Anthony La Vopa
Department of History
North Carolina State University
Preface
I would begin a course on modern biography with two texts: Samuel
Johnson's
An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl of
Rivers,
published in London in 1744, (we're using the text edited by
Clarence Tracy and published by Oxford University Press, 1971,
referred to here as The Life); and Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson &
Mr. Savage, a Vintage paperback published in 1993 (referred to here
as Johnson & Savage).
Placing a biography written over two-and-a-half centuries ago under
the rubric "modern" may strike you as perverse. But remember: I'm an
historian, and historians like to take a long view of things. I'm
looking for a point of demarcation, where something new occurs in
the history of biography as a literary genre. A full history of the
genre would take us back at least as far as ancient Rome. If we
wanted to do justice to the Christian era, we would have to devote
considerable attention to the recorded lives of, among others,
saints, popes, and great rulers and conquerors. But if we're looking
for a revealing moment in the origins of biography as a modern
literary form, it would be hard to find anything more suitable than
Johnson's Life. Illuminated by Holmes's richly detailed and
absorbing study, it tells us a great deal about the conditions that
gave rise to modern biography; about what has distinguished it as a
genre since its origins; and about the historical, literary, and
moral issues it raises.
Four other, much briefer texts will help us pursue these subjects:
1. Johnson's letter announcing the forthcoming biography of Savage,
published in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1743 (and also quoted in
full in Johnson & Savage, pp. 7-8).
2. Johnson's essay on biography, published in his periodical The
Rambler on October 13, 1750.
3. One of Johnson's comments on biography, as recorded by James
Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791)
4. Holmes's description of the "essential process of biography," at
the close of the first chapter of his Footsteps: Adventures of a
Romantic Biographer (1985).
The
Principal Characters
1. Richard Savage figures in the history of English literature as a
minor poet of the Augustan Age (ca. 1688-1760). He enjoyed moments
of public success (and scandal), but lived most of his life in
obscurity. He is perhaps best described as a quasi-public figure.
Though he left more traces than most of his contemporaries, he
reveals himself to us only in scattered fragments. Here are some of
the established facts:
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He was born sometime around 1698. |
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He claimed publicly and repeatedly that he was the illegitimate son
of an Earl and a Countess (he accused the Countess of disowning him
at birth and trying to thwart his every effort to succeed in life).
The surviving evidence does not disprove the claim about his birth,
but suggests that it was a delusion. |
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He had periods of comfort and even affluence, thanks largely to
pensions from prominent patrons, but from 1735 on descended into
poverty.
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He spent most of his life in relentless dissipation in London,
usually without a settled abode, frequenting the city's many taverns
and coffee houses and sleeping wherever he could find a bed or at
least a place of shelter. |
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In 1727 a court in London convicted him of having murdered a man in
a tavern brawl and sentenced him to be hung. In January, 1728 he was
granted a royal pardon. |
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Several of his published poems were highly esteemed by men of
letters among his contemporaries, including Johnson. The modern
reader, if she has a taste for Augustan verse, may find that they
exhibit considerable talent and skill. |
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He died on August 1, 1743, in Bristol (where he had been imprisoned
for failing to pay a debt), possibly of liver failure caused by
heavy drinking over many years.
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2. By the time Samuel Johnson died in 1784 he was an icon of British
literary life, the Sage whose no-nonsense observations on morality,
taste, and a host of other subjects would soon be available to the
reading public in James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). He
occupies a singular place in the history of modern biography, both
as a subject and as an author. Boswell's immense book (1402 pages in
the modern Oxford edition!) was arguably the most ambitious,
original, and informative biography of the eighteenth century. From
1779 to 1781 Johnson himself had published the Lives of the English
Poets, which set a new standard for literary biography.
Our concern, however, is with the thirty-four-year-old failed
schoolteacher and aspiring author who wrote The Life of Savage in
1743. By 1743 Johnson had been in London six years, but he had
hardly begun to distinguish himself as a man of letters. He had met
Savage in 1737, shortly after arriving in the city, and they had
developed an intimate friendship in frequent, perhaps daily contact
over the next two years. It took him roughly five months to write
the Life.
3. Richard Holmes is a master practitioner of the craft of
biography, esteemed especially for his lives of the Romantic poets
Shelley and Coleridge. Unlike most of his fellow practitioners, he
is willing and indeed eager to reveal his personal stakes in his
work and to address the larger issues - personal, literary, and
ultimately moral - that biography raises. He began this
self-revelatory pondering with Footsteps (1985), and continued it
with Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000).
Johnson & Savage is still another contribution, and perhaps the most
important. Holmes conceived it not as a dual biography, as the title
might suggest, but as "the biography of a biography." He tells us in
the opening pages that the book's concern is with "the kind of human
truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can
obtain as he tells the story of another's life, and thereby makes it
both his own (like a friendship) and the public's (like a
betrayal)"; and that it "asks what we can know, and what we can
believe, and finally what we can love."
It's the biography of a biography that we're after.
Exercise 1:
Texts and Contexts
We'll begin with a truism: in a good biography texts and contexts
are brought into mutually illuminating interaction. The text in
question here is the Life, but there are of course a wide variety of
texts - from intimate diary entries to public speeches, and from
account books to hallucinatory poems - to which the truism applies.
Contexts come in many shapes and sizes. Some examples: a religious
tradition and the challenges to it; a structure of social relations;
the life of a literary movement; the environment of a city. The
point is that biographical interpretation is a two-way street. The
text is an historical source; it tells us things about its contexts,
and hence is one of the pieces we use to reconstruct them. In turn,
placing a text in relevant contexts enhances our awareness of its
meaning. Features of a text that may strike us at first as trivial
or odd or just plain boring - because they are specific to a bygone
era - take on the significances, both intended and unintended, that
the biographer needs to recover.
The Life has many contexts, but I take the two most important to be
London and its world of print. Greater London, including several
outlying parishes, was the megalopolis of the eighteenth-century
West. With a population of nearly 700,000 in 1700, it comprised
one-eighth of the entire population of England and Wales (in the
same year Paris, the next largest European city, had a population of
less than 500,000). Its size reflected the fact that it was the
magnetic center of two empires: Great Britain (which would soon
include Scotland) and a far-flung colonial empire
encompassing a large chunk of North America as well as several
Caribbean islands. As a commercial center London housed the Bank of
England, which made the state itself an object of investment and a
source of credit; the miles of wharves and warehouses along the
Thames; a bewildering variety of trading companies; and a bustling,
sometimes frenzied Stock Exchange. As a political capital it boasted
one of the grandest royal courts in Europe and that peculiarly
English institution, Parliament, which included both an hereditary
House of Lords and an elected House of Commons. The broad
participation in politics - courtiers and ministers of state vying
for the ear of the King, people of all sorts arguing the issues of
the day in taverns and coffee houses, obscure hirelings doing the
dirty work in elections, pens-for-hire churning out propaganda and
polemics - had no equivalent elsewhere. Likewise unique was the
fierceness of political partisanship: to many visitors from the
Continent, accustomed to the serenity of "absolute" monarchies and
oligarchic republics, London - and England - seemed to be in a
perpetual state of civil war.
It was not the prospect of a political career that pulled the
twenty-eight-year-old Johnson to London. Like many other educated
young men of his generation, he moved to the city in the hope of
achieving fame and fortune as a man of letters. He could entertain
that hope because London was leading the way in the creation of a
recognizably modern print culture. Though the press runs and the
sales figures from the period seem piddly by our standards, the
production and consumption of print, and most notably of novels,
magazines, newspapers, and political pamphlets, was becoming
something of a mass phenomenon. When Johnson expressed faith in the
judgment of "common readers," he had in mind a new reading public
that extended from educated professionals (clergymen, lawyers, and
physicians) and prosperous merchants to humbler shopkeepers and
artisans, and that included, at all these levels, a substantial
number of their wives and daughters.
Two features of London's print world are especially striking:
a) We tend to regard our modern "celebrity culture" as the creation
of electronic mass media, but in fact its rudiments are already
there in the London of Johnson and Savage. Print was becoming an
article of mass consumption, purchased for entertainment as well as
for instruction. The key to success was to grab the attention of
"the public." We can imagine a hardened veteran of this scene
offering the young Johnson some advice: "Scandal is the thing, my
boy, though it may land you in prison or get you beaten up. If you
can't cash in on someone else's scandal, make your own. But mind
you, do it fast. The public bores quickly; it thirsts for novelty."
b) Like the population of the city itself, the people who produced
and sold print - the writers, the printers, the booksellers - formed
a steeply graded hierarchy. Its broad bottom (if I may put it that
way) was peopled by the "scribblers" of "Grub Street."
There was an
actual street by that name, a particularly squalid street just
outside the old city walls; but the term was also used loosely,
sometimes to designate the shabby quarters in Grub Street's
vicinity, where the print industry had one of its hives, sometimes
to evoke the way of life - or, in modern parlance, the subculture -
of the many obscure writers, surviving from hand to mouth, who lived
scattered across the city. Despite the growth of the print market,
it was a rare author who could earn a decent living from the sale of
his work; most needed the largesse of wellborn or at least
well-heeled patrons, usually in the form of pensions and sinecures.
This was the world Alexander Pope had satirized mercilessly in 1728
in his mock epic The Dunciad, for which Savage himself supplied much
of the sleazy detail. Savage attacked it three years later, on a
more modest literary scale but with no less venom, in his An Author
to be Let. Grub Street lay suspended precariously between the
"respectable" society of the city and its underworld of disreputable
taverns,
grubby
coffee houses, flophouses, cheap rented rooms, pawn shops,
warrens of burglars and pickpockets, and brothels. Its
denizens were - to paraphrase Savage's title - authors for hire. We
might think of them living in a double bind - maneuvering for
survival in the face of an unenviable choice between the whims of
patrons and the whims of the market.
Step 1: Before you read Holmes's book, read Johnson's
Life. What
does the Life tell us about London and its world of print? How might
more information about these contexts (and there is, of course, much
more to know) enhance our understanding of the meaning of the text?
Perhaps the most obvious place to begin - because it is thematically
central to the text - is Johnson's account (or, more precisely, his
reformulation of Savage's account) of Lady Macclesfield's behavior
and the public reactions to it. But there is also much to be gleaned
from more incidental features of the narrative. Consider, for
example, the two anecdotes about Richard Steele; the accounts of
Savage's' financial arrangements for his poems "Wanderer" and "The
Bastard"; the story of his "The Progress of a Divine"; the
descriptions of the city's underworld of poverty and criminality
(esp. pp. 96-97).
Step 2: Having taken a stab at this kind of work, see how Holmes
goes about it. You'll notice one of Holmes's rare gifts as a
biographer. He is a master at conveying a sense of place, at
integrating into his narrative physical details that make palpable
the eighteenth-century atmosphere of the city, from its fashionable
neighborhoods to its slums. Step back from the detail and ask what
general conclusion Holmes asks us to draw. Though he never puts it
this way, I take his conclusion to be that this moment in the
origins of modern biography could only have occurred in London -
that only the city and its world of print had the conditions
necessary for its occurrence. What were those conditions? How did
they contribute to the making of the Life?
Step 3:
The more we interrelate the texts and its contexts, the more
aware we become that the Life is rich in social meaning. Let's
imagine a sociologist - perhaps a specialist in the sociology of
literature - reading the Life. She would find much of interest, but
my guess is that she would be especially intrigued by what she might
call the social psychology of clientage. To one degree or another,
the denizens of Grub Street were clients beholden to patrons, or
would-be clients in search of patrons. As men of letters they were
convinced of their intellectual superiority over the people of
inherited rank, wealth, and power on whom they depended for
survival. But they were dependent, and that meant that, like it or
not, they had to kowtow to their patrons, both in private and
publicly, with effusive flattery and other gestures of deference.
Sometimes, of course, they could use their pens to slash the hands
that fed them, and to utter cries of rage (however muted) at the
humiliations they had to endure; but that was very risky business.
How do we get at this social psychology through the Life? One way is
to consider the meaning of narrative, and particularly of Johnson's
accounts of, and judgments about, Savage's troubled relations with
dispensers of patronage (e.g. Lord Tyrconnel, Robert Walpole).
Another - the one we'll focus on here - is to examine the contextual
meaning of a family of words. I have in mind a vocabulary that was
not limited to Grub Street, but that its scribblers infused with
their alienation, so that, at least implicitly, it censured the
injustice of the distribution of power in eighteenth-century society
and asserted the principles on which a just society might be
organized. Some of the terms will not be found in the technical
vocabulary of modern sociology. Non-sociologists will find other
words quite familiar, but may wonder why I think the term "social"
(or "sociological") applies to them.
So, we need to conduct a translation exercise, despite the fact that
the language of the text is quite obviously English. Listed below
are several keywords in the family of words. Having examined how
they are used in the text, translate (if necessary) their
eighteenth-century meanings into our contemporary vocabulary of
social description and evaluation:
Advantage
Dependence (and Dependant)
Fortune
Genius
Merit
Wit (and Wits)
Exercise 2: The Genre: Facts and Fictions
The author of the Life was quite aware that he was pioneering a new
literary form. In the announcement in the Gentleman's Magazine he
distinguished his project sharply from "a Novel filled with romantick Adventures, and imaginary amours." He had in mind novels
like Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild, published just a year earlier,
which had turned the real life of a notorious gang leader into the epic biography of a larger-than-life villain.
Johnson assured prospective readers that, unlike authors who might
be tempted do something similar with Savage's life, he was in a
position to "gratify the Lovers of Truth and Wit," especially since
he could reveal what Savage himself had told him. Johnson, then, was
intent on distinguishing his biography from fiction disguised as
biography. He also saw himself departing from the longstanding
conventions of biography itself. That we can infer, I think, from
his essay in The Rambler, though it was written seven years later.
Biographies of the Great often seem to lack human interest, Johnson
tells us, because their narratives are limited to public events at
heights to which most of us never ascend. Modern biography should be
about ordinary people, and indeed about their "domestick privacies"
and "the minute details of daily life."
What Johnson does not say is that there was, and there has continued
to be, a certain tension between his two agendas. Biography as
Johnson conceived it is devoted to truth or, perhaps better, to
factual and other kinds of veracity. Establishing the veracity of an
account of a summit meeting between heads of state - when it
occurred, who attended, how it was organized, what issues were
discussed, and so on - is relatively easy. There are public records
to consult. Most ordinary people have left little in the way of
public records, and the lack of evidence becomes all the more
intimidating if the biographer is interested, as Johnson was, in
their psychological and moral interiors as well as the external
details of their lives. The farther we reach down to ordinary lives
that left few records, and the deeper we try to penetrate to the
less accessible corners of consciousness, the more tempting it is to
slide from "fact" into "fiction."
Step 1:
Savage's life was not, of course, ordinary. He was a
published author, a notorious figure, at times something of a cause
célèbre. And yet, compared to the great public figures of his day
(including the figure Johnson himself later became), he spent most
of his life in obscurity and left few traces. Johnson was
nonetheless confident that he could convey the truth not only about
the facts of Savage's life, but also about the kind of man he was,
the real "character" behind the public images and rumors. His
confidence rested on the fact that he had been on friendly and
indeed intimate terms with his subject and hence, probably more than
any other living soul, could relate his life as he had experienced
it.
Arguably, however, it was precisely because Johnson could draw on
this "personal knowledge" (as he would call it in his Rambler essay)
that he failed to do the sorts of things one might expect a
biographer committed to veracity to do. Holmes has recorded
Johnson's lapses with admirable precision, and I'll just recall a
few. He accepted without any apparent skepticism Savage's claims
about his birth and his self-serving allegations about his mother's
many efforts to ruin him. For the period before he knew Savage,
Johnson relied heavily on a pamphlet written by the poet's friends
in 1727 with the obviously biased purpose of saving him from the
gallows. He did not consult available documents that would have
contradicted the pamphlet's many errors of fact, or interview people
who would have provided a quite different point of view. And so on.
The result is that, as Holmes demonstrates, Johnson often seems
almost inexplicably gullible and his narrative of Savage's life is
often misleading. What are we to make of this? Is the Life so
factually unreliable that nothing in it can be trusted? Or is there
reason to believe that, despite its errors, it is a reliable
psychological portrait of Savage?
Step 2: Now read the selection from Holmes's
Footsteps. It's safe to
say, I think, that Holmes agrees with Johnson that biography must be
kept cleanly distinct from fiction. Unlike the novelist creating a
fictional character, he argues, the biographer "cannot really say
that his subject 'thought' or 'felt' a particular thing." If he is
to avoid culpability in "the courts of Truth," his narrative must be
"a type of shorthand," always implicitly limited to the claim that
"'there is evidence from his letters or journals or reported
conversations that he thought, or that he felt, such-and-such a
thing at this time…'"
How do these observations apply to
Johnson & Savage? Does Holmes
practice what he preaches? In the Life Johnson acknowledges that he
was a friend of Savage, but makes no mention of their intimate
conversations on "night walks" through the streets of London during
the first two years of their friendship. In fact, as Holmes is quick
to admit, there are no first-hand accounts of those walks and
conversations, or of Johnson and Savage being together at any other
time. We have only a few second- or third-hand accounts, from people
who learned of the friendship much later from Johnson or someone
else. This is the kind of challenge that a biographical sleuth like
Holmes cannot resist. How can he make visible a friendship that, as
a matter of historical record, is "invisible?" At issue, I should
stress, is not a minor detail, but the hinge of Holmes's entire
interpretation. At critical moments Holmes's biography of the
biography turns on a biography of the friendship; and the crux of
the latter is that two-year period of night walks and conversations
for which we have no surviving comment from either man and no
first-hand description from anyone else.
How does Holmes fill this immense lacuna in the evidence? Does he
pull it off, or does he, in practice, stray into the fiction he is
committed in principle to avoiding?
Exercise 3: Biographer and Subject
The
Rambler essay gives us two reasons why the biographies of people
like Savage are worth writing and reading. The first I will call our
need to empathize with others, and the second our need to form moral
judgments about them. Johnson seems to assume that these are
naturally paired, and indeed that they complement each other in
making biography morally "instructive." But we could as well regard
empathy and judgment as working at cross purposes. It is a short
step from empathizing with your subject - trying to see the world as
he saw it, and to experience it as he experienced it - to accepting
uncritically his excuses for behavior that is, on the face of it,
inexcusable. The more you empathize with your subject, the more you
run the risk of absolving her of moral responsibility. At the other
extreme, you can become so intent on judging your subject - on
identifying the moral flaws in her character, and in specifying when
she was (and was not) at fault - that empathy is precluded; and the
result is that you strike the reader as judgmental, blind to the
fragilities of human nature, perhaps even hypocritical in subjecting
others to moral standards you yourself cannot meet.
Step 1:
Take another, closer look at the
Rambler essay, with the
above issues in mind. On empathy: why does Johnson think it is
possible for the biographer to "[place] us, for a time, in the
condition of him whose fortune we contemplate"? What does he mean by
"an act of the imagination"? On judgment: In what sense can the
biographer, in Johnson's view, "widely diffuse instruction"?
(Consider his claim that "more knowledge may be gained of a man's
real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants,
than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree,
and ended with his funeral." What sort of knowledge does Johnson
have in mind?)
Step 2: The
Life may strike you as excessively empathetic. It is not
simply that Johnson made a strenuous effort to sympathize with
Savage's plights. Holmes demonstrates (and I think the text
abundantly confirms) that Johnson identified with the poet as an
alienated outsider, and indeed "loved" him as a friend despite all
his nasty faults. He seems compelled to excuse Savage's outrageous
behavior, if only by saying that, in view of the victimization he
had suffered, nothing better could be expected. And yet at the end -
in the final paragraph of the Life, apparently added to a reissue of
the text - the stern moralist seems to win out; Johnson does condemn
his friend, and rather harshly. Let the Life be a reminder, he tells
us, to "those, who in Confidence of superior Capacities or
Attainments disregard the common Maxims of Life." The lesson is that
"nothing will supply the Want of Prudence, and that Negligence and
Irregularity, long continued, will make Knowledge useless, Wit
ridiculous, and Genius contemptible."
Does the text betray the author's confusion - his inability to make
up his mind about someone he knew all too well? Or is it a literary
(and rhetorical) triumph, fusing his conflicting impulses into a
coherent image of a "character"?
Step 3: How would you describe the roles of empathy and judgment,
identification and disapproval, in Holmes's relationship with
Johnson?
Exercise 4: Biography and the Study of Literature
You may have noticed that both Johnson and Holmes quote extensively
from Savage's poetry. And that brings us to our final issue: how
does - and should - a biographer relate the life of an author to the
products of her work? To take a hypothetical example, a literary
scholar writing the biography of T.S. Eliot chooses to exclude any
detail that, in her judgment, does not enhance our understanding of
the meaning of his poetry or, in an even more "purist" approach,
ignores anything that does not deepen our appreciation of the
literary merit and quality of the poetry. She finds it quite
relevant to her purpose that T.S. Eliot converted to
Anglicanism
but entirely irrelevant that he was very fond of cats. The reader
who shares Eliot's fondness for cats - or who suspects that his
fondness points to a dark secret of his psyche - will be
disappointed. At the other extreme, a biographer preoccupied with
revealing everything possible about the man behind the poetry
largely ignores the issue of literary meaning and merit; the poems
are relevant only to the extent that they reveal something about the
life, and are read simply as windows onto the life. In contemporary
celebrity culture, this latter approach often takes the form of
bio-exposés of famous authors - biographies intent on revealing the
monsters, or at least the tragically flawed human beings, behind the
authorial personae. If the reader is at all interested in an
author's works as literary achievements, she is left wondering how
such an awful person could have produced them. The serious literary
scholar has reason to complain that the study of the life, rather
than advancing our study of the work, has replaced it.
What are the differences in the ways Johnson and Holmes relate
Savage's life and his poetry, and indeed in the reasons that they
quote the poetry? Perhaps the best place to begin is their comments
on the figure "Suicide" in "The Wanderer" (the
Life, pp. 54-56;
Johnson & Savage, pp. 89-90).
Further Reading:
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Walter Jackson Bate,
Samuel Johnson (1984). |
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James Boswell,
Life of Johnson (1981), edited by R.W. Chapman
(1970). An imposing reading project, but well worth it. |
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Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of
Literature," in Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
(1982): 1-40. Explores the "Grub Street" subculture of Paris on the
eve of the French Revolution. Makes for interesting comparisons with
London.
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Hogarth.
The Complete Engravings, edited by Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell. Indispensable to appreciating the
social diversity, the vitality, and the squalor of
eighteenth-century London. |
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Alvin Kernan,
Samuel Johnson & the Impact of Print (1987). A study
of Johnson's success in establishing himself in the new print
culture. Includes a discussion of the significance of Savage's life.
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Maynard Mack,
Alexander Pope: A Life (1985) |
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Pat Rogers,
The Augustan Vision (1974) |
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Adam Sisman, Boswell's Presumptuous
Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (2001). Another
absorbing biography of a biogaphy. |
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Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972). Informative on Grub
Street as an
actual place as well as on its metaphoric significance in English
literature. |
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Clarence Tracy,
The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard
Savage (1953). A careful reconstruction of Savage's life from the
available evidence, though without Holmes's panache. |
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John Wain,
Samuel Johnson (1974). Superseded in some ways by Bate's
biography, but more informative on Johnson's relationship with
Savage.
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