Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer - Hardcover

Holmes, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679438467 ISBN 13: 9780679438465

Publisher: Pantheon, 2000

Synopsis

In 1985 Richard Holmes published a book called Footsteps, and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mixture of travel, biographical sleuthing, and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains one of the most intoxicating and magical works of modern literary investigation ever written.

Now Holmes has put together a further and wonderfully revealing exploration of his biographical methods. Sidetracks is his personal casebook, assembled from decades of "wanderings from the straight and narrow" of his major biographies. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. "This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it."

Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities--French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.

With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: "To be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever."

About this title

Review

"Biography, like love, begins in passionate curiosity." So declares Richard Holmes--and as one of our most gifted biographers, with a half-dozen classic works under his belt, he ought to know. Yet Sidetracks is neither a close-focus chronicle (like Coleridge: Early Visions and Coleridge: Darker Reflections) nor a spirited, allusive slice of the author's life (like Footsteps). It is instead a miscellany with a difference. Introducing this collection of essays and sketches, Holmes describes it as "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."

Wishful thinking? Not in the least. Sidetracks does indeed lead the author all over the map, from Thomas Chatterton to Felix Nadar, Mary Wollstonecraft to F. Scott Fitzgerald, not to mention that superlative Regency swinger Scrope Berdmore Davies. But Holmes's continuing preoccupation with the biographical arts gives the book a real unity, and makes it required reading for any aspiring Boswell. His professional tips are invariably on the nose: "Empathy is the most powerful, the most necessary, and the most deceptive, of all biographical emotions." His critical judgments are no less acute, whether he's discussing Shelley's "quality of verbal helium" or the "intellectual physiognomy" of Voltaire's grin. Still, the best lessons here (and the purest pleasures) are supplied by Holmes's own sympathetic magic, which can bring so nondescript a figure as John Stuart Mill to vivid life:

His face was small, dry and circumstantial, deeply lined from early age, nose chiselled out and lips hydraulically compressed and narrow, the mouth drawn down at the corners by the imponderable weights of Utility.... The right eye never stood still at all: there was a permanent, perceptible twitch flickering the lid and eyebrow like a heliograph; and above it, strangest of all, a large inexplicable bump, a sort of dome, as if something alien had taken up occupation.

The best biographers are necessarily revisionists, and even in these short pieces Richard Holmes comes up with some startling interpretations. He argues, for example, that Chatterton's suicidal dose of arsenic was in fact an accident. What stays with the reader, however, are the fascinating and sometimes eerie intersections of past and present, life and art. It's enough to make you wonder whether biographers ultimately choose their subjects, or vice versa--and Sidetracks, in any case, suggests not six but at least a dozen characters in search of an author. --James Marcus

From the Back Cover

                

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 that old, fascinating question, 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.
--From Sidetracks

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679438467
• ISBN 13: 9780679438465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432