James Boswell and his World by David Daiches

James Boswell and his World Reviews

• 
  Avis Black

  Everyone knows Boswell today because Boswell decided to know everyone back then and gossip about it. The great biographer tried to attach himself to every notable personage he came across, and he not only landed interviews with the most stubborn and reclusive people, he made friends out of his conquests. It helped a great deal that Boswell worshipped every great man he encountered, a most pleasing attitude, as far as his subjects were concerned.
  
  Boswell was not just the inventor of the modern biography with his Life of Johnson, he was an interesting subject for the biographer himself. David Daiches, in Boswell and his World, gives you a portrait of a man who badly needs a psychiatrist.
  
  For Boswell had a little problem. He could not control himself—at all. He chased relentlessly after prostitutes both before and after his marriage—you’d think 3 doses of gonorrhea would cure you of this, but not Boswell—while confessing every one of these transgressions to his wife. The poor lady died of tuberculosis, which I suspect was aggravated by her husband’s long absences from home combined with his sudden arrivals only to confess that he’d cheated on her yet again.
  
  Boswell loved to cavort with his temporary mistresses in wild sprees, preferring everything outdoors, completely off his head with drink. A man who calls himself temperate when he decides to confine himself to only 6 glasses of booze a day isn’t trying hard. He records in his diary at least one episode where he smashed up a room with walking stick in a drunken delirium. Often, Boswell punished himself with long sessions in a church pew while vowing to reform, only to break his resolution at the first opportunity. He was also a compulsive gambler, a poor idea since Boswell was bad at landing clients in his day job of being a lawyer. He was prone to thinking his clients innocent (really, Boswell, you should have known better), and he identified obsessively with them, carrying his advocation of their innocence to the point where his wife and friends thought him ridiculous.
  
  Boswell was a champion seeker after jobs, and if you were a Scottish official in the late 1700s, you were sure to have Boswell knocking at your door hunting an appointment. No amount of being turned down or lack of shame deterred Boswell in the least when he was chasing a prize, a trait for which we can thank him for his biography of Johnson, but he must have been a massive pain to the entire Scottish political establishment. Boswell’s lack of success in his office-seeking makes me suspect that after a dose of Boswell’s personality, the elites of his day thought him too flaky to be trusted with serious work. He was forever searching for a role he never attained.
  
  He suffered from frequent bouts of depression, and he nearly married half-a-dozen times, falling in love with great passion and out of love just as thoroughly. He nearly fought various duels, and he spent his entire life quarrelling with his father, a curious contrast to his constant chasing after other men of prestige and authority. For the longest time he wanted to join the military because of the opportunity for socializing--and the clothes. He was obsessed with clothes to the point where he said that being well-dressed uplifted his mood exactly the way the very best music did, a claim that makes me want to twirl a finger around my ear in a ‘crazy’ sign.
  
  Boswell played the buffoon at times and was consciously aware when he did so, and he pondered his feelings and published a lot of essays about them, the sort of thing scorned by other men of his day for being unmanly. One of Boswell’s most notable traits in a very chaotic bag was his extremely hypersensitivity. This allowed him to notice little things about Johnson that another man might have ignored in writing a biography, but helped Boswell portray ‘the whole man’ in his work.
  
  If you’ve read this far into my review, and read about Borderline Personality Disorder, it’s quite plain Boswell had it. Unstable personal relationships, flipping between idealizing people and devaluing them, unstable self-image and no idea what to do with himself in life, reckless and self-indulgent behavior to the point of danger, periods of depression and extreme emotion, Boswell had all the classic instability of the Borderline.
  
  If you’ve wondered how such a fruitcake got along so well with so many notable men, I’d advise you look up the phenomenon known as the Borderline-Narcissist Dance. Borderlines and Narcissists are strongly drawn to each other, and they interact in an interesting manner that is enlightening and worth reading about. Supposedly, Borderlines are the only people who can get the better of Narcissists. Boswell certainly did.
• 
  Madelaine

  I love the fact that every contemporary illustration possible is included in this book.