[This article appeared in Sewanee Review, Fall 2003]

 

BOSWELL'S ANATOMY OF FOLLY

 

                             ROBERT H. BELL

 

             James Boswell is a fascinating paradox, irremediably double.  His politics, conservative enough to be called "feudal," are full of radical innovation and revolutionary sympathy; his eighteenth-century neo-classical taste overflows with enthusiastically "Romantic" instincts; his conventional beliefs vie constantly with, or are belied by, astonishingly reckless behavior. Born to privilege, he finds or fashions himself as perpetually marginal; a naif or ingenu and a shrewd citizen of the world; widely beloved and often despised; outrageously self-aggrandizing and harrowingly self-abasing.

            In The Life of Johnson Boswell plays many roles sometimes in alarming tension because fundamentally he is both a biographer and an autobiographer. If Boswell often subordinates himself to the larger task of biography, he also makes his own feelings--his pleasure and gratification, his desire for approbation, his apprehensions--the subject. Preening and fawning, Boswell features, even flaunts, his own drama throughout Johnson's story. Boswell's dedication stresses that in his Tour of the Hebrides (1786), his successful trial-balloon for the Life, he was "almost unboundedly open in my communications, and from my eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson's wit, freely shewed to the world its dexterity, even when I was myself the object of it. I trusted that I should be liberally understood, as knowing very well what I was about, and by no means as simply unconscious of the pointed effects of the satire."  He claims to be sensible of all that "others could observe." 

            But Boswell does not explore the complicated problem of how he (or his reader) can distinguish that knowing authorial persona from the naive hero.         Contemplating levels of awareness is always speculative, never more tricky than in the writing of Boswell, who vehemently asserts his comprehensive narrative control and mocks his dull readers' misperceptions: "The world . . . I have found to be a great fool, as to that particular, on which it has become necessary to speak very plainly," that is, to declare forcibly that he knows what he is doing. Boswell insists that he very well knows his business, that he plays the fool for sound rhetorical purposes: he regards himself, to borrow the Elizabethan distinction, as occasionally an "artificial" fool, never a "natural" fool, that is, deliberately humorous or subtly wise rather than unknowingly ridiculous. In "Of Laughter" Henri Bergson notes that "When the humourist laughs at himself he is really acting a double part; the self who laughs is indeed conscious, but not the self who is laughed at."   Bergson's emphasis upon the comic "double part" describes a notable quality of Boswell's writing, a startling disparity between narrator and character, which at times suggests two persons.  Boswell would appreciate seeing Bergson's formulation applied to his writing, for such strategic separation and humorous uses of the "self" are exactly what he claims to be doing.

            Yet the Bergsonian model, or Boswell's contention, is only partially or intermittently apt, for Boswell's narrator is only loosely a "persona," and that narrator is not always "indeed conscious" of how silly he sounds, nor is he reliably stationed above "the self who is laughed at."  The question of self-awareness--how much of this humorous performance Boswell provides consciously, deliberately--is vexed, perhaps inherently. As Johnson, "rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye," remarked: " 'True, Sir: and when we see a very foolish fellow, we don't know what to think of him.' He then rose up, strided to the fire, and stood for some time laughing and exulting."  We may laugh and wonder.  Boswell's performance is an incredible display, almost as conspicuously antic as that of Tristram Shandy, so that the Life of Johnson has an invisible subtitle, The Life and Opinions of James Boswell, Gentleman. The Prince of Biographers is also English literature's Court Jester, for the Life is profoundly, peculiarly inflected with follies of which Boswell seems blissfully unaware, or in which he revels.

            Consider Boswell as our wise, authoritative narrator. It is Boswell's sacred office, or ultimate opportunity, to evaluate everyone and everything that swims into his ken.  In playing the sage, he hopes to fulfill, his youthful self-admonition to "Be Johnson," distinguishing the sheep and the goats, the quick and the dead, the redeemed and the damned. With the vaguest pretext, Boswell asserts his prerogative as ultimate arbiter; court is always in session, wherein he can settle accounts with all those who undervalued, patronized, or mocked him.  But in emulating Johnson, Boswell woefully lacks Johnsonian moral authority; Boswell is tall only by strutting on tip-toe.

            Boswell regards himself as an apostle, Johnsonizing the land and commemorating truth.  But Boswell the narrator fails to sustain the Johnsonian sublime; he does not sound sufficiently inspired or adequately wise.  When Boswell "does" Johnson, speaking as interpreter, critic, and judge, he sometimes appears to be in loosely-flapping "borrowed robes," or even motley. Using narrative privilege to clarify and guide the perplexed, his reach exceeds his grasp, so that professions or impersonations of authority backfire. Touched by wisdom, delivering the word, Boswell somehow stoops to folly.  We continually doubt Boswell's judgment and wonder why Johnson's star pupil is not more impressive. Strong doses of Johnsonian counsel are repeatedly administered and endlessly reitered, because perpetually needed. There is the famous parable of the moth whom Johnson christens "Boswell," and many frequent exhortations in jest and earnest. Once, recalling Pope's times, Johnson muses, "It was worth while being a dunce. Ah, Sir, hadst thou lived in those days!" Johnson discourages drinking, philandering, publishing private correspondence, tittle-tattle, pursuing fame or yielding to vanity, making "people stare, by being absurd": Clear your mind of cant!  Boswell hardly bothers to disguise the identity of that young gentleman so often  professing inapt judgments or inadequate wisdom.           

            Correcting errors in Thrale and Hawkins, establishing "with authentick precision"  what Johnson composed, clarifying Johnson's position on Garrick's candidacy for the Club, documenting his opinions of Scots, Whigs, lady preachers, dissenters, infidels, skeptics, Boswell is a great and good servant, upholding Johnson's "acute discrimination, that solid judgment, and that knowledge of human nature, for which he was upon all occasions remarkable."  Mounting the bully pulpit himself, Boswell spreads the word zealously, effectively, clearly, unforgettably. Yet we never forget the disparity between apostle and prophet, between student and teacher.  Often, Boswell sounds less like "The Rambler" than like Tristram Shandy, reveling in and swamped by folly.

            There are indeed many Boswellian moments when he appears "by no means as simply unconscious" that he is the butt of Johnson's wit. Frequently, Boswell's self-exposure is calculated and wonderfully comic.  When, for example in the Tour of the Hebrides, the travelers are caught in a violent storm, while the sailors are scurrying about their business, Boswell "asked Col, with much earnestness, what I could do. He, with a happy readiness, put into my hand a rope, which was fixed to the top of one of the masts, and told me to hold it till he bade me pull. If I had considered the matter," Boswell continues, "I might have seen that this could not be of the least service; but his object was to keep me out of the way of those who were busy working the vessel, and at the same time to divert my fear, by employing me, and making me think that I was of use. Thus did I stand firm to my post, while the wind and rain beat upon me, always expecting a call to pull my rope."   Boswell not only exposes but emphasizes his ridiculousness, to contrast starkly the stoic equanimity of the philosophic hero Johnson, who had retired below to fortify himself with prayer and philosophy. 

            In such scenes, his silliness subordinated to larger designs, Boswell's narrative seems fully controlled. There are many such masterful moments when Boswell is fooling around or impishly provoking Johnson. He takes Johnson into a "wretched little hovel" because he hopes for a "scene that would amuse Dr Johnson"-- and his readers. Who would  maintain that Boswell is oblivious to its comic effects? "Dr Johnson was curious to know where [the old lady who lived there] slept. I asked one of the guides, who questioned her in Erse. She answered with a tone of emotion, saying . . . she was afraid we wanted to go to bed to her. This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a being, was truly ludicrous." Boswell develops this amusing encounter: "Dr Johnson and I afterwards were merry upon it. I said, it was he who alarmed the poor woman's virtue. 'No, sir,' said he, 'she'll say, "there came a wicked young fellow, a wild dog, who I believe would have ravished me, had there not been with him a grave old gentleman, who repressed him: but when he gets out of the sight of his tutor, I'll warrant you he'll spare no woman he meets, young or old." ' 'No, sir,' I replied, 'she'll say, "There was a terrible ruffian who would have forced me, had it not been for a civil decent young man who, I take it, was an angel sent from heaven to protect me." '   Conceived as amusement, elaborated as badinage, this passage typifies Boswell's strategic uses of folly and carries out his avowed purpose, to display Johnson's wonderful wit, "even when I myself was the object of it." That it also provides an opportunity to display his own wit, and to discharge in jest a serious, lifelong pressure to philander, should not be held against him.

             But Boswell only sometimes seems, as he claims, "sensible of all" his readers "could observe." At least as often he appears unknowingly ridiculous, and we laugh not with but at Boswell, for his "perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself."  All his writing blurs the distinction between wise narrator and naive protagonist, so that it is often difficult to distinguish what Boswell calls the "truly comick"  and the inadvertently humorous.  An indication of Boswell's partial awareness is that he sometimes restricts his foolishness to footnotes, as if he wishes the discourse to proceed seriously, properly, but needs an escape hatch or folly spout.  Many of Boswell's footnotes are priceless. On his lineage: "Of such ancestry who would not be proud?" he asks, citing a Latin tag line which could adorn his coat of arms: "It is nothing if the other person doesn't know it."

            Boswell inclines toward self-aggrandizement, self-abasement, or a disorienting blend of both. For instance: Boswell quotes Johnson recounting how difficult it was to get Boswell into the Club, which operated on a fraternity blackball system. "Several of the members wished to keep you out. Burke told me, he doubted if you were fit for it." Burke! Himself so admired by Johnson and Boswell and nearly all the world! Either Boswell was willing to humiliate himself for the Johnsonian principle of truth in all things, or he felt that his success in winning over such skeptics balanced the debit of appearing ridiculous: "but," continues Johnson, "now you are in, none of them are sorry." This was almost true, though Gibbon might beg to differ. Boswell infers what in fact happened: " 'They were afraid of you, sir, as it was you who proposed me.' JOHNSON: 'Sir, they knew, that if they refused you, they'd probably never have got in another. I'd have kept them all out.' " Then, without comment, Boswell continues  Johnson's account of the election, including this indication that he, Johnson, was not the only Boswell Booster: "Beauclerk was very earnest for you." This was a kind gesture, to which Boswell responds with the sort of fatuity which never ceases to amaze: "Beauclerk," opines Boswell, "has a keenness of mind which is very uncommon."  The reviewer who so warmly praised my last book is widely respected for his rigor, objectivity, and acuity.

             Or this entry, near the end of the Tour: "I happened to tell that one evening, a great many years ago, when Dr Hugh Blair and I were sitting together in the pit of Drurylane play-house, in a wild freak of youthful extravagance, I entertained the audience prodigiously, by imitating the lowing of a cow. A little while after I had told this story, I differed from Dr Johnson, I suppose too confidently, upon some point, which I now forget. He did not spare me. 'Nay, sir,' said he, 'if you cannot talk better as a man, I'd have you bellow like a cow.' "  The reader will not be surprised to learn that Boswell includes another footnote. "As I have been scrupulously exact in relating anecdotes concerning other persons, I shall not withhold any part of this story, however ludicrous.--I was so successful in this boyish frolic, that the universal cry of the galleries was, 'Encore the cow! Encore the cow!' In the pride of my heart, I attempted imitations of some other animals, but with very inferior effect. My reverend friend, anxious for my fame, with an air of the utmost gravity and earnestness, addressed me thus: 'My dear sir, I would confine myself to the cow!' "

             Boswell can barely open his mouth without sounding   fatuous, self-absorbed, and sublimely foolish--a veritable Toad of Toad Hall, as one modern scholar says.  Boswell very often seems to consider James Boswell the most unusual and intriguing figure in the Life of Johnson. Here is  a splendid burst of smug Toadish nonsense:

 

            "Notwithstanding my high admiration of Rasselas, I will not maintain that the 'morbid melancholy' in Johnson's constitution may not, perhaps, have made life appear to him more insipid and unhappy than it generally is; for I am sure that he had less enjoyment from it than I have. Yet, whatever additional shade his own particular sensations may have thrown on his representation of life, attentive observation and close inquiry have convinced me, that there is too much of reality in the gloomy picture. The truth, however, is, that we judge of the happiness and misery of life differently at different times, according to the state of our changeable frame. I always remember a remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated in France, 'Ma foi, Monsieur, notre bonheur dépend de la facon que notre sang circule.'  This have I learnt from a pretty hard course of experience, and would, from sincere benevolence, impress upon all who honour this book with a perusal, that until a steady conviction is obtained, that the present life is an imperfect state, and only a passage to a better, if we comply with the divine scheme of progressive improvement; and also that it is a part of the mysterious plan of Providence, that intellectual beings must 'be made perfect through suffering;' there will be a continual recurrence of disappointment and uneasiness. But if we walk with hope in 'the mid-day sun' of revelation, our temper and disposition will be such, that the comforts and enjoyments in our way will be relished, while we patiently support the inconveniences and pains. After much speculation and various reasonings, I acknowledge myself convinced of the truth of Voltaire's conclusion, 'Après tout c'est un monde passable.' But we must not think too deeply."    

            What, a Sensible Reader might well ask, is Johnson to the Turkish lady, or the Turkish lady to Johnson? Aptly but (probably) not self-knowingly, Boswell caps this fantastic farrago of Shandean zig-zaggery with a line from Gray: "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."  Such a farcical potpourri, skipping merrily from Rasselas  and neo-Johnsonian generalizations to the Turkish lady educated in France to Voltaire to its blithely banal conclusion, typifies the Life as much as such justly-praised sequences as the gladiator image, the dinner with Wilkes, or meeting with George III. Facing some formidable competition, Boswell emerges as one of literature's most flamboyantly self-centered figures. Boswell mounts the pulpit in motley.

             Yet in this outburst is a strange glory or egotistical sublime, like those surprising, amazing architectural "follies" in eighteenth-century gardens and estates. Apparently rambling, Boswell completes a rather nifty circle, like Tristram's "wheel of life," making space for himself and seemingly anything else he wishes to mention. Such utter lack of "normal" self-consciousness, such vibrant fluency, seems deftly artful and subtly subversive: if Boswell had put the Turkish lady's words in Voltaire's mouth, and vice versa, would we know the difference--or attribute subtle irony to "ironic" Voltaire? Is Boswell mad north-by-northwest? Or is Boswell's folly more than feigned and less than madness?

            Nowhere is Boswell more earnestly foolish than in regarding his rival, Mrs. Thrale/Piozzi, who had recently published her Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson.   Boswell's attacks upon Mrs. Piozzi are unintentionally amusing, habitually reckless, and sometimes outlandish.  One of my favorite examples of Folly Unbound is Boswell's appalling story of writing and publishing a scurrilous burlesque, Ode by Dr. Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale upon her Supposed Approaching Nuptials. As if reciting this "sportive lay" in public were not sufficiently tasteless, four years after Johnson died, Boswell printed pseudononymously but thinly veiled the bawdy epithalamium. Nor was this the end of his foolishness. In a footnote he mentions rumors that Johnson wished to marry this "rich widow," gossip he judges "without foundation."  But he adds, "The report, however, gave occasion to a poem, not without characteristical merit," which coyly hints his authorship and justifies citing three stanzas of his masterpiece--including this breathtaking reference to Johnson's deceased wife, or is it his step-daughter? "Porter no longer shall be praised/ 'Tis I MYSELF am Thrale's Entire."

            Usually Boswell is slightly more discreet, shielding himself behind Johnson's authority, as when he quotes Johnson comparing the Thrales: "She is more flippant; but he has ten times her learning; he is a regular scholar [meaning that Mr Thrale is well read, for a brewer]; but her learning is that of a school-boy in one of the lower forms."  Reading passages such as this introduction of Mr. Thrale, it is hard to believe that Boswell deliberately projects a naive narrative persona, like Chaucer's Pilgrim or Swift's Gulliver: "Foreigners are not a little amazed," remarks Boswell, "when they hear of brewers, distillers, and men in similar departments of trade, held forth as persons of considerable consequence. In this great commercial country it is natural that a situation which produces much wealth should be considered as very respectable; and, no doubt [our honourable, reliable narrator assures us], honest industry is entitled to esteem. But, perhaps, the too rapid advance of men of low extraction tends to lessen the value of that distinction by birth and gentility, which has ever been found beneficial to the grand scheme of subordination."  Boswell specializes in such howlers. Anything as close to Boswell's heart as the value of birth and subordination may precipitate opinions utterly irrelevant and frequently embarrassing; we enjoy the spectacle, or cringe, or vent our indignation, each according to our needs. The one thing a Sagacious Reader is unlikely to do is to accept such nonsense as evidence of authority.

             As biographer Boswell cavorts with the unrestrained glee of an all-licensed fool. Discussing Garrick's light verse, Johnson spoofs the line, "I'd smile with the simple, and feed with the poor."  "Poor David!" exclaims Johnson. "Smile with the simple! What folly is that! And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich." Thus we glimpse Johnson's impatience with such cant as the superior virtue of the oppressed, and his appreciation for the superior cuisine of the privileged. What makes the vignette so irresistible and ludicrously Boswellian is what follows: "I repeated this sally to Garrick, and wondered to find his sensibility as a writer not a little irritated by it."   Boswell's motives appear multiple: he conveys a genuinely witty "sally," shows that he is privy to Johnson's intimate responses, and puts down Garrick. Why Boswell specifies that it was he himself who told Garrick Johnson's mockery, and why he perpetually exposes himself behaving so indiscreetly, is strange but characteristic: evident throughout Boswell's life, especially in his social and sexual behavior, and throughout his writing, is a Shandean pattern of assertion and withdrawal, self-aggrandizement and self-abasement.

            Boswell conducts himself, as both narrator and character in the Life, in ways perhaps intended to be entertaining but bound to be risky.  Boswellian discourse, early and late in his career, is a process of accommodation, aspiring and stumbling, a struggle with follies the author partly comprehends and partly re-enacts, rather than an impersonal product of magisterial genius. Such staging of one's own hey-nonny-nonny is willy-nilly an irresistible subject,  a deft strategy, and a catastrophe.  Like Falstaff, Boswell is both humorous and in earnest. He continues right through his final revisions of the Life to indulge himself, Falstaff-like, foolishly consoling and promoting James Boswell. Occasionally an impressive authority and always an entertaining companion, Boswell as narrator amuses and amazes us with his foolish innocence, or canny folly. However we evaluate it, his folly seems more remarkable than his authority.

             As  biographer and commentator, Boswell takes unrestrained delight in emulating Johnson's "acute discrimination, that solid judgment, and that knowledge of human nature, for which he was upon all occasions remarkable."  But Boswell's judgments are small beer, less hearty than Johnson's: when he delivers them, or delivers himself of them, he sounds like a bright Sixth Former, or a choirboy elevated to the Bishop's lectern for the Feast of Fools.  But beyond his depth, trying vainly to sustain authority, Boswell is so eager to set things straight or get even that he sinks ignominiously.

            Whenever Boswell has some personal relationship or investment in the issue, which is often, he is likely to intrude foolishly. His thin skin and itch of self-justification provoke many self-serving digressions. Ironically, the urge to show that he is trusted with confidential or implicitly private material undermines his narrative trustworthiness. Incessantly in hot water for repeating gossip, Boswell continues to produce tittle-tattle in the Life.  It stands to reason, if reason is your criterion, that you cannot publish hundreds of pages of intimate opinions, jests, evaluations, and witticisms concerning real people without peril.     There are countless examples of embarrassing imprudence, for gossip, grandly gussied up in Boswell's subtitle ("THE WHOLE EXHIBITING A VIEW OF LITERATURE AND LITERARY MEN IN GREAT-BRITAIN FOR NEAR HALF A CENTURY . . ."), is the woof and web of Boswell's Life.  Today respectable journalism like Newsweek or "Nightline" periodically reports how tasteless  political campaigning, media coverage, and advertising have become, thus giving themselves a pretense to repeat  innuendo, vulgarity, and scandal. ("We are shocked--shocked!-to find. . ." ). So too Boswell has his cake and eats it. He corrects Hawkins and Thrale on the delicate subject of David Garrick's suitability for membership in the Club. He gets to repeat what Hawkins had cited as Johnson's objection: "He will disturb us by his buffoonery."  Boswell's Corrected Text enshrines for the ages Hawkins's apparently inaccurate but deliciously nasty comment, and proceeds to add another instance of Johnson's displeasure "with the actor's conceit."

               Boswell's indiscretions are breathtaking, especially gossiping about anyone with whom he was closely involved, such as Lady Diana Beauclerk. Characteristically, in conversation with Johnson Boswell presents himself as the gallant protector of the lady's honor, apologizing (as he says) for her history. Treated brutally by her husband the Viscount Bolingbroke, she fell in love with Beauclerk, divorced, and remarried. Though Lady Diana's story was very familiar to Boswell's readers, he makes little effort to veil her identity and adds the Boswellian signature: "Seduced, perhaps, by the charms of the lady in question, I thus attempted to palliate what I was sensible could not be justified [divorcing an abusive husband?]; for, when I had finished my harangue, my venerable friend gave me a proper check: " 'My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman's a whore, and there's an end on't.' "  This exhibition is appalling in too many ways to belabor: between Boswell and Johnson it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity.  One can only imagine the humiliation of the lady, reading it and knowing everyone else was repeating it. In such exhibitions OF LITERATURE AND LITERARY MEN Boswell continually demonstrates how far short of the ideal he and Johnson fall, failing to attain that "well considered, and impartial opinion of the judge, which falls from his lips with weight, and is received with reverence."

            Of course the reason Boswell thought he could and should record this insult to Lady Diana is that Johnson said it. In Boswell's world the number of fools is infinite, for no one appears on his comic stage without at least sometimes appearing ridiculous.  Willy-nilly, one of Boswell's regular "topicks of ridicule" is the hero: Boswell's Johnson is a very humorous fellow, "grotesque" (to recall one of Johnson's definitions of humorous) or foolish enough to be a kind of comic monster. Like Fielding and Sterne, Boswell is perpetually amused by the way a character, even one as grand as Johnson, may speak as a philosopher and behave as a man, if not as farcically as Parson Adams or the philosopher Square, yet with comic regularity. For better and for worse, Johnson is, as Bottom defines himself, "a man as other men are." Nearly everyone is surprised upon first viewing the "sage" and "decorous philosopher." We tend to remember Johnson descending about noon from his bed-chamber, a "huge uncouth figure, with a little dark wig which scarcely covered his head, and his clothes hanging loose about him."  His countenance was "disfigured" by scrofula and he was virtually blind in one eye; he was always "remarkably large" but his disabilities precluded many boyish games. To his tutors at Oxford, his "figure and manner appeared strange" with some sort of "defect in his nervous system."  He suffered greatly from a "morbid melancholy" which Boswell associated with his own hypochondria known as "The English Malady."  As a young man Johnson feared he was quite mad, and endured "perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved."  Pope, impressed by Johnson's anonymous poem "London," made inquiries and learned that it was the work of a young poet with "an Infirmity of the convulsive kind, that attacks him sometimes, so as to make Him a sad Spectacle."  Boswell explains that this is a distemper known as St. Vitus's dance, causing convulsion and unsteadiness, so that the patient moves "like an ideot."  Indeed, a natural fool is just what Hogarth thought of Johnson when he first encountered him at the home of Samuel Richardson: "a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. [Hogarth] concluded that [Johnson] was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson."

            But Boswell goes far beyond acknowledging what cannot be ignored, Johnson's curious, unavoidable "particularities." He represents Johnson in patently ridiculous postures or situations, as the schoolmaster not "profoundly reverenced by his pupils."  Is anything more mortifying to a man than appearing sexually ridiculous? The boys would imitate their master's "oddities of manner, and uncouth gesticulations"; through the key-hole they would spy, "that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and aukward fondness for Mrs. Johnson."  Probably humiliated by his physical infirmities and strange appearance, Johnson had married a woman twice his age, obese, vulgar, vain, and often intoxicated. "I have seen Garrick exhibit her," writes Boswell, "by his exquisite talent for mimickry, so as to excite the heartiest bursts of laughter."  Though Johnson is far more often reverenced than ridiculed, elevated rather than demeaned, is not a pinch of folly more striking than a pound of reason?  Some readers suspect the Life to be deliberate debunking, "craftily depreciating" or "vilipending" Johnson, while others regard it as an unconscious Oedipal revenge. Whatever the ratio of ridicule and reverence, or whatever the latent significance of Boswell's father, Boswell's Flemish portrait, "warts and all," renders Johnson's peculiarities unforgettably vivid.

             Boswell rarely neglected any funny anecdote, casual jest or pungent gibe, nor was he in any condition to verify every amusing titbit.  To some readers, especially Johnsonians, Boswell is what James Joyce termed a "biografiend," chopping his great subject down to his own proportions, while pretending or meaning to be a faithful apostle. (Joyce Carol Oates calls this "pathography.") Perhaps Boswell does convey even more Johnsonian folly than he admitted or realized. The Samuel Johnson we meet in the pages of the biography is in some measure a creation of James Boswell, constructed (we'd say today) to gratify Boswell's needs both conscious and unconscious. It is transparent why Boswell darkly and without evidence hints at Johnson's youthful sexual promiscuity. To acknowledge that the figure of Johnson is colored by Boswell's subjectivity is important. Johnsonians have labored mightily to separate Samuel Johnson from The Life, for various reasons: to correct the record, redeem an authority, discredit Boswell, etc.   One should know that Boswell skews Johnson towards a more rigid, orthodox, high Tory ideology. Donald J. Green, a Johnson scholar, argues that Boswell--out of his desperate need to win approval and justify himself--found, partly remade, and took a measure of revenge upon his great father-figure.  This process of Boswellizing Johnson allows Boswell to defend and define himself, of course, but it also permits Boswell and his reader "to feel superior to [Johnson]," which, adds Green, "is no doubt why so many Boswellian anecdotes appeal to readers."

            The character "for which he was eminently qualified, a majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom," is Boswell's definition of Johnson's major role, yet Boswell continually places the Johnsonian ridiculous next to the Johnsonian sublime. Directly before donning Johnson the majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom, for example, he depicts the author of Irene ludicrously dandified in a scarlet waist-coat, with rich gold lace and a gold-laced hat. He loved to frequent the Green Room, where, as he told Garrick, "the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities."  Even so, this is a celebrated instance of Boswellian bowdlerlization: what Johnson said to Garrick, according to other testimony, was "the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses  do make my genitals to quiver."  

             Despite occasional bows to propriety, Boswell does often depict Johnson as a kind of "comic monster,"  a heroic subject literally "subjected" to mockery, as in Bakhtin's carnival, "abused and beaten when the time of his reign is over, just as the carnival dummy of winter or of the dying year is mocked . . . Abuse reveals the other, true face of the abused, tears off his costume and mask. It is the king's uncrowning."  The pathetic image of Johnson fondling Tetty lingers with readers, as it did with Garrick and the audiences for his mimicry, and like all enactments of folly remains profoundly ambiguous. "It has a negative element of debasement and destruction," Bakhtin notes, "and the positive element of renewal and truth."

            Ultimately dominant in Boswell's portrait of Johnson is that positive element, for Johnson regularly triumphs over the threat of ridicule. Standing so firmly on his dignity, he is always a ripe target. Like the absent-minded pedant or the other-worldly philosopher, he could easily stumble into the ditch. But Boswell does not view Johnson as the foolish victim of a world he never made, even when he subjects Johnson to something resembling a practical joke, as in the dinner with Wilkes. Potential satire becomes comic affirmation. The overall effect of Boswell's emphasis upon Johnson's "peculiarities" and "particularities" is to elevate the subject, so that he too is abased and exalted. This "king of men" comprised two bodies, frail flesh and immortal spirit; through the massive force of intellect, will, and imagination he triumphed over his mortal coil.  Imperial intellect transcends frail body. At Richardson's house, Johnson "displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired."  If Johnson appears foolish, he sounds inspired, a Miltonic adversary of folly.

            In almost every conceivable way, Johnson is folly's scourge, the epitome of wisdom, authority, lucidity, conviction, faith. If Falstaff loves to pass counterfeit tender, and Tristram gleefully confounds mask and self, Johnson systematically affirms the stability of truth and assails the "propagation of falsehood": what delights the chameleon fool shocks the virtuous philosopher. If Boswell often feels and says "we must not think too deeply," Johnson urges him to think again, more deeply: "My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. . . You may talk in this manner: it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly." Led by his friend Savage "into some indulgencies which occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind,"  he detested libertines, censored debauchery, castigated drunkenness, advocated abstinence. For Johnson, author and authority were intimately connected, and were virtual antonyms for fool and folly.

             I've compared Boswell to a number of sublime and ridiculous figures: Milton, Fielding, Johnson, Falstaff, Bottom, Tristram Shandy, and Toad. One last connection: Boswell resembles Charles Kinbote, the narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, whose ludicrous commentary upon John Shade's poem dramatizes and celebrates himself in a frenzy of peacock-like display, rambunctiously eccentric and adamantly egocentric. The personality of James Boswell will ineluctably remain an important part of The Life of Johnson, just as Boswell intended.  He certainly could not have written the great book he produced, nor sustained those fascinating journals, without being a very strange person, abounding with that most venial of the deadly sins, vanity.  Indeed, he had amazing temerity, which we'd call perseverance in a good cause and otherwise obnoxious aggressiveness. Virtually every twentieth-century Boswellian deplores Macaulay's famous portrait, but Macaulay speculates very shrewdly about The Life of Johnson: "The work could never have been written if the writer had not been precisely what he was. His character is displayed on every page, and this display of character gives a delightful interest to many passages which have no other interest."  Folly, however we judge it, permits and enables Boswell's greatest achievement and everything else he ever wrote, or was. Boswell remains a happy hunting-ground, or a fool's paradise, for lovers of the ludicrous.