It is a principle which receives a surprisingly modern echo. Roland Barthes said (with what seriousness, however, it is impossible to judge) that ‘were I a writer, and dead, how I would like my life to be reduced, by the attentions of a friendly, carefree biographer, to a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections; let’s say, “biographemes”.’163 The massive inclus-iveness of the Life is plainly at odds with the feline Barthes’s decadent, astringent preference for ‘a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections’; but otherwise, in its prizing of the grit of a life, Barthes’s playful formulation is not at complete variance with Boswell. There are so many tantalizing, unconstrued details in the Life of Johnson. Which reader would not want to know more about Elizabeth Blaney, who died of unrequited love for Johnson’s father?164 Who is not intrigued to be told of Johnson’s perpetual fondness ‘for chymical experiments’?165 When Johnson refers in passing to ‘all my Lincolnshire friends’, who does not wish to know who they were, and when Johnson met them?166 Who has not wondered to what purpose Johnson put the dried orange peel he sedulously collected at meetings of the Club?167 Would we not wish to know more about the Mr Ballow from whom Johnson learned law?168 Is there not almost endless resonance in the conjunctions of posture and occupation in some of Boswell’s recollections of Johnson? ‘He was for a considerable time occupied in reading Memoires de Fontenelle, leaning and swinging upon the low gate into the court, without his hat.’169 The collocation of that book, that state of undress, that pose and movement: the mind could dwell upon it almost without end. And in which reader does not Boswell’s late revelation of Johnson’s youthful recourse to prostitutes start reflections about the hidden life of Johnson?170 And, finally, there are all those unwritten Johnsonian works which are, as it were, embryonically preserved in the narrative of the Life: the edition of Bacon, the edition of the Biographia Britannica, the ‘Tory History of his country’, the life of Cromwell, the family history of the Boswells, the translation of de Thou and the life of Spenser which Johnson toyed with when virtually on his deathbed, all the projects contained in the catalogue of literary schemes which Johnson gave to Bennet Langton, and most of all perhaps the ‘two quarto volumes, containing a full, fair, and most particular account of his own life’, which Boswell supposes were consumed in the bonfire of Johnson’s personal papers in December 1784.171 These frequent alleyways leading from the written life to the life as lived, the existence of which we can register but which we cannot follow to their end and fully explore, keep the Life of Johnson supple and living, make it the receptacle of our keen, imaginative involvement, and prevent it from ever declining into something as unmoving (in all senses) as an embalming of Johnson.
Boswell places an instance of misplaced literary confidence close to the opening of his narrative, when he records Johnson’s amused recollection of the vanity of the nevertheless human wishes of an early teacher: ‘His next instructor in English was a master, whom, when he spoke of him to me, he familiarly called Tom Brown, who, said he, “published a spelling-book, and dedicated it to the Universe; but, I fear, no copy of it can now be had.”172 By keeping his aspirations closer to the soil, Boswell ensured a very different fate for his own book.
St Catherine’s College, Oxford, 2007
Further Reading
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clifford, J. L., and Greene, D. J., Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970)
Fleeman, J. D., A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
Greene, D. J., and Vance, J. A., A Bibliography of Johnson Studies, 1970– 1985 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, BC, 1987)
BIOGRAPHY
Bate, W. J., Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)
Clifford, J. L., Young Sam Johnson (London: Heinemann,