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REVIEWS UFE OF SAVAGE" Clarence Tracy undoubtedly knows more about the enigmatic eighteenthcentury individual who called himself Richard Savage than anyone since Savage's own lifetime 01697-1743) - perhaps than anyone except Savage himself. Tracy'S biography of him, The Artificial Bastard, appeared in 1953, and his edition of Savage's poetical works in 1962. Obviously the next task was Johnson's fine Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, published the year after Savage's death and reprinted many times since, but never properly edited until now; and this assignment Professor Tracy has carried out with his usual quiet competence. It perhaps needs emphasizing that Johnson's Life deserves the care that Professor Tracy has unstintingly bestowed on il. It is one of the most surprising productions of Johnson's bewilderingly various genius, possibly the work that most amply authorizes Boswell's great tribute in the opening sentence of his Life of Johnson : 'To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others ... is an arduous and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.' It is the one full-dress biography Johnson ever wrote - the so--cal1ed Lives of the Poets, written some thirty-five years later, were, as their correct title indicates, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical to collections of works of several dozen English poets - and, in its concern with psychological analysis, its use of concrete detail, seemingly trivial but often highly revealing, and the deep emotional involvement of the biographer with his subject, perhaps the first 'modern' biography. (Yet Johnson is only obeying his own strikingly modern theory of biography, set out in Rambler 60, which adumbrates Strachey's 'Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.') When young Johnson, talented, neglected, miserably poor, and intensely sorry for himself, arrived in London in 1737, he was greatly attracted to and fascinated by the older writer, Savage, likewise conscious of talent, and self-pitying almost to the point of paranoia. Johnson's story of the suit of clothes - some friends, seeing that Savage badly needed one, took up a collection, but instead of giving the money to Savage, paid it to a tailor, with instructions to measure him and make the suit; whereupon Savage 'came to the lodging of a friend with the most violent agonies of rage, exclaiming with the utmost vehemence of indignation, 'That they had sent for a tailor to measure him'" - sounds very much like the story of Johnson at Oxford hurling a gift of a much-needed pair·Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage. Ed. Clarence Tracy. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971. Pp. xxxvi, 162. $7.75. UTQ, Volume XLU, Number I, Fall 1972 LIFE OF SAVAGE 83 of shoes hack down the stairs after the donors. Johnson revels in the most melodramatic fashion in Savage's archetypal story - never proved or disproved of his fiendishly cruel, rejecting mother, anxious even to encompass his death. (Johnson's relationship with his own mother is seen by his latest psychological biographer, George Irwin, as the key to his massive psychological ailments.) On nights when they could not find enough money between them for a bed in a flophouse, the young and the older 'injustice collector' (as one psychoanalytic critic termed Savage) walked 'round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning , dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, and giving laws to the several states of Europe.' Johnson recounts with disapproval the numerous near psychopathic escapades that eventually alienated from Savage the many who tried to befriend him and led to an early death in a debtors' prison. Yet Johnson cannot help adding, 'Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty, nor will a wise man easily presume to say, "Had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage." , It is an apolOgia, not only for Savage, but for the 'eccentric' Samuel Johnson. Professor Tracy's introduction, a little disappointingly, does not make as much as it might of the fascination of the book as a work of literature and psychology. (Cyril Connolly once included it...

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