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In My Good Books

A New Kind of Human Story

James Fenton
copyright © 2005

Originally published in The Guardian
31 December 2005

Appreciatively reviewed by Nicholas Lezard in these pages (December 17), the new edition of Johnson on Savage, edited by Richard Holmes, is indeed very welcome. In addition to its main contents, Dr Johnson's famous description of the accursed poet in "An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl of Rivers" (1744), the slim book includes Johnson's three essays on biographical themes in the Rambler and the Idler. For the inquirer into life-writing, this makes it a very handy kit, because these three essays were reprinted again and again. Johnson was very influential. But did he invent modern biography?

Holmes in his introduction tells us that "Johnson had championed English biography as a virtually new genre. He had saved it from the medieval tradition of solemnly extended hagiography, or the lifeless accumulations of 17th century biographical Dictionaries." But for once I disagree with Holmes. Indeed I think he disagrees with himself, since in the volume Defoe on Sheppard and Wild in the same HarperCollins series, he has biography set free by the genius of Daniel Defoe "to tell a new kind of human story". So that takes us back to the 1720s at least. I think we could trace it further.

What was the newness of this kind of story? What is being talked about is partly the choice of character: Savage's life was the opposite of exemplary, and Johnson tries not to skirt over the worst of his bad behaviour. Indeed he gives us more than enough information for us to doubt that the author has quite understood or faced up to the implications of the story he is telling.

Was the illegitimate Savage persecuted by his unfeeling mother, or was he persecuting her? Was he - a thought Holmes certainly entertains - a stalker? The book worried Boswell. It failed to convince John Clare, who wrote of it in 1824: "It is a very interesting piece of biography, but the criticisms are dictated by friendship that too often forgets judgment ought to be one of the company." A modern delight in reading between the lines ensures that Johnson will interest us either way. He may fail as an advocate for his dead friend, but if he does fail he engages our interest in his own motivation.

There was nothing unprecedented, however, in writing a life of a character notable for his faults - even in English, Bishop Burnet's life of Rochester had done that. But Johnson, in his little essays on biography, makes a good moral case against covering up a subject's faults: "If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth."

If history was typically expected to deal with large events (remember that this was long before social history took an interest in daily or private lives of common people), biography seemed to be about small things. Some biographers consciously attempted to cut out the trivia. Johnson loved and recommended the telling detail that was revelatory of character.

A classical example he gives comes from Sallust's account of Catiline, that "his walk was now quick, and again slow" indicative of "a mind revolving something with violent commotion". Johnson likes to learn of Luther's friend Philip Melanchthon that "when he made an appointment, he expected not only the hour, but the minute to be fixed, that the day might not run out in the idleness of suspense". Since Cranach painted Melanchthon's portrait, one may imagine that he too came across this novel exactness when making an appointment.

Johnson thought that many of the large subjects which had engaged biographers - lives of soldiers or ministers - would prove of no lasting value and would never be read. He suggested the learned might write of their own lives. He gives a vivid thumbnail sketch of what it is like to find that you have had a literary success.

And he tells what it is like to find that your reputation is in decline: "If the author enters a coffee-house, he has a box to himself; if he calls at a bookseller's, the boy turns his back; and, what is most fatal of all prognosticks, authors will visit him in a morning, and talk to him hour after hour of the malevolence of criticks, the neglect of merit, the bad taste of the age and the candour of posterity."

This kind of experience is part of our common humanity. "Success and miscarriage have the same effect on all conditions." So this was the sort of neglected material that might form "very amusing scenes of biography". And of course no one ever read these three Johnson essays with more attention, or learned their lessons better, than Boswell.

    
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