Adam Sisman: Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making Of The Life Of Dr. Johnson

In the late 18th century, when James Boswell wrote The Life Of Samuel Johnson, his famous biography of the London gentleman, distinguished men tried their hand at literature like modern rich folks race yachts or collect foreign cars. Both Boswell and the subject of his magnum opus dabbled in poetry, pamphleteering, drama, journal-writing, and fiery letters to newspapers. But Johnson became best known for the amusing lines and profound thoughts he delivered in dialogue with his vast circle of influential friends, and Boswell made his name by keeping a detailed record of what Johnson said, and to whom. Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task serves in part as a biography of Boswell, and as an argument for his qualities as a great writer, as opposed to a mere stenographer. The bulk of the book is devoted to the seven years Boswell spent preparing Life, during which he endured the death of his wife, public ridicule, and a shelf-full of competing biographies. Boswell's Presumptuous Task scrupulously recreates an era when men of letters took their craft seriously, and their feuds played out in the press, through anonymous articles penned by the feuders themselves. Boswell's published account of his trip with Johnson to the Scottish Hebrides Islands—a prelude to Life and a precursor, in a way, to Truman Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers—reaped stellar sales and strong rebukes from society types, who feared that the author's habit of recounting private conversations would lead to a breakdown in propriety. Boswell's critics were right. His highly personal, gossipy re-imagining of Johnson's life in biography whetted readers' appetites for revealing profiles of public figures, and his habit of reshaping Johnson's words set a precedent for centuries of reportage that revealed more about its writers than its subjects. Sisman's thoroughness in presenting a play-by-play of Boswell's painstaking assembly of stray bits of "Johnsoniana" gets a bit repetitious, as does the detailed recounting of the biographer's drinking, whoring, and venereal diseases. Endlessly fascinating, though, are the sections addressing the subtle and not-so-subtle insults traded by the ambitious Boswell and the London upper-crusters who resented his impertinence, his success, and his Scottish origins. Boswell's Presumptuous Task connects the bluster of the moneyed class with their decline in importance, and implicates Boswell's relaxed prose style as an unintentional catalyst in the demystification of great men.