The stubborn trace of instrumentality in Boswell and Johnson’s friendship – the uneasy feeling repeatedly awakened in the reader of the Life of Johnson that each man to some extent pursued his own goals by means of the other – is most vivid in those moments, of which the engineering of a meeting between Johnson and John Wilkes is the most celebrated,39 when we see Boswell tampering with the life as lived in order to produce sensational material for the life as written. Johnson occasionally growled at this treatment:
He sometimes could not bear being teazed with questions. I was once present when a gentleman asked so many as, ‘What did you do, Sir?’ ‘What did you say, Sir?’ that he at last grew enraged, and said, ‘I will not be put to the question. Don’t you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what, and why; what is this? what is that? why is a cow’s tail long? why is a fox’s tail bushy?’40
But for the most part Johnson seems to have been complicitous in this unstated, but nevertheless palpable, process of literary production which was advantageous both to him and to Boswell.41 Later in life Johnson touched again on this subject: ‘To be contradicted, in order to force you to talk, is mighty unpleasing. You shine, indeed; but it is by being ground.’42 But the chance to shine often reconciled Johnson to the grinding.
It is a paradox of play that, in any game, the opponents are also collaborators, and a further paradox that they collaborate precisely by opposing one another – their conflict engenders the game they create together. The moments of disagreement, of opposition and of conflict, between Boswell and Johnson which we encounter in the Life sometimes have this gaming quality to them: they are the grinding which produces brilliance. Boswell repeatedly draws his reader’s attention to issues or topics on which he disagreed with Johnson: topics such as the respective merits of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, the current crisis in Corsica, the significance of Sir John Dalrymple’s discovery that the Whig martyrs Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell had been secret pensioners of Louis XIV, the war with the American colonies, and the institution of slavery, which Johnson consistently attacked, and Boswell shamefully defended:
I beg leave to enter my most solemn protest against his [Johnson’s] general doctrine with respect to the Slave Trade. For I will resolutely say – that his unfavourable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information… To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.43
When he does this, Boswell is in part preening himself before the reader and displaying the fact that he is not merely Johnson’s creature – this is the function of these passages in the life as written.44 But in the life as lived, these episodes served the different function of drawing Johnson out. In the transition from experience to literature, they migrate from utility to ostentation.
To draw Johnson out was also, one suspects, at least at times the purpose of another kind of difference between the two men, namely their occasional bouts of coolness or sullenness.45 The Life records a number of interruptions in their friendship: for instance, in 1764 and 1765 (when Boswell records that Johnson ‘did not favour me with a single letter for more than two years’), in 1767 (‘I received no letter from Johnson this year’), in 1770 (‘a total cessation of all correspondence between Dr. Johnson and me’), in 1778, and in 1784.46 Doubtless some of these apparent estrangements were innocent; but surely not all. In 1779 Boswell reveals that ‘I did not write to Johnson, as usual, upon my return to my family, but tried how he would be affected by my silence.’47 In 1780 Johnson began a letter by chiding Boswell for having ‘taken one of your fits of taciturnity, and [having] resolved not to write till you are written to; it is but a peevish humour, but you shall have your way.’48 And plainly Johnson suspected another of these experiments of silence in the winter of 1784, when he wrote to Boswell (who acknowledges that he had been ‘with much regret long silent’) and commented on the absence of the letters which had provided comfort in the midst of his ailments: ‘In this uncomfortable state your letters used to relieve; what is the reason that I have them no longer? Are you sick, or are you sullen?’49
To sickness and sullenness might be added calculation, and Boswell’s willingness to work upon Johnson by employing what seem close to the arts of coquetry. All this was part of the greater artfulness which produced the Life, but it was a risky strategy. In a character as labile as that of Boswell, it was (as we have seen) hard always to keep the feigned clearly separated from the felt, and the felt could easily have led to rupture, as it nearly did in 1778, in consequence of a dinner party at which Boswell had not been able to control Johnson’s environment:
there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends. I was so much hurt, and had my pride so much roused, that I kept away from him for a week; and, perhaps, might have kept away much longer, nay, gone to Scotland without seeing him again, had not we fortunately met and been reconciled. To such unhappy chances are human friendships liable.50
And also human books, for this tiff might have not only ended Boswell’s friendship with Johnson, but also aborted the Life of Johnson. So the reader of the Life might shudder at this passage, which reveals the slenderness of the thread by which the ‘work which they are now perusing’ (to return to that Boswellian phrase) once hung.51
If, for Boswell, resistance could be an instrument for literary production, for Johnson it was a trait much more deeply etched into his character, and which even assumed an ethical significance. Many of the most vivid phrases and images of the Life reflect the centrality of the practice and principle of opposition in Johnson’s personality. Johnson’s appetite for opposition could take the form of a simple combativeness directed towards others, as when Boswell summed up an evening’s conversation in the words ‘Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several persons.’52 This is the Johnson who loved above all else to prevaiclass="underline"
This [an explanation of how medicated baths might bestow curative benefits] appeared to me very satisfactory. Johnson did not answer it; but talking for victory, and determined to be master of the field, he had recourse to the device which Goldsmith imputed to him in the witty words of one of Cibber’s comedies: ‘There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.’53
This is the Johnson who was animated by the ‘spirit of contradiction’ and a ‘love of argumentative contest’, who might at any moment be overtaken by the ‘humour of opposition’.54 Sometimes the motive for this was ostentation, as Johnson confessed to Boswelclass="underline" ‘When I was a boy, I used always to choose the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious things, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.’55 It was a failing he did not entirely outgrow, as Boswell noted in 1776: ‘The truth, however, is, that he loved to display his ingenuity in argument; and therefore would sometimes in conversation maintain opinions which he was sensible were wrong, but in supporting which, his reasoning and wit would be most conspicuous.’56 Boswell thought this characteristic so central to Johnson’s personality that he allowed it to stand at the climactic point of the summary assessment which closes the book: