Harvesting Conversational Fruit in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Before recounting a series of loosely connected conversations between Samuel Johnson and his company, James Boswell pledges to “present my readers with a series of what I gathered this evening from the Johnsonian garden,” (622). For Boswell, the magnitude and range of Johnson’s intellect were best displayed in his conversation. The “Johnsonian garden” was the metaphorical crop Boswell harvested each time he visited with Johnson. The species of conversation produced by Johnson and cultivated by Boswell distinguished itself from common talk as a form of art. After one evening, Johnson commented to Boswell that he had dined with “‘a very pretty company;’ and [Boswell] asked him if there was good conversation, he answered, ‘No, Sir; we had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed,” (867).

When conversation did occur, Johnson and his friends esteemed it as any other artistic production. During a discussion of Gray’s Odes, Johnson likens them to “forced plants raised in a hot-bed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all,” (769). Poetry and conversation share this metaphorical status as the fruit of the minds of men. A respondent claims that the Odes would be better if they had been “literally cucumbers,” but Johnson chides him for this exaggeration by retorting, “‘Yes, Sir…for a hog,” (769). The Odes may be literary cucumbers but to wish them “literally cucumbers” is to deny poetry’s privileged status as mental fruit. Conversation’s place on this higher plane of intellectual production – separate from agricultural productions that are fit for hogs and humans – presented Boswell with the problem of publication.

Unlike many other oral productions of art (such as ballads, plays, and oratory), conversation has no print or scriptural equivalent. It was neither based on a scriptural production nor commonly reproduced in print. When conversation was depicted in print, it was because it possessed unique value as in parliamentary records or it was fabricated for its usefulness as a literary device as in Thomas Tyer’s contemporary Political Conferences (1780) (or Socratic dialogues for that matter). As The Life of Johnson’s lasting fame confirms, Boswell’s project of preserving his friend’s conversation was unprecedented. His descriptions of transcribing conversation and apologies for less than perfect records shed light on what his method looked like. On one occasion, he explains:

I found, from experience, that to collect my friend’s conversation so as to exhibit it with any degree of its original flavour, it was necessary to write it down without delay. To record his sayings after some distance of time, was like preserving or pickling long-kept and faded fruits, or other vegetables, which, when in that state, have little or nothing of their taste when fresh. (622)

Yet what does “to write it down without delay,” mean? Did Boswell have a pen and paper recording conversation as it was happening? Given his penchant for women and drink, he probably did not record it later in the evening. So if Boswell were recording the previous night’s conversation in the morning, what was lost? What were his criteria for recording conversation?
Following a night of conversation, Boswell met with Johnson the next day to compare their memories of the discussion that occurred:

He put me in mind of some of it which had escaped my memory, and enabled me to record it more perfectly than I otherwise could have done. He was much pleased with my paying so great attention to his recommendation in 1763, the period when our acquaintance began, that I should keep a journal; and I could perceived he was secretly pleased to find so much to the fruit of his mind preserved; and as he had been used to imagine and say that he always laboured when he said a good thing – it delighted him, on a review, to find that his conversation teemed with point and imagery. (664)

At other times, Boswell relies on the accounts of friends to recreate a conversation. From the similarities between the conversation recounted across a variety of sources, certain requirements for transcription can be inferred.

But before speculating on those requirements, I might ask what did Boswell want his transcriptions not to be? By positioning his records against that of Mrs. Thrale, Johnson’s longtime friend, he indicates what qualities he wants to emphasize in his own. Of the conversation that Mrs. Thrale included in her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, Boswell remarks, “we find she noted, at one time or other, in a very lively manner, specimens of the conversation of Dr. Johnson, and of those who talked with him; but had she done it recently, they probably would have been less erroneous; and we should have been relieved from those disagreeable doubts of their authenticity, with which we must not peruse them,” (956). Boswell’s portrayal of Thrale as an unscrupulous transcriber began much earlier in Life of Johnson. He goes out of his way to record incidents that depict her bending the truth or mixing up the details of a story so that he can undermine her credibility. After she refers to a story about an old woman that is actually about an old man, Boswell pounces on the opportunity to correct her. He comments that “I presumed to take an opportunity, in presence of Johnson, of shewing this lively lady how ready she was, unintentionally, to deviate from exact authenticity of narration,” (646). The end of the work ties together all of the anecdotes of her carelessness with this reminder: “I have had occasion several times, in the course of this work, to point out the incorrectness of Mrs. Thrale, as to particulars which consisted with my own knowledge. But indeed she has, in flippant terms enough, expressed her disapprobation of that anxious desire of authenticity which prompts as person who is to record conversations, to write them down at the moment,” (952).

Boswell’s attention to the “veracity” of conversation addressed in his remarks on his transcriptions, the records of other he employs, and those he dismisses contribute to a consistent conception of preserved conversation. In addition to the specimens themselves, these remarks on conversation create an impression that the printed version has been deracinated from his original environment unadulterated, but the uniformity in format of his accounts suggests that something happens to conversation when it gets reproduced in The Life of Johnson. As Johnson is the subject of the work, he is also the center of conversation, often getting the last word and the better of his combatants. Conversation is streamlined with one subject per account colored by all the detail Boswell can muster. The noise of marginal discussions or interjections is muted. These are only initial thoughts on what happens to conversation in its transcription/translation to print, but Boswell’s preoccupation with the “Johnsonian garden” makes his Life a good starting point for considering conversation in print more generally. And from it, a couple fundamental questions emerge: What can conversation do in speaking that it cannot do in print? What does the form of conversation facilitate that other literary genres do not?