Books: Incongruous Crusoe

BOSWELL'S JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES WITH SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (520 pp.)—Edited by Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett—McGraw-Hill ($10).

Boswell's matchless life of Dr. Johnson made rather small potatoes of their engaging tour together through the Hebrides. But the tour was unforgettable in many ways—and this eighth volume of Yale University's edition of Boswell's papers lets the reader count the ways. It pictures Johnson—the most ungainly of oldsters, the most nearsighted of onlookers, the most sedentary of talkers, the most fanatical of Londoners—perched atop tiny horses, half-drowned in pitching vessels, sleeping in chilly barns and clambering over rocks in remote Scottish islands. And by the side of this most incongruous of Crusoes trudges the most inspired of Man Fridays.

Published in 1785, Boswell's Tour proved a sort of tryout for the Life that appeared six years later. But the published Tour varied considerably from the actual journal that Boswell kept, most of which turned up a generation ago in a croquet box at an Irish castle. First brought out in 1936. the journal is now reprinted with much supplementary mate rial drawn from documents that have since come to light. Densely annotated, the present volume is as formidable as Johnson, but much of it, freed of foot notes, is also as chatty as only Boswell could be.

Endless Gibes. The Tour has a double value to the very degree that Boswell had a double aim in writing it. His first concern was his hero, and only his second the Hebrides. The two objectives sometimes gloriously combine, but they can just as gloriously clash. Scotland was always for Johnson a pet target that he waggishly exploited as a pet aversion; it produced endless gibes on tour as well as at home.