Monday, September 14, 2009
A Guest Thought From Charles Schuling Concerning "Abbey Road"
Hyde Park in the Moonlight
Saturday night I cut through the newly landscaped main quad to return to Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap for a "Last Night of the Summer" beer with the group. It reconfirmed my attitude towards bars: they're loud. So loud that I have to speak up and keep my ears firmly attuned to hear, and this after mastering the art of keeping my voice level all summer! It also reconfirmed my almost-forgotten attitude towards Pilsner Urquell: one of the best beers on the planet. (Old Style, as Marc would say, is just a PBR variation and not a good one at that...sorry Chicago.)
But I go to bars not necessarily for the atmosphere or the beer but for the conversation, and a completely different bunch was there for the second get-together. Peter came by, which was terrific, but I also met Karen, who lives in our building (the only other one so far and who moved in yesterday...not the Karen who resembles Lisa and will run board game night but a short blonde who reminds me physically of Diana Santangelo, BHS Orchestra Concertmaster)...and Bailey, who triple-majored in English, Japanese and Film, once interned for some of the greatest magazines on Earth, and who lights up when you tell her you got to meet Werner Herzog. And there were reacquaintances with Phil the talkative philosopher, Jamie, the gentle giant of a historian who went downtown with Julie and I back in April, and Davis, the cinematic man who loves good music.
And yesterday, after I took a walk to Promentory Point and read the Letter to the Romans in an essential bit of soul-searching which left me with much peace of mind, I had my first MAPH event: the barbecue and picnic. Now, the only problem here was that I had so many people I wanted to have conversations with and so little time (could have kept it going at Jimmy's afterwards, but saving my money and have little inclination for more to drink after a heavy meal). But I WAS able to meet Abigail Zitin, my preceptor, who has absolutely NO stuffiness and is great to talk to, and I re-met all the program heads...Professor Levin now has a beard, but Professor Miller still looks like Gary Sinise...and Lindsey, the big-hearted social services worker...who distinctly remembered our talk from Campus Days as much as I did (and like Danny found me on YouTube). There were more hellos, more spouses and significant others, a great Hitchcock movie (Oh Grace Kelly...), and enough pork, beef, coleslaw, baked beans, and barbecue sauce and cornbread and wine to feed a Napoleonic brigade. We shall definitely be marching on our stomachs today for the first lecture.
So the last thing to ponder as day starts to break over Hyde Park...WHY is my Internet suddenly working better after Peter and I plunk down $80 for a modem and $20 a month for access? Ah, well, better safe than sorry...
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A Prayer by the Writer for His First Day of Graduate School, September 13, 2009
God,
Bless my parents, my brother, and all my relatives, Rostan and Kacenga.
Bless my dear friends, spread here, there, and everywhere.
Bless all the people in the world whom I care about, and all those I would care about if I only knew them.
Bless all afflicted by the evils of humanity, that one day they may be comforted and troubled no more.
Bless all who practice the evils of humanity, that they may experience repentance or divine justice.
Bless all who create, inspire, and instruct in hopes of bringing a society into being which is truly part of the kingdom.
And I humbly ask of you that my mind stay disciplined, focused, and open to all ideas, that my body remain strong to support me through the work ahead, that my heart be full of love and peace and empathy for my newfound partners in this great endeavor and cohabitors of this wonderful city, and that my reverence for You and Your righteousness and eternal plan remain paramount in my mind as I strive towards fusing the best of this temporal world together.
I humbly ask of you that for the next ten months, and all my days beyond then, I shall each day perform works in accordance with your faith to serve your other children.
And I humbly, meekly ask of you to bless my tiny little soul as I find my true self and my way on Your many paths.
In gratitude for the innumerable, undeserved blessings You have already bestowed upon me…
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit…
Amen.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Coming of Mr. Gaffney, or, Andrew’s First Trip to Costco
My apartment is now the way it was always meant to be. You can tell by the oscillating fan in my bedroom, the year's supply of toilet paper in the closet, the newly-expanded quantities of coffee, soup, and pasta…and most of all by Peter Gaffney, Vassar '08, sleeping in the room across the hall.
Peter showed up at 11:30, a tall, thin, but very well-built man with a fine pair of glasses: sharp, brown-rimmed, angular, but still fitting the contours of his face. We'd had three conversations over the phone, and I quickly learned the laid-back demeanor of his cellular presence equaled the friendliness of his being here in the flesh…and, like when Paul came to our first apartment in May 2007, or when I left Burbank for Big Pink, it was a great relief and comfort not to be alone anymore. In fact, I'm not alone in a double sense. It turns out Peter and I both have the one-time Oxford English Dictionary American-edition employee Abigail Zitin as our preceptor. Can't wait to meet her tomorrow…and everyone else!
Peter's mother helped him move in…a very attractive art teacher who has now sent three children off to college. She is NOT like my mother in that her whirlwind of energy never eases into a breeze. And yesterday was the sort of day you needed energy, and the senior Gaffney was lucky to have it, as well as the patience of a saint.
Peter also had a minivan, but only two large suitcases and two heavy coats. After these were dropped off (and both my new acquaintances viewed the apartment) and he signed the lease (half his keys don't work) we made tracks for Target at Marquette and 81st Street. WHOLE OTHER WORLD. Except for one megachurch, every building was careworn, and most very garish, and drivers cut across lanes and people ran through the streets with little regard. It was like being back on Western Avenue, only even more in-your-face. Then at Target, we were the only white people in the store…not that this mattered, but after the multicultural Targets of Los Angeles it was a bit unnerving being in the minority. Picked up lots of good stuff at great prices, including the fan.
After we both installed fans and he put sheets on the bed, late lunch at Potbelly, where you apparently have to ask for vegetables on your healthy Mushroom Melt. Then came Costco, and unfortunately our moving locations to 55th Street had the Garmin convinced that the best way to get there was on the freeway. At 4:00 on a Friday.
The alternate route we took after fifteen minutes idling along sent us through neighborhoods in Chicago I'd never seen before and will probably never see again, streets of Hispanic businesses and massive schools (including the Miles Davis Academy) and abandoned buildings with propped up mattresses instead of glass in the windows and forlorn industrial plants recalling Youngstown and Detroit…between that and the salsa stations we'd find as Peter scanned the radio, it was Los Angeles déjà vu.
And out of nowhere, a row of one big-box store after another. Costco (which I'd been to once before in Marina Del Rey but did not purchase anything from) is Sam's Club on an even more extravagant scale, with everything you could ever want apart from Ramen noodles. Turns out Peter loves to cook as much as I do, so we acquired eggs, chicken tenderloins, and the aforementioned other provisions as we pushed the cart through one aisle after another.
Unsurprisingly, the route home took us back in a much more direct manner not involving freeways. And I had time to unwind with a few drinks (only one non-alcoholic), a book about Trollope, the comforting news I can get into the first major Victorian course of the year AND read Vanity Fair again in the process, and a nice late-night chat, the first of what will probably be many, with Mr. Gaffney as we tried to force his keys to do what they were intended for but inclined against, got his e-mail worked up, and talked about the things we loved…including how happy we are to be here.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Return to the MAPH 100
Wearing my striped PGA shirt, Old Navy khakis, and fedora, I walk over to the Starbucks at 55th and Woodlawn and meet Raff, philosophy major born and raised in Pittsburgh, getting off the bus. As we walk in, I suddenly realize that a little coffee shop would have been great for a meeting for two, but…an unestimable number is rather different. Then, as more of us wander in, it turns out there's a picnic bench in the back, and people are there reading Freud, Mika in charge already.
Three hours later, we've held a mini-Campus Days for about one-third of the program. I'm reacquainted with Danny, the personable Bostonian with slicked hair who acts like life is a giant stand-up routine…and who remembers our conversation regarding Boswell from all those months ago, which makes me that much more delighted to see him again…and Julie, as kind and winning and quietly knowing and supportive as ever. And I meet and re-meet people, many of whom were surprisingly NOT here back in April, and we trade academic stories and miscellany and thoughts on Obama's health-insurance plan and frustrations with Freud. I drink a coffee Frappucino light and meet Bill, who wears a cool tie, Karen, who reminds me of Lisa and loves James Joyce and has a sick husband, Abby, a dancer from KENT, Pete, who's never missed an episode of Lost, Artemis, a Brooklynite whose age I don't know but who cheerfully admits to being the eldest in the group, and even Amelia from Austin Texas, who looks nothing like my creation and lives in a basement apartment with her fiancé and two dogs, and Anna who makes every sentence seem like the funniest thing ever…I could go on…
A detour to show people around and talk ethics with Raff, and then five of us take the Metra to Van Buren. Julie and I laugh about how every time we meet up in Chicago we travel together. Joining us this time, and taking the permanent place of Katharine who won a fellowship to stay in Iowa…congratulations and I'll miss you!...are Alex from Michigan and Bowling Green (!), film, Jess from Minnesota, feminist theory, and Ashley, also from Austin, English and dance. Both Jess and Ashley are redheads, and Ashley looks like Nicole Kidman in Practical Magic, so they and Julie make good company…although I talk to Alex about film most of the way on the train.
The Art Institute of Chicago's free Thursdays are beautifully packed, and we see the modern and Impressionist galleries over 100 lovely minutes. Nighthawks. American Gothic. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grand Jatte. A room full of Monets I'll be coming back to in winter. And in an exhibit which would have delighted my Mom and Dad and is just about to close, a history of wine storage and glassware with accompanying art from the Greeks to the Dutch masters to Hogarth to Neiman. Casks, 18th-century bottles, urns, the most beautiful punch bowls and ewers I've ever seen, the greatest Murano and Morani there is, and an astounding all-glass still life of a table full of spillage. I don't even get back to the Thorpe Miniature Rooms but we have a great time. Julie is the most passionate art lover I've been to a museum with thus far…she keeps falling behind the rest of us as different things transfix her, and Ashley and Jess love Monet and company as much as I do.
By now we're starving, and we're a few short blocks from the Berghoff, the 100 year-old restaurant which is just a little pricy but we figure we'll splurge one night. We toast to the year with water and Pepsi and talk about what classes will be like, what the future will be like, what we know we can do. Judging that cooking with your own beer will be a good sign, I have an excellent, just-the-right-amount battered cod with sweet potato fries and fruit coleslaw. Ashley is a vegetarian and she is the last to finish a delectable Iceberg wedge. I clue the others in to the books on sale at the store, but over a back-to-the-Metra talk about bridge and mah jong and Texas Hold 'Em, I look at the programs in Alex's hand and realize I left them and the hat under my seat. We retrieve them and nobody cares…but we miss the train by a minute and have to wait forty for the next one, passing the time by discussing movie musicals and the hauntingness of Cabaret in a slowly-filling station.
On the train back to Hyde Park, a giant black man sees me, waves, and makes his way next to us, so I spend ten minutes having my hand vigorously shaken by Lamont from Ivanhoe as he shares that he's going home to smoke a blunt while watching the porn tapes he got for his birthday! And he has Old Country Buffet coupons!
Jess lives near me, so I walk her home under the moonlit Hyde Park night, keeping on her purse side the way Mommy told me, both of us gently reassured by a fine day and night of friendship that we did the right thing in coming here.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
I Am Fifth: The Chicago Diary of Andrew J. Rostan Begins Today...
Epilogue: “Now Rising Fortune ELEVATES His Mind…He Shines Unclouded, and Adorns Mankind”
Many people I have spoken to regarding the graduate school experience refer to studying the humanities, or anything else, as joining in an eternal conversation. In my lifetime, it shall be a privilege to say what I feel is worth saying, then leave behind words for others to respond to.
Today, as a postscript to my piece on Samuel Johnson, Richard Savage, and Sigmund Freud, I want to add in some things which struck me in a sort of live-blogging format while reading an entire book on the same subject…which never mentions Freud once. In 1993, the great historian and literature expert Richard Holmes devoted over 200 pages to the case of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (What a great title!), and in homage to this superior figure, I offer some thoughts of my own, as I recently did with Nabokov. (And yes, the commentary will resume, but if you asked me when, I'd have to say around the same time Hollywood shoots A Confederacy of Dunces.)
Prologue: Johnson used seven excerpts from Savage's poetry to illustrate the definitions of his Dictionary. The words were "elevate," "expanse," "fondly," "lone," "squander," "sterilise," and "suicide." A combination which suggests someone warmly regarding someone else who managed to touch their life for the better before a tragic end.
Death: Holmes points out on 10 that Johnson did not put his name to any publications until 1749 and "The Vanity of Human Wishes." An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage and "London" were as anonymous as his political reportage and pamphlets. Holmes imagines on 10-13 that if Johnson had died at Savage's age, "Wishes" on the market but the complete Dictionary still a beacon in the distance, he would have been even more obscure, certainly less celebrated. When Johnson writes with sympathy about the composite figure of Savage, he is writing of a person leading a life of unquiet desperation, worried he may die without ever making his mark on the world. Perceived desperation, as Freud would agree, drives people to extremes, and gives root to Savage's paranoid hatred as people in his station were succeeding while he kept failing. Johnson had to have grasped this, and thus comes his sympathy for Savage.
Love: Holmes delineates in this chapter the side of Johnson which Boswell, in his father-figure worship, deliberately obscured in his biography, as I discovered in my research to compose my application essay: Johnson was a deeply romantic man, a Cyrano de Bergerac whose ungainly body and physical tics made him despair of finding a woman to love, but did not keep him from engaging in many passions for many young, beautiful girls, in what poet and amateur Johnsoniana collector Anna Seward, whom Boswell tried to ignore in his research, described as "always fancying himself in love with some princess or other." (21) Boswell mentions Johnson's passion for Olivia Lloyd, but glides over his love and subsequent lifelong friendship with Lucy Porter, whose mother he married. (23-26) Holmes dates the period of Johnson and Savage's closest intimacy to 1737-1739 (28), during which time Johnson and Elisabeth were living separately in London. (27) Following Savage's Welsh retreat, Johnson fell in love with Molly Aston, a titled lover of literature to whom he wrote poetry, spent at least one passionate evening with, and actually deferred to the opinions of! (28-29) By the time he wrote Savage, all of this was behind him, and Elisabeth was an overweight, disagreeable alcoholic…Holmes suggests he mainly married her for her fortune so he could launch himself as a teacher. (26) Boswell did depict with perfect accuracy Johnson's closeness and devotion to his friends, Savage being one…how much more intimate were these friendships when Johnson was, as during his years knowing Savage, subjected to unrequited love in his sexual prime while married to an aged shrew who had to have frustrated his capacities? Freud's theories claim that the empathy resulting from Oedipus resolution is also based in an innate bisexuality stemming from identification…in Johnson seeing a man as lonely as himself in Savage, the depth of feeling in such a bond may have approached the passionate, and Johnson's biography of his friend certainly reaches ecstatic highs.
Night: The subject of Johnson and Savage's nighttime excursions through London is described in four different ways. Boswell felt Johnson and Savage engaged in East End literary talk (36), Johnson gaining inspiration for his essays and biographies. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Arthur Murphy placed them in the West End, two dissolute friends dreaming giant dreams of reforming the Walpole-Hanover political system. (37-42) Sir John Hawkins agrees the conversation was political, but writes with bitterness and suspicion that the duo were engaging in serious, seditious discourse. (43-44) And Johnson himself claimed that Savage was forced to live this way for most of his final decade, his opinions banishing him to the outskirts of society. (49-51) The great deed Holmes does in this chapter is to quote Savage's poem on public works (47-48), which reveals that his sympathy for colonies paled next to its root cause: his anger at the "great" societies which oppressed and exploited them. The conclusion here is that we had a young admirer with an empathetic superego listening to the endless, loquacious philosophies of an older man whose constantly frustrated id caused him to see the majority of the world as an oppressive place. Johnson's feelings for Savage, already elevated, would have been pushed to pathos seeing a man of intelligence forced to expand on his philosophies at night in the lowest companies. Small wonder that Johnson felt compelled in later talk with friends to pass this off as humor, using his gift for language to make the literary man, the artist, and the light comic playwright see this episode according to their own views. Only Hawkins, who really knew Johnson at this youngest age, was not entirely fooled.
Mother: Holmes shares my basic view of Countess Anne Macclesfield as a transformed figure and Savage as her threatening persecutor. This chapter expands on both those views. Two points stand out: first, the actual distress Anne had in her marriage to Macclesfield (59-60), which in my opinion would have increased her determination to separate herself from Savage: she was a passionate woman married to an alcoholic brute who fell in love with Rivers, a gambling addict, and gave birth to two children who died in childbirth. Her subsequent life was much happier by comparison, and Savage using his poetry to bring that to mind over and over again would have been unwelcome. Second, Holmes believes Savage's mentor Aaron Hill, the writer and publisher, encouraged his protégé to air his scandalous tale in the press for both attention and more financial success on top of the profitable Overbury. (81-82) Recalling how Pope was able to get Savage to do what his friends wanted through an appeal to his vanity, Savage's exhibitionist tendencies and determination to be heard met a dangerous match in Hill, who recognized the 18th-Century public's taste for lurid roman a clef and now had a talented young writer with whom he could exploit this. Savage, swayed by his id, would not have cared as to how well-advised this course of action really was, as it most likely fueled his mania.
Bard: On pages 83 through 99 Holmes covers a portion of Savage's life Johnson skipped over, in between Overbury and the murder trial, when he was composing "The Wanderer" among other things. This is a side of Savage never even hinted at, friends with pastoral poet James Thomson and other leading intellectuals (including Pope), wealthy enough to go back and forth between London and a nice home in Richmond to write "The Wanderer," and financially in good shape thanks to the success of Miscellaneous Poems, a compendium of different poets associated with Aaron Hill which attracted noble subscribers. Savage also found the time to pen an elaborate castigation of Anne Macclesfield with deliberate malicious calculation. It is unsurprising why Johnson omitted this from Savage, or at least tried to, for with all the emphasis on the starving London poet, an undercurrent throughout Johnson's biography is Savage as charlatan, using his sad story and tastes for poetry and conversation to worm his way into the affections of the powerful and take to sponging, a talent for which his id would have had no qualms. How would his ploy, and Johnson's identifying image of him, have worked if he was better off and more at leisure than others suspected and writing against Macclesfield not out of desperation but out of deliberate effect? Johnson had the evidence, Holmes asserts (91), but to include it would have contradicted Savage's equivalency with Johnson as an unsuccessful, oppressed writer…a successful Savage who at least for a time showed that sinfulness and instinctual living paid would have doomed Johnson's catharsis, for what argument could he have made for changing his behavior if Savage had gotten away with it?
Murder: Holmes takes serious issue with how Johnson obscured the murder charges, and his description of the trial, while initially impartial, devolves into "an outright attack on the prosecution witnesses." (108) Johnson's motivation for doing so is their station as employees and customers at what was (known to Savage) a brothel. (104) If Savage is really Johnson's attempt at his public apology and exorcism for his sins, then from Holmes's second chapter it is clearer than ever his deepest sin was his tendency to sexually dally and engage in at least emotional infidelity. Prostitutes are his nemesis and antithesis, and identifying them with the media for his transgressions, he is for once able to transform his self-hatred into hatred for his "accomplices" in the sexual act…otherwise, again, the whole plan falls apart. The evidence also makes it clear that Savage, possibly heady with his newfound literary fame and recent attack on Macclesfield, provoked the affair by claiming privileges of noble station to occupy private rooms in the brothel against the wishes of the staff. (105-106) Johnson had no record of either Savage's closing oration (116) or Page's summation (119) and so, in falsification, put words in their mouths in the manner he used to cover Parliament for the Gentleman's Magazine (116), which contradicts his assertion of the truth of the biography, of course (116), but is essential for his purpose. In Johnson's interpretation, the trial was where Savage made a stand to determine his own identity after years without the parentage to give him one, and took the first step on his unhappy road to self-destruction at the same time he had his great, all-but-theatrical success. Johnson NEEDED to put something down, and he was intimate enough with Savage to copy his style. Likewise, Page stands in for the world which is out to get Savage, and must have a voice as well as the primary figure who refuses to understand.
Holmes examines all the evidence himself and comes to the conclusion that James Gregory and William Merchant, Savage's two friends, provoked the quarrel and that Savage did kill James Sinclair only when he saw Sinclair advance on the weaponless Gregory…otherwise, he was literally dumbstruck (in all likelihood under the influence) by the turn of events. (125-126) However, Savage, believing still in his superiority, prejudiced the jury against him by talking over everyone at the trial and refusing to obey court protocol, suggesting a violent character (119) but more likely reflecting Savage's psychic drive to be noticed. When Johnson writes of the plea for mercy, Macclesfield's influence, and the ultimate pardon, he was working from information supplied by Savage himself, who saw another opportunity to slander Macclesfield and "for obvious reasons…preferred to boast of the distinguished and literary Lady Hertford" (129) as the prime force behind his salvation when really Aaron Hill had "organised the whole appeal" (129) and prompted Tyrconnel to take charge (127-130), the man with whom Savage would ultimately strive to dissociate himself from. Holmes chalks the account in Savage up to Johnson's "enormous loyalty and moral generosity" (131) and moving "refusal to abandon faith in Savage." (132) "What kind of man could inspire this sort of loyalty?" (132) Holmes asks. The kind of man whom Johnson saw as a few bad decisions away from becoming himself and so turned into a hybrid of souls for the biography. If Savage was condemned by circumstances,. So too would Johnson be. An innocent Savage meant that Johnson had hope for saving of his own.
Fame: This is Holmes's longest chapter, and it generates some insight into the psychology of Johnson and Savage:
After the trial, Savage finally published "The Wanderer," and this poem, which Holmes acknowledges as "an extraordinary work" (151), was most likely what made Johnson seek Savage out. As the story of Savage's links to Thomson, Hill, and Pope implies, there were plenty of established poets and publishers who would have willingly been a mentor and friend in their community to tyros. Johnson had his pick, and he chose a man whose view of a world possessing "an active cruelty pulsing through the material of being" (153) but also the "possibility of spiritual triumph" (154) and the "positive…companionship in suffering, the intimacy of talk, the consolation and confession" (154), views so similar to what Johnson would depict in his essays and Rasselas (154), suggested a kindred spirit. So Johnson's identification of Savage came not from shared circumstance alone, but a shared philosophy.
While Johnson implied "The Bastard" was not published until 1735, Holmes's research reveals it came out BEFORE "The Wanderer" in 1728, after the trial. (137) Johnson obscured this fact so as to make Savage's publication seem like an act of desperation after losing his position with Tyrconnel instead of a cruel masterstroke against Macclesfield. This writer is surprised that Johnson picked this as a dramatic retelling of events, for if Macclesfield represented the worst of the id in Savage/Johnson, it would make sense to keep the true publication date as the id laughingly victorious over Macclesfield's alleged persecution during the trial.
Holmes also muses on why Lord Tyrconnel would have become Savage's patron, helping him secure what would have been in 1993 30,000 pounds a year (144), if not to keep him from attacking Macclesfield. Apparently, Tyrconnel was an art lover who felt Savage had great promise, and Savage also was there as a friend and consoler during the final illness and death of Tyrconnel's beloved wife Belinda. (142-144) It was Belinda to whom Savage dedicated "The Triumph of Health and Mirth" (144), though this display again feels like Savage the charming charlatan.
Except for his work as the "volunteer laureate," Savage did not publish between 1730's The Author to be Let and 1735's "The Progress of a Divine." With his "laureate" patronage he had no reason to, and here Holmes finds himself in psychological accord with Johnson: Savage's success would not last because of his id's jealous, tempestuous desire to put down the people he saw himself as equal to or better than (157-158), and "Divine" was his way of putting himself back into the scene after the final break with Tyrconnel, whose patronage he repaid with insults. (158-159)
The end of the chapter points to why Savage went out of his way to befriend Johnson. My guess from the original essay that Savage saw both an admiring fan and a potential victim comes out stronger in the former. "Divine" made Savage infamous, and his combative poetry made his friends abandon him rather than risk being on his abusive, profligate side. (163) Savage, already ill (165), had to recognize with his one bit of common sense that with even Hill withdrawing his original championship (169-170), he needed a friend.
Friendship: Page 173 is Holmes restating my case, but since his analysis is one purely based on the primary texts, he does not distinguish the complement of Savage's id and Johnson's superego, though he hints at it in touching on Johnson's "naïve romanticism and his extraordinary commitment to the fate of an outcast writer." (173) Holmes proposes the two of them met through their joint employment by Edward Cave (177), and this is where the circumstantial identification can be made: two writers doing hackwork and striving for more. However, Savage was already on the way down, and recognized Johnson was on the way up…here may be why Savage imparted so much to Johnson, seeing him as a future literary star and, again, a potential patron. Savage was undoubtedly the inspiration for Johnson's first major work, "London," a poem whose central figure is reminiscent of Savage's language and philosophy (179), and Holmes uses this link between the two to explain why Johnson carried on such devotion to Savage: "Johnson was keeping faith with the man he knew Savage might have been [the spirit from their nighttime walks]; and more than this, with the man Savage wanted him to be in the future." (183) In non-Freudian terms, this is again my thesis: Johnson saw himself the psychological equivalent of Savage and needed to separate that part of his personality to find lasting happiness and success. Holmes also reveals from numerous pieces of documentation that Savage did not tell Johnson about all of his friends, that in all likelihood he "kept his friends in separate compartments…and rarely let one supporter know what the other was doing for him." (186) Here again is Savage the charlatan with his self-centered id…in his desire for others to take care of him he could easily pass himself off to Johnson as the destitute voice of London while keeping up a country life with James Thomson at Richmond. (190) In the end, Johnson recognized Savage's many failings, his ingratitude and inability to face reality, but his intelligence and search for virtue led him to finally judge Savage as having a "moral meaning" to his "existence" which "lay in the capacity of even a flawed man to struggle nobly against the misfortunes of life." (194) One might add, "even when such misfortunes are brought about by one's self." Or that this was how Johnson saw his own existence, trying to overcome his self-perceived defects to achieve a place in God's kingdom. Johnson also rearranged the chronology of Savage's last letter to Tyrconnel: instead of coming from his retreat to Wales and thereby representing his explosion of egotistic will, it was actually written before he left London (199) as part of Pope's money-raising scheme. Again, dramatically viable, and the principle of Savage's angry rejection of his betters still holds. Finally, Holmes points out one final reason Johnson had to memorialize Savage, whom he never saw again after the Welsh departure: guilt. Johnson had given the protagonist of "London" a vision of setting up a peaceful, reflective existence in a country Arcadia, and Savage, who of course recognized the link between the poem and himself, became intoxicated with the vision and argued against Johnson's growing misgivings. (204) In Wales and Bristol, Savage's id and lifeforce would be shattered by the supplication to others he faced. Johnson, with his naturally strong guilt, might have felt he had all but killed his friend.
Arcadia: Johnson fails to mention that Savage left Wales not out of impecunity but because he was rejected by a beautiful widow, Bridget Jones, to whom he wrote several poems (211-213), and that Savage deliberately obscured the truth of his incarceration from Pope so that he might use several different schemes to get money from his friends. (221-222) Savage having hope and calculation still detracts from a Savage who was taking the final steps down the spiral, climaxing in Pope finally rejecting him. It implies he never felt the full punishment for his actions which Johnson wanted him to feel. Holmes adds to this by finding that Johnson's condemnation of Savage in the final paragraph was added later when he realized he had to draw a strong moral lesson for readers (226-227), this being before his commitment to truth in biography from his great literary essays. That no one could "easily presume to say, 'Had I been in Savage's condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage,'" (227), was his original wrap-up. Johnson's catharsis would have been greater without drawing lines in the sand, if he had kept himself on Savage's level than hinting at superiority.
Charon: This writer cannot end these musings any better than Holmes's description of how Johnson made biography a viable literary art form in Savage for asking new questions, the questions which shape the Johnson-Savage bond: "How far can we learn from someone else's struggles about the conditions of our own; what do the intimate circumstances of one particular life tell us about human nature in general?" (231)