Johnson Minus Boswell

SAMUEL JOHNSON--Hugh Kingsmill-- Viking ($2.75). Most-famed biography in English literature is James Boswell's 143-year-old Life of Samuel Johnson. Greatly daring, Author Hugh Kingsmill has written his own version, and his audacity has been successful. Though not comparable to Boswell's book in size (249 pp. to 1,104 pp.) Samuel Johnson can well afford comparison in other ways. Boswell is often thought of as the man who knew Dr. Johnson best. But that is not so. Boswell was a first-hand reporter of only one period of Garrick's actresses excited his amorous propensities. Johnson's career--when he had already become the Great Charn of English letters. Though Boswell's Johnson is a very human figure he is a full-fledged prodigy. Kingsmill successfully attempts to humanize him further.

Inheriting melancholia from his father and scrofulously infected by his nurse's milk, Sam Johnson got off to a bad start. Though huge-framed and strong as a bull, he was myopic, twitchety, haunted by fears of madness and death. Net result, says Kingsmill, was to make him the apotheosis of honesty and common sense. "Johnson's fear of insanity immensely strengthened his innate truthfulness and sense of reality, for the lies and illusions which make life more comfortable for ordinary men appeared to him as the first steps towards madness." Extremely indolent by nature, Johnson was capable of Herculean labors, undertook them when he had to. One of his literary drudgeries was to report the debates in Parliament for a London magazine. Though he visited the House only once, often made up the speeches entire, readers liked them, called for more. When he discovered that his reports were fooling the public into taking them as genuine, Johnson quit.

Johnson married a widow older than himself, whom no one else found very attractive, was tenderly faithful to her as long as he lived (she died 32 years before him). But he liked to have young and pretty women around. He finally gave up going behind the scenes at his friend David Garrick's theatre. "I'll come no more behind your scenes, David, for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities." His letter to Lord Chesterfield, "thanking" him for his belated interest in Johnson's Dictionary, is a masterpiece of dignified resentment against patronage. Though he himself defined a pension as ''an allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country," Johnson gratefully accepted a Government pension. Kingsmill pours a little cold water on the glowing friendship between Johnson and the Thrales, suggests that Johnson sponged on them, that they exhibited him, that neither party was really happy.

Boswell's reverence for Johnson and his mischievous curiosity gave a bias, thinks Kingsmill, to his biography. "Though Boswell did not invent Johnson's irritability, he drew it out, and gave it a disproportionate place in the Life." And though Boswell reports Johnson's eccentricities, such as his midnight fit of laughter that "seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet ditch." he reports them as the aberrations of genius and not (as Kingsmill thinks they were) the pathetic attempts of a sick mind to change the sickening subject.

The Author, Hugh Kingsmill (Lunn), like his great and good friend William Gerhardi (Futility, Memoirs of a Polyglot, Jazz and Jasper), writes with uncloistered irony, quiet wit. Though clumsy in appearance and manner, he has a mania for precision, prides himself on the accuracy with which he can gauge the number of words he has written. Journalist of a high order, he is a frequent contributor to the English Review, has also written biographies (Matthew Arnold, Frank Harris), jobational anthologies (Invective and Abuse, More Invective). "All great men,'' says he, "work slowly." He rarely accomplishes more than 400 words in a three-hour session.

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