by James Atlas
How much shade was there in the Life? On occasion Boswell showed his subject to disadvantage, but his criticisms tended to be mild and gently expressed. (“Notwithstanding the high veneration which I entertained for Dr. Johnson, I was sensible that he was sometimes a little actuated by the spirit of contradiction.”) There was much light and little shade. And that is the Johnson we know today. But it’s not Johnson. It’s Boswell’s Johnson.
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They met up in sewage-drenched Edinburgh, where it was the habit of its citizens to empty their chamber pots onto the street. (“Sir, I smell you in the dark,” said Dr. Johnson with good-natured annoyance.) Travel was rough in those days: rudimentary lodgings, poor roads, crummy food, and genuine hazards. At one point, they had a quarrel when Boswell rode ahead to secure lodgings, leaving Johnson out in the dusk on a wobbly horse. “I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh and then parted, and never spoke to you no more,” Johnson reproved him.
In consultation with a minister encountered on their way west, they had worked out a route from Inverness, by way of Fort Augustus, to the palindromic Glenelg, Skye, Mull, Lorn, and Inverary. Accompanied by Boswell’s servant, Joseph, they set forth in mid-August, traveling by post chaise; when they got to Inverness, they switched horses, struggling over the muddy terrain in terrible weather.
Dr. Johnson dressed in Scotland as he did in England: “He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes with twisted-hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy grey wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles.”*9 They found lodgings where they could: at the home of Sir Alexander Macdonald, a member of the ancient clan on the Isle of Skye, there were no teaspoons and they had to use their fingers; Sir Alexander stuck his fork into a pudding and hogged it all himself. Their next stop, a farmhouse not far away, at least had tongs for sugar, and they dined well: “We had for supper a large dish of minced beef collops,*10 a large dish of fricassee of fowl, a dish called fried chicken or something like it.” And so on through many delectable-sounding courses, served on a white tablecloth, with napkins, china, and silver spoons. “It was really an agreeable meeting.”
Scotland was a mixed experience. Sailing in a tippy boat to the island of Coll, they nearly drowned; in Eigg, they came upon “a very large cave in which all the inhabitants were smoked to death by the Macleods”; in Ulva, they were shown a room with nice beds but broken windows that let in rain to muddy the clay floor. But they enjoyed each other’s company—Boswell in his role as verbal portraitist of Doctor Mor, the Big Doctor, as the Scots called him; Johnson as the Great Cham,*11 sounding off on everything from the derivation of words to the efficacy of different types of shovels, the taste of various game birds to “the nature of milk.” Boswell recorded as much as he could get down in the thick notebooks he’d brought along “to glean Johnsoniana.” He was practicing for the work ahead.
Subject and biographer were well suited, co-conspirators in an enterprise that required tacit collusion. “Each is a creation of the other,” noted Adam Sisman in Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, his fine account of the writing of the Life. While Boswell was transcribing Johnson’s speech, Johnson was commenting on Boswell’s project. “He read a great deal of my journal in the little book which I had from him, and was pleased; for he said, ‘I wish the books were twice as big’ ”—in other words, had more about him. “He helped me to supply blanks which I had left in first writing it, when I was not quite sure of what he had said; and he corrected any mistakes that I had made.” The future biographer was so assiduous in his labors that he sometimes got burned out and took the night off: “I did not exert myself to get Dr. Johnson to talk, that I might not have the trouble of writing down his conversation.” But when he wasn’t there, Dr. Johnson complained of missing his company.
In effect, Boswell’s masterwork was a collaboration. “Dr. Johnson told me there were two faults in my Journal: one was expatiating too much on the luxury of the little-house at Talisker.” The other was about some clergyman they encountered: “ ‘I did not say the man’s hair could not be well dressed because he had not a clean shirt, but because he was bald.’ ” Here the subject is correcting the biographer: a dangerous precedent.
In this context, with his interlocutor setting the scene, Johnson could sound as if he were speaking for the ages: “If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still.” “However bad any man’s existence may be, every man would rather have it than not exist at all” (“all this delivered with manly eloquence in a boat on the sea,” wrote Boswell, setting the scene, “upon a fine autumn Sunday morning”). There is a preening self-consciousness in these proclamations, but how could there not be, with Boswell hovering beside his pompous subject, even supplying the props? When Johnson drinks a rare dram of Scotch and leaves a drop, Boswell asks him to pour it into his glass “that I might say we have drunk whiskey together.”
Johnson pretended to chafe at always having to be onstage. “You have but two subjects: yourself and me,” he once complained. “I am sick of both.” But he was more than willing to play his part. Prancing about his room in a blue bonnet, roaring Highland ballads, grousing about the crude table manners of the Scottish and the lack of privies, he was a character in search of an author. And he didn’t have far to look.
Dr. Johnson published his account of their travels, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, two years after their return to London, and it has “the settled flavor of wisdom precipitated, conclusions pondered in tranquil recollection,” wrote Israel Shenker, for many years The New York Times’s premonitory obit writer, in his charming travelogue, In the Footsteps of Boswell and Johnson. Boswell waited another decade to publish his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., but his book was “livelier, chattier” than Johnson’s, in Shenker’s view, and had “the vividness of fresh reporting.” Thus did the biographer, not for the first or last time, trump his subject.*12*
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It was the summer of 1992, and our children—now five and nine—were out of school for vacation. But we had no money. Somehow I managed to persuade my friend Muffin, who worked at a glossy travel magazine, to let me follow in the footsteps of Shenker. Thus it was that one day in August, our little crew flew to London, rented a navy blue Land Rover, and went bombing up the M-6 to Scotland.
We stayed in drafty castles and threadbare bed-and-breakfasts that would have made no Top Hundred Resorts list. I felt sorry for my nervous charges and their mother. While other families went camping in Yellowstone or rented a cabin on Cape Cod, we were headed for “a country where no wheel has rolled,” as Johnson put it, the inns were “verminous,” the people “savages,” and the weather “dreary.”
I had never been one for roughing it. Not for me the knapsack and walking stick of Richard Holmes on the path of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes, camping out in rough weather. But Tuscany and the Lake District were spoken for; it was the Hebrides or nothing.
I had brought along my primary copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a 1933 edition published by J. M. Dent that I had picked up in a secondhand shop for—according to the penciled-in price—$3.50. Such a handsome book, too: squarishly old-fashioned, its pages tissue thin. For me, the Life was more than a book; it was a guide to the practice of biography, as flexible from use as the thumbprint-smudged repair manual in the glove compartment of our rented Rover.
For our first night out of Glasgow, I had booked rooms at the Pheasant Inn, beside Lake Bassenthwaite, in the northern corner of the Lake District; Shelley had stayed in a nearby cottage in the autumn of 1810. Tucking into a plate of grouse in the oak-beamed dining room, I recalled Boswell’s observation that “there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
The next day we crossed the border and headed for Auchinleck, the Boswell family seat (pronounced something like Owthckh Leck, according to the proprieto
r of the Pheasant Inn). Our destination was the Auchinleck Boswell Museum and Mausoleum, described in my guidebook as “the burial place of five generations of Boswells.”
The border towns were grim; their treeless thoroughfares gave them a denuded look. I rolled down the window and asked a grizzled man on the street the whereabouts of the museum, and he answered in a language I had never heard before, a stream of gutturals and throat-clearing snorts; I surmised it was some Scottish dialect, or “Scots,” if that was a language at all. The look of bewilderment on my face must have conveyed my incomprehension, for he beckoned us to follow and continued up the street as we crept along beside him. Some yards up, he pointed to a small windowless building made of ancient stone. Beside it was an empty car park and an outcropping of tilted tombstones on a weedy, overgrown patch of grass. Across the street stood a seedy pub—the Boswell.
We were greeted by Douglas Wilson, the curator. He was small and wiry and wore a crisp blue vest and a matching knitted tie. He gripped my hand tightly, as if he were afraid I’d wander off. I explained my mission, such as it was, and he offered to show us around.
The museum’s holdings were sparse, consisting largely of old books and crockery salvaged from the family home. Mr. Wilson suggested we have a look at Boswell’s crypt. He pulled open a trapdoor in the rough-hewn wooden floor; the biographer lay below. I peered down into the crypt, declining an offer to descend a shaky-looking ladder. There was Boswell. Or what was left of him—a pile of bones in a coffin.*13
That the ebullient, high-spirited figure who had stumbled drunk through the streets of London, learned Greek and Latin in some rented room, argued cases before the court in Edinburgh, studied chemistry “at stool,” trotted after his corpulent prey from the George to the Cheshire Cheese, this complicated, unstable soul who outdid even Pepys in the number of whores and chambermaids he “tossed,” who wavered between self-love and self-contempt, who was more vivid to me in his centuries-long absence than my own contemporaries, now lay in this dank tomb was impossible to grasp. But I was excited, too. For the first time—and perhaps the last—I experienced the sensation of being in the presence of a dead person who suddenly seemed alive, in his ale-stained vestments and ill-fitting wig, malodorous (“Sir, I smell you in the dark”), excitable, talkative, emanating colossal energy, “strutting about,” as Fanny Burney’s sister, Charlotte, memorably described him….Maybe death wasn’t the end after all.
As we were leaving, Mr. Wilson asked me to sign the register. There were only two names on the page, Japanese from the sound of them. “English literature students from Kyoto,” he explained.
Mr. Wilson appeared to have a lot of time on his hands and now proposed a tour of the family estate. It was in the countryside, two miles from town.
Auchinleck, like everything old, had once been new. Boswell described it as “a house of hewn stone, very stately and durable.” It had fallen into disrepair and the windows were boarded up, but the great blocks of quarried stone and the Georgian pediment attested to its former grandeur. The sun came out as we drove up, and all at once I could imagine the “very fine day”—November 4, 1773—when Boswell, “elated” to have his illustrious subject under his own (or rather, his father’s) roof, had shown off the grounds to Dr. Johnson and strolled beneath “some venerable old trees, under the shade of which my ancestors had walked.” They were still there, even older now, a canopy of ancient elms lining the road to the house. It was in this house that Johnson had complained about the “incommodiousness” of the weather, chewed out the local minister (“Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot”), and had a violent quarrel with Boswell’s father. “They are now in another, and higher state of existence,” Boswell would observe in his Life of Johnson. “And as they were both worthy Christian men, I trust they have met in happiness.” Boswell has since joined them, but with the recollection of his dank crypt still in mind, I doubt it was to a higher state of existence that any of them had gone.
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It had been Boswell’s ambition, he declared in his preface to the Life, to produce a portrait of a man who would be seen “more clearly than any man who has yet lived.” The biographer’s chief duty was to “lead the thoughts into domestick privacies…by interweaving what [his subject] privately wrote, and said and thought.” And to achieve this goal—to see “the real Johnson,” “Johnson as he really was”—you had to shadow your subject. “Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him,” Johnson maintained. Thus did Boswell accompany Johnson to Lichfield, his childhood home; to Oxford, where Johnson had once been a student; and to London dinner parties, at which he would pull up his chair behind Johnson’s, determined not to miss a mot. “When my mind was, as it were, strongly penetrated with the Johnsonian ether, I could, with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit.” Or when it wasn’t too strongly penetrated with other kinds of ether.
Boswell had devised an ingenious method of transcription: having memorized as much as he could of a dialogue, he would scribble down rapid condensed notes, sometimes in Johnson’s presence, abbreviating all but key words—“the heads,” he called them, the ingredients of “portable soup,” “a kind of stock cube from which I could make up a broth, when the time came to feed.” It didn’t always congeal. “I have the substance,” he confided in his journal, “but the felicity of expression, the flavor, is not fully preserved unless taken instantly.” And even that method was unreliable. Johnson once challenged his biographer to an experiment in which he slowly read a passage from William Robertson’s History of America, while Boswell tried to transcribe it; when Boswell read the passage back, “It was found that I had it very imperfectly.”*14
Still, if he sometimes stumbled over the words, he was a brilliant mimic of Johnson’s voice. “He had an odd, mock solemnity of tone and manner, that he had acquired imperceptibly from constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson,” wrote the novelist Fanny Burney, who was often in their company. “Every look and movement displayed either intentional or involuntary imitation.”*15
Boswell’s ability to capture Johnson’s table talk was the natural outcome of an edict he had delivered to himself: “Be Johnson.” It was a directive he took literally, imagining what it would be like to occupy Johnson’s garret after his subject died: “I could not help indulging a scheme of taking it for myself many years hence, when its present great possessor will in all probability be gone to a more exalted situation.” He was like a greedy heir, worshipping his benefactor but impatient to inherit his possessions.
In the meantime, he would simply be there, a witness to Johnson’s vitality. To insinuate yourself into your subject’s daily life, to experience it as it’s being lived, was one of the advantages (I nervously told myself) of writing a biography of a living person. Boswell’s account of a dinner at the home of his friend Bishop Percy has an uncanny verisimilitude. The two men—as recorded by Boswell—are having a heated argument about the landscaping of a castle in Scotland that both have visited. At issue is whether the grounds could be described as “trim.” The bishop maintains that there is “a very large extent of fine turf and gravel walks.” Johnson retorts that “there is no variety, no mind exerted in laying out the ground, no trees.” Percy insists that there are in fact “an immense number of trees,” but Johnson is too “short-sighted” to see them—a sally so provocative that the myopic Johnson can scarcely maintain his temper: “Inflammable particles were collecting for a cloud to burst.”
Soon the two parties are accusing each other of incivility. The stage-managing biographer, meanwhile, is loath to intervene because he sees an opportunity to display his subject’s “tender and benevolent heart” engaged in the act of forgiveness. Which is exactly what happens. By the end of the night, the two friends have made up: “Dr. Percy rose, ran up to [Johnson], and taking him by the hand, assured him affectionatel
y that his meaning had been misunderstood, upon which a reconciliation instantly took place.”
What fascinates me about this entry is how banal it is. There are no oracular pronouncements about God or Death or Education (“To learn is the proper business of youth”); no prefatory “Sir.” Instead we have two men idly sitting around the dinner table squabbling over some pointless question. How many trees are there on the grounds of Alnwick Castle? They might as well have been two guys in a sports bar having a disagreement about how many years Ted Kluszewski had played for the Chicago White Sox.*16
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Boswell’s wasn’t the first biography of Johnson to see print. The day after Johnson’s death, his protegé received a letter from the bookseller-publisher Charles Dilly proposing an “instant” book: four hundred pages of Johnson’s table talk.*17 But six other potential biographers were already on the case—Johnson was a huge deal in that day—among them John Hawkins (officially Sir John Hawkins, Knt.), one of Johnson’s executors and a member of the Literary Club. He, too, had a personal acquaintance with the Great Cham.
Hawkins was first out of the gate, publishing his biography just three years after Johnson’s death. (The world would have to wait another four years for Boswell’s Life.) It was not well received, to put it mildly; reviewers “fell to their task,” writes Bertram H. Davis, the editor of the 1961 edition, “with all the zest they would have given to a defense of London against an invading armada.” The book was condemned as spiteful, rancorous, malevolent; Hawkins had been indiscreet about Johnson’s marriage, revealing that he and his erratic wife, Tetty, had briefly separated on account of her husband’s nocturnal perambulations with Richard Savage. As Davis put it: “Johnson’s executor had become his executioner.”
How fair was the accusation that Hawkins had dwelled excessively on the couple’s marital discord? Johnson’s affection “soon returned,” he had noted, citing as evidence David Garrick’s habit of imitating his subject’s uxorious behavior. He was also generous, at least intermittently, in his depiction of Johnson’s character. “With all that asperity of manners with which he has been charged,” wrote Hawkins, “he possessed the affections of pity and compassion in a most eminent degree.” Which he did, along with a lot of other traits that made him human, such as vanity, pride, and malice.
