'Without My Being at All Prepared for It'

Occasionally I jump ahead to the death-bed scene when reading a biography, the way some people, incapable of waiting to learn whodunit, cut to the final page of a mystery. In real life, there’s only one denouement. It’s the quality of the ending that interests me; not whether the subject dies but how. 

Consider Dr. Johnson’s death at age seventy-five, with its mingling of grotesquery and nobility. In his final months, he suffered from general circulatory disease, made evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. His friend and biographer Sir John Hawkins reports Johnson’s final coherent words were Iam moriturus (“I who am about to die”), an echo of the gladiators’ salute to Caesar: “Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.” Dying is often sloppy and undignified.

 

Now think of Johnson’s other friend and biographer, James Boswell. A lifetime of drinking and whoring, including recurrent cases of gonorrhea more than a century and a half before penicillin, left Boswell a wreck. In December 1795, while staying at Auchinleck, his family estate in Scotland, he wrote a verse, “Pathetic Song,” that suggests his mood. It includes these lines: “’Tis o’er, ’tis o’er, the dream is o’er, / And life’s delusion is no more.” Boswell returned to London and, as reported by Peter Martin in his 1999 biography:

 

“[H]e threw himself with abandon into what life still had to offer him there. He drank heavily, seemingly without a thought for the morrow . . . He drank so much wine and brandy that it became common gossip.”

 

On April 14, at a meeting of the Club, Boswell was stricken with a fever, headache and upset stomach. His kidneys were failing. He suffered from uremia brought on by chronic urinary tract infections. The pain was constant and severe. He was unable to read or write. On May 18, when he asked to be taken out of bed, Boswell fainted. The doctors could do nothing. He died early the next morning on this date, May 19, in his London apartment on Great Portland Street. His friend, the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone wrote in a letter two days later:

 

“I shall miss him more and more every day. He was in the constant habit of calling upon me almost daily, and I used to grumble sometimes at his turbulence; but now miss and regret his noise and his hilarity and his perpetual good humour, which had no bounds. Poor fellow, he has somehow stolen away from us without any notice, and without my being at all prepared for it.”

 

Boswell lead a reckless, self-destructive life and lived long enough to write the greatest biography in the language.