ABSTRACT
In this passage from an article ‘On diaries’, published in March 1783 in The London Magazine under the pseudonym The Hypochondriack, John Boswell analyzes the difficulties one encounters in keeping a ‘journal of life’. The most troublesome problem with translating life into language seems to be that of scope: how can one hope to confine the ‘multiplicity of instructive and entertaining scenes’ encountered daily into words and sentences? Boswell’s answer is that one needs ‘a peculiar talent for abridging’, for condensing life, boiling it down to the essentials, as it were. In a striking culinary metaphor he calls this extract ‘portable soup’, a thick, rich broth of life which can later be dissolved to provide a nourishing discursive meal. Of course Boswell himself had perfected that method, particularly for those innumerable occasions when he recorded the essentials of Dr Johnson’s ‘instructive and entertaining’ dinner conversation in his diary. The process of dissolving these notes into the huge volume of Life of Johnson (1791) began when his famous friend died in 1784. In the terms of Boswell’s article, this enterprise was both a success and a failure. With its mass of personal detail and dialogue, reproduced verbatim years after the event, the Life revolutionized biography writing. Yet it took him far too long – seven years in all, during which a flood of rival biographies managed to cash in on Johnson’s fame – to serve as a convincing example of instant soup. In hindsight, Boswell’s advice that ‘a man should not live more than he can record’ reads almost as a hidden complaint about
Johnson’s extraordinary vitality and volubility. Boswell could indeed have done with an ‘invention for getting an immediate and exact transcript of the mind.’
