Boswell's Presumptous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson

Rating:
Summary: Valuable Insights Into How Modern Biography Was Born
Review: Before Boswell, biography was like a formal portrait, a flattering way to honor the subject. Today, biography is more likely to be critical than to be positive. All of this has happened in less than 220 years. How was the line originally breached? That's the key element of this rewarding "biography of a biographer doing a biography." In fact, this book's perspective on Boswell's task has itself has now broken new ground. Where will this new view take us 220 years hence?

This book will probably only be a three or four star effort for those who have not yet read (or cannot remember much about) James Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. If you think you are interested in this book's subject, go read or reread the biography first unless it is very clear in your mind. Otherwise, many of the juiciest bits of this book will not connect as well for you.

Before reading the Life of Dr. Johnson, I could not make any sense of why Boswell had written the book. Surely an attorney had something better to do than to follow another man around, taking verbatim notes of his conversations. After seeing the biography, I realized that the relationship was in many ways like that of the fictional Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories and novels. Boswell adored Johnson, as did most people. But it still wasn't clear what all his motivations were, aside from adoration. This book is very helpful in that regard. I had never invested the time in reading a biography of Boswell, so many of these details about the time after Johnson died were new to me.

The core of the book deals with the issue of great men having their downsides. I often am shocked by how often it seems that the greater the genius, the worse the person is in his or her private life. It is as though the genius withdraws them from all else, and gives them psychological license to break the rules of ordinary mortals. The Prometheus myth comes to mind as a parallel.

Dr. Samuel Johnson was no exception, although certainly not as weak in many ways as other "great men" have been. In biography terms, what was exceptional was that Boswell recorded and reported much of the flaws he encountered.

What this book reveals that was new to me (and possibly to you) is what Boswell did not include in the biography. Now, that part of this book was even more interesting that what I had read in the biography.

This point was even more striking to me because Boswell seemed to be a classic case of a man who lacked emotional intelligence. He was surprised when he offended people, and that some were stricken to the quick by what he had written. This occurred despite having had these experiences over and over again. But even Boswell had some scruples.

You will probably also be interested to learn about what the Boswell notes and journals have shown about Boswell's writing process. Boswell's notes were not actually stenographic records. They were fragments and general references to jog his memory about what had been said and what had happened. Boswell did not write in the journal every day, and so the journal is more like new writing than summarization. So we should give Boswell more credit for what we like about The Life of Dr. Johnson.

I enjoyed the comparisons to the other biographies and collections of letters that were published at about the same time. Boswell's accomplishment seems all the greater in that context.

Boswell himself is someone who goes down in my esteem from this book as a person, while up as a researcher and as a writer. In a sense, this "biography of a biographer writing a biography" has done to him what he did to Samuel Johnson. That seems apt.

I disagreed with the book's final point. The author says "never again will there be such a combination of subject, author, and opportunity" as coincided to create Boswell's biography of Sanuel Johnson. What do you think?

After you finish this wonderful and interesting book, I suggest that you think about great people you have met. Have you created notes about your contacts with them? Have you written up anything from those notes? Have you published any writing about them? If not, perhaps you should. What will you include . . . and omit?

Presume to share what is important for all humanity to know!

Rating:
Summary: The Biography of a Biography, or The Heavy Price of Fame
Review: Boswell's Life of Johnson is one of those super-great books that you keeps sneaking off the shelf from time to time, opening at random, and re-sampling just to reassure yourself that there is ever so much more to life than terrorism, crime, or the workaday rut. The writing leaps out at you, and the epiphanies erupt in your mind like champagne bubbles.

In my collection are several editions, my favorite being an elegant hardback printed on superthin India paper that I love to take with me on my travels.

Imagine my delight to read a biography of the making of Boswell's Life. Far from a triumphal march, however, Boswell paid heavily for being the first biographer to incorporate actual conversations and comments affecting the privacy of people still living. Overnight, he found former friends crossing the street to avoid greeting him. Social to the extreme, Boswell found himself excluded from gatherings for fear that he would bring a chill to the proceedings by transcribing conversations not meant for the ears of others.

And yet the Life has never once been out of print. It was a best seller from the beginning, and its reputation has only grown in the years to follow. Adam Sisman's wonderful study shows us a man who was so beset upon for writing this best-seller that his heirs refused to even discuss him for several generations. While everyone praised the book, the poor author won only obloquy for being a social ingrate who scribbled down juicy bits of conversation.

Boswell immolated his whole life to bring us this book, and its companion journal of his and Dr. Johnson's travels in Scotland. Reflect well that fame can bear a heavy price, and that Boswell paid it in full.

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Summary: Simply Delightful
Review: Boswell's Presumptious Task (The Making of the Life of Dr. Johson) is an examination of a biographer creating a biography, or, in this case, THE biographer creating THE biography. This book is itself not quite a biography as it concentrates mainly, although not exclusively, on Boswell's life as it pertains to the creation of his book. It is also not a careful examination of the book Boswell wrote itself. Instead, it is a fascinating view of the human interactions, both between subject and author, but also those between the author and his sources before and after Johnson's death, that went into the creating process. The literary masterpiece that came to be the Life of Johnson was born out of the social and cultural mileau both men enjoyed in London and this is well recreated in this book. This is a readable, sometimes funny, sometimes touching book.

Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: I thought this was an outstanding dual biography of Dr Johnson and James Boswell. I marveled continuously at how carefully and thoughtfully Sisman describes the selvages and biases of the cloth of these two writers' lives without unraveling them. The writing itself is exemplary. Sisman's book, along with Tomalin's biography of Pepys, are among the best biographies in recent memory.

Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: I thought this was an outstanding dual biography of Dr Johnson and James Boswell. I marveled continuously at how carefully and thoughtfully Sisman describes the selvages and biases of the cloth of these two writers' lives without unraveling them. The writing itself is exemplary. Sisman's book, along with Tomalin's biography of Pepys, are among the best biographies in recent memory.

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Summary: The writing of a biography
Review: I've never read the biography written by Mr. Boswell about his friend Dr. Johnson, but having finished this extremely well-written book concerning it, I am willing to give it a try. I've heard of Sam Johnson of course (what literary person has not), but knew really next to nothing about him, except that his biography was written by Boswell. Now this book has revealed in all its detail how that book came to be written, and it has sparked my great interest. That is the highest compliment which a reader can pay to an author, that his work has led the reader to another writing, based solely upon what the reader learned in the first book. Hats off to Mr. Sisman for a job well done!

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Summary: Bozzy and the Great Cham
Review: In this magnificent work Mr Sisman describes the making of that greatest of all biographies, Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson. To his contemporaries the task that Boswell had taken on was presumptuous indeed - to record the life of the greatest literary man of his age, while being dismissed himself as a frivolous and reprobate dilettante incapable of any serious activity. Well, the world knows that Bozzy succeeded in confounding his critics, but the tragic irony of his predicament was that he succeeded too well. While hailing the book as a masterpiece, the current and future literary establishment dismissed Boswell's own role as little more than that of a stenographer. Macaulay's damning essay on Boswell formed the opinion held by too many people for far too long. The true story of Boswell's genius became well known to scholars in the 20th century; with this book, Mr Sisman brings the story to a wider audience. It is a remarkable portait of Boswell's love for Johnson and the great struggles he endured to bring his hero to life in the pages of his biography. Battling drink, debauchery, depression and his own self-destructive nature, Boswell managed to pull off the one great sustained piece of effort of his life. In his book Johnson was brought to life once again, an image so convincing that it took over 150 years for people to discern the art behind the apparent ingenuousness of Boswell's technique. Sisman does a good job of showing how the Johnson of the Life was as much a product of Boswell's gift as the historical record (although I think readers would have benefited from a few examples of textual analysis to illustrate this). His final chapter on the gradual unearthing of the Boswell papers provides an exciting ending and his writing is clear and compelling. "Boswell's Presumptuous Task" is nothing short of a triumph.

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Summary: A Portrait of the Artist as Another Man
Review: It was an unlikely friendship at best, not the kind of association that could have been expected to change the literary landscape of the western world. James Boswell, a high-born and well-connected Scot with a taste for the dissolute life, found vicarious greatness through the famous man of letters Samuel Johnson. Their friendship became a crucible for the development of modern biography.

Adam Sisman does a great job of setting out the irony of his story. Boswell, thirty years Johnson's junior, scorned by his own father, plagued by manic depression, and given to bouts of drunkeness and venereal disease, was never taken seriously by most of the high born men of letters and law he cultivated. Viewed largely as a fop and a dilettante, he often seemed lost in life, hardly the kind of person to walk on the same hallowed ground as the great Samuel Johnson.

Sisman delicately explores the attraction Johnson had for Boswell, indicating that the younger man's insatiable curiosity and lust for life plugged holes in Johnson's thinking and brought relief to his often sour and querulous view of humanity. Perhaps he also felt a sense of destiny Boswell. Only one genius can recognize another.

Whatever the case, Sisman's book is a greatly entertaining laboratory for dissecting two intense personalities who raised each other into the pantheon of literary history. It's filled with pathos, jealousy, lust, ambition, disappointment and ecstasy, all the elements that make up a rich life. It's fascinating to see the how the legacy of the Boswell papers played out over the course of centuries as they migrated through the Boswell family, locked away in different chests and vaults, leaking out bit by bit into the hands of ecstatic scholars.
To this day, it seems, elements of the Boswell canon are still being discovered. Undoubtedly the process will continue, and Sisman's book is a worthy record of the ongoing story.

Rating:
Summary: Well-researched, but bland
Review: On the positive side, this is a well-written and well-researched book. It's a good, clear account of the writing of Boswell's Life of Johnson. However, it has no new facts or insights, and it doesn't achieve the author's stated aims.

Most of it is merely a summary of Boswell's journals, particularly while he was writing the Life. It's a good summary, with some background information and some clarification of points that may be unfamiliar to the modern reader. However, Sisman usually just repeats Boswell's own descriptions of his thoughts, feelings, and actions, and presents them to the reader (chapter after chapter) with little or no comment.

In the introduction Sisman raises many interesting questions, such as the extent to which Boswell 'invented' Johnson, and the nature of biography and its limits. Unfortunately, he doesn't provide any answers, or even any real discussion.

There are some strange omissions. He rightly states that Boswell polished up and 'improved' Johnson's conversations, a fact which is obvious to anyone who has compared the relevant passages in the Life and in the Journals. But even though this issue is crucial to understanding the writing of the Life, he not only fails to discuss it, but even fails to show a single example of such polishing.

Sisman states in the introduction that "I have attempted to deconstruct the Life of Johnson". However, this 'deconstruction' seems to be limited to remarking that, in the Life, we see Johnson through Boswell's eyes, and that Boswell tended to emphasize things that mattered to him personally. These are truisms that hardly need stating, and he takes these points no further.

I can't help thinking that the introduction contains intentionally misleading hype, intended for lazy reviewers. It's like fancy icing added to a dry cake. People who only read the introduction and then rapidly skim and sample the rest of the book could easily get the impression that it's more profound than it really is. A thorough reading shows that the author makes no real attempt to address the issues that he says he does.

There is some liveliness and interest in Sisman's book, but it is just a little of the light of Boswell's journals filtering through. If you are looking for a summary of Boswell's later life and the contents of his journals at this period, this book may be useful, but overall I would say that although Boswell succeeded in his 'presumptuous task', Sisman didn't succeed in his.

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Summary: A Biography of a Biography
Review: This is a work in three parts, first detailing James Boswell's life before and during his long friendship with Samuel Johnson; then describing Boswell's long travails in writing his celebrated biography of Johnson; and then the biography's illustrious career from publication to the present.

What I found most enjoyable about Boswell's Presumptuous Task is the insight it gives to the lives of Dr. Johnson and James Boswell themselves. Johnson first comes off as gruff and forbidding, but as we read on we realize the charm that, along with his celebrated erudition, made him a magnet for his many friends. As for Boswell, was there ever a man so self-destructive yet accomplished? Unwilling to settle down to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer and landowner in Scotland, he tore off to London whenever possible to enjoy the high life. In the capital he tried to shine in high society, but usually wound up on its fringes at best. Although he apparently adored his terminally ill wife, he was unable to resist prostitutes ( I lost count of the number of VD infections he contracted ). He tried to go into Parliament, but failed to grasp that no one would be willing to sponsor him in a seat unless he agreed to give up his independence. (And we think politics today is cynical!)

Despite his naivete, Boswell was accomplished enough to turn out a landmark biography of Samuel Johnson. Its emphasis on its subject's character has influenced every biography since.

Boswell's Presumptuous Task is an enjoyable description both of the process of writing a classic biography and of the growth of the biographer himself.