I was recommended Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by my friend James, who was so impressed by it that his recommendation came to me all in caps. I don’t know what exactly the book is – Holmes himself calls it a “mongrel book” – but it’s awfully good. It is both a work of biography and a work of autobiography, and because of the approach to biography that Holmes takes, it is also a book of travel too. For the “footsteps” of the title are no measly metaphor, but real tracks in the ground. Holmes sees biography not merely as the result of months and years spent absorbed in dusty tomes, but as the fruit of reliving the life of a dead, retracing their steps through the places that had once charmed them so much.
It is this approach that makes Footsteps so special. For what the book really shows is a different way of reading to the usual, casual, one of reading and moving on. Holmes’s approach is marked by a passionate relationship with the author and his or her works. It somehow turns reading from a passive activity into an active one, a tussle with the past. Reading Footsteps, I thought back to the times when I myself had felt great passion for authors – for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Conrad, Foster Wallace and Pynchon and many others – and I found myself wanting. I had not fanned the flame of my own desire, not dug deep into either the books or their authors, but rather been content to glide upon their surfaces. Most importantly, I had not slowed down. Following an artist’s footsteps forces us to stop, to breathe, to focus and enjoy.
Reading Footsteps, I saw how I should be reading. In some sense, the book and its approach are an antidote to the pressures of our time and our relentless rushing about. That’s why it’s so worth reading.
The Structure of Footsteps
Footsteps is divided into four parts, each taken from a different part of Holmes’s life and detailing his encounter with a different writer. These are: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and finally the French poet Gérard de Nerval. I can’t describe myself as “knowing” any of them well. I had read a story by Stevenson, a few poems by Shelley, and nothing by either Wollstonecraft or Nerval (the latter I’d not even heard of). But a familiarity with the writers is not a prerequisite to enjoying Footsteps, not at all. For Holmes is not offering an appraisal of their works so much as their lives. He uses their works, letters, journals, to emphasise the connection between the writers and the places they’ve been. He anchors each writer in their experience of a moment and place, rather than trying to grab hold of all of them at once.
In each section of Footsteps there is a different question obsessing Holmes which he hopes to find the answer to. In Stevenson’s case, for example, Holmes soon discovers that some apparently simple travel writing about a journey in France is much more complex than it first appears. Instead of simply following Stevenson around, Holmes is forced to follow him into his heart, as the writer faces down his doubts about his love for a married American, Fanny Osbourne. In Percy Shelley’s case, Holmes wants to understand the nature of the relationship between the poet and Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife, Mary, during much of their stay in Italy. In the case of Nerval, by contrast, who went mad and committed suicide, Holmes wants to try to salvage some kind of fact from the mass of fabrication and incoherence left in the poet’s wake.
These questions and focuses keep Footsteps from getting out of hand, as is perfectly possible with biography. (Holmes’s full biography of Percy Shelley is over 800 pages). Even in these comparatively short pieces we are introduced to a bewildering array of characters, and each of them seems deserving of detailed investigation. Holmes, who absolutely has done his research, is always able to approach his problems from multiple angles, through multiple voices. Alongside his physical tramplings, this polyphonic approach makes the past come alive not just as a single reanimated authorial figure, but as a vibrant crowd. It makes us aware of just how interesting even a minor figure is, and how we all fit together into a whole.
Mr Holmes
Holmes is a wonderful guide, though not just because he knows his stuff, is passionate, and writes well. He’s also a great guide because of his own almost confessional tone. Just as in Footsteps he draws us near to the dead men and women, so too does he draw us near to himself. It is this that makes the text feel so alive. When he cracks a puzzle, like why Wollstonecraft describes herself as seeing something from her rooms in Paris that ought to have been geographically impossible (it turned out her rooms were on the roof, not the fashionable front rooms biographers expected her to have been given), we share his joy. Likewise, when he is struck with grief – for example, when finding the bridge that Stevenson had crossed “broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy” and being forced to accept that he cannot follow him forever – we share that too.
His openness about the process of biography is part of this. Before Footsteps I had read very little biography, and never thought seriously about the form, especially in respect to other genres. Holmes readily describes the challenges of producing “the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact”, and the way that unlike a novelist, “ordinariness… family intimacy, is the very thing that the biography… cannot share or re-create”. He made me aware of the genre’s limitations – for example, a happy couple will be mostly together, and less likely to write journal entries because each member will have each other, leaving a blank space where the biographer was hoping to find material. Then there is “the fatal past subjunctive” (would have), when the biographer is forced to claim what evidence cannot provide. All things I’d never considered.
Past and Present
Holmes’s active role in Footsteps is also important for another reason. It draws together the past and present (or at least, the latter 20th century). Holmes, who was in his twenties during the May 1968 protests in France, uses the experience of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley in and after the French Revolution to illustrate his own generation’s ambiguous feelings towards the protests and what they achieved and failed to. Like any historian, Holmes naturally finds connections, and because of his focus on the personal over the general, these connections seem much more fresh and relevant, even to the modern reader, whose hopes for revolution may long have turned to ashes. They make the past immediate, and remind us that reading history is more than a school exercise, but rather gives us a new lens through which to view our own time.
In seeing how writers responded to their times, Holmes also gives us a new way of looking at more modern writers. How does Pynchon’s treatment of the 1960s and disillusionment compare to Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s once the French Revolution was done and dusted? Without biography, it can be hard to ask such questions – we don’t know where to begin.
Nerval – journey into madness
The treatment of the character of Gérard de Nerval – for where does the man Gérard Labrunie end and Nerval begin? – was for me the unexpected highlight of Footsteps. The poet himself I can’t say I encountered in any serious way, thanks to Holmes’s unwillingness to translate French quotes. What was interesting, however, was the way that as Holmes pursued Nerval through masses of confusing and often contradictory evidence, he himself began to feel that a normal biography would not be able to make sense of Nerval. Instead, there was an “overflowing of the irrational into the normal forms of biography”, in which Holmes began to believe that it was Tarot cards which held the key to the mystery, rather than books or facts.
In his search to “save” Nerval, Holmes finds himself “slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him”. When he finally finishes, he has seven different notebooks in seven different colours, like a kind of talisman. But he has found no answers. He has only succeeded, thankfully only temporarily, in losing himself. It is a final warning for us, that biography, like everything else, must be enjoyed in moderation. We should not seek to become our quarries, only to draw level with them. Otherwise we risk losing our very selves.
Conclusion – Following in Holmes’s Footsteps
I was recently at the museum-house of the poet and painter Max Voloshin, on the coast of the Black Sea. I had not heard of him, but at the museum we were given a detailed tour. He had built the house himself, and it is an insane mass of staircases and doors and secret passageways. One detail I loved was that the windows in Voloshin’s study were arranged so that the sunlight would get in his eyes at exactly midday, as a warning to the artist that it was time to take a break. I left that evening, determined to read him when I had the chance.
The next morning my girlfriend and I decided to visit Voloshin’s grave, which lies above the town at the top of a hill. The tradition is to bring a stone from the seashore up to him, and we both did. The walk took two hours as we fought sweltering heat and tumbling rocks to get to the top. But in the end we made it, and were met with his grave, covered with stones and pebbles, many of them signed with messages for the poet. We both added our own, then we went a little further, and sat down to enjoy the view.
I was glad, so soon after finishing Footsteps, to put into practice, in a small way, the ideas implicit in Holmes’s book. In climbing that hill I had made my relationship with an author, even one whose works I have not read, personal and active rather than simply passive. As I sat on the hill, looking out over the sea, I stopped, I thought, I breathed. And I felt grateful that I still have plenty of authors to love and plenty of time to love them. Read Footsteps, and then read everything else in the world!