From Boswell's Trunk

THE PORTABLE JOHNSON & BOSWELL (762 pp.)--Edited and with an Introduction by Louis Kronenberger--Viking ($2).

Readers who know the name of James Boswell only by hearsay are likely to consider him an intellectual lackey who simply recorded every scrap of conversation that fell from the nonstop mouth of Samuel Johnson. But he was much more; as Louis Kronenberger points out in his introduction to this handy Portable, Boswell was both a kind of genius and "a tissue of contrarieties." The man who rushed off to a brothel on hearing of his mother's death "was both cocksure and uncertain of himself; painfully self-searching yet comically self-deluded; a Tory in his beliefs and an anarchist in his behavior; unable to curb any of his physical cravings, yet capable of the stupendous discipline needed to complete the Life; romantic about love yet rakish about women; an inflexible snob and a born mixer; irrepressibly gay and morbidly gloomy. ... A character no novelist would have the audacity to invent."

Hidden Papers. When he died in 1795, Boswell left over a million words of manuscript in a huge iron chest at Auchinleck Castle, the family seat in Scotland. His respectable heirs decided that Boswell had embarrassed the family enough during his lifetime, and kept his papers hidden. Eventually the papers moved, with Boswell's great-great-grandson and heir, Lord Talbot de Malahide, to Malahide Castle in Ireland. Famed U.S. collector Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach cabled Lord Talbot an offer of $250,000 for the Malahide Papers. Said Lord Talbot: "Who is this person? Please ask him not to correspond with me. We have not been introduced."

Wealthy U.S. Bibliophile Ralph Heyward Isham made out better. He showed up at Malahide Castle in person, got on well with the family, in 1927 came away with the Malahide Papers for a rumored $300,000 to $500,000 (TIME, March 9, 1936). Three years later he got another batch that Lady Talbot discovered in an old croquet box. She had carefully inked out all of Boswell's uninhibited indiscretions, gave experts the 18-month job of restoring the deletions. Not until the mid-'30s were the Malahide Papers issued, in a $900 limited edition of 570 18-volume sets.

Now, in the Viking Portable, Kronenberger prints from the Malahide Papers Boswell's Dialogue with Rousseau, making it available for the first time in a trade edition. Boswell dropped in at the humble retreat of the great Frenchman several times, carefully set down every verbal exchange:

Boswell: "Morality appears to me an uncertain thing. For instance, I would like to have thirty women. Could I not satisfy that desire?"

Rousseau: "No!"

Boswell: "Why?"

Rousseau: "Ha! Ha! If Mademoiselle [his housekeeper] were not here, I would give you a most ample reason why."

Boswell: "But consider, if I am rich, I can take a number of girls; I get them with child; propagation is thus increased. I give them doweries, and I marry them off to good Peasants who are very happy to have them. Thus they become wives at the same age as would have been the case if they had remained virgins, and I, on my side, have had the benefit of enjoying a great variety of women."

Rousseau: "Ah! You will be landed in jealousies, betrayals, and treachery." The next day Rousseau asked: "Do you like Cats?"

Boswell: "No."

Rousseau: "I was sure of that. It is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free, and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do."

Boswell: "Nor a Chicken, either."

Rousseau: "A Chicken would obey your orders if you could make them intelligible to it. But a cat will understand you perfectly, and not obey them."

The two could find almost nothing they could agree on. At their second meeting, Rousseau said:

"You are irksome to me. It's my nature. I cannot help it."

Boswell: "Do not stand on ceremony with me."

Rousseau: "Go away." . . .

But they had five sessions together, and by the last one, had achieved a kind of wary mutual respect. Said Boswell in parting:

"I with my melancholy, I, who often look on myself as a despicable being, as a good for nothing creature who should escape from life,--I shall be upheld forever by the thought that I am linked to M. Rousseau. Goodbye. Bravo! I will live to the end of my days."

Rousseau: "That is undoubtedly a thing one must do. Good-bye."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.