Book Review: Facts and Inventions

Facts and Inventions:Selections from the Journalism of James BoswellEdited by Paul TankardYale University Press, 2014 The name of James Boswell is forever fixed to that of Samuel Johnson, the great literary figure who was his sometime-friend, his frequent scourge, and, ultimately, his passport to immortality as the subject of his seismic 1791 Life of Johnson. But as Paul Tankard points out in the introduction to his immediately-indispensible Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James Boswell, our sodden, syphilitic hero was never happier than when he was scribbling, scribbling, scribbling away:

Before, after, and between his early and late literary triumphs, for thirty-five years, Boswell was – in the interstices of an Edinburgh legal practice and the management of his Ayrshire estate – a busy professional writer, with an almost constant presence in the British press.

The “early triumph” Tankard mentions is Boswell’s 1768 bestselling Account of Corsica, which was the talk of London and beyond for a season and broke “Corsica Boswell” upon the literary world. And of course the late triumph is the Life, which beat out all other Johnson memorials in its day and has been rightly regarded as the single greatest biography in the English language (so praised by, among others, Macaulay, who gets around to exalting the book only after he’s thoroughly and hilariously abused its author for half a dozen thunderous paragraphs). And that mention of Boswell’s Ayrshire estates arises from the fact that when Boswell’s long-suffering and short-tempered father died in 1782, Boswell became, of all things, the laird of Auchincleck and master of the manor.A full and busy life, in other words, but Boswell had the writing bug. During long sessions over legal documents and other tedia, he yearned to be dashing off “pamphlets” on the news of the day or the latest literary sensation. He wrote prose in a lively, engaging voice, and he wrote it at ferocious speed, and he was interested in everything, and he was good with deadlines. And, as all of his own biographers have pointed out over the centuries, he was easy to like. If he were alive today, a week wouldn’t elapse without his byline showing up somewhere – The Nation, Commentary, The New York Times Book Review, Redbook … the venue would be almost irrelevant.It was a tendency that could elicit criticism from his acquaintances – most pointedly from Johnson, who scolded him, “Your love of publication is offensive and disgusting, and will end, if it be not reformed, in a general distrust among all your friends.” There’s only so much Tankard can do to soften such a brutally accurate assessment, although he tries: “Johnson was admittedly using the term ‘publication’ in a broad sense, but for Boswell, appearing in print was one means of making the private public.”Tankard’s interest in all this confessional and quasi-confessional publication on the part of his subject is evident throughout Facts and Inventions; this is a scrupulously edited and annotated volume, and virtually everything in that critical apparatus is fascinating, despite the rather direly academic way it’s all introduced:

While I have long found the Periodicals section of the bibliography of Boswell tantalizing and thought much of the actual material (when located and read) to be extremely interesting, it seemed to me to require a considerable degree of editorial intervention to make its interest apparent to a modern reader.

Ordinarily, in a book of this kind, the fact that the author considers it necessary to clarify that it was only once he’d located and read something that he found it interesting would be a kind of death-kiss, a guarantee that the “considerable degree of editorial intervention” would consist entirely of the author clamping onto a vibrant subject and lampreying every last ounce of approachability and readability until only the particular sub-species of walking dead known as “doctoral students” would shamble anywhere near it. The idea of a writer as immensely engaging as Boswell suffering such an operation is especially dismaying, but it never happens: despite a mumbling start, Tankard does a readably erudite job keeping his readers up to speed on the dozens of squibs and scenes and scandals Boswell covers in these pages. Readers who know him only from the Life will be pleased to find such a funny and chatty Boswell to enjoy, and the presumably fewer readers who’ve savored his London Journal will be doubly pleased to find that Boswell, their favorite Boswell, saucily opinionizing left, right, and center here.Boswell wasn’t picky about where he sent his stuff. His satirical “Rampager” pieces appeared in The Public Advertiser, his frequently funny “Hypochondriack” pieces appeared in the London Magazine, and there was a veritable river of additional matter, dashed off for places like The Scots Magazine, St. James’s Chronicle, the London Chronicle, the Morning Post, and dozens of others. These pieces always written in haste and often written anonymously, or else under a gallery of pen-names, which renders all the more ironic Boswell’s frequent protestations on the score, as in the case of a letter he wrote for publication in the Public Advertiser in 1785 in which, to put it mildly, he protests too much:

Sir,As there have been innumerable paragraphs in the newspapers concerning my illustrious departed friend Dr. Johnson, since his much lamented death, and in many of them my name has been mentioned, I think it proper to declare upon my honour, that not one of them was of my writing, nor do I know who wrote any one of them, nor shall I send a single sentence upon the subject that is not signed with my name.The compliments which some of your benevolent correspondents have been pleased to pay me as his biographer, I do own have flattered me, and will encourage me to persist in my ambitious design of erecting a literary monument worthy of that great and good man. The materials at least will be available, being chiefly furnished by himself.

Fake humility aside, what runs through these pages is the penny press of the day, all the hot topics big and small – one of the biggest of which was the American Revolution, naturally. Under an array of pseudonyms, Boswell takes frequent swipes at both the conduct of General Howe and his brother in dealing with the rebellious colonies and at the obdurate ministry in London that seemed at times determined to make the whole situation worse:

If by the mere Magic of Words, Realities at three thousand Miles Distance could be changed, as we are told that Witches by their mumbling and muttering can produce very strange Alterations very far off, I should not wonder at the extraordinary Pains which were taken upon one Side of the House to have it said, that the Americans were not firmly united against the unconstitutional Attempts of the present Ministry, and that upon several Occasions they might have been conquered.

(Tankard, ever the worrier, appends: “The ministry claimed, with some truth, that the Americans were not united – i.e., that a sizable proportion supported British rule.”)It would be too optimistic to imagine a large general readership for Facts and Inventions; its price tag is well over $100, and when it comes to vivid, inviting prose, Paul Tankard would probably be the first person to admit he’s no James Boswell. But it nevertheless deserves that readership, whether it gets it or not – these pieces, most of them presented to the reading public for the first time, all lovingly contextualized (there are virtuoso stretches where Tankard is essentially providing a portrait of the press of an entire era) and notated, are an excellent sampling of the writing that meant the most to Boswell on a day-to-day basis. This is the writing he loved doing even when he was sure nobody was reading it or remembering it; he sought immortality elsewhere, but this stuff brought him exactly the kind of guttery joy that made him James Boswell in the first place.