This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic biographer – review

Richard Holmes explores the literary art of telling a life story in this glorious autobiographical study

There is a wonderful moment in Richard Holmes’s new book in which he describes himself gazing at a flowerbed of his own making. The flowerbed is abundant in “old friends” and its roses, anemones and potentillas are redolent of the memory of their planting. In a book concerned mostly with the lives of others, Holmes offers a glimpse of himself amid the flowers. He is a fond and forgetful figure, longing to subside into the skirts of a plant the size of a “plump chaise longue”, the name of which has escaped him.

It is a brilliant vignette, prompting a meditation on the role of memory in biographical writing, and an exploration of the things that get forgotten in the writing of lives. Throughout This Long Pursuit, Holmes moves between reflections on the subjects of his career as a biographer and sketches of himself at work. We see him lecturing on Coleridge at the Royal Institution, scribbling at a table in the Cévennes, scurrying from the National Portrait Gallery with a glossy catalogue under his arm and newly discovered stories brimming in his mind. The result is a glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, Footsteps and Sidetracks.

Certain moments stand out. I loved his fantasy alternative of Shelley’s middle age, in which the poet lives to campaign for reform in 1832 and to pen his famous “odes to electromagnetism”, before causing a late scandal by being elected as the first professor of poetry and politics at the secular University of London. Such virtuosic game playing may be heaven for Holmes’s fans (of whom I am unashamedly one), but it also reveals a serious point. The death scene, Holmes argues, is not the end of the human story. Instead, “the dead may always have more life, more time, to give us”.

A fascinating chapter on the 17th-century woman of letters Margaret Cavendish reveals both the story of a life and the workings by which that life is literarily constructed as Holmes makes his readings of Cavendish’s letters explicit. The restoration of women’s lives is a particular concern here as Holmes returns once more to Mary Wollstonecraft (the subject of the most moving essay in Footsteps) and uncovers the hidden stories of the French writer Zélide and the editor Anne Gilchrist. Gilchrist’s history also takes Holmes into the realms of the biography of biography, as he looks at the efforts of Anne and her husband to produce the first full-scale study of William Blake.

Anne Gilchrist provides the volume’s closing words, in a celebration of her husband’s approach to the writing of lives. “He desired always to treat his subject exhaustively… to stand hand in hand with him, seeing the same horizon, listening, pondering, absorbing.” It is an approach that is for Holmes an article of faith, in which the biographer stands next to his subjects as critical supporter, gazing outwards from the windows at which they stood. Elsewhere in the volume, he describes biography as a “handshake” and “a simple act of complex friendship”.

Over the course of This Long Pursuit two preoccupations dominate. The first takes up the theme of Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, and is concerned with the close relationship between imaginative writing and science. If we are to have any hope of making a better world, he argues, “we must understand it both scientifically and imaginatively”. The second, as the Shelley fantasy illustrates, is the intellectual and imaginative significance of the posthumous life. Keats’s survival after death is the theme of a particularly fine essay that takes the poet’s own description of his dying days as a “posthumous existence” as its starting point. Holmes pursues his subjects past their deathbeds and into posterity, exploring how literary biography is shaped by generations of readers. In so doing he offers an account of the genre as endlessly abundant and inventive, concerned with every aspect of telling and reading lives. Here he is, in his own words, the “pursuer pursued”, and the best advocate imaginable for the richness of his form.

This Long Pursuit is published by Harper Collins (£25). Click here to buy it for £20.50

Contributor

Daisy Hay

The GuardianTramp

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