Boswell's Presumptuous Task.(Review)

Adam Sisman Boswell's Presumptuous Task. Hamish Hamilton, 392 pages, 17.99 [pounds sterling].

Published in 1791, the Life of Samuel Johnson became famous at once, but left everyone baffled that such a tremendous masterpiece could have been produced by James Boswell. The biographer was regarded by those who knew him as a talentless buffoon and by many others as something even less. Macaulay, most famously, pronounced Boswell "one of the smallest men who ever lived ... a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect ... servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot ... a common butt in the taverns of London." Does not a work of genius require a genius for its production?

The mystery endured for half-a-century, until a cache of Boswell's letters was discovered and published in the 1850s. This began the long, gradual discovery of Boswell himself, as more and more of his journals and letters came to light. We now know that the great biography of Johnson had its foundations in a much larger work of art: Boswell's obsessive chronicling of his own life. He observed early on that he would not like to live any more of life than he could record, and he seems to have remained true to this ideal, at least until his very last years.

Given that we know so intimately much about Boswell from his own hand, it seems to me a very daunting thing to attempt a biography of him. In A Life of James Boswell, Peter Martin has taken the direct approach, proceeding steadily from the subject's birth (in Edinburgh, 1740) to his death (London, 1795). Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task(1) follows a different plan, giving us a decent summary of Boswell's earlier years but concentrating on the creation of the Life of Johnson and taking its title from that book's opening sentence: "To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others ... may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task." The difference in the two authors' approaches to their common subject can be seen by noting the point in each book at which Boswell sits down to write the Life. This point, which occurred 83 percent of the way through Boswell's own actual life, is reached 90 percent of the way through the narrative part of Martin's book, but just before the halfway mark in Sisman's.

We find Boswell here much as we already knew him: bumptious, foolish, morbid, priapic, endlessly observing himself. "I have an excess of self-esteem," he noted at age twenty-five, and he was not mistaken. To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no less, he said at parting: "You have shown me great goodness. But I deserved it." Such a high regard for himself might have made him insufferable--but no, almost everyone seemed to like him (Mrs. Thrale and Horace Walpole were significant exceptions). As Mary Hamilton noted in her own diary: "Mr. Boswell is one of those people with whom one instantly feels acquainted." Johnson took to him at once and wavered in his affection only when Boswell pressed him too hard for his opinions about the afterlife, a topic of endless fascination for Boswell but terrifying to the great lexicographer.

Martin is especially good on Boswell's youthful travels in Europe, and on his relationship with his cold, unimaginative father (who declared journal-keeping to be "a register of follies" and Johnson "a brute"). Sisman is at his best showing us what pains Boswell took to get his facts right in the Life. "He was determined to paint a 'Flemish picture' of his friend, faithful to life, and accurate in every detail." It is, in fact, extraordinary to see this man, who in his everyday affairs was often so careless, dilatory, and chaotic, authenticating his material with such diligence. Boswell himself had, of course, been the first to notice this aspect of his abilities: "How attentive and accurate I am!," he had told his journal in 1778. This assiduity would not be so striking in a biographer of our own time, but was unusual in those days. Certainly it was not Johnson's method. When Johnson was writing his Lives of the Poets, Boswell went to some trouble to arrange for him an interview with Lord Marchmont, Pope's friend and executor. Johnson could not be bothered to go. "If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hand," he said irritably, "but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it." Later, notes Martin, the two men did call on Marchmont and were treated to a feast of Popean anecdotes. Boswell took careful notes, but Johnson never used them.

Boswell's labor on the Life was undertaken, as Johnson had said of his own work on the Dictionary, "not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, ...