Bringing the Dead Back to Life

I first encountered the writing of Richard Holmes when, as a student in the late 1970s, I picked up a copy of his first book, “Shelley: The Pursuit,” and was thrilled. Here was a picture of Shelley different from all my previous ideas of him, which at the time were largely derived from “Ariel” by Andre Maurois-the first book ever published by Penguin, by the way, back in the 1930s, and thus one of the very first mass-market paperbacks of any sort (a biography of a poet-are we talking different times or what?), a swooning portrait that shaped the fantasies of several generations of English girls, not to mention those of the boys who twigged to the idea that verse might be useful for reasons other than literary.

Holmes’ Shelley is altogether more substantial, a robust, capable and indeed almost terrible figure, a determined and professional literary man who mastered several languages so he could better ply his trade, a visionary and very political poet who perhaps had more in common with his beleaguered predecessor William Blake than his glamorous friend Lord Byron, a man who abhorred violence and who, by the turmoil of his living, left behind a stream of dead lovers and dead babies, victims who came back to haunt him with nightmare visions of his own doom.

A poet maudit indeed, and yet Holmes made me wish I’d been around him, to feel his electricity and inspiration and, on finishing the book, I didn’t feel that Shelley had been debunked, far from it. It was as though he’d been restored by an act of scholarship as impassioned and thrilling as the events described, as though Holmes had rendered the tragic gesture of the life complete and whole for the first time and not without emotional cost to himself.

Intellectually, the book redressed a balance. On the page, the prose tingled with excitement. As only the best writing does, it put you there: for instance, evoking Shelley’s death by drowning with cool dread: “The exposed flesh of Shelley’s arm and face had been entirely eaten away, but he was identifiable by the nankeen trousers, the white silk socks beneath the boots and Hunts’ copy of Keats’s poems doubled back in the jacket pocket.”

“Shelley: The Pursuit” was published in 1974, when Holmes was still only in his late 20s. Since then, each of his full-length studies, and there haven’t been many-two long and splendid books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a less successful shorter one on Samuel Johnson’s relationship with the poet and murderer Richard Savage-has been marked by the same intense yet objective identification and by an exhilarating style that acts as airy, uplifting counterpoint to the interpretative depth.

Holmes has established himself as one of the finest of literary biographers, but biography isn’t just his metier, it’s his subject too. In two further books, “Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer” (1985) and now “Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer,” he meditates on the nature of his craft and the increasingly primary importance of biography as a form.

Why are we fascinated by other people’s lives? Why do we reach for the latest magazine with Russell Crowe on the cover, hoping that we’ll get the dish on Meg Ryan and the kidnapping plot? And is this the same prurient, gossipy impulse that makes us want to read about Keats? In what way, exactly, is Walter Jackson Bate better and more useful than Vanity Fair, if indeed he is? And why is it that certain biographies-Bob Woodward’s rummage through the credit card receipts of John Belushi in “Wired,” for instance, or the more recent “Joe DiMaggio” by Richard Ben Cramer-entertain us and yet fill us with mistrust?

“Sidetracks,” evoking plenty of questions like this, collects 20 or so essays and-perhaps even more curious-plays and short stories, written over a 30-year span, and weaves autobiographical notes among them. The result amounts to much more than the mere attractive repackaging of old stuff, even if there is a slightly dusted-off air, as if the book retained the not-unpleasant aroma of the trunk from which these old cuttings were disinterred before being heaved to the Xerox machine.

But that’s easily forgiven: Holmes is so good, and “Sidetracks” is funny and bracing, full of wonderful stories and suggestive plums, beginning with how he made his own start.

There’s a familiar pattern to the traditional English literary career. First step is the move from the provinces or the university (and it still helps if it’s Oxford or Cambridge) to the big city, where sex is pursued, liquor and mind-altering substances are consumed and loneliness and depression are encountered. Somehow in the midst of the fret, writing happens and professional advancement is secured-or not. It’s the well-trod and perilous path whose pleasures and disappointments have been scurrilously recorded and whose tricky curves are littered with wrecks and smeared with road-kill. Book life isn’t race car driving, but it isn’t dentistry either.

On his own move from Cambridge, living in London, feeling “suicidally lonely and depressed,” ’mad to write,” driven by “the inky demon,” Holmes became fascinated by the 18th-century poet and forger Thomas Chatterton, who in 1770 traveled from his home town of Bristol to the capital, at first in high spirits, and committed suicide four months later by taking arsenic.

That fascination led to Holmes’ first notable work, a long (and long unavailable) essay that leads off “Sidetracks’; the essay ends, remarkably, with a rousing clarion call of optimism, a refusal to see Chatterton’s self-slaughter in his Holborn attic as an act of hopelessness.

Holmes’ analysis of the poet’s final work, “The Excelente Balade of Charitie,” in which a monk in gray appears out of a storm and freely gives aid to an embattled pilgrim, may seem stubborn and wishful. But it is also an extraordinarily beautiful evocation of the affirming light that writing can hold: “The storm against them is all storms; it is the storm of the circumstance, the storm of the mind, the storm of the body, of creativity, of ambition, of loneliness. But there is no final despair; help comes, life is made out. There is no final despair at Pyle Street, or at Colston Hall, or at Lambert’s drudging office; there is no despair at Shoreditch, or at Brooke Street in the attic. Above all the poet did not despair in the attic.”

Chatterton couldn’t save his own life, but he saved Holmes’ and gave it new dimension. In the poet’s story, Holmes sees the end of the Augustan Age and the beginning of the Romantic, one of those times in history when English literary life turned its back on London as firmly as the city had on Chatterton himself, the era of the lonely and perhaps insane romantic wanderer. He also found the threads that, once picked up, would lead to a quarter-century of his own work. In this case Chatterton was a sidetrack that duly led to the scholarly highways of Shelley and Coleridge.

But of course anybody’s life only looks inevitable in retrospect. In “Sidetracks,” Holmes records how, after “Shelley: The Pursuit,” he turned to the French Romantic writers Theophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval (he who stalked the streets of Paris with a lobster on a leash as though it were a puppy) and wrote a 400-page book about them and their friendship (the one a success, the other yet one more sad suicide) that lost itself “in a maze of shifting journeys and identities” and didn’t cohere and was never published.

From these years of work Holmes salvaged various newspaper articles and a radio play that reaches toward an understanding of installment death. That play is another of the splendid oddities here, another genre mastered, another way of trying to recapture the fleeting emotion of a life, a tool to carry with him while he searches for his next subject or, rather-as he came to realize was a more accurate representation of the way the process works for him-as he waits for his next big subject to find and invade him, for Coleridge to walk down a hill toward him in North London and take up residence in his head, a moment that seems more predestined to us than it ever does to Holmes himself.

Which is just his point: for Holmes biography is a metaphysical, an intimately autobiographical matter, a process of emotional projection that brings responsibilities and duties, that must resonate with his own life for him to feel he’s doing justice to his subjects, who, in turn, because he’s loved them so much, never let him go.

Thus Shelley takes curtain calls in two pieces here, one a play about those last, doomed days at the Villa Casa Magni, the other a quite delicious essay about a friend of Byron’s, the Regency rake Scrope Berdmore Davies, “a university don and a society gambler-a combination of metiers that would have interested Dostoyevsky,” as Holmes writes.

Davies left a battered leather suitcase, abandoned when his gambling debts forced him to flee England in 1820, an item of luggage lined in polka-dot silk (Holmes has an infallible eye for this sort of lively detail), which turned up in 1977 and was discovered to contain a priceless cache of Byron’s letters and previously unknown Shelley manuscripts.

And in another hefty piece, “The Feminist and the Philosopher,” Holmes once again courts (there’s no other word for it) a particular heroine of his, the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, in whose strange, passionate and highly contemporary marriage to William Godwin he sees prefigured his own late-blooming love affair with the English novelist Rose Tremain, a relationship that is perhaps his own delighted coming-to-terms with the fact that not all despairing young poets blaze across the sky like meteors and then die, that others-like Coleridge-survive and move forward into the more comical pastures of middle age, where happiness can indeed be a choice that gets made or doesn’t.

The muse of biography, in other words, has rewarded Holmes for the devotion he’s shown, and after explorations of the worlds of various Victorian ghost-story writers (written while he was living on Romney Marsh, one of the most haunted places in England, a landscape that slithers with eels and vapors and seems barely to have emerged from the brine), of the Paris of Voltaire and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (whence Holmes fled after finishing his first book and where he now keeps a place with Tremain), he turns his attention in a final cluster of pieces on James Boswell, whose astonishingly unorthodox and touching and hilarious “Life of Johnson” is his foundation text. Here we get the author’s most naked and straightforward assessment of what makes great biography and why it is important.

Boswell’s book, he notes, is “a mighty chronicle which is also an intimate conversation,” a Grand Tour of an era that encompasses “subtle layerings of autobiography upon biography, dramatised dialogues upon sober documentation, reverence upon mockery.” Boswell’s passionate curiosity championed the art of biography and launched it as a business, yet still bequeathed “not a technique of exploitation but an idea-even an ideal-of truth-telling.”

The proper study of mankind is indeed man, Holmes says, and thus our current obsession with life stories is justified, even useful and admirable-but only if the teller is obsessed by truth and not only fact and works with love to bring the dead back to life and explore the past’s intricate ironies. And if that isn’t a romantic idea, I’ve never heard one, but then this latest installment from Richard Holmes confirms its validity, even necessity.