The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  He is still going on. “Put your questions, and then keep your word and allow us each to go about our business. You insist upon honesty. It is an insult that you should stress it so. We are men of honor. This is your own eldest brother, your own flesh, for God’s sake. He has shown you nothing but affection. A more open and plain-dealing man I have never met.”

  I cannot resist a smile at that. “Plain-dealing, you say. But then you should know, of course, having spent several full weeks in his company.”

  “Your sarcasm does not change my assessment of his character, I can assure you, sir.” There is open contempt in Johnson’s look now. He has all but curled his lip. “Quite the contrary, in fact. Quite the contrary. If your brother fails to reach your standards, that seems to me excellent reason to believe that he well exceeds my own.”

  The anger struggles in my chest, but I put it down. He is baiting me, nothing more. He and James must still believe that the lark is keeping watch outside the door somewhere, a useful misperception.

  “I find your parallel intriguing, Mr. Johnson. You would draw a clear distinction between us, with James cast as the plain-dealer. James, why not tell Mr. Johnson where you took your constitutional this morning, before walking over to the Temple? And where you stopped off after that? It seems a year ago, but your memories on this point are surely more vivid than my own.”

  James says nothing, head hung like a dog.

  “James had several meetings this morning before keeping his rendezvous with you, Mr. Johnson. He was a very busy plain-dealer indeed. There was the meeting in St. James’s Park, first, with several women of exemplary moral character who happened to be up and taking the air just before dawn. And then there was an even more touching scene with the mother of his natural son Charles. I assume James has mentioned Peggy Doig and the child he had named for the Stuart martyr. No? In any event, James wished to be certain that little Peggy was quite recovered from the hazards of childbirth, and so apparently he examined her quite thoroughly—”

  James can contain himself no longer. “You said you had forgiven me, Johnnie! Why must you—why must you torture me, and attempt to tear me down as—”

  “I have forgiven you, James. Truly, I have. But Mr. Johnson must know enough to be able to forgive you in his own turn. And so another question, James, and this one I will have answered, not avoided. What have you this moment in your right waistcoat pocket, brother?”

  James looks startled, even amidst the startling elements of the moment. He flicks his glance over at Johnson.

  But the question itself sits poorly with Johnson. He leans forward, scowling down the impossibly long troll’s nose, even waving a thick hand at me. “Put your questions, damn you! You have threatened our lives—you continue to threaten us, and you may wound us either through your malice or your incompetence—and we have said we will answer and have done with you, sir. But do not insult us with absurdities. Do not trifle with things in pockets, or else you may go to the Devil, pistols or no. I assume you have, even in your gross obvious madness, some grievance, something that we can address—”

  I bring the dags into the air, and he stops speaking. As always, the effect on their two postures is striking. They cannot look directly at the barrel, but must avert their eyes slightly. They have seen these guns fire once tonight, of course. They know they are loaded. They know the guns are altogether real.

  “I will decide what is absurd, Mr. Johnson. My purpose tonight is to expose each of us for what we truly are. James was good enough to begin that process at the Turk’s Head. I insist now that he continue it. What have you in your waistcoat, Jemmie?”

  “A memorandum,” James admits. He dips a finger into the pocket, touching the thing absently, but makes no move to draw it out.

  “Bring it out.”

  He does so, but with great reluctance. And now we have Johnson’s attention, his curiosity engaged, without a doubt. He watches the tiny folded square come into the light as if it were a living creature. He is a writer, after all, and here is writing for him to read. Johnson is struggling so visibly for mastery of the situation, and now it has moved suddenly and unexpectedly into his own realm of expertise. He cannot wish it otherwise.

  “Open it,” I say.

  “John, you know it is nothing, some scribbled notes for myself. Nothing more.”

  “I know nothing of the sort. I know that you spent upwards of an hour on this little note, in all likelihood. And I know it has a great deal more to say about you than you have to say for yourself. Open it.”

  The thing springs open in James’s hand, and it is clear immediately that it contains more than a few scribbles. It is long and detailed. I have seen James construct these memoranda for himself over the years, and it was a good bet that today, of all days, he would come armed with comprehensive self-direction.

  “Read it,” I tell him.

  “John,” James pleads.

  “It is a man’s private correspondence,” Johnson puts in, but weakly. Again, he would know what is on this page as well as I.

  “Mr. Johnson,” James says to him, “the note was meant only as a way of making the greatest use of the time you are good enough to spend with me.”

  “Read it, James. I will not tell you again to do so.”

  And in a faltering, deliberately mechanical voice, James reads.

  “Today is the day,” he begins, “to which you have long looked forward, your riverine excursion to Greenwich with Mr. Samuel Johnson. It will be the most glorious of all your year in London. You are to be congratulated for bringing it about. The weather promises fine, and you are to have his company for the entire day. You must make the most of these hours; let them mark you the way ink seeps into the page as the pen scratches along. Above all, mark his language exactly, that you may frame his remarks justly in your journal tomorrow evening. Steal a stray moment here or there, as you may, to jot down notes of particular remarks. Do not let him observe you doing so. It may inhibit his talk. He may think you rude.”

  Here James pauses, and his eyes seem to skip down the page.

  “Leave nothing out, Jemmie. I will read it myself when you are done.”

  James looks up at me, and again he is merely my older brother, and a part of me feels for him. He has spent a year, nearly enough, preparing the ground for this relationship, and now he is being made to display the dirty tools he used cultivate it.

  “Johnson is a man of learning, and moral precept, and conversation. He is a didactic being, with a need to instruct, and you attach yourself to him insofar as you agree to be instructed. Make this clear. He has promised to direct your education, and you may hold him to this directly. He can only be flattered at your persistence there.”

  Again, James breaks off. “That is—that is the tenor of it. Notes on how to conduct myself. Nothing of which to be proud, perhaps.” His glance goes again to Johnson. “But nothing of which to be ashamed.”

  Johnson, however, is staring at me. His attitude has grown almost visibly more contemptuous. His voice drips disdain. “Your brother has found a means to regulate his conduct, by means of notation. Am I to be shocked?”

  Johnson throws up his hands, then barks, “I applaud him for it, I tell you. Perhaps he has been less than moral in his conduct; he would not be the last young dog of whom it might be said. But your second example outweighs your first. Your brother has found a means to regulate his conduct. He cares to do so, to perfect himself. You sit here, however, guilty of kidnapping and threatening murder, and lying, everything that is base—and I tell you, sir, you had been better off with a note or two in your own pocket. It might have saved you a trip to the madhouse, for all we know.”

  I know James well enough to know that this is not all. His memoranda, for a day like today, always run deeper. “Come, there is more. Continue to the end, James.”

  James’s eyes are threatening to well up again, with embarrassment now as much as anything else. But the fight has gone out of him almost entirely,
and he continues to the end this time. He keeps his eyes on his own words.

  “Do not be afraid to flatter him. Flattery may be made a very fine thing. When you come to Greenwich, have a copy of his London in your pocket, and when you reach the line about ‘kissing the consecrated earth,’ actually do so. Mind no one passing by. Show him that you risk scorn on his behalf. He will be delighted, though he may protest. Study his happiness constantly. And show him how his words shaped your boyhood. Tell him the story of the secret language. Secure his correspondence, above all. Your commission has failed to make your fortune; but here is another way to rise. Here is another king whom you may serve.”

  When he has finished, James thrusts the note out to me, but I wave it away with the dag in my left hand. He doesn’t bother to restore its more intricate folds, but creases it once carelessly down the middle and slides it into his outer coat pocket, its secrets now spent. He does not look at either of us now.

  “Well done, Jemmie,” I tell him.

  “You may go straight to the Devil, John,” he snaps, but that is all.

  I turn to Johnson, and I smile again. For the smile seems to pierce the big man’s thick hide like nothing else. “Here is your plain-dealing young Scot, Mr. Johnson. He has planned to meet you for months, if not years. He has hounded his acquaintances for an introduction. He has written your lines, and his own.”

  “He would meet an author by whom he has been inspired,” Johnson counters petulantly. “If that is a crime, every man of any learning would wear chains.”

  “Then, when once he has got your ear, this plain-dealer, he walks about with little scripts in his pocket, scripts full of flattery and greasy little courtier’s tricks.”

  “If all courtiers were genuinely moved to kiss the earth at Greenwich, I tell you I should be better pleased with the state of the Court.”

  I cannot help but raise my own voice. “There was nothing genuine in the case. That is the very point. It was written out the night before, like an actor crying on cue. It was deeply planned. There is nothing heartfelt here. It is all rank ambition. He thinks you particularly susceptible to flattery, and he exhorts himself to lay it on even thicker than a young man like himself might ordinarily risk.”

  “He was taking vows, sir.” Johnson’s eyes are flashing, the cords of his neck now stretched taut. He looks as though he might spit across the four feet that separate us. “Vows of which you would know nothing. To be humble, before the Monarchy, before a mentor. To accept learning and instruction. To serve in humility, sir. You see weakness of character, but this is a man who would serve before he attempts to command.”

  “And you are to be his new king, this note tells us. That is grand indeed, for a boy come up from Lichfield.”

  At the mention of his boyhood village, Johnson leans forward, looking down the crooked nose. He drops his voice almost to a whisper, a taunt. “And what of it, sir? If we are not to have a Stuart on the throne, but merely choose a likely man among several? Your brother would serve a king of learning. Why should it be a crime for him to say so? Why should that merit taunting from the likes of you?”

  Even knowing what I know about Johnson, and James, the response feels like something just this side of blasphemy. But before I can answer, James suddenly comes to life. He sits up straighter in his chair, and I can see that our discussion has set off some train of thought in his mind, something that has nudged him out of his fatalism. It is almost as though he has a plan of some sort.

  He begins to speak, but his voice catches on tears or regret, and he must clear his throat first. “I mentioned in my note the story of the secret language John and I shared when we were boys,” James goes on. He is addressing Johnson, but with his eye on me. It is amusing to see, as he begins his storytelling, the way he also begins to put himself back together, one small fragment at a time: he straightens the set of his waistcoat, brushes a bit of dust thoughtlessly from his knee. Narration begins to set him right again. James continues. “When we were boys, our father bought a copy of your dictionary, Mr. Johnson. And for a while it was displayed prominently in his library, and he was wont to check it every so often, for usage. We were amazed, as boys, that it had cost ten shillings.”

  But in the midst of this opening, Johnson turns savagely on him, bullying him into silence. “You begin to rave as well as your brother, Boswell! This is no time for reminiscences. Remain silent, sir, and let him come out with it, and have it over.”

  James pulls back as if stung. But I clarify the situation again. “You are the one who would do well to remain silent, Mr. Johnson. I will decide when we have sufficiently canvassed the matters at hand.”

  “I have understood your threats, sir!”

  “And you, sir, have already confessed to part of what you were earlier concealing. That is a confession I would have my brother hear from your own lips.”

  Johnson glares, but the mention of his earlier confession silences him.

  “But first I should like to hear James finish his story. It would be a shame if his artful memorandum should have no effect on the reality our conversation. And I suggest you listen carefully, if you would learn why we three are sitting here, as we are. If you would know something about the Boswells.”

  I tip up the dag in my right hand. The fluctuations in the lamplight give the pistols a curious appearance. The play of light makes them seem almost molten, liquid gold, and occasionally the effect catches my eye.

  James would sooner slit his own throat than displease his hero, and he steals a glance over at Johnson. But then, with the air of one who believes his story will secure its own pardon, James steels himself to continue with it.

  “Our father would consult the dictionary every so often, as I’ve said. But then one afternoon, having been informed of something by a man at court, he came home and went straight to the library and searched the book for a single word.”

  Johnson waits, anger still suffusing his countenance. When he does not inquire, James moves the story forward himself. “That word was oats.”

  “My father was livid,” I cannot help but add.

  “I will never forget your definition,” James goes on, his voice sounding a bit stronger now. “It ran, A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland supports the people. And while I know you meant it as a jest, one in good nature, my father took it as an intentional insult. He knew that you had no love for Scotland; that was well known even in Edinburgh. He brooded on the supposed slight all through our dinner, and when we had finished, he walked into the library and tore the page from the book. No fire was burning, or he would certainly have burned it. Instead he crumpled it and threw it on the scrap heap.”

  Johnson sits blackly with this for a moment, then snorts, adding only, “And this man is a High Judge in your country. Taking his pique out on an inanimate object.”

  I have no idea why James has chosen to tell this story, but it is one I like well enough, and always have. At some level, James has steered the conversation here to involve me, to make me nostalgic for the days when we conspired together against my father.

  But even understanding the purpose behind his introducing it, I cannot help but add little bits to the story. “And there James found it, and stole away with it back to our room. Where we smoothed it out, and pressed it flat beneath a stack of books. And over the next several days, we studied that definition.”

  James takes over almost immediately, as he has done all our lives. “We studied the entire page, in fact. It was a page of writing our father had forbidden. The words on it were stricken from the language, in effect. But we were beginning, then, to see that our father did not control the world, not entirely. And so we made a copy of the page—”

  “I made a copy of the page,” I correct him, “for the simple reason that James would not share the sacred original.”

  James looks over at me, and then nods, or bows his head rather. “That is true. I would not share it. It was my own page of Jo
hnson’s dictionary, and it was my prized possession. But I allowed John to copy it. And we made a game of it. The idea was that twice each day, we had to use one of the forbidden words in a sentence while speaking to Father, and we had to do so when the other of us was present. Given that all of the words began with the letter O, it was no simple trick.”

  Outside the shack, perhaps as far away as the Savoy Stair, there is the sound of shouting, voices raising an alarm. We all sit frozen for a moment, suddenly painfully aware of the guns in my hand again, and then the noise dies away.

  After another instant, the silence of the timber-yard re-establishes itself. I wait an instant longer, by way of insurance, and then continue the story myself. “Of course, one can only use good Johnsonian vocabulary for so long before it becomes … noticeable, shall we say. A word like oberration will begin to stand out in conversation at the breakfast table. And so finally my father recognized the pattern, and had the truth out of James.”

  James has his eyes down on the dag in my left hand, seems in fact to have his gaze focused on the very mouth of the snubbed barrel, the blackness there, as though it were a magic lantern showing the Edinburgh flat and my father’s rage.

  “He found the page of the dictionary I had saved, and he made me confess that John had copied it out as well,” says James.

  “In other words, James implicated me to save himself. No hero, even then.”

  “This time the scrapheap was insufficient. He burned both copies, and stood watching until they were both ashes. And he did not spare the rod that day.” James looks up and into my eyes, and although I know he has his own skin in mind, I cannot help but feel the kinship there. “We were both soundly beaten for playing that game.”

  “My father,” I say, turning now directly to Johnson, “wished to impress upon us the way that the English shape the world to their own advantage, using any tool that may come to hand.”

  Maintaining an impotent rage seems finally to have become too much for Johnson. He has slumped back in his chair, and there is as much injury as anger in his air. His breathing, always labored, now seems to be occupying more of his attention, and there is an audible rattle when he inhales; his back too seems to be troubling him, and he works a shoulder to ease a muscle pinching there.