The Life of Samuel Johnson Read Online

In that case, musick may make a part of our future felicity.’147

An obvious aspect of Boswell’s address in this exchange is the variety of conversational roles he has in his repertoire, and his adroitness in assuming them: the hesitant querier (‘But, Sir, is there any harm…’); the supportive reinforcer (‘One of the most pleasing thoughts is…’); the troubled doubter (‘Yet, Sir, we see in scripture…’); the robust endorser (I think, Sir, that is a very rational supposition’); the anxious seeker after comfort (‘Do you think, Sir, it is wrong…’); finally, the helpful supplier of apposite information (I have been told…’). The adroitness is partly a question of Boswell’s sensitivity to Johnson’s replies: any trace of testiness immediately prompts the adoption of a submissive role, whereas complaisance or relaxed expatiation on Johnson’s part is the signal for Boswell to move away from the postures of deference, to begin a new incursion, and open up a new line of exploration of the great man’s mind. Conversation conducted on this basis is partly like dancing, partly like fencing. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the first edition, Boswell refers to the ‘labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed’.148 He might have said ‘collected, arranged and half-created…’

Yet the Life does not comprise simply Boswell’s recollections of Johnson. It also digests within itself the collected impressions and anecdotes of a number of Johnson’s other friends, usually placed not so much with an eye to strict chronology (despite what Edmond Malone says in the ‘Advertisement’ to the third edition about Boswell endeavouring ‘uniformly to observe’ chronological order),149 but rather to fill in those areas where Boswell’s own material was, for whatever reason, thin. So, in the section of the Life dealing with September 1783, when Boswell was in Scotland and consequently apart from Johnson, Boswell inserted ‘a few particulars concerning him [Johnson], with which I have been favoured by one of his friends’ – in fact William Bowles, with whom Johnson had stayed the previous month.150 In a similar way, when Boswell failed to meet Johnson at all in 1780, he chose that moment in the narrative of the Life to insert an ample collection of Johnsonian sayings supplied by Bennet Langton; and when the same lack of contact had occurred in 1770, ‘without any coldness on either side, but merely from procrastination, continued from day to day’ as Boswell explains, he inserted at that point in the narrative of the Life the Johnsonian Collectanea of Dr Maxwell.151 The incorporation of this related but also foreign material not only amplifies and reinforces the Life:152 it contributes strongly to the distinctive experience of reading it provides.

We have commented on the elaboration of Boswell’s narrative. However, the narrative is far from polished, if by that metaphor for literary style we wish to imply a kind of writing completely purged of unevenness. The Life proclaims and seeks out unevenness, whether it be the inclusion of un-Boswellian material, or the different kind of unevenness which resulted from Boswell’s less than perfect commitment to the biographer’s task:

For some time after this day I did not see him very often, and of the conversation which I did enjoy, I am sorry to find I have preserved but little. I was at this time engaged in a variety of other matters, which required exertion and assiduity, and necessarily occupied almost all my time.153

A pleasing unevenness, too, arises from the incorporation of different kinds of literary material into the Life: letters, opinions, conversations, dramatizations of the more important encounters.154 The Life has in part the character of a florilegium of Johnsoniana, which both brings about a transfer of life to writing and yet also refrains from any pretence that this transfer is or can be anything more than partial.155 As with any anthology, its virtue is inseparable from – indeed, is precisely a product of – its selectivity.

The eschewal of mechanical regularity in the Life is thus a consequence of deliberate choice on Boswell’s part, and is an expression of the work’s implicit biographical theory. At the very outset, Boswell reminded his reader of Johnson’s own interest in the genre of biography:

Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited. But although he at different times, in a desultory manner, committed to writing many particulars of the progress of his mind and fortunes, he never had persevering diligence enough to form them into a regular composition. Of these memorials a few have been preserved; but the greater part was consigned by him to the flames, a few days before his death.156

The ‘opinion’ of Johnson’s to which Boswell refers is to be found in Idler 84 (1759), in which Johnson elevates autobiography (although he does not call it that) above biography, on grounds of its probably superior veracity.157 The preference is advanced explicitly in terms of comparison between the two forms of life-writing:

Those relations are… commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story. He that recounts the life of another, commonly dwells most upon conspicuous events, lessens the familiarity of his tale to increase its dignity, shews his favourite at a distance decorated and magnified like the ancient actors in their tragick dress, and endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero.158

Boswell’s practice in the Life can be read as an implicit reproof of this Johnsonian suspicion of biography, since he welcomes the quotidian into his narrative and displays his subject in the most intimate circumstances. For Boswell, the route to appreciating Johnson’s heroism lies directly through his common humanity: it is not to be found by detouring round it. For this reason, it is difficult to accept at face value the praise Boswell bestows on the hypothetical autobiography which Johnson did not get round to writing: ‘had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.’ Difficult because the crafted discontinuities and asperities of Boswell’s narrative aim at vivacity of impact more than they do at clarity and elegance; and, most importantly, difficult because Boswell’s object is not to embalm, but spectrally to revive.159 So there is a trace of triumphant ressentiment when Boswell notes the abortion of this hypothetical Johnsonian autobiography. His own work, albeit produced on a different plan, at least exists.

What was that plan? Boswell confessed that he had been influenced by William Mason’s Memoirs of Thomas Gray, which had been published in 1775.160 It was a model which, at least as Boswell understood it, prescribed the intermittent self-effacement of the biographer:

Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect, and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; 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…

Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life.161

It is the unmediated (although framed, arranged, and set) incorporation of particularity which is the cornerstone of Boswell’s practice in the Life. ‘Minute particulars are frequently characteristick’: this is Boswell’s creed.162 It is a principle which receives a surprisingly modern echo. Roland Barthes said (with what seriousness, however, it is impossible to judge) that ‘were I a writer, and dead, how I would like my life to be reduced, by the attentions of a friendly, carefree biographer, to a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections; let’s say, “biographemes”.’163 The massive inclus-iveness of the Life is plainly at odds with the feline Barthes’s decadent, astringent preference for ‘a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections’; but otherwise, in its prizing of the grit of a life, Barthes’s playful formulation is not at complete variance with Boswell. There are so many tantalizing, unconstrued details in the Life of Johnson. Which reader would not want to know more about Elizabeth Blaney, who died of unrequited love for Johnson’s father?164 Who is not intrigued to be told of Johnson’s perpetual fondness ‘for chymical experiments’?165 When Johnson refers in passing to ‘all my Lincolnshire friends’, who does not wish to know who they were, and when Johnson met them?166 Who has not wondered to what purpose Johnson put the dried orange peel he sedulously collected at meetings of the Club?167 Would we not wish to know more about the Mr Ballow from whom Johnson learned law?168 Is there not almost endless resonance in the conjunctions of posture and occupation in some of Boswell’s recollections of Johnson? ‘He was for a considerable time occupied in reading Memoires de Fontenelle, leaning and swinging upon the low gate into the court, without his hat.’169 The collocation of that book, that state of undress, that pose and movement: the mind could dwell upon it almost without end. And in which reader does not Boswell’s late revelation of Johnson’s youthful recourse to prostitutes start reflections about the hidden life of Johnson?170 And, finally, there are all those unwritten Johnsonian works which are, as it were, embryonically preserved in the narrative of the Life: the edition of Bacon, the edition of the Biographia Britannica, the ‘Tory History of his country’, the life of Cromwell, the family history of the Boswells, the translation of de Thou and the life of Spenser which Johnson toyed with when virtually on his deathbed, all the projects contained in the catalogue of literary schemes which Johnson gave to Bennet Langton, and most of all perhaps the ‘two quarto volumes, containing a full, fair, and most particular account of his own life’, which Boswell supposes were consumed in the bonfire of Johnson’s personal papers in December 1784.171 These frequent alleyways leading from the written life to the life as lived, the existence of which we can register but which we cannot follow to their end and fully explore, keep the Life of Johnson supple and living, make it the receptacle of our keen, imaginative involvement, and prevent it from ever declining into something as unmoving (in all senses) as an embalming of Johnson.

Boswell places an instance of misplaced literary confidence close to the opening of his narrative, when he records Johnson’s amused recollection of the vanity of the nevertheless human wishes of an early teacher: ‘His next instructor in English was a master, whom, when he spoke of him to me, he familiarly called Tom Brown, who, said he, “published a spelling-book, and dedicated it to the Universe; but, I fear, no copy of it can now be had.”172 By keeping his aspirations closer to the soil, Boswell ensured a very different fate for his own book.

St Catherine’s College, Oxford, 2007

Further Reading

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clifford, J. L., and Greene, D. J., Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970)

Fleeman, J. D., A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)

Greene, D. J., and Vance, J. A., A Bibliography of Johnson Studies, 1970– 1985 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, BC, 1987)

BIOGRAPHY

Bate, W. J., Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)

Clifford, J. L., Young Sam Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1955)

––––– Dictionary Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1979)

De Maria, Robert, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993)

Kaminski, T., The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)

Kelly, R.