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Writing The Brothers Boswell ~ A Guest Post by Philip Baruth
When I got offered a copy of The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth by Sarah at Soho Press, I knew that this would be a great book for the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club. I responded back that I would love a chance to read it and then make that our September selection. The Brothers Boswell was published this month and its author, Philip Baruth, graciously wrote a guest post for us. I hope that this makes you as excited as I am to read this novel!
Writing THE BROTHERS BOSWELL
I first read James Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763 when I was twenty-one. I was in college, plotting to be a writer and all the while telling my father I would go to law school. To my astonishment, Boswell was also 21 and a would-be writer, also pretending to be preparing for a career in the law. So I felt an immediate, electric kinship, across the centuries.
We didn’t mesh on everything, of course. Boswell trolled the brothels and associated with Dukes and Countesses, so I never reached as high or as low as he typically did. Still, I had the immediate and lasting impression that here was a character worth a novel, and two decades later I sat down to write it.
James Boswell
My thought was that I’d sketch the famous friendship between Johnson and Boswell from the inside, from Boswell’s point of view. In 1763, Johnson is the undisputed literary lion of England; Boswell is little more than a boy from a good Scottish family — not much in the way of a recommendation in London high society. Yet they become fast friends almost from the moment they meet. It seemed like a natural. Except that when I sat down to write, nothing came.
The problem, I think, was that I knew the Boswell-Johnson story far too well: I wrote about it for my Honors thesis as an undergraduate, and my Ph.D dissertation, and I’d published several articles on the topic for good measure. And of course Boswell’s London Journal describes that year in painstaking detail.
But I knew the key must lie in the London Journal itself, and so I sat down to read it for the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth time, determined to search the background for what I’d previously missed. And there, in a footnote to January 5 1763, it was: I’d forgotten that John Boswell, James’s younger brother, visited him in London for several weeks, following a brief bout of insanity at the end of 1762. I noticed something else as well — John appears almost not at all in Boswell’s journal entries, with the exception of a line like “Had tea with my brother John.” In most cases, that was the extent of the reference.
The more I thought about it the stranger that reticence seemed to me. Boswell wrote and thought a great deal about madness. It was a topic that consumed him, partially because a strain of melancholia ran through his own family, and his uncle had spent the last part of his life in a strait-waistcoat. Boswell asked everyone about madness, friends, strangers, even Johnson, in their first conversations. So here was a visitor fresh from the madhouse, and a brother no less — but almost complete silence from Boswell on the topic, silence from a man who happily recorded everything, from prostitutes to venereal disease.
Samuel Johnson
There was no avoiding the conclusion: Boswell wanted desperately to hide his brother’s madness, from London society, from the friends reading the manuscript pages of his journal, and mostly from himself. It was repression of a very high order.
From that point, the rest fell directly into place. John, in my novel, stumbles on the Journal and discovers how systematically he has been hidden away from the great and powerful by his brother, and that knowledge reactivates his madness. He is so jealous of James’s budding friendship with Johnson that he either begins or imagines his own deeper relationship with the author of the Dictionary. And when he cannot reconcile his brother’s London with his own, John acquires two golden pistols, and sets out to trap Boswell and Johnson, to force them to acknowledge the relationships they’ve kept secret from one another. A tangled web, admittedly, but one that made emotional sense.
And I could tell immediately that I’d hit on something, because suddenly the writing of the novel became great fun, something I looked forward to, rather than daily misery, which is always a good sign, of course.
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Thanks so much for stopping by, Philip!
If you would like to read more from Philip Baruth, why not check out his blog, Vermont Daily Briefing.
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My Grandmother’s Journal
It is with great pleasure that I announce The Literate Housewife Review’s very first guest post by Diana M. Raab, the author of Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal. I hope that you enjoy her reflections on her grandmother and how she encouraged the young writer in Diana:
At the age of ten years I found my grandmother dead in her room next to mine. On that sunny summer morning I knocked on her door to ask permission to swim in a friend’s pool. I called her name, but she lay in her bed beside the window, remaining perfectly still. On her stomach sat an opened Graham Greene book and a pair of eyeglasses. I touched her face and it was stone cold. With a child’s intuition, I sensed something was seriously wrong. I ran out of the room to phone my mother at work.
Within minutes, emergency vehicles lined our once quiet residential street. All I remember is two uniformed men carrying my grandmother down the creaky wooden stairs strapped to a stretcher. I prayed they wouldn’t drop her.
There wasn’t much talk about my grandmother until about twenty years later when my parents were getting reading to move from that childhood house in Queens, New York. While packing, they stumbled across her retrospective journal which she’d written after emigrating from Vienna in the early 1930s. Only after reading that document did I really understand the deep roots of her depression, which tormented her entire life, and eventually led to her demise at the age of sixty-one.
I tucked the journal away and pulled it out ten years later after being diagnosed with breast cancer. I wondered if she’d committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis which she’d kept to herself. I hoped her written words could provide an explanation for my own health problems, but they didn’t. However, the details of her tragic life once again drew me close to her. Her powerful words sharing her being orphaned during World War I, just pulled me in. She witnessed the Russians hack up little boys in the street and soldiers march through her town.
I realized how I’d never connected with another woman in the same way. She was an extension of me. Those ten years she’d care for me, planted the seed for my writing, because not only was she devoted to the written word by daily journaling and propensity for leaving notes on the kitchen table, but she had also taught me how to type. I remember the day as if it were yesterday.
Her black Remington typewriter was perched on the vanity in her room. Each morning, I knocked on her door for a morning kiss. She then took my hand and we’d walk down to the kitchen for breakfast. One morning when I was about six years old, instead of immediately heading downstairs, she invited me into her room.
“Have a seat,” she said,” pointing me to her vanity chair.
“I’m going to teach you how to type. This is a handy skill for a girl to have, plus you never know what kind of stories you’ll have to tell one day.”
She stood behind me with her image glowing in the mirror. She took my right hand and positioned it on the second row of keys from the bottom, carefully placing one finger on each letter, repeating the same gesture with my left hand.
“This is the position your fingers should be in. When you become a good typist, you won’t have to even look at the letters while you’re typing. Okay, dear, let’s see if we can type your name.”
With my left middle finger she had me press on the “D.” Then we moved to the right middle finger and moved up a row to type an “I.” Then my pinky pressed the “A” and then something really tricky had to happen, I had to move my right thumb down to the bottom row to type an “N.” Then my left pinky typed an “A.” After each letter I glanced up at the paper to see the impression of my efforts. After reaching the last “A” in my name, I proudly looked up at my grandmother’s face in the mirror.
“You see, you did it!” she said, squeezing my shoulders.
“Like anything in life, the more you practice, the better you’ll become. You must work hard to get results; you’ll learn that soon enough, my love.”
This seemingly innocent gesture on her part instilled my own lifelong commitment to the written word. As a young girl, I wrote stories, but as a young adult, I worked my way through college typing term papers for students.
Finding the journal was my impetus in writing write my memoir released in September 2007, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal. The project which began as my graduate thesis made me me realize the strong connection I had with my grandmother. It also made me realize how depression is a precurrsor to suicide and the intrinsic value of writing and how important it is for one generation to pass on their stories to the next generation. As a result, I have become a journaling advocate to those in my community and beyond.
Book Blogger Con
Have you heard about the 1st Annual Book Blogger Convention that will be held in NYC during the BEA? You should check it out. I know it will be a fantastic experience. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend due to family obligations, but I'll be trolling blogs for up to the minute news.
WE Magazine’s A Woman Blogger to Watch
Literate Challenges
What's in a Name? 3
Random Reading Challenge
