The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  My own memory is not nearly so obliging, and I have devised no systems to compel it. Since leaving the Plymouth Hospital, I have embraced the absent places in my own mind, with mostly quite satisfactory results.

  It is not unlike a progress by Hogarth, this new memory of mine: the six or eight engravings gradually tell a composite story, but one marked by unavoidable gaps in time. And yet the viewer does not experience those gaps as destructive of the narrative, but constructive, rather.

  In the first panel of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, for example, Moll Hackabout is fresh from the country, clean of dress, carrying a gift of a dead goose in a basket for her London relations. Of course, the London relations have forgotten her, and she is left alone at the station, where she falls prey to the Bawd. That is where Hogarth stops the action of his first panel, just as the hand of the Bawd is about to stroke the cheek of the virgin. Just before the touch that will seal her fate.

  Yet by the second panel, the pox has already marked the virgin’s face, and she is now more than shrewd enough to cuckold her elderly keeper.

  Between those two images lie events more shocking than Hogarth could bring himself to represent, and yet those events are not lost, for they are indelible. They are understood, and palpable in logic.

  IT IS MAY the 21st. I am walking down a hill, and my memory of it is sharp and bright as a straight razor because it is a hill I walk most every day now: Fish Street Hill, sloping down gently to the Bridge. I walk on the west side of the street, the better to see the Monument to the Great Fire, thrusting up two hundred feet into the black sky, over the carriages and fish-sellers passing beneath.

  Why am I walking to London Bridge? Because there are days when the fish stink on the Hill—and the borrowed fish stink wafting down from Billingsgate—accumulates and seeps into my room at the Starr Inn and makes me remember that my room has no windows. And I will slowly begin to suffocate. My eyes will begin to water. The air thick with fish: dead, alive, spoiled, fresh, but fish.

  And on those nights, when the sun is three hours down and the Bridge’s lamps a dull yellow phosphorescent string away over the water, I will walk out onto the Bridge simply to feel the air moving over me. Of course, that wind over the bridge brings its own stink, but at least it is air in motion. Although it smells of fish now, and smelled of fish yesterday, there is just a chance that the wind may not smell of fish tomorrow.

  Sometimes I walk the length of the bridge and back again, eight or ten times in the lamplit dark, before I feel I can return to my room with no windows.

  The City expanded London Bridge only recently, both above and below. Now it is wide indeed—well above forty feet—a thoroughfare in size and aspect. And like a street it has its own rights of way, and things that may or may not be done.

  For instance, at regular intervals, large hooded stone alcoves rise up over the railings, and in these alcoves are nearly always men of one sort or another, watching passersby, or matching pennies, or sipping gin with an eye out for the Watch.

  It is best not to walk too close to these alcoves, but if one must, it is best to avert one’s eyes. Some of the alcoves contain beggars rolled in cast-off wool, some contain footpads, and some men and women looking for a place to fumble with their clothing and exchange money out of the light.

  And some contain decent men seeking nothing more than a minute’s peace. The paradox, of course, is that one can only know which is which by drawing close to an alcove and peering within. And then, as often as not, it is too late.

  So it is best to walk as near the center of the bridge as one may without being run down by the occasional carriage crashing through the quiet and the dark.

  But on this particular night in my memory, as I am walking along and as I approach the south end of the Bridge, I do look into an alcove, and I do see a man sitting quietly and alone on the stone bench that rings the interior.

  Why I have looked into this alcove and no other, I cannot say. Because here is where my memories begin to find their connectivity through logic and intuition alone.

  It is dark in the alcove, and this man I cannot see distinctly. But he is there, and he means me no harm.

  And then, in the next instant, I am not walking south on the bridge, but north, back toward the Starr Inn, and this man is walking at my side.

  How he is walking beside me is important, and here again my memory is brilliantly clear. He does not walk as near as a friend, nor beyond arm’s length, as would a stranger. He walks slowly, just away off my elbow, his breath audible and deep, with a touch of a rasp, an occasional, periodic clearing of the throat. It is perfectly evident to me that we are walking by mutual agreement, and I am just a touch in the lead because the agreement is that I will take this man somewhere.

  And because I then lead him across the Bridge and up Fish Street Hill, through the Starr’s entranceway, between its stables, and across the smutty courtyard to my tiny room, I can only surmise that this is what I have agreed to do.

  The why is unknown, but there may be many reasons for my doing what I am doing. Perhaps the man off my elbow is a countryman who has not eaten in days, a Scot denied any basic English comfort. Perhaps he is a soldier I have recognized from my regiment, a familiar face picked out in the gloom.

  Suffice it to say that there are reasons, and I am confident of them as I walk. The man is no stranger, this man beside me.

  Only in my room, with the door closed and the man seated before me at the flimsy table, do I realize who it is I have befriended. The wick takes flame, and the face can suddenly hold nothing back: it is Samuel Johnson.

  I know it is Johnson, because I have seen engravings of his face since I was a boy. I know it is Johnson because he has been pointed out to me on the street, and once the previous week—after I found out that James had begun to socialize with the man—I trailed Johnson from a coffeehouse to his lodgings in the Temple.

  It is he, and no doubt: the large, pointed, shrewd nose, the brooding lips, and dark, arching brows over eyes that look bruised with fatigue. A gargoyle’s features, fleshy, piercing, mutton-fed. Eyes that have been strained over a book until they are a sad, cloudy brown.

  It is he: the marks of the King’s Evil, the wig worn carelessly and out of fashion. The hand occasionally trembling, the shoulders moving, as though beyond his control.

  We drink a glass of wine at the table, and this seems to calm his hands. His voice begins to come deep and strong, untroubled by the tics and gutturals that punctuated his first few sentences.

  The drinking itself is not what has been agreed upon, however, and we are sitting at the table still only because a question has been asked and not yet answered somehow.

  But my last memory of that first meeting—the last engraving in the sequence—is this: the candle is out, sending the smell of fire curling through the room, and I have pulled off my clothes down to my linen. I am lying in my small bed, the coverlet drawn up over my chest. Near my sitting chair, I hear Johnson removing his own coat and shirt and shoes; and then the planks of the cot creak, and he is lying beside me in the dark. Without hesitation, his arms come around me, and there we lie, together. He pats my hair with a heavy hand, the way one reassures oneself that a strange dog is friendly after all, and then the big arms lock around me once more.

  And that is all.

  I fall to sleep in his arms, and there is none of the sudden insistent hunger of Gentleman, none of that sort of satisfaction, although I have half-suspected all along that this was the question unanswered, that this was the understanding reached somehow in the stone alcove on the Bridge.

  No, Johnson lies with his arms about me, protectively so, and he and I fall eventually to sleep. Quietly, easily, contentedly. And there is nothing strange in the feeling at all.

  My brother has been afraid of ghosts and spirits all his life, for instance; and to this day, if he attends a public hanging or if an acquaintance dies abruptly, he will show up at the home of a close friend and ask to share
his bed. Because he cannot bear to be alone. Because he is afraid. Because there may in fact be ghosts, for all James knows. Idiosyncratic, but not so very strange for all that.

  And so maybe that is all there is to it, I tell myself. Maybe Johnson and I are two men who have seen enough of London to know that more than a few of its spirits are restless, and we would have one another’s company through the small hours. For although we are strangers in one way, in another I have known him well for most of my reading life.

  One thing is certain: this first time is not the last time that I will meet him on the Bridge, nor the last time he will share my bed. But never will there be anything more to it than this, this warmth, this safety and this contentment.

  This chastity.

  PART FOUR

  All Hail the Lord

  of Misrule

  5 January 1763

  I was agreeably surprised at breakfast with the arrival of my brother John in good health and spirits, although he had been for three months lately in a most terrible way. I walked with him in the Park. He talked sensibly and well.

  I then went to Lady Betty’s. I was rather in the low-spirited humour still. She was by herself. I talked of my schemes. I owned my unsettled views, which indeed are only so at times, as I have preserved almost an uninterrupted constancy to the Guards. She asked me to dine. I told her I now had money to support me till Friday, was not obliged by a dinner, and therefore would come. I went and had some elegant conversation with Louisa; told her all was fixed for Saturday. She sweetly acquiesced. I like her better and better every day.

  —From Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763

  London, England

  Friday, the 24th of December, 1762

  9:17 A.M.

  11

  THE WINTER SUN has been shimmering weakly behind the curtains for the last hour or so, but what brings the drowsing twenty-two-year-old James Boswell suddenly alert is the conviction that someone or something is watching him. How he knows this, he has no idea; his eyes have yet to open, and he hears nothing out of the ordinary, a bird cooing beyond the glass, Downing Street two pair of stairs below his window. But the feeling has now flowered into certainty. And there is no way around the inference that this observer must be positioned somewhere inside his own bedchamber.

  From his prone perspective, peering down the length of his bed, Boswell can see his own stout shape obscured by three blankets and the bed’s dull red moreen cover. Beyond that—framed by the posts of the bedstead—the door to his chamber stands inexplicably ajar. His left leg has escaped the blankets and now dangles in the chill air.

  And Boswell can make out something else hovering just at the level of that leg: the white ordinary cap of his landlord’s maid, Molly. For a long instant the cap does not move; then slowly it tilts, as though the wearer were bettering her angle on something strange or confusing.

  Boswell remains motionless, but eventually he realizes that Molly—a somewhat prim, church-going Londoner in her early fifties—can only be squatted down on her haunches, three or four feet from his bedside, staring at his ankle.

  He has a good idea what she is looking at, and, as it happens to be something he has always preferred remain unseen, Boswell yanks the leg suddenly back under the covers. Molly gives a little cry, before scuttling backward out of the room almost faster than his eye can follow. Only when she is upright and safely in the parlor does she call back through the open door: “So sorry, sir. But I—the door was standing open, y’see.”

  He closes his eyes again. “How came the door to be open then, Molly?”

  “That I’m sure I don’t know, sir.”

  Boswell suspects that he himself failed to shut the door before retiring; he was up very late the night before, composing a series of long memoranda to himself about today’s events. At one point, he lay down to catch a half hour’s nap and apparently slept like a stone through the night. He says nothing of this to Molly, however. Since Boswell took these rooms a month and a half ago, Mr. Terrie’s maid has managed silently each morning to communicate an air of mild disapproval. But there is a delicious reversal somehow in their situations this morning, and Boswell is inclined to protract the moment.

  “Molly, you may rest assured I will tell no one about this morning,” Boswell pauses delicately, “your coming into my bedchamber. It shall remain just an amusing story between ourselves. Never a word to Mr. Terrie on the subject. You have my Christmas Eve morning promise, Molly.”

  The maid pulls the door quickly closed without so much as a parting look, and Boswell falls back to savor his favorite slice of the day. But this morning, before sinking back into the pillows, he is moved to throw back the covers and haul out the leg in question again. He takes his thick ankle in his hand and brings it up into the morning light falling through the window.

  There, in the tender skin just above his heel, just below the hollow at his outer ankle-bone and just inside his Achilles’ tendon, placed with remarkable precision, are the tiny black strokes, now more than seven years old. The wounds themselves healed long ago, and the dark marks have taken on a dull muted look, as his body has gradually come to terms with the ink.

  In the tender hollow at the outer ankle-bone of his left leg, Boswell carries one word of two letters: NO.

  In a roundabout way, the word inked onto Boswell’s ankle is the fruit of his first nervous breakdown, ten years ago, when he was twelve. He awoke in his Edinburgh bed that morning to find that he hadn’t the energy to rise—neither the physical energy nor the spiritual. He felt as though he would prefer to die, and said so. His younger brother John finally burst into tears and ran for their parents.

  The doctors found a rash around both his ankles. Boswell was diagnosed with an overtaxed constitution and packed off to the spa town of Moffat to take the waters for six weeks.

  Moffat proved to be a border town of 1,500 inhabitants, the size of a watch fob to an Edinburgh boy, its primary spring housed in a tiny stone hut surrounded by a great lot of rural nothing. Visitors had to walk the long dirty Well Road up into the hills, and then scramble up and down the steep banks of the Hindsgill to take the waters.

  But the boy James was too enervated to scramble. He spent his first afternoon in town lying across a stiff narrow bed, head throbbing, while the Reverend John Dun, his tutor, saw to his own carefree business about town.

  The dull weight in his head was enough, over the course of two days, to make James flirt with the idea of suicide. In his darkened room, he made God a series of desperate offers, to join the clergy, to eat a meatless diet, to build a showy new chapel when he should inherit his father’s estate. He offered finally, on his third night there in Moffat, just before collapsing into sleep, his chastity.

  And the next morning something miraculous occurred: for the first time, he felt strong enough to hike to the well, and within two days his depression had lifted and melted entirely away. The scurf vanished magically from his ankles.

  His relief gave him a sunny social energy he had never known, and within a week Boswell had become the pampered favorite of the young married set in Moffat, with an open invitation to their high teas and low whist tables. Several of the men had made their new money in coal, and their wives were well dressed and bored. Boswell, with his Edinburgh manners, became their prodigy. It didn’t matter that he was a child by comparison; he could make these fashionable adults laugh out loud, and occasionally nudge an angry husband back to a sulking wife. He found that he could read all of their interwoven emotions for him and for one another like a penny pamphlet.

  Only later, during the ensuing years, did it dawn on him that not everyone could read these sorts of penny pamphlets, that he was somehow emotionally literate in ways that others were not. That this quality made it easy for him to step through the scrim of people’s words into the actualities of their feelings. And that this in turn could make some genuine brand of intimacy available in hours, rather than years.

  That he had a gift, a
gift to counteract the family curse of hypochondria.

  And so when the chaise finally rolled out of Moffat, the six-week cure an astounding success, he understood with perfect clarity that God had upheld His end of the bargain. Boswell returned to Parliament Square and set about upholding his own vow, but by his sixteenth birthday he was doing so with greater and greater effort.

  He wrote himself increasingly long, stern letters—furious exhortations—but by almost inverse proportions the documents seemed less and less effective. And then, just as the stern notes threatened to become completely useless, he discovered a new form of writing altogether.

  He was strolling down the Leith Walk in Edinburgh, killing time, in what he called his See-Everything Suit: a jumble of discarded caddy’s clothing he’d put together for himself at fifteen, a disguise to allow him to go out into the city and see all of the things that fail to happen when a man of quality happens near. The Leith Walk had been of interest to him for months, with its odd shops and nearby gibbet, the Gallow Lee.

  In the doorway of a tiny wonder-shop, beside a window full of stuffed squirrels and a live parrot, stood a bald bronze-skinned man, arms crossed over his chest. Boswell noticed as he passed that one of the hairy hands bore the image of a thistle. It was artfully done, the plant’s stiff leaves shaded like a fine print.

  The shop owner begrudged a smile and put out his hand, and it was only then that it occurred to Boswell that the ink was not on the hand, but in it.

  “’Tis very old Scots, this sort o’ pouncing o’ the skin,” the man said, tapping the thistle, “a thing from the pechts in the Highlands. There’s folks still know the skeel, where I come frae.”