Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (6 page)

Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, ‘he was a blockhead … What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal.’ BOSWELL. ‘Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, it is of very low life.’

Johnson believed, as he instructed Boswell, that ‘nobody could furnish the life of a man but those who had eat and drank and lived in social intercourse about him’. Here, therefore, is Boswell describing his subject at table:

His looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.

On the matter of ‘social intercourse’ (or the other kind), his first biographers (Boswell, Hawkins, Thrale) were privy to things which even Johnson would have wanted to keep hidden. Nor were they averse to pulling the curtain for a discreet peek at his dark side. Mrs Thrale, for example, disclosed to posterity a ‘secret far dearer to him than his life’: namely Johnson’s attachment to ‘fetters and handcuffs’. It may have been a penchant for BDSM (modern critics have had a fine time with that hypothesis).

Many biographies of Johnson have been written since Boswell’s. The narrative grips from the opening scenes: an ungainly, half-blind, nine-year-old lad – born into a dull town of dull parents – randomly takes up a volume of
Hamlet
while sitting in the basement kitchen. The words on the page induce a hallucinatory vision of Elsinore and ghosts. He throws down the book, and rushes into the street outside, ‘that he might see people about him’. An author is born. The dull town was Lichfield. Dr Johnson is still the biggest thing to happen there. He lived his early life over the bookshop his father ran (hence access to
Hamlet
). Books were, however, not selling well and the family struggled. A late-in-life, unwanted child (his mother was forty at the time of his birth) did not help the Johnson finances. Infant Sam contracted scrofula, a disfiguring condition, as ugly as its name. He is also suspected of having suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. Throughout life he twitched and was prone to blurt out in conversation – typically (as above) with the aggressive prefix ‘Sir!’ His eyesight was so defective that he was at risk of setting his wig on fire from leaning too close to the candle, as he read by night. And he was probably alcoholic.

There was, however, nothing wrong with the Johnson brain. Prodigiously precocious (he was reciting the New Testament at three, translating from the classics at six), he had a sound grammar-school education. It seemed he might be destined – despite his manifest gifts – to follow his father into the book trade. But an unexpected legacy enabled him to go to Oxford. The money ran out, however, and he was obliged to leave without a degree (a doctorate would come,
honoris causa
, fifty years later). His subsequent career is legendary: marriage (probably sexless) to a widow, ‘Tetty’, twenty-one years his senior with money and three children; a spectacularly failed attempt to set up a school (with Tetty’s money) which recruited all of three pupils. Finally, with one of those three pupils – David Garrick, no less – Johnson set out on the road to London. Ahead, after years of struggle and authorial humiliation, lay the
Dictionary, The Lives of the Poets
, the greatest moral poem in the language (
The Vanity of Human Wishes
), and installation as the ‘Great Cham’ – the country’s (some would say English literature’s) presiding man of letters and arbiter of literary taste.

Johnson was also, in one of his minor parts, a novelist. In 1759 his ninety-year-old mother was dying; his father had gone to his reward in 1731. To cover the expense of his mother’s last days, Johnson wrote, in the evenings of one week,
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
. It is a mixture of thinly applied oriental setting (drawn from travel books) and heavy moral dogmatising, as English as suet pudding (drawn from the fifty-year-old author’s life experiences). The
ingénu
hero leaves the comfort of his palace in Ethiopia to range the world, seeking the secret of a happy life. He is accompanied by his sister and a philosopher, Imlac (alias Samuel Johnson). There is, Rasselas discovers, no happiness to be found. Life is, as Johnson said elsewhere, a condition in which much is to be endured and little enjoyed. ‘Patience is all’ – Christian patience, that is (not for Johnson Voltaire’s objectionably Gallic heathen quietism, with that stuff about cultivating your garden). Few novelists, one imagines, could produce the statutory happy-ever-after with the ‘Dead March’ from
Saul
droning, incessantly, in their ears and their mother’s corpse genteelly decomposing at the undertaker’s.

Rasselas
is no page-turner – sermons on the human condition seldom are. But it brought Johnson £100 and £25 for a prompt second edition. In terms of hourly rate, for a week’s scribbling it was the best money of his writing career. None but a blockhead, Johnson said, writes for anything but money. Fifty such princely tales a year (giving himself a fortnight’s annual holiday) would have yielded the sum of £6,250: a princely sum. But having no more parents to inter, he wrote no more fiction. The fact was, Johnson regarded such work as unworthy. The novel, as a form, was merely words written on the passing waves of public fancy. He rejoiced to concur with the common reader, but was disinclined to pander to that reader’s taste
for ‘delight’. He registered the existence and popularity of the genre in his 1750
Rambler
essay on the novel (in which he patented the compound ‘modern fiction’), but his personal view is summed up in his uncompromising dismissal of Sterne’s great novel: ‘Nothing odd will do long –
Tristram Shandy
did not last.’ The Johnsonian stricture is heard throughout the genre’s history. In James Fitzjames Stephen’s verdict on
Oliver Twist
, for example: ‘All very well, but damned low.’ And, of course, ephemeral, unlasting – unlike dictionaries.

It would be a century and a half before Henry James would, with the help of his advanced coadjutors in the genre, make the English novel ‘discutable’. The author of
The Lives of the Poets
would have scorned the worthwhileness of any such project for novelists.

A Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot.
Cleland’s description of
Fanny Hill
, his story of a ‘Woman of Pleasure’

Cleland was, for a novelist (not to say, a writer of dirty books), exceptionally well born. His father, a former army officer of distinguished Scottish lineage, later a civil servant, was a friend of Alexander Pope’s. His mother’s family were wealthy Anglicized Dutch Jewish merchants who moved in high literary and political circles. Had Cleland done nothing in life he would probably have been passingly footnoted in biographies of the worthies of his time. Had he been himself luckier, or less indecent, he might even have been numbered among those worthies.

Young John spent two years at Westminster School before being expelled. The offence is unknown; delinquency most likely. Over the years of his adolescence one surmises that he was no stranger to London’s ‘women of pleasure’, about whom he was later to write so knowingly. But there may well have been some serious disgrace. Aged twenty-one he was packed off to India, to serve for twelve years as a soldier, and later an administrator, in the East India Company. He returned to London in 1741, as his father was dying. The Clelands had once been well off, but during the 1740s, John Cleland’s fortunes waned. He had no luck in trade. In 1748, he was arrested for debts of almost £1,000, and spent a year in the Fleet prison.

Debt drives the pen, and in jail he wrote
Fanny Hill
. The first volume of the ‘memoirs of a woman of pleasure’ was published in November 1748, the second in February 1749. The author was paid £20 for the copyright. Legend has it that the publishers gained as much as £10,000 by the bargain. Who sprung Cleland from clink is not known. The composition of
Fanny Hill
behind bars, as a kind of extended masturbation fantasy (a ‘Wanker’s Opera’), by a man denied his doxies, is a pretty anecdote. It may be prettier than true. Twenty years later, Cleland boasted to James Boswell that he had actually written the work in Bombay, in his twenties, as a wager to prove that one could write erotica without ever using a single item of foul language. It seems likely that he revised a pre-existing manuscript in the boring hours of his monastic incarceration.

In late 1749, Cleland was arrested, along with his publisher, and charged with ‘corrupting the King’s subjects’ with his scandalous novel. In court, Cleland ‘from my soul’ wished the work ‘buried and forgot’. He got off. An authorised, ‘expurgated’
Fanny Hill
came out in 1750; a pirate edition, in 1751, featured an interpolated homosexual scene (probably not from Cleland’s pen) which alarmed the authorities further. According to his obituary in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, Cleland was awarded a pension of £100 a year from the public purse, on condition that he wrote no more corrupting works. This is unlikely – although he may well have received financial assistance from his friends in high places, and some sage warning to mind his step. It was no longer a libertine age.

Cleland was, for the remainder of his life, a productive, unpornographic and consistently unsuccessful Grub Street author. Riding on
Fanny Hill
’s notoriety, he published the novels
Memoirs of a Coxcomb
in 1751 and
The Woman of Honour
in 1768. They neither offended, nor amused, nor sold. He wrote plays (David Garrick was a friend), none of which made him a penny. The promisingly titled
Tombo-Chiqui, or, The American Savage
(1758) did not even make it to the stage. His verse satires failed, as did his eccentric treatises on medicine, language (he discerned a lexical connection between Welsh and Hebrew), and politics. He grew peevish in later life, falling out with friends. He accused Laurence Sterne of trading in pornography; which is rather like Larry Flynt taking a high moral tone with Hugh Hefner. All the while he could never shake off the unwanted fame of being the author of the infamous
Memoirs
. He lived by himself, never married, and had the reputation of being a ‘Sodomite’.

Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, as published in 1748–9, takes the form of a confessional letter, describing the heroine’s ‘progress’, and was clearly designed to contradict the joyless moralism of Hogarth’s
A Harlot’s Progress
(1732) and to mock the timidly parsimonious reference to sex in Defoe’s ‘whore’s
autobiography’,
Moll Flanders
(1722), both of which aims
Fanny Hill
achieves triumphantly. The name is a somewhat laboured pun on ‘Veneris mons’ – Venus’s hill. It is not clear whether ‘fanny’ was, then as now, street slang for quim. Fanny is born in a small village in Lancashire, ‘of parents extremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest’. When they die of smallpox, the pubescent Fanny makes her way to London. Here she is taken under the wing of the procuress, Mrs Brown. She is introduced into the sensual pleasures of her body (which never fail to delight her more than her clients) by a fellow inmate of the house, Phoebe. Mrs Brown tries to sell Fanny’s maidenhead to an ill-favoured customer, but the girl declines to cooperate. Eventually (after a number of exciting voyeuristic episodes) she loses her virginity to a ‘young Adonis’ called Charles (a gentleman – well endowed financially and physically). Her ecstasies of pain and pleasure are recalled with a barrage of florid but ‘modest’ euphemism.

Fanny becomes the mistress of a rich merchant, Mr H—. But, bored by the condition of kept woman, she seduces a manservant (even better endowed than Charles) and is cast out with fifty guineas. So ends the first volume. The second opens with Fanny now the occupant of a brothel run by the good-natured Mrs Cole. Finally she is enriched by connection with an old and grateful benefactor. Now prosperous, and just nineteen, she is united with the devirginating Charles and becomes a respectable wife and mother. As she informs her correspondent on the last page: ‘If I have painted Vice in all its gayest colours … it has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner Sacrifice of it to Virtue.’ Hypocritical minx.

Fanny Hill
sold steadily and clandestinely over the following centuries. The fact that the novel contains no four-letter words and is elaborately ‘polite’ in its descriptions of sex gave it a perverse underground respectability. As a schoolboy, I read a much thumbed copy, printed abysmally in Tangier. (‘I wanked over it four times last night,’ said the white-faced friend who passed it on to me.) The novel was successfully prosecuted in London in 1963 (following the
Lady Chatterley
acquittal in 1960), but subsequently slipped back into print where it now enjoys the respectability of a place in the World’s Classics and Penguin Classics lists. A BBC-TV version, adapted by Andrew Davies in 2007, attracted an audience of seven million.