IT IS DIFFICULT to conceive how pathetic and naïve I am in middle July of 1759, at just sixteen years of age, but here is a bright case in point: I am race-walking down the High Street to the Cross, occasionally even breaking into a dogtrot, dodging caddies and chairmen and slow-moving carts because I am to meet James there at half past noon, and I am afraid to be late. The sun is bright, opulently so, but I am all but unaware of it, this pleasant day of only a handful or so a year we have in this wretchedly dark country.
The music bells are playing from the tower of St. Giles, some careless popular air that I half-recognize but cannot name, but in my hurry they sound like warning bells, fire in the city, approaching armies.
Why am I afraid to be late?
True, it is not often that James takes me to the theater, and I don’t want to begin the day badly. He is good about taking me to tea or to a chophouse, places where we concentrate on our meat or our hot water and leaves. But the theater, for the last several years, has been his ruling passion, his obsession, and when he is there he is very sensitive to his own social performance, and my own—preternaturally sensitive, you might say.
I have gone with him to the Canongate just four times in the last year, including today, and each of those times he was both with me and not, present corporeally and yet diffused as a kind of turbulent energy throughout the playhouse. He shimmies like a spaniel in his seat.
And this infatuation has lately come to a head: James spent all of last summer in the playhouse, making copious but nervous love to a second-rate actress named Mrs. Cowper, known for the role of Sylvia in Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer. Not actual love, mind you, but high-flown talk of love.
Let’s be clear about that. This is 1759, and James is still almost entirely inexperienced in matters of the body.
How do I know this? James is not shy about divulging such things. Never in his life, believe me, but never less than at eighteen. He has begun to write poetry and to consort with players and secretly to publish gloomy graveyard verse in the style of Thomas Gray, but only an eighth of an inch beneath the surface he is still an anxious, quite regular churchgoing virgin. The theater is his alchemical agent.
And so by taking me today he brings me into his dearest circle. Still, why in such a rush, as I run to the Cross? James is himself often late, sometimes abominably so. And when he is, he’s then tragicomically contrite for a moment, and there’s an end on’t. Today the play doesn’t begin until six, doors don’t open until five, and the early rehearsal we are privileged to attend won’t begin until half past one. So we will have thirty minutes for a twelve-minute walk, in order to wait twenty minutes or so to be let through the door. I could show up at the Cross dead late, and not one lick of this, not one tittle, would be changed.
What is your hurry then, Johnny? It is a mystery.
JAMES I S WAITING for me, almost precisely in the spot once occupied by the octagonal monument that used to mark the Cross. It has been three years since the city magistrates pulled down and re-located the small decorative building, topped with a high stone pillar, itself topped with a magnificent fighting unicorn. It is there in my earliest memories of the High Street, that dourly clever little obstacle to traffic.
Sometime in the dim past, James told me a story about how the unicorn had helped Scottish forces crush the English at Bannockburn, before being imprisoned in stone by a wizard named Union. It was a story I loved immediately, and he told it to me regularly for a few months until, inexplicably, it began to give him dramatic, screaming nightmares and my mother barred the story from the flat.
And now the building and the pillar are no more, three years since the Cross has truly been the Cross. But James continues to insist that we meet there, out of loyalty to the unicorn—Charlie, as one of us named him some forgotten afternoon.
James is there when I arrive, miraculously, and he is alone, miraculously. There is a sort of overstuffed magnificence to him as he stands there in the space of the absent unicorn, in full sunlight, in his second-best suit. Matching coat, waistcoat, and breeches of blue corded velvet, the elephant-ear sleeves falling magnificently from his wrists, the short, tight breeches pinched precisely above his knees, lace ruffles rampant, sword hilt poking pugnaciously from the coat, hair freshly powdered and well buckled at the temples, he clearly wants to look as dressed as humanly possible in Edinburgh without quite overdressing.
But the magnificence lies not in the dressing or the powdering, but in James’s own person and in the way he wears it. Sleek and dark as a stage hero, bright and winning as a spring pig, eyes black and nose just overly large, he is handsome and faintly comical. The combination is devastating in its way.
And James is the son of a Justice of the High Court in a city that worships the Law. In addition to an air of size beyond his girth, he wears an aura of importance well beyond his achievements. He cuts a figure, as my uncle Doctor John Boswell once said to me: He cuts a very quick figure, does your brother Jemmie.
James turns and sees me slowing to a stop beside him. He smiles absently, and I guess that he is lost in his long-running fantasy of the theater. But I am wrong.
“I miss Charlie,” he says. “He was a good unicorn.”
“Yes, he was that.”
“He wore his horn lightly, Charlie did.”
“Am I late?”
He shakes himself out of his pleasurable little melancholy, hauls up a small pretty bunch of wildflowers he has been concealing behind his hip. He smiles down at the flowers, and I can see that for James, today is a very special day indeed, more special even than I have understood. “Is not a man always late to the theater, Johnny, no matter how soon soever he may come?”
And then he pivots on his heel and we are off, but we are not simply walking to the Canongate. One does not merely walk with James on a bright afternoon.
No, no, no. One sallies forth.
Although his legs are moving vigorously beneath him at all times, James has a way of leaning back into the plush frame of his own body like a duke into a coach. Hands always moving, punctuating the chatter he trails in his wake. Right hand draped at his sword hilt, then cutting the air to acknowledge a bookseller my father brought off, reluctantly brought off, on a charge of piracy several years ago. Left hand diving into his coat for a silk handkerchief, then genteelly throttling off a tremendous sneeze without any help whatsoever from the right. “Ah! Rippingly perfect sneeze. Like blowing the top of a mountain away with cannon fire. A man sees the view suddenly unobstructed.”
We pass a greenwife’s booth, and James is struck by a mound of tea-roses. So struck that he lays hands on a bunch and after buying them presents his suddenly out-of-favor wildflowers to the middle-aged woman behind the till with a flourish. Forget that she sells flowers, that she is sitting in a tiny wooden box filled almost to bursting with herbs and vegetables and flowers—that this woman is in point of fact occupied from first light until dark with trying to disencumber herself of flowers—the truth is that the greenwife is enchanted, and we leave her still perched on her little wooden creepie, but now dimpling with pleasure.
We sally forth with tea-roses. James thrusts the bulb of his nose into the yellow profusion of the roses, sucking the scent from them hungrily.
Just at the head of New Street, we turn right, down into Playhouse Close. The alleyway is a canyon two men wide and nine stories high. Tenements and towers brood over the cobblestones. Even in broad daylight, it is always somewhere near dusk in the close. Your heels clatter louder than in the High Street, and you can feel the temperature fall just that palpable little bit.
On poles far above us, drying linen flaps like falcon wings.
At the very bottom of the canyon stands the door of the Canongate Theater. And at that door stands—slouches, lists—a middle-aged man in a leather apron. Broken vessels and capillaries stream out over his fat cheeks; white whiskers cover these tributaries like birch. But as we come to a stop, the man straightens into something like sentry-readiness, drum stomach stretching his apron warningly in our direction.
“Doors open at five, gentlemen. No admittance till then, I’m to say.”
He delivers these lines with obvious relish. My guess is that he is a scenery-maker, happily filling in for the doorman today instead of hauling stage machines. In any event, James might simply inform the man that Mr. Gentleman has asked us to attend the company’s dress rehearsal. But James does not. No, no, no.
“Sir,” James says, resting his hand on my shoulder, “you see before you two brothers, back in their native country after a stretch of four long years. Our history must speak for us—two whose father forbid their service in the wars against the French, who sneaked away to join a Highland regiment, and who swore a blood oath to the clan leader. At last we fought in Newfoundland, and in Cuba, and our campaigns were brilliantly successful. The French and the Spaniards knew their masters. And then,” he punches one gloved hand suddenly into the other, “we returned to London only to find that we were unwanted, and reviled, and hissed as Scotsmen.
“And so we’ve come to the theater today, sir, to revel in the performance of a good hamely Scottish company, to feel ourselves men again. And can any countryman blame us for coming sooner rather than later?”
The substitute doorman is taken aback, to say the least. He doesn’t believe, of course, not really, but there is much here that puts belief to one side of the question. A few seconds tick by, and the old patriot seems about to strike some sort of middle ground when the door behind him bursts open, and Francis Gentleman leans way out, his bagged black hair bobbing.
“Thomas!” Gentleman shouts at the confused doorman. “Are you keeping the Boswell men, the older and the younger, on the step? Did I not specifically say that all persons Boswell were to be put through straight away? Stand aside, blockhead, stand aside. Let good taste pass. Gentlemen, my apologies. Excuse the ignorant prick. Come in, by all means, come in.”
James gives a little answering cry of delight. For him, this is the best of all possible worlds: his name has opened the door for him, but he can tell himself his own fictions might yet have done the trick. I have no such option.
GENTLEMAN HAS HIS arm draped around James’s shoulder, and, as he steers us through the dwarfish entry rooms and then through the gigantic auditorium doors and down through a sea of benches toward the pit, he is talking about everything under the sun. And although I cannot catch all of it, it is clear that he is talking a bit desperately about every thing under the sun.
Gentleman knows well enough that for James there is only one topic, Sylvia, but he threads his choice new tidbits of Sylvia in and through a jumble of other things not-Sylvia.
“Shockingly block-headed, this man Thomas,” he says, directing his talk down into James’s ear. “Once overturned a barrow full of nine-pound shot trying to simulate thunder for a production of Lear, which we may yet play this season, by the way, with myself in the lead role. Digges always nips the part for himself, but with him off to parts unknown there’s a chance yet for Francis, never fear. I’ve always wanted to run mad across the stage, beard flying. Rend my garments, you know.
“Your Sylvia plays Cordelia, not surprisingly, and I want you to imagine, James, the transport into which the audience is thrown by the sight of her, in nothing but a wrapper of sheer green silk, weeping over her dear demented father. Kissing the old man’s hand with those faultless lips.”
James introduced me to Gentleman and the others of the company last summer, but only after preparing me at the flat beforehand. I could see how important it was for James that I fit in by how methodically we swotted up for that meeting.
“A likeable rogue,” James had catalogued Gentleman then, “an impecunious Irish army-officer, full of agreeable nonsense. Thirty-one or thirty-two, I would say. He can play a highwayman or a clergyman with equal ease. Written some damned fine plays, and one day may succeed there. Was to buy into the management of the Canongate, but he’s lost that somehow. But he does manage a bit when Digges is away. You’ll love him, John. All the world loves a soldier with poetry in his soul.”
This afternoon there’s a wheedling edge to Gentleman’s baritone.
The Irish army-officer must find himself particularly impecunious this week. He sounds like a peruke-maker with too many heads to peddle.
His talk has the desired effect, however: James listens raptly to the whole stream of patter, and, by the time we enter the pit and take in the actors rehearsing on the stage, he is all but saucer-eyed in anticipation.
THE WOMAN LOOKS charmingly, no denying it. The play today is The Careless Husband, Old Cibber’s frothy vehicle, and so rather than simple Mrs. Cowper, second-rate actress exiled from London to the provinces, she is Lady Betty Modish, a turn-of-the-century flirt and a beauty of the highest order. Brownish ringlets loose down the back, emerald gown covered over with lace and gold embroidery. Black plaster mouche at the cheekbone.
I have seen Mrs. Cowper several times dressed for the street, and she is an agreeable-looking woman in her late twenties. Agreeable— no angel, James’s fixation notwithstanding. Her mouth is a bit big and her eyes a bit small. And she is top-heavy, to my eye. Once married illicitly to her music-master, she has somehow lost him in the workings of the world and now allows herself the freedoms of a widow. But the light of the candles, the revealing fifty-year-old fashions and the unabashed way she wears them as she turns to us—it all comes together in a very pretty picture.
She breaks off the exchange of lines to shout down to us. “Mr. Boswell! You are as good as your word. Not only in the audience, but in fact the entire audience. Well done. And you’ve brought me roses! I assume they are for me and not Mr. Dexter.”
James gives a deep bow, saying nothing. As he does so, Gentleman drops me a wink, a smile hovering at his lips.
“Shall we continue?” she shouts down.
“With all my heart, Sylvia,” James shouts back, voice also pitched to reach the boxes. I can tell he is half-tempted to vault onto the stage.
In another moment, the three of us are slouching on a bench, center pit, four rows back. It is James’s bench, his very particular chosen bench. He says that he must be in a constant fixed location, like a star in the heavens, should Sylvia choose to direct a look or a line his way.
Scratched into this bench with a case-knife are these words: This is the bench of James Boswell, Esq. Any man else sits here at his peril. James, for all his outright possessiveness toward this company, could never have carved the words himself—in most things, in Edinburgh, he is still acutely aware of his social position. And so Gentleman did it for him, near the end of last summer’s run, not long in fact after James confided that he planned to publish a serial review of the company’s next season.
It is a cozy, half-articulated relationship they have developed over the last year and a half. James desires a thing he cannot name, which thing Gentleman then procures; for his part, Gentleman has need of things James can easily supply while remaining for the most part unaware. For James it is acceptance and access, to the theater, to Mrs. Cowper, to the closed club of players. For Gentleman, it is association, with a coming Laird, with the son of a Justice in a city where plays are still nominally against the law, where players must fake a concert and bill their own show as an odd bit thrown in free.
And it is money. It is grubby money: James has already agreed to allow Gentleman to dedicate a tricked-up version of Oroonoko to him later this year.
But of course their desires are partially in conflict. James wants to swim in the illusion that he is a kindred spirit, while Gentleman’s needs are predicated on their essential differences. Hence the half-articulation. Hence the way they often speak to one another while each letting their glance rest somewhere else.
Such as now. James is confiding, as he searches his waistcoat for threads and stains. “The last time you played The Careless Husband, Gentleman, I told Sylvia that the character of Lady Betty has always made me—how did I put it?—weak in the boots. Lady Betty’s beauty and her cruelty are both unmatched. She treats Lord Morelove like a tomcat, I said, to be stroked and then kicked.
“And then I looked uncomfortable, as though I had something serious to say, and admitted that it was hard for me to lose myself in the character when played by herself. Why so, she asked, more than a little miffed. Why, madam, says I, because while you come up to Lady Betty in beauty, you are far too kind to touch her in cruelty. And I thought that a sweet bit of flattery.”
“A little slap and a little tickle,” Gentleman puts in approvingly.
James gives a mock-bow in his seat, then goes on. “But she swatted it aside almost immediately, and made just to take it as an insult. We play Cibber again next week, Mr. Boswell, she said, and I want you to be present. I want you to sit in your seat, she went on, and avoid chit-chat and fooling with orange girls. I want you to pay strict attention to whether or not I reach both of Lady Betty’s marks. Have I your promise, then? she demanded of me. And John, Francis, what can a man do in such a case but merely acquiesce?” He pulls back, a hand at his cravat, eyelids fluttering for effect.
“Funny you should say so, James,” Gentleman says. He is sprawled over the far side of the bench, one long leg resting on the arm of the bench in front of us. “Very funny, that. Because as you know, the Canongate makes it one of its unfailing rules to forbid visits to the actors’ tiring rooms.”
“No one knows it better. No one suffers from it more.”
“You bear up well under it. I’ve never seen a man return so regularly to suffer. But even you must sympathize with us a bit. Guarding the actresses, and by the way contracting for a year’s wage, which no company in England will do, I can tell you, these are our only means of holding really top talent—a Mrs. Cowper, a West Digges, yes, even a Francis Gentleman—this far north of the Tweed.
“But something is different today. I have no idea why, but Mrs. Cowper has asked me the favor of allowing you backstage for a few moments before her performance and a few more moments after. This from her, mind you, very much from her, none of my ham-fisted meddling.”
“Don’t toy with me, Gentleman.”
“Never! On my life, Boswell! She has a plan for the day. I am purely an instrument, a tool.”
James is running over the mental permutations. “You are serious, then! Lord, it will be charming to see her before the play begins. But seeing her just after she exits is most to my taste. When the assumed character still clings to her, warm from the stage. When she’s still two women at once in her own mind. That will be unbeatable. That will be staggering.”
Gentleman examines James carefully. James does not realize it, but each time they meet, Gentleman’s knowledge of him grows twice as fast as James’s knowledge of Gentleman. Whatever else one might say of him, Gentleman is a quick study.
James leans over to pat Gentleman amiably on the shoulder, then suddenly swivels to me. I say very little in most situations, little compared to what I think might be said. But with James in company, I speak less than little, who knows why. Now he wants my confirmation of his triumph. “What say you to that, John? Is she not slashingly bold?”
I raise and lower my eyebrows, as though to say nothing more.
But James is waiting, and Gentleman is looking at me with some amusement, so I go on. “What do I think? I think Mrs. Cowper wants you there beforehand to prove to you and herself that she is Lady Betty, and wants you there afterward to prove to you both that she is not. To send you home without so much as a kiss.”
Gentleman signals to someone downstage that he’ll be there in a moment. He prepares to haul his long body upright. But before standing, he slits his eyes at me. “So you think it’ll come to nothing, then, young John.”
“Not nothing. James will have what he really wants, she will have what she really wants. And Cibber’s creaky farce will seem full of the intrigue it normally lacks.”
Gentleman claps his hands and hoots at that and begins to walk down the aisle, strides lengthening as he goes, but he turns back to point at me and call, “A deep one, your little brother, James. Very deep. Give me two minutes, Mr. Boswell, and then make your way backstage. The tiring rooms are yours.”
James waves a hand by way of assent and then turns to me, and for a moment I think he’s going to say something critical or cutting, something that will spoil the day for me. But instead he gives a gentle bridegroom’s smile and says, “Look at me carefully, John. I will want you to tell me if I look at all different when I come back.” He looks off toward the spikes guarding the stage. “I expect I shall.”
He brings his face a bit closer to mine for effect. And for an instant I do look: I look at his dark but mild eyes, the soft chin and the lips of a putto, all this thrown somehow into question by the wild, fleshy exclamation point of his nose. It is a cherub’s face with the mark of the goat dead center.
No wonder the world’s doors either swing wide or slam shut as he approaches.