Sidetracks : Explorations of a Romantic Biographer [Hardcover]

Richard Holmes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 14, 2000

In 1985 Richard Holmes published a book called Footsteps, and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mixture of travel, biographical sleuthing, and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains one of the most intoxicating and magical works of modern literary investigation ever written.

Now Holmes has put together a further and wonderfully revealing exploration of his biographical methods. Sidetracks is his personal casebook, assembled from decades of "wanderings from the straight and narrow" of his major biographies. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. "This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it."

Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities--French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.

With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: "To be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Biography, like love, begins in passionate curiosity." So declares Richard Holmes--and as one of our most gifted biographers, with a half-dozen classic works under his belt, he ought to know. Yet Sidetracks is neither a close-focus chronicle (like Coleridge: Early Visions and Coleridge: Darker Reflections) nor a spirited, allusive slice of the author's life (like Footsteps). It is instead a miscellany with a difference. Introducing this collection of essays and sketches, Holmes describes it as "the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest, a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject, and the form to fit it."

Wishful thinking? Not in the least. Sidetracks does indeed lead the author all over the map, from Thomas Chatterton to Felix Nadar, Mary Wollstonecraft to F. Scott Fitzgerald, not to mention that superlative Regency swinger Scrope Berdmore Davies. But Holmes's continuing preoccupation with the biographical arts gives the book a real unity, and makes it required reading for any aspiring Boswell. His professional tips are invariably on the nose: "Empathy is the most powerful, the most necessary, and the most deceptive, of all biographical emotions." His critical judgments are no less acute, whether he's discussing Shelley's "quality of verbal helium" or the "intellectual physiognomy" of Voltaire's grin. Still, the best lessons here (and the purest pleasures) are supplied by Holmes's own sympathetic magic, which can bring so nondescript a figure as John Stuart Mill to vivid life:

His face was small, dry and circumstantial, deeply lined from early age, nose chiselled out and lips hydraulically compressed and narrow, the mouth drawn down at the corners by the imponderable weights of Utility.... The right eye never stood still at all: there was a permanent, perceptible twitch flickering the lid and eyebrow like a heliograph; and above it, strangest of all, a large inexplicable bump, a sort of dome, as if something alien had taken up occupation.

The best biographers are necessarily revisionists, and even in these short pieces Richard Holmes comes up with some startling interpretations. He argues, for example, that Chatterton's suicidal dose of arsenic was in fact an accident. What stays with the reader, however, are the fascinating and sometimes eerie intersections of past and present, life and art. It's enough to make you wonder whether biographers ultimately choose their subjects, or vice versa--and Sidetracks, in any case, suggests not six but at least a dozen characters in search of an author. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly

These "b-sides and rarities" (stories that arrested Holmes's attention while he was investigating his principal subjects) of an eminent literary biographer, most recognized for his two-volume life of Coleridge, present an atypical mixture of autobiography, literary criticism and travel narrative recalling his 1985 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and spanning more than 30 years of a prolific career. Claiming "to find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way," Holmes looks back on how the fickle connection between a biographer and his subject comes into existence by examining his own writing. Just as Wallace Stevens incessantly struggled to "catch" his imagination in the very act of imagining, this collection shows that Holmes has always tried to "catch" himself in the very act of writing about someone or something else. Whether writing about the relatively obscure poet Chatterton (a "sidetrack" to Keats) or about figures as well-known as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (retracing the couple's last trip to Europe together), Holmes approaches biography as a kind of literary game, a puzzle whose pieces he puts together to tell readers why things happened as they did. The result is almost novelistic. A BBC radio play takes readers inside the minds of the poet Shelley and his wife, Mary. Though they lack an overall sense of unity, these pieces undeniably confirm why Holmes has been setting new and challenging standards for how biographers approach their subjects, and they make for glorious reading indeed. (Nov. 14)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (November 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679438467
• ISBN-13: 978-0679438465
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,385,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992. His first book, 'Shelley: The Pursuit', won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. 'Coleridge: Early Visions' won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and 'Dr Johnson & Mr Savage' won the James Tait Black Prize. 'Coleridge: Darker Reflections' won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, 'Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer' in 1985, and 'Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer' in 2000.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely not the place to start for Holmes, June 2, 2006

By 

Gulley Jimson (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (Paperback)

Until I came across this book, I had loved everything I'd read by Richard Holmes, from the biography of Shelley to Footsteps, which is a genuinely great book. I think that everyone should go out and read the latter, since it one of the strangest and loveliest works I have ever come across; no one I've recommended it to has ever found is less than wonderful.

Sidetracks, unfortunately, has nothing in particular to recommend it. It does not appear to have been carefully edited for quality or consistently; it is just a grab bag of articles and pieces from across Holmes's career, with an introduction much less illuminating about the art of biography than any of dozens of passages in Footsteps.

Other than the wonderful article on Chatterton (unsurprisingly, the longest thing in the book), I don't think a single one of the pieces here reaches the quality of his best work. They are either too short to achieve any sort of memorable density, with conclusions that come off as unsupported by evidence - or are just not very inspired. It's clear that Holmes doesn't care nearly as much about, say, Maturin, as he did about Stevenson or Nerval (both featured in Footsteps); and his article on Maturin, unsurprisingly, ends up being little more interesting than an encyclopedia entry.

Obviously, there is nothing here that is downright bad, but also very few pieces that deserve to be bound in a book, especially at this price. Only get this, if you must, after you've read everything else by this great writer.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Biographer's Art Through his Wanderings, January 30, 2002

By 

Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (Paperback)

Richard Holmes has collected many of published and unpublished essays from the past, added new introductions and created Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (as per sub-title of his book, Sidetracks). The journey encompasses many centuries and many delightful figures of the literary past, from John Boswell to F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Lord Lisle to M. R. James (in a wonderful section on Gothic shadows). The two best chapters concentrate on the death (and life) of Thomas Chatterton and the life (and death) of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. This book will be enjoyable for those who are not familiar with all the discussed writers' work (such as myself) as the writing is so clear and beautiful and the personalities examined so fascinating. This book examines biography writing as an art form and thoroughly proves its case. A charming read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deleted Scenes from a Biographer...., April 27, 2008

By 

D. S. Thurlow (Alaska) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (Paperback)

When Sir Charles Oman finished his magnficent seven volume history of the Peninsular War, he had enough unused material on Wellington's Army to fill a separate history nearly 400 pages long. The DVD version of any popular movie is expected to contain extra features such as deleted scenes and a director's commentary. So with 2001's fascinating "Sidetracks" by romantic biographer Richard Holmes.

Holmes, successful and enthusiastic biographer of the poet Samuel Coleridge, offers up a collection of literary sidetracks, back alleys, and interesting stories uncovered in the course of his researches. The collection includes some short articles, radio plays, and sketches of other literary figures such as Thomas Chatterton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Boswell. The well-written pieces illuminate both the subject in question and Holmes' personal fascination with the art of biography.

One highlight is the story of "Melmoth", a long forgotten but horrifc Gothic novel by the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde, one Reverend Charles Maturin, in which a man who has made a Faustian bargain with the devil roams the world in search of another, more miserable person who will take his place.

Another highlight is the story of British Feminist Mary Wollstonecroft and philosopher William Godwin, two opposites who somehow forged a loving marriage out of their differences. When Wollstonecroft died young, Godwin took it upon himself to write her biography, and, in spite of their philosopical differences, to defend to posterity her feminist beliefs.

A third highlight is a sketch of the strange life of Scrope Davies, a close friend of the poet Lord Byron, who abandoned a mysterious trunk in the vault of a London bank containing original writings by both Shelley and Byron. Davies, said to be a witty influence on Byron, fled England to avoid his debts and never reclaimed the trunk.

Holmes' enthusiasm for his subjects and the art of biography is quite contagious. It is hard not to be swept along with the author as he explores some obscure corner of the literary world. That said, this book will be a challenge to read for those without at least some background in English Literature. The longer narrative arc of the book will likely be lost on those who do not share at least some of Holmes' fascination with the processes and challenges of biography.

This book is highly recommended to those who are already fans of Richard Holmes or who are likely to fascinated by some of the leavings of literary biographical work.