Books: Portrait of a Genius

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JAMES BOSWELL: THE EARLIER YEARS (1740-1769) by Frederick A. Pottle. 606 pages. McGraw-Hill. $12.50.

Scotland's James Boswell (1740-95) has done most of his growing in the grave. Until he died, his Life of Samuel Johnson was more esteemed as a feat of stenography than as a work of literature. In the 19th century, the book was accurately revalued as the first great biography in English, but its author was dismissed by proper Victorians as a whoremongering buffoon. "Servile and impertinent," Lord Macaulay called him, "a bigot and a sot, a talebearer, a common butt in the taverns of London." But Boswell was to have the last word —in fact, several million of them.

In Ireland's Malahide Castle, at intervals between 1925 and 1941, Boswell's descendants discovered a vast mass of manuscript stacked in a hideous old ebony cabinet, in the moldy loft of a barn, in an ancient croquet box. It was the literary find of the century: thousands of Boswell's letters, notes for the Life and drafts of it in his own hand, above all the manuscript of his masterpiece—the voluminous journal he kept for 35 years. Published in seven installments between 1950 and 1963, the Journal (which sold 2,500,000 copies) dramatically transformed the lusty laird of Auchinleck from a minor to a major figure in 18th century letters and at the same time multiplied a thousandfold the known facts of his life.

A new biography was obviously in order, and the first half of one has now been supplied by the man best qualified to write it: Yale's Frederick A. Pottle, 68, who for 37 years has served as custodian and editor of the Boswell papers. With phrases and perceptions long seasoned in sensibility, he builds a warm, complex and radically altered portrait of his subject. The face shows the same old clutter of confusions: arrogance, snobbery, priggery, pushiness, stinginess, grossness, rampant infantilism. But behind the confusions, Pottle perceives the fundamental fear and hunger in the man and, more acutely than any earlier biographer, discerns his peculiar powers: the geysering energy, the shimmering charm, the surging sympathy and undefended heart that left him open to a range of experience the greatest novelists alone outreach. Yet for all his genius, Boswell as Pottle sees him is common man in microcosm, an all-too-human being rattling, prattling, wriggling, giggling, creeping, weeping along through a procrastinated adolescence like a great big lovable ninny who believes that all the world is his playpen and all possible experience his pabulum.