Boswell's Presumptuous Task Book

Like Dr Watson or Sancho Panza, Boswell was for over a century thought of as stooge or straight man to a genius. He was a buffoon who had unaccountably written a masterpiece. It took a steadily torrential discovery of Boswellian journals and papers in the 20th century to first force a reappraisal and then inspire an industry, while Johnson studies have withered somewhat. The irony is not lost on Adam Sisman, who abandoned a conventional biography of the man who invented its modern form to concentrate on his relationship with Johnson, and his "presumptuous task" of assembling, over seven years, the pioneering Life of Samuel Johnson. Sisman calls Boswell's note taking "a kind of stock cube" from which he made up a broth. If so, then Sisman reduces its sauce to a delicious piquancy.Although he only knew Johnson for just 425 days over a period of 21 years, after meeting in a Covent Garden bookshop in 1763, Boswell's rapacious memory and devotion to his master (he had something of a father-figure fixation) saw him put together a Life which was to be "in scenes", so that the reader could observe Johnson in all his pomp--and faults. Stuffed full of conversation snippets, the inclusion of which scandalised many of those quoted, a defining moment for the genre, Sisman writes of this hugely fallible Scottish facilitator, the original "clubable" gentleman, that his Johnson "is a heroic expression of Boswell himself": depressive, hypochondriac, heavily in debt, with a continuous hangover and full of the pox from whoring. And his sympathetic study largely supports his assertion, though wisely asserting the largely unsung role of Irish Shakespearean scholar, Edmond Malone, Boswell's own "Boswell", in judiciously editing the text to help conjure, as well as remember, Johnson. Sisman's own writing is marvellous, measuring a mischievous indulgence of his subject's "ticklish mind" (Johnson's observation), against a sharp, articulate organising of his sources and a sympathy for the nitty-gritty of biographical writing and book production. Though the Doctor would inevitably have found fault, one senses that Bozzy would approve of this lively return from his legacy. --David VincentRead More