artenol0416_sm_flipbook

Biography
Good heaven! What is
n WHEN THE 8,000-PAGE JOURNAL OF JAMES BOSWELL
(1740-1795) was discovered in a chest of drawers in Malahide Castle,
Dublin, in the 1920s, this provincial Scottish lawyer, whose reputation
rested almost entirely on the documentation of celebrity, became
a literary genius overnight. “Many of the greatest men that ever lived
have written biography,” Lord Macaulay had pronounced, a good
52
hundred years before the discovery; “Boswell was one
of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten
them all.” The unveiling of this breathtaking document
– gossiped about in literary circles for decades,
published in a limited vanity edition in the 1930s, then
brought out by Yale in fourteen volumes from the
1950s through the ‘80s – showed that the greatest biography
in the English language, Boswell’s Life of Samuel
Johnson (1791), was only a slice, in some parts literally
shorn off, of this small man’s monument to his own,
very large mind.
It wasn’t learning that made his mind great. Boswell
had an average intellect. But he paid close attention to
it. This was his gift. Take his run-in with “Signor Gonorrhea”
on a trip to London at age twenty-two, 1763.
Before:
A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five
times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa
was madly fond of me; she declared I was a
prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary
for human nature. I said twice as much
might be, but this was not, although in my own
mind I was somewhat proud of my performance
... Louisa had an exquisite mixture of delicacy
and wantonness that made me enjoy her with
more relish. Indeed, I could not help roving in
fancy to the embraces of some other ladies which
my lively imagination strongly pictured. I don’t
know if that was altogether fair. However, Louisa
had all the advantage. She said she was quite
fatigued and could neither stir leg nor arm ... I
have painted this night as well as I could. The
description is faint; but I surely may be styled a
Man of Pleasure.
And after, while clapped-up in bed:
I thought London a bad place for me. I imagined
I had lost all relish of it. Nay, so very strange
is wayward, diseased fancy that it will make us
wish for the things most disagreeable to us merely
to procure a change of objects, being sick and
tired of those it presently has ... In the afternoon,
my brother came. He brought many low old
Sunday ideas when we were boys into my memory.
I wanted to indulge my gloom in solitude. I
wearied of him. I showed it. I was angry at myself.
I was peevish. He was good enough to say
he would go and come just as I chose. He left me.
I remained ill.
Here stood on each page an individual, more vivid
in his private jottings than Clarissa Harlowe or Samuel
Pepys. The latter, probably Boswell’s closest diarist
predecessor, a London naval administrator of the 17th
century, is remarkably observant in the diary he kept
for nine years. But he does not plumb the depths or
dramatize as Boswell does. Pepys, 1663:
Up betimes and to my office (having first been
angry with my brother John, and in the heat of my
sudden passion called him Asse and coxcomb,
for which I am sorry, it being but for leaving the
key of his chamber with a spring lock within side
of his door), and there we sat all the morning,
and at noon dined at home, and there found a
little girl, which she told my wife her name was
FALL 2016