Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  He produced many highly regarded works, among them Rasselas and the poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” His Lives of the Poets remains an indispensable biographical commentary. His writings on Shakespeare’s plays are among the most perceptive observations we have on that canon. His numerous essays for The Idler and The Rambler are incisive and instructive. He wrote poems, prayers, sermons, and commentaries on a variety of topics. And there is, of course, his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. His pen and his tongue could both inspire and diminish. He enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as the brightest mind and sharpest tongue of his time. His conversation was elevated, pithy, and cranky and frightened lesser wits with its slashing barbs.

  His many curmudgeonly comments on Scotland readily attest to what his contemporaries had to put up with and why many Scots feared his coming. To wit: “Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.” And, “Sir, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.” And about his hostess at one stop on the Scottish tour: “The woman would sink a ninety gun ship, she is so dull, so heavy.” You get the idea. Brilliant. Clever. Amusing. And he could be a trial.

  Johnson was English-born, 1709, in Litchfield, and left his native country only twice—the first time when he joined Boswell in Scotland—before his death in 1784. He married once, in 1735, but his marriage may not have been a happy one, and his wife died rather early on, leaving Johnson’s sexual feelings undiminished, possibly adding layers of guilt to his existence, and certainly providing fodder for biographers two centuries later. Physically he was an imposing man, and not always for good reason. Boswell sketched him at an older age in the opening of his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and his description offers us a revealing, close-up view of Johnson. He was tall—about six feet—large, robust, “approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency,” in Boswell’s words. With a pockmarked face, he could be seen as almost repellent, and indeed some small children were frightened by him. He was affected by a palsy that set his head and arms often in motion and made him seem awkward and either terrifying or comical when he walked. He suffered from bad knees, bouts of gout, hearing loss, and a crushing depression. “Poised dangerously between control and madness, between doubt, fear and faith, tormented by the dread of loneliness and death and lacerated by physical as well as mental sickness, he often feared he would fall into madness,” writes one of his most recent biographers, the Anglo-American writer Peter Martin. Johnson was a mess, physically and sometimes emotionally.

  And he was full of contradictions. In spite of a deep and profound faith that colored his life, he worried that his place in heaven would be denied. Near death, he experienced acute guilt that he had not lived up to God’s expectations. In spite of tremendously successful literary endeavors throughout his life, he feared the sin of sloth, which he despised. And remember, at an age when most men were sedentary if not close to the grave, he willingly undertook a physically testing journey to Scotland, and he did so in high spirits, more cheerful and positive through the experience than anyone could have anticipated.

  Through all of his struggles and his ailments, mental and physical, Johnson survived to the age of seventy-six, and when he died he was more than a scholar and well-known writer: he was a celebrity, at least in the eighteenth-century sense. “I believe there is hardly a day which there is not something about me in the newspapers,” he told Boswell. The press reported on his every move, his visits and his visitors, and there was concern expressed over every turn of his health and, ultimately, over his passing.

  Today Johnson’s reputation is formidable, and he is not merely admired but also honored and even venerated. The tercentenary generated at least three lengthy, new biographies and dozens of shorter studies. There are exceptions, of course. The author Bill Bryson, in his otherwise cheerful book Notes from a Small Island (1996), labeled Dr. Johnson “a tedious old git.” But in spite of that, and some occasional scholarly quibbles mostly over style, Johnson’s legacy seems assured. There are Johnson societies all over the globe, and his cultural impact may be gauged by the impressive number of appearances his words make in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Academic studies flourish. New books and new admirers flourish, and a huge collected edition of his works, now more than seventeen volumes, is under way from the Yale University Press.

  James Boswell is a bit of a different story. His monumental book, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., published in 1791, is by just about any measure the finest biography ever written in the English language and one of the great books of our civilization. It was a “Bible” for Robert Louis Stevenson, who said “I mean to read him now until the day I die.” The Life, despite its limitations, gives us a warts-included portrait of Johnson as a great man and is packed with unforgettable scenes of the man and the age. It also shows us the depth and humanity of Dr. Johnson and his unquenchable, relentless zest for life. It is fun to read, too.

  So it should not be astonishing to realize that The Life has never gone out of print. It became a best-seller in London on the day of its publication, and it went through an astounding forty-one editions during the nineteenth century alone. New editions appeared constantly in the twentieth century, and a new one already has been published in the first decade of the twentyfirst. Boswell wrote many essays and short pieces along with two other books that brought him a measure of literary fame during his lifetime: An Account of Corsica (1768), largely unknown these days, and his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Of those two books, Boswell’s latest biographer, Peter Martin, writes, “They are like silvery minnows swimming around a majestic whale.” Smaller by comparison to The Life it is, but Boswell’s Journal is a majestic work on its own considerable merits. In Johnson, Boswell had “a character as good as was ever invented by a novelist,” and in writing about him Boswell’s artistry and imagination leapt. But the Hebridean book is a first-rate travel account, and Boswell was a first-rate traveler, physically tough and resilient, curious and eager and showing good humor even in some occasionally poisonous situations. His is a book that entertains and instructs.

  Boswell was a Lowland Scot, born in 1740 in Edinburgh, who spent much of his later life in his native country. He traveled over the Continent widely as a young man, from Amsterdam to Germany to Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, and France. He did that to establish his creative reputation, partly to avoid becoming a soldier and partly to elude the clutches of his stern, often overbearing Calvinistic father, a judge who wanted his son to follow him into the legal profession. If it had not been for Johnson, Boswell might have emerged as the best-known depressive of his day. He suffered from melancholia, a fairly common eighteenth-century malady that at times for him meant a debilitating depression that could stop him in his tracks. He regularly experienced profound, dispiritingly low periods followed by times when his spirits were high and exuberant. These contradictory periods, however, induced in him a restlessness that was a key part of his personality reflected in his frequent erratic behavior. He was well-educated, and did in fact become a lawyer, honest, sensitive to a fault, and possessing a strong and curious mind. His writing gifts were substantial and gave him abundant confidence.

  He was at once a good husband, a loving father, a violently uncontrollable man, an alcoholic, and a sex addict who, to put it pleasantly, took his delights (and subsequent sexually transmitted diseases) from a succession of prostitutes throughout his life. Remarkably he kept diaries and journals in which he courageously—or foolishly—recorded his behavior as well as his repeated vows of repentance and renewal. Alas, he too frequently seemed to fall off the wagon and right on top of one of the lower-class of women. His contemporaries were largely aware of these propensities—and so was his wife, increasingly through their relationship—but the eighteenth century didn’t frown on them in the same way that more moralistic societies before and since have done. His wife, however, did. The venereal diseases he contracted throughout his life, along
with the recurring melancholia, might seem to have diminished his geniality, yet by all accounts he remained publicly the most convivial and open of men. Vigor he possessed in abundance. A ribald love of life never deserted him. Few enjoyed a party as much as Boswell, almost to the end. And Johnson loved his younger friend.

  Boswell’s wife died in 1789, and he was a widower until his death in 1795 at the age of fifty-five. His papers disappeared from public view, most likely because one of his executors was quite conservative and found Boswell’s accounts too shocking to consider for publication or even for private eyes. Some papers may have been destroyed. Boswell’s personal reputation, after all, was dismal, and there was little call for the journals and other materials, whatever they might be. So while Boswell’s Life of Johnson endured and flourished, biographers cast Boswell as a “sot” and a “buffoon” who was struck by lightning and given a moment of genius to write his book before sinking back into a bog of misbehavior. Charitable scholars called him a “child” who never grew up.

  A scattering of Boswell’s papers appeared as early as the 1830s, but it was really in the 1920s with the incredible story of the discoveries of his journals in Ireland that the rehabilitation of his image began in earnest. That great adventure story has been well told by the great Boswell scholar Dr. Frederick A. Pottle and others. The results of the finds—they continue to this day—have enabled scholars to see Boswell in a different light and his work as anything but undisciplined. Boswell was, we now know, a careful student, an industrious researcher, and a thoughtful writer and editor (who had help and encouragement from a friend and Shakespearean scholar, Edmond Malone). His personal life—for all its manifold shortcomings—exposed a complex humanity that marked him, to my mind, as the most fascinating figure of the eighteenth century, more so even than his celebrated biographical subject.

  Hundreds of books by and about Boswell, reassessing his life and work, have appeared over the last sixty years, including multivolume sets of his journals, letters, and other materials. Many have been published by Yale University Press in an ongoing series that is now nearly fifty years in the making. His Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides has undergone a bit of a tangled publishing history that readers may find interesting. The first edition in 1785 was heavily edited to obscure potentially upsetting passages, and those editions that followed in Boswell’s lifetime had also been cut and words and phrases had been censored. Modern versions, however—those published under Pottle’s editorship in 1936 and later and the most recent one edited by Ronald Black, for instance—give us what Boswell actually wrote in 1773 while he was on the tour with Johnson. Those modern versions are much more intimate and detailed, and they give us much clearer views of Boswell’s heart and mind as well as of Johnson’s language.

  So how did Johnson and Boswell happen to get together in Scotland? Boswell was the promoter and planner, to be sure, but it was a trip that seemed inevitable almost from their first meeting in 1763 in London. Boswell had long been an admirer of Johnson’s literary efforts, especially his essays and the Dictionary of the English Language. Typical of Boswell, he had been seeking ways of effectively ingratiating himself into Johnson’s circle of friends. This he accomplished; Boswell truly was good at these sorts of things. Some thought him a sycophant, though hardly anyone who knew him could resist his boyish charm and energy. The proximity to Johnson, of course, provided the underpinning for what eventually would become The Life of Johnson. It turns out that Johnson found the younger man quite engaging if occasionally a trial. And though he disapproved of Boswell’s misbehaviors, he accepted them, which is our strongest evidence of Johnson’s qualities of grace and tolerance.

  From the beginning both men evinced a fascination with the most isolated regions of Scotland. Johnson began his Journey with this statement: “I had desired to visit the Hebrides, or Western Islands of Scotland, so long, that I scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited; and was in the Autumn of the year 1773 induced to undertake the journey, by finding in Mr. Boswell a companion, whose acuteness would help my inquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel, in countries less hospitable than we have passed.”

  In the opening pages of his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Boswell recalled that Johnson as a younger man had read and been intrigued by Scottish explorer Martin Martin’s 1703 book, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland. Boswell wrote, “Dr. Johnson had for many years given me hopes that we should go together and visit the Hebrides. Martin’s Account of those islands had impressed us with a notion that we might there contemplate a system of life almost totally different from what we had been accustomed to see; and to find simplicity and wildness, and all the circumstances of remote time or place, so near to our native great island, was an object within the reach of reasonable curiosity.”

  Boswell and Johnson discussed the prospect of the trip on a number of occasions from 1763 to 1773. The Johnson scholar Pat Rogers suggests Johnson had some other motives, too, including making “an autumn journey which was meant to prepare Johnson for the winter of his days” and a curiosity both philosophical and physical about the country to his north. The journey is best considered as a “fugue,” Rogers declares, “an act of willful self-withdrawal” that permitted Johnson to have the time and focus to meditate on the largest issues of history and culture.

  But other things were at work no less. Johnson earlier had been open about his feelings against Scotland; one of his close friends referred to it as “hatred.” In that he would not have been alone; Scotland and England had warred less than thirty years before, and hard feelings remained alive on both sides, especially for the Scots, who lost. A devout Anglican, Johnson had little affection for Whigs and Presbyterianism, and so the anticipation of Johnson’s visit, stoked by Boswell, met with some hostile reactions in Scotland, some silly, some genuine. Some believed he would arrive in order to make fun of the Scots’ education and attire. One newspaper suggested that Johnson was coming in order to propagate the growth of potatoes in the Highlands, and others saw in his visit secret political motives. Such was Johnson’s reputation that his work, whether perceived as good or bad, preceded him and made his arrival one of the most commented upon in Scottish history, rivaled since only by the coming of Queen Victoria and of the Beatles.

  The genesis of my own journey occurred more than twenty years ago when I read an abridged edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson and became so enthralled that I promptly polished off the more satisfying and much longer unabridged version. That led one friend to comment that I seemed to have too much spare time, but it also opened the pathway to the Boswell and Johnson accounts of the trip to the Scotland, and that in turn led to a gradual absorption into the journals, diaries, and letters of the two men and into books written about them. They have since become something of an obsession—though I hasten to point out I have no pets named Bozzy or Dr. Johnson—because they seem forever fresh, forever inviting—and because I find myself laughing and moved to tears countless times throughout their works.

  I’ve lived with both long enough to count them among my most valued friends and to be envious and admiring at accounts of their time together and apart. Because their work must be read to be appreciated, I have liberally stocked this book with their words, mostly from their accounts of the trip to the Highlands and Islands, but also from time to time with additions taken from letters, diaries, and other sources that I hope will further illuminate a point in the journey. Still, there can be no substitute for reading Boswell and Johnson directly, and if this book might persuade some to do so, then I will have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. In a perfect world, this book would contain all of their entries along with my own comments and observations, making clear why these two eighteenth-century explorers still live so passionately in our minds and hearts. Practically speaking, that is a luxury neither I nor my publisher could afford.

  Like Boswell, I had pl
anned the trip to Scotland in my head for many years; I memorized enough maps to make the journey without the need for a GPS, which is a good thing since I wound up forgetting to bring mine. In any event it turned out not to be necessary; there was usually only one road in the Highlands and Islands, or there was a ferry. Either way, it was hard to make a wrong turn. I did a little walking on my trip but never got near a horse; there is such a thing as getting too close to your sources, I believe, and the prospect of climbing on a horse to trail Johnson and Boswell in the pursuit of authenticity was about as appealing as falling off one, which I have done enough of already.

  After a frenzy of planning and arrangements, the stars seemed in place for a trip in 2007, 234 years after B & J. I would go in late winter and early spring for a total of seventy-two days. (Boswell and Johnson were together for 101 days, but their travel was much slower than mine.) The time of year would mean I would likely encounter some challenging weather as they did; they went in the late summer and fall, and they found the rain and wind as unpredictable as I would. But it also meant I would miss the bus-herds of tourists and legions of midges (more on them soon). It was a good plan, and for the most part it worked out satisfactorily. I got a rental car, though no one seemed to believe I wanted it for more than a week or two much less that I planned to drive it into the Highlands—and beyond. I had no friends to call on, as Boswell did in so many places along the way, nor did I have any limitations on what I could do, beyond the obvious climatological sanctions. Much more on them later.