Books

reviewed by Steve Peterson

“His story begins in an aristocratic divorce court, emerges in the world of publicity and the new monthly magazines, continues in a murder trial, touches upon fashion, politics and royalty, and ends suddenly and disgracefully in a debtor’s prison” writes Richard Holmes. Born out of wedlock, disowned by his mother, Richard Savage blackmailed his mother using a preface to a poetry anthology. Convicted of murder, pardoned by the Queen, he quickly exploited his fame by composing and publishing his confessional poem The Bastard. Savage appointed himself Queen Caroline’s Volunteer “Laureate” to celebrate her virtues annually and received a royal grant in return for his flattery. He whored, drank to excess, and spent his money profligately. The story of Richard Savage exhibits nearly all the exhilarating elements of sleaze and vulgarity that fill the pages of the National Enquirer or the New Yorker.

Why and how was Samuel Johnson involved with this scandalous figure? To explicate the notorious figure of Savage, the curious friendship of Savage and Johnson, and the insight that this figure and friendship provide on Johnson’s life and moral writing, which includes everything Johnson wrote, is the aim of Holmes’ lovely book.

Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage were friends in London for several years in the late 1730s. Johnson, in 1738, published London, a poem inspired by his experience with Savage wandering the streets. In 1744, he published The Life of Richard Savage, the first of his literary studies. The last generation of Johnson scholars have shown that there is more to Johnson than the clever conversations reported by Boswell. Particularly the moral impulse of his writings has finally received the focus Johnson gave it. “The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it,” remarks Johnson. How does Johnson in The Life of Richard Savage seek to reach this aim?

Holmes seeks to recover a more vivid pre-Boswellian Johnson.

We have to deconstruct almost entirely that powerful, domineering, confident, late-eighteenth century figure whom Boswell created in his own biography. We have to recover a much more shadowy, fraught and uncertain personality: young Sam Johnson, failed schoolmaster, provincial poet, and desperate Grub Street hack, who signed his letter in 1738 ‘impransus’ (supperless).

This recovery of a more shadowy, uncertain Sam Johnson, however, does not diminish the subject. Holmes avoids the current biographical fashion of insult and scandal mongering. The recovery of a more desperate Johnson gives an authority to his moral writings. Johnson’s rather dogmatic statements—Goldsmith remarks that there was no arguing with Johnson: if his pistol misfires, he knocks you down with the butt end of it— gain a new status when his readers learn about the misfortunes of his life. They are reflections born of long struggle. His life and thought—it is the connections I emphasize here—are a tribute to the dignity of being human. Johnson is no mere role model. He rises above his circumstances in heroic fashion. Nearly deaf, oafish and homely, half-blind, destitute (at least, after he lost Tetty’s estate in an attempt to open a boarding school), burdened with aggressive pride and acute melancholia, Johnson faced tremendous obstacles. Holmes suggests that Johnson’s version of Savage’s life reveals much about these obstacles. “Through the vivid but fragmented mirror of Savage’s life we have glimpsed the reflections of a personality as anguished and unstable as Savages’ own.”

The misfortunes of Johnson’s life taught Johnson both the nobility of the moral struggle and compassion for moral failure. Johnson’s moral generosity expresses itself in the conclusion to his Life of Savage.

Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty; nor will any wise man presume to say, ‘Had I been in Savages’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.’

Johnson does not merely condemn Savages’s irresponsibility although he writes that those who “disregarded the common maxims of life, shall be reminded that nothing will supply the want or prudence.” Nor does he rely on sociological determinism to excuse Savage’s failings, although he notes often the “perpetual hardships” of Savage’s life. Rather, Johnson pulls the reader into the story. He provides the reader an occasion for self-reflection. As Johnson pursues Savage, he also pursues himself and the reader.

“Ethics of Morality is one of the studies which ought to begin with the first glimpse of reason and only end with life itself,” writes Johnson. His remarks on morality gain formidableness because of his wide and sympathetic acquaintance with life. Johnson was no prig.

Holmes concludes:

What Johnson finally saw as the moral meaning of Savage’s existence lay in the capacity of even a flawed man to struggle nobly against the misfortunes of life. . . . That fate was hard for Savage; but is hard for anyone. Johnson could never accept the optimism of Shaftesbury any more than he could yield to the pessimism of Hobbes. Instead he clung to the redeeming virtues which may be discovered in human compassion and stoic resolution.

A smart aleck friend remarked that what this country needs is more of Johnson and less prozac. I would only add that we also could use more Richard Holmes.