After many a weary year, a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson has at last fallen into my hands, courtesy of Dr. William Fahey. I had tried to read the Gutenberg version, but this is one of those classics that weighs in at well over 1000 pages. Now that I have an actual physical book, I find that Boswell is eminently browsable, and I for one don’t like to browse in a browser.
You can open the book at almost any point and interrupt a conversation in 18th-century London. Boswell was so struck by Samuel Johnson, a brilliant author and conversationalist, that he made it his life’s work to write the biography of the man. His rather rigorous standard included sheafs of letters, intricately insignificant incidents, and best of all, pages and pages of conversations reported verbatim.
You’ll surely find cause to disagree with Dr. Johnson; everyone else did too. He explicitly referred to conversation as a battle, and he was a famous and skilled warrior. But ideas were not the only targets for his verbal skewer. Speaking of a man named Taylor, he said,
I do not suppose he is very fond of my company. His habits are by no means sufficiently clerical; this he knows that I see; and no man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.
This is reported as a casual comment. You might wonder whether it would be possible to get along with such a man, and indeed much of the book seems to be a faithful report of a wit incisive rather than kind. Johnson appears to have had this caustic reputation even in his own time; yet Boswell is not only his admirer but his dear friend, at pains to show the gentler side of the man. Though perhaps I should have chosen excerpts showing Johnson’s exquisite command of logic and the language, I found myself more interested in Boswell’s friendship with his superstar. Boswell seems to have been somehow an adoring fan, drinking buddy, conversational contender, and needy friend all rolled into one. After taking his part in years and years and pages and pages of linguistic fireworks at Johnson’s side, we find a sudden attack of the teenage girl.
I did not write to Johnson, as usual, upon my return to my family, but tried how he would be affected by my silence.
And how did the brutal Terror of the Tavern, many years his senior, respond to this waiting game?
‘To JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ.
‘DEAR SIR,
‘What can possibly have happened, that keeps us two such strangers to each other? I expected to have heard from you when you came home; I expected afterwards. I went into the country and returned; and yet there is no letter from Mr. Boswell. No ill I hope has happened; and if ill should happen, why should it be concealed from him who loves you? Is it a fit of humour, that has disposed you to try who can hold out longest without writing? If it be, you have the victory. But I am afraid of something bad; set me free from my suspicions.
‘My thoughts are at present employed in guessing the reason of your silence: you must not expect that I should tell you any thing, if I had any thing to tell. Write, pray write to me, and let me know what is, or what has been the cause of this long interruption.
‘I am, dear Sir,
‘Your most affectionate humble servant,
‘SAM. JOHNSON.’
‘July 13, 1779.’
From the Gutenberg version of the Life of Johnson, Volume 3.
It seems the perfect answer.
Of course, Boswell wrote him back, but there must have been a mix-up, because Johnson wrote again in September:
‘Are you playing the same trick again, and trying who can keep silence longest? Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish; and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.
‘What can be the cause of this second fit of silence, I cannot conjecture; but after one trick, I will not be cheated by another, nor will harass my thoughts with conjectures about the motives of a man who, probably, acts only by caprice. I therefore suppose you are well, and that Mrs. Boswell is well too.
Which, given his mistake, seems the right answer too. But Boswell gives himself the last word:
On the 20th of September I defended myself against his suspicion of me, which I did not deserve; and added, ‘Pray let us write frequently. A whim strikes me, that we should send off a sheet once a week, like a stage-coach, whether it be full or not; nay, though it should be empty. The very sight of your handwriting would comfort me; and were a sheet to be thus sent regularly, we should much oftener convey something, were it only a few kind words.’
The very sight of your handwriting would comfort me. Today such frank affection is expected to be encoded in emoticons, embalmed by Hallmark (on special occasions), or else reduced to ritual exchanges of beers and girlfriends. We seem to be ashamed of all the wrong things.
