Books: Rake’s Progress

BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNAL 1762-1763 (370 pp.)—McGraw-Hill ($5).

One cold November morning in 1762, an ambitious young Scotsman left his Edinburgh home and took the highroad to London. At 22, James Boswell had no intention of becoming a lawyer like his eminent father, Lord Auchinleck.* He was out to become a Guards officer, not because he liked the army, but because it seemed the surest way to a soft life and quick acceptance in the best London circles. At the end of nine months of scheming and making up to persons of influence, he had failed to crash the Guards and was thinking better of the law. But he had had a gay time and, somewhat astonishingly, had won the firm friendship of England’s top man of letters, Samuel Johnson.

Boswell’s London Journal of those nine months is part of the huge cache of Boswelliana uncovered by indefatigable poking into Irish and Scottish castles over the past quarter-century and now safely housed at Yale (TIME, Oct. 2). It is the first volume, and possibly the liveliest, of the entire 45-volume Boswell that Yale scholars are now projecting.

Hold the Apples. Young Boswell wasted no time in pushing himself forward. He chatted easily, had a knack for making friends, had his hair “dressed” every day and took care to be seen in the most fashionable places. He was soon intimate with Lord and Lady Northumberland, Actor David Garrick, Writer Oliver Goldsmith and a fast set of tony young rakes. He dined well, co-authored (with Andrew Erskine) a book of poems and letters which he calmly reviewed himself in the London Chronicle as “a book of true genius.” London’s more objective Critical Review called the poems “the cheapest and most nauseous drugs of this press surfeited age and country.”

Young Boswell was by turn gay and uncontrollably depressed (a brother and daughter went insane). He feared the dark, was mortally afraid of ghosts and shifted from uneasy lack of confidence to unattractive smugness. “Upon my soul,” he wrote of himself, “not a bad specimen of a man … I think there is a blossom about me of something more distinguished than the generality of mankind. But I am much afraid that this blossom will never swell into fruit.”

In a day when all Scotsmen had to suffer under the English imputation that they were hopeless provincial boors, Boswell was torn between his loyalty to his fellow Scots and his own social aspirations. At a theater once, he leaped to the defense of two Highland officers who had been pelted with apples from the gallery and greeted with cries of “No Scots! No Scots!” Boswell was so aroused that he jumped up and roared back at the galleryites: “Damn you, you rascals!” But only three months later, he wrote in his journal: “Summer will come when all Scots will be gone. Then you’ll grow more English and fine.” At his first meeting with Johnson he apologized: “Mr. Johnson, indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.” Johnson’s famous reply: “Sir, that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”

Roving Eye. To his own mild dismay, young Boswell was always aspiring to virtue and yielding to vice. In church, his mind and eye kept roving toward pretty women (“What a curious, inconsistent thing is the mind of man!”), and London prostitutes found him an easy conquest. What seemed at first a discreet affair with an actress brought him down with a venereal disease that kept him under treatment for five weeks. But nothing could discourage his sensual appetite for long, and the Journal is thick with accounts of his cheap and hasty liaisons. Boswell had been .in London less than two weeks when he got news from Scotland that he was the father of a son, the result of a brief affair in Edinburgh. The child died before Boswell saw him, but not before Boswell had righteously admonished the mother “not to fall into such a scrape again.”

For all his faults, there can be little doubt that young Boswell was a man of charm. It didn’t get him into the Guards, but it made him almost at once an intimate of the great Johnson, who, Boswell noted chirpily, lived “in literary state, very solemn and very slovenly.” Johnson’s disapproval of prostitutes was not enough to keep Boswell from prowling the streets, but the last few entries in the Journal show that its author had begun to feel the regard for Johnson that was to become the preoccupation of his life.

The admiration was mutual: only ten weeks after they had met, Johnson assured the entranced Boswell that he knew not one man he could rate above him. Reaching for fashionable English understatement, the young Scot told his diary that “this was very high.”

* No kin to World War II General Sir Claude J. E. Auchinleck.