Sidetracks. Richard Holmes

      SIDETRACKS

      

      EXPLORATIONS OF

       A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER

      RICHARD HOLMES

      

      To my old friend and adviser

       Peter Janson-Smith through thick and beastly thin

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Prologue

I A Romantic Premonition

Introduction

Thomas Chatterton

II Lost in France

Introduction

Monsieur Nadar

Gautier In London

Poor Pierrot

Inside The Tower

       III Five Gothic Shadows

       Introduction

       The Singular Affair Of The Reverend Mr Barham

       The Reverend Maturin And Mr Melmoth

       M. R. James And Others

       John Stuart Mill

       Lord Lisle And The Tudor Nixon Tapes

       IV A Philosophical Love Story

       Introduction

       The Feminist And The Philosopher: A Love Story

       V Shelley’s Ghost

       Introduction

       Scrope’s Last Throw

       To The Tempest Given

       VI Escapes to Paris

       Introduction

       Scott And Zelda: One Last Trip

       A Summer With The Novelist

       Letters From Paris

       Voltaire’s Grin

       VII Homage to the Godfather

       Introduction

       Boswell’s Bicentenary

       Boswell Among The Tulips

       Dr Johnson’s First Cat

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       About the Author

       Also By Richard Holmes

       Praise

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Prologue

      WE WERE AT a café table, under the plane trees, far in the south, with the evening light flowing away down the river. I was asking the beloved novelist those old, fascinating questions: How do you find your stories? Where do your ideas come from? When she said, with that sudden challenging smile of hers: ‘But how do you find your subjects; where do they come from?’ And I answered almost without thinking, between two mouthfuls of the cold white wine: ‘Down many sidetracks.’ She laughed and looked out into the gathering dark. ‘I think you’d better explain that,’ she said. So I have tried.

      This book is my attempt to explore – as well as to explain – something of these mysterious biographical pathways. (I love the French word sentier for a track, because it also hints at the notion of a line of smell or perfume, as in ‘on the scent’.) It is a biographer’s collection of short pieces, rather like a novelist’s collection of short stories, but it has a theme and purpose. It is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest, a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject, and the form to fit it. It is my personal casebook.

      For me biography has always been a personal adventure of exploration and pursuit, a tracking. It is uncertain in its beginning, when even the first outline of a glimpsed subject may change into someone else, or become a minor role in another life, or simply fade away into the historical undergrowth. It is tantalizing in its final destination, when a completed biography invariably leaves so much else to be discovered, sometimes by other means. It is often surprising in retrospect, when previously hidden perspectives and retrospectives emerge. I conclude that no biography is ever definitive, because that is not the nature of such journeys, nor of the human heart which is their territory. Sometimes all one achieves is another