Holmes, Richard 1945-

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Holmes, Richard 1945-

PERSONAL:

Born November 5, 1945, in London, England; son of Dennis (a lawyer) and Pamela (a poet and children's writer) Holmes; partner of Rose Tremain (a novelist). Education: Churchill College, Cambridge, B.A., 1967. Hobbies and other interests: Sailing, walking, gardening.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o David Godwin, Aitken, Stone &Wylie Ltd., 29 Fernshaw Rd., London SW10 0TG, England.

CAREER:

Journalist and writer. Canvasser for City of Westminster, London, England, 1968; University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, professor of biographical studies, 2001—.

MEMBER:

Royal Society of Literature (fellow), British Academy (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Somerset Maugham Award from Society of Authors, 1976, for Shelley: The Pursuit; Society of Authors Foundation Award, 1986; Whitbread Book of the Year Award from Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland, 1989, for Coleridge: Early Visions; Order of the British Empire (OBE), 1992; James Tait Black Award, 1993, for Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage; Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award, both 1998, both for Coleridge: Darker Reflections; honorary Litt.D., University of East Anglia, 2000.

WRITINGS:

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy (poems), Cafe Books (London, England), 1970.

Thomas Chatterton: The Case Reopened (monograph), J. Murray, 1970.

Shelley: The Pursuit (biography), Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1974, Dutton (New York, NY), 1975, new edition, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2003.

(Translator and author of afterword) Theophile Gautier, My Fantoms, Quartet Books (London, England), 1976.

Inside the Tower (radio play), British Broadcasting Corp.-Radio 3, 1977.

(Editor) Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley on Love (anthology), University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1980.

Coleridge (essays), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(Contributor) Gerard de Nerval, The Chimeras, translation by Peter Jay, essays by Jay and Holmes, Black Swan (Redding Ridge, CT), 1984.

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (literary travelogue), Viking (New York, NY), 1985.

(Editor and author of introduction) Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [and] Memoirs of the Author of "The Rights of Woman" (the former by Wollstonecraft, the latter by Godwin), Penguin (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Robert Hampson) Kipling: Something of Myself, Penguin (New York, NY), 1987.

Coleridge: Early Visions (biography), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1989, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1993.

(Editor) Coleridge: Selected Poems, HarperCollins (London, England), 1996.

Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, HarperCollins Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor and author of introduction) Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Savage: An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers, Harper Perennial (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor) Defoe on Sheppard and Wild, Flamingo, 2002.

(Editor) Gilchrist on Blake, Flamingo, 2002.

(Editor) Godwin on Wollstonecraft, Flamingo, 2002.

(Editor) Scott on Zelide, Flamingo, 2002.

(Editor) Southey on Nelson, Flamingo, 2002.

(Editor) The Age of Wonder, HarperCollins (London, England), 2006.

Also author of the unpublished work A Dream Biography, about Gerard de Nerval. Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, New York Review of Books, and the London Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

"‘Biography’ meant a book about someone's life. Only for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit." So writes Richard Holmes in an impressionistic memoir about his life's work—Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. Holmes specializes in the life stories of nineteenth-century writers and has produced award-winning studies of English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Admired for his scholarship and the diligence with which he tracks down the old haunts of his subjects, he is also known for his controversial belief that the biographer's art is inherently somewhat subjective. Along with documents, photographs, and literary pilgrimages, Holmes suggests, the biographer needs an imaginative, emotional contact with his or her subject in order to bring it to life for the reader.

As Holmes relates in Footsteps, he first became interested in biography in his late teens. Unsure of his direction in life after years in strict religious boarding schools, he decided to gain a sense of independence by traveling to France and tracing the mountainous route that author Robert Louis Stevenson had taken for the 1879 journal Travels with a Donkey. "If I wrote anything at all," Holmes recalls, "I thought … it would be poems about walking, swimming, climbing hills and sleeping under the stars." Instead he wrote "prose meditations" that "focused on one totally unforeseen thing: the growth of a friendship with Stevenson, which is to say, the growth of an imaginary relationship with a non-existent person, or at least a dead one." Knowing that Stevenson was also the skeptical child of a strict religious upbringing seemed to make this "friendship" all the more real. Holmes became eager to follow Stevenson's route as closely as possible, and he felt the "blackest gloom" when he realized that one of the bridges Stevenson had crossed was now an impassible, crumbling ruin.

That moment, Holmes suggests in Footsteps, prompted one of his first insights into the complex role of the biographer. On the one hand, Holmes contends, "love" or "hero-worship" for a subject is necessary to spur a biographer to seek and assemble the details of the subject's life. At the same time, though, objectivity must remind the biographer that another person's life can never be fully recaptured, just as Stevenson's old bridge can no longer be crossed. "Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact," Holmes writes in Footsteps. "You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present."

Holmes renewed his interest in biography after graduating from Cambridge University in 1967. Dismayed by the poverty he saw as a government canvasser in London neighborhoods, he became fascinated by the student protests that were occurring in Paris. To many of Holmes' generation, such unrest presaged a new movement for social justice. Eager to witness the unfolding events, Holmes went to France; soon he was facing an angry member of the French security forces, who pointed a rifle at him and said that Englishmen should mind their own business. By 1969 the protests had ended and little had changed. Pondering his disillusioning experience, Holmes realized that during the French Revolution of the 1790s many English intellectuals, including poet William Wordsworth and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had visited Paris as political observers somewhat like himself. Both Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft expected to witness advances in human rights, but instead both became entangled in painful love affairs and watched the Revolution betray its own ideals. Through reading, research, and travel Holmes reconstructed the experiences of his predecessors. Their personal turmoil, he suggests, embodied the perennial conflict in human life between the thrill of idealism and the disappointments of reality. As an unabashed "child of the Sixties," Holmes finds the dilemma particularly meaningful to his own generation.

Though he published a book of poems in 1970, Holmes was increasingly drawn to biography. He became fascinated by the life story of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a brilliant and troubled Romantic poet who died in 1822 at the age of twenty-nine. Though Shelley wrote of such high ideals as artistic beauty and social justice, he was plagued by personal problems that were often of his own making. Believing in free love, he abandoned his wife and eloped to continental Europe with another woman; his wife soon committed suicide and he suffered permanent ostracism. Moreover, Holmes suggests, after marrying his new lover, Shelley repeatedly distressed her by showing a strong attachment to her sister. "Shelley," declares Holmes in Footsteps, was "the man who acted on principle, who acted out of sympathy and truth of feeling, who deliberately defied convention—and, to his utter dismay, caused chaos as a result." Once more, Holmes saw a parallel to the sixties generation as it adapted to the disappointments of the seventies, and he began an imaginative pursuit of Shelley, visiting many places where the poet had lived throughout Italy and even slipping into fenced-off Roman ruins to study Shelley's poems where they had been written.

Such an obsession with another person, he suggests in Footsteps, began to affect his sense of well-being. "In Italy my outward life took on a curious thinness and unreality that I find difficult to describe," he recalls. "I drifted without contact through the tourist crowds of the cities, and among the sleepy inhabitants of remote villages where the Shelleys had stayed." The author added: "I read and reread Shelley's poetry and letters and got quietly drunk in the evenings because I felt so solitary and yet so tense with the voices in my head." Finally, Holmes relates, he returned to England and spent fourteen months doing little but sleeping on a cot by day and writing about Shelley by night. The resulting book—his first full-length biography—appeared in 1974 as Shelley: The Pursuit.

"There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them," writes Holmes in the introduction to the work. In particular Holmes challenges the image of Shelley that arose during the Victorian era, when apologists successfully popularized him as a quiet, delicate man whose sorrows were generally undeserved. "That fluttering apparition is not to be found here," continues Holmes, "where a darker and more earthly, crueller and more capable figure moves." While praising Shelley's work and urging new respect for his political writings, Holmes also insists on examining the poet's flawed personal life with a frank and dispassionate eye. Shelley: The Pursuit received high praise. Holmes, wrote Morris Dickstein in the New York Times Book Review, "advances our understanding of Shelley's poetry by giving us … a truer picture of Shelley's life and character than any we've yet had.… He sees how some of Shelley's most dubious qualities as a man are intimately related to his imaginative gifts." The complex ideas in Shelley's poetry, the reviewer explained, were often a reaction to his tangled private life. Dickstein wrote: "Now that we no longer recoil from the uses of biography in the understanding of poetry … Holmes's lively and eloquent book offers one kind of access we can't afford to ignore."

The year Shelley was published Holmes returned to Paris, expecting to write a novel about the social unrest of the late 1960s. "I had had enough of facts," he observes in Footsteps; "I wanted some fiction, and some daylight." Instead he was soon attempting a biography of the nineteenth-century French writer Gerard de Nerval, a madman who was greatly admired by some literary peers for his hallucinatory poetry and prose. The project forced Holmes to confront the limits of the biographer's craft. Nerval's youth, for example, seemed crucial to his development as a writer; but the only way Holmes could reconstruct those years was from Nerval's own distorted recollections. "To write a novel based on Nerval's life from these materials would be perfectly satisfactory," Holmes observes: "It would have imaginative truth. But for me to write his biography meant entering a solipsistic world, where the traditional structure of objective documentation, third-party evidence, and chronology dissolved." For lack of solid facts, "I found myself slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him. As if self-identification—the first crime in biography—had become my last and only resort." He describes his four hundred-page biography of Nerval as a "confused production" that proved unpublishable.

Holmes's next full-length original work did not appear until 1985, more than a decade after Shelley. Footsteps recaps Holmes' early career as a biographer, beginning with Stevenson and ending with Nerval. The book mixes informal biographies of the writers he investigated with accounts of his own activities and observations on the nature of biography itself. While gently mocking his youthful tendency to identify too strongly with his subjects, Holmes nonetheless maintains, after decades of experience, that biographers can utilize emotional insight in their work. "A biographer does become slowly convinced of his subjects' characters," he observes. "After studying them and living with them for several years he finds they become one of the most important of all human truths; and I think perhaps the most reliable. This sense of character eventually grows very strong, and in an extraordinary way a relationship of trust seems to be established between you." Interestingly, as A.S. Byatt observed in the London Times, Holmes carefully maintains a professional distance in Footsteps, for all his "self-revelation." "He is describing … his discovery of his vocation as a biographer," Byatt explained—not his personal life. "We feel we know him very well and not at all," the reviewer concluded. "As he no doubt intended."

Footsteps received widespread attention from book reviewers. "This amounts to … a defence of biography as equal, if not superior to fiction," declared Observer's Hilary Spurling, who praised its "scholarly thoroughness and scope, intellectual clarity and … quite extraordinary emotional precision." Many reviewers were charmed by the eloquence of the author's writing. Footsteps, wrote Melvyn Bragg in Punch, is "original, thoughtful and captivatingly readable …, fun, touching and a great success."

In 1989 Holmes published a new full-length biography titled Coleridge: Early Visions. Part of a projected twovolume work, it describes the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Shelley's Romantic predecessors, from birth in 1772 until age thirty-two. (The work was anticipated by a short one-volume study that Holmes produced in 1982.) While Shelley challenges conventional wisdom by showing the human flaws of its subject, Early Visions seeks to moderate the traditional denigration of Coleridge, who was long seen primarily as an addict and plagiarist who failed to fulfill his early promise as a writer. Holmes readily admits Coleridge's failings, but he also notes attributes that he feels made the poet an "authentic visionary," including a charismatic personality, a great intellect, and the ability to create insightful poetry even from his own sense of failure. In Early Visions, writes Holmes in his introduction, "I have attempted to recapture [Coleridge's] fascination as a man and a writer, and above all to make him live, move, talk, and ‘have his being.’ If he does not leap out of these pages—brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking—and invade your imagination (as he has done mine), then I have failed to do him justice." Many reviewers felt Holmes achieved his aim, and he garnered more than twenty thousand British pounds as winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

The narrative of Early Visions ends in 1804, at a time when Coleridge had written his most famous poems and his promise still seemed untainted by disappointment. In a postscript, Holmes wonders what the popular image of Coleridge would have been like if the author had died that year—"Suppose his life had never actually had a part two? How would his reputation now stand?" Coleridge, Holmes surmises, would have appeared more like Shelley: a brilliant young talent lost before he could realize his full potential. If Coleridge were a character in a novel, Holmes suggests, it might be most effective for him to die young, so that he would be easy to understand and admire. "And yet biography cannot stop," Holmes declares, "because it must conform to the complication, strength, and strangeness of life." He adds: "That is its power over fiction, the authority of truth."

Next from Holmes' pen came, not a sequel to his work on Coleridge's early life, but Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, the story of a fleeting, almost clandestine, friendship between the erudite, bookish Samuel Johnson and the profligate playwright Richard Savage, a pardoned murderer. Johnson is in his late twenties, depressed from his failure as a teacher and unhappy in his marriage; Savage, in contrast, is ecstatic over the possibilities life offered after his escape from death. Their relationship is a nocturnal one, their time spent together consists of walking the dark city streets in conversation, unseen by friends or associates, and unrecorded for posterity. In attempting to capture the undocumented relationship between these two men in his characteristically mythshattering fashion, Holmes is "determined … to recapture the living figures who tend to prove so elusive in literary biography," according to Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Peter Ackroyd. Indeed, continued Ackroyd, "he suggests that the two men were twin subversives, political radicals who despised the claims of wealth and the prerogatives of power." Indeed, the friendship proved so significant to the impressionable young Johnson that he would immortalize his notorious friend a decade later with his first significant prose work, his acclaimed Life of Savage. "Savage mythologizes his own life, Johnson memorializes his erstwhile companion and Holmes deconstructs the motives of both, with a glancing illumination of his own practice as a biographer," explained Michael Dirda in a synopsis of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage in the Washington Post Book World. By describing Johnson's close identification with the subject of his Life of Savage, Holmes is also describing his own identification with his subjects—a relationship that he himself has often characterized as obsessive. Writing in Publishers Weekly a reviewer called the book an "outstanding, eminently readable work of literary scholarship."

The second volume of Holmes's biography of Coleridge, titled Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, was published in 1999, nearly a decade after the first volume's appearance. The biography begins with Coleridge already past his literary prime and beginning his descent into bitterness and feelings of failure. Although the author dutifully chronicles Coleridge's difficulties, including his failing family life and increasing addiction to opium, the author also reflects on what some critic's consider to be Coleridge's greatest literary accomplishment, the writing of the Biographia Literaria. "The astounding complexity of the poet … is brilliantly captured," wrote Stuart Whitwell in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor called the biography a "majesterial chronicle." Hugh Barnes, writing in the New Statesman, commented: "It is hard to deny the perceptiveness or importance of Darker Reflections."

In Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, Holmes presents a series of writings about various people that garnered his attention while he was writing his full-length biographies. The people examined range from the obscure, such as a poet named Thomas Chatterton, to the literary elite, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Boswell, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The author's ponderings not only include essays but also other literary forms, including a radio play, a short story, and a letter. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that "these pieces undeniably confirm why Holmes has been setting new and challenging standards for how biographers approach their subjects." Mary Carroll, writing in Booklist, called the book "an involving intellectual history." Wilson Quarterly contributor Michael Dirda wrote that the book "is as enjoyable as any of Holmes's more sustained works."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 155: Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Holmes, Richard, Shelley: The Pursuit, Dutton (New York, NY), 1975.

Holmes, Richard, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Viking (New York, NY), 1985.

Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Early Visions, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, June, 1990, Phoebe-Lou Adams, review of Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 120.

Booklist, July, 1994, John Shreffer, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, p. 1916; March 15, 1999, Stuart Whitwell, review of Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, p. 1274; November 1, 2000, Mary Carroll, review of Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, p. 511.

Commonweal, November 4, 1994, Edward T. Wheeler, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, p. 32.

Economist, November 11, 1989, review of Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 110.

Kansas City Star, December 7, 2000, John Mark Eberhart, review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems.

Library Journal, March 15, 1999, Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., review of Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, p. 79; October 1, 2000, Robert L. Kelly, review of Sidetracks, p. 96.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 28, 1994, Peter Ackroyd, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, pp. 3, 9.

New Leader, February 24, 1986, Phoebe Pettingell, review of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, p. 13; May 14, 1990, review of Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 22; October 10, 1994, Phoebe Pettingell, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, p. 14.

New Republic, June 25, 1990, Robert M. Adams, review of Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 40.

New Statesman, October 22, 1993, Janet Barron, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, p. 37; October 23, 1998, Hugh Barnes, review of Coleridge: Darker Reflections, p. 48.

New York Times Book Review, June 22, 1975, Morris Dickstein, review of Shelly: The Pursuit.

Observer (London, England), June 30, 1985, Hilary Spurling, review of Footsteps.

Publishers Weekly, March 16, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 56; August 1, 1994, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, p. 69; March 29, 1999, review of Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, p. 79; November 1, 1999, review of Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, p. 50; October 30, 2000, review of Sidetracks, p. 57.

Punch, July 3, 1985, Melvyn Bragg, review of Footsteps.

Times (London, England), July 4, 1985, A.S. Byatt, review of Footsteps.

Wilson Quarterly, winter, 2001, Michael Dirda, review of Sidetracks, p. 131.

Washington Post Book World, September 4, 1994, Michael Dirda, review of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, pp. 3, 8.