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!