I am about to start reading The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, but in truth, I’m not as interested in Samuel Johnson, right now, as I am in the writer himself. A while back I read Boswell’s London Journal and found some of his thoughts and ideas so enjoyable that I decided to immerse myself in the biography he wrote about Johnson to get back into that pleasurable place he led me to before.
James Boswell must have been Samuel Johnson’s biggest fan. It seems he venerated him to the heavens, he writes this:- ‘To write the Life of Him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, had been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and maybe reckoned in me a presumptuous task.’ Although he says that, it’s hard to believe he means anything else but, it is I and I alone who should be writing Johnson – at least as you read on and he glibly slights the other biographers intent on the same task, you believe that to be true. It might have been intrinsic to the manners of the time, 1791, to appear to be humble or even grovel. At any rate, I realised that James Boswell, this blubber-lipped boy, strikingly like Dylan Thomas in appearance, was a terrible liar and conniver when I read his diaries. Apart from being a dog of a man around women, of course. I liked the grubby bits of his diary very much and so I’m hoping there is more to come in ‘The Life of….’
However, reading further into Boswell’s introduction, he says that, ‘What I consider as the peculiar value of the following work, is, the quantity it contains of Johnson’s conversation; which is universally acknowledged to have been eminently instructive and entertaining; and of which the specimens that I have given upon a former occasion, have been received with so much approbation, that I have good grounds for supposing that the world will not be indifferent to more ample communications of a similar nature.’ Of course he is right, and he has a pretty good idea about what a decent biography should include. First he tells us how he thinks it should not be done, and probably has in mind writers he’s acquainted with. He says:- ‘We know how few can pourtray a living acquaintance, except by his most prominent and observable particularities, and the grosser features of his mind; and it may be easily imagined how much of this little knowledge may be lost in imparting it, and how soon a succession of copies will lose all resemblance of the original.’ And further:- ‘I am fully aware of the objections which may be made to the minuteness on some occasions of my detail of Johnson’s conversation, and how happily it is adapted for the petty exercise of ridicule, by men of superficial understanding, and ludicrous fancy; but I remain firm and confident in my opinion, that minute particulars are frequently characteristick, and always amusing, when they relate to a distinguished man. I am therefore exceedingly unwilling that any thing, however slight, which my illustrious friend thought it worth his while to express, with any degree of point, should perish.’
That is a statement of remarkable devotion.
