On the Trail With a Biographer Bringing Lost Lives to Light

With a preternatural gift for place, Holmes qualifies as a virtuosic landscape painter. He has also regularly joined his subject on the page, an outgrowth, he reveals in his new book, “This Long Pursuit,” of his double-entry notation system. On one side of his notebook he documents his research. On the other he delivers his impressions. Empathy — “the biographer’s most valuable but perilous weapon” — joins the two. For Holmes, biography truly is an affaire de coeur. He measures his life in those doubly accounted descriptions. Fifteen years with the cyclone that was Coleridge equals 30 notebooks for 900 pages, or two volumes, of biography.

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Robert Louis Stevenson, circa 1885.



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Adoc-Photos/Corbis, via Getty Images

Holmes bought his first notebook for Stevenson; it is today one of nearly 200. Which leads him to reflect a little on what he has learned since that summer in the Cévennes. He has been down this discursive path before. With “Footsteps” he began what has turned into a cycle of works by a “Romantic biographer,” shapely nonfiction stories about lives and the art of writing them. He billed “Sidetracks,” his second, as a “personal casebook” or a sort of “sentimental education.” With “This Long Pursuit” he completes the trilogy. Holmes sees his new volume as a “declaration of faith,” though it is as much a book of parables. It includes as well his 10 tongue-in-cheek commandments. In his ninth Holmes prescribes an immodest pride in biography, an English gift to the world on a par with cricket and the full-cooked breakfast. With his 10th he advocates humility, as “we can never know, or write, the Last Word about the Human Heart.” The master admits, after all these years, that he remains mystified by his elusive art.

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While Holmes divides his essays into sections, each can be read as a riff on Virginia Woolf’s sly observation that the actual length of a person’s life is open to dispute. Lives don’t necessarily end on deathbeds after all. Biographically speaking, Holmes points out, the dead are immortal, the more so if you acknowledge the essential open-endedness of the exercise. Documents surface. Memories fail. In an especially loose-limbed chapter he takes his uncertainty out for a stroll, reflecting back to that seminal summer. On arrival in the south of France, he meets Monsieur Hugues in his field. Holmes can still see the cap, the belt buckle, the red-checked handkerchief with which the farmer swabbed his face. Or was that someone else’s handkerchief? Fifty years on, Holmes attempts to return it to its rightful owner. He will not succeed, though he will carry us off on a free-associative trek toward the physiology of memory, ultimately connecting the immortal madeleine of 1913 with an electrifying olfactory summons that predated it, from “The Wind in the Willows.”

Holmes devotes a third of his pages to a group of quiet revolutionaries; he has a soft spot for clever, rebellious, freethinking women. Throughout he remains true to the “reflections” of his subtitle: The biographer stays in the picture, a reminder of how history comes down to us and how it is shaped in the process. So we get a discussion of Geoffrey Scott’s 1925 classic “The Portrait of Zélide,” in which the unnervingly modern 18th-century writer and composer takes a back seat to Scott’s exhumation of her. A young architectural historian, Scott stumbled on Zélide more than a century after her death. Rakish biographer overidentified with rakish subject; Scott made her story a version of his own. He also took to seeing her everywhere. He would assure no fewer than four women — Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West among them — that each was Zélide, lightly disguised.

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Margaret Cavendish



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Bettmann/Getty Images

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Holmes does not so much resurrect five highly original women as explore how and why they have confounded (seduced, traduced and plainly exhausted) their chroniclers. He can’t really answer the question of why Madame de Staël isn’t better remembered today — is it possible that with all the caffeine, the lovers, the travel, the talk, the turbans, she simply wears us out? — but he does arrive at some essential wisdoms. Among his scientific heroines is Margaret Cavendish, the polemicist, poet and cross-dressing naturalist, a woman Woolf described as “quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crackbrained and bird-witted.” So she may have been, though she leads Holmes to note something about exclusion, in this case about women at the edges of the scientific establishment: “Observing from the outside, they saw the inside more clearly.”

He is particularly eloquent about Shelley, with whom he has lived intermittently for decades and who met his end in an 1822 shipwreck. In Holmes’s 1974 biography, Shelley never exactly died: The waves close in as a storm gusts ominously over the Gulf of Spezia. A page later the body washes up, difficult to identify but for the white silk socks and the bundle of poems in the jacket pocket. One might assume Holmes circumnavigated the actual drowning as others had stalled there; Shelley’s tragic end was rewritten so many times that it loomed, in Holmes’s phrase, like “some sinister biographical coral reef.” In truth he did not detour on account of that reef. Holmes simply could not bear the gruesome scene. He suspects that some “subliminal identification” arose when it came to drowning Shelley. Both men were 29 at the time.

Holmes has noted that biography begins “in passionate curiosity.” No one knows where it ends, if only because it never does; it is impressionistic, elastic, closer to archaeology than to sculpture. The shapes shift and the view clears as the path suddenly veers to the left. The emphasis in his title is decidedly on its final word; the closer we get, the more a subject shimmers from our grasp. “They are always in motion,” Holmes has wistfully observed, “carrying their past lives over into the future.” The biographer alone remains fixed in time, his shadow bending across the page. Sometimes a glint of moonlight plays around the edges.

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