Boswell’s pleasures, the pleasures of Boswell

SUSAN MANNING

Man is. in general. made up of contradictory qualities: and these will ever shew themselves in strange succession, where a consistency in appearance at least. if not in reality, has not been attained by long habits of philosophical discipline. In proportion to the native vigour of the mind. the contradictory qualities will be the more prominent’

In Boswell’s celebrated summation of the character of Johnson, the autobio- graphical confessions of the writing self are concealed, as perhaps they always must be. within the prose of the judicious biographer: here is a characteristic compound of personal apologia. self-advertisement, and admission of defeat. embodying the very contradictory qualities it describes. Boswell’s Journals are the long record of his unsuccessful struggle to subject the vagaries of his own character to a ‘long habit of philosophical discipline,’ to impose unity and regularity on the wayward motions of his mind.

In an era of Enlightenment, the project of self-improvement did not seem a priori either an impossible or an impious one; as a young man. Boswell notes optatively,

I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character very different from a rattling uncultivated one which for some time past I have been fond or. I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything2

In fact, as we know. it is the extent to which this is not true that galvanises Boswell’s journals. at once driving them forward with plans for self-improvement and keeping them locked in the oscillatory momentum of his emotional pendu- lum. It is one of the things we read Boswell for, the naked candour with which his writing identifies, subscribes to. and repeatedly fails to enact, this power of choice and enlightened self-interest over behaviour. Dennis Porter has recently suggested that the pleasure in reading the journals lies in just this ‘continuing struggle between his early moral education and his desire, between an alternating indulgence and abstinence that generate a series of self-reproaches and self- recriminations’.’ This seems an accurate description of what goes on in the

I . Boswell’s Life of lohnson. ed. G . U. Hill. revised and enlarged by I,. F. Powell. (7 vols (Oxford

2 . Boswdl’s London journal ~ 7 6 2 - 1 7 6 3 . ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London 195ol. p.47 (Sunday 2 i

3 . Haunted journegs: desire and traris~p~siori i r i Furopmn frnvrl writing (Princeton. New Jersey

ryj4-1y64). iv.425.

November I 762). Subsequent rerei-ences 10 this volume are identified as Lj in the text.

1991). P . 3 8 .

I 8 SUSAN MANNING

writing, but I find the logic of Porter’s conclusion troubling. A clinical interest in this spectacle might be appropriate, or perhaps a voyeuristic or even a sadistic one - but to what extent can we properly speak of a readerly pleasure in this melancholy record of a lifetime’s desire for self-improvement thwarted by lifelong addiction to harmful excess! There are of course many straightforward pleasures in reading Boswell; these, for the moment, I want to take for granted, to focus instead on the least edifying ‘pleasures of Boswell’, which he strives to expunge from the ‘consistent picture of a young fellow eagerly pushing through life’ (LJ , p. 206): the melancholy cycle of his repeated ‘lapses’ into drunkenness and verbal and sexual incontinence, and the associated self-disgust and plans for reformation and future self-control. What emerges, I believe, is that these impermissible ‘pleasures’ - the things which the journals attempt to write out of the existence of the ‘composed’ character - do have a quite complex relationship with the pleasures of Boswell’s writing for the reader, but at the level of structure and style rather than of spectacle.

A ‘composed’ character is one in which order, method and choice have overruled the unruly; it is also, though. an aesthetically motivated idealisation rather than a reality, a notion of the self created for the page and for the reader. Like the eighteenth-century aesthetic theories with which Boswell was familiar, it stressed ‘regularity’, ‘fitness’ and ‘uniformity’, excluding discordant features in favour of a pleasing harmony.4 The ‘Inviolable plan’ Boswell wrote out to subdue the terrible bout of melancholy he suffered on arrival in Utrecht proceeds on this principle:

Always try to attain tranquillity. Every time that you gain a n advantage over bad affections, you’ll be stronger. Write out Plan fully today for certain, and write obligation to Father with answers to all objections, and make him keep you to it [...I Learn retenue. Pray do. Don’t forget in Plan: when once you’re fairly at business, you‘ll go on. / [...I Read your Plan every morning regularly at breakfast, and when you travel, carry it in trunk. Get commonplace book [...I The more and oftener the restraints, the better. Be steady.[ ...I

After this let your mems give first a little sketch of the former day. Mark what was right and what wrong, and then give directions for the following day.[ ...I

What may be innocent to others is a fault to you till you attain more command of yourself. Temperance is very necessary for you. so never indulge your appetites without restraint.7

‘Learn retenue’: hold yourself back. ’Get commonplace book’: write yourself

4. See, for example, Jonathan Richardson. A n essay on the theorg of painting. 2nd edn (London i p s ) : Francis Hutcheson. A n inyuirg into the originrils qf our idens of henutg and virtu(,. 3rd edn (London 17.59): and Eighteeiifh-century criticul c ~ s n y s . ed. S. Elledge. 2 vols (New York 1 9 6 1 ) .

5 . Boswell in Hollaiid 1763-1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York/London 1952) . p.47. 49. .390. In addition. it seems clear that the routines Boswell subjected himself to during his Continental sojourn ~ the verse composition, the daily French themes. the strenuous programme of correspon- dence and journal-writing - made him feel that he was carrying out his Father’s instructions in completing his education and preparing himself Tor ‘life‘. The projected dictionary of Scottish words which he began in Utrecht may have been a further manifestation of this rather desperate impulse to order. Subsequent references to this volume are identified in the text as BH.

Bosiwll’s plrwsures. the pleasures of Boswell T 9

into order. l h e precepts of the Plan. designed to stop the self from rioting in its own disorders, fill up all the potentially dangerous spaces in life: ‘No neutral time,’ Boswell urges himself ( B H 175). The ‘Inviolable Plan’, and the later reiterated self-admonitions of his journals. attempt to plot the empty space of the day and days to come so that there will be no room for the lapses into the unscheduled and unmappable pleasure-pain region of his debauches?

your point is to persevere and by keeping your mind contantly employed, to leave no room for gloomy thoughts entering your mind I...] Think of the thing you are about and of nothing else, and when you find your mind like to wander, write notes that will lix your attention, and if you be attentive to the thing you are about, there is no fear that anything will get access to disturb you. ( R H . 2 34)

Boswell’s project as such was not a unique one in his time; Benjamin Franklin, another master of colloquial directness and informal prose, describes how in youth he also

conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any Fault at any time: I would conquer all that either Natural Inclination, Custom, or Company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong. I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a Task of more Difficulty than I had imagined. While my Attmtion was taken up in guarding against one Fault. 1 was often surpriz’d by another. Habit took the Advantage of Inattention. lnclination was sometimes too strong Tor Reason. 1 concluded at length, that the mere speculative Conviction that it was our Interest to be completely virtuous, was not suficient to prevent our Slipping. and that the contrary Habits must be broken and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any Dependence in a steady uniform Rectitude of Conduct. For this purpose I therefore contriv’u the following Method.’

True to the character being written into existence as the representative American self at the dawn of the nation’s being, Franklin presupposes that willed moral progress is a rational possibility: having identified thirteen headings of virtuous conduct on which to work, he constructs a chart for each one (Figure I ) , and on it he marks the ‘little black Spots’ which stain the page and his character with imperfection, to be successively eradicated as he completes his courses of training. The aim is to leave the recorder (who is also the reader) ‘happy in viewing a clean Book after a thirteen Weeks daily Examination’, the errata erased. Like Tristram Shandy, Franklin even gives the reader a graphic sample in his text of the black dots which bring the project for perfection to a full stop in the course of a week, identifying absolutely the creation of character with the writerly project. Here is the matrix of morality, reduced to a series of ciphers of progress or failure, the co-ordinates of conduct inscribed on the page

6. Cf. W. R . Bion, Cogitations (London r c j q i ; rpt 1994). p.304: ‘Inability to tolerate empty space

7. The Autobiography of Bmjnniiri F r m t k l i f i . ed. 1.eonat-d W. Labaree. Ralph L. Ketcham. Helen C. limits the amount of spacc available’.

Boatfield and Helene H. Fineinan (New Havcn/l.ondon ~ 9 6 4 . 1976). p.148.

20 SUSAN MANNING

as a calculation of addition and subtraction. In a very literal way, this is a 'syntax of sin', the grammar of a life ordered by its black spots, the dots which bring the structured march of progress to a full stop. The scheme of Franklin's day is brought into the realm of control, leaving no dangerously free spaces: 'The Precept of Order requiring that every Part 0s m y Business should have its allotted Time, one Page in my little Book contain'd the following Scheme of Employment for the Twenty-four Hours of a natural Day.' For satisfying neatness of composition, the plan is organised so that it can be gone through completely four times in a year (Figure 2).8

Possible in theory, perfection (to the reader's relief) proves more elusive in practice: if the character the youthful Franklin had wished to build for himself was unattainable, the anecdote as described in the Autobiography serves to furnish the character of the wiser, recording Franklin with an attractively detached self-knowledge. The tension of failure relaxes into comic pleasure in a celebrated parable:

Like the Man who in buying an Ax of a Smith my neighbour. desired to have the whole of its Surface as bright as the Edge; the Smith consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the Wheel. He turn'd while the Smith press'd the broad face of the Ax hard and heavily on the Stone, which made the Turning of it very fatiguing. The Man came every now and then from the Wheel to see how the Work went on: and at length would take his Ax as it was without farther Grinding. No, says the Smith, Turn on. turn on; we shall have it bright by and by; as yet 'tis only speckled. Yes. says the Man; but - 1 think 1 like a speckled Ax best (p.15 5-56).

It is because Franklin can tolerate, and even enjoy, the tarnishings on his own moral rectitude that he writes as he does: the pleasures of his writing for the reader frequently focus themselves in moments of self-directed irony like this one, and like the incident when he abandons his principled vegetarianism to the delicious aroma of frying fish, and then describes how he attempted to justify this capitulation to himself on rational grounds: 'So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do' (p.88). In the end, as Franklin describes it in his Autobiography, the project for Moral Perfection was abandoned simply because life took over: 'at length, I omitted [the courses of moral training] entirely, being employ'd in Voyages and Business abroad with a multiplicity of affairs' (p. I 5 5 ) . The perfect tense in which the episode is recounted fixes it as an aspect of his development, now gone beyond in the mature present of the writing moment.

8 . Franklin, Autobiogrr~phy. p.r 5 2 . I 54. Comparison with another provincial American self- fashioner, William Byrd 11. suggests itself here. Unlike Franklin, but like Boswell. Byrd did not leave behind his self-accountings, but continued the practice throughout his life in a series of commonplace books whose shorthand notation at once reveals and conceals the obsessive repetition which marked his diurnal self-structuring. The relationship between the fully 'written out' self-examinations of Boswell's journals and the fragmentary compilations and exclusions of Byrd's commonplace books requires fuller exploration than I am able to give it here. Cf. Kenneth Lockridge. The Diary. and fife, of Williurn ByrdlI ofVirgirIiu, 16/14-1744 (Chapel Hill. North Carolina r987). and my essay 'Industry and idleness in colonial Virginia: a new approach to William Byrd 11'. in Iournal of American studies 2 8 . 2 (1994). p.169-90.

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22 SUSAN MANNING

The aspiration towards 'moral Perfection' is not negated, simply incorporated as a stage in the story of a self which has learned to live with its own imperfections:

tho' I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but Fell far short of it, yet I was by the Endeavour a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been. if I had not attempted it: As those who aim at perfect Writing by imitating the engraved Copies, tho' they never reach the wish'd for excellence of those Copies, their Hand is mended by the Endeavour, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible' (p.156).

Boswell, however, writing to the moment rather than retrospectively, could never consent to be a 'speckled Ax'; right to the end of his life his diaries record the constant skirmishes and wearinesses of a self divided against itself.9 Comic irony is not an option, when consciousness can claim no distance from its projects for perfection. The 'little black Spots' which plague his moral chart become recurrent shadows on the pages which ure the inscription of his 'charac- ter', not 'errata' on the surface to be expunged, but the very dynamic of the narrative's existence. Journal writing exerted order over the formless flux of experience; but the particular mode of Boswell's journalising could never, I'll suggest, leave him free, like Franklin, to abandon his moral accountancy for involvement in the world's 'multiplicity of affairs'. One of the most pitiable entries of all records Boswell's own recognition, near the end, of how little has changed, through all experiences and all his plans of reformation:

What sunk me very low was the sensalion that I was precisely as when in wretched low spirits thirty years ago. without any addition to my character from having had the friendship of Dr Johnson and many eminent men. made the tour of Europe. and Corsica in particular. and written two very successful Books. I was as a board on which fine figures had been painted, hut which some corrosive application had reduced to its original nakedness."'

In some sense, Boswell's journals are addicted to plans for self-reformation every bit as much as he was to the unrecuperable pleasures which sabotaged them. The relationship between pleasure and compulsion or addiction is a complex one. My purpose here is not to designate Boswell an alcoholic - such a diagnosis at this distance in time and from the evidence of writing alone being at once impossible and impertinent - but rather, by borrowing some recent thinking on structures which characterise repeated self-destructive behaviour, to inquire into the form of Boswell's journals. Defining addiction, briefly, as 'any substance or process that has taken over our lives and over which we are powerless', it makes sense to extend the discussion from Boswell's use of alcohol to his compulsive whoring, his continual plans for self-reformation, and even to his habit of journalising.'I That is. the Plan itself may be part of the problem.

9. It should he noted that this is a compositional choice. a fiction which serves to perpetuate the rhetorical oscillations of the narrative. rather than an urimediated actuality: the journal is the 'written up' record of memoranda frequently recorded several days previously.

10. Boswell Papers. xviii.70-71. cited by Allan Ingram. in Boswclf's crentive gfoorn: ri sti& of imager!/ and niefaricholy ir i the writirigs qfjnrties Bosudl (London I 982) , p. I 84.

I 1. A. W. Schaef and D. Fassel. Tlie Addictive orgmiiritiori (San Francisco 1988). p.5 (my italics).

Boswrll‘s plrtrsures, the pleasures of Boswell 2 3

‘Alcoholism’, according to the account of Kessel and Walton, ‘is an integral part of the alcoholic: it is difficult to separate the man from his disease because so much of his energy and his actions are bound up in the addictive drinking and its consequences’.Tz In Boswell’s case, to ‘addictive drinking’ one could add, or substitute, ‘addictive accounting’, and transfer the analysis to the rhetorical- confessional form of the journals. which recurrently construct the figure of its author in pre-Romantic terms as the guilt-bearing subject defined (like the Rousseau of the Confessions, or like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner) by his obsessive repetitions of a first, Original, Sin.’ 1 Boswell’s life and writing may be more self- consistent. more of a piece than he himself believed.

The episodes of drunken seeking after oblivion are identical in their function to the formless melancholy which periodically assailed Boswell: the records of both as blots in the forward movement of his life-Plans are similarly structured in the past tense, as interruptions in his narrative of sensation and reflection, and in opposition to the renewed resolution which they prompt. So dead and deadening of expressive possibility are these episodes that the record develops a series of shorthand indicators of emptiness: ‘Was very bad’: ‘Was indolent and listless and gloomy’, ‘Was ashamed of this day’s conduct’; ‘My riot had distressed me terribly’.’4 Literally as well as morally unspeakable in the present, they occur at the point where words, intolerably, demonstrate their incapacity to contain feeling. Drunkenness and melancholy are vessels with holes through which meaning has leaked away. and Boswell’s near-compulsive verbalising comes, repeatedly, to a horrified full stop before this recognition, the ‘syntax of sin’ asserting its structure on his narrative. There is another sense, too, in which these episodes of uncontrol belong always to the record of the past rather than to the hopeful projections of the future: stubbornly resisting transformation from one dimension of desire to another more accessible and more acceptable one, they are repetitions, failures to change the present by the active operation of memory. And, as Adam Phillips wittily puts it, ‘there is no future in repetition’.’s

These black holes in his Plan have, however, a crucial function: recording them preserves, if only as a source of reproach, a portion of Boswell’s existence which he cannot afford to let disappear, and, equally importantly, the record gives some structure to their formlessness in his experience. ‘An unrecorded day passes quickly into oblivion, and Boswell was much afraid of oblivion. To be sure, he sometimes sought it in drink. But when he achieved it, he did so, in a

12. Neil Kessel and Henry Walton. Alcoholism (Harmondsworth 1965). p.74: quoted by Kevin McCarron in ‘Alcoholism as metaphor in William Golding’s Tlrr Pnprr men’. Regond the plrasurr dome: writing and addirtinn frorn the Rumnt~tics. cd. Sur Vice. Matthew Campbell and Tin1 Armstrong (Shcftield 1994). p.276.

I 3. See Jeremy Tambling. Confession: srxrmlitLy. sin. thr subjrct (Manchester/New York 1990). esp. chs 4 and 5 .

14. Hosuwll it? rx t r rmrs I 776-1778. ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (London 1971). p.27, 29. 19.

Christopher Bollas’s Bring a churucter and Malcolm Rowie’s Ps;ychoanalysis arid t he future of theory. T 5 . ‘The shock of the old’. The London rw i rw of books. 10 February I 994. Phillips is reviewing

24 SUSAN M A N N I N G

sense, against his will: "I was sadly intoxicated. Perdidi diem."'L" The account of his lapses is like the trace or image of his forgetting in the record of memory; 'memory', as St Augustine puts it, 'retains forgetfulness. So it is there lest we forget what, when present, makes us forget [...I If, then, memory holds forgetful- ness not through itself but through its image, forgetfulness must itself have been present for its image to be registered'.'F Constant renewal of the Plan is necessary to defend Boswell's self against his unspeakable, non-negotiable oblivion on the other side of memory:

One would a t first wonder how a man should have any difticulty to tell what he himself has suffered. But the sufferings of a Hypochondriack. like the troubled dreams of a person in a fever. do not settle themselves with any permanent regularity in the memory. And indeed let any one try to express the most severe pains which he has endured. a t any distance of time after they have ceased, and he will find his language quite inadequate: so that he must use those strong indefinite phrases which do not particularly specify any thing, convey any distinct meaning, or excite any lively perception.'x

'Regularity' - or its absence - is a crucial word here, to be interposed always between the extremes of loquacity and muteness. The problem is to regulate speech and silence, to still the pendulum, as it were, of abstinence and excess. The repetition of the dialogue of compulsion may have no future: but it is preferable to the nullity of the present-as-empty-space which might ensue were it to be pretermitted, and it does keep the open acknowledgement of impermissable desires at bay. Jacques Lacan has drawn attention to the 'para- doxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character' which distingu- ishes desire from need. I 9 The Inviolable Plan, like all its successive recapitulations through the journals, is born in some sense of that very Augustinian desire to have no desire. Elsewhere, Lacan elaborates on the close connection between language and desire: to engage in language is to activate a dangerous pleasure of more-than-need, just as for the alcoholic, a single drink may lead unstoppably to drunkenness. Boswell-as-Hypochondriac is perfectly aware that if he begins to speak, he may not be able to stop within the bounds of decorum:

I have always considered it to be a great misfortune to be one of those people. who may be said to have no fanners in their minds with which they can winnow the grain from the chaff, so that all their thoughts of every sort are brought forth whatever may be the consequence. This with some is a natural defect, an absolute want of discernment. But I believe it is most frequently owing to an extreme degree of inattention and carelessness from not being habituated to any kind of correction.'"

An Hypochondriack is sometimes so totally incapable of conversation. having a

16. John N. Morris. Versions of the si4J studies in nutobiography f r o m John Bunyan to John Stunrt

17. Corifessions. x.xvi. trans. and introd. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford 1991). p.194-95. 18. 'On hypochondria'. Roswell's columri. ed. Margery Bailey (London 195 I) . p.48-49. 19. Ecrits. A selection. trans. Alan Sheridan (London 1977). p.286. 20. 'On reserve', Boswell's column. p.1 39.

Mill (New York/London 1966). p.192.

Boswcll’s pktwsures, the pleasures of Boswcll 2 5

mind like an exhausted receiver, and organs of speech as if palsied, that when his ideas and his vivacity return, effusion is a pleasure to him, in which he can hardly resist an excess of indulgence.”

Unregulated drinking and unregulated speech bear always the same burden in Boswell’s writing. The ‘Inviolable Plan’ of litrecht and its successors are, in one of their aspects, a kind of conceptual corset to hold in the overflowing plenitude of thought or - though this is to anticipate - of imaginative possibility.

So the obsessive form of the journal-writing becomes itself a part of the figure in the carpet. The regular backslidings give equally regular opportunities to repent, wipe clean the sheet and begin again. Every time, in the event, his memory fails to recall the resolution: but the failure brings his forgetting back to mind, so that it can be re-written on the familiar fresh record of the day’s experience. If Boswell was addicted (to convert to the theological language in which so much of this experience is structured) to Sin, he was no less addicted to Repentance. To keep itself going across the pages and the years, it is necessary for the whole cycle to repeat every time. Trying always to overcome the deadening repetitiveness of the exhortation - resolve - failure - confession - reproach - exhortation dance, Boswell had it so firmly inscribed on his mind that his journals simply transcribe the pattern on paper. ’I determined vigorously to resist temptation for the future.’zZ The journals are the record of a search for something lost to the organising mind, but held as a trace in the Forgotten but relentlessly recurring: the memory ‘demands the return of the missing element’,z4 but the mind cannot oblige: ‘Method [...I Plan [...I regularity [...I order’: the words revolve as. from the opening pages of the London journal to the melancholy death of the Great Biographer, the journals attempt to impose the language of constraint by force upon the life of excess. But structured like this, every failure leads only to a further reiteration of the same attempt: ‘I am determined to pursue it with unremitting steadiness’ (LJ, 2 0 5 ) . ‘Could I but fix myself in such a character and preserve it uniformly, I should be exceedingly happy. I hope to do so, and to attain a constancy and dignity’ (LJ, 258). The despondent conditional registers the hopelessness of the venture: there is something perverse in the inability to recognise it, but Boswell’s emotional agenda does not contain an alternative grammar of possibilities. The plans are predicated on progress, on change: the experience seems to refute that postulate as often as it recurs.

I t is a battle that Boswell musf lose, because it has been structured that way long before the inception of the account that confirms it. The account of his day - the narrative told in the journal - is always implicitly (and often explicitly)

21. Ibid.. p.142. 22. Boswrll for the defence 1769-1774. ed. W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (London

1960). p.235. 2 3 . ‘We do not say we have found the thing which was lost unless we recognize it. and we cannot

recognize it if we do not remember it. ?’lie object was lost to the eyes, but held in the memory’. Augustine. Confessioris, x.xviii. 195.

24. Ibid. x.xix.rgg-96.

26 SUSAN M A N N I N G

also a form of moral accountancy - the drawing up of the balance sheet of his life in response to an inferred judge hovering over the audit of events.zi The self- accountings, even when they begin in hope and self-congratulation, always lead to failure and thence to renewed resolution:

I shall take a short review of this summer session. I never was so busy. having written 50 law papers. nor made so much money, having got 120 guineas. I had been up almost every morning at 7 . and sometimes earlier. I had been in the Court of Session almost every morning precisely at q I...] I had advanced in practice and kept clear of the President. I had distinguished myself nobly in a capital trial. I had been a good deal in company, and in the best company of the place, both in my own house and in their houses. I had therefore great reason to be satisfied, having enjoyed, withal, good health and spirits. BUT I had been much intoxicated - 1 may say drunk - six times, and still oftener heated with liquor to feverishness. I had read hardly anything but mere law: I had paid very little attention to the duties of piety, though I had almost every day, morning and evening, addressed a short prayer to GOD [...I Let me endeavour every session and every year to improve. (Defence. p.280-81. entry for 12 August I 774)

That judge is, variously and simultaneously, God, Boswell's father, and Boswell- as-narrator, recounter and accountant of the actions of Boswell-as-character. Its a form of self-torture, this compulsive re-enacting of a scenario whose only outcome can be a further redaction of the crime. The structure of the writing reiterates, as it must, the structure of Boswell's experience: it cannot. therefore, in the nature of things, provide (as he hopes it will), an avenue of escape from that experience.

Notoriously, through life Boswell sought the collusion of a series of father- figures in his project of self-perfection, drawing them in to his moral dilemmas with admissions of failure, declarations of repentance and requests for advice. More often than not they obliged, absolutely in the terms he enjoined, and thereby perpetuated the structure of both his behavioural and rhetorical oscillations: Lord Kames, Sheridan, Johnson, Voltaire - the list is familiar, and long. Driven to secure the participation of ever-higher 'authorities' in his project of self- improvement, Boswell presented himself and his written account of himself to Rousseau. It is a particularly revealing example of his method of enlisting others:

I had left with him when I was last here what I called a 'Sketch of My Life', in which I gave him the important incidents of my history and my melancholy apprehensions, and begged his advice and friendship. It was a n interesting piece.

As Boswell hopes, Rousseau is irresistibly drawn into the game in the role assigned him, and they begin together to consider Boswell's hankering for multiple sexual liaisons. The implicit dialogue becomes actual in his account as the desired structure is set in place:

BOSWELL. 'Still, I should like to follow the example of the old Patriarchs. worthy men whose memory I hold in respect.' ROUSSEAU. 'But are you not a citizen? You

2 5 . Literally. too, in some cases: see the frugal 'Scheme of living' which Hoswell drew up for himselfin London in 1 7 6 2 ( L J . p.335-37) .

Boswell's p l m u r r s , the pleasures 01 Boswell 2 7

must not pick and choose one law here and another law there: you must take the laws of your own society. Do your duty as a citizen. and if you hold fast. you will win respect. I should not talk about it. but I would do it. - And as for your lady, when you go back to Scotland you will say. "Madam, such conduct is against my conscience, and there shall be no more of it." She will applaud you. if she is not to be despised.''"

The exchange is profoundly satisfying to Boswell. whose release is complete. if temporary: 'I gave myself full scope; for since I left England I have not had anybody to whom I could lay open entirely my mind till I found Monsieur Rousseau'. His gratification is related to the intuition (at least as far as it is manifest in his own record of the conversation) that he and Rousseau spoke not so much the same language, as the same corlfiguration oflanguage: the vocabulary of 'law', 'duty', 'conduct' and 'conscience' in which Rousseau frames his admon- itions answers exactly to the structure of Boswell's inquiries. The lapsed Calvinist from Scotland and the lapsed Calvinist from Geneva have their experience cast in the same verbal mould.

When no such figure was in the ofing, Boswell colluded with himself, producing the ventriloquised tones of his father as an exhortatory other voice in his journals:

apply hard, and make yourself a man of learning. At first after so much dissipation it will be irksome, but every day it will become more easy [...I don't take up with odd people or with vicious people I...] be cautious against contracting intimacies with people you know nothing about. (I,etter from Lord Auchinleck. BH. 2 6 )

Even when he is not actually present or represented in his letters, Lord Auchin- leck's is the powerful shadow presence which drives the journals into dialogue: 'Be earnest to improve. It is not you alone concerned, but your worthy father' ( B H . 4); 'I envied the steady, regular, prudent conduct he had maintained through life, and did not think with any pleasure of the superiour warmth of enjoyment which had been my lot'.l7 The reminiscences of paternal exhortation modulate into impersonation, and the narrative fluctuates between the first- and second-person as his father's voice is assimilated with a fearful accuracy: 'Don't smoke any more because it makes you sick and a foreigner need not do it' ( B H 4): 'Be resolute to try one week six hours' reading, two walking. &c. I...] Act with fortitude [...I Repress fastidiousness and encourage good humour' ( B H , 20):

'Guard against liking billiards. They are blackguard' ( B H , 22); 'Never remit plan'

It is as though Boswell has no idea of what to do, how to behave, when to eat or drink or go to stool, unless someone will tell him. This might be the friends to whom he earnestly writes to solicit advice. but how readily Boswell learns to instruct himself, in this striking form of self-admonishment. His memoranda reek with the kind of good advice one would not take from another, could not from

w. 39).

26. Roswcdl oti the Grnrid Tour.: Gertiinrr,~/ t r i i t l Sir~itzc,r.lrrtid I 764. ed. Frederick A. Pottle (I'ondon

2 7 . Boswell papers. xiii.202. cited by A l l u i Ingrain in Boswll's crcntiw glootti. p.82. 1953). P.248.

28 SUSAN M A N N I N G

oneself. Boswell’s writing does not help him resolve his difficulty; rather, it works as it does because he cannot resolve it, and serves to perpetuate the dilemma in a different medium: dealing with his self-formation, the prose is static in two opposed voices of statement and contradiction, repentance and admonition. It is, one suspects, a compulsively continued version of the oppressive dialogue of the confessional which had always structured his relations with his father. The black spots in Boswell’s journals are, then, not simply the incidental errata common (as Benjamin Franklin discovers) to every life, but a vital counter in maintaining this dialogue against the silence which otherwise threatens to overwhelm his narrative. In this context, it seems likely that Boswell found particularly upsetting one remark of Hume’s recorded in the celebrated ‘deathbed interview’:

He said, ‘If there were a future state, Mr Boswell, I think I could give as good an account of my life as most people’.’*

And could, therefore, rest easy in the prospect of annihilation. Now this final Calvinist compt - the repeated uncomfortable interview with his unyielding father-in-judgement writ intolerably large - was just the encounter Boswell could least bear to be reminded of. word perfect as he already was in the script of the scene which was the story of his whole life: he would be compelled to plead guilty to his faults, would be harshly arraigned according to the dictates of extreme righteousness, and sent finally away. The ‘deathbed interview’ ends abruptly at this point. with Boswell reduced to that feared silence, not giving himself the last word, even in the privileged re-composition which his journal afforded.

I have suggested that Boswell may have been compelled to drink and whore uncontrollably because he was addicted to the process of self-accounting. as much as the other way round; the activities are reciprocal in his life and writing, and both belong to a similar conception of the self. The divisive process of self- scrutiny enjoined by Calvinism and endorsed by Boswell’s father and in his relations to him is a ‘virtue’ which becomes an addiction closely linked to and perhaps structurally indistinguishable from Boswell’s ‘vices’. As Oliver Goldsmith’s Sir William Honeywood says of his nephew, the compulsively generous ‘Good-natur‘d Man’, ‘There are some faults so nearly allied to excel- lence, that we can scarcely weed out the vice without eradicating the excel- l en~e’ .~’J The Hypochondriack paper on ‘Conscience’ takes a motto from Cicero from which Boswell draws the instruction ‘to expand his mind into a grand theatre of self-observation’.3” The journals are that theatre, the elaborately

28. Boswell in extretnes 1776-1 778. ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (London 19711% P.15.

2y. The Good-natur’d t r i m (I 768). Collectid works of Olivrr Goldsmith, ed. A. Friedman. 5 vols (Oxford 1966), v.20. See also Caryn Chaden. ‘The promise of moderation: addiction. codependence. deception and disguise in Goldsmith satires’, in Beyond the pleasure dome. p.86. I am indebted to this essay’s discussion of Goldsmith and its formulation of the notion of addiction.

3 0 . Boswd’s colunin, p . 5 1 . 5 3 .

Boswll’s pleasures, the pleasures of Boswell 29

figured dance of moral accountancy the show upon its boards. But the sense of self (as Hume had shown) disintegrates under scrutiny, the mind retreating from reflecting upon its own movements to diverting sensation.3’ The deeper his melancholy self-preoccupation became, the more extreme the ‘pleasure’ Boswell required to divert him: indulging sensation to the point of insensibility, he sought escape in excesses which could only lead to further debilitating self-scrutiny.

To Temple, one of his most longstanding paternal-fraternal colluders, he wrote in 1789.

You have told me, that I was the most thiriking man you ever knew. It is certainly so as to my own life. I am continually (oriscious. continually looking buck and looking forward and wondering how I shall feel in situations which I anticipate in fancy. My journal will afford materials for a very curious narrative. I assure you I do not now live with a view to have surprising incidents, though I own I am desirous that my life should trll.3*

Clearly, Boswell equated ‘thought’ with the obsessive processes of self-scrutiny and moral reckoning. But consciousness, and particularly self-consciousness, is not the same as thought. In fact, despite the way Boswell liked to think of himself, the whole activity of the journals might be regarded as a way of avoiding thought - thought as it might lead to fundamental change in, rather than perpetuation of, his pains. 13 The activity Boswell describes here belongs to the cycle of dissipation and self-denial, to the world where memory must fail to be effective in preventing endless repetition. It is itself a melancholy enough experience, and hardly a source of pleasure. reading one’s way through the inscribed writhings of a mind struggling to evade the implications of its failure to forge change from resolutions of self-denial. And yet - to return to my starting point - I believe it is this very inability to think, to find (as Franklin did) some perspective on the binary pattern of his self-accounting, which is also the source of the ‘pleasures of Boswell’ for the reader.

At this point, the nature of alcohol’s irresistible attraction for the addict may cast a bit more light on the analogy between Boswell’s bouts of compulsive drinking, and the pleasures of his journals. The poet Peter Redgrove reflects:

I have wondered about the reason why men drink. I think it’s because they’re creating sensation in their bodies. The alcohol stills thought and allows them to attend to sensation in the same manner as meditation will, but also of course they’re pissing, which is feeling the world pass through their bodies.34

The ‘pleasure of Boswell’ is precisely not that of thought, trapped in a structure

31. A Trcwtise of human riature ( I 739-1 740). ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd edn revised by Peter Nidditch (Oxford 1978). Book I . part 4. sections v and vi.

32. Letter to Temple. 22 May I 789. Lmw of \artif’s Roswdl to the Rev. W. 1. Temple. with a n introduction by Thomas Seccombe (London I 908). p.245.

33. As a thinker. Boswell is facile: without detracting from why he remains an important writer, it may be said of him as Goethe said of Byron. that ‘The moment he reflects, he is a child’ (quoted by Matthew Arnold. in Esscugs i r i criticism. swotid s c v k . I 888 . ‘Byron’).

34. Interview of 1980 quoted by Neil Roberts. ‘Peter Redgrove: drinking as menses-envy’. in Beyond the plcnsure doine. p.149.

30 SUSAN MANNING

it cannot transcend, but of escape from thought, something more akin to the fluidity of drink, Redgrove’s ‘feeling the world pass through [his] body’. One way, I have suggested, of evading thought is to repeat a pattern: Boswell’s projects for moral reform, self-betterment. and literary or personal self-advancement are diversions, which prevent him from having to rest in the frustrations and pain of the moment, mitigate the self-disgust of being drunken, whoring, bored Boswell now with the possibility of being reformed, successful, good Boswell tomorrow.35 They give him, in a very literal way, something to do. Another kind of diversion is to find a route into sensation:

Somehow or another, I was very low-spirited and melancholy [...I and was very discontent. I left my company. and mounting on the back of a hackney-coach, rattled away to town in the attitude of a footman. The whimsical oddity of this, the jolting of the machine, and the soft breeze of the evening made me very well again. (LJ. 286)

This is harmless enough, and the unfettering of consciousness into the ‘whimsical oddity’ of the action is certainly a source of pleasure for the reader. At such moments, released from the burden - and the possibilities - of thought, Boswell’s writing is irresistibly, curiously present in the world his journals observe and portray, drawn to its details and minutiae. When his journal gives itself up to the stream of events, as to drink, Boswell is without equal.

But the truly remarkable thing about the Boswell of the journals. is that his ‘Sin’ is so literally, so transparently, at once the site of his guilt, of his pleasure, and of the ‘pleasures of Boswell’. William James brings many of the concerns of this paper together, as he ponders the closely allied seductions of alcoholic and religious elevation:

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties o f human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates. and saps no: drunkenness expands, unites. and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the YPS function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. 3‘’

If for ‘sobriety’ we read Auchinleck, and all his voice represents in Boswell’s prose, crushing with cold systems and dry criticisms the freedom of unformed imaginative Boswell to shape himself, it is easily possible to see the attraction of drink for him in the terms William James proposes: an expanding yea-sayer offering that sensation ofspiritual elevation which eluded him in the thwarting structure of moral accountancy that always stood between him and the religious consolation he so earnestly sought. More than, better than, simply oblivion,

35. Adam Phillips describes somcthing like this as ‘a premature flight from unccrhinty. the familiar orgy of promiscuous and disappointing engagements that is also. as it were. a trial action in action. a trying things out’ (‘On heing bored‘. in OJI kissing. tickliiig orid bring borrd. London I 99 3 . P.74).

36. William James. The Varietic’s I$ rcligiorrs rsperirrrcc~: I I stud!/ i t1 hu1t7a11 I J O ~ I W P ( I goz). in W i l h l J ~ J P S : rvritiiigs igor-1910 (New York 1987). p. 348.

drink makes him (as William James goes on), 'for the moment one with truth'. 37

Boswell's pleasures and the pleasures of Boswell come together when his prose is able to take in and take on 'for the moment' the same imaginative deliverance from constraint which the release of alcohol represents in his life. Here, indeed, is character 'composed', in terms which rise almost to those of Burns, though its freedoms may - must, even - later be repented:

We were shown into a good room and had a bottle of sherry before us in a minute. 1 surveyed my seraglio and tound them both good subjects for amorous play. I toyed with them and drank about and sung Youth's tha senson and thought myself Captain Macheath; and then I solaced my existence with them, one after the other. according to their seniority. I was quite r r r r s d . as the phrase is: thought I was in a London tavern, the Shakespeare's Head. enjoying high debauchery after by sober winter. I parted with my ladies politely and came home in a glow of spirits. FRIDAY 20 MAY. My blood still thrilled with pleasure. (LJ. 264)