, and will not be gone from your hearts.”

  That October 1772 Goethe heard an unfounded rumor that one of his Wetzlar friends had committed suicide. He wrote his friend Kestner, “I honor the deed.… I hope I shall never trouble my friends with news of such a kind.” Before the end of the month another young friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, really committed suicide. As Goethe recalled, he was a gentle youth who “wore the clothes that were usual, in imitation of the English, in northern Germany: a blue frock-coat, a buff leather waistcoat and breeches.” With a brooding disposition, he liked to draw deserted landscapes, and had a passion for another man’s wife. Snubbed by Wetzlar society, he had actually written a defense of suicide. His beloved asked her husband to forbid him their house. At that point, Jerusalem borrowed Christian Kestner’s pistol for a pretended trip. Just after midnight, seated in his room he shot himself. The account that Goethe received of the burial from Kestner ended, “No priest attended him”—the very words with which Goethe ended his Werther.