He's No Boswell

I have read a remembrance of the late W. Jackson Bate, the Harvard scholar and biographer of Keats and Johnson, by David Gessner, a writer new to me. “Benediction: On Being Boswell’s Boswell” was first published two years ago in The Georgia Review but I found it reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXX, the annual collection of poetry, fiction and essays edited by Bill Henderson. I knew nothing about Bate as a man. As a writer, he was worthy of his subjects, and my only quibble was his occasional over-reliance on Freudian boilerplate as a substitute for explanations of character.

Gessner was Bate’s student at Harvard in the early 1980s, several years after Bate had won his second Pulitzer Prize, for the Johnson biography. The early part of the essay is a recounting of Gessner’s drunken undergraduate shenanigans and, worse, his brief infatuation with Thomas Wolfe, of Look Homeward, Angel notoriety. Gessner lingers too long on Gessner – a snare for so many nonfiction writers. I wanted to know more about Bate, but Gessner gives us little context, almost as though Bate existed only in and for his relationship with Gessner.

Most of us are not interesting enough to merit many words. The memoirs I admire -- and I use a very elastic definition of “memoir” – are noteworthy not for self-revelation but as autonomous works of literary art – Walden and Speak, Memory, for instance. What Gessner gives us of Bate resembles Hollywood’s caricature of an “absent-minded professor” – the eccentricity, emotional volatility, abstractedness, even the obsessive fumbling with pipe and tobacco. The most moving moment comes during Gessner’s first visit to Bate’s farm in New Hampshire. By this time Gessner is about 30 and has spent much of the previous decade wrestling unsuccessfully with the manuscript of a novel. Gessner asks Bate if he believes in God. Bate answers, “Oh, yes, I suppose. I have to believe that there is something behind such a miraculous world.”

Bate goes to another room and returns with a book. He reads aloud the last 20 lines from “East Coker,” the most beautifully mournful and resigned in all of Eliot’s work. Gessner thanks him and Bate replies, “Thank you. It’s been years since I read poetry out loud. The last time I read this piece was at Eliot’s memorial service.”

As a coda to his essay, Gessner tells us how he wrote an original version of it several years after his final visit, and sent copies of it to an unidentified journal and to Bate. Gessner says Bate saw his portrait as “a caricature of an enfeebled, senile old man.” Bate called the editor of the journal, who promised not to publish it. Gessner apologized and promised never to publish it. The essay we read is Gessner’s violation of his promise to Bate, who died in 1999. This is distasteful. Bate deserves a better, less self-regarding, more honorable Boswell.

Several weeks ago I recommended a poem by Ben Downing, “On First Looking into Bate’s Life of Johnson,” from his collection The Calligraphy Shop. Here’s the fourth of the poem’s four sections, addressed to Johnson:

“Professor Bate has served you faithfully
despite being an American.
As you once ambered others, he has spun
A grease-stained halo round your memory,

“embalming you in neither the debauched
fluids of the ordinary Joe
nor the priggish ether of the hagio.
Half slob, half saint: your corpulence was lodged

“between the rock of faith and the hard spot
of being merely human – a Gordian knot
which you, no Alexander, couldn’t cut,
yet worked and worried in such intricate,

“persevering, poignantly futile ways
that your greatness beggars his. Epitome
of Adamites, the ur-Dr. J,
your frazzled life here finds a natty peace.”

The excerpt from “East Coker” Bate read aloud includes the line “Old men ought to be explorers.” Bate was 59 when he published the Johnson biography, in his early 60s when Gessner was his student, and in his 70s by the time he broke with his former student. In other words, Bate remained a scholar, an explorer of history and the human heart, well into his eighth decade. His greatness beggars Gessner’s.