Читать книгу Too Far for Comfort - Rana Tekcan - Страница 7

Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D.

There is a group of biographers who are historically placed at such a privileged moment that they are able to see their subjects with their own eyes. Does it follow that the strongest asset of any biographer is his/her personal knowledge of the subject – as Anthony Alpers says with reference to Robert Browning’s famous line, “the author once saw Shelley plain, and there is no substitute for that” (12)? Whether this unique situation is an advantage or a disadvantage in disguise has been a topic for debate. There are cases where the personal relation between the biographer and the subject produces disaster. The biographers in such cases are mostly relatives or close friends who may be just too close to write a reliable narrative. The commemorative instinct reigns above all other likely and often imperative considerations such as adherence to facts or objectivity. The outcome is a panegyric full of tiresome praise, distortions of fact and covering of faults.

Despite the possible abuses of the “distanceless” biographer-subject relationship, some of the genre’s most famous examples are included in this category. The biographers in these works manage somehow to curb, transform, or masterfully disguise their basic commemorative instinct. This might be the most complicated author-subject relationship in literature since the intention of writing the biography of someone one knows is never pure, unambiguous or wholly altruistic. The debate of objectivity is hardly won by the biographer. In the midst of such emotional entanglement choices are not easily made when time comes to express faults or weaknesses without offering justifications. These complications aside, personal knowledge is invaluable to the creation of the sense of immediacy and lived life. Managing to recreate this immediacy on paper is the touchstone of any successful biography. These biographers are lucky: What is there to make the retelling of a life more vivid than knowing the subject’s favourite walk, favourite food, the absolutely favourite poem, the tone of his/her voice when s/he speaks or the look on his/her face when s/he gets angry? Naturally each biographer uses this advantage in his/her own way, in certain cases the intimacy itself is reason enough to write a biography.

Within this category it will be interesting to look at two well-known examples of the genre: Samuel Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Both biographers personally knew their subjects in varying degrees and both used this intimate knowledge to find their own way of creating a vivid portrait on paper. As Homburger and Charmley claim in The Troubled Face of Biography these works “[seek] to do what only the greatest art has ever done: to convey the feel of an individual’s experience, to see the world as a single person saw it” (xi), their advantage being the opportunity to stand together with their subjects, at least for a certain amount of time, and look at the same world with them. Let us start with one of the most seemingly odd biographical pairs.

In 1777, a group of London based booksellers came together to publish a collection of works by English poets. They were a competitive group since a similar task was recently completed by a group of Edinburgh booksellers. However, that particular edition was criticized for its small print and errors. These London booksellers were determined to make a better effort. They would attach the name of one of the most illustrious literary figures of the land to the production of their series which would ensure profitable sales. With this in mind, they approached the then sixty-eight year old Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). He was to write a biographical preface for each of the poets featured. Johnson agreed. He was no stranger to biography by then. He was both a practitioner with a series of lives written for the Gentleman’s Magazine and a theoretician with two major essays on biography in The Rambler No: 60 (1750) and The Idler No: 84 (1760) under his belt. Johnson’s prefaces were published under the title Prefaces Biographical and Critical to the Works of the English Poets; but they came to be known by the title Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781). Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Gray, Swift are some of the names on this list of poets. However, there is one name among them that is not very readily recognized today: Richard Savage. Why would Johnson add Savage to this list? Is this the generosity of a talented man to one who is less accomplished than himself or did he consider him equal to the others? Any answer we try to find will mislead us if we ask the question thinking Savage as an integral part of this group of literary figures, for Life of Richard Savage does not actually belong to the series.

To place this work in its right context we need to go back thirty-three years to 1744. We also need to leave behind the older Johnson, whose name attached to any work assures profits, and go to a young Johnson who is just starting out in London, a Johnson who is just emerging from the position of a Grub Street hack “who signed his letters in 1738 ‘impransus’ – supperless” (Holmes 9).

Johnson was writing anonymously for the Gentleman’s Magazine. By 1742 he had published a short series of lives of scholars, physicians, scientists, priests, and others. A year later his friend, the poet Richard Savage, died, and in 1744 Johnson wrote his biography. This work, alongside poems like “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” which he signed openly, established Johnson as a figure of major literary force and fame.

Why pick Savage who was little more than a frustrated genius even for his contemporaries? For the answer we need to look in two different directions. One is personal: Savage was a friend of Johnson’s youth. Together they suffered poverty. Johnson made it, but Savage never did. After a life of misfortune, misunderstanding, waste, and self-destruction Savage died in prison, penniless and virtually friendless. Johnson used biography to justify Savage’s ways to the public, to clear his name for posterity. Ironically, he made his friend immortal through literature, something which Savage himself was unable to realize with his own claim to genius and his literary output.

The second direction is Johnson’s moralistic approach to biography which he later formulated in the two essays he wrote for The Rambler and The Idler. In The Rambler No: 60 he writes:

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind. (95)

If so, what better material for a biography could there be than Savage’s life? Savage claimed that he was the illegitimate son of Earl Rivers and Anne Countess of Macclesfield. His parentage was never acknowledged and he never got the inheritance which he believed was due to him. He lived a life of poverty with occasional bubbles of good fortune which burst just as soon as they materialized.

Johnson opens his rendition of this “fit for fiction” life with an echo of his moralistic approach. He makes a general statement about the human condition. This is not a conventional opening for a biography. The common practice is to introduce the subject directly, in the very first paragraph. Here, we find that the introductory paragraph does not highlight an individual but what may be considered common to humanity in general, indicating that Johnson is particularly interested in the extent to which this life will awaken empathy in others, and provide them with instruction and comfort.

In this opening section Johnson states that power or fortune does not guarantee happiness. The ordinary person who possesses much of neither, falls into the mistake of believing the opposite and thinks himself unfortunate. Life is full of examples to the contrary. Since power and fortune are “extrinsic,” it is understandable that they do not bring happiness. But one expects more from “intrinsic” attributes such as “intellectual greatness.” Although Savage was unable to gain either power or fortune, Johnson implies that he was a literary gem and thus blessed with “intrinsic” value; however, the biography will show that this advantage is not enough either. Hence Johnson defines Life of Savage as “a mournful narrative.” In the beginning, the Savage Johnson sees is a gifted man who suffers in life because of misfortunes beyond his control: q