'Incredulous as to Particular Facts'

“What a talent for the anomalous!” 

That’s Hugh Kenner describing James Boswell in an April 3, 1974, letter to Guy Davenport. While recovering from the flu, Kenner is reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson for the first time since he was sixteen. By “anomalous,” I take it Kenner means odd, freakish or singular. It’s worth remembering that Dr. Johnson himself was anomalous. Kenner writes:

 

“There is for instance the golden moment when Bozzy was conversing in sign language with a cluster of Esquimaux [i.e., Eskimos], of whom one a priest, on the busy streets of George III’s London, sedan chairs whizzing by in the background.”

 

Kenner is referring to a brief passage in the Life, dated May 1, 1773:

 

“[Johnson] did not give me full credit when I mentioned that I had carried on a short conversation by signs with some Esquimaux, who were then in London, particularly with one of them who was a priest. He thought I could not make them understand me. No man was more incredulous as to particular facts, which were at all extraordinary; and therefore no man was more scrupulously inquisitive, in order to discover the truth.”

 

That’s the sole mention of Esquimaux in the Life. Johnson seems to have suspected that Boswell’s story was what Mark Twain called a “stretcher.”

 

Some thirty years ago I wrote a newspaper story about a guy named Critter who ran a tattoo parlor in Troy, N.Y. Tattoos give me the creeps but as a writer I’ve always been attracted to sub-cultures, people who come together based on some common interest or belief, often out of the ordinary (as tattoos were at the time). Critter, a member of a motorcycle club, was bearded and wore a Lincolnesque top hat indoors. While I was in his shop, he was inking the final blank expanse of flesh on one of his customers, lending the occasion a ceremonial air. These were not my people but they were interesting and friendly.

 

When the newspaper published my story on a Sunday section front, complete with photos, a lot of readers and fellow reporters said they enjoyed it. Then the editor-in-chief took me aside and said, in effect, “That’s fine but don’t devote a lot of time to the raffish.” I’m certain he said “raffish.” I think he meant “anomalous.” It’s good to remember that Boswell was, among other things, a journalist. In a prefatory note to Alec Wilder and His Friends (1974), The New Yorker’s jazz writer, Whitney Balliett, says: “There is no New Journalism; Boswell invented modern literary reporting, and we have all been improvising on him ever since.”

 

[You can find Kenner’s letter to Davenport in the second volume of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]