A Biography as Great as Its Subject James Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” : Joseph Epstein
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-biography-as-great-as-its-subject-1442008662
It helped ensure the posterity of the ever quotable Samuel Johnson.
The world’s greatest biography was composed by a depressive, a heavy drinker, an inconstant husband and a neglectful father who suffered at least 17 bouts of gonorrhea. That biography is, of course, James Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Nothing like it came before in form and content, and nothing like it has appeared since. Biography we call it, but in some ways it also qualifies as an autobiography of its author, who regularly obtrudes in its pages and may even be said to be its secondary subject.
Adam Sisman ends his excellent book “Boswell’s Presumptuous Task” by noting that “never again will there be such a combination of subject, author, and opportunity.” Boswell was 22 years old and Johnson 54 when they met in 1763. Johnson was widowed from his beloved, roughly 20-years-older wife, Tetty; Boswell was the unanchored and still disappointing oldest son of the Scottish laird and magistrate Lord Auchinleck. Famous both as a talker and as the author of the Rambler, “Rasselas” and his Dictionary, Johnson was already recognized as a great man. Upon meeting him, Boswell must have sensed that this large, strange, twitch- and tic-ridden man was his passage to a permanent place in literary history.
Boswell saw not merely a great subject in Samuel Johnson, but an exemplar, a teacher, a reality instructor, for the two men were vastly different in outlook, stability and, above all, good sense. Johnson came to love Boswell without ever quite treating him as an equal. “You are longer a boy than others,” he told him when Boswell was in his mid-30s. In Johnson’s eyes, he would remain a boy, always in need of straightening out, through their 21-year relationship, which ended with Johnson’s death in 1784 at 75.
A habitual keeper of journals, Boswell wrote down nearly everything he heard Johnson say or that was said about him. In 1785, Boswell published “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,” his account of the two men’s trip to the western islands of Scotland, announcing at the end of the work that he was planning to write a full life of Johnson. Boswell had been collecting Johnsoniana—journals, notebooks, letters, anecdotes supplied by friends—for years. He also wrote under the lash of two competing biographies, that of Sir John Hawkins, who was Johnson’s official biographer, and that of Mrs. Hester Thrale Piozzi, in whose home Johnson was long a welcomed and intimate guest.
Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” (1791) was the first biography to attempt to probe the inner life of its subject, while also considering his writings and his standing as a public figure. Johnson himself, who wrote “Lives of the Poets,” felt that the inner failings of a biographical subject should not be ignored. Boswell set out to write a full portrait of the great man in all his weaknesses, failings, faults and oddities, of which Johnson offered a rich smorgasbord. He did so, however, only against the larger view of his subject’s grandeur. Boswell, who adored Johnson, aimed to show that Johnson was greater than his intellectual bullying—his so-called bow-wow way—prejudices, lassitude, general slovenliness and sometime crushing temper. He claimed, correctly, that in his book Johnson was seen “more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.”
At the heart of Boswell’s biography was Johnson’s conversation, both that to which Boswell was privy and that reported by others. Mr. Sisman speculates that Boswell met with Johnson on roughly 400 days over the 21 years of their relationship. On nearly every occasion he prodded him into conversation on what he hoped would be propitious topics. Well worth the effort it was, for Johnson’s talk was studded with “genuine vigour and vivacity” and larded with “the exuberant variety of his wit and wisdom.” One encounters all the famous Johnsonisms in Boswell’s biography, from “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” to “One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thought” to “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
In its slightly less than half-million words, the best things in the biography are Johnson’s many mots. So greatly did these capture the fancy of Boswell’s readers that he was accused of having people “talk Johnson.” He replied: “Yes, I may add, I have Johnsonised the land, and I trust that they will not only talk, but think, Johnson.”
Johnson’s many distinctions are always of interest, such as that between intuition and sagacity, or between talk and conversation, or between doctrine contrary to reason and doctrine above reason. He prefers the Irish over the Scottish because “the Irish are a very fair people—they never speak well of one another.” He regularly pulls back the curtain on pretense: “Depend upon it,” he tells Boswell, “that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.” He thought the situation of the Prince of Wales “the happiest of any person’s in the kingdom,” for he had “the enjoyment of hope, – the high superiority of rank, without the anxious cares of government.” He lambastes Swift, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and prefers Richardson’s novels over Fielding’s.
Oliver Goldsmith said that “there is no arguing with Johnson; for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” Although not said in response to this, Johnson held that “every man has the right to utter what he thinks truth, and every man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.”
Early in his biography Boswell remarks “that minute particulars are frequently characteristick, and always amusing, when they relate to a distinguished man.” In the hands of an artful biographer, these minute particulars, like so many well-placed dots in a pointillist painting, conduce to provide a satisfyingly full picture. So it is with the “Life of Johnson.” Boswell shows us his subject’s gruff table manners, how he walked, his laugh (like that of a rhinoceros), his terror of death, his immense—one can only call it his Christian—generosity to the poor and those defeated by life.
Some have found Boswell slavish in his admiration of Johnson. Macaulay called him “servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic. . . always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spat upon and trampeled.” Boswell’s wife said of the relationship: “I have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by a bear.” If Johnson put up with Boswell’s sometimes cloying sycophancy—“Sir,” he at one point tells him, “you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of them both”—his doing so paid off handsomely. Without Boswell’s biography, Johnson’s reputation would not stand anywhere near as high as it does today. A great biographer was required to show us how great a man was Samuel Johnson.
—Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport (Rowman & Littlefield).
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