Re: Corneille, I‘ll check out whether the Orieux biography says where Orieux has his numbers from. It‘s interesting that they are so completely different for each participant, not just one.
Size: as tall as my mother then. Noted.
Busy 65 years olds: MT: Ahem. Louis XIV: Excuse me. From the time after Cardinal Mazarin died to the weeks before my own death, I was a hard working monarch. Even my time for mistresses was tightly scheduled, though you wouldn’t know it from the movies. It‘s not my fault that none of my successors were as disciplined. Cardinal Richelieu: I did not just govern, I also wrote articles and none too successful plays in between being PM and trying to outscheme everyone who wanted me dead. Catherine: I did all that at 65 and had a vivid sex life, too, Monsieur le Cardinal. Goethe: Since I was to German literature what Voltaire was to France‘s, and not a royal but born a middle class boy, perhaps I am the most appropriate comparison. In addition to busily writing poetry, essays and a novel at 65, I managed the Weimar theatre, was involved in the Neptunism vs Vulcanism natural history feud and kept corresponding with half of Europe. I was no longer a minister in my Duchy‘s government, but I still was a consulting advisor to Carl August, and thus also had to show up court new and then.
first, if you want to catch your Boswell, you must catch him young, and for Voltaire it is now too late...
LOL. Well, Boswell was young when first meeting Johnson (22 years), but Johnson was over 50. It‘s not a coincidence that the LIfe manages to devote a fifth of its volume to Johnson‘s first 56 years and then devotes the rest to Johnson‘s remaining life, i.e. the time when Boswell knew him. What‘s more, some statistic fans have worked out that between Boswell living most of the time in Edinburgh during these years, and being on the Grand Tour right after his initial time in London where he had met and befriended Johnson, they spend only about 200 plus days in each other‘s company all in all. (Though of course they corresponded in between.) (Also, just how much Johnson had taken to Boswell can be seen from the fact that Boswell talked the Scotland-disliking Johnson into a journey a deux to the Hebrides - where Boswell basically had Johnson all to himself, wilthout any of the other friends and followers as competition - and this years into their acquaintance.)
The artistry in Boswell‘s Life Isn‘t that‘s a well balanced biography in the modern sense, which it‘s not, but that Boswell fulfilled his intention of delivering a „Flemish“, „Rembrandt“ type of portrait of Johnson, full of vivid personal details, giving a very vivid sense of what he was like in a way biographies until then hadn‘t and which both made it a bestseller and shocked some of their contemporaries. (I.e. Boswell‘s Johnson is a moral hero and has bad hygienic habits, and we get page to to standard (for the day) admirable, biopgrahy-worthy episodes like him squaring off against Lord Chesterfield, sure, but we also get the everyday life story of him buying the oysters for his cat Hodge himself as not to turn the servants against Hodge. And Boswell is willing to present himself as the punchline to Johnson‘s joke in order to given an impression of Johnson’s conversation in a way few writers then or now would be willing to, from their first meeting („Dr. Johnson, indeed I am from Scotland, but I cannot help it“/ „That, Sir, is what I find a great many of your countrymen cannot help“) onwards.
That‘s also where Boswell‘s Macauly-solidified 19th century reputation as a kind of idiot savant of biographers comes from, the idea being he was so stupid he didn‘t know what he was writing, how silly it made him look, with the „Life of Johnson“ a happy accident. Come the 20th century and the unearthing of Boswell‘s papers, containing not just the diaries but also the various drafts and revisions of the „Life of Johnson“ and all the notes Boswell took while researching for the Life (he used his diaries as material for all they were worth in that case, sure, but he also interviewed and corresponded with whoever he could get a hold of re: Johnson for years and years, collecting material), this was no longer viable, because these papers show how carefully composed the „Life“ actually is, that far from just including every bit he could find, Boswell made selections, kept rewriting and redrafting the book for years till it had its final form despite the fact he was under huge commerical pressure, with all these other Samuel Johnson bios coming out and seemingly draining the market, and, of course, the diaries show that he was quite aware how he came across (he keeps writing memos to himself to be more dignified, more like his father or Johnson; it never works, but unaware, he was not).
And of course, that‘s the other thing you can‘t replicate about the Life, and which is why when Arthur Conan Doyle lets Holmes refer to Watson as „my Boswell“, he doesn‘t just mean the biographer/noting down of conversation and excentricities function. Just as the few Holmes stories which aren‘t narrated by Watson don‘t work so well, expecially the one narrated by Holmes himself, the Life of Johnson lives from the Johnson-and-Boswell dynamic, and Boswell himself being as much a character as Watson is to the ACD stories. There isn‘t another biographer I can think of who is at the same time such an important part of the narrative he tells. Not least because biographers are usually encouraged to do the opposite, like journalists, if they are contemporaries to their subjects - to take themselves out of the narrative, to leave their own personality and opinions out of it.
Near contemporary case of comparison: Eckermann‘s „Conversations with Goethe“. This is Goethe in his old age, and Eckermann respectfully notes down lots and lots of what the great man has to say about subjects great and small, like Boswell did with Johnson. But you get no idea of what Eckermann himself is like from this book. And of course there is no put down from Goethe of Eckermnann in it, nothing to make him look silly or wrong. Now several of Voltaire‘s servants did apparantly write memoirs - I‘ve seen quotes in Orieux, and also in the Émilie biogrpahies - but there is, presumably, a reason why these books are only known to experts now, whereas Boswell‘s biography never got out of print.
Re: Random things
Size: as tall as my mother then. Noted.
Busy 65 years olds: MT: Ahem.
Louis XIV: Excuse me. From the time after Cardinal Mazarin died to the weeks before my own death, I was a hard working monarch. Even my time for mistresses was tightly scheduled, though you wouldn’t know it from the movies. It‘s not my fault that none of my successors were as disciplined.
Cardinal Richelieu: I did not just govern, I also wrote articles and none too successful plays in between being PM and trying to outscheme everyone who wanted me dead.
Catherine: I did all that at 65 and had a vivid sex life, too, Monsieur le Cardinal.
Goethe: Since I was to German literature what Voltaire was to France‘s, and not a royal but born a middle class boy, perhaps I am the most appropriate comparison. In addition to busily writing poetry, essays and a novel at 65, I managed the Weimar theatre, was involved in the Neptunism vs Vulcanism natural history feud and kept corresponding with half of Europe. I was no longer a minister in my Duchy‘s government, but I still was a consulting advisor to Carl August, and thus also had to show up court new and then.
first, if you want to catch your Boswell, you must catch him young, and for Voltaire it is now too late...
LOL. Well, Boswell was young when first meeting Johnson (22 years), but Johnson was over 50. It‘s not a coincidence that the LIfe manages to devote a fifth of its volume to Johnson‘s first 56 years and then devotes the rest to Johnson‘s remaining life, i.e. the time when Boswell knew him. What‘s more, some statistic fans have worked out that between Boswell living most of the time in Edinburgh during these years, and being on the Grand Tour right after his initial time in London where he had met and befriended Johnson, they spend only about 200 plus days in each other‘s company all in all. (Though of course they corresponded in between.) (Also, just how much Johnson had taken to Boswell can be seen from the fact that Boswell talked the Scotland-disliking Johnson into a journey a deux to the Hebrides - where Boswell basically had Johnson all to himself, wilthout any of the other friends and followers as competition - and this years into their acquaintance.)
The artistry in Boswell‘s Life Isn‘t that‘s a well balanced biography in the modern sense, which it‘s not, but that Boswell fulfilled his intention of delivering a „Flemish“, „Rembrandt“ type of portrait of Johnson, full of vivid personal details, giving a very vivid sense of what he was like in a way biographies until then hadn‘t and which both made it a bestseller and shocked some of their contemporaries. (I.e. Boswell‘s Johnson is a moral hero and has bad hygienic habits, and we get page to to standard (for the day) admirable, biopgrahy-worthy episodes like him squaring off against Lord Chesterfield, sure, but we also get the everyday life story of him buying the oysters for his cat Hodge himself as not to turn the servants against Hodge. And Boswell is willing to present himself as the punchline to Johnson‘s joke in order to given an impression of Johnson’s conversation in a way few writers then or now would be willing to, from their first meeting („Dr. Johnson, indeed I am from Scotland, but I cannot help it“/ „That, Sir, is what I find a great many of your countrymen cannot help“) onwards.
That‘s also where Boswell‘s Macauly-solidified 19th century reputation as a kind of idiot savant of biographers comes from, the idea being he was so stupid he didn‘t know what he was writing, how silly it made him look, with the „Life of Johnson“ a happy accident. Come the 20th century and the unearthing of Boswell‘s papers, containing not just the diaries but also the various drafts and revisions of the „Life of Johnson“ and all the notes Boswell took while researching for the Life (he used his diaries as material for all they were worth in that case, sure, but he also interviewed and corresponded with whoever he could get a hold of re: Johnson for years and years, collecting material), this was no longer viable, because these papers show how carefully composed the „Life“ actually is, that far from just including every bit he could find, Boswell made selections, kept rewriting and redrafting the book for years till it had its final form despite the fact he was under huge commerical pressure, with all these other Samuel Johnson bios coming out and seemingly draining the market, and, of course, the diaries show that he was quite aware how he came across (he keeps writing memos to himself to be more dignified, more like his father or Johnson; it never works, but unaware, he was not).
And of course, that‘s the other thing you can‘t replicate about the Life, and which is why when Arthur Conan Doyle lets Holmes refer to Watson as „my Boswell“, he doesn‘t just mean the biographer/noting down of conversation and excentricities function. Just as the few Holmes stories which aren‘t narrated by Watson don‘t work so well, expecially the one narrated by Holmes himself, the Life of Johnson lives from the Johnson-and-Boswell dynamic, and Boswell himself being as much a character as Watson is to the ACD stories. There isn‘t another biographer I can think of who is at the same time such an important part of the narrative he tells. Not least because biographers are usually encouraged to do the opposite, like journalists, if they are contemporaries to their subjects - to take themselves out of the narrative, to leave their own personality and opinions out of it.
Near contemporary case of comparison: Eckermann‘s „Conversations with Goethe“. This is Goethe in his old age, and Eckermann respectfully notes down lots and lots of what the great man has to say about subjects great and small, like Boswell did with Johnson. But you get no idea of what Eckermann himself is like from this book. And of course there is no put down from Goethe of Eckermnann in it, nothing to make him look silly or wrong. Now several of Voltaire‘s servants did apparantly write memoirs - I‘ve seen quotes in Orieux, and also in the Émilie biogrpahies - but there is, presumably, a reason why these books are only known to experts now, whereas Boswell‘s biography never got out of print.