Even literary giants like Dr Johnson struggled to make a living from writing, says Stephen Marche

At thirty, Samuel Johnson was broke as fuck. He was worse than broke. He had a wife, much older than himself, who needed more money than he could earn. For her health, Tetty couldn’t live in London. For his work, Johnson couldn’t live anywhere else. Any money he made he sent away.

A friend who knew him at the time claimed that Johnson “subsisted himself for a considerable space of time upon the scanty pittance of fourpence halfpenny a day.” The hackwork was brutal. He took every assignment. The House of Commons, in 1738, banned reports of parliamentary debates, so for the Gentleman’s Magazine Johnson devised the scheme of turning the debates into fiction, using the setting of Lilliput from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. (They didn’t even try to hide the names. Walpole became Walelop. Pitt became Ptit.)

Johnson did the shit work, like judging poetry prizes. He classed the magazine up a bit by writing Latin verses. He translated The History of the Council of Trent, told hooker life stories, spread gossip. Anything that could be printed that there might be the slightest market for he sold or tried to sell. It was never enough. It never is.

Writers don’t often talk about their rejections, even among one another. Sometimes, though, they use the lives of others to describe their pain. Johnson used a hack colleague, Richard Savage, a poet and playwright twelve years his senior, as his failure double. Savage was in a worse state than Johnson, because money poured through him. After scarlet cloaks with gold lace became the fashion, Johnson ran into Savage “with one of these cloaks upon his back, while, at the same time, his naked toes were peeping through his shoes.”

Besides being vain and a spendthrift, Savage was also a prick. You couldn’t tell him anything in confidence because he betrayed confidences the moment you had an argument. He was quick to fight and “he considered himself as discharged by the first quarrel from all ties of honour or gratitude.” He made friends easily. He lost friends easily.

Savage and Johnson shared the gutter, the best friendship incubator. Sometimes they did not have even enough money for the flophouses, so they would walk the streets all night. Savage knew the spots to lie down “with his associates in poverty, among the ashes of a glass-house.” One night, they circled St. James’s Square over and over. “They were not at all depressed by their situation,” Joshua Reynolds remembered Johnson telling him, “but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the minister, and ‘resolved they would stand by their country.’”

Like every loser, Savage had his little sob story. He told everyone, and he probably believed, that he was the illegitimate son of Anne Mason, the Countess of Macclesfield. The Countess of Macclesfield failed to approve this assessment. Savage’s attempts to wrangle acknowledgement, and money, out of his supposed mother failed. He regarded himself as an aristocratic victim of maternal contempt, a fine position for a confirmed moocher. He overwhelmed himself, and tried to overwhelm others, with his particular brand of self-pity.

Johnson swallowed the whole bit about the aristocratic mother. He bought Savage’s version of everything. After Savage murdered a man in an argument about a seat by the fire in a coffee house, he survived a death sentence through the intercession of the Countess of Hertford.

“His merit and his calamities happened to reach the ear of the Countess of Hertford, who engaged in his support with all the tenderness that is excited by pity, and all the zeal which is kindled by generosity,” Johnson wrote in his Life of Savage, “and demanding an audience of the Queen, laid before her the whole series of his mother’s cruelty, exposed the improbability of an accusation by which he was charged with an intent to commit a murder that could produce no advantage, and soon convinced her how little his former conduct could deserve to be mentioned as a reason for extraordinary severity.”

Savage was at least half-criminal. He was a criminal who needs the eyeball witness. There are writers who become criminals so that there will be an eyeball witness.

Savage was just another fucked-up writer. There are plenty of those. His friends tried to take care of him. Alexander Pope set up a subscription to provide him with an annual pension on the condition that he keep himself out in Wales. That’s not how it works with the fuck-ups. He kept going into Bristol with his friends’ money. He died in debtors’ prison there in 1743.

An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, probably the best thing Johnson ever wrote, ends with a plea for mercy. “For his life, or for his writings, none who candidly consider his fortune will think an apology either necessary or difficult,” Johnson writes. “Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumbered away their time on the down of plenty, nor will a wise man presume to say ‘Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage.’”

Samuel Johnson was rarely merciful in his judgements, even to his friends. Johnson’s plea for mercy for Savage was, obviously, also a plea for mercy for himself. “On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glass-house among thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of The Wanderer, the man of exalted sentiments, extensive views, and curious observations, the man whose remarks on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts.”

“Might have” is the cry of every artist who has to hustle, who has to reconcile the dreams of art with the realities of shifting marketplaces. Every seed is a seed that’s fallen on hard ground. Writers want to be judged by what they could have written. The world insists on judging them by the reception of what they have written. Careers are circumstances. Others treat them as the unfolding of an inner truth.

Johnson and Savage were countrymen: The nation of writers is a nation of three-legged dogs.

This is an extract from On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche, published by Sort Of books, £7.99 paperback.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Stephen Marche will be our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” when it returns on Thursday 18 January 2024. 6-7pm. Free to subscribers.

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