Tag: Biography

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

How do we write biography? Well, depending on whether the subject has shuffled off this mortal coil or not, we could talk to them or else their relatives, friends, and enemies. Most likely we will spend a lot of time in archives, scattered around the country or world, reading journals and diaries, letters, and memoirs. To recreate the past we may need to read some history books, or better yet newspapers. If we are writing about a creative person we ought to read their books or watch their films, over and over. And yet if we do only this, we may still end up with something rather soulless.

Richard Holmes employed the “footsteps method”. He would literally retrace the steps of his quarries throughout their lives, allowing himself to imagine his way into their lives in a way that merely memorising poetry could not do. I myself have been to a Dostoevsky house museum in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two Tolstoy ones in the former city, and there is a Dickens museum not far from me where I am now staying in London. Sometimes seeing these old places can really bring the writers back to life, but more often it seems to be the objects inside them that do that. The Akhmatova museum in Petersburg stands out as doing a great job of reminding me how awful that period of the Soviet Union was for many of its people.

Julian Barnes’ novel and non-fiction work, Flaubert’s Parrot, is an attempt at writing a biography of Flaubert. I say attempt only because its failure is deliberate, and the fault of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, rather than his creator. We learn a great deal about Flaubert, but far more about the nature of biography. Each chapter seems to employ a different approach to dealing with Flaubert as if Braithwaite is trying to work out which approach will stick. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

We have a chronology chapter, which contains three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life with a little bit of editorial commentary. In the first, Flaubert emerges as a successful, cheery, and social being; in the second his life is one of misery, disappointment, and financial problems; the third is made of extracts from his letters. Each chronology, in fact, quotes from Flaubert, but each ends up leading to an entirely different impression of the man. The authority that we expect to come from the primary source – his letters – only serves to make us look silly for trusting any of the chronologies at all. One message we might take away is just how easy biography, even a simple chronology, can be used to manipulate or mislead.

Another chapter imagines Louise Colet, Flaubert’s legendary mistress (who saved an awful lot of his most fascinating letters for us lucky readers in posterity), and the story she would tell of him. This is imaginative biography, giving us another perspective. One chapter looks at Flaubert through the various animals he used to compare himself to (bears, dogs, sheep, camels etc); another looks at him through the books he hadn’t written, the decisions he hadn’t made in life – a sort of “what if” biography; still another explores his attitude to that most awful of modern inventions, the choo-choo train. What is so brilliant about Flaubert’s Parrot is that each of these angles manages, even while occasionally (deliberately) sharing choice extracts from the letters and novels, to tell us something new about Flaubert, and cast him in a completely different light. Nothing alone, certainly not traditional biography, can fully capture the soul.

A murky patch in Flaubert’s biography concerns an English governess, so Barnes creates some letters that have fallen into the hands of a rival academic (Braithwaite is actually a doctor) which would blow open the academic consensus and bring our narrator fame and glory. The academic relates the story of how he came upon these letters, tells what they contained, but finally informs Braithwaite that he burned them out of respect for Flaubert’s wishes on the matter. Our narrator is outraged – his chances at fame and glory have gone down drastically.

But here there is also something else at play. Biography is often about solving mysteries, eliminating those last few blank spots in the chronology with a fantastic discovery. One of the most memorable pieces of Holmes’ Footsteps concerns his travels around Italy, attempting to work out the truth of Percy Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife during their own time there. Biography is about taking control over the past and bringing it into order, and Braithwaite has just had the past rebuff him. There were several times as I was reading Flaubert’s Parrot where I thought of W.G. Sebald’s novels – Austerlitz or The Emigrants. In both we have a narrator attempting to recover the past, by all possible means, only to be disappointed. It is not so easy to recapture the world.

Just as literature is not the real world, so too is a biography of a literary figure not the same as that of a friend. Initially, our impression of Braithwaite places him as one of those stock characters we see in 20th-century fiction – the cynical old man spitting on the world and obsessed with his work. For example, Braithwaite gets more upset by moments in Flaubert’s life than he does revisiting memories of his participation in the Second World War. During the chapter involving the letters, he seems positively monomaniacal. But as the book progresses, we get hints of a troubled relationship with his wife, and finally her suicide. For example, we linger longer on the topic of adultery than perhaps even a book on Flaubert warrants.

All this puts the experiments at writing Flaubert’s life in a new light. We might say that Braithwaite is trying to work out what kind of biography might allow him to make sense of his own life, his own loss. Is it a little dictionary of important people, or is it a fictionalised telling of his wife’s side of things? His cynicism finally seems more tragic than tedious, because we see immediately what it takes him a whole book to realise – that life and literature, research, and intimate biography, are separated by a chasm:

“Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

Fiction is a way of building a world where things make sense. And biography is just fiction that sticks close to its source material. But life does not make sense. Letters are burned, lives are ended, in ways that are incomprehensible, and no moral waits for us at the end of the tunnel. Flaubert’s Parrot tells us about Flaubert, and it tells us about Braithwaite’s wife. But it is only Flaubert who seems comprehensible by the book’s end, only Flaubert whose actions can be explained by whichever explanation offered by the book seems to make the most sense to us.

We come away from the novel with a sense of a world that is limited. After the humour (which Flaubert’s Parrot is full of) and the literary games, there comes unease. Biography is so much less comprehensive than we had previously imagined, so much less respective of the truth – because we see that the truth is impossible to determine. Literature appears a refuge, as always, but a cowardly one. And so, we return to the real world, uncertain, because that’s the only thing for it.

I really enjoyed the novel, in case that does not come through. It’s really good fun, and its experimentation serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, it is informative on Flaubert in a way that feels far more useful than a full biography. For example, there’s a chapter on common complaints about Flaubert (his politics, his pessimism, his women) and their rebuttals. This kind of approach is far more exciting and dynamic than just a footnote in a stodgy tome. The novel achieves what the best experimental fiction of our age does – it reveals that there are more ways to read and write than we had hitherto realised and that what is familiar may not even be the best. In this Flaubert’s Parrot is not just inspiring, it’s vital too.

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!

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes

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.

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the heroes of Footsteps. Holmes does an excellent job in making us interested in people we’d never been interested in before.

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.

A photograph of the poet Nerval, one of the subjects of Footsteps
Gérard de Nerval, a French poet whose madness alas was more permanent and fatal than that of Holmes’s. While I found the lack of translations frustrating, Holmes’s own increasingly deranged quest to understand Nerval more than made up for it.

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.

The grave of Max Voloshin
The grave of Max Voloshin, covered with pebbles from the beach below. I was glad to make my own small literary pilgrimage, following in Holmes’s own footsteps.

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!