Category Archives: Books

I finished Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps a couple days ago and want to write one last post on it; it’s a book that has inspired a number of posts — you can read more here and here.

I wasn’t as taken by the last chapter as I was by the first three — the last chapter discusses Gerard Nerval, who is someone I didn’t know much about, and the chapter didn’t really inspire me to learn more, but it is interesting in the way Holmes uses it to discuss his failure to write Nerval’s biography — or rather, his failure to write a successful one. He wrote a 400-page book on Nerval, but couldn’t get it published (he says “wisely no publisher ever touched it”) and recognized later that it didn’t really work. By this point, Holmes had already written his hugely successful biography of Percy Shelley, so it wasn’t as though he didn’t know what he was doing; rather, he just couldn’t get a handle on the strangeness of Nerval’s life. It’s interesting that some people might not be good subjects for biography no matter how good the biographer. Here is what Holmes says on the subject:

I was thus, in a way, committed to psychoanalysing Nerval for myself; to achieving what even Dr. Blanche had been unable to do. And as my months went by in Paris, I became more and more convinced that was exactly what could not be done, and that I had reached the limits of the biographical form, as a method of investigation. Instead, I found myself slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him. As if self-identification — the first crime in biography — had become my last and only resort.

Holmes has very interesting things to say about the process of writing biographies; for example, he describes what he sees as the two main parts of the process: first, the gathering and assembling of facts about the subject and, second, creating

a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a “point of view” or an “interpretation”, but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions.

He says the first part of this second stage is “a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject”; it is “pre-biographic” but essential — it is like falling in love with the subject and without that devotion the biographer won’t be as willing to follow in the subject’s footsteps. But there comes a moment when gaps occur between biographer and subject: “the true biographic process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where this naive form of love and identification breaks down. The moment of personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal, objective re-creation.”

So the biographer must become the subject, walking in the subject’s footsteps, as Holmes did with Stevenson, and then establish that he or she is not the subject after all, in a process that can be painful, as Holmes recognizes. Holmes goes back and forth between closely identifying with his subjects and being intensely and painfully aware of the gaps between them. He his suspicious of his identification with his subject, as in the case of Nerval, but he revels in it too.

It is this emotional involvement in his research and writing that I find so appealing, I think. Here is Holmes on researching Percy Shelley:

The pursuit became so intense, so demanding of my own emotions that it continuously threatened to get out of hand. When I travelled alone I craved after intimacy with my subject, knowing all the time that I must maintain an objective and judicial stance. I came often to feel excluded, left behind, shut out from the magic circle of his family. I wanted to get in among them, to partake in their daily life, to understand what Shelley called the “deep truth” of their situation. I was often in a peculiar state , like a displaced person, which was obviously touched off by some imbalance, or lack of hardened identity, in my own character.

Thus far in my life I haven’t been terribly interested in Percy Shelley, but this makes me want to read Holmes’s biography of him anyway. Holmes is a writer you can come to feel you trust — someone this self-aware, this willing to discuss his weaknesses and how they affect his writing, has got to be a trustworthy writer. I don’t mean trustworthy in the sense of having his facts straight, although I’m sure he does that, but rather that I trust his interpretations and instincts and choices.

I love books that deal with an intellectual problem or issue in a personal way — books that are as much about the author grappling with the issue as they are about the issue itself. Richard Holmes’s Footsteps is just such a book; it’s about biography as a genre and about the lives of various writers Holmes has researched, but mostly it’s about Holmes’s process of learning how to write biography and his discoveries about what we can and can’t know about the past and about other people’s lives.

I’ve written about Holmes’s chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson, where he writes about following in Stevenson’s tracks through France; I’ve now read his chapter on William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft and I’m halfway through his chapter on Percy Shelley. The Wordsworth/Wollstonecraft (mostly Wollstonecraft) chapter is about their experiences of the French Revolution, but Holmes gets at the topic by writing about his own experience of the student uprising in Paris in May 1968. He tells about getting caught up in the action on the streets and how an officer held a rifle to his chest, and when Holmes said he was English to try to get out of the situation, the officer told him to mind his own business and go back home to England. Holmes moves from there to considering what it was like for Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft to be in an analogous situation — foreigners experiencing another country’s revolution. Holmes wants to know what it was these two were seeking in France and what they might have felt.

This leads him to think about the differences between a rational reaction to revolution — a philosophical take on events — and an imaginative and emotional one — its personal impact. Wollstonecraft was capable of being very philosophical about the revolution, in the sense of distant and nonemotional. She could even be a little glib. But when she actually lived through some of the revolution’s most dramatic events, it changed her. Both Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft went through some personally harrowing times while in France, and somehow these personal events (love affairs, babies) and the political ones connect. Holmes speculates that the real effects of revolution aren’t so much political as they are personal — the internal turbulance revolution causes matters just as much as the political turmoil, and the internal revolutions might cause longer-lasting changes. He isn’t quite so despairing about the failure of the May 1968 uprising when he thinks about revolution in this sense — the immediate political goals might have been left unfulfilled, but it did cause changes in the way many people thought and acted.

Perhaps these are the conclusions one might expect from a biographer, one who is focused more on individual lives than on the sweep of history.

At any rate, I like Holmes’s method of placing himself in the middle of his discussions of 18th and 19th century people, and he’s careful not to make too much of the parallels too — the comparison between the French Revolution and May 1968 can only go so far, after all. But it gives him a way of getting inside the experiences of people long dead — a way of imagining what they might have seen and thought and felt.

Holmes has some amazing things to say about what it’s like to write biographies and he makes me want … not to write a biography exactly, but to research a writer deeply. I may write about this more later (I’m by no means through with posting about this book!), but for now I’ll leave you with this quotation:

I’m taking a break from summing up my year (more on that to come though!) to write about Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, of which I have now read about 35 pages, and 35 captivating pages they are. I’ve found a new quotation for my blog (see above) and have become convinced I need to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Holmes is following in Stevenson’s footsteps and writing about his travels and also about his devotion to Stevenson and to the genre of biography.

In one scene, Holmes describes how he has become so obsessed with Stevenson, he feels that Stevenson is actually there, and as Holmes walks through towns and looks at faces, he searches for Stevenson’s likeness. But then he experiences a disappointment: although he has tried to follow his footsteps exactly, he realizes that the bridge on which he crossed a river is not the one Stevenson had used; instead, he finds an old crumbling bridge a little further upstream that marks his path. His response is powerful: “The discovery put me in the blackest gloom. It was stupid, but I was almost tearful.”

What he realizes is that he cannot follow in Stevenson’s literal footsteps — the route has changed over the course of the hundred or so years that separate them — but also that he cannot find Stevenson himself; he cannot perfectly follow the traces of his life. A biographer can only approximate the life, can only follow in the subject’s footsteps at a distance; there is always a gap between biographer and subject:

Even in imagination the gap was there. It had to be recognized; it was no good pretending. You could not play-act into the past, you could not turn it into a game of make-believe. There had to be another way. Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact. The adult distance — the critical distance, the historical distance — had to be maintained. You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic….

… it was the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called “biography” really means. I had never thought about it before. “Biography” meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

I’m a sucker for travel metaphors and I like this one — to write a biography is to travel along with the subject, following in that person’s footsteps on his or her life’s journey. Holmes is physically acting out his life’s work, covering the landscape Stevenson had crossed, attempting to see the things Stevenson’s saw, but seeking Stevenson’s mental and emotional landscape as well as his geographical one. And he both succeeds and fails in this attempt — time and change create a space between Holmes and Stevenson that can’t be bridged. I like that it is a journey that teaches him this lesson and that he has turned this lesson into a book; Footsteps is a travel book in two senses (but all travel books are this, aren’t they?), physical travel across a landscape and an intellectual and emotional journey as well.