Books in Brief: The Heart of Boswell

The Heart of Boswell: Highlights from the Journals of James Boswell, edited by Mark Harris (Me Graw-Hill, 407 pp., $17.95).

The Heart of Boswell is a marvelous idea: a one-volume abridgment of the first six volumes of the Private Papers of James Boswell, that incomparable repository of carnal knowledge and literary gossip out of which Boswell himself quarried the Life of Johnson. It is not altogether clear, however, why Mark Harris was entrusted with the job; the dustjacket of The Heart of Boswell tells us that Mr. Harris “is perhaps best known for his novels of baseball,” that “he feels he and Boswell are spiritual kin, and when, in Heaven, he calls upon old friends, he will call upon Boswell almost first,” and that “his most recent book is Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck.” Hardly the best of credentials for so formidable a task, it would seem; and a perusal of The Heart of Boswell confirms many of the suspicions aroused by its exterior. Though Mr. Harris praises the original editors of the sixvolume Yale Edition for the way in which “they supplied background information and footnotes at precisely the length and exactly the moment I seemed to require them,” he has chosen to throw out all of the footnotes and most of the background information for his one-volume “distillation,” counting on short appreciations at the beginning of each section to keep the reader oriented. Moreover, Mr. Harris’s method of abridgment results in such minor irritations as one-sentence entries; the book as a whole reads rather choppily. (Example: the very first sentence, all preamble having been excised, starts out “I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal” and goes on from there.) Fortunately, Mr. Harris is no prude, and The Heart of Boswell is no Everybody’s Pepys —Boswell’s amorous dalliances are quite well represented in the selections Mr. Harris has chosen to include. On the whole, The Heart of Boswell is indeed, as the book’s subtitle claims, largely made up of the “highlights” of the unabridged version; but one is left with the nagging feeling that Mr. Harris could have done a better job, and it may not be all that unfair to suggest an analogy with Dr. Johnson’s dismissal of the lady clergyman’s preaching as being much like a dog walking on its hind legs. “It is not done well,” he said curtly, “but you are surprised to find it done at all.”