Sexpats in History: 2) James Boswell, 4th Laird of Auchinleck (1740-1795)

The ancient philosopher certainly gave wise council when he said, ‘Know thyself.’ For surely this knowledge is of all the most important... I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal in which I shall set down my various sentiments and various conduct… In this way I shall preserve many things that would otherwise be lost in oblivion. I shall find daily employment for myself, and I shall lay up a store of entertainment for my after life.

So begins Boswell’s London Journal – a journal of his experiences as a visitor to London in 1762-3. The journal is remarkable for its frankness about all aspects of life – including Boswell’s sexual adventures – and because of the vivid portrait it gives of his first meeting with the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Boswell later wrote Johnson’s biography – a biography which is regarded as one of the finest ever written, and his masterpiece.

It is not my intention to give a detailed biography of Boswell, but if you would like to find out more, here is a good place to start: http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usbiography/abc/jamesboswell.html. I also heartily recommend his two best works: Boswell’s London Journal (from which many of the quotations below are taken) and the Life of Samuel Johnson.

I am interested in Boswell because he is an example of the diaristic (or should that be diarrhoeaistic?) urge that seems to inspire so many travellers – and not just sex-tourists. I recall sitting in Don Muang airport writing up the erotic events of the previous night, and noticing a young female backpacker busily scribbling in her diary – I assumed it would be a poetic description of a Bangkok sunset or the like – but I may have been wrong. Of course, the reasons we do it (whether it is erotic adventures or sunsets) are accurately summed up by Boswell in the above quotation.

But can Boswell be described an ‘expat’ given that the Act of Union which created Great Britain was passed in 1707? Well, it took him three days to get from Edinburgh to London (compared with 12 hours from Heathrow to Bangkok today), and Scotland always has had a distinct and more puritanical culture (the Scottish parliament recently passed a law criminalising paying for sex). If there is any lingering doubt, he later carried on his adventures on a European Grand Tour, though by that time he was trying (often without success) to be ‘good’.

I regularly moan about the discomfort of the flights to Bangkok, and even if I manage to escape the endless queues, the indignities of the security checks, the rudeness of officials, flight delays and lost baggage, there is no way I can escape the deep-vein thrombosis-inducing 12-hour incarceration in cattle-class. However, that is nothing to what Boswell had to endure:

15^th November 1762

We did very well till we passed Old Cambus, when one of the wheels of our chaise was so much broke that it was of no use…I made the chaise be dragged on to Ayton, where we waited till the driver rode to Berwick and brought us a chaise…we were set down in a cold ale-house in a little dirty village. We had beefsteak ill-dressed and had nothing to drink but thick muddy beer…we tried to sleep in vain.

No wonder he was keen to make up for it when he finally arrived by sampling the pleasures of London life. Despite his resolution to ‘have nothing to do with whores’ he was disappointed in his hopes of meeting a girlfriend from Edinburgh and ended up searching the streets:

25^th November

I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with the intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said that if ever I took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling, and had command enough of myself to go without touching her. I afterwards trembled at the danger I had escaped.

‘Armour’ refers to a primitive form of condom, which at this time were made of animal intestines and used to prevent STD’s – a serious matter, because in those days gonorrhoea and syphilis were often fatal. Antibiotics changed all that, and for a brief period, there was no STD with fatal consequences – but with the advent of HIV, we’re back to the Boswellian situation and go bareback at our peril. The old condoms must have been even more uncomfortable than their modern counterparts, so it was no wonder that Boswell wanted to find ‘some safe girl’ or ‘some woman of fashion’.

It was not long before he did. He met ‘a handsome actress of Covent Garden Theatre’ called Louisa. At that time many actresses were little better than high-class prostitutes. High-class because they aimed to find a man who would set them up as a mistress and provide them with an apartment and a regular income. Louisa plays Boswell with skill, drawing out the courtship so that she does not seem too ‘easy’ and to give authenticity to the pretence that she is a virgin – or at least, very inexperienced. However, it is not long before she is wheedling money out of him:

21^st December

“Sir, there is a person has sent to me for a trifling debt. I sent back word that it was not convenient for me to let them have it just now, but in six weeks I should pay it.” I was a little confounded and embarrassed here. I dreaded bringing myself into a scrape. I did not know what she might call a trifling sum…” Pray, Madam, what was the sum?” “Only two guineas, Sir.” Amazed and pleased, I pulled out my purse…

Two guineas would have been a months wage for a manual worker at the time. However, Louisa does not offer up the goods just yet, but keeps Boswell dangling. It is clear from the description of their meetings over the next few weeks, that Boswell thinks he is entering into a genuine love affair, while Lousia is just playing him along, hoping, perhaps, that he will be the one to set her up. Boswell, in that respect, was a little like the Thailand newbie being treated as an ATM by his first bargirl – but being a Scotsman, Boswell has his own agenda – not to spend too much money (he writes that he is ‘upon a plan of economy’). When he does finally get to consummate the relationship it sounds from the description below that it was well worth the wait and the expense (which he estimates will be about ten guineas for the winter):

12^th January 1763

Good heavens, what a loose did we give to amorous dalliance! In a moment I felt myself animated with the strongest powers of love, and, from my dearest creature’s kindness, had a most luscious feast. Proud of my godlike vigour, I soon resumed the noble game…a more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was extraordinary for human nature…

However, it was not long before things started to go wrong: ‘18^th January: I this day began to feel an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil; a little heat in the member of my body sacred to Cupid…’ and he realises with horror that he has venereal disease (possibly gonorrhoea). In a letter to Louisa on 3^rd February, he writes that he paid a surgeon five guineas for a ‘cure’, and takes the opportunity to rebuke her for deceiving him into thinking she was an innocent:

If you are not rendered callous by a long course of disguised wickedness, I should think the consideration of your deceit and baseness, your corruption of body and mind, would be a very severe punishment…

The frank description of sexual matters is, of course, one of the interesting things about Boswell’s London Journal, but equally interesting are his attempts at self-evaluation. For example, on 19^th December 1762, he spends the evening with his landlord and landlady: ‘I read some of Pope. I sung a song. I let myself down too much’ (because he has been over-familiar with a lower class of person). Later in the same entry he records that, though he went to St John’s Chapel and listened to a sermon on humility, ‘I was not so devout as I could have wished’.

In the last entry in his journal, for 4^th August 1763, he reflects on his London experiences (including the night before when he indulged himself with ‘a fine lass’ who tapped him on the shoulder in the Strand) and resolves to set himself higher standards:

I am now upon a less pleasurable but more rational and lasting plan. Let me pursue it with steadiness and I may be a man of dignity…let me be manly. Let me commit myself to the care of my merciful Creator.

Boswell spent the next two years travelling around Europe where he met Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He also travelled to Rome and Corsica. He continued to keep journals which have been published as Boswell in Holland and Boswell on the Grand Tour. He continued to enjoy sexual adventures. For example, he had a long-term relationship with a Dutch woman whom he nicknames Zelide, ‘a young lady free from all the faults of her sex, with genius, with good humour, with elegant accomplishments…but not half so rich as I thought’. He also visited brothels, took advantage of maidservants, and occasionally enjoyed a relationship with a woman of higher class:

6^th December 1764

Picture to yourself the most seductive face in the world, a sparkling eye, a fresh complexion, an uptilted nose, rosy lips and a breast of alabaster, the walk and beauty of a goddess, softness full of grace and voluptuousness in all her movements…she is married to a Swiss captain, a man of very little charm…

However, there is nothing like the detailed description of his bedroom antics that we get in the Louisa episode. The reason is that he seems to be making a real effort to improve himself with a view to being a successful and respected laird when he returns to his Scottish domain. As a result, he devotes more space in these later journals to describing the honours he receives in the various courts he visits. For example, after going hunting with Prince Dietrich of Dessau he writes:

25^th September 1764

Prince Dietrich then presented me with the stag’s foot, saying, “My dear Sir, this is a mark of distinction.” This pleased me. It shall be laid up in the museum at Auchinleck, with an inscription on a plate of gold or silver, telling that Laird James the Fourth had it in a present from a German prince with whom he had the honour of hunting, when upon his travels.

Boswell returned to London in February 1766 accompanied by Rousseau's mistress, with whom he probably had an affair. He returned to Scotland to take his a law exam and became an advocate. He married his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, in November 1769 and she remained faithful to him despite his continuing visits to prostitutes. He spent the final years of his life writing his Life of Johnson, and there is no doubt that his many years of journal writing contributed to its vivid style, authenticity and the ability to bring his subject to life.

One of the qualities of Boswell’s writing that I admire is his use of lots of specific detail. This can be seen not only in his journals, but in his biography of Johnson. It is this kind of detail that brings writing to life. To take an example where I have tried to achieve this in my own writing, Bangkok Don Juan, Canto I, Stanza V refers to ‘Don Muang’, ‘Taxi-Meter’ and ‘Soi 4’ – all very specific details which (I hope) add to the authentic texture of the poem.

I also admire Boswell’s frankness; he is not ashamed to tell us that though he aspired to be ‘a brilliant, high-bred man of pleasure, poised, courtly, etc.’ he was actually a ‘raw, loud, romping, over-eager boy: greedy, stingy, and with brutal tastes’ (quoted from the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Journal edited by Frederick Pottle). Actually, there is not much point in journal or autobiographical writing if you are not going to be honest. If you are honest, both you and your readers might learn something – if you lie, your readers will see through you anyway. (Like some of the writers on Stickman’s forum who claim to have hundreds of gorgeous western girlfriends, a million dollar a year salary, and condos in every exotic holiday resort). I cannot match Boswell’s levels of frankness, but I try, and anyway, as a Yorkshireman, frankness is in my blood. Thus, in Canto I of Bangkok Don Juan, I describe the hero, Jim, with these words:

A fat and fifty-something sort of man,
He is divorced and hasn’t had a lover
Since, it seems to him, the world began.

And admit that he is ‘a bit like me’. Finally, I like Boswell’s plain style of writing – no purple passages here! The worse writing is the self-consciously literary type which sounds as though the writer had been ransacking a thesaurus. That is an important lesson for me as a poet, as I want to get away from the hearts and flowers stuff and put back some of the sinew that we find in the 18^th and early 19^th century poets. An example is the first stanza of Bangkok Don Juan which contains no figures of speech or fancy diction, but introduces the topic as straightforwardly as a railway timetable. Of course, whether I have successfully applied these lessons is a matter of opinion – the point is that Boswell sets the standard to which I aspire.

For those of us who are interested in writing, Boswell is a reminder that journal writing is one of the best ways to develop the craft – particularly the skills discussed above. However, if Boswell’s art is an example worth imitating, his life provides a salutary warning – especially to those of us whose writing has grown out of the Thailand nightlife – for he died at the early age of 55 as a result of venereal disease and years of heavy drinking.

© Rob, 2008