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By Root 4994 0

querier (‘But, Sir, is there any harm…’); the supportive reinforcer (‘One of the most pleasing thoughts is…’); the troubled doubter (‘Yet, Sir, we see in scripture…’); the robust endorser (I think, Sir, that is a very rational supposition’); the anxious seeker after comfort (‘Do you think, Sir, it is wrong…’); finally, the helpful supplier of apposite information (I have been told…’). The adroitness is partly a question of Boswell’s sensitivity to Johnson’s replies: any trace of testiness immediately prompts the adoption of a submissive role, whereas complaisance or relaxed expatiation on Johnson’s part is the signal for Boswell to move away from the postures of deference, to begin a new incursion, and open up a new line of exploration of the great man’s mind. Conversation conducted on this basis is partly like dancing, partly like fencing. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the first edition, Boswell refers to the ‘labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed’.148 He might have said ‘collected, arranged and half-created…’

Yet the Life does not comprise simply Boswell’s recollections of Johnson. It also digests within itself the collected impressions and anecdotes of a number of Johnson’s other friends, usually placed not so much with an eye to strict chronology (despite what Edmond Malone says in the ‘Advertisement’ to the third edition about Boswell endeavouring ‘uniformly to observe’ chronological order),149 but rather to fill in those areas where Boswell’s own material was, for whatever reason, thin. So, in the section of the Life dealing with September 1783, when Boswell was in Scotland and consequently apart from Johnson, Boswell inserted ‘a few particulars concerning him [Johnson], with which I have been favoured by one of his friends’ – in fact William Bowles, with whom Johnson had stayed the previous month.150 In a similar way, when Boswell failed to meet Johnson at all in 1780, he chose that moment in the narrative of the Life to insert an ample collection of Johnsonian sayings supplied by Bennet Langton; and when the same lack of contact had occurred in 1770, ‘without any coldness on either side, but merely from procrastination, continued from day to day’ as Boswell explains, he inserted at that point in the narrative of the Life the Johnsonian Collectanea of Dr Maxwell.151 The incorporation of this related but also foreign material not only amplifies and reinforces the Life:152 it contributes strongly to the distinctive experience of reading it provides.

We have commented on the elaboration of Boswell’s narrative. However, the narrative is far from polished, if by that metaphor for literary style we wish to imply a kind of writing completely purged of unevenness. The Life proclaims and seeks out unevenness, whether it be the inclusion of un-Boswellian material, or the different kind of unevenness which resulted from Boswell’s less than perfect commitment to the biographer’s task:

For some time after this day I did not see him very often, and of the conversation which I did enjoy, I am sorry to find I have preserved but little. I was at this time engaged in a variety of other matters, which required exertion and assiduity, and necessarily occupied almost all my time.153

A pleasing unevenness, too, arises from the incorporation of different kinds of literary material into the Life: letters, opinions, conversations, dramatizations of the more important encounters.154 The Life has in part the character of a florilegium of Johnsoniana, which both brings about a transfer of life to writing and yet also refrains from any pretence that this transfer is or can be anything more than partial.155 As with any anthology, its virtue is inseparable from – indeed, is precisely a product of – its selectivity.

The eschewal of mechanical regularity in the Life is thus a consequence of deliberate choice on Boswell’s part, and is an expression of the work’s implicit biographical theory. At the very outset, Boswell reminded his reader of Johnson’s own interest in