The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  It is always a sensation mingling wonder and threat. When he addresses the duke again, then, it is with just this sort of blind urgency, a juggler tossing china plates in a suddenly lightless room.

  “Of course it is difficult, my Lord,” he hears himself begin, a bit sharply. “It is as difficult a thing as may be imagined. It is asking the world. And yet I should think your Grace’s interest might do it, if any interest in London might.”

  “My good Boswell, such—”

  “Please, let us not toy with one another, sir, but speak as two men. I ask you to allow me that favor, that dignity. You have it in your power to do this thing. That, neither one of us should deny. That is reality.”

  Beneath the hat, the duke’s untended brows have dropped by way of warning, but Boswell continues. “My Lord, a state of suspense and hanging on is a most disagreeable thing. I have heard people talk of it, and I have read in the poets of it, but now I feel it. And I despise it, with all my soul.”

  “I can understand this, sir. No man enjoys it. I enjoy it even less, I assure you.”

  “I despise it,” Boswell repeats distinctly. “It just comes to this, my Lord. If Your Grace is so generous as to make a push for me, I believe the thing may do. It is true I offer no money, but I would serve George the Third. And I would serve him in London, because under this king the arts will flourish, merit will flourish, and I feel—God forgive me for saying it of myself, sir—but I feel that I have a touch of genius in me.”

  The duke lets a smile play openly on his lips, then murmurs, “Genius! Oh, my dear sir, really. Are we now to speak of genius in this thing?” He chortles softly around his pipe stem, shifting his weight in the cold.

  Boswell hesitates, then pushes stubbornly past the little mockery. “Yes, indeed I think one should speak of genius, my Lord. One might better ask why anyone speaks above a whisper of anything else.”

  This last remark seems to have flicked the duke on the raw, and he says nothing in return. Boswell quickly drops the little volume of Johnson he has been holding into the pocket of his coat, and bows his head. He can feel it all going wrong somehow, feel the china plates slipping past his fingertips in the dark.

  But he speaks a last time in any event. “I desire to use that genius to elevate my king, and my country. And my patrons, sir. I truly believe I shall have it in my power one day to repay the favor, the great favor, I now ask. To celebrate your name in a way that will make you remember this evening—this very conversation, tonight, this moment now—with a most genuine satisfaction. But I cannot pay for that favor. I ask for your faith, my Lord.”

  The duke snorts, shakes his head a bit, then begins the process of tamping out his pipe and replacing it deliberately in his right coat pocket. Boswell can only take the silence as a prolonged snub, and he stands awkwardly as the man stows his pipe and then gestures formally toward the light spilling from Northumberland House.

  Together they grind down the frozen gravel path in silence.

  The evening is suddenly in shambles, and, as he picks his way through the ice, Boswell could almost burst out laughing at his own idiocy. Has he really just now been speaking seriously of his own genius, he wonders, staring past the trim of the duke’s hat to the starless sky beyond. Has he actually just been menacing the Duke of Queensberry with his own future prominence? It seems impossible to believe.

  And then the duke stops and turns, with what seems like a hint of truculence. “And what does the Great Johnson say of genius, might I ask?”

  Boswell halts himself, again looks the duke in the face. He thinks for a moment, sensing an opportunity, but his mind remains entirely blank, and he can come up with nothing. “I have no good idea, sir. But I dine with him tomorrow. With your leave I will put the question to him directly then.”

  The duke looks startled, then snorts again and turns away, as though his point has been proven.

  IT IS SOME ten minutes later, as Boswell is retracing his listless way through the great vestibule to the entrance onto the Strand, that he hears heels tapping behind him on the marble floor. Clearly fluent in the language of these particular heels, the servant leading him pricks up his ears.

  Boswell turns, and it is in fact the Countess, sweeping up behind him as quickly as her Friday-night dignity allows. She grips the satin flounces of her dress carefully in one hand, but she does not stop before him, coming instead directly to his side, and then to his ear, so that Boswell can feel her short little breaths for an oddly intimate moment.

  “I have come away to tell you, Mr. Boswell, to save myself the trouble of a letter. Oh, I’ve tousled my cap so! But can you guess what the duke has said to me just this moment, as he passed behind my chair on his return from the garden? Can you guess, my dear sir? ‘Well, madam,’ said he, ‘it seems as though this Boswell of yours may have merit indeed.’ And then he quite patted my shoulder, as though to reassure me. Oh, is it not propitious, Mr. Boswell? Is it not as I said earlier?”

  Here she grasps his arm, more tightly perhaps than might strictly be allowed, but not a great deal more. “We shall do it together, you and I, though it take the full year your father has allotted you, Mr. Boswell! Have faith, sir. We will win him to it yet.”

  And then—almost before he realizes it—Boswell finds himself out on the ice-hushed street, moving into the thin crowds collected in the Square without perceiving the motion of his legs and feet beneath him. He hears singing from the Golden Cross across the street, a wash of ragged voices, and he is buoyant, airborne.

  This dreamy flight lasts some four slow blocks, before a small woman in a dirty yellow bonnet steps up alongside him in the dark. She matches his pace for five or six strides and then, when Boswell doesn’t shy, casually takes his arm.

  Boswell’s mood being what it is, he pats her arm in his and walks this way for another five or six strides—smiling down at her, and she smiling back with clear dark eyes and good white teeth— before stopping finally to detach himself.

  But as he does so, the woman executes a deft, practiced little figure, taking his hand at the turn and drawing it firmly alongside her own, up into the bodice of her dress, so that in a heartbeat Boswell’s four cold fingers are nestled along the warm smooth side of her breast, the nipple frank against his palm. The woman presses her own hand tightly to the outside of the dress, holding this arrangement steady.

  Only then does she speak, in a whisper. “Please, but my legs are frozen, sir. Just as cold as two slips of ice. They need warming, truly.”

  Boswell begins to draw his hand back, but the woman presses harder against the side of her bodice, holding him steady. Boswell lowers his own voice to a whisper. “Take yourself inside where it’s warm. The Golden Cross is not so far away.”

  “You come to the Cross with me, sir, and I’ll go where you will. And do what you will.”

  “I shall send you a coin to keep you company,” Boswell says, and then in a surplus of generosity, “as well as another coin to keep that coin company. I have an early morning engagement. With a great man. It cannot be missed.”

  “We’ve time before then,” the young woman argues, looking defiantly into his eyes, then tightening her hold on his hand. It is the sort of demanding approach that he likes best from such women, and on another night he would more than likely allow himself the pleasure of yielding, if only to some furtive, partial pleasure. But if he is certain of anything concerning the revolutions of the last half hour, it is that the very mention of Johnson’s name has done him some sort of unquantifiable good with the Duke of Queensberry, perhaps as much as secured his commission outright.

  And that conviction has already begun to expand into something more extensive and profound: he can feel Johnson’s moral influence over him already beginning, feel it working in advance of their actual Christmas Day meeting, and the net effect is like a smaller, more compact iteration of his Moffat vow of chastity.

  Because Boswell knows suddenly that he will deny himself this woman standing
before him. He begins to suspect already that he will deny himself the consummation of his painstakingly wrought affair with Louisa as well.

  When his hand is his own again, he returns it deliberately to his right coat pocket and places it on his small calfskin copy of Johnson’s Rambler essays, and only there and then do his fingers curl protectively.

  And when he leaves the woman with a three-penny piece, at last, he does so not to buy her willingness when next he runs across her, not to keep her in some sort of vague potential readiness, as he might have done last night or last week; he does so because he believes her when she says that her legs are cold, and—in the abstemious glow of his meeting tomorrow with Samuel Johnson—Boswell would actually have her go and warm them.

  15

  As you read this note, you sit at your breakfast table, easy in loose dressing gown, the morning of the day you are to meet the celebrated Samuel Johnson. Breakfast neat in honor, toast, rolls, and butter only. Refuse all jams, to show you may forgo any distinct pleasure at will. As you eat toast, think on true London authors: men of wit, praise, pleasure, and profit.

  Yesterday you brought your first and second grand enterprises fairly to the brink: your true London love affair, and your commission. Today the last enterprise of the three: attaining the acquaintance, the general good opinion, and the correspondence of the author of the dictionary of the English tongue itself.

  Let no Scotticism cross your lips; talk seldom, but that scrupulously best fine English.

  Deny not your country, but hold it lightly, fondly, the way a man now astride a stallion speaks of a childhood pony.

  You have committed much Johnson to memory, but while every man would have his words memorialized, no man can hear them quoted in company without affecting displeasure. Bide time; wait until alone. Then run the man’s words naturally into your own, that he may appreciate depth of his impact upon your mind, soul.

  Should you have opportunity, also tell him the story of how aword in his Dictionary angered father, gave birth to secret language between brothers. “You see, Sir,” you may remark when the story is finished, “how your work has moulded not merely a man, but a family entire.” This you may perform before the rest of the company, be they however many.

  Have shoes wiped, hair powdered and dressed, sword sharpened, polished, and belted in the rakish way of a military gentleman. Better that you should enter late, as a novelty, when he has met and conversed already with the rest of the company.

  Better that you should stand out clearly: a young man of family, a would-be soldier, a one-day Laird, and—above all else—a Rasselas in search of his Imlac.

  Boswell finishes the morning’s third reading of the Johnson memorandum just as he rounds Drury Lane, at a bit before noon, and passes quickly into Russell Street. Although his fingers are stiff with the chill, they are well-practiced, and Boswell has no need to oversee them as they return edges to intricate folds and finally cause the sheet to disappear again into his deep fob pocket. Instead, he keeps his eye on Drury Lane Theater as he turns the corner. More than once, Boswell has stood outside Davies’s bookshop and watched actresses come and go at noontime. But none are about today.

  Just beyond the Christmas quiet of the Rose Tavern, Boswell lets himself into Davies’s. Although the shop, too, is closed, Davies prefers that his guests track their dirt over the store’s planks rather than the rugs of the townhouse attached to the rear. The French door connecting the structures stands open, and Boswell can make out the play of the fire beyond and the placid movements of Davies’s guests.

  He pauses in the half-lit shop for a moment, among the tables and stacks of books, breathing manuscript dust. He can’t help but feel that there is something fitting to his approaching Johnson through this gateway of the printed word, and he wants suddenly to slow the moment down.

  In fact, Boswell is about to actually close his eyes when Davies— some fragment of his attention always on the shop—steps out of the house.

  Even as booksellers go, Davies is disarming: the businessman’s wig is a good ten years out of date, but scrupulously powdered and tied, over a nose too large by half, the mouth always open, talking, gossiping, laughing. “Mr. Boswell!” he cries, seeing Boswell stopped out among the shelves. “Oh, but the shop is closed, my young friend, quite closed! Come in, come in!”

  Coming forward and shaking hands, Boswell confides, “I was gathering my courage, Mr. Davies, here in the quiet.”

  “Courage? Have you need of courage to face your friends, sir?”

  “Not old friends, but new.” Boswell gives a small smile. “It was Mr. Johnson who made me hesitate.”

  But at the mention of Johnson, Davies suddenly squeezes his eyes closed and looks pained. “I had meant to dash a note off to you. Johnson has gone to Oxford. He’s sent his regrets. Too bad for all of us in the company, I’m afraid.” He hesitates, and then—seeing actual, solid disappointment on Boswell’s face—maneuvers hurriedly. “But there was a line in the letter, more or less to you. He has written near the end of his note, ‘Tell your young man of prestigious family that I shall make his acquaintance as soon as I return to the City, and you shall bring us together, Davies.’ It was nicely done for him to remember you so particularly in that way, I thought.”

  Boswell laughs at the praise, and follows Davies into the light and warmth of the parlor, but the news of Johnson’s absence has struck him more powerfully than he would have imagined. He is not merely disappointed, but oddly hurt, he realizes.

  And so—after a round of introductions and a brief, strained attempt to share the mood of the other guests—Boswell allows himself to collapse into one of Davies’s deep armchairs, away from the small crush. The ivy hung at intervals about the room looks wilted to his eye.

  Only belatedly does he realize that the companion chair is occupied as well.

  “Looks like Davies has lost both his lions this year,” the other young man remarks, surveying the room contentedly.

  Davies is very much the sort of host to list off his guests to other guests, and Boswell is himself the sort to remember those lists effortlessly: the man in the other armchair is one Oliver Goldsmith, maker of translations, pamphlets, letters, and also, according to Davies, both a rising poet and a so-so novelist. Goldsmith’s face is badly pockmarked and slightly popeyed, and, for a man in his early thirties who has chosen to wear his own dark hair, he has surprisingly little of it. He is bald and homely, in a pair of words, but there is a certain sleek avidity at play in his features that Boswell finds immediately intriguing.

  “I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning, sir.”

  “Old Sheridan was to come today, as was Johnson.” Another sly look. “Both have clearly decided to eat their Yule doughs elsewhere.”

  Somewhere beneath the casual London accent, Boswell can trace the faintest suggestion of an Irish brogue, and he immediately begins to monitor his own accent more closely. “So Davies said earlier. I confess I was genuinely disappointed. I had hoped to meet Johnson today and sample the man’s world-famous conversation.”

  “Infamous, I suppose you mean. You might as well regret missing a savage beating in a blind alleyway.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Goldsmith takes a sip of his wine and considers the matter, then goes on. “That Johnson’s conversation has overwhelming force, no man may doubt; but it is just the force of a cudgel, sir. He makes his point, you disagree, he shouts you deaf—quod erat demonstrandum. There is no true subtlety to speak of, nothing of finesse. All men agree on this as well, although not when Johnson is by,” Goldsmith adds, and winks.

  “You are joking, certainly.”

  “I’m afraid I must remain the authority on whether I was or was not joking, sir.”

  “But Johnson’s essays and arguments have always struck me as inexpressibly subtle, as well as forcefully made.”

  Goldsmith sits back and lifts his eyebrows, folding his long-fingered hands over his small belly. He picks
a bit of lint from his vest and seems to choose his words with special care. “Indeed. Well, neither a man’s eyesight nor his taste are susceptible to argument, I suppose.”

  Boswell is mulling this last comment—deciding whether and how to take some vague offense—when Davies suddenly raises his voice above the drone of conversation. “May I have your attention, esteemed ladies and gentlemen!” he calls loudly, then claps his hands three times. “May I have complete silence, please!”

  As individual conversations are hushed, and talk dies by turn in each corner of the parlor, Goldsmith whispers to Boswell, “Now we will all of us pay for our wine.”

  “How so?”

  “Davies was denied his Christmas as a child in dreary Scotland, and since coming to London he has gone mad for holiday games and treats. Trust me, you shall see. We shall have the cutting of the Christmas cheese itself if we are not careful.”

  Standing before the small fireplace, Davies raises his glass in the sudden quiet, and silently the company does likewise. “My friends,” Davies begins gravely, “we come now to a most solemn and ancient element of our Christmas day festivities. Our ancestors knew that revelry was crucial to a holiday such as this.”

  Davies allows laughter to percolate, then continues. “And so they created an office whereby the cheer and the hijinks of their progeny might be both stimulated and regulated down through the ages. This officer they held in greatest esteem, an esteem reflected in his most terrible and noble honorific.”