Michael Scammell wrote the lives of Arthur Koestler and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writers
who between them constitute a core sample of the twentieth century and its
horrors. Scammell also helped translate The
Gift, the final Russian novel written by Vladimir Nabokov, another of his
century’s representative men. Asked by an interviewer who served as his model when
writing the biographies, Scammell replied, James Boswell, “the greatest
biographer of all time, and the one against whom I measure my own
accomplishments, such as they are.” Mindful of Johnson’s pioneering biographies,
Scammell notes that Boswell’s subject was also his literary model:
“.
. . it took Dr. Johnson, who had one foot firmly planted in the ancient
classical tradition, to challenge the reigning conventions. He was the one who
first opened up English literature to biography as an art. In one of his books,
The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, he
came close to producing a biography with the vividness and modernism that
characterized Boswell’s. Boswell, building on Johnson’s experiments, created
the art of biography in the modern sense of the word.”
Scammell
notes how little time Boswell spent in Johnson’s company, and that he “didn’t
know him half as well as he pretended.” He was a slippery, less than
trustworthy character. Lord Macaulay famously complained that Boswell was “one
of the smallest men that ever lived,” and added: “Of the talents which
ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none.”
Macaulay’s review effectively stifled Boswell’s reputation for a century, and
it’s true his C.V. is unlikely to have impressed any prospective employer – mediocre
lawyer, drunk, pox-ridden roué. Now his preeminence as a biographer cannot be
seriously contested. For most readers, Johnson largely remains Boswell’s
Johnson. Scammell’s judgment is close to definitive:
“Boswell’s
genius lies in the vividness with which he brings his encounters with Johnson
to life. It’s Boswell’s scene painting that made such a big impression on me,
as well as the way in which he organizes his material around those scenes and
the interviews he contrived to have with Johnson. At the end of your reading,
you feel you’ve been living with Dr. Johnson for a very long time and have
really come to know him.”
As
a bonus, here is Scammell on the odious Lytton Strachey: “I’ve read Strachey
very carefully, but he’s no model for me. The biographies in Eminent Victorians are mostly very short
and written in a satirical vein as part of a wide-ranging polemic against the
hypocrisy and moral turpitude of Victorian England. His skill is immense, but
he turns the exhortation of Ecclesiasticus, `Let us now praise famous men,’
completely on its head.”
On
this date, Dec. 11, in 1758, Dr. Johnson wrote in The Idler #30, in a passage rich with ambiguity: “One of the
amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and
the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to
be read.” Solzhenitsyn was born on this date, Dec. 11, in 1918. He wrote the
rarest of books – one that changes the world for the better – and The Gulag Archipelago has been read and
studied my millions.
1 comment:
"[Johnson] was the one who first opened up English literature to biography as an art."
An obvious counter-example comes to mind: William Roper's life of Thomas More. To be sure, Roper was not primarily a writer.
As for Macaulay, on some points I am tempted to apply to him his own words on Horace Walpole: "The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little."
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