James BoswelL" The Later Years, 1769-1795

...Lord Byron thinks of his journal as a "relief...

...Paul's churchyard, singing ballads in the company of two women in red cloaks...

...But Eliot wrote that in 1918, and he was referring to James's physical death, not his critical standing...

...The reader often has to backtrack to see what train of thought, if any, led to the sentence he is reading...

...One wonders how many quarts he shed before he finished his life-time chronicle of four million words...

...In short, Boswell the writer was very um~rn~tea m,mage 1 For Leisurely Touring and Sightseeing THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 45 different from Boswell the person...

...It would be a Flemish portrait, providing details about his subject that most biographers would regard as inappropriate and unseemly...

...And to say that James never allowed the "unconscious force of sex" to his heroines is nonsense...

...Also, by quoting from Boswell's correspondence with Malone, Brady shows us what a careful writer Boswell was--how he usually resisted Malone's attempts to make his prose more dignified and latinate...

...Brady also realizes that Boswell brought a discipline to his work that he could not bring to his life...

...Many paragraphs become a series of nonsequiturs...

...but I can't read it over," he confesses...

...It is supposed to edify us rather than titillate us, and that involves looking at "domestick privacies, and.., the minute details of daily life," discussing the faults and failings of the subject...

...If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one's self than to anyone else), every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor...

...Of course, diaries are kept for as many reasons as there are diarists, and Mallon's object is to take us on a tour, stopping to muse over this author and that, questioning motives and occasions in what he describes as his "ruminatingly undisciplined" way...

...Of Thoreau he writes: "The altar was Nature, but Henry Thoreau's God was one of those faint radio signals that can still be detected from a stellar explosion that ceased millions of years ago...

...I don't believe one can write to oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator, saying 'Buy Bread.' Before another sentence is added it becomes a psychological impossibility...

...Kazin also has the gift of quotation...

...Biography is a mirror, not a peephole...

...What Boswell actually did was write condensed notes--a method, as Boswell himself said, that "brings to my mind all that passed, though it would be barren to anybody else...

...While not a deep thinker, he was a great listener who, as Brady says, "prized [his] ability to 'tune' himself to others . . . . " When he died, Edmond Malone--the century's greatest Shakespearean scholar who was also Boswell's close friend and collaborator on Life of Johnson--said, "I used to grumble sometimes at his turbulence...

...A discreet and sympathetic audience, to be sure, comprising those perceptive enough to take you at your own measure and honorable enough not to blab about those little quirks and failings you were brave and honest enough to share with them...

...A few paragraphs later, Kazin says that Eliot in 1916, the year of James's death, "admitted that James had been dead for some time...

...Even Samuel Johnson complained to him: "Of the exaltations and depressions of your mind you delight to talk, and I hate to hear...

...He always complains about gonorrhea, yet he continually picks up prostitutes...

...We are all prompted," Johnson said, "by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure...

...Reading this biography you'll have no Stephen Miller is executive assistant to the Board of Radio Free Europe and author of Special Interest Groups in American Politics (Transaction Books...

...Of course, even then there are limits...

...they continually had to wage war against a melancholia so powerful that at times it left them incapable of doing anything...

...But such pleasures are few in the nearly four hundred pages of sentimentalism and distortion, and this reviewer could not wait for the fleet of street cleaners after the last float...

...Though he made his name in London, Boswell was one of a remarkable group of Scottish writers who made a name for themselves in the second half of the eighteenth century in Edinburgh, or, as it was often known, the Athens of the North...

...The idea that it can be longer than that is a diarist's convenient fiction, an illusion that may keep him writing, but which, in his deeper recesses, he knows is false...

...Kazin says that it was one of E Scott Fitzgerald's boasts "never to be too tired for anything...

...His Lady, it seems, is one who knows how to put on a good appearance for those who count...

...evening, "I'll be hanged if I am not in a humor for shedding ink tonight--feel as if I could scribble, scribble, scribble to the extent of a quart bottle full...

...He's not out to forge an aesthetic of diaries...

...He cite~ Leon Edel's observation regarding Edmund Wilson, "After a while, you're always writing for a public," only to amend it...

...If Byron lets his diary flow where it will, Stendhal can't let his alone, reading it over and over, annotating his entries and then annotating his annotations...

...To be fair, a felicitous observation surfaces now and then in this sea of intellectual melted caramel...

...But he does see one common feature in all his selections...

...Yo did take h e r . . , sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh...

...JAMES BOSWELL: THE LATER YEARS, 1769-1795 Frank Brady/McGraw-Hill/S24.95 Stephen Miller What does one make of a great writer who liked to perform on the London banquet circuit as an after dinner singer of doggerel...

...In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Ellen Weeton, a very different sort of woman, turns to her diary for solace when her brutal husband dismisses her from his house and deprives her of her daughter...

...The hypochondriacal, phobic recluse, Arthur Crew Inman, writes ten million words, "fanatically" provides for their future stipulating they are to be published uncut, and then shoots himself to death in 1963...

...Mallon's selections are nothing if not telling...

...Confession was still good for the soul, but now it could be a positive delight to the eyes as well...

...Instead of "their multifarious colloquies," for example, he wrote, "their plunge.., into the deeps of talk...

...George Templeton Strong, a nineteenthcentury New Yorker, remarks in his one...

...And, in the same paragraph, we are told that when Joseph Conrad visited the United States and was secluded on a Long Island estate, Fitzgerald, unable to see him, "humble as Gatsby, waited on the lawn for the merest sight of the great man...

...he brings us to the landmarks, great and small, says a few helpful words, and steps aside to let us look for ourselves...

...he had a very clear idea of the type of biography he wanted to write...

...No species of writing," he said, "seems more worthy of cultivation . . . . " Why...

...Unlike most of their friends, both were haunted by religious questions, especially the question of divine punishment...

...Boswell, he makes clear, was a man with intense curiosity about the social, political, and cultural world (he cared not a whit about the natural world...

...About deception, no one was more honest...

...he continually brags about his ancient Scottish lineage, yet he never stops flattering the rich and politically powerful...

...And what variety there is...

...Buffoonery aside, Boswell is a difficult subject for the biographer because there was no development in his life...

...Moreover, Johnson held the genre of biography in high esteem...

...Oscar Wilde knew...

...Mallon elaborates: Having been brought to life partly by the dour Puritans of the seventeenth century as a place in which the faithful might privately expiate their sins, the diary had become, by the late nineteenth century, more typically the place in which they could savor them . . . . By unburdening one's soul on paper, one could have one's sins and remember them, too...

...He doesn't try to bind it all together with some grand theory...

...Some complain that keeping the damn thing is as irksome as it's futile, but they go on writing...

...And Johnson certainly would have acknowledged that by completing his extraordinary biography Boswell had to some degree triumphed over his obvious infirmities...

...The diary creates a private world in which we can let loose all those thoughts and feelings we ordinarily buckle-up when away from our secluded studies for fear of public collisions...

...Mallon turns out to be that best of all tour guides...

...One does gets tired of hearing about Boswell's irresponsible behavior...

...God knows what contradictions it may contain...

...Others can't wait to let go their daily screed...

...Sensational indeed...

...Very touching, very romantic...

...One should always have something sensational to read in the train," he had Gwendolyn Fairfax declare in The Importance of Being Earnest...

...At the other end of the scale, weighing in with a sixty-three page effort, William Tayler, a London footman, decides to keep a diary for the year beginning January 1, 1837...

...When I took lunch away," Tayler records, not without irony one must suppose, "she was reading a novel with the Bible laying by her, ready to take up if any body came in...

...In his immersion in the raw details of Johnson's life, Boswell examined not just Johnson but also himself...

...not only did they fail to get Conrad's attention, they were thrown off the grounds for drunken behavior...

...Or who once ended a day drunk in St...

...Yet at the same time it would be a heroic portrait, with Johnson as a modern hero who triumphed over poverty, disease, loneliness, melancholy, religious doubt, and fear of insanity to become the most important writer of his age...

...Brady understands Boswell's genius very well...

...Professor Kazin should reread (or read for the first time) the descriptions of Mrs...

...The errors just pile up as the parade goes on...

...Boswell's influence was not that of Adam Smith or David Hume, but through his masterpiece-The L6fe of Samuel Johnson--he changed forever the course of biography...

...Luna in The Bostonians...

...Woolf said that about 1910...

...It begins as a private affair between you and your book conducted cosily out of sight and left behind in a locked drawer, yet how you long for an audience after a while...

...the words have to start going someplace...

...AS Mallon takes us through this amazing variety, he resists what has become the common temptation of academics in recent years...

...John's University...

...Stendhal, who kept his diary under lock, admitted at one point that he was writing for three or four like-minded friends only to add this warning to them a few paragraphs later: "Don't go any farther, you bastards...

...Pepys would have been pleased," Mallon adds, no doubt recalling some passages from the master diarist he has cited earlier, especially the one in which Pepys uses a bit of Spanish to cover his philandering tracks...

...but now miss and regret his noise and his hilarity and his perpetual good humor, which had no bounds...

...To keep a diary is to conceal and reveal ourselves at once...

...A while is probably no more than a sentence...

...In James BoswelL" The Later Years, 1769-1795, Frank Brady speaks delicately of Boswelrs "obvious infirmities," but it is easy to make a more blunt assessment: In many ways, Boswell was a first-class buffoon...

...He does so to improve his handwriting...

...George McCartney teaches English at St...

...These people did not suffer fools gladly...

...But what really happened, as attested by all of Fitzgerald's major biographers, is this: In May 1923, when Conrad was staying at the Doubleday estate, Fitzgerald and his friend Ring Lardner got roaring drunk and tried to get the great man's attention by performing a tap dance on the lawn outside his window...

...Because reading about others helps us learn about ourselves--learn especially how to conduct ourselves, how to control our baser impulses...

...Thy will be done: I see Thy mercies and Thy Graciousness in this, and am thankful...

...But Brady persuades us that Boswell was neither a liar nor a stenographer...

...Then there's Harold Nicolson, for whom keeping a diary was a routine to which he attached about as much emotion as brushing his teeth, or so he claimed...

...But even when Kazin has got the story straight, the book suffers terribly from his manner of writing...

...q~velve months later to the day, he writes his final entry: "I have at last finished the task which I have been heartily sick of long agoe and I think it will be a long time before I begin another of the kind...

...When he's weary, out it comes and "down goes everything...

...The itinerary wanders but never flags...

...If anything, James's revisions made novels like Portrait of a Lady easier and more colloquial...

...How true that was of Boswell, who saw so much of himself in his subject...

...trouble understanding why his dour and difficult father had no use for him...

...The sentences themselves range from the ungrammatical ("Adams would be more interested in world conflict than in the social misery filling up realism from Chicago") to the platitudinous ("The unredeemed wasteland of the century began in 1914, that onset of all our woe") to the ridiculous ("The Sound and the Fury is certainly hot...

...Life of Johnson didn't pour out of Boswell as the natural result of his effusiveness...

...he always protests his devotion to his wife, yet he continually leaves her to go off and have fun in London--doing so even when he knows she is at death's door...

...Anyone who has ever kept a diary, however intermittent, however shortlived, knows Mallon is right...

...But it doesn't keep her from making her peace with the God who "appears to have specially deprived me of all those things on which I could have set my affections...

...Kazin quotes Virginia Woolf as saying that 1908 was the year "human nature changed...

...Great writers, we tend to assume (probably mistakenly), are often difficult and eccentric human beings, but I wonder whether any other great writer has been so deficient in dignity as the drunkard and compulsive womanizer, James Boswell...

...Critics have argued, for example, that the rich supply of wonderful conversation with which Boswell lards Life of Johnson is mostly his own creation, or else there because he had the bad manners to scribble continuously in the company of others...

...he was the same at fifty as he was at twenty, preoccupied with his moods and motives, saying the same things about himself over and over again...

...But he's had enough time to give us a few telling glimpses of his betters...

...Besides his life, his 150 typed volumes include his interviews with the strangers he hired at seventy-five cents an hour to tell him their stories while he listened behind a black curtain...

...Gwendolyn makes her brief appearance in Thomas Mallon's A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries for what her remark tells us of the diary's evolution...

...Most telling is the amount of forethought and calculation that went into Boswell's study of Johnson...

...But at the same time, by putting our shame, pride, anger, and doubt on paper, we risk being 46 THE AMER1CAN SPECTATOR APR1L 1985...

...Johnson, I think, would have approved of a Flemish portrait of his own life...

...The distinction is not trivial, because she was referring to the tremendous impact that the first PostImpressionist exhibit, which opened in London in December 1910, had on English sensibility...

...Vincent's College St...

...Boswell got the essence of what Johnson and others said, if not their exact words, Brady argues, and most of Johnson's contemporaries would agree with him...

...But he also never lets us forget that Boswell was liked by an extraordinary variety of distinguished men and women...

...A BOOK OF ONE'S OWN: PEOPLE AND THEIR DIARIES Thomas Mallon/Ticknor & Fields/S15.95 George McCartney What's the point of keeping a diary...

...Anais Nin burbles about "this quest for the self" and the need to "alchemize events" and locks her innumerable volumes in a Brooklyn bank vault not only to secure them for the admirers she never doubts will swell posterity's ranks, but also and more importantly to immortalize herself...

...Kazin goes on to say that for the New York Edition of his works, James "rewrote his earlier novels in his elaborate later style...

...Johnson himself had explored the dark side of Richard Savage in his brilliant biography of that minor Augustan poet who had been a close friend when he first came to London...

...Both had overheated imaginations that drove them to morbid introspection...

...At a fairly young age, Boswell was accepted into a club that included Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Richard Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Edmond Malone, Joshua Reynolds, and Charles James Fox--to name only its most wellknown members...

...Writing a journal becomes her only way of addressing her girl from the impoverished, solitary existence into which she's been forced...

...But that was the boast of his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy who inspired Tender Is the Night, which is where Kazin got the quote...

...Brady spends too much time chronicling the ups and downs of Boswell's moods and too much time on Boswell's career as a lawyer...

...There is an essential ambivalence to the project...

...Like Emerson, his basic unit of utterance is the sentence, and, again like Emerson, he has difficulty stringing his sentences together in a manner which will keep the reader turning the page...

...Joshua Reynolds, who was present at many of the conversational feasts that Boswell attended, said that "every word in [Life of Johnson] might be depended upon as if given upon oath...

...Would Johnson approve of Boswell's having delved into the dark side of his character...