Читать книгу Johnson on Savage: The Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson - Samuel Johnson - Страница 8

Johnson had one other major biographical source of information. He obtained from Cave a 29 page pamphlet written anonymously at the time of Savage’s conviction for murder in 1727. It was entitled The Life of Mr Richard Savage…Who was Condemned at the last Sessions of the Old Bailey, for Murder…With some very remarkable Circumstances relating to the Birth and Education of that Gentleman, which were Never before made Publick. This was the pamphlet, hurriedly organized by Aaron Hill, intended to save Savage from the hangman’s noose. It was dashed off in 2 days by a fellow Grub Street journalist, one Thomas Cooke, who worked in the upstairs room of a Fleet Street tavern, hoping to save ‘a brother poet - how unworthy soever of the appellation’ from the gallows. It was from this work that Johnson drew his extraordinary portrait of Lady Macclesfield, which dramatically sets the combative tone of the opening.

Johnson’s righteous anger is felt throughout this early section, with an unrelenting series of attacks on Lady Macclesfield’s ‘barbarous’, ‘cruel’ and ‘unnatural’ behaviour. He recounts a breathless (and gripping) series of incidents in which she denies Savage’s birthright, suppresses his name, farms him out to a nurse, frustrates a £300 inheritance, attempts to apprentice him to a shoemaker, and dispatch him to the American colonies. Finally she promotes his execution by seeking to prevent the royal pardon, (p.26–7)

The mounting bitterness of these accusations, their rhetorical force, and their melodramatic repetitions, cannot quite hide from an alert reader their curious and unsubstantiated nature. Most problematic of all, Johnson can find no real motive - moral, prudential or pecuniary - for these maternal crimes, (p.5). Yet it is difficult to doubt Johnson’s good faith, and since Lady Macclesfield was still alive (a point he reiterates), one assumes he had documentary evidence that would have protected him and his publisher against libel.

But he did not. All these stories were simply taken from the Old Bailey pamphlet of 1727. No doubt they were confirmed by Savage in his long conversations with Johnson, yet the fact is that they have no other independent documentary source. Even the ‘convincing Original Letters’ which Savage claimed he had discovered and proved his birth, were never actually produced. They are mentioned in the Old Bailey pamphlet, and the editor Aaron Hill claimed he once saw them in 1724, but they were never printed and have long since disappeared. One concludes that Johnson simply wanted - or needed - to believe Savage’s version of events. And to defend Savage, he must also make his reader believe.

Johnson’s defence of Savage’s whole disastrous life - the sponging, the blackmail, the murder charge, the ingratitude to his patron Tyrconnel; and later the obscene poetry, the reckless improvidence, the moral blindness, and the self-destructive behaviour in London and Bristol - depends upon his convincing the reader that Savage was a lifelong victim of Lady Macclesfield’s persecutions. So she is consistently presented as Savage’s evil star, his nemesis, his avenging angel.

This mother is still alive, and may, perhaps, even yet, though her malice was so often defeated, enjoy the pleasure of reflecting that the life which she often endeavored to destroy, was at least shortened by her maternal offices; that, though she could not transport her son to the plantations, bury him in the shop of a mechanick, or hasten the hand of the public executioner, she has yet had the satisfaction of embittering all his hours, and forcing him into exigencies that hurried his death, (p.28)

Over forty years later, Boswell the professional biographer and trained lawyer (he had a brilliant success in defending a sheep-stealer at the Scottish Bar) was also strangely puzzled by what he saw as Johnson’s credulousness over Savage’s claims. ‘Johnson’s partiality for Savage made him entertain no doubt of his story, however extraordinary and improbable. It never occurred to him to question his being the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, of whose unrelenting barbarity he so loudly complained, and the particulars of which are related in so strong and affecting a manner in Johnson’s Life of him.’

His own subsequent researches cast much doubt over the entire story and left him, in a memorable phrase, ‘vibrating in uncertainty’. Modern scholars, like Clarence Tracy and James L. Clifford, have felt the same perplexity. (See Further Reading)

It is interesting that the great French Enlightenment critic and novelist Denis Diderot, in a review of a French translation of the Life which appeared in Paris in 1771, also singled out the peculiar nature of Johnson’s handling of Lady Macclesfield. He wondered, with a wry smile, if a fiction-writer would have got away with it. This Countess of Macclesfield is a strange woman, persecuting a love-child with a rage sustained for many years, never extinguished and founded on nothing. If a writer decided to introduce, in a play or a novel, a character of this kind, it would be booed.’ The implication is that Johnson has broken the Aristotelian rule of ‘probability’.

Yet Diderot finally gives Johnson (not after all a French classicist) the benefit of the doubt. ‘Nevertheless it is compatible with reality. And is reality then sometimes to be booed? Why not! Does it never deserve it?’ It has been suggested that the chameleon anti-hero of Diderot’s own subsequent novel, Le Neveu de Rameau, may partly have been inspired by Savage’s machinations.

It is certainly possible that Savage may have been what he constantly, obsessively, unfailingly (even under sentence of death) claimed to be: Lady Macclesfield rejected son. Johnson may have been right: his honesty and intellectual judgement were always formidable After all, he later saw through the claims of the epic poet ‘Ossian’, and the Rowley ‘forgeries’ of Thomas Chatterton. On the other hand, his profound sympathy for Savage may simply have misled him. His later confidante, Hester Thrale remarked tenderly: ‘Dear Dr Johnson was not difficult to be imposed on where the Heart came into question.’

Yet there is a strange fury in these biting, unsubstantiated denunciations of Lady Macclesfield which suggest other, obscurer forces at work. They might perhaps be connected with young Johnson’s own darker feelings towards women: his repulsive appearance, his difficulties with his wife Tetty (20 years his senior and increasingly reliant on ‘cordials’); and his own unloving mother Sarah Johnson.

A modern poet and biographer, John Wain, has speculated in this direction rather further than Boswell. There were also deeper emotional reasons. Savage had, by his own account, been cruelly rejected by an unnatural mother. Now Johnson, as we have seen, had strong and ambivalent feelings towards his own mother…This resentment of Sarah for her failure to give him love and emotional security was buttoned down tightly out of sight and watched over by an unsleeping censor. All the more eagerly did he listen to Savage’s tirades against the mother who had similarly, and far more spectacularly, failed him. Chords which his own fingers were forbidden to touch became vibrant at the eloquent recital of Savage’s wrongs. How deep did Savage’s influence go? Very deep, I think. His presence touched the hidden springs of Johnson’s deep feelings, and may, here and there, have caused some strange streams to gush from the rock. He was, for some crucial months, closer to Johnson than anyone else. Certainly, closer than Tetty.’ (Wain, 1974)