BOZZY’S LAST LAP

James Boswell: The Great Biographer – 1789-1795

Presented at the Chicago Literary Club, April 23, 2012 by Charles E Ebeling

Bozzy’s Last Lap

Amidst the winter’s snows of late January of 2008 I presented an essay titled, “Samuel Johnson and His Clubbable Friends.” Some of you may have been there, and if not, you can meet that ensemble on our club’s website. The book I’ve recently read. “Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795,” is a conclusion of Boswell’s diaries.

By way of introduction, here’s a snippet of what I said in 2008 about the connection between Johnson and Boswell.

For the privileged of mid-18^th century London, those steeped in the professions and arts, “clubbing together” had become a way of life. Johnson enjoyed the club life as a way to take his mind off his dictionary-in-the-making and “enjoy literary conversation, and amuse his evening hours.”

The most famous of the periodic gatherings favored by Johnson, Boswell and their friends came to be known as the Literary Club, and here a few similarities with our own club of the 21^st century begin. For many years they met to talk over dinner and drinks at an agreeable inn, on Monday evenings at 7pm, much as we do today.

Our silent interlocutor is surely today the best-known of Johnson’s fellow club members, and that is James Boswell, among the most candid and prolific diarists and biographers of all time.

Boswell, a brash social climber and sometime lawyer with a pedigree among Scotland’s minor peerage, was at first a bit player among London’s intellectual elite. His brilliant biography, “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” changed that. His own candid and insightful personal journals, which he diligently kept over a lifetime, ultimately became monumental achievements in their own right, and especially so as a detailed record of a pre-digital age – a blog long before the blogosphere.

With that background, let me further introduce you to my friend. But, wait; he may be an old friend of yours as well. On his birthday next October 29^th, he’d turn a crusty 272. But he did some real living in the second half of the 18^th century.

James Boswell did live hard and fast. He was the friend who went everywhere and did everything, knew everyone and was loved by some, found intriguing by others, and reviled by a few, both in life and death. And he told us everything. He was like the kid leaning on a locker, telling you who said and did what to whom, and where and when. He was one of the most prolific diarists ever – some ten thousand pages have been found, so far. Even today, more is being found, and much is known to have been lost.

I first met my friend five or six years ago, at a curio shop in Lake Geneva, where they have a few cabinets of old books for sale. On a whim, I purchased a musty three-volume set of Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson.” His crowning literary achievement was the “Life,” a biography that many have heralded as the greatest in the English language. Dictionary Johnson, as contemporaries liked to call him, was by some measures the most accomplished intellectual in London, when London was the seat of the intellectual world. While he did write the first comprehensive dictionary of English, he was a prolific author and commentator on political, historic, cultural and ethical issues. But more than that, those who knew him thought his verbal discourses and spoken rhetoric were his greatest triumph.

And we don’t have to take the word of Johnson’s fellow members of the original Literary Club. Because Bozzy, as Johnson fondly dubbed his erstwhile follower, who had both a near-photographic memory for conversation plus an ever-present notebook in hand, wrote down whatever Johnson said in his presence.

My latest bedtime read from my shelf of some three dozen volumes by and about Boswell and Johnson, documents, mostly through Boswell’s own diary entrees, the period during which he researched, wrote and edited the first edition of the Life. The book begins in 1789, five years after Johnson’s death at age 75, and carries through the quiet end of Boswell’s life in London six years later at age 55.

Published in 1989, The Great Biographer volume is the last of what is referred to as a trade edition of the massive Yale research series of Boswell’s works that the New York Times Book Review dubbed, “one of the most impressive and interesting monuments of its kind in the whole of English literature.”

The research series, comprehensively annotated, is designed as a scholarly parallel and supplement to the 'trade' or 'reading' series of Boswell's journals, which began with the publication in 1950 with Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle, and concluded in 1989 with this thirteenth volume, edited by Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady. I currently have collected 10 of the 13 trade volumes; the most recent is an orphan edition stamped as “discarded” by the Kingsport, Tennessee Public Library. I suppose Bozzy had found few friends in Kingsport.

Frank Brady, the Yale Boswell editor, titles an interesting parallel biography, “James Boswell, the Later Years, 1769-1795.” Another complementary book, providing interesting triangulations on the diaries and the biography through the eyes of others who knew the man, is titled, “James Boswell: As His Contemporaries Saw Him,” by Eric Larson, an expert on 18^thcentury English biography.

Boswell’s own successful books, published during his life, on Corsica’s fight for independence, on his tour of the Scottish Hebrides with Johnson, and the Life of Johnson itself, drew in part on his private journals. But his personal journals, most of which were considered to be lost or destroyed, until the bulk of them turned up in Malahide Castle, north of Dublin, in 1925, documented Boswell’s entire emotional life.

Boswell’s journal, which he began at age 22 in 1762, became a kind of ledger, which he might look into at any time to see what progress he had made in shaping his character. While his journal was filled with descriptions of the adventures in his life, it is not a record of harmony and happiness. It is the account of one who hungered to know himself and is the story of a man dominated by his own feelings. It talks of his pleasures and heartbreaks, his hard work, meditation, sympathy and despair, including his confusions. It is a study of his temptations and debauchery, and only rarely of his achievements. He wrote, “I have some principles, but my existence is chiefly conducted by the powers of fancy and sensation. It is my business to navigate my soul amidst the gales as steadily and smoothly as I can.”

Boswell was as honest with himself, as we wish we could be. He wrote: “There is an imperfection, a superficialness in all my notions. I understand nothing clearly; nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but never have in my memory a mass of any size. I wonder really if it be possible for me to acquire any one part of knowledge fully.” Boswell cautions himself in his journal, writing, “I have a strange feeling as if I wished nothing to be secret that concerns me.” For example, he observed that his friend Samuel Johnson advised him to “divert melancholy by every means, except drinking.” Boswell then writes, “I thought then of women, but no doubt he no more thought of my indulging in licentious copulation than of my stealing.”

Summing up his self-assessment, Boswell wrote: “I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.”

His wife Margaret, though she didn’t see his journals, thought the process of writing them left him “emboweled to posterity,” which it certainly did. Fanny Burney referred to him as “that anecdotal memorandummer.”

Today his journals are seen as one of the great diaries of literature, somewhere between Samuel Pepys and the Confessions of Rousseau. Boswell’s own biographers have said that those who only knew him for his biography of Samuel Johnson knew only one side of him.

Boswell referred to himself as a “feudal Goth” and often referred to his medieval antecedents at the family’s ancient grounds in Auchenleck. His journal sometimes descended into barbaric ravings. Yet a friend would write of him, “He was one of those men whose very look is provocative of mirth.”

Another day Boswell reports his visit to view Watt’s steam engine at Mathew Boulton’s manufactury. “I recognized that I did not know mechanics well enough to comprehend the description of a machine lately invented by him, which he took great pain to show me. ‘I sell, sir,” said he, “what all the world desires to have – Power.”

In the final years of his life, documented in this book, Boswell completes and publishes several editions of his masterpiece, The Life of Johnson, with the unfailing editorial help and guidance of his close friend Edmund Malone. Edmund Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare. He regularly visited Samuel Johnson and was of great assistance to Boswell in revising and proofreading his Life. They worked together constantly, leading Boswell to quip, “I cannot dine with you forever. I had better board with you.”

On Thursday, November 29^th, 1792, Boswell hosted a celebration on the success of the book, published the year before. The guests included Malone, the printer Dilly and several others, plus his two daughters and his brother. He writes: “I gave a dinner, a kind of feast, two courses and a dessert. I got into a pretty good state of joviality, though still dreary at bottom. We drank to ‘Church and King,’ ‘Health and Long Life’ and ‘to The Life of Johnson,’ and to the pious memory of Dr. Johnson.’ We did not drink to excess, but went to tea and coffee at a reasonable hour, and played whist, and part of the company stayed and partook of cold meat and a moderate glass.”

A cynic once called Boswell’s writings, “the diary of a nobody.” Whosoever wrote that was undoubtedly, in my humble estimate, nothing more than a nobody’s nobody. But Boswell believed in the substance and worth of his diaries, writing to himself, “A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup, a little may be diffused into a considerable portion.” Indeed it can.

Boswell’s final years were often sad for him, as what he called his “constitutional melancholy” returned and he recognized his failure in achieving so many of his aspirations. He found his cherished Literary Club not as satisfying without Johnson’s presence. He found raising five children without their mother to be a great burden. While he had succeeded to his family’s Scottish estate and title, as the Laird of Auchinlech, he found little satisfaction there. His life was in London. While Boswell’s ambitions in law and government service had also been thwarted at every turn, sometimes by his own laxity, he did become a highly acclaimed, if controversial, author in his lifetime.

When the full extent of his exhaustive personal journals fully surfaced 125 years after his death, Boswell ascended to the literary heights as a diarist. And so today, his published books and private journals live on together. The journal had become to him an escape, at times an agony and perhaps most of all a treasured scorecard of his uneven social progress, and of his complex interactions with the great and the grotesque of his era.

Writing just two months before his death in 1795, he was still carousing with old friends and making new ones. “In truth, I am wonderfully happy at present. What a varied life I do lead! Yesterday dined with Lord DeLaval at his princely home in Portman Square; last night at Newgate; tomorrow with the Officer of the Guard at the Tower. The Earl of Inchiquin has given me dinner after dinner with admirable parties at his home.”

When Boswell died, several weeks after suddenly being taken ill at the Club, his stunned friend Malone wrote, “Poor fellow. He has somehow stolen away from us, without any notice, and without my having at all prepared for it.”

The candid stories of Boswell’s inner and outer life, which have been called, “the greatest English autobiographical epic,” bring forward this most colorful, flawed and brilliantly articulate friend from the past, who enjoyed a collation and a glass after dinner with his pals more than anyone.