The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [7]
He sometimes could not bear being teazed with questions. I was once present when a gentleman asked so many as, ‘What did you do, Sir?’ ‘What did you say, Sir?’ that he at last grew enraged, and said, ‘I will not be put to the question. Don’t you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what, and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow’s tail long? why is a fox’s tail bushy?’40
But for the most part Johnson seems to have been complicitous in this unstated, but nevertheless palpable, process of literary production which was advantageous both to him and to Boswell.41 Later in life Johnson touched again on this subject: ‘To be contradicted, in order to force you to talk, is mighty unpleasing. You shine, indeed; but it is by being ground.’42 But the chance to shine often reconciled Johnson to the grinding.
It is a paradox of play that, in any game, the opponents are also collaborators, and a further paradox that they collaborate precisely by opposing one another – their conflict engenders the game they create together. The moments of disagreement, of opposition and of conflict, between Boswell and Johnson which we encounter in the Life sometimes have this gaming quality to them: they are the grinding which produces brilliance. Boswell repeatedly draws his reader’s attention to issues or topics on which he disagreed with Johnson: topics such as the respective merits of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, the current crisis in Corsica, the significance of Sir John Dalrymple’s discovery that the Whig martyrs Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell had been secret pensioners of Louis XIV, the war with the American colonies, and the institution of slavery, which Johnson consistently attacked, and Boswell shamefully defended:
I beg leave to enter my most solemn protest against his [Johnson’s] general doctrine with respect to the Slave Trade. For I will resolutely say – that his unfavourable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information… To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.43
When he does this, Boswell is in part preening himself before the reader and displaying the fact that he is not merely Johnson’s creature – this is the function of these passages in the life as written.44 But in the life as lived, these episodes served the different function of drawing Johnson out. In the transition from experience to literature, they migrate from utility to ostentation.
To draw Johnson out was also, one suspects, at least at times the purpose of another kind of difference between the two men, namely their occasional bouts of coolness or sullenness.45 The Life records a number of interruptions in their friendship: for instance, in 1764 and 1765 (when Boswell records that Johnson ‘did not favour me with a single letter for more than two years’), in 1767 (‘I received no letter from Johnson this year’), in 1770 (‘a total cessation of all correspondence between Dr. Johnson and me’), in 1778, and in 1784.46 Doubtless some of these apparent estrangements were innocent; but surely not all. In 1779 Boswell reveals that ‘I did not write to Johnson, as usual, upon my return to my family, but tried how he would be affected by my silence.’47 In 1780 Johnson began a letter by chiding Boswell for having ‘taken one of your fits of taciturnity, and [having] resolved not to write till you are written to;