'So Whimsical a Thought Came Into My Mind'

“He is their Boswell, but with more even than Boswell’s ingenuity in eliciting curious conversation; a Boswell always on the level which the great biographer reached only once, when he asked Doctor Johnson what he would do if he were left at the top of a deserted tower with a newly born infant. ‘Sir’, the Doctor replied, ‘I would feed it.’” 

The first “he” is Laurence Sterne, whose Dr. Johnson here is a collection of characters inhabiting Tristram Shandy, as described by the Scottish poet and Kafka translator Edwin Muir: “[Sterne] invented for himself a void which only his own figure would fill; so that without him we feel that Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Trim and the others would remain in eternal silence and immobility, and never think of all the things they say.” I found Muir’s essay in the March 1931 issue of The Bookman. He is alluding to Boswell’s entry for the pair’s October 26, 1769, meeting at the Mitre Tavern. We see Boswell baiting Johnson, feeding him cues to get him talking. Here’s the exchange Muir alludes to, a favorite of mine that gives insight into Boswell’s method for gathering material for the biography, and into Johnson’s bluff, compassionate nature:

 

“I know not how so whimsical a thought came into my mind but I asked, ‘If, Sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a newborn child with you, what would you do?’ Johnson: ‘Why, Sir, I should not much like my company.’ Boswell: ‘But would you make the trouble of rearing it?’ He seemed, as may well be supposed, unwilling to pursue the subject; but upon my persevering in my question, replied, ‘Why, yes, Sir, I would; but I must have all conveniences. If I had no garden, I would make a shed on the roof, and take it there for fresh air. I should feed it, and wash it much, and with warm water to please it, not with cold water to give it pain.’”

 

This scene reminds me of Louis Malle’s 1981 film My Dinner with Andre – one hour and fifty minutes of two guys talking in a restaurant. It shouldn’t work but it does. The comparison is inexact. The Wally Shawn character shares some qualities with Boswell but Andre Gregory, a charming, softheaded crackpot, is no Dr. Johnson. A better analogy for Shawn and Gregory are Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. Here’s Muir on the Boswell/Johnson exchange quoted above:

 

“And the reply, like the question, was pure Shandyism; for if the one starts almost endless themes for speculation, the other starts even more. Sterne's technique is to feed his characters with problems such as these, and busily note the result, appearing constantly at their heels as a benevolent secretarial familiar.”

 

Remember what Sterne writes at the start of Chapter XI in the second volume of Tristram Shandy:

 

“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”