Boswell as Lydia Davis?

found micro-fiction

I am ill, dying perhaps, with a violent cold, so this is all I can manage for you today. With regrets, I may also have to cancel the Shakespeare book club this weekend. (I will rearrange.) Anything other than reading a book in desultory manner in bed, trumpeting into my handkerchief and coughing like a consumptive, is beyond me at the moment.

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During this argument, Goldsmith sat in restless agitation, from a wish to get in and SHINE. Finding himself excluded, he had taken his hat to go away, but remained for some time with it in his hand, like a gamester, who at the close of a long night, lingers for a little while, to see if he can have a favourable opening to finish with success. Once when he was beginning to speak, he found himself overpowered by the loud voice of Johnson, who was at the opposite end of the table, and did not perceive Goldsmith’s attempt. Thus disappointed of his wish to obtain the attention of the company, Goldsmith in a passion threw down his hat, looking angrily at Johnson, and exclaiming in a bitter tone, ‘TAKE IT.’ When Toplady was going to speak, Johnson uttered some sound, which led Goldsmith to think that he was beginning again, and taking the words from Toplady. Upon which, he seized this opportunity of venting his own envy and spleen, under the pretext of supporting another person:

‘Sir, (said he to Johnson,) the gentleman has heard you patiently for an hour; pray allow us now to hear him.’ JOHNSON. (sternly,) ‘Sir, I was not interrupting the gentleman. I was only giving him a signal of my attention. Sir, you are impertinent.’ Goldsmith made no reply, but continued in the company for some time.

From The Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell so often captures the essential personalities in the room and teases out the social dynamics: he seized this opportunity of venting his own envy and spleen, under the pretext of supporting another person. Don’t you see that all the time? It’s commonplace in meetings.

Although this is “life writing”, it is as tense and controlled as great fiction. Doesn’t it have the quality of a scene in Dostoevsky or Gogol—Goldsmith standing there, wanting to SHINE, with his hat, like a gamester? And how tragic, at the end, for Goldsmith to continue in the company for some time, unable to bring himself to leave, unable to relieve the bile of his strong feelings. What mood! What bathos! How carefully unresolved Boswell makes this anxiously intemperate man!

You could publish this on its own, perhaps with a little editing, and call it “found micro-fiction”, a little cell of psychological perspicacity in the great body of the Life of Johnson, the way some people have “found” poetry in letters and other such works.

Would this be so out of place in a Lydia Davis collection?

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See also

“Goldsmith, as usual, endeavoured, with too much eagerness, to SHINE.”