Footsteps. Richard Holmes
They also involved a natural struggle to free myself from parental influences—benign ones, but nevertheless encroaching. Hence I suspect the powerful note struck by Stevenson’s exploration of the “dream childhood” theme, the poetry of homesickness—of travelling far away over blue hills and brown rivers, only to find yourself once more back on the final wooded ridge above the natal valley, the small boy wanting to come home.
This form of identification or self-projection is pre-biographic and in a sense pre-literate: but it is an essential motive for following in the footsteps, for attempting to re-create the pathway, the journey, of someone else’s life through the physical past. If you are not in love with them you will not follow them—not very far, anyway. But the true biographic process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where this naive form of love and identification breaks down. The moment of personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal, objective re-creation. For me, almost the earliest occasion was that bridge at Langogne, the old broken bridge that I could not cross, and the sudden physical sense that the past was indeed “another country”.
The past does retain a physical presence for the biographer—in landscapes, buildings, photographs, and above all the actual trace of handwriting on original letters or journals. Anything a hand has touched is for some reason peculiarly charged with personality—Thomas Hardy’s simple steel-tipped pens, each carved with a novel’s name; Shelley’s guitar, presented to Jane Williams; Balzac’s blue china coffee-pot, with its spirit-heater, used through the long nights of Le Père Goriot and Les Illusions Perdues; other writers’ signet rings, worn walking-sticks, Coleridge’s annotated books, Stevenson’s flageolet and tortoise-shell “Tusitala” ring. It is as if the act of repeated touching, especially in the process of daily work or creation, imparts a personal “virtue” to an inanimate object, gives it a fetichistic power in the anthropological sense, which is peculiarly impervious to the passage of time. Gautier wrote in a story that the most powerful images of past life in the whole of Pompeii were the brown, circular prints left by drinkers’ glasses on the marble slabs of the second-century taverna.
But this physical presence is none the less extremely deceptive. The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing, almost as fast as human skin. A building is restored, a bridge is rebuilt or replaced, a road is widened or rerouted, a forest is cut down, a wooded hill is built over, a village green becomes a town centre. Stevenson’s La Trappe had been burnt down, redesigned and rebuilt; many of his donkey-tracks had become tarred roads; his wild upland heaths had been planted over; and even his terraces of deep chestnut trees had been replaced by the commercial foresting of young pines.
The well-meaning attempt to conserve or recover the past can be more subtly destructive. Since the centenary of Stevenson’s Travels I am told the whole route has been marked out, by the local Syndicats d’Initiative, with a series of blazed stakes which lead the pilgrim from one picturesque point de vue to the next, and bring him safely down each evening to some recommended hotel, Carte Touristique, hot bath, and Souvenirs Cévenols. I have not had the heart to go back and see.
Beyond this sense of physical presences growing upon the biographer—which includes the whole aura of personal body influence, the sound of Stevenson’s voice, his particular loose-limbed gait, his mixture of frail boniness and hectic energy, the large mobile brown eyes, the quick thin wrists and ankles, the smell of tobacco and cognac and cologne and sweaty Scottish tweed mixed with the rank odour of Modestine—there is the growing awareness of psychological complication.
This is the second factor that awakens the necessary objectivity of the biographer. My gradual discovery of Fanny Osbourne, and her hidden importance in Stevenson’s journey, made me realise how Stevenson fitted into the enormously intricate emotional web of other people’s lives. The single subject of biography is in this sense a chimera, almost as much as the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, living in splendid asocial isolation. The truth is almost the reverse: that Stevenson existed very largely in, and through, his contact with other people: his books are written for his public; his letters for his friends; even his private journal is a way of giving social expression—externalising—his otherwise inarticulated thoughts. It is in this sense that all real biographical evidence is “third party” evidence; evidence that is witnessed. Just as the biographer cannot make up dialogue, if he is to avoid fiction; so he cannot really say that his subject “thought” or “felt” a particular thing. When he uses these forms of narration it is actually a type of agreed shorthand, which must mean—if it means anything factual—that “there is evidence from his letters or journals or reported conversations that he thought, or that he felt, such-and-such a thing at this time …” In this way the biographer is continually being excluded from, or thrown out of, the fictional rapport he has established with his subject. He is like the news reporter who is told something in confidence, “off the record”, and then can do nothing about it until he has found independent evidence from other sources. His lips are sealed, his hands tied. Otherwise he is dishonourable and prosecutable, not only in the courts of Justice, but in the courts of Truth as well.
My final lesson from the Cévennes is as much metaphysical as literary. It is the paradox that the more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past the more conscious do you become that they never existed wholly in any one place along the recorded path. You cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them, at any particular turn in the road, bend of the river, view from the window. They are always in motion, carrying their past lives over into the future. It is like the sub-atomic particle in nuclear physics that can be defined only in terms of a wave-motion. If I try to fix Stevenson in his green magic dell in the Lozère, or his whitewashed cell at La Trappe, or under his chestnut tree below Mont Mars; if I try to say—this man, thinking and feeling these things, was at this place, at this moment—then at once I have to go backwards and forwards, tracing him at other and corresponding places and times—his childhood bedroom at No 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, or his honeymoon ranch at Silverado, California.
So without knowing it, my youthful journey through the Cévennes led me over the hills and far away into the undiscovered land of other men’s and women’s lives. It led me towards biography.
1
One sultry evening in the spring of 1968, standing at the window of a small upper room in Paddington, I first heard the sounds of the new French Revolution. I had not been to France for four years, and the idea of biography had lain dormant in my mind. After taking a degree at Cambridge I had come down to London and found a temporary job compiling the political register for Westminster City Council. It brought me to the hundreds of poor flats and bedsits in Victoria and Pimlico, the depressed area of South London by the Thames. I sat discussing paintwork, plumbing and social security benefits in endless sad kitchens, sipping tepid tea or sweet sherry. Powerless to act on the petty injustices and miseries I saw, I learned at least how to listen to other people, and observe some of the forces that shaped their lives. I expressed my anger in poems, written with the clumsy literalness of pop-songs, but could find no real outlet for my deeper feelings.
The five-storey house in which I had my garret was almost entirely let to other young people and students, and in keeping with the times we became a kind of commune, busy with macrobiotic food and anti-Vietnam marches and geodesic domes.
The ground-floor was occupied by the consulting rooms of a lady psychiatrist, specialising in drug-addicts and other youthful breakdowns, many of them gifted drop-outs from universities, unmarried mothers trying to find their feet, or young painters and musicians who’d temporarily blown their minds. I sketched a story-essay, which eventually became an impressionistic study of the poet Thomas Chatterton, a precursor of Romanticism, who came to London at the age of