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Object Lesson
Boswell’s Ebony Cabinet
May/June 2005
Gordon Turnbull is general editor of the Yale Boswell Editions.
“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.”
“When a man knows he is to be hanged … it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Smoking “preserves the mind from total vacuity.”
The provocatively aphoristic Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), English essayist, poet, editor, and pioneering lexicographer, holds a permanent place in the currency of shared and recognizable quotation, thanks mostly to the popularity of his biographer James Boswell’s two main works, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) and the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). The Life, in its time a wholly innovative and pathbreaking literary achievement, pioneered the modern field of the large-scale warts-and-all biography now thoroughly familiar to us, and Boswell’s Johnson, who once admitted that he “talked for victory,” stands as an endlessly compelling model of conversational authority. Johnson’s pronouncements turn up on such things as Salada tea bags and Perugia chocolate wrappers and are beloved of political journalists and headline writers. The last presidential election proved particularly effective at flushing out useful Johnsonisms, with “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” appearing frequently.
Few knew, however, how much more there was to Boswell (1740–1795) beyond the myth of a life lived in more or less constant stenographic attendance on Johnson, until the sensational series of recoveries of his rich trove of private diaries, letters, and other papers in the early twentieth century, and their publication by the Yale Boswell Editions. An Edinburgh-born lawyer and prolific journalist, and ninth laird of the handsome Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, Boswell kept an enthrallingly candid diary, alternately ebullient and depressive, of his busy, crowded, and often wayward life. He also retained the correspondence of nearly everyone who wrote to him. His nervous Victorian heirs at first suppressed the papers and rebuffed approaches from scholars and researchers; but his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century descendants, the Talbots of Malahide (near Dublin), became interested in their possible literary and commercial value. Word began to spread, and soon attracted the exhilarated notice of the American collector Ralph Heyward Isham and Yale English professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, Class of 1889. Tinker traveled to Malahide in 1925 and, when he examined the cache of manuscripts stored in the ebony cabinet shown here, confirmed for the scholarly world the rumors of the papers' existence. Isham set passionately about acquiring the papers, and there followed more and more discoveries at Malahide in increasingly improbable places, including a croquet box and a stable loft. Then came a second unexpected major manuscripts recovery from Fettercairn House, in Scotland, home to the descendants of Boswell’s executor. Isham eventually collected all the papers then known and sold them to Yale in 1948. The Yale Boswell Editions were established the next year, and the first of its many acclaimed volumes, the now famous London Journal 1762–1763, appeared in 1950.
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The seventeenth-century Flemish cabinet, a treasured Boswell heirloom, came into the family with Boswell’s Dutch great-grandmother. It had stood in the morning room of Auchinleck House. At the time of Boswell’s death it held the family’s collection of coins and medals and, among other things, letters that Boswell especially prized. It was moved with other items from Auchinleck to Malahide Castle in the early 1900s, where it stood prominently in a drawing room and was used to house portions of Boswell’s manuscript journal. After Tinker beheld the cabinet and its contents in 1925, he fired off an agitated letter declaring that now he had “seen the valley of rubies.”
Mary (Hyde), Viscountess Eccles, scholar and collector, acquired the cabinet at the final auction of the contents of Malahide Castle in 1976, and it long stood in pride of place near her great library at her home, Four Oaks Farm, in Somerville, New Jersey. She bequeathed it to Yale so that it might rejoin the remarkable documents it once long ago housed. It stands now near the reader services desk at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Meanwhile, the work of the Boswell Editions, which completed the 13-volume trade edition of Boswell’s journal in 1989, continues. The 14th volume of the project’s research series is scheduled to appear this year.
Two-million-dollar baby
by Natalie Danford '88
Dan Brown’s thriller The Da Vinci Code, which mixes history and legend, has now sold 25 million copies. Publishers saw that same potent combination in The Historian, a first novel by Elizabeth Kostova '88, which follows a young woman’s discovery that she may be descended from the real-life Dracula. After a bidding war, Little, Brown paid $2 million for Kostova’s debut.
“To get that kind of money for an intelligent book that isn’t based on Sex and the City or written by the 23-year-old daughter of the Irish Prime Minister is extremely unusual,” says Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson '78. The book goes on sale in June. In April, Kostova talked about winning the literary lottery.
Y: How does it feel to be tagged the next Dan Brown?
K: I’m still trying hard to believe this is not a practical joke. But my book is so different from The Da Vinci Code. It’s much less commercial.
Y: What do you mean by “less commercial"?
K: My novel is a literary novel. The Da Vinci Code hugely increased public interest in the idea of historical research as a detective tale, and that has a lot to do with why my book sold as well as it did. However, none of my approach to writing is commercial.
Y: Did you realize what was going on during the auction in June 2004?
K: My agent kept me posted, and we worked together as a team. She was very good at helping me understand the process. It was exactly a week before we got the three final competing offers, and then I took a couple of days over the weekend to think about it.
Y: The research and writing took you ten years. Were you thinking about publication while you were writing it?
K: The sale part has startled me very much. There’s an innocence about a first novel. You’re not thinking about the reception it will have or the contract. It’s kind of pure.
Y: Does it still feel pure now that you’re booked to do a ten-city tour ?
K: I’m trying to hold on to the feeling of private pleasure with which one works on a first novel. I can tell already that my favorite memories of this book will be that pleasure of composing it completely out of any public eye, not of any publicity. It’s the craft of writing that really matters to any serious writer.
Y: How does the money affect you?
K: I’ve always done a lot of teaching, which I enjoy, but it was very much a necessity. After years and years of writing at two in the morning, I’m very grateful to have the freedom to devote myself to writing. I started a new novel this past summer.
Y: Will the new book require as much research as The Historian?
K: I promised myself that this time I would write a book with no research because this one took such a long time, but then I immediately found myself writing a book that will take a great deal of research. It’s just hopeless.
Y: Do you read genre fiction?
K: I’m very interested in literary fiction that plays with genre, but I don’t like horror and I don’t have a stomach for it. It scares me too much.
Yale as Utopia
Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism
by Vincent Scully '40, '49PhD; Catherine Lynn '80PhD; Erik Vogt '99MEvD; and Paul Goldberger '72
Yale University, $45
Reviewed by Aaron Betsky '79, '83MArch, author of the book James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism and director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute.
If the Yale campus did not exist, Vincent Scully would have had to invent it. For half a century, the university’s visionary and inspiring professor of architectural history has used the physical surroundings in which he has lectured and lived as an example of everything he thinks architecture should be: a repository of history and memory, an urban and urbane collection of buildings, and an emblem of the promise of American democracy. Now he has collected his thoughts and those of his students and collaborators in Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism. Yale (not the Yale University Press) has published it as a thick compendium about everything Scully believes is great—and a few things that are not so wonderful—about the university.
To Scully, the story of his beloved Yale is one of great hopes that took a long time to find their way into the stones of the school’s buildings, that reached their apotheosis in the massive rebuilding of the campus in the 1920s and 1930s, and that have since been dashed and frustrated by a short-sighted and defensive administration. In the end, though, Scully still believes that Yale could and should be “God’s city under the mountain: haven of exiles, heaven on earth, for all mankind to see.”
This millenary and strangely evangelical tone pervades the entire book. Scully, picking up on the work of his student Erik Vogt, claims that New Haven’s nine-square grid, from which the layout and, according to Scully, the spirit of Yale’s campus ultimately derives, “was surely Old Testament in origin.” Vogt, in his own essay, makes the assertion, not really supported by any concrete evidence, that the city’s founders based their plan on an early-seventeenth-century reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and on biblical descriptions of the landscape of Palestine. For those of us who have spent a great deal of time in New Haven, however, the notion of East Rock as the “fiery rock in the wilderness” seems a bit far-fetched.
After this evocative scene-setting, the book settles into a lengthy description of all the plans and buildings Yale produced between its founding and the First World War. The problem, Catherine Lynn notes, was from the start that the college had very immediate needs that often contradicted the notion of a bucolic utopia, which Vogt and Scully designate as the ultimate destiny of an institution that was once a theological seminary. Specifically, the school continually felt the need to distinguish and protect itself from that once God-fearing community in which it grew up. Thus the story of Yale becomes one of buildings massed more and more into walls that surround more and more private courtyards that stand more and more apart, both stylistically and culturally, from the surrounding city.
This development culminated in the work of James Gamble Rogers, Class of 1889, who transformed Yale from a loose collection of buildings into a campus of 12 colleges, a major library, a graduate school, and a law school whose designs were all coordinated. It was Rogers who made Yale into what it is today: “gentle buildings for gentle men … an architecture of ease and intelligent cultivation, intended as an environment in which to shape a civilized, educated class,” as New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger describes it in his essay.
Since then, not much has gone right, according to the authors. Scully is scathing in his assessment of the work of modern architects, who forgot that their task was to “build the human settlement entire, shaping towns with coherent plans in which the most important thing about each building was that it got along with the buildings around it.” His hope is that one particular group of students will save the campus and even American architecture as a whole. These are the so-called “New Urbanists,” a group of designers based in Florida and grouped around the husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany '74MArch and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk '74MArch. Their notion of remodeling the American city and suburb into the kind of villages and towns that grew up in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strikes many of us as romantic fodder for developers, but to Scully it is the future that they learned from living in and looking at Yale.
There is a deeper truth here that runs through the whole volume. As Vogt points out, President Timothy Dwight, Class of 1769, almost two centuries ago dreamed of a campus that would be a “microcosm of the many villages he had admired and described in his travels, forming with its 'neat and tidy' houses, spired chapels, and common yard a fundamental pattern of communal order.” Though Goldberger does not mention this, James Gamble Rogers used exactly the same model when he began planning for the new residential colleges. Now Scully sees this ideal in New Urbanism.
This book is thus a continuation of a long-held dream that lies buried in the Yale campus: of finally building and being that small settlement that would preserve the Christian values for which its founders had fled first England and then Boston. That vision slowly changed into one stripped of its religious overtones, coming to represent the values of a small community against those of the big, industrial city New Haven represents.
Ultimately, that dream must always fail, for it is just that. Yale is in fact a modern educational machine that exists in a declining industrial city whose economy was once based on guns, not Christian values. It is a reality none of the authors address. East Rock and the nine squares have not shaped Yale’s campus so much as the factories and the highways, the medical complex with its technical requirements, and the contrast between an elite institution with an endowment of many billions of dollars and an impoverished city. A thorough analysis of the material history of Yale and New Haven and how they might develop in the future remains to be written. In the meantime, we have a wonderful fairy tale about a place that never really was, but that continues to inspire architects and writers exactly because of its otherworldly quality.
In Print
The Professor’s Daughter: A Novel
Henry Holt, $24
Emily Raboteau '98
“My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable.” In a graceful debut novel, Raboteau uses the traditions of African storytelling to weave a story about Emma, a Yale freshman who must come to terms with both her biracial past and the loss of her soulmate brother, who is in an irreversible coma.
Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life
Crown Forum, $26.95
Michael Medved '69
In this autobiography-cum-polemic, conservative radio personality Medved discusses his journey from “skeptically secular to intently religious, from adventurous single status to devoted and doting daddy … and from idealistic and instinctive save-the-world liberalism to hard-headed and experience-based do-it-yourself conservatism.”
50 Signs of Mental Illness: A Guide to Understanding Mental Health
Yale University Press, $27.50
James Whitney Hicks '87, '91MD
In this alphabetical guide, Dr. Hicks, director of clinical services at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York City, offers a user-friendly introduction to common psychiatric symptoms and a plethora of information on how to treat various aspects of mental illness.
Suzy Zeus Gets Organized
Tin House/Bloomsbury, $17.95
Maggie Robbins '84
“Suzy needs a long vacation/ Suzy needs to get away.” And so, in a modern Odyssey, the heroine of New York psychotherapist Maggie Robbins’s saucy and insightful novel-in-verse embarks on an epic and soul-transforming trip. The chronicling of this voyage actually began 21 years ago, when Robbins read the first Suzy Zeus episode, modeled on traditional Swahili love poetry, at a Jonathan Edwards College gathering.
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Meeting the Professor: Growing Up in the William Blackburn Family
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Sheldon S. Cohen 1953
British Supporters of the American Revolution, 1775-1783: The Role of 'Middling-Level' Activists
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