海角大神

Sometime-law student and budding rake James Boswell was only 22 when, while visiting the bookshop of his friend Tom Davies in Covent Garden, he first met 53-year-old lexicographer and semi-legendary literary figure Samuel Johnson and commenced a friendship that would make both himself and Johnson immortal. And immortally connected 鈥� we scarcely ever think of the two men apart.

It adds an extra dash of intrigue to Robert Zaretsky's new book Boswell's Enlightenment, then, that Johnson is so seldom in it. Instead, concentrating on the Grand Tour Boswell undertook in 1763-65, our author has chosen 鈥渢o trace one particular aspect of the Scot's life: his struggle with the great questions dealing with the sense and ends of life, brought into being by the Enlightenment.鈥� Following his young hero to the top of Arthur's Seat overlooking Edinburgh, Zaretsky comments that 鈥淛ames Boswell and Enlightenment are as complex as the coils and wynds and streets forming the old town of Edinburgh below.鈥澛�

It's a pairing that seems as incongruous on the surface as the pairing of Boswell and Johnson themselves. Zaretsky rightly characterizes the Enlightenment as a high-minded movement devoted to reason, dedicated to 鈥渓iberating humankind from the shackles of tradition and superstition.鈥� It's an epic movement, fit for intellectual giants like Voltaire, Roussseu, Hume 鈥� and Johnson himself. Such momentous burdens at first look decidedly odd sitting on the shoulders of Boswell, a young man who often ruefully described himself as a 鈥渉eedless, dissipated, rattling fellow.鈥�

Even in Zaretsky's sympathetic telling, young James Boswell seems at least as dedicated to wine and women as to wit and wisdom. Rather optimistically, Zaretsky tells us that 鈥渢his remarkable Scot toured not just the Continent, but also the ideas and ideals, hopes and fears of his era.鈥� It's hard to know which of them 鈥� Boswell or our author 鈥� is fooling himself more.

In reality, Boswell's Tour was a thoroughly and typically ramshackle affair that even Zaretsky's spryly readable account can't entirely salvage from coffee house lounging, wine bar sousing, near-constant chambermaid-deflowering, and, as Zaretsky puts it, 鈥渘ineteen or so bouts of gonorrhea.鈥� (鈥淭his disease,鈥� he informs with studied neutrality, 鈥渁long with his excessive drinking, would eventually take its toll on even Boswell's robust constitution, as well as on his pleasant, if unexceptional features鈥�)

When Boswell wasn't cripplingly hung over, or penitently undergoing mercury treatments for 鈥淪ignor Gonorrhea,鈥� or hunched over his writing table penning apologetic letters to his austere and disapproving father Lord Auchincleck, he was tracking down the famous people of his era with a single-mindedness that makes today's paparazzi look downright lazy. He sought out Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire; he schemed to meet Frederick the Great; he tracked down the romantic freedom fighter Pasquale Paoli in Corsica; he found rabble-rouser and political contrarian John Wilkes in Naples (about which location we're told: 鈥淲hen not enervated by the heat or wine, male tourists in particular were frequently floored by venereal disease鈥� 鈥� you're almost tempted to see if Zaretsky has an MD, or a nervous mother).

It's true that in all of these cases Boswell was looking for those 鈥渉opes and fears of his era鈥� as Zaretsky puts it, but he was also 鈥� and much more pressingly 鈥� looking for good material; he was and would remain an unceasing chronicler-to-the-stars. In later years he would go to great trouble in order to bag an interview with a dying David Hume specifically to try goading the old atheist into a scandalous sick-bed conversion (Hume had earlier summed Boswell up as 鈥渧ery good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad鈥�), and his behavior during these Grand Tour years was of the same cloth. Casting him as any kind of avatar of the Enlightenment is, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch.

It's much to Zaretsky's credit that he makes it such an entertaining stretch, and he manages this is the surest way possible: by putting Boswell forward as, among other things, a harbinger of our own day, a living symbol of a transition from the high-minded ideals of a more pure intellectual world to the self-centered obsessions of day-to-day reality. 鈥淗umankind's descent from that distant fire to Facebook was a question of millennia, not maybes,鈥� Zaretsky winningly writes. 鈥淭he moment we caught sight of ourselves in the reflection of the other's gaze, we could never again go back.鈥�

If that's true, then we're all living in Boswell's Enlightenment 鈥� and like him, we should make the most of it.