Pale Fire and Johnson's Cat: The Anecdote in Polite Conversation

Perhaps because I often fall victim to them, I have become interested in those moments when conversations are suddenly struck dead. Take, for example, this anecdote from James Boswell's Life of Johnson:

This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. "Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats." And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, "But Hodge shan't be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot."¹

The speaker quoted is Samuel Johnson. Johnson was the London lexicographer and conversationalist who came, in the words of his contemporaries, to exemplify a certain grandeur of style, masculine sensibility, and intellectual firmness; Boswell, his biographer and protégé, composed, in the aftermath of Johnson's death, the monument to Johnson's conversational style, which he called The Life of Johnson (1791).² Characteristic of the literary form Boswell adopts for the Life, the compact narrative episode I quote above is braced between similar moments, one among a series of anecdotes first related by the living Johnson as he held court in his Literary Club, and later recorded by Boswell for posterity.³ As Boswell recalls it, Johnson summons up an anecdote about a young gentleman by way of clinching a dissertation on ethics. But while Johnson summons up an anecdote in order to provide force to a moral argument, the effect is more than he bargains for. His rhetorical turn to an historical event reminds him of the very real and vulnerable body of his own cat, a tabby named Hodge. And so the deaths of a number of cats in London's West End return, in a real way, to kill the conversation that they enabled.

Samuel Johnson's Literary Club represents a particularly rich episode in the history of the polite conversation—where the crossings of politeness and the ineffable effects of the real were brought repeatedly, conspicuously into focus. It is the history of this conversational form that this essay takes up—and takes it up through the long history of this exemplary anecdote, born at the Literary Club, but reappearing, revenant-like, at superficially unconnected spots of time. This Boswellian rehearsal of a Johnsonian anecdote might be said to contain, at its core, this young gentleman "running about town";⁴ it is nevertheless encrusted with a lengthy history recorded in the anecdote itself. Johnson "hears" in conversation a story about a young gentleman shooting cats. He repeats it for the (somewhat obscure) moral it provides. Boswell hears the story from Johnson. When he repeats this same story, however, it does not have anything to do with the moral Johnson intends. Instead, for Boswell, it becomes a way of recalling into the present Johnson's love of even the smallest animals he has "taken under his protection" and, by extension, his love of children and servants in general. In the way that anecdotes become collaborative productions, the trajectory of this anecdote does not end with Boswell's Life. This same anecdote also turns up in the paratextual front matter of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), between Nabokov's dedication of the book "To Vera" and the table of contents. Gerard de Vries's note in The Nabokovian, extending the life history of this anecdote yet further, frames the problem it poses in this way: "[W]ith the epigraph to Pale Fire, Nabokov left us with a rather contumacious riddle."⁵ It is in the spirit of riddle-solving, then, that de Vries sets about reimagining this anecdote: how this anecdote can be understood to fit into the text it precedes.⁶

From London to New Wye, from Johnson's Literary Club to the Nabokovian, what we would call and recognize as the same anecdote turns up serially, stitching together different moments in conversational time. The characteristic thing that governs each of these ritual redeployments is that nobody seems to be interested in all the shot cats...