NPPF Commentary Line 172, P. 154-156 Part 3

[Mary Krimmel]

Thank you for good commentary, Vincent A. Maeder.

Probably others have enjoyed the book "Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The 
Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson" / Adam Sisman, as I have. Both Sisman's 
original eight-page Introduction to the book and his two-page introduction 
to the Study Guide appended in the Penguin edition are well worth reading.

The book suggests so many Kinbote/Shade parallels (and divergences) that 
had it been produced fifty years earlier I could suppose that VN had read 
it. The title is taken from Boswell's first sentence in the "Life..." 
[Sisman modernized Boswell's spelling and punctuation.]

      "To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the 
lives of others...may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task."

A self-assessment about as far from Kinbote as you can imagine. I am 
tempted to quote one paragraph from Sisman's introduction (p.xviii in the 
Penguin edition) and I yield to temptation.

      "The Life of Johnson can be read as an unending contest between 
author and subject for posterity. Johnson and Boswell are locked together 
for all time, in part-struggle, part-embrace. Boswell will forever be known 
as Johnson's sidekick, remembered principally because he wrote the life of 
a greater man; Johnson is immortalized but also imprisoned by the Life, 
known best as Boswell portrayed him. Each is a creation of the other."

Mary Krimmel

At 08:07 AM 10/7/03 -0700, you wrote:
>Back to Mr. Kinbote's little black book which contains "a footnote from
>Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson . . ."  Although I would be harried to
>find a suitable footnote from this opus, I have supplied a website that
>seems to have the complete work:
>http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/BLJ/  But it is interesting that
>Mr. Kinbote brings up this reference.  Perhaps he saw our Mr. Shade as
>his Mr. Boswell to his own works.  Also, here Mr. Kinbote has actually
>played the Boswell part by transcribing Mr. Shade's conversations.
>Well, here's some encyclopedic snippets of these two gents.
>
>James Boswell, 1740-1795, was a Scottish lawyer, diarist, and writer
>renowned as the biographer of Samuel Johnson.  He inspired a noun:
>Boswell, n. assiduous and devoted admirer, student, and recorder of
>another's words and deeds.  Some encyclopedia around here states that
>Mr. Boswell was the son of a judge.  He reluctantly studied law and
>practiced throughout his life.  His true interest was in a literary
>career and in associating with the great individuals of the time.  He
>met Samuel Johnson in 1763 and, having himself achieved fame with his
>Account of Corsica (1768), produced Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides
>with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785).  His great work, The Life of Samuel
>Johnson, LL.D. appeared in 1791.  Boswell recorded Johnson's
>conversation so minutely that Johnson is better remembered today for his
>sayings than for his own literary works.  The curious combination of
>Boswell's own character (he was vainglorious and dissolute) and his
>genius at biography has led later critics to call him the greatest of
>all biographers.  Masses of Boswell manuscript, discovered in the 20th
>cent. near Dublin, have enhanced his reputation.
>
>As for Mr. Johnson, the encyclopedia states that Samuel Johnson,
>1709-84, was an English author.  The leading literary scholar and critic
>of his day, he helped to define the great period of English literature
>known as the Augustan Age.  He is as celebrated for his brilliant
>conversation as for his writing.  He began writing for London magazines
>around 1737, on literary and political subjects.  The anonymously
>published poem London (1738) won the praise of Pope, and his reputation
>was further enhanced by his poetic satire The Vanity of Human Wishes
>(1749) and his moral essays in The Rambler (1750-52).  Johnson's place
>was permanently assured by his great Dictionary of the English Language
>(1755), the first comprehensive English lexicon.  Rasselas, a moral
>romance, appeared in 1759, and the Idler essays between 1758 and 1760.
>In 1763, Johnson met James Boswell, and his life thereafter is
>documented in Boswell's great biography (1791).  With Joshua Reynolds he
>founded (1764) "The Club"; this elite gathering, with such members as
>Goldsmith, Burke, and Garrick, was dominated by Johnson, whose wit and
>aphorisms are still remembered.  In 1765, he published his edition of
>Shakespeare, the model for later editions.  His last works include an
>account (1775) of a trip with Boswell to the Hebrides and the perceptive
>10-volume Lives of the Poets (1779-81).  He was England's first complete
>man of letters, and his influence was incalculable.