The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [19]
And here is the corresponding passage in the Life:
On the 9th of April, being Good Friday, I breakfasted with him on tea and cross-buns; Doctor Levet, as Frank called him, making the tea. He carried me with him to the church of St. Clement Danes, where he had his seat; and his behaviour was, as I had imaged to myself, solemnly devout. I never shall forget the tremulous earnestness with which he pronounced the awful petition in the Litany: ‘In the hour of death, and at the day of judgement, good Lord deliver us.’
We went to church both in the morning and evening. In the interval between the two services we did not dine; but he read in the Greek New Testament, and I turned over several of his books.142
Comparison reveals a general tendency towards polish and integration, and confirms one’s impression of Boswell as a voluptuary of writing. The staccato syntax of the journal entry is worked up into more elaborate sentences. The more refined technique of implication (the Life’s quietly pooh-poohing ‘Doctor Levet, as Frank called him’) supplants mere statement (the journal’s more openly disbelieving ‘I never knew till now that Levett had that title, or rather took it’). That syntactical and strategic impasto is accompanied by an enrichment of point of view. In the finished account the perspective of the observer is incorporated into the overall effect, as we see when the journal’s simple assertion that ‘He was solemn and devout’ undergoes enhancement into the Life’s ‘his behaviour was, as I had imaged to myself, solemnly devout’ – a revision which overlays the raw perception of Johnson’s religious devotion with the film of that parallel devotion which was Boswell’s persistent and imaginative contemplation of Johnson himself. Most striking of all, however, is the introduction into the Life of a vibrant detail not present in the journal: ‘I never shall forget the tremulous earnestness with which he pronounced the awful petition in the Litany: “In the hour of death, and at the day of judgement, good Lord deliver us.”’ Is this a real memory of Johnson’s behaviour on that day in 1773, which somehow failed to be recorded in the journal? Is it an accurate memory of Johnson’s behaviour on another occasion, which Boswell has inserted into the account in the Life of the events of 9 April 1773 in order to heighten it? Or is it rather a glimpse of an ideal Johnson, the Johnson whom Boswell elsewhere paints as gripped by fears of damnation, which was forged by that process of repeated tacking between memory and imagination to which Boswell refers when he found that Johnson’s actual demeanour in St Clement Danes – at least as he recollected it when he came to write it up for the Life – matched how he had ‘imaged’ it to himself in advance of the event?143 In this, is it like that other, less obtrusive, detail in the account in the Life for which the journal gives no warrant, namely the assertion that it was Levet who made the tea that Good Friday, and whose pretensions to the title of ‘Doctor’ were thus quietly placed by his performance of that menial task? In both Levet’s tea-making and Johnson’s ‘tremulous earnestness’ are we confronted with Boswell remembering as factual something which his imagination dictated to him, after the event, as possessing a truth deeper than that of circumstance?144
So the text of the Life, even when it may seem guileless, is far from any simple transcription of what happened to occur. For one thing, as we have already seen, Boswell was active in creating the reality he subsequently described. In this he may have picked up tips from an older friend of Johnson’s, Miss Williams, whom Boswell found ‘agreeable in conversation; for she had a variety of literature, and expressed herself