Books: The Lively Davy

GARRICK (312 pp.)—Margaret Barton —Macmillan ($5).

In 1736 a clever, ugly young man opened a private school in an English village, hoping to support his new wife by drumming Latin into boys’ heads. Few came to Samuel Johnson’s school; one of those who did was 19-year-old David Garrick, son of a shabby-genteel army captain. Davy was a poor scholar, preferring to do impersonations rather than homework ; he would even listen at the keyhole of the Johnson bedroom and later mimic the schoolmaster’s clumsy gallantries. When the school collapsed for lack of students, the awkward Johnson and the terrier-like Garrick set off for London together, a few coins between them, to make their fortunes.

Ghosts to Frighten. How quickly Davy did, and how painfully Sam Johnson had to struggle for his bread, is the story Margaret Barton undertakes to tell. The book is one more in the succession of works on Johnson and his circle, many of them no doubt stimulated by Lieut. Colonel Ralph Isham’s astonishingly successful search for missing Johnson and Boswell manuscripts since World War I (TIME, Nov. 29). Miss Barton’s book is highly readable biography in its own right and one of those solid English performances as thick and tasty as an English pudding.

After a brief, unhappy career as a wine salesman, Garrick wheedled his way on to the stage. He was an almost immediate success. At the age of 24 he revolutionized English acting with his performance of Colley Gibber’s version of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Where his predecessors had declaimed in stiff and grandiloquent periods, he developed an easy-flowing, natural and rant-free style. They had recited, but he acted.

Garrick was thought especially successful as Hamlet; his start of terror at seeing the ghost was considered one of the 18th Century stage’s great moments. Only the more critical Johnson refused to ‘be impressed. Asked Boswell once: “Would not you, sir, start as Mr. Garrick does if you saw a ghost?” “I hope not,” Johnson replied. “If I did, I should frighten the ghost.”

Buttons to Fix. By the time Garrick reached fame, the English stage was in a condition of happy disorder. Shakespeare’s plays had been murderously rewritten; King Lear had a happy ending and Macbeth had been refitted with low-comedy witches. While one actor rumbled through his speeches, another might nod to his friends in the audience, fix his buttons or ostentatiously spit on the stage. Audiences were noisy and quarrelsome, and privileged dandies would stand in the wings loudly gossiping. Occasionally, a drunken beau would stray on to the stage to kiss the leading lady.

Once he became undisputed master of Drury Lane Theater, Garrick made improvements. He scrapped some of the more outrageous revisions of Shakespeare (though he lacked the courage to restore the tragic ending of Lear), and he insisted on sincerity in performances. Garrick’s actors found themselves merged with their roles—even though the identification might sometimes become too complete. Once when Garrick spoke the line, “There’s blood upon thy face,” the poor fellow opposite was so startled that he flubbed his lines and cried out, “Is there, by God?”

He had had one fling in his life—with Peg Woffington, a saucy and beautiful Irish actress. That done and over, he sedately married an Austrian dancer and lived as a respectable bourgeois. He did not mix well with his fellow actors, and was wretchedly sensitive to their gibes about his vanity. Garrick was indeed terribly vain—how could he help it? He had been praised enough to turn a man clear out of his mind. “More pains have been taken to spoil the fellow,” said Sam Johnson, “than if he had been heir-apparent to the Emperor of India.”

Friends at Whistle. For years Johnson kept Garrick out of his famous literary club because “He’ll disturb us by his buf—foonery.” Wrote Oliver Goldsmith, whom Garrick had rebuffed when he wrote his first play:

He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack,

For he knew when he pleas’d he could whistle them back.

But if Garrick could offend, he could also charm. In 1773, Johnson admitted him to the circle, and when he retired from the stage in 1776, the citizens of London gave him tremendous applause at his last performances. To a good many Londoners it was a far more important event than the rebellion then going on in those troublesome American colonies.