Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson [Hardcover]

Adam Sisman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2001

A heroic, brilliantly detailed portrait of the biographer as artist.

James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself was regarded by his contemporaries as a man of no judgment and condemned by posterity as a lecher and a drunk. How could such a fool have written such a book?

Boswell's "presumptuous task" was his biography of Johnson. Adam Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and his great mentor, one of the most unlikely pairings in literature, and provides a fascinating and original account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write the Life following Johnson's death in 1784. At the time, Boswell was trying -- and failing -- to make his mark in the world: desperate for money; debilitated by drink; torn between his duties at home and the lure of London; tormented by rival biographers; often embarrassed, humiliated and depressed. Boswell's Presumptuous Task shows movingly how a man who failed in almost everything else produced a masterpiece.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Adam Sisman's task is almost as "presumptuous" as the one he anatomizes with such precision and grace in his text. He has attempted a biography of a biography--and not just any biography, but the most famous one in the English language. From its publication in 1791, James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson has been acclaimed (and reviled) as the first truly modern biography, a book that reveals its subject with unprecedented intimacy, faults and all. The 20th-century discoveries of quantities of manuscripts, including Boswell's extremely frank journals, sparked greater interest in the man once dismissed as a mere recorder of Johnson's pithy conversation, but now shown to be an ambitious writer in his own right. More to the point for Sisman, these documents made it possible to scrutinize in detail the writing of The Life of Samuel Johnson. "Why did he want so much to write about Johnson, and why did he persist in the face of so much adversity?" asks Sisman. "How did he set about his task? Did his ideas change as his writing progressed? How did he evaluate the varied and sometimes contradictory material he gathered?" These questions are still relevant to biographers today, and Sisman addresses them with sensitivity and acuity. He begins by cogently sketching the unlikely friendship begun in 1763 between a renowned 53-year-old London man of letters and a naive 22-year-old Scotsman, then moves on to examine in depth the seven years after Johnson's death during which Boswell battled depression, bouts of heavy drinking, and venereal disease to shape masses of material into a book "that stands next to other biographies as Shakespeare stands beside other playwrights: towering above them all." The result is a thoughtful and revealing analysis of the creative process by which biography, as much as fiction, is shaped. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Aged 45, health waning from alcoholism, beaten to the press by rivals quick to exploit the death of literary icon Samuel Johnson in 1784, James Boswell finally began his ambitious biography two years later, in June 1786. For 21 years Boswell had been the acolyte of the creator of the great Dictionary and author of the influential Lives of the Poets. Boswell reconstructed his subject's life largely from his own proximity and other people's memories and documents. But, as Sisman points out, only the first fifth of the biography covers the 53 years of Johnson's life before master and pupil met. From that point on, the biographer is a major character in his own book. Evidently, as Sisman shows in analyzing the relationship of the two very different men, Johnson realized that he spoke for posterity each time he talked to the adoring Boswell, and that every particularity of his slovenly dress and gross behavior would be recorded. Indeed, Johnson comes alive in those and other minute details. Sisman (A.J.P. Taylor: A Life) focuses on the seven years late in Boswell's career when he finally disciplined himself to write the early masterpiece of biography. Even so, much of the credit, according to Sisman, is due not to the bibulous, prostitute-chasing Boswell, who often abandoned his tubercular, dying wife as well as his book, but to Shakespeare scholar Edmund Malone, Boswell's devoted friend. Malone kept the faltering biographer on task and despite failing eyesight painstakingly revised the ever-lengthening manuscript. When Malone was unavailable, the project languished. "I go sluggishly and comfortless about my work," Boswell confesses. "As I pass your door I cast many a longing look." While the pathos of Boswell's life lingers, Sisman's study will appeal largely to Boswell and Johnson aficionados.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 Amer ed edition (August 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374115613
• ISBN-13: 978-0374115616
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #967,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bozzy and the Great Cham, November 13, 2001

By 

bibliomane01 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (Hardcover)

In this magnificent work Mr Sisman describes the making of that greatest of all biographies, Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson. To his contemporaries the task that Boswell had taken on was presumptuous indeed - to record the life of the greatest literary man of his age, while being dismissed himself as a frivolous and reprobate dilettante incapable of any serious activity. Well, the world knows that Bozzy succeeded in confounding his critics, but the tragic irony of his predicament was that he succeeded too well. While hailing the book as a masterpiece, the current and future literary establishment dismissed Boswell's own role as little more than that of a stenographer. Macaulay's damning essay on Boswell formed the opinion held by too many people for far too long. The true story of Boswell's genius became well known to scholars in the 20th century; with this book, Mr Sisman brings the story to a wider audience. It is a remarkable portait of Boswell's love for Johnson and the great struggles he endured to bring his hero to life in the pages of his biography. Battling drink, debauchery, depression and his own self-destructive nature, Boswell managed to pull off the one great sustained piece of effort of his life. In his book Johnson was brought to life once again, an image so convincing that it took over 150 years for people to discern the art behind the apparent ingenuousness of Boswell's technique. Sisman does a good job of showing how the Johnson of the Life was as much a product of Boswell's gift as the historical record (although I think readers would have benefited from a few examples of textual analysis to illustrate this). His final chapter on the gradual unearthing of the Boswell papers provides an exciting ending and his writing is clear and compelling. "Boswell's Presumptuous Task" is nothing short of a triumph.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable Insights Into How Modern Biography Was Born, August 8, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (Hardcover)

Before Boswell, biography was like a formal portrait, a flattering way to honor the subject. Today, biography is more likely to be critical than to be positive. All of this has happened in less than 220 years. How was the line originally breached? That's the key element of this rewarding "biography of a biographer doing a biography." In fact, this book's perspective on Boswell's task has itself has now broken new ground. Where will this new view take us 220 years hence?

This book will probably only be a three or four star effort for those who have not yet read (or cannot remember much about) James Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. If you think you are interested in this book's subject, go read or reread the biography first unless it is very clear in your mind. Otherwise, many of the juiciest bits of this book will not connect as well for you.

Before reading the Life of Dr. Johnson, I could not make any sense of why Boswell had written the book. Surely an attorney had something better to do than to follow another man around, taking verbatim notes of his conversations. After seeing the biography, I realized that the relationship was in many ways like that of the fictional Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories and novels. Boswell adored Johnson, as did most people. But it still wasn't clear what all his motivations were, aside from adoration. This book is very helpful in that regard. I had never invested the time in reading a biography of Boswell, so many of these details about the time after Johnson died were new to me.

The core of the book deals with the issue of great men having their downsides. I often am shocked by how often it seems that the greater the genius, the worse the person is in his or her private life. It is as though the genius withdraws them from all else, and gives them psychological license to break the rules of ordinary mortals. The Prometheus myth comes to mind as a parallel.

Dr. Samuel Johnson was no exception, although certainly not as weak in many ways as other "great men" have been. In biography terms, what was exceptional was that Boswell recorded and reported much of the flaws he encountered.

What this book reveals that was new to me (and possibly to you) is what Boswell did not include in the biography. Now, that part of this book was even more interesting that what I had read in the biography.

This point was even more striking to me because Boswell seemed to be a classic case of a man who lacked emotional intelligence. He was surprised when he offended people, and that some were stricken to the quick by what he had written. This occurred despite having had these experiences over and over again. But even Boswell had some scruples.

You will probably also be interested to learn about what the Boswell notes and journals have shown about Boswell's writing process. Boswell's notes were not actually stenographic records. They were fragments and general references to jog his memory about what had been said and what had happened. Boswell did not write in the journal every day, and so the journal is more like new writing than summarization. So we should give Boswell more credit for what we like about The Life of Dr. Johnson.

I enjoyed the comparisons to the other biographies and collections of letters that were published at about the same time. Boswell's accomplishment seems all the greater in that context.

Boswell himself is someone who goes down in my esteem from this book as a person, while up as a researcher and as a writer. In a sense, this "biography of a biographer writing a biography" has done to him what he did to Samuel Johnson. That seems apt.

I disagreed with the book's final point. The author says "never again will there be such a combination of subject, author, and opportunity" as coincided to create Boswell's biography of Sanuel Johnson. What do you think?

After you finish this wonderful and interesting book, I suggest that you think about great people you have met. Have you created notes about your contacts with them? Have you written up anything from those notes? Have you published any writing about them? If not, perhaps you should. What will you include . . . and omit?

Presume to share what is important for all humanity to know!

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched, but bland, February 18, 2002

By 

Mark Snegg (Boone, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (Hardcover)

On the positive side, this is a well-written and well-researched book. It's a good, clear account of the writing of Boswell's Life of Johnson. However, it has no new facts or insights, and it doesn't achieve the author's stated aims.

Most of it is merely a summary of Boswell's journals, particularly while he was writing the Life. It's a good summary, with some background information and some clarification of points that may be unfamiliar to the modern reader. However, Sisman usually just repeats Boswell's own descriptions of his thoughts, feelings, and actions, and presents them to the reader (chapter after chapter) with little or no comment.

In the introduction Sisman raises many interesting questions, such as the extent to which Boswell 'invented' Johnson, and the nature of biography and its limits. Unfortunately, he doesn't provide any answers, or even any real discussion.

There are some strange omissions. He rightly states that Boswell polished up and 'improved' Johnson's conversations, a fact which is obvious to anyone who has compared the relevant passages in the Life and in the Journals. But even though this issue is crucial to understanding the writing of the Life, he not only fails to discuss it, but even fails to show a single example of such polishing.

Sisman states in the introduction that "I have attempted to deconstruct the Life of Johnson". However, this 'deconstruction' seems to be limited to remarking that, in the Life, we see Johnson through Boswell's eyes, and that Boswell tended to emphasize things that mattered to him personally. These are truisms that hardly need stating, and he takes these points no further.

I can't help thinking that the introduction contains intentionally misleading hype, intended for lazy reviewers. It's like fancy icing added to a dry cake. People who only read the introduction and then rapidly skim and sample the rest of the book could easily get the impression that it's more profound than it really is. A thorough reading shows that the author makes no real attempt to address the issues that he says he does.

There is some liveliness and interest in Sisman's book, but it is just a little of the light of Boswell's journals filtering through. If you are looking for a summary of Boswell's later life and the contents of his journals at this period, this book may be useful, but overall I would say that although Boswell succeeded in his 'presumptuous task', Sisman didn't succeed in his.