Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage.

At the very end of his Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage Richard Holmes points out that a reader should hear an echo in the title; the echo is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This teasing revelation works very well by summation: the pairing of light and dark, the split self, Apollo and Dionysus. To outward appearances, Johnson, the Great Cham, judicious lexicographer, moral essayist, and critic works as a Dr. Jekyll. Savage, a murderer saved by royal decree, notorious poet, and self-proclaimed "artificial bastard," certainly is a Mr. Hyde. Holmes's study sets as its central question why the two men should be so closely linked, for undoubtedly as a young man Johnson had a profoundly affecting relationship with the older Savage. Upon the latter's death in debtors' prison two years after they met, Johnson wrote The Life of Richard Savage which Holmes reckons to be the first modern biography, the book that created the genre.

This Jekyll and Hyde pairing, the source of a "new hybrid, no-fiction form of enormous energy and potential," also gives the highly successful biographer Richard Holmes a chance to, as he says, write the biography of biography. "I believe," Holmes asserts, "that biography itself, with its central tenet of empathy, is essentially a Romantic form; and that Johnson's friendship with Savage first crystallized its perils and its possibilities."

So we have two strands in this extraordinary book, parallel lives offering revisionist views of both Savage and Johnson, and an analysis of the limits of biography, an oblique but persuasive demonstration of the role of the biographer as opposed to that of the novelist.

But first the facts: Richard Savage (1698?-1743), poet, playwright, and self-proclaimed illegitimate son of the fourth Earl Rivers, was tried and condemned to hang for the murder of a man in a tavern brawl. His court case must have attracted the attention of the London literati in the way that O.J. Simpson's has attracted prime-time America today. He was lionized by society after gaining a royal pardon and became a very lucrative literary property, especially in those works in which he attacked his mother, Lady Macclesfield, for denying him recognition. In an age of wits, he supplied to Pope the more salacious bits of Grub Street gossip for "The Dunciad." Besides Pope, he could claim James Thomson and Edward Young among his poet friends. In including Savage's life among The Lives of English Poets, Johnson placed Savage beside Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and their like.

Savage eventually alienated every patron who offered him protection and estranged most publishers by failing to meet contract dealines. He was finally "pensioned off" in what was to be a retreat to rustic Wales, but in inimitable form he squandered his payments on drink and other dissipation and wound up dying in debtor's prison in Bristol. He befriended his jailer just as he had charmed virtually everyone who felt the attraction of his powerful personality. To the end he herated those who did not support him for their failure to treat him as was his due, just as he reviled them for their offers of charity. Holmes warmly compliments Savage's modern editor and biographer, Clarence Tracy (The Artificial Bastard, 1953, Poetical Works, 1962) and uses Tracy's research to bring to bear evidence suppressed by or unavailable to Johnson. He also tells a far better story than Tracy as he establishes that Savage was not simply a son maimed by a cruel mother, but a manipulative self-propagandist who was able to bully or charm his way into a position which he felt he deserved.

The Savage that Johnson presents is, however, the central figure in a moral allegory: a gifted outcast challenging society's hypocritical morality--he is passionate in his attacks on the slave trade and the genocidal effects of taking civilization to the colonies--and offering in his poetic vision a form of truth accessible only to the artist. Holmes would have Johnson in 1744 identifying all the traits of the Romantic "unacknowledged legislator" in Savage. The evidence quoted from Savage's poems more than justifies the claim that, despite the heroic couplets, Savage had a Romantic sensibility as much as he had a Byronic lifestyle.

Moving from chapter to chapter, a reader becomes aware that Holmes proceeds by a marshaling of evidence from different perspectives and so presents a series of corrective readings. We end with a less simple, far more human understanding of both characters; the judiciousness of the reading is the biographer's warning: this is not fiction.

Holmes would make as brilliant a lawyer as he is a biographer; the two vocations meet their natural intersection in the book's most entertaining chapter, one which reconstructs the events which led up to Savage's murder of one James Sinclair. The recorded testimony of each of the witnesses, the examining physician's report, and the finer points of the etiquette of sword play fall together seamlessly; this is imagination working within the constraints of corroborating evidence. The obligations devolving from Savage's sense of himself as "the son of the late Earl Rivers" go far to explain why he acted as he did and offer a far more convincing defense, at least to a modern reader's ears, than that presented by Johnson in his Life. The recreation of the events of the murder and the analysis of the motives which drove Savage to kill are striking object lessons in the art of biography.

Holmes, who has received high critical praise for his books on Shelley and Coleridge, investigates the art that he practices with little sense of weighty theory. His autobiographical Early Visions (1987) conveyed a giddy sense of vertigo as he bounced down a Cumbrian hillside with Coleridge. The sense of the vertiginous is never distant in Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, but the vertigo comes more by way of the mirror-like structure of the book: a Savage whom Holmes deftly reconstructs is placed against the Savage Johnson created in his biography. The differences in the reflection yield a different image of Johnson. In the same way that Holmes used the documented evidence of the trial to piece together the events of the brawl and to derive from them a satisfying sense of Savage's motivation, he brings Johnson's rhetoric to testify to a man whom Johnson's great biographer, Boswell, never knew. He takes Johnson's advocacy of his friend as evidence of Johnson's motivation and offers us a psychological understanding of Johnson's devotion to Savage.

We are also remined that Johnson was affected by a tubercular infection passed on by his wet nurse which left him partly blind, disfigured, and almost convulsive in movement. The Great Doctor might have been a curmudgeon wielder of verbal clubs, but as a young man he was desperate for friendship and dismally mismatched in marriage. Holmes traces Johnson's movements to London: he was a failed school teacher and struggling journalist clearly charmed by the worldly, gracious, and ambivalently attractive Savage. Johnson was sympathetic to his anti-establishment politics and perhaps desperate to escape through him the hopeless marriage he had contracted. "Tetty" Johnson was twenty years her husband's senior and Holmes suggests that Johnson's reaction to the much older woman was one reason he so warmly took to Savage's vilification of his mother. But Holmes also allows us to see that Johnson's advocacy of Savage did not blind him to the flaws in his personality; he never confused the "love of a friend with the judgment of a biographer" and could write in the Life that Savage "was morally incapable of friendship in its true sense." It is this legacy that Holmes reflects in the elegant description of the art he practices: it is possessed of "the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can obtain as he tells the story of another's life, and thereby makes it both his own (like a friendship) and the public's (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love."

Johnson, reflecting on the nature of biography in his Rambler No. 60 essay, noted that every life carefully examined will witness something universally recognizable: "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure." He also reckoned that "more knowledge may be gained of a man's real character by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative." Richard Holmes manages to strike the Johnsonian balance between broad observation and piquant detail. He writes no bastard version of biography. Although he has a great deal to say about the demise of the patronage system and the rise of the tribe of writers, those who are not "blockheads," and who scratch their pens for money, he is not primarily concerned with social history. We can hear the true descent of his work in his closing comments in which he sees himself trailing, both as a researcher and as a friend, the two conspiring figures of Johnson and Savage, "talking and arguing through a labyrinth of dark night streets, trying to find a recognizable human truth together." We are lucky to have Holmes as our Sherlock and guide.