"The stronger the story is, the stronger it holds back the contemporary noise."
Trekking across northern Italy in 1972, Richard Holmes stumbled upon the house in the hills above Pisa where Percy Bysshe Shelley translated Plato's Symposium in 1818. It was a startling discovery for the novice biographer, but more startling still was a snapshot he later developed of the leafy garden behind the weathered farmhouse: there was a figure in the background who didn't appear on Holmes's contact sheet: a young boy with dark eyes peering out from among the trees. "A faint tingling sensation passed over my scalp," Holmes later wrote. "I felt I was looking at a photograph of little William, Shelley's dead son."
An apparition conjured from the mists of English Romanticism or just a modern child come to spy on the eccentric man with the antique camera? Holmes suspects the latter, but for a writer who measures his beginnings as a biographer from the day he bounced a check inadvertently dated 1772, the boy in the picture -- whose quizzical gaze is now immortalized on the jacket of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, a collection of essays reprinted by Vintage in 1996 -- remains a potent symbol of the biographer's power to raise the dead, and of the enchantments that the dead sometimes hold for the living.
"I'm often haunted by the idea that once you've started writing about someone, there's a figure in the doorway," Holmes tells PW in the sparsely furnished living room of the home in Northern London that he shares with his companion, the novelist Rose Tremain. "It's like a Henry James thing -- a presence. I can't tell you how real is the sense that someone is standing in the doorway, saying..." Holmes pauses, gazes towards the hall and whispers intensely, " 'Have you... got me? You promised.' "
The most recent phantom to darken Holmes's doorway has hovered there for so long as to become a permanent fixture, consuming more than a decade of Holmes's life and filling two separate biographies, published 10 years apart. Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1804-1834), just out from Pantheon is the second and final volume of an epic study of the romantic p t Samuel Taylor Coleridge-a magnum opus that Jonathan Raban has called "the greatest literary biography in our time, and maybe anyone's time." The first volume, Coleridge: Early Visions (1772-1804), which won the Whitbread award for best book of the year in 1989, was published in the U.S. by Oxford, but Holmes's American editor, Dan Frank, has reprinted it as a matching Pantheon trade paperback.
Through Holmes's eyes, the esoteric, visionary, opium-addled author of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" becomes a man of spellbinding contradictions and talents. Early Visions tracks Coleridge from the vicarage of a small town in Devon to Cambridge, where he absorbed the reformist spirit of the French Revolution, and to England's Lake District, where his friendship and collaborations with William Wordsworth produced his most enduring p ms and laid the groundwork of English romanticism. It's commonly believed that Coleridge's life ends there, that his chaotic later years -- marked by a bitter falling out with Wordsworth, the deterioration of his family, and the tightening grip of opium, poverty and dependence -- are of little interest.
But for Holmes, whose biographies and biographical sketches of Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Gerard de Nerval and Dr. Johnson are unorthodox in both their approach and their conclusions, the excitement lay in grappling with Coleridge at the very nadir of his life, as he lay hallucinating in a Bath inn in 1813, impecunious and ravaged by opium, his p try in tatters and unpublished. By charting Coleridge's passage through even the bleakest of days, and by rescuing the older man and his work from two centuries of critical neglect, Holmes also hoped to subvert the romantic myth of self-immolating youth. "It was the middle of the life which interested me very, very much. Paradoxically, the lives of the Romantics tended to be that very fast early curve, the rocket going up -- like Keats or Shelley or Rimbaud. This one looks different."
Holmes recalls giving a lecture on Coleridge at the Royal College of Surgeons, when a distinguished doctor approached him and hissed, "After your first book, all that's left is a corpse. How can you write about a corpse?""I bridled and said, 'Well, resurrect him, Sir, resurrect him!"
The incantatory excitement Holmes displays as he talks of his quarry makes it easy to see how a man of such wild intellectual ferment as Coleridge would hold him in thrall. Trim and soft-spoken, with large glasses and an engaging, impish grin, Holmes is so expansive a talker that he often impulsively leaps up to pull books from his shelves, spread them on the floor and read passages aloud. His energy no doubt springs in part from the syrupy coffee that he serves PW, which has been boiled twice in a tin pot on the stove. It's a variety of coffee, he tells us, that was favored by the 19th-century English adventurer Edward Trelawny, who fought in the Greek civil war with Lord Byron, designed Shelley's tomb and swam across Niagara River just above the Falls.
Footstepping
Though Holmes has described himself as a "mad motorcyclist," and was once pulled from the North Sea by an RAF helicopter after his 9-meter wooden sailboat struck a shoal 20 miles out to sea, his own adventures are generally far more clandestine. Since his first biographical foray at age 18, camping alone under the stars in the Cevennes region of France, following a walking tour that Robert Louis Stevenson chronicled in 1879, Holmes has made a career of slipping quietly into the sh s of dead writers. The essay on Shelley in Footsteps recounts Holmes's uneasy sense of invisibility as he "drifted without contact through the tourist crowds of the cities, and among the sleepy inhabitants of remote villages where the Shelleys had stayed a hundred and fifty years before."
"I do a lot of traveling in winter," he says, "because there's no tourism and the rates are much reduced, everything's emptier, the actual inhabitants are there working. You can sort of slide into that."
It's a method that helps him unearth a depth of quotidian detail in unlikely corners, illuminating the subtle connections between past and present. "The reader should feel, `Yes, I can see this little town, this street, this room, this lecture hall.' "
Holmes's sleuthing usually begins in the archives -- which for the Coleridge project were scattered among London, New York, Toronto and Malta -- and then radiates outward. "My notebooks are always divided," he says. "The right-hand side has research details and scholarly notes. The left-hand page is a bit of your own travel writing, your diary, your questions to yourself. I've always found that there's naturally arisen a dialogue between the two pages."
In Early Visions, he draws an indelible image of the p t's protean personality from a passage in Coleridge's notebooks that shows him awakening at dawn in the overnight coach to London, watching the flight of starlings "thickening, deepening, blackening" across a winter landscape.
"What's really moving about it is that the writing there has suddenly got large and jerky," says Holmes. "There it was, actually written in the carriage. It brings him to life in a wonderful way."
Witness to a Revolution
Holmes partly attributes his first impulse to travel to the 10 years he was pent up at a Catholic boarding school. The second of four children born in London to a lawyer and a children's book author, he studied history at Cambridge with George Steiner and worked for the Westminster City Council, canvassing the impoverished blocks of Victoria and Pimlico, before returning to France for his first biographical venture since his tour of the Cevennes. It was 1968 and Holmes's thoughts were spinning with images of Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle of English expatriates gripped by the revolutionary fever that swept the republic two centuries earlier. Happening upon a demonstration one night, confronted by a French soldier who aimed an automatic rifle at his chest, Holmes began pondering the English experience of revolution then and now, and its effect on the p tic imagination.
Such moments of recognition -- chance encounters that make history suddenly seems eerily palpable -- are a hallmark of the essays in Footsteps, each a unique blend of travel, biography and personal memoir. It's a sensation that Holmes hopes to convey to his readers, especially the younger ones, as his work circulates among a new generation of literary travelers and radicals. Reaching for a new U.K. edition of Shelley: The Pursuit, his first full-length biography, published by Dutton in 1975 but now out of print in the U.S., Holmes reads from the introduction: "Nothing is so moving to a biographer as finding an old copy of a book in a stranger's hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its p try underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its jacket bleached with sun and sea. I hope this new edition has such luck."
How appropriate it is, then, that Holmes met Tremain on a travel junket, at an altitude of 36,000 feet, in a Quanta airliner en route to a writer's conference in Adelaide. "It was the most romantic meeting," he says. "We saw the dawn twice, because it rose on us once over southern Europe, then when we arrived it was dark and the sun rose again. For me it was indeed the day the sun rose twice."
The sedentary phases of Holmes's life are now divided between London and a home on the coast in Norwich, where he and Tremain find the solace to write, often stationing themselves at opposite ends of the house. "We may be under the same roof but we're in completely different worlds," he says. "We may not see each other at all during the day but always in the evening, usually very late. We light candles and we talk, and it's like two travelers coming together. I can't tell you the delight of that."
Though Holmes is hardly a recluse, his rustic redoubt clearly frees his imagination to travel the continent and bridge the centuries. Biography, he argues, should replicate that experience for the reader. "In some way, the reason biography is so important to contemporary readers is that we live with this massive foreground of information technology and media news. Our lives are tremendously noisy. Historical memory and personal memory are terribly reduced. One of the things biography d s is make a calm space and ask, `What is the continuity, what are the historical roots of where we are now,' through the story of another life. And the stronger the story is, the stronger it holds back the contemporary noise."
In the ten years that elapsed before the second volume of Coleridge appeared, many wondered if Holmes had been defeated by his subject. After all, the p t himself was, as Holmes puts it, "the master of the unfinished work, the wondrous fragment." In fact, Holmes was editing a selection of Coleridge's verse, so "the telephone line was still open to Coleridge."
Holmes also found time to write another, more unconventional biography depicting the mysterious friendship of a young Dr. Johnson and the dissolute, minor 18th-century p t Richard Savage. In the book's final chapter, Holmes writes that in Johnson's day, there was a ferryman named Holmes who ran boats up the Thames. It's a revelation that leads Holmes to wonder if as a biographer, he, too, is an incarnation of Charon, the Greek river god who ferried the souls of the dead over the Styx.
"Maybe in a way that's what biography is doing," Holmes says. "You're going back along this lost path, across the River Styx, which is also the River of Oblivion. So you cross and stand on the other side and remember. It's a very simple idea, the idea that you're not just doing justice, but it's an act of memory, a recovery, a refusal of that River of Oblivion."
Perhaps it's no surprise that from the narrow roof deck of Holmes' London house, a panoramic view crests at the steeple of St. Michael's church in Highgate, where Coleridge is buried. Holmes's Coleridge may now be finished, but clearly the spirit of the great Romantic remains well within his reach.
