Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

SIDETRACKS

EXPLORATIONS OF

A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER

RICHARD HOLMES

To my old friend and adviser

Peter Janson-Smith

through thick and beastly thin

Cover

Title Page SIDETRACKS EXPLORATIONS OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER RICHARD HOLMES

Prologue

I A Romantic Premonition

Introduction

Thomas Chatterton

II Lost in France

Introduction

Monsieur Nadar

Gautier In London

Poor Pierrot

Inside The Tower

III Five Gothic Shadows

Introduction

The Singular Affair Of The Reverend Mr Barham

The Reverend Maturin And Mr Melmoth

M. R. James And Others

John Stuart Mill

Lord Lisle And The Tudor Nixon Tapes

IV A Philosophical Love Story

Introduction

The Feminist And The Philosopher: A Love Story

V Shelley’s Ghost

Introduction

Scrope’s Last Throw

To The Tempest Given

VI Escapes to Paris

Introduction

Scott And Zelda: One Last Trip

A Summer With The Novelist

Letters From Paris

Voltaire’s Grin

VII Homage to the Godfather

Introduction

Boswell’s Bicentenary

Boswell Among The Tulips

Dr Johnson’s First Cat

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

Also By Richard Holmes

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

WE WERE AT a café table, under the plane trees, far in the south, with the evening light flowing away down the river. I was asking the beloved novelist those old, fascinating questions: How do you find your stories? Where do your ideas come from? When she said, with that sudden challenging smile of hers: ‘But how do you find your subjects; where do they come from?’ And I answered almost without thinking, between two mouthfuls of the cold white wine: ‘Down many sidetracks.’ She laughed and looked out into the gathering dark. ‘I think you’d better explain that,’ she said. So I have tried.

This book is my attempt to explore – as well as to explain – something of these mysterious biographical pathways. (I love the French word sentier for a track, because it also hints at the notion of a line of smell or perfume, as in ‘on the scent’.) It is a biographer’s collection of short pieces, rather like a novelist’s collection of short stories, but it has a theme and purpose. It is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest, a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject, and the form to fit it. It is my personal casebook.

For me biography has always been a personal adventure of exploration and pursuit, a tracking. It is uncertain in its beginning, when even the first outline of a glimpsed subject may change into someone else, or become a minor role in another life, or simply fade away into the historical undergrowth. It is tantalizing in its final destination, when a completed biography invariably leaves so much else to be discovered, sometimes by other means. It is often surprising in retrospect, when previously hidden perspectives and retrospectives emerge. I conclude that no biography is ever definitive, because that is not the nature of such journeys, nor of the human heart which is their territory. Sometimes all one achieves is another point of departure. Such are the shifting themes of this collection.

Looking back I see, rather to my surprise, that I have written (or failed to write) one biography about every three or four years. This seems to be a languid, circadian rhythm that comes quite naturally to me. But during that slow, ruminative period of researching, travelling, dreaming and writing (which go on simultaneously), the journey also spreads out in many unexpected directions. It produces a great deal of material that, for one reason or another, never gets into the final book; or else erupts later as a kind of after-shock or aftermath. I suspect many biographers experience this.

Yet these wanderings from the main path, these seductive sidetracks over another part of the hill, are often the places where I have learned most about my subjects and have felt most free in their company. They also tell something about how a particular biography was brought to life. As Shakespeare’s Polonius put it (a very fond and foolish old fellow), ‘by indirections find directions out’.

So this book is organized, like a series of traveller’s tales or informal route-maps, around the main biographical voyages I have taken over the last thirty years. All of them concern more or less Romantic themes; some of them actually produced books; others signally failed to do so – and these I am particularly attached to. I think it is sometimes supposed that biographers advance steadily and relentlessly from publication to publication, along a kind of well-signed literary motorway. Perhaps some of them do; but I am more of a rambler and botanizer myself. As a matter of record, here is a list of my major biographical subjects, with their results in brackets.

The sidetracks that arose from these main expeditions take several, perhaps surprising forms. For I am fascinated by the many different ways in which a ‘true story’ can be told. Why should the biographer be limited to one kind of narrative voice, one kind of discursive prose? So they include two radio-plays, several travel pieces, a large number of character-sketches, some autobiographical fragments, some formal essays, and a very informal short story for BBC Radio Four’s ‘Book at Bedtime’. All of them were written as different ways of investigating biographical material: to see how far certain hints and possibilities could be taken down the path, explored and relished.

It is this love of imaginative displacement, of seeking and snuffling on the trail of another life, so essential to literary biography, which I hope also unites this collection. It is the history of a self-education, a sentimental education perhaps. It aims to record whatever I have learned about the peculiar magic, and haunting life-music, of this most contemporary, most lovable and perhaps most ephemeral of forms.

To be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost for ever. But no true biographer would mind that, if he can take a few readers with him. To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way. This is my record of such departures from the straight and narrow. I hope it will encourage others to turn aside, to reconnaître, to stray purposefully into the vast geography of the human heart by which we come to know ourselves.