11

In which the craft of literary biography is expounded

Notwithstanding his dislike of the overused term ‘genius’, Sam several times attached it to the subject of the Life of Savage. It is thanks to this book that Savage’s name endures, and with his account of his recently deceased friend Sam rebooted assumptions about who matters and why. The story of a failure and an outcast, it suggests that a marginal figure can be interesting, worth treating with compassion and psychological acuity. It is also, as Richard Holmes observes, a kind of ‘displaced autobiography’. Savage is Sam’s ‘demonic alter ego’, embodying what he might under other circumstances have become.1 In this respect, too, the Life of Savage is influential, for we now accept, as Sam’s contemporaries did not, that biography will always contain an element of displaced autobiography – part calculated, part unintentional. Paying deep attention to another person’s life demands that one pay equally deep attention to one’s own.

In Sam’s conception, a biography is an act of rescue. By imagining people’s lives and minds, it reclaims them for history. ‘The biographical part of literature,’ he told Boswell, ‘is what I love most’; he thought of it as essentially humane, a sympathetic activity rather than a dusty, antiquarian one. Excavating facts is part of the biographer’s mission, but registering character – especially by reproducing conversation – is more important. The biographer’s subject is not just some symptom of the past; the texture of his or her existence must be palpable.

This is a principle that has filtered down to Sam’s own biographers. Each of the many ‘lives of Johnson’ claims for itself some special licence to reanimate him and invoke his spirit. The first person to produce a substantial account was his executor Sir John Hawkins, who has tended to be considered an uncharitable biographer. Anyone who reads him soon notices his habit of introducing sly little digs – at the expense of Sam’s ‘inattention to historical facts’ or the fondness for rhyme that was ‘one of the blemishes in his judgement’. He could claim a deep knowledge of his subject, having met Sam as far back as 1738. He was particularly close to him in his final months, and he writes with insight about his spiritual life. But Hawkins was no stylist. Struck by the stilted prose of his Life of Samuel Johnson, an early reviewer joked that there were plans for the book to be translated into English, and others complained that it was digressive, grudging and inaccurate.

Hawkins’s efforts were soon surpassed, for in 1791 there appeared Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the full title of which ran to more than sixty words.² The Life is both intimate and immense – about 550,000 words. More thoroughly researched than Hawkins’s biography, it contains a vast quantity of Sam’s sayings and observations. As a record of his conversation it is astonishingly rich. Boswell tells us that he has provided a faithful transcript of ‘his occasional talk at such times as I had the good fortune to be in his company’. Yet we should be wary of taking this at face value. Boswell’s gifts included a good memory, but not total recall. The two men did not meet until May 1763, by which time Sam was fifty-three and established as a literary celebrity, though not prosperous. Boswell was twenty-two, ambitious and naive. He had first travelled from his native Scotland to London in 1760, when he’d been struck by the city’s abundance of ‘the great, the gay, and the ingenious’, and in November 1762 he had returned, hoping to deepen his acquaintance with all three types. He immediately saw documenting Sam’s life as an opportunity to make his own name as a writer, and guessed that the childless Sam might enjoy his puppyish company.

Boswell worked hard to distil the essence of his subject. He wanted to portray Sam as a (mostly) heroic figure and to correct the less flattering impression created by Hawkins, though he inevitably wasn’t above nabbing some of his predecessor’s material. Sam’s first fifty-three years occupy less than 20 per cent of the Life, and in the twenty-one years that Boswell documents more fully he includes plenty about himself. We might infer that he was Sam’s constant companion – but he was not. In the two decades they knew each other, there were about 420 days when they were together; 117 of those were in a single year, 1773, and there were in total eight years in which they didn’t see each other at all.³ That’s not slender acquaintance, yet it means that they saw each other on average once every three weeks. Would you, in old age, be happy to say that someone you have met 420 times after the age of fifty-three knows every recess of your mind? I’m not sure I would. Most biographers, it’s true, exercise a far greater degree of presumptuousness, but Boswell has the knack of making it seem as if he is at Sam’s shoulder, looking on and listening in. It’s a shock, then, to realize that sometimes he reports as an eyewitness events from which he was certainly absent. He uses what he knows of the mature Sam as he seeks to understand his earlier years. It’s an inevitable approach, and one that allows him to claim that Sam was from his early years ‘a king of men’.

The Life makes Boswell look tender-hearted and curious-minded, but also gossipy and inquisitive to the point of being tactless. He records Sam’s irritation at ‘hearing a gentleman ask . . . a variety of questions concerning him’: ‘Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.’ It was Boswell’s practice to reel off query after query, and the ‘gentleman’ was probably not some third party, but the biographer himself. On another occasion, Sam snapped that ‘I will not be baited with what, and why . . . why is a cow’s tail long? why is a fox’s tail bushy?’ Yet while there was more than this to their relationship, it is clear that each man was useful to the other: if writing about Sam gave Boswell a rich subject, and one that might find a large audience, it was also true that Sam wanted to be written about. He knew that his posthumous reputation would be defined by the information his biographer so busily gathered, and he knew that he could shape that information. Every aspiring Johnson needs a Boswell, though the real Boswell was less reliably adhesive than the proverbial one.

In the nineteenth century, thanks largely to the dashing disparagement of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, it became common to think of Boswell as a conceited parasite – ‘one of the smallest men that ever lived’, a creature of feeble intellect, bloated with booze and self-importance, who produced a great book by accident. The satirical poet John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym Peter Pindar, called him a ‘shark for anecdote and fame’, ‘the pilot of our literary whale’ and ‘a tomtit twittering on an eagle’s back’. Sam himself spoke of his ‘noisy benevolence’, and the first of the two words stuck in others’ minds.

Since then, Boswell’s reputation has been rescued. Crucial to this was the recovery of his private papers – from Malahide Castle near Dublin, where they’d been stored in a cupboard, in a box that had once contained croquet balls. In these, Boswell revealed himself to be a tormented and sometimes thrilling chronicler of eighteenth-century life. To Macaulay his manner might have seemed impertinent, shallow and vain, but today he feels grippingly candid about his weaknesses and desires. In the Life of Johnson there’s an arresting moment, in the autumn of 1777, when Boswell complains of ‘a wretched changefulness, so that I could not preserve, for any long continuance, the same views of anything’. Relief came from Sam, whose ‘steady vigorous mind held firm before me those objects which my own feeble and tremulous imagination frequently presented’, and we’re impressed by the biographer’s acknowledgement of his own fallibility and his friend’s mixture of dynamism and dependability.

The appeal of Boswell’s book derives in large part from its set pieces. For instance, there is a dinner party at which Sam tries to praise a woman by saying she had ‘a bottom of good sense’; at first he can’t figure out why most of his companions are tittering, but then he twigs, collects himself and has another go at expressing his opinion – ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible’. Or there’s the occasion, in February 1767, when he goes to the Queen’s House (where Buckingham Palace now stands) to make use of the fine collection of books known as the King’s Library. One of its young members of staff, Frederick Augusta Barnard, introduces him to the king. They exchange polite talk, not unlike the sort that reputedly passes today between the monarch and people who work in the arts. Is Johnson writing anything? What are people up to at Oxford? Which are the largest libraries? Asked his opinion of John Hill, an ambitious botanist regarded as something of a quack, Sam starts to say that he is unreliable, but cuts himself short, aware that he is depreciating this man in the king’s esteem. And when the king pays him a compliment, Sam chooses not to reply, for as he later explained, ‘It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign.’ All of this is droll, and it seems more so in retrospect because the king in question, whom Sam calls ‘the finest gentleman I have ever seen’, was George III, then in his twenties and far from exhibiting symptoms of mental illness – but in today’s popular imagination Mad George, all erratic notions and purple-tinged pee.

The Life’s charm also comes from its parade of telling little particulars. Here is Johnson, watering and pruning a vine in order to fill a few idle moments, and here he is, buying a heavy oak stick in case he has a ruck with a writer he has nettled. Here he sees a man gesticulating to ram home a point in argument and snaps at him, ‘Don’t attitudinize’, and here he reports drinking three bottles of port and being none the worse for wear, adding the details of where he did so in case anyone wants to check up on him. Here he is, very frankly putting George III straight on a point to do with microscopes, and here he is in less exalted company, explaining that the reason why some of the London poor go about gathering bones is that the best ones can be sold as mock ivory for knife handles, with the rest being boiled to produce grease for lubricating wheels. Here he is, in an unpowdered wig that is much too small for his great head, and here he is, paying twice the usual fare to a waterman on the Thames, impressed by the young man’s curiosity about the Argonauts.

Snippets of this kind punctuate mightier moments, in which he reflects on the nature of memory, the importance of kindness or what one should read. But while the hero of the Life often appears to be a literary and social colossus, there are times when Boswell seems eager to emphasize his provincialism and quaintness, describing his ancestry as ‘low’ and then thinking better of this and calling it ‘obscure’. This urge to put him in his place is most apparent where sex is concerned. A carnally voracious man who suffered at least nineteen attacks of venereal disease, Boswell prided himself on his success with women (whom he managed to find both alluring and uninteresting) and shuddered at the idea that any woman could think Sam was physically attractive. When Sam’s friend Elizabeth Desmoulins, daughter of his godfather Samuel Swynfen, revealed that he had sometimes fondled her and admitted she could not have resisted him if he had chosen to ‘proceed to extremities’, Boswell was aghast. He pressed her to confirm that she hadn’t ‘felt any inclination for him’, and, relieved when she confirmed that she had not, blurted that ‘I cannot imagine it of any woman. There is something in his figure so terribly disgusting.’ He labelled his notes of this conversation with the Latin word tacenda, ‘things that should be kept silent’.

Although one reason to be discreet was, of course, that Sam’s behaviour to Mrs Desmoulins was at odds with his image as a man of scrupulous moral character, it is clear that Boswell preferred to play down any suggestion of his master’s sexual appetites. For instance, Sam told Garrick that he felt he must give up going backstage at the theatre because ‘the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses do make my genitals to quiver’. When Boswell reproduced this admission, he changed the final words to ‘excite my amorous propensities’. Perhaps he was trying to strike a suitably Johnsonian note of dignity. Yet the polysyllables of ‘amorous propensities’ smother the awkward and important fact that Sam felt sexually frustrated. On another occasion, Boswell made a note of a story in which Sam, asked to name the greatest of pleasures, replied, ‘Why, fucking.’ This, too, didn’t make it into the Life. Boswell may have thought it uncharacteristic, but usually he enjoyed representing the more surprising aspects of Sam’s behaviour.

Because Sam’s life has been generously documented and closely analysed, by Boswell and the many biographers who have followed, he is that strange beast, an author who is well-known more than 200 years after his death, even though his works are not widely read. True, his prose still has many admirers, yet for every person who has read Rasselas there must be a hundred who know that he liked drinking tea and was fond of cats. As a result, he resembles a character in a work of fiction, an institution, a mythic treasury of anecdote and aphorism. What’s more, in the many biographies and jaunty character sketches his brilliance as a speaker is on show; not all the things he says in them are his considered views, but the best of them have been allowed to eclipse his virtues as a writer.