`I have taken a liking to you," Dr Johnson said to the young James Boswell soon after they first met. Boswell was guileless, socially ambitious, and thrilled to become the friend of the great man. He was already keeping a journal; now, he wrote into it everything that Johnson said and did. Adam Sisman sketches in the background of the Scottish landed gentry to which Boswell belonged, stressing his unhappy relationship with his father. He shows us, too, Boswell the affectionate, hopelessly unfaithful husband. But it is Boswell the biographer, rather than Boswell the man, that fascinates Sisman, and his book implicitly illuminates the problems and pitfalls of all biographical writing. When Johnson died, Boswell was advised to rush into print at once with his record of 20 years' friendship. But he wanted to come last, in order to get the benefit of others' research and correct their errors. The official biography by Hawkins and several others duly appeared. The most painful for Boswell was a memoir and some correspondence with Johnson published by Mrs Thrale (now Mrs Piozzi). He had never realised how intimate Johnson had been with her, nor how they joked about him, nor how peripheral he apparently was. There was a lot he didn't know. He didn't understand Johnson's politics. He didn't know that the way Johnson spoke with him was not the way Johnson always spoke, and he was too naive to recognise Johnson's irony. He gave posterity his own Johnson, "Boswell's Johnson", an immortal work in which the characters of the author and subject are inextricably enmeshed.
He incorporated great chunks of his journals, and designed his biography as a series of "scenes", like a drama. He aimed to resuscitate his dead friend in print, and included details of Johnson's bizarre behaviour, his clothes, his disgusting table manners, and his scathing remarks about other people. This indiscretion was to elicit the criticism that biography was becoming merely a trivial exercise in satisfying vulgar curiosity - a judgment often made about biography in our own day. Boswell's view was that "everything relative to so great a man is worth recording". Sisman maybe overstresses the revolutionary nature of Boswell's method. Early biographies of Swift who, like Johnson, was a legend in his lifetime, also included verbatim conversations and accounts of unorthodox manners and behaviour. Boswell's "presumptuous task" took seven years of effort and agony. He was overwhelmed by the mass of material and suffered from bouts of depression, in which he could not work. He was drinking too much, as always. It is not widely realised how heavily Boswell relied on his close collaboration with the Irish scholar Edmund Malone. This involvement with the Life of Johnson isn't even mentioned in the article on Malone in Robert Hogan's Dictionary of Irish Literature.
Malone was calm, reliable and methodical. He worked alongside Boswell, acting as editor - modifying Boswell's verbosity and self-reference, suppressing outrageous indiscretions, imposing a style, even rewriting quotations from Johnson. Without Malone the book might never have got finished at all. Boswell was not happy, even after publication. His wife and his closest friends were dead. Sunk in gloom, disappointed by his failure to achieve worldly success, he embarrassed his teenage children by his uncontrolled public drunkenness. He died at the age of 54. It took another 50 years for the biography to be recognised for the achievement it was, and even longer for Boswell himself to be "united in greatness", as Sisman puts it, with his subject.
This book ends with a summary of the dramatic 20th-century growth of the "Boswell industry", beginning with the discovery of his journals and other papers at Malahide Castle. "Anyone with an interest in biography", writes Sisman, "soon finds that all roads lead him to Boswell's Life of John- son." Anyone interested in biography will equally be riveted by this elegantly written and altogether excellent book.
Victoria Glendinning is a biographer and novelist. Her most recent book is Jonathan Swift.