Dear Sarah,
Listing possible successors to, or disciples of, Boswell in yesterday’s post, I neglected to mention (another way of saying completelyforgot) perhaps the most striking specimen of all. Or, if not necessarily the most striking, certainly the one most relevant to the question you and I have been considering: To wit, how much conscious malice went into Boswell’s book about his great friend?
In 1950, Lillian Ross published a profile of Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker. Ross was a good friend of Hemingway’s and an unabashed fan of his work, and her portrait purported to be a lively and straightforward account of a two-day visit the author and his wife paid to New York after he had completed Across the River and Into the Trees. She intended the piece to be affectionate and admiring. But once it was published, something unexpected happened. In her own words: “To the complete surprise of Hemingway and the editors of The New Yorker and myself, it turned out, when the profile appeared, that what I had written was extremely controversial.”
The problem, it appears, is that Hemingway–the selfsame Hemingway Lillian Ross knew and loved and portrayed with such sympathy and scrupulous accuracy–was also something of a horse’s ass. Those who liked him, or liked the idea of him, had ignored this aspect of his personality, either by choice or because they were blinded by his achievements. But once her portrait appeared in cold print, the reality was pretty hard to deny. Now, Ross herself was terribly chagrined at this reaction; it wasn’t at all what she’d been aiming for. But still, the sheer precision of her reportage was responsible for it, and maybe, just maybe, some tiny observant part of her consciousness had been aware of the possibility all along.
So … in answer to the question we’ve both been pondering, my guess is Boswell was not actuated by conscious malice. He was a superb instinctive journalist before the profession’s existence was recognized, and he wrote a superb personality profile before the genre had been invented. But the key word here may well be “conscious.” He worked hard at creating an accurate likeness. (Those in the know considered his drawing-room mimicry of Johnson’s conversation superior even to the great actor Garrick’s.) And he was certainly aware that the portrait he was producing was complex and that a fair number of his subject’s flaws and quirks were being put on display. This was a deliberate, considered strategy. Given the inequality in their relations, it’s hard not to suspect he might have taken some secret pleasure in that fact. Even if he kept the pleasure secret from himself, too.
Thus, when you ask whether Johnson as a person bothered me at all, I would say very much so. Thoroughly. In fact, although of course it would have been fascinating to have had a conversation with him or maybe even to have been a guest at the same dinner party, I can imagine nothing worse than being in thrall to such a man, as Boswell emphatically was. (At the risk of seeming excessively Freudian, I’d guess that only someone who had as many conflicts with his real father as Boswell did would have sought out and embraced a relationship like the one he had with Johnson.) But nevertheless, despite or because of the thralldom, Boswell captured his man whole and brought him back alive. It is a tribute to Boswell’s achievement that we can talk about Johnson’s personality with such confidence; one absolutely feels one knows the man. And brilliant and witty as he undeniably was, he was also a major pain.
He was a bigot–even by the standards of his own time and place–a snob, and a bully. His Toryism was fierce and unyielding (“Whiggism is a negation of all principle,” he proclaimed, with that exquisite tolerance he brought to all controversies); his wit was often cruel, his presumption limitless, his callousness breathtaking. Although occasionally capable, we are informed, of tender concern for the unfortunate, he was also able to tell Boswell, when the latter asked how he would feel if a good friend were apprehended for a capital offense, “I should do what I could to bail him, and give him any other assistance; but if he were once fairly hanged, I should not suffer.”
His most consistent conversational gambit is contradiction, and contradiction offered, offensively, de haut en bas. His truculence, his constant positioning of himself in such a way that he seems to be instructing those around him, wears very thin very quickly. It also sometimes forces him to assume perverse and even downright untenable attitudes and opinions, merely for the sake of being able to disagree.
Thus, to a Dutch visitor who deprecates the use of torture in Holland, Johnson replies:
Why, Sir, you do not, I find, understand the law of your own country. The torture in Holland is considered as a favour to an accused person; for no man is put to the torture there, unless there is as much evidence against as would amount to conviction in England. An accused person among you, therefore, has one chance more to escape punishment …
To a woman expressing horror at the excesses of the Inquisition, Boswell describes how “… [t]o the utter astonishment of all the passengers but myself … [Johnson] defended the Inquisition, and maintained that ‘false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance; that the civil power should unite with the church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion, and that such only were punished by the Inquisition.’ “
When Boswell mentions disapprovingly that Oxford has expelled six Methodist students on religious grounds:
JOHNSON: “Sir, that expulsion was extremely just and proper. What have they to do at an University who are not willing to be taught, but will presume to teach? Where is religion to be learnt but at an University? …” BOSWELL: “But, was it not hard, Sir, to expel them, for I am told they were good beings?” JOHNSON: “Sir, I believe they might be good beings; but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.”
And when Boswell casually uses the phrase “to make money,” Johnson takes him firmly to task, saying, “Don’t you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it; you should say get money.”
Give me a break.
Eventually, even Boswell himself comes to recognize and acknowledge this quality in his friend: “He appeared to have a pleasure in contradiction,” he tells us, “especially when any opinion whatever was delivered with an air of confidence.” But Boswell attributes this tic to Johnson’s delight in lively and elegant argumentation, and I think he’s being far too generous. To me, it seems more a method of gaining power over his interlocutors, a way of seizing control of a conversation.
But I can’t help noticing that, in my previous paragraph, I’ve unintentionally reiterated, or rather enacted, the salient point I’d want to make about Boswell’s splendid book. So vivid is his portrait of Johnson, so lifelike and lucid, that I actually feel free to dispute with him about his closest friend, a person he knew intimately and who, in addition, died over 150 years before I was born. And I don’t even feel presumptuous doing so. In other words, this is one damned lively portrait; as Peter Cook might have said, it must be, its eyes follow you around the room.
Sarah, it’s been a great pleasure taking this lovely voyage of discovery with you.
All best,
Erik
