Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Richard Holmes, 1985)

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?