Issue 223, Winter 2017
Born in London in 1945, Richard Holmes has written ten biographies and books of biographical essays. Even in his early works Shelley (1974) and Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), Holmes demonstrates a keen eye for place and a striking empathy for his subjects. In his pages, one has the chance, however fleeting, to imagine what it may have been like to ride on the Lido with Shelley and Byron, or roam the midnight streets of London with Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, or take to the air over the Arctic with Salomon August Andrée. His books have warmth and intimacy combined with a knowing sense of their own incompleteness, an idea that Holmes sees as the very heart of biography.
We met three times in the winter of 2017. Our first meeting began at a London bistro and ended in overstuffed armchairs at the office of his literary agent in Covent Garden. The next day, we continued at his apartment in north London—not too far from where an aging Coleridge stood to salute Byron’s funeral cortege. In his apartment, the books on past subjects were clustered on the shelves like memorials to old friends, some of whom (like the poet Gérard de Nerval) have escaped the full Holmes treatment but linger on in his affection. Our final meeting took place over tea and cookies at my apartment in New York.
An adventurous spirit, Holmes has followed his own Romantic enthusiasms far and wide—from a sailing adventure that ended in a helicopter rescue, to an attempted hot-air balloon landing on the front lawn of the Australian parliament in Canberra, to many experiments with fiction and radio plays. Perhaps most adventurous of all was his shift from literary to scientific biography in The Age of Wonder (2008). For a number of years, he was a professor of biography at the University of East Anglia and the editor of a series of reissued classic biographies; he now lives between London and Norfolk with his partner, the novelist Rose Tremain, from whom he will slyly admit having borrowed a character for a brief part in his latest book, This Long Pursuit (2017). The couple returns every year to their stone house on the edge of the Cévennes, where, much earlier, as Holmes explains below, he first felt the biographical urge.
INTERVIEWER
How did you start writing biographies?
HOLMES
At eighteen, just out of Roman Catholic school and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red hardback with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the Lozère, following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a rucksack, sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The Cévennes is like a French version of the Scottish Highlands, wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle étoile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a traveler’s check for fifty pounds in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began.
INTERVIEWER
But it was years before you actually published anything about Stevenson—not until your 1985 book, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. First you went to university and moved to London and became a poet.
HOLMES
Well, in my twenties I wrote a lot of poetry, songs, and story-ballads, some collected as a pamphlet, One for Sorrow, Two for Joy (1970), with the help of a real poet, Christopher Logue. I supported myself by reviewing, but a publisher suggested I write a book called “Prodigies,” about the lives of young creative people—poets, painters, writers, musicians. I remember he mentioned Janis Joplin. After all, this was in the late sixties. I thought, Well, maybe, but where does this fascination with prodigies really start? Not with Janis Joplin. It starts with the British Romantics, and who was their youngest star? Thomas Chatterton, the Bristol prodigy who invented an imaginary poet called Thomas Rowley. Chatterton wrote medieval poems as Rowley, ballads and rather beautiful, songlike lyrics. At seventeen, Chatterton came to London hoping to make his fortune, but it was all a disaster. He took opium and committed suicide in a Holborn attic. I was haunted by a famous Victorian painting of him by Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton.
In the Rowley poems, Chatterton refers to certain medieval chivalric tombs in Bristol, and I went down and found they were still there in Saint Mary Redcliffe church. Suddenly the past became very real. I wrote what was just intended as the first chapter of that “Prodigies” book. But Chatterton’s story possessed me, and all the rest rather fell away. I explained this to my future agent, Peter Janson-Smith, and he sent the Chatterton piece on its own to John Murray, the publishing house that had once published Byron. And to my amazement, dear John Murray, with his abrupt manner and his witty bow tie—a direct descendant of Byron’s editor—said, Well yes! Why not—we’ll publish it in our magazine, Cornhill. They gave me half the
issue. It was a fifty-page piece, and the other half was a wartime memoir by Alan Moorehead. After the poems, that was my first publication, “Chatterton: The Case Re-opened,” with some original manuscript illustrations, and some wonderfully atmospheric photographs of the tombs taken by my brother, Adrian.
INTERVIEWER
What did you experience in writing your Chatterton essay?
HOLMES
I found how intensely I enjoyed bringing someone back to life. Gathering the evidence, recovering the story, and trying to find, for example, what he looked like. Were there any genuine portraits of Chatterton? The answer is, Possibly one. And because there was something so short and brilliant and tragic about that life, I was simply driven to retell it. I had the sense that a sort of justice hadn’t quite been done to him. That’s partly the biographer’s job, I think, to give someone a fair hearing, to do them justice.
INTERVIEWER
Looking back, it seems that many elements of your career were there in that essay, in some form or another. The following in someone’s physical footsteps, the sense of empathy, the effort to rescue a figure who is known in a superficial way as a young prodigy, and so on.
HOLMES
Yes, that’s true. So many poets whom I would subsequently write about did surprisingly turn up in that piece, like Shelley, Coleridge, and even Richard Savage. They were out there, interviewing me already, as it were. I continued writing poetry, but I thought, Could I write more prose pieces on a larger scale? In those days, the poet Shelley had been dismissed by all the academics. F. R. Leavis had written that he was not serious. What’s more, he was something of a dangerous atheist radical. That was a challenge, too.
INTERVIEWER
Wasn’t that a good thing in the late sixties and early seventies?
HOLMES
By that time, yes it was. But I don’t think I had read a line of Shelley earlier at Cambridge. With my superb, provocative director of studies, George Steiner, we read Blake and Goethe, but not Shelley. So I began to read him and found his travel letters and short prose essays were wonderfully good—for instance, “On the Devil, and Devils.” They were an eye-opener for me. Then I began the poetry. I remember reading Prometheus Unbound in a laundromat off Baker. I was still living hand-to-mouth in those days. It was probably on a wet Sunday afternoon, when most things seem to begin. I was watching my washing go round in the laundromat and reading this extraordinary poem about defying the gods. This was something else. Who on earth was this man?
INTERVIEWER
So it didn’t start with love?
HOLMES
No, I thought Shelley was quite a difficult character, actually, and a lot of the poetry I didn’t like to begin with. But then there were astonishing things like “Ode to the West Wind” and “The Mask of Anarchy” and the Venetian poem “Julian and Maddalo.” And he was always traveling—in Ireland, France, Switzerland, and Italy. That was interesting for biography, and I wanted to travel myself, too. Then also, I was writing weekly reviews for the Times, which was demanding but seemed to be settling into a safe pattern. I thought, I could go on for years doing this. If I’m going to write seriously, I must break out.
My agent got me a contract with Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write a big biography. The advance was generous—two thousand pounds over two years. In those days, I could live on a hundred a month, so it was enough to leave reviewing, go away, travel, research, and write. Though of course it took three years. I went to Paris immediately after finishing, to recover, and began a different kind of feature journalism about French historical figures like Nadar and Gautier, subsequently collected in my book Sidetracks (2000).
INTERVIEWER
How did you know how to write a biography?
HOLMES
Writing for the Times had taught me a lot about research and story lines, and deadlines. I had a fifty-page practice with “Chatterton.” I knew a life had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, although, as they say, not necessarily in that order.