Wine, women, and Sam...

A Life of James Boswell by Peter Martin,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson

It could be said that writing a biography of James Boswell is like painting a portrait of Rembrandt: the man has already done it rather well himself.

Peter Martin has accepted the risk of comparison with his subject and he faces the challenge with confidence and style. Whilst he has avoided the pitfalls either of being a mouthpiece for Boswell's journal, he does not attempt to establish his independence by avoiding lengthy quotation. He has, for example, the good sense to give us the splendid account of the seduction of Louisa in Boswell's own words. All in all Mr Martin has produced a highly readable and amusing narrative. Not everything is quite right, however, and there are times when it seems that he has little grasp of the period. He takes some time to make up his mind as to whether there is a Countess or a Duchess of Northumberland. In fact, the same lady was both (she was the Percy; her husband, a baronet called Smithson, who sensitively changed his name, was created a duke in 1766). More seriously, his detailed account of Boswell's visit in 1766 to Brunswick, Prussia, and a number of minor courts, betrays almost total confusion over German history. He gives a sketchy description of the Holy Roman Empire (with a curious reference to Czechoslovakia's boundaries in 1935) and tells us ludicrously that Frederick William II of Prussia (reigned 1786-1797, by the way) was Emperor. The index describes this same king as "The Great". Frederick II, his uncle, is usually given that soubriquet and was indeed king when Boswell was in Germany. Frederick was the best known misogynistic homosexual of the eighteenth century and might have been surprised to hear that he had a son to whom, according to Mr Martin, Boswell was presented.

The laziness and cupidity of publishers is becoming increasingly tiresome and, I hope, counter-productive. Should not someone have saved Mr Martin from these embarrassing gaffes? Was there not a single editor at Weidenfeld and Nicolson capable of spotting that Lord Monboddo, a fellow judge of Boswell's father, Lord Auchinleck, is referred to as Mondobbo on half the occasions he is mentioned, or that the eminent doctor, Sir John Pringle, is gratuitously awarded a peerage? These are not trivialities. They leave the reader with a problem of trust. How far can he believe any of the author's assertions?

Mr Martin is on surer ground when he is dealing with literary London and Boswell's relationship with Samuel Johnson and he manages to give us a feel for Edinburgh at the time when it was emerging from a squalid provinciality into the Athens of the North. More than this, he conveys the complexity of Boswell's character and the factors which combined to create a driven and tortured personality. Mr Martin wants to rescue Boswell from his reputation as a buffoon. So well ingrained is this impression that it might seem an impossible task. Macaulay's judgement that "if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer" was accepted wisdom for years. There is no doubt that many contemporaries mocked him. He was often the butt of Dr Johnson himself and we know this because he gleefully records his own humiliations. His solipsistic musings verge on the absurd more often than not. However, he was loved by almost everyone who knew him. His company and conversation was welcomed and sought by a wide variety of eminent men: Johnson himself, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, John Wilkes, David Hume, the Duke of Queensberry, Lord Bute, Lord Pembroke, General Burgoyne. During his visit to Corsica, he won the confidence and friendship of the rebel leader Paoli, whose cause he vigorously championed at home, and, in the French controlled part of the island, charmed the Governor, the urbane Comte de Marbeuf, who as a matter of interest, was the lover of Laetizia Bonaparte and probably the father of her son Louis, but not, as is sometimes asserted, of Napoleon himself. Boswell had a talent for ingratiating himself with luminaries: by any standards Voltaire and Rousseau were A-list celebrities and they both liked him, allowed him unprecedented access, and maintained contact. The things which marked Boswell out from armies of fame groupies, the sort who today write in colour supplements, were his engaging personality, his clubbability, his sharp intellect, and his critical acumen. All these qualities he had in abundance. He was also a drunk, a sexual profligate, and a depressive.

Boswell's depression, a condition which was common in his family, was much exacerbated by his Presbyterian upbringing. His father was cold and distant; his mother loving but devoted to Calvinistic gloom. Prospects of an afterlife and the possibility of spending it among the damned were preoccupations which recurred throughout his life. He nearly escaped, fleeing to London, and instruction in the Catholic Faith. Fashionable Society and tarts proved too powerful a distraction. Although he did have the privilege of kissing the Pope's foot during his visit to Rome, in the end he made do with the arid grandeur of latitudinarian Anglicanism. He was always being pulled both ways: restraint and abandonment; order and chaos; his wife and the whores of St James'; the measured, intellectual pleasures of Johnson's conversation and the stupor of solitary drinking. When he drank, he whored. When he whored, he despised himself and plunged into melancholy. When he was "hypochondriak", a contemporary name for the condition, he drank. Even in an age when venereal disease was routine and when an upright figure like Lord Auchinleck could accept that a dose of the pox was part of a young gentleman's experience, Boswell must have held some kind of record for the number of times he suffered from gonorrhoea. Alcohol nearly always played its part, although, of course, Boswell was a man of huge sexual appetite and needed little encouragement. "By 17 April...he was free of the infection, but in June he did exactly the same thing, with worse results, spending the night at a brothel with a whore...after an evening of heavy drinking." This was a story repeated again and again. Although he did remain largely free from infection once married to the long-suffering Margaret, he did not remain faithful (although he rationalised that whores did not count) and was occasionally violent when drunk.

An indication of his good qualities was that his friends did not desert him. Some attempted to help him mend his ways. Dr Johnson was full of good advice on the avoidance of overindulgence. Paoli induced him to take an oath to give up drink for a year, an oath which, in the way of these things, led to a spectacular binge once broken.

In the midst of this, Boswell managed to practise as an advocate at the Scottish bar and to create in his journal one of the most remarkable records in English literature. Whilst he closely examines others, especially Johnson, of course, he dissects himself minutely. He may be self-congratulatory when he thinks it is his due, but he does not spare himself when it comes to recording his failings. Like so many obsessives, he operates in a number of fields: he cannot leave off whoring; he cannot stop drinking to excess; and he cannot stop taking notes of Johnson's talk. "You have but two topics," the great man exclaimed on one occasion, "yourself and me, and I'm sick of both."

It is our good fortune that Boswell's manner of living did not carry him off to an early grave. He was able to produce his masterpiece, "The Life of Johnson ", for which he had been preparing himself for so long. Thomas Carlyle was writing before the discovery of the journals when he said, "Boswell has given more pleasure than any other man of this time, and perhaps, two or three excepted, has done the world greater service." Would we have him any different? The personality which led to appalling drunkenness, sexual profligacy, and occasional violence against a much-loved wife was the same which drove him on to seek out fame and celebrity, to follow Johnson so doggedly. Boswell knew he would be a happier man sober. There was no question that the drink he consumed was necessary to his literary or social success - again and again he proved to himself that the opposite was the case. The young man who takes to debauchery in reaction to a Calvinistic upbringing was once a familiar figure and there is no doubt an element of this in Boswell's life. The psychological strain of striving to please a father who not only refused to be satisfied but who made demands quite at odds with the son's nature was another. The conflict between a genuine desire to be a faithful husband and the drive to have as much rough sex as possible clearly affected him profoundly. All these things were allied to Boswell's inability to put the bottle aside but, more importantly, to the fascination with himself which was the spur to write not only the journals, the most remarkable exercise in autobiography in English, but, paradoxically, "The Life of Johnson", which in reality is an exercise in self-revelation.

Andrew Varley