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The girl with whom I was last night had told me she lodged in Stevenlaw’s Close, and at my desire engaged to be at the head of it generally at eight in the evening, in case I should be coming past. I thought I could not be in more danger of disease by one more enjoyment the very next evening, so went tonight; but she was not there.
He finishes the day by observing: ‘I was shocked that the father of a family should go amongst strumpets; but there was rather an insensibility about me to virtue, I was so sensual. Perhaps I should not write all this’ - ‘all this’, from Monday through till Thursday, in fact being written on Friday 29 November. On Sunday 1 December, however, a crisis is reached. Boswell, listening to a sermon, is already sketching out his evening:
I must confess that I planned, even when sober, that I would in the evening try to find Peggy Grant, and, as I had risked with her, take a full enjoyment.... About eight I got into the street and made Cameron, the chairman, inquire for Peggy Grant.... He brought her out, and I took her to the New Town, and in a mason’s shed in St. Andrew’s Square lay with her twice.
At home, sober, by now, but ‘in a confused, feverish frame’, Boswell finds his wife suspicious: ‘My dear wife asked me if I had not been about mischief. I at once confessed it. She was very uneasy, and I was ashamed and vexed at my licentiousness. Yet’, adds Boswell, ending the day’s entry (written the following day, Monday 2 December), ‘my conscience was not alarmed; so much had I accustomed my mind to think such indulgence permitted.’[18]
Telling, for Boswell, was clearly an important dimension of living, as if the actual experience remained incomplete for him until it had also been recreated in writing, within the confessional of his journal. The prose is energetic, active, with an eye for the memorable detail - the ‘young slender slut with a red cloak’. It revives and re-enacts as it goes. And yet it does not simply recreate, for Boswell is also his own moral commentator, his own confessor: ‘I was vexed to think of it’; ‘This was desperate risking’; and especially ‘Perhaps I should not write all this.’ There is a mixing of time scales, with Boswell the writer, the man of words, the confessing voice, looking back on Boswell the actor, the misbehaver, the confessed for, so that the journal reality emerges as a superior, more roundedly truthful reality than a life simply lived with no account kept. Lived reality became, apparently, more real by virtue of giving itself over to language, of conceding its deeds, thoughts, layers, timescales to the written word, of making a perpetual confession of itself.
On this occasion, Boswell’s confession to his wife of his mischief - and again the event is illustrative - was not the end of the matter. The actual confession to Margaret is, of course, itself confessed within the journal, and therefore forms part of the more truthful reality of Boswell’s privately known self. One week later, on Sunday 8 December, Mrs Boswell ‘insisted to read this my journal,
and finding in it such explicit instances of licentiousness, she was much affected and told me that she had come to a resolution never again to consider herself as my wife; though for the sake of her children and mine, as a friend, she would preserve appearances. When I saw her in great uneasiness, and dreaded somewhat - though not with much apprehension - her resolution, I was awakened from my dream of licentiousness, and saw my bad conduct in a shocking light. I was really agitated, and in a degree of despair.... At night I calmly meditated to reform.[19]
In one sense, the two realities have abruptly been brought together, and the private, more truthful reality has been forced to acknowledge itself within the real lived world. It has been exposed for the sham thing it is, a confession with no comeback, no penances, no risk. Boswell is forced to see his conduct, his mental prevarications, his moral shiftiness, as cheap, self-serving and hurtful. He is genuinely moved, sufficiently moved to write up the whole week, from Tuesday till Sunday, on the very evening of the calamity.
In another sense, however, the journal is reinforced as the superior reality, and this happens in two ways. Firstly, Margaret Boswell’s reading actually turns Boswell’s journal into a yet more genuine confession - more genuinely a confession than Boswell intended when he wroe it - and a still more roundedly true confession. Not only does she find out the whole truth, but her reading is also an endorsement, a consummation of one of the deepest instincts behind Boswell’s writing, the ‘strange feeling’ to have ‘nothing to be secret that concerns myself’. She is a third party who brings an outside eye to the confessing voice, the confessed actor, and thereby reintegrates it into the reality of deeds, feelings, people, out from the world of language in which it has been privileged to exist.
But secondly, and inevitably, the journalist goes on. Language can never be outflanked by life. Boswell writes up five days in order to get to the sixth, Sunday 8 December, and to record the catastrophe, to confess his ‘despair’, after which he leaves off writing for another week. The brutal enforcement into the world of Mrs Boswell, the children, appearances, the making of the journal a genuine confessional, is itself in its turn confessed, reincorporated into the more roundedly truthful linguistic reality, even more roundedly truthful, in fact, since the endorsement by Margaret and the outside eye.
Not that Boswell existed easily between these realities. There is, indeed, in his writing a constant ambiguity, a series of tensions between the self that acted and the self that was conscious of having participated in action. The reflective self can reflect at times with satisfaction on the self that has acted, as upon his arrival in London in 1762:
Since I came up, I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character very different from a rattling uncultivated one which for some time past I have been fond of. I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.[20]
The reflective self can even reflect with satisfaction on its existence within the reflective medium, on its own facility with language:
How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill; and I turn my periods smoothly and imperceptibly like a skilful wheelwright turning tops in a turning-loom.[21]
But more often the reflective self is forced to respond with distress, shame, censure at what it is obliged to record. So, in Scotland in March 1777, he ‘drank outrageously at Whitburn and at Livingstone and at some low ale-house, and arrived at Edinburgh very drunk. It was shocking in me to come home to my dear wife in such a state.’[22] Or in London in March 1776 he finds my ‘moral principle as to chastity was absolutely eclipsed.... I was in the miserable state of those whom the apostle represents as working all uncleanness with greediness.... This is an exact state of my mind at the time. It shocks me to review it.’[23] Even in the generally buoyant record that is the London Journal, Boswell has to observe: ‘I now see the sickly suggestions of inconsistent fancy with regard to the Scotch bar in their proper colours. Good heaven!... I shudder when I think of it. I am vexed at such a distempered suggestion’s being inserted in my journal....’[24]
Part of this tension is to do with his desire to preserve ‘good’ in the journal, to make a genuine harvest of his life. More deep-seated, though, is Boswell’s confusion over the relation between two dimensions of reality - between action and reflection, between the world as lived and the world as confessed. Where, in particular, is there any security in identity when the recording self is constantly to be appalled by the active self, is obliged, in fact, to set down actions and moods that would be better, safer, though less truthful, if let go into oblivion? This confusion is particularly acute for the hypochondriac who, as Boswell writes in The Hypochondriack, is perpetually in need of reassurance about his own stability: