Passion Put to Use: Richard Holmes’s This Long Pursuit

Richard Holmes is an extremely dangerous writer. He is dangerous to your wallet and to whatever fixed notions of a literary canon you may have. My copy of This Long Pursuit, a kind of companion volume to Footsteps, which I reviewed earlier, was a gift from my friend James, who is between blogs at the moment. The British are the main focus of this volume of biographical essays, though Holmes spends time with French-language writers too.  And as ever, Holmes is circling around that historical sweet spot, somewhere between 1750 and 1850, when the Romantics were busy being Romantics.

But “Romantics” not only in the sense of poets – though here we have Keats, and Coleridge, and Shelley – but in the sense of a worldview. Scientists are not excluded, and nor are the many women who have historically been locked out of the pantheon. Holmes, with his sympathetic biographer’s eye, makes everyone interesting. And in this lies his greatest strength – he makes us aware of the value of biography. Perhaps even more so than literature itself, biography teaches us that everyone, great and small, has an exciting history of their own. He makes us look at the world and people around us, and care.

Confessions

This Long Pursuit is broken up into three sections. The first of these, “Confessions”, is Holmes at his most personal. Firstly, he reminds us of his biographical principles. The first is “the Footsteps principle”, which states that “the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past”. Footsteps saw Holmes tracing Stevenson among the French countryside; This Long Pursuit has him chasing Coleridge, though without any opium, through England, and Keats and Shelley through Italy. As readers, the text that Holmes presents is heavily influenced by this principle – we have a sense of the subject’s world as something lived in, precisely because Holmes has done just that.

The second principle is that of “the Two-Sided Notebook”. What this means is that Holmes devotes one half of a notebook’s page to the objective facts of his quarry, as he researches them, and the other half to the impressions and feelings that come to him as he does the work. This creates a subjective and objective biography, and the resulting work is a synthesis of these two strands. But their very existence means that reading Holmes is never dull or clinically lifeless as certain academic texts undoubtedly are. 

In the five essays of “Confessions” Holmes explores directly what a biography is, or ought to be. It is a thing that asks us “What was this human life really like, and what does it mean to us now?” It is not simply about trying to work out the past as fact, but rather there is an element of “imaginative faith” involved, for otherwise we would never realise what the past means to us now. Elsewhere he talks of biography’s “humanist ambition” – it aims to inform us of “a common human nature”. Holmes’s style, with regular quotations from the primary sources, serves this idea well. We always have a feeling that the people he is writing about are alive and are being brought back to life before our eyes. But not as pedestal-bound demi-gods so much as human beings.

Restorations

“Restorations”, the second section, is about precisely that. Holmes takes figures who have faded over time and recovers them, as best he can, from obscurity. And in “Restorations” his focus is on the women of the age. I remember reading a scathing review on Goodreads of Footsteps, in which the author denounced Holmes as a terrible sexist because of some off-hand remark that only became offensive a few decades after the book was written. It is ridiculous because focusing on such petty details obscures the great spirit underlying Holmes’ work in both Footsteps and This Long Pursuit – namely, to treat the inhabitants of the past with respect and justice. He rescues people like Madame de Stael or Zélide who I may have heard of but certainly wasn’t planning on reading, simply by engaging with them and relating their value.

One of the things I found most disheartening was the way that many of these women had been famous in their time, but had had their respect worn away by centuries of men deciding who was worth reading. Holmes goes from popular science, with Mary Somerville, to literary and philosophical reflections with Mary Wollstonecraft. He focuses on the heroism of these women at a time when they faced huge difficulties to finding success, but found it anyway. When describing the scientists, Holmes writes that “precisely by being excluded… they saw the life of science in a wider world”. For example, I had no idea that popular science writing in English was essentially the creation of a woman, Mary Somerville!

But Holmes does not shy away from darker themes either. His essay on Mary Wollstonecraft is particularly shocking. Wollstonecraft, who is famous for her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, is perhaps the coolest of the characters featured here. But she had a difficult life, as Footsteps made clear, and an even less pleasant afterlife. Holmes describes how her husband, the naïve but well-meaning William Godwin, wrote a biography of her that was so honest it scandalised society and ruined her reputation for over a century. If this seems like an exaggeration, Holmes finds some choice quotes to back his assertion up. I particularly “liked” one newspaper’s comment that the biography was “the most hurtful book” of 1798. Ouch.

Afterlifes

Going back to the past in search of a new way of looking at people does not only extend to those who have been almost forgotten, though when we deal with canonical figures there is much less urgency. In the final five essays under the heading “Afterlifes” Holmes deals with the classic figures – Keats, Coleridge, Blake – who had sat out of the earlier sections. But rather than go over the lives once more, he is more interested in how their lives were treated once they were beyond the grave. This is all fascinating stuff. The case of Shelley is a good example. His tragic death and classic Romantic death by drowning became a biographical leitmotif. People could no longer look at his life except as something tending towards an early grave, giving it a sense of predeterminism that in reality it lacked. This rather obscures who Shelley really was, at least in Holmes’s eyes.

He traces the first biography of William Blake and the figures, male and female, who made it possible. (I had heard of Anne Gilchrist in connection with Walt Whitman, but I had no idea that she had also wrote part of the biography that perhaps saved Blake from being forgotten forever). He explores the joy of friendship that animated Humphrey Davy and Coleridge’s scientific experiments together, and the ebb and flow of the painter Thomas Lawrence’s reputation.

Conclusions

And he does all this with grace and humour! The entirety of This Long Pursuit is a joy to read – as a writer Holmes is every bit a match for his subjects. Of the Scot, Oswald Lord Nelvil, he writes that his is “a name truly redolent of damp tweed”. One of Blake’s old friends is described as “a well-meaning but gushing middle-aged raconteur, who embroidered freely on the facts”. And then there is this magnificently pithy description of a mental crisis Thomas Lawrence underwent in 1797: “What exactly this involved remains obscure, except that he embarked on a strangely melodramatic affair with both of Sarah Siddon’s daughters simultaneously, and then threatened to commit suicide”.

Holmes, better than any historian, makes the past and its characters alive. And in so doing he does something more than just entertain – he teaches us. This quote from Coleridge is perfect for describing what makes This Long Pursuit special: “Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love”. Holmes’s sympathy and love for his subjects makes us more engaged than even the most incisive monograph ever could. I finished the book determined to read Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Zélide, Madame de Stael, and all the rest as soon as possible. This is why Holmes is so dangerous. He shows us that reading and learning are truly never-ending processes. That there is always someone new to discover, another writer or life worthy of attention. Every single one of these essays bursts with passion. And Holmes’ passion is absolutely contagious. Read it!

Race and Redemption in Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Phenomenal, unbelievable, awesome: Home is one of those books I cannot recommend enough. In many ways a quiet, boring affair, much like Gilead before it, Home is so deeply packed with life, lived and felt, that it expands inside us like the impression of tree does, the moment we stop walking and start to give it the attention that its complexity and majesty undoubtedly deserves. Home takes place almost contemporaneously to Gilead, and the characters are shared between the two works, but the tone is very different. Gilead had seen the aging Reverend Ames writing letters full of love to his young son, consigning his own failures and guilts mostly to the margins. But Home, which takes us into the home of Ames’s friend Reverend Boughton as it deals with the return of a prodigal son, Jack, and a failed daughter, Glory, is a much more ambivalent tale.

The book is filled with tensions, with guilt, with shame, with pain. But at the same time it shines with the radiance of love, conditional and unconditional, and faith and grace. Unlike Gilead, where Ames’s occasional digressions on doctrinal matters such as baptism may have turned off readers with limited exposure to the Christian tradition, Home is a much more down-to-earth book in terms of its religious fundament. The central questions concerning redemption and grace are, I hope, a little more palatable to people, and more relevant to their own lives.

Glory

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” Her father said, and her heart sank.

The opening line of Home is brutal, and immediately informs us of the pain at the centre of the novel. Glory is the youngest daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, youngest of eight children, and almost forty when the book begins in the late 1950s. Where other brothers and sisters have made successful marriages, or started successful careers, Glory worked as a teacher while engaged in a long courtship with a man who ultimately abandoned her. Apparently married, she could not even return to her teaching job. And so she has returned home, the only place that will offer her a refuge.

Her father, Reverend Boughton, is not the sprightly, young-at-heart man that Ames was. He spends most of Home being carried from chair to bed to chair. He retired from the pulpit ten years before the story begins, and his mind has declined where Ames’s remains nimble. But he is determined to make his home be a place where his children are welcome, and to show them the unconditional love of parents towards their children, no matter what they have done. Glory has come home, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, so she gives herself up to her father, caring for him as best she can, cooking and cleaning and doing the practical chores he is too weak to do. But she is desperately lonely. In the town she grew up in, all she has is the radio for company.

The Prodigal Son

That is until her father receives a letter from Jack. Jack is the prodigal son, the vanisher – he hasn’t been home in twenty years. As a child he was the only Boughton to scorn the church and steal and hide away. Eventually, he turned to alcohol too. What hangs over him, at least in the eyes of others, are two particular acts, committed long enough ago. The first is that he seduced and then abandoned a young girl, whose child later died; the second is that he did not return home for his mother’s funeral either. But he is his father’s son, and Boughton is determined to show him kindness.

The letter that arrives says Jack will be home soon. Boughton’s joy is so simple, so pure: “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand… I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in the top right-hand drawer… So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

And though he delays, and sends further letters, Jack does eventually come:

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Robinson has an eye for the perfect detail. The action of Home takes place almost entirely within the walls of the Boughton home, and between these three people. But Robinson uses every sense, every minor gradation of feeling, to paint an extraordinary picture of family life in all its painful, wondrous, complexity.

Jack

Jack is back for his own reasons. For Glory, her older brother’s return is in a way a blessing. “At least I know what is required of me know, and that is something to be grateful for”. They have not seen each other for years, and Home is a record of intimacy gained, lost, fought for. Where Glory was duped, Jack is guilty. Most of all, he is battling against the notion of predestination, the idea that his life has already been decided for him, and that no matter what he may do he is doomed to hellfire because of something incorrect in his nature, in the very nature that God had given to him. He is a modern day Ivan Karamazov, knowledgeable about God and the Bible but unable to accept them for his own reasons, even as he rages against the despair stemming from having a terrible black hole inside him.

Jack comes home, he tends to the garden, he fixes the family car. He drinks, he hides, he hurts himself. His alcoholism is one part of his character, but in a way, as an addiction it sums up the heart of his problem. Anyone who has faced addiction will know the way that it can feel like predestination to fall back into old habits. No matter how we try, it seems as if an external force, like a cruel god, drags us back towards our vices. When faced with addiction, it’s sometimes impossible to feel that we can ever change, that we can ever right our course. While the two reverends discuss the thorny nature of predestination within their respective churches, it is Lila, Ames wife (and heroine of Robinson’s third Gilead novel), who steps up to reassure Jack. “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Like Jack, Lila has spent most of her life as an outcast. But after she meets Ames, something we only really hear about vaguely in Gilead, her life changes for the better. She is, in a way, saved. Does Jack redeem himself? Does Jack get saved? I’m not sure these questions are the point of Home. Jack comes home, and he leaves again. Life is not neatly tied up, and Home recognises that. In Jack’s story – here, in Gilead, and no doubt in Robinson’s latest novel, Jack –what matters is the process. Jack’s life is a swinging between salvation and perhaps, as he claims, perdition. And in our own lives, full of mistakes and guilt and yet bursting with beauty and always with the possibility of making things right again, Jack appears as a thoroughly human, thoroughly sad, brother.

Race and Religion in Home

Last summer I read a lot of books about race, but Home is probably more effective than any of them. At the end of Gilead we learn about why Jack is interested in racial tensions, and in Home this information is once again saved for the end. But early on, when Glory finds him reading W. E. B. DuBois, we have a sense that even though the village of Gilead is made up of traditional rural white Iowans, race will someway figure in the novel. Later, to entertain their father, Glory and Jack get him a TV set. Home is set during the height of the American civil rights movement, and Jack has spent a lot of time in the South. His father, meanwhile, appears scarcely to have even left his state.

Now, I confess, being not an American, I know little about the civil rights movement, so I may get a few bits wrong. As they watch the television, and read about protests in the newspaper, a division appears in the family.

After reading about white police with riot sticks attacking black peaceful demonstrators, Boughton speaks to calm his son: “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

But Jack replies. “Some people will probably remember it.”

Boughton is a religious man, but he is not necessarily a wise one. His vision of the world is small. The idea that the African Americans who were suffering may have slightly longer memories than his own, watching them on the television, is not something that comes naturally to him. It is less hypocrisy, than ignorance, but it remains a problem. When Jack cries “Jesus Christ” after a particularly brutal moment, Boughton’s anger is aimed at his blasphemy, rather than the actions of the police. Eventually, he attempts to be conciliatory. “Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We have to forgive each other.”

At times like this Robinson describes Boughton as “statesmanlike” – she uses this adjective several times, and in a way that is far more ironic than anything else. Boughton asks who can judge, but the answer, for readers, is clearly that we can. We know better, we know now the suffering of black Americans thanks to social media and publicised brutalities. We know that the civil rights movement has not finished, and Boughton’s faux-conciliatory remarks which paper-over real and legitimate suffering are just the same ill-judged remarks we hear today, from certain sections of society. The blacks were rioting, they were violent. But even when disproved we continue to hold fast to these lies. I don’t mean to disregard the violence of certain protests last year, only to indicate that there is a continuity not just in terms of the problems, but also in how they are represented and dealt with.

Robinson’s story reveals that underlying hypocrisy. Yes, we should avoid judgement in many things. But in matters of racial justice, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t tolerate brutality, refraining from judgement becomes a moral stance. And we know, I hope we know, enough to know that things that were wrong then, in the 1950s, must still be wrong now.

Conclusion

Gilead was in many ways a paean to the blessings of the everyday little things that make life so magical but which we often pass over without a thought. And Home is filled with that same, slightly religious sentiment. But Home goes further than that, in that it asks moral questions too. Are we managing to be good people, even as we enjoy the world? Is there a chasm between our beliefs and our actions? Are we Christians or whatever to all people, or only to a few? In its portrayal of Jack’s tortured complexity, both his good and his bad, and his struggle for what perhaps we could call redemption, Home is a much more gritty book than its predecessor. But it is a book whose message is every bit as important as that of Gilead. Perhaps, unfortunately, given the world we currently live in, it may be even more so.

But either way it’s fantastic, brilliant, and well worth reading.

Thinking Too Much: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, whose heyday in the English language was in the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of men and women like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, is a writer whose greatness we hear about more often than we actually sit down and read him. He was an indisputably superhuman being: writer of plays, poetry, prose, a statesman, a scientist, a man who saw battle in the Napoleonic Wars – Goethe seemed to have the experience and the talents and the range of a hundred others. He even, unlike his contemporaries, Schiller and Hölderlin, managed to live the entirety of his life without dying prematurely or going mad – no small feat for someone whose dates might make us term him “Romantic”. But still, we don’t read him. We know his main works – Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and of course Werther, and perhaps a smattering of his poetry – but only second-hand.

I don’t know why that is. The common explanation is that Goethe ultimately came to embody a distant, lofty, Enlightenment-era sensibility that makes him boring to the modern reader, growing up in the shadow of emotional, irrational, Romanticism. Perhaps there are simply a dearth of good translations? In my time at Cambridge I have read precisely two works by Goethe – Urfaust, an early version of Faust: Part 1, and Iphigenia, a play. Yet for the German tradition he is as central as Shakespeare is in our own. And so I went and bought myself a 14-volume collected edition of his works, and hope to read at least some of them, over the coming year(s). Being interested in canonical European literature and not knowing Goethe is rather embarrassing, after all. And if he is really a genius, I am sure he will have something interesting to say to me.

It’s just a shame he doesn’t in Werther!

The Sorrows of Young Werther

With the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe became an international sensation. But often what is initially popular doesn’t stand the test of time. Werther is perhaps more notorious now than anything else, on account of the various copycat suicides it inspired. I have to say, for me, a 21st century sad person, I find it strange how this book could have brought anyone to end their life. The gulf of sensibilities seems huge here. This story is not a semi-respectable literary love-triangle so much as one idiot’s selfish, solipsistic, obsession for another human being which brings torment to her and destruction to him. But, as always with German, it could just be that my understanding of the text was negatively impacted by my knowledge of the language. Anyway, Werther is important, so I suppose I must try to find what’s good and interesting in it. Let’s see.

Werther

Werther is structured predominantly as a series of letters from young Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Later on, the novel also includes a few letters to Lotte (the heroine), some of Werther’s translation work, and some third person narration. All of these formal elements are perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel, and I’ll write about them towards the end of this post.

The initial impression Werther’s letters make is that of an overwhelming emotional consciousness. Werther is emotional about absolutely everything. Even a decision like trying to live in the present is fraught with feelings: “I want to enjoy the present, and what has past should stay there in the past”. One of the central ideas of Werther is stated early on in a lamentation from Werther – “oh best of friends, what is the human heart!” The answer to the question, at least the one the book offers, is profoundly limited – we can’t really know the human heart. Werther’s letters, emotional, increasingly deranged, are only ever his letters. We are drawn into a world of pure subjectivity, so that it’s impossible to have any confidence about what is actually going on outside Werther’s head.

But we should have a go. Werther has ended up in a small village, there to do absolutely nothing. I believe the reason for his exile involves a romantic entanglement with Wilhelm’s sister, but I can’t be sure because the whole thing takes up a single page and is promptly forgotten. Here, in the peace and quiet, he makes friends with the locals, and eventually comes across a young lady, Charlotte – or Lotte, to her intimates. Lotte is, in Werther’s eyes, so absolutely amazing that to call her an angel is not enough. She is perfect, not just in her beauty, but in embodying a kind of idealised feminine existence: her mother is dead, so she looks after her younger siblings in her place. How amazing, how wonderful! Did I mention that she is engaged? Well… yes… but “I received the news somewhat indifferently”. Lotte reads, Lotte is natural and “artless”, a pure being plucked from Rousseau dreams.

Lotte

Yes, Werther is head-over-heels in love. What passion! But is it really passion, given that “often I didn’t even hear the words she spoke to me”. Werther’s imagination is so great, so hard-working, that it envelopes poor Lotte. They do have their moments, like when they are heading home after a storm and it’s all very spooky and intense. Memorably, she utters the name “Klopstock”, a well-known German poet of the day, while looking at the sky. Wilhelm, wisely, picks up on what Werther himself doesn’t, and suggests he leave before it’s too late. Werther, of course, does not. And at this point we have the first of his letters to Lotte: ridiculous, emotional, and dangerous too. Her husband-to-be has been away so far, but what will come of it when he returns?

“Wilhelm, is it just a phantom speaking, when we think all’s well?” Werther switches with alarming regularity from the deepest of joys to the deepest of sadnesses. “We long, ah, long to give our entire being over to something, and be filled with the bliss of a single, great, and powerful feeling”. He is an artist, who naturally barely gets anything done. He manages three incomplete portraits of Lotte. At one point he blames the peace and quiet of the rural idyll for his failure to work, but once he has tempestuous feelings he doesn’t become that much more successful either.

We hear Lotte rarely, at least while the narrative still consists of Werther’s letters. The effect of this is suffocating. We struggle to see her beneath Werther’s description of her, which is always filled with the possibility that he is deceiving himself (“Yes, I feel, and in this I am sure I can trust my heart… that she loves me!”).

Albert

In the first edition of Werther, published in 1774, Lotte’s fiancé Albert is a less sympathetic character than he appears in the revised version of Werther from 1787 which most people read these days. The thirteen years clearly gave Goethe time to mellow and let him turn upon his hero more than his youth once allowed. Albert is in many ways Werther’s opposite. Where Werther is emotional and prone to extremes, Albert is dour and serious and practical. Unlike Werther, who doesn’t appear to do any work at all, Albert’s main characteristic is his “Emsigkeit”, or industriousness. When the topic of passion comes up, Albert’s views are predictably sensible: “a man who lets his passions throw him about loses all his self-control and appears as a drunk or else as a madman”. For Werther, the Romantic, this is sacrilege. But Werther loves Lotte, so he keeps visiting their house.

The thought has just come to me that Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee have a lot in common. Both feature a love triangle where the emotional man loses out to the industrious man in the pursuit of the somewhat emotional girl. But the key difference is that Reinhard, the hero of Immensee, fails to propose to Elisabeth on time because of his sensibilities (he wants the proposal to be something special), while Werther arrives too late to make a proposal at all. Immensee is the tragic story of how emotions and hesitancy spoil a beautiful romance; Werther is the story of how a refusal to think rationally lets Werther imagine into being a romance where he has no right to, leaving him a far less sympathetic protagonist.

In the comparison between Albert and Werther we have played out what is one of the fundamental dramas of the 19th century – namely that of feeling against reason. In an increasingly industrial, increasingly business-driven world, feeling becomes a liability while hard-work and cool intelligence assume a dominant position in bourgeois society. In Werther, Lotte may regret that she is not with Werther, but she does not leave Albert, and Werther takes his own life. His sensibility dies with him, while Albert and Lotte will no doubt have plenty of little industrious children of their own. But perhaps all this is eminently sensible – only through the marriage of reason with feeling can feeling hope to survive. Werther, who wouldn’t know reason if it hit him over the head, just isn’t right for this world.  

Style and Structure

Werther’s second half, which details Werther’s precipitous decline into the abyss, is more interesting than the first, which had ended with him at last managing to leave Lotte’s village and do something else for a month. It is here that Goethe starts playing around with form. As long as we inhabit Werther’s insane letters, we are forced to accept his worldview: “What else is human fate but to go beyond its bounds, to drink the cup right to the dregs?”

But at about three quarters of the way through the book the letters stop and we have a message from the publisher, which comes as something of a shock. After the closed world of Werther’s letters, suddenly we have a sense of objectivity. It gives the reader the necessary perspective to realise that Werther really is going mad, just in case they hadn’t realise this earlier. We continue reading letters from Werther, but now they are broken up with information about how they were received, or what Werther was doing. We hear Lotte’s voice, her fear that perhaps “it is only because you couldn’t possess me that your desire gained so much power over you.” What a sensible thought. It is too bad that Werther is unwilling to listen to her.

The third person narration naturally allows us to hear about Werther’s suicide, as being dead makes it hard to write a letter (though of course there are plenty of literary workarounds). I think that the main effect of this narrative rupture is to ironize what had otherwise been deadly serious – Werther’s love. As the publisher goes through the letters left on Werther’s desk, including at least two letters that purport to be the last one’s he’ll ever send to Lotte, it’s hard not to feel that Werther is much less the emotional hero of the novel, and more a fool who came and destroyed the peace and happiness of others. His translation of part of the Ossian poems, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, is beautiful, but at the same time hints at the unoriginality of his own feelings. Is Werther just imitating others, even at his most emotional?

Conclusion

I have written before about how writing a blog post makes me appreciate works of literature in ways I would not have otherwise and find enjoyment in works that otherwise frustrated me. But I am not sure that this is one of those times. Werther is too imbalanced – too much feeling, not enough reason. For the modern sensibility, Werther’s failings are too much his own. There are plenty of things to be sad about in life, in love as in everything else, without letting our imaginations create additional difficulties for us.

Werther was my first prose experience of the almighty Goethe, but it is a young man’s work, and I am glad I have finished it and can move on to something else. I am certain that better things await, if not in volume 6, then in one of the others! So, dear reader, know that the battle with Goethe has only just begun.

Readers, should you have read more Goethe to me and had a better experience, or indeed had a better experience with Werther, do let me know in the comments.