The biographical writings of a biographer of 19th century writers. Pretty unusual combination of essay, autobiography, literary biography and reflections on the art of writing biography.
My friend John used to say that literary tourism was a drag. You know, visiting the grave of Jim Morrison in Paris, or going to Kafka‘s house in Prague or something. Who do you become if you do that kind of thing?
I have fallen into this trap myself, I too have felt a sense of history when visiting famous writers’ homes – a few years ago I visited the home of Edith Wharton in Massachusetts. But I was in the area on other business. Others go even further, like a a friend of mine who once seeked out a cave in which famed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once temporarily dwelled, in provincial Norway. That’s a level of dedication I don’t possess.
Holmes, however, has this dedication in spades: as a young man, he went on a wallfahrt in the footsteps (hence the title) of his idol R.L. Stevenson and his trek across rural France.
It makes the French revolution come alive when he describes it through the eyes of Wollstonecraft. Also noteworthy for me that he describes her time in Sweden and Norway.
He then goes on to describe a lengthy stay in Italy where he traces the ramblings of P.B. Shelley. It goes on too long in my opinion.
Nerval is the least known of the writers he describes, but arguably the most interesting. He was an important figure in the literary circuit around Saint-Beuve, de Musset and Théophile Gautier.
This is the first book of this kind Holmes wrote, where he mixes biography ad autobiography, or writes literary biography through memoir. He has since ventured into that area with later titles like Sidetracks (2000) and This Long Pursuit (2016). It is an interesting experiment, and I tried to find other examples in this obscure genre. I found that most biographers don’t consider their own lives very interesting and rarely venture into writing about themselves. An interesting exception is James Atlas (biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow) who wrote a few years ago The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. It was his way of bookending his writing career. Are there other memoir-writing biographers that I’ve missed?
Month: December 2022
Medallions (Zofia Nalkowska, 1946)
Medallions in a collection of eight short reportage-like pieces about the horrors Nalkowska saw shortly after the end of world war 2. The books is famous in Poland, but not very well-known outside the country.
The stories are truly horrifying, about people who make soap out of human lipid matter, reports of pointless suffering and death by rural train tracks, where none of the witnesses dares offer help, for fear of reprisal. There are interviews with people who managed to survive in ghettoes, with nothing to eat. Stories from the camps, with stories of people reverting to autophagous practices. The short tone and sense of witnessing reminds me of another Polish writer, Hanna Krall. Also Ida Fink? The difference is that Nalkowska does not herself have a Jewish connection, I think.
Nalkowska was once a big deal in Polish literary life, but only a few of her numerous works are translated to English except Medallions. I’m not sure what is meant by the title. In one of the stories there is a woman who tends the local graves and when they are bombed there are medallions lying around. Maybe the image is meant to point to the terrible irony of military awards in the face of vast horrifying mass death.
This was translated to Swedish in 2017 by Emi-Simone Zawall. Her postscript frames the book as a great example of Polish literature, which annoys me mildly. To me, these stories should first and foremost be seen as testimony about the horrors of war, and any literary merits it might have should come in second place. She also manages to translate Izbica to Ibiza, which is kind of a big mistake for a translator from Polish. The book was also translated to Norwegian in 2022 by Julia Wiedlocha, published by Cappelen Damm.
Kinship of all Species 