Of course there was shock and laughter from many at Boswell’s selfportrayal. Critics found the intrusions of Boswell’s views upsetting because, in spite of the explicit title, they saw the book as a biography of Johnson. Nonetheless Boswell’s coarseness and occasional behavioral antics generated not-always-good-hearted laughter—Malone had warned him about this and urged him to censor some of the passages—and hardly anyone noticed the travel aspects of the book. But if you accept the theory that as far as book sales go, any publicity is good publicity, Boswell definitely had a hit on his hands.
Eighteenth-century critics didn’t write the way modern reviewers do. There are no references to the book as a “page-turner” or “the best book I’ve read this year”; nor are there statements that tout the author as the equivalent of “the new John Grisham.” You have to peruse the reviews a little more carefully to extract the blurbs that modern publishers adore.
Here’s one fairly typical note of praise for Boswell that appeared October 6, 1785, in the Public Advertiser: “I find in it, as I expected, all the qualities it was recommended to us for.” (There’s a dazzler of an endorsement that would sell a bunch of books today.) Here’s another from October 25, in St. James’s Chronicle: “It determined me to buy the book, and having read it, I am perfectly satisfied that my money was well bestowed.” (A welcome guide for consumers, I suppose; your shillings won’t be wasted.) And finally there is this comparatively generous observation that was printed in Gentlemen’s Magazine in November 1785: “It would be not only uncandid but ungrateful to dwell on a few minute blemishes after the pleasure and profit we have received in the perusal of this work.” (May critics be as kind to me.)
The book’s success pleased Boswell, but the uproar over it in various places upset him. “I am now amidst narrow-minded prejudiced mortals,” he complained as he contemplated revisions for future editions. The revisions improved the book, writes biographer Peter Martin, but they also set off a round of negative commentaries on it. Boswell’s character was attacked, he was criticized for his vanity and impertinence, his history was belittled, and one reviewer even claimed that Johnson had told Boswell the book was not fit to be printed.
That was then. Now we may be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was all about. The anecdotes, even at their most revealing, seem decorous by current standards. The vivid prose pictures of moments on the tour are endearing, hardly shocking. The re-creation of a time long gone is magisterially accomplished, and the historical inaccuracies are wisely submerged into footnotes for the scholar’s attention. Six years after Boswell’s Journal appeared, an even greater book—his Life of Johnson—came to public light, again thanks to the immeasurably valuable and devoted assistance of Malone. It was warmly received and sold well. An author with a better sense of discretion and editorial insight—and what one writer has called “a less wayward and disconnected mind”—might have dodged some of the inevitable complaints by not passing along so many of Johnson’s occasionally unconsidered thoughts on his contemporaries. But Boswell had his unquenchable curiosity about human nature and his “sacred love of truth.” And at the bottom line he also had Johnson’s consent, recalled in the doctor’s words: “Sir, it is of so much more consequence that the truth should be told, than that individuals should not be made uneasy, that it is much better that the law does not restrain writing freely concerning the characters of the dead.”
Boswell’s last four years were spent as a “famous” man. Most friends, legal colleagues, and even strangers treated him with a newfound respect. Widowed, he enjoyed a sense of personal freedom that unfortunately included drinking, which would exact a toll on his health. He had literary acclaim, but as Martin tells it, he still most desired wealth, position, and social prestige. He moved restlessly from Auchinleck to Edinburgh to London, his public behavior occasionally appallingly embarrassing. His hypochondria worsened, and he quarreled with his daughters. A revised second edition of The Life appeared and was an immediate success.
His intellectual life now at a virtual end, Boswell took little pleasure at Auchinleck, where he became less and less involved. Even in London his spirits and both his mental and physical health declined. He was stricken with a fever at a meeting of the club in April 1795, and the pain from progressive kidney failure and uremia forced him to bed. He died there early on the morning of May 19. His death was mourned, and his stature—belatedly—has grown in death.
Afterword—Back to the Twenty-first Century
I hated to leave Boswell and Johnson and Scotland. If their journey to the Highlands and Islands represented the happiest days of their lives, I could with reasonableness claim the same. Immersed in the eighteenth century and alert to signs of its evidence, I could easily have fantasized my way around the country. And in some ways I suppose I did.
I had clocked 2,789 miles on my trip, enough to make the guy at the rental car check-in counter stare disbelievingly at me and ask if I “had driven the car to Iceland and back?” But the Scotland of the twenty-first century I saw and visited in March, April, and May bore little resemblance to that of the eighteenth century, in spite of some marvelously memorable scenes that popped into view along my journey. For all the tangibles—Inveraray Castle, the Abbey on Iona, and James’s Court—where the footprints of Boswell and Johnson could be detected, the fact that the calendar had advanced by hundreds of years was unmistakable. For all the historical and personal imaginings about my own journey—the long-empty battlefields, the Bravehearts, the castles—the reality proved a constant corrective to the myths I believed or thought about.
Scotland as Myth is easy to recognize. Braveheart, kilts, tartans, Scottie dogs, Balmoral, Highland games, haggis, shortbread. You can find tokens of that mythical Scotland in shops all over the country, and there’s really nothing wrong with that. Kitsch sells. Ask the folks who peddle lederhosen in Bavaria or Civil War bullets in Virginia. Facts and truth don’t often have much to do with each other. What stores sell to visitors doesn’t reflect the reality of Scotland today, a nation resurgent economically yet still struggling with unemployment, trying to find its place in the world, debating pros and cons of a long-considered goal of independence, with a strong national party advocating solidarity apart from England.
Among the most prominent supporters of Scottish independence has been the Academy Award-winning actor Sir Sean Connery, who said recently that he believes that his native country is “within touching distance” of making a final break with England. Connery was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000, but that hasn’t mellowed him, apparently, since he also referred to the Scots who endorsed the Treaty of 1707 with England as “a parcel of rogues who sold their freedom.” Connery has a tattoo on his forearm that reads “Scotland Forever,” but he doesn’t choose to live in the country. Instead he makes his home in the Bahamas, where the climate will never be confused with that of Scotland, although I know that it rains in the Bahamas, too.
I tried to resist the myths as much as possible. I did, however, buy into my share, literally and figuratively. That started with single malts, for which I offer no apology or explanation. But there were no bagpipes filling my return luggage nor was there a tartan kilt designed to reflect perfectly my own distinctive Highland heritage. Never mind that I don’t have any discernible Highland heritage; there’s surely a tartan pattern made just for my family, as there is for yours. Really. That’s one of the myths promulgated most often in Scotland which few want to talk about because it undergirds a very profitable segment of the tourist industry. The whole business of “authentic” tartans for variously named clans is certainly open to question; a few serious skeptics call it an outright hoax.
There’s an entertaining and controversial section in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 2008 book, The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, titled “The Sartorial Myth.” That acclaimed scholar took as his theme the history of “innocent ritualisation” in Scotland, “the process whereby the customs and costumes of the Scottish Highla
nders, previously despised as barbarians, and at one time formally extinguished were resumed, elaborated and extended.”
That process occurred over a period of about one hundred years that began with the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746. Literary sources tell us that before then the idea of a kilt as we know it came into existence in the early years of the eighteenth century and there was not even a modest differentiation of tartan by clans until the same time; the kilt was the garb of the peasantry. After Culloden the Highland costume was banned, the censure was accepted passively, and those who had worn kilts got used to trousers. But toward the end of the eighteenth century the middle and upper classes took to the fashion. They did so because of the growing romantic movement in Scotland which relished the drama of the Jacobite period and the adventure of Ossian’s poetry. From this grew the cult of supposedly ancient tribal dress, colorful and heroic. As Scotland eased into the early twentieth century, the revival of kilts and tartans mushroomed, aided and abetted by a pair of exceedingly clever entrepreneurs who fabricated a book connecting all the dots: kilts and tartans go back centuries, each clan has its own distinctive colors and patterns, and it was the stuff of royalty. Those entrepreneurs, according to Trevor-Roper, were the brothers John and Charles Allen, who deserve a special place in Scottish mythology. Little is known of their backgrounds; but in 1822 they suddenly appeared as poets of a glorious Scottish history with Scoticized names: John Hay Allan and Charles Stuart Allan. They acted the role of nobles and dressed in every imaginable Highland costume at least once. With evidence of a good education and the guile of skilled actors, they easily entered Scotland’s high society and spent nights in castles as the guests of assorted dukes and the like.
Their antiquarian studies climaxed in 1829 when they disclosed the existence of an ancient document given to their family by none other than Bonnie Prince Charlie. This amazing document proved that not only did the Highland clans have tartan costumes by which each family distinguished itself but all the Lowland clans had them as well. Everybody had a tartan! In 1842 the brothers published the document as the Vestiarium Scoticum, complete with color illustrations. Two years later—for what was the high-water mark of tartan preposterousness—their editor joined with them to publish an even more sumptuous book aimed at a broader audience called The Costume of the Clans, which still is relied upon as the “bible” of tartanism. It has served as the foundation of the tartan industry.
Maybe, in spite of Trevor-Roper, it’s a bit harsh to call the whole matter of tartans bunk, but it does seem reasonable to assume that there are some serious questions about the phenomenon and that it belongs, in some measure at least, to the realm of myth in a country that is rife with myths, from Nessie to Ossian to the image of the thrifty Scotsman. What works ultimately is what most people believe, so wear that tartan proudly.
I’m not trying to write off all the myths. I like most of them, frankly, and for every Braveheart Museum there’s a Callanish Standing Stone. On an ironic note it’s worth pointing out that while most of Scotland’s population resides in the narrow east-west corridor linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, the country gets the largest slice of its identity from the virtually empty Highlands, a part of the country that few Scots visit or know much about. I read in a magazine recently abut a man living on the northwest Scottish mainland who called the National Health Service because he needed to get to a hospital and was told the nearest was only thirty miles away on Lewis. Right—that’s thirty miles as the crow flies, entirely over the tempestuous waters of the Minch to the Outer Hebrides, a trip that would take hours in the best of conditions. Clearly someone at the National Health Service has little knowledge of Scottish geography; what might that suggest about others? While a lot of Scots talk about a need for independence from England, you can find islanders who talk about wanting independence from Scotland.
But how can you not appreciate a country that hosts a website bragging that it features “probably Scotland’s dullest webcam?” Yes, that’s the Neilston webcam, a camera focused on an extraordinarily quiet, unattractive street in the small burg of Neilston a few miles north of Glasgow. The camera’s feed is updated several times during the day, giving viewers an opportunity to see whether or not it has started raining. Readers who find this compelling can check for themselves by visiting this url: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neilstonwebcam/. I wouldn’t kid about this.
And how could you not savor a nation whose favorite word is numpty? No typo there; it is the favorite word of Scotland’s residents, according to a national poll taken in 2007. It’s apparently derived from numps, an obsolete word for a stupid person (although it can be shaped into an endearment, as in numpty-poo). As used these days it also suggests a dose of windbaggery, which explains, I suppose, why it seems to pop up most often when describing members of the Scottish Parliament or in discussions about Prince Charles.
What other country would take one of its most celebrated areas—the gorgeous and popular tourist destination Isle of Skye—and decide to change its name to something unrecognizable to most Scots and everyone else? In 2008 the Highland Council decided to do just that. Never mind that Skye has been acclaimed in words and music for centuries; the council members decided to do away with its Anglicized “slave” name and substitute its Gaelic nickname, Eilean a’ Cheo. That’s pronounced something like Eileen achoo, which, if uttered out loud, would certainly be followed with someone’s gesundheit. Ah, but it could have been worse: Eilean a’ Cheo is a nickname—the full name of Skye would be An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, and I have no clue how that night be pronounced. It means winged isle, a lovely Gaelic name to be sure, but it is one that might turn many cash-totin’ tourists back for home quickly.
Apparently others thought so, too. While everyone applauded the idea of preserving Gaelic names, many felt the idea was a radical and unnecessary. Maybe put up signs when people get there, but don’t deter them from making the trip by calling the place something they can’t even get out of their mouths. So the Highland Council in its collective wisdom rescinded the action and decided to keep calling the island Skye. For now at least.
That decision—or change of heart, perhaps—tells us something about Scotland both good and bad, a country trying to imagine its independence from England at the same time that it tries to cope with the prospect of staying in a dependent relationship with Westminster. It’s a nation with a remarkable, distinctive history that isn’t quite sure of what to do with itself these days. To lean on all that history—which is undeniably easy; it’s been done effectively for hundreds of years—has given us all those silly caricatures and trinkets. That image seems to defy thoughts of Scotland as a serious global partner in anything but bagpipes. Yet presenting Scotland as an economically progressive nation that eschews all those trappings—which few seem to want to disappear entirely—would leave the country culturally impoverished.
Most public polls I’ve seen indicate that the idea of independence for Scotland from England appeals to a minority of Scots, not a small one, but a minority nonetheless. It’s hardly a subject that has been sprung on anyone, however, as the nation’s history attests. These days, if you go to Google and search using the term Scottish independence you’ll come with up 431,000 entries. Use the term Independent Scotland and you’ll get 844,000 hits. This is not a barren field for discussion. One of the websites promoting independence carries photos at the top of the home page of Robert Burns, Robert the Bruce, and—hold your breath—an American-born Australian named Mel Gibson. I swear I’m not making this stuff up.
Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), says he sees independence for Scotland coming in the next decade. His party is obviously in the vanguard pushing for that goal. He wants Scotland to be part of an “arc of prosperity” by joining with other nations on the edge of Europe, such as Ireland, Norway, and Iceland. The party appears to have been making progress over the last decade, but its aggressiveness also seems to have
angered some and made enemies of others. It has, however, unquestionably touched nationalist roots that run deep. “The sooner we’re rid of the bloody bastards [the English], the better,” said my companion at the bar in Edinburgh a few weeks earlier. “If we can’t run ourselves better, then we should go to the devil, too.” The more he talked and the less I said, the angrier he got. “They’ve milked us dry for centuries, and we won’t have them sucking at our teat any more. Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em.” I wasn’t a participant in a conversation in which the other side was expressed, but I suspect those views are about as outspoken.
There is a lot of territory to be covered before independence arrives, surely. First there’s the issue of the North Sea oil. The SNP says 90 percent of that belongs to Scotland and will be the backbone of the new nation’s economy. England’s lawmakers may charitably be said to feel differently. And then there’s the matter of the U.K. national debt, so many billions of dollars; will an independent Scotland still share in that? What happens to English military bases that exist all over Scotland? And can the new Scottish Parliament prove capable of governing the country effectively? Can a small nation—the population is less than six million—with such extremes in culture and economy as exist between the Edinburgh-Glasgow axis and the Highlands and Islands ever be fiscally viable?
Three hundred years after the signing of the Act of Union in 1707, are most people still pissed off enough at England to want to break up? Or, as the Englishman Charles Jennings wondered in Faintheart, why does the Scots’ “morgue-like grip on their past” demand that they characterize their neighbors always and forever “as predatory, hypocritical, self-obsessed bastards.” Get over it, he argued: don’t Canada and the United States get along, as do Germany and Denmark, albeit with some occasional misunderstandings and irritation? Well, yes, I suppose, but everywhere I went I found that a strong feeling about England definitely exists. Maybe it’s not enough to demand independence, but there’s clearly a deep reservoir of hard feelings about the long relationship between Scotland and England and to minimize that tension is to diminish the whole of Scottish history. That history may have given rise to some fanciful notions and myths over the centuries, and the opportunistic may have used them for their own profit. But there is powerful history in this nation. It hasn’t been very pretty. It cannot be denied. And it will help to shape whatever is to happen.
Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster Page 27