Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

here we have these two extreme opinions: one, that Boswell was an idiot who had the good fortune to meet Johnson and write his biography—that’s Macaulay’s—and the other, the opposite, of Bernard Shaw, who says that Johnson was, among his other literary merits, a dramatic character created by Boswell.
    It would be unusual for the truth to be exactly in the middle between these two extremes.Lugones, in his prologue to
El imperio jesuítico
[The Jesuit Empire], says that people often claim that the truth can be found between two extreme statements, but that it would be very strange in any particular case for there to be, for instance, 50 percent in favor and 50 percent against. 8 The most natural would be for there to be 52 percent against and 48 percent in favor, or something like that. And this can be applied to any war and any argument. In other words, one side will always be a little more right and one a little more wrong.
    So, now we will return to the relationship between Boswell and Johnson. Johnson was a famous man, a dictator in the world of English letters (at the same time he was a man who suffered from loneliness, as do many famous men). Boswell was a young man, in his twenties. Johnson was from a humble background; his father was a bookseller in a small town in Staffordshire. And the other was a young aristocrat. In other words, it is well known that men of a certain age are rejuvenated by the company of the young. Johnson was, moreover, an extremely unkempt person: he paid no attention to what he wore; he had a gluttonous appetite. When he ate, the veins on his forehead swelled, he emitted all kinds of grunts, and he didn’t respond if somebody asked him a question; he pushed away—like so, with his hands—a woman who asked him something, and grunted at the same time, or he’d start praying right in the middle of a meeting. 9 But he knew that everything would be tolerated because he was an important figure. In spite of all this, Boswell became friends with him. Boswell did not contradict him; he listened to his opinions with reverence. It
is
true that at times Boswell annoyed him with questions that were difficult to answer. He asked him, for example—just to know what Dr. Johnson would answer—“What would you do if you were locked in a tower with a newborn baby?” Of course, Johnson answered, “I have no intention of answering such an inept question.” And Boswell jotted down this answer, went to his house, and wrote it up. But after two or three months of friendship, Boswell decided to go to Holland to continue his legal studies, and Johnson, who was very attached to London . . . Johnson said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” Johnson accompanied Boswell to the boat. I think it is many miles south of London. That is, he diligently tolerated the long and—at the time—difficult trip, and Boswell says he stood at the port watching the boat sail away, waving goodbye. They wouldn’t see each other for two or three years. Then, after his failure with Voltaire, his failure with Rousseau, his success withPaoli—which might not have been difficult because Paoli was not a very important person—Boswell decided to dedicate himself to being Johnson’s biographer.
    Johnson dedicated his final years—I think we have already talked about this—to conversation. But first he wrote and published some
Lives
, of the English poets. Among these is one that is easy to find and I recommend it to you: the “Life ofMilton.” It is written without any reverence for Milton. Milton was a republican; he had already participated in campaigns against the royalty. Johnson, on the other hand, was a fervent defender of the monarchy and a loyal subject of the English king. Now, in these
Lives
, there are some very interesting elements. Moreover, we can find details that were quite unusual for that time. For example, Johnson wrote the life of the famous poet AlexanderPope, who had real manuscripts, not like Valéry. 10 What I’ve been told about Valéry is that during his final years he was not a wealthy man, and he devoted his time to creating false manuscripts. That is, he wrote a poem, used any old adjective, then crossed it out and put in the real one. The adjective that he first wrote, he had invented in order to correct it. Or, he would sell manuscripts in which he changed a few words and then didn’t correct them so they would look like drafts. On the other hand, Johnson had,