Footsteps by Richard Holmes
For Stevenson himself there remains no doubt now in my own mind that the whole Cévennes experience was a kind of initiation ceremony: a grappling with physical hardships, loneliness, religious doubts, the influence of his parents, and the overwhelming question of whether he should take the enormous risk of travelling to America and throwing his life in with Fanny’s—“for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health”. In the desperate summer months of 1879, immediately prior to his departure for New York, the memory of the trip was obviously much in his mind. He wrote to a friend: “I can do no work. It all lies aside. I want—I want—a holiday; I want to be happy; I want the moon or the sun or something. I want the object of my affections badly anyway; and a big forest; fine, breathing, sweating, sunny walks; and the trees all crying aloud in the summer wind and a camp under the stars.”
So the pilgrimage begun at Le Monastier ended six thousand miles away in a honeymoon on the wooded hills of the Pacific coast of California. But that is another story, as eventually told in The Silverado Squatters.
For me, the Cévennes was a different initiation. I embarked on it, and finished it, in all innocence from a literary point of view. It never crossed my mind that I might write about Stevenson; or that my diary should be anything more than a “route-journal”, a record of my road and camps. If I wrote anything at all, I thought, it would be poems about walking, swimming, climbing hills and sleeping under the stars. But what happened was something quite other, something almost entirely unexpected. Instead of writing poems I wrote prose meditations. These concerned not so much the outward physical experiences of my travels but inward mental ones that were often profoundly upsetting. The full record of my black depressions, intense almost disabling moments of despair, and childish weeping fits, still seems inexplicable and embarrassing. The corresponding moments of intoxication and mad delight are still vivid to me twenty years afterwards, so that my pulse-rate increases when I write about them, even now. But all these inward emotions were concentrated and 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.
In this sense, what I experienced and recorded in the Cévennes in the summer of 1964 was a haunting. Nothing of course that would make a Gothic story, or interest the Society for Psychical Research; but an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present. And in this experience of haunting I first encountered—without then realising it—what I now think of as the essential process of biography.
As far as I can tell, this process has two main elements, or closely entwined strands. The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man’s “journey” through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the “life and letters”. The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a “point of view” or an “interpretation”, but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions. It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.
The first stage of such a living, fictional relationship is in my experience a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject. More or less, because the real elements of self-identification are often much more subtle and subliminal than one originally thinks. This, strictly speaking, is pre-biographic: it is a primitive form, a type of hero- or heroine-worship, which easily develops into a kind of love affair. Looking back at the Cévennes, I can now see that I went straight into that phase with Stevenson, passionately identifying with what I saw as his love of bohemian adventuring, getting out “on the road”, and sharing with him his delight in all things French, original, eccentric. I saw him, naively, as a direct predecessor of figures like Jack Kerouac—though the European Kerouac, the Kerouac of Lonesome Traveller, a bit lost and a bit uncertain of himself, not the roaring American romantic of On the Road. The Kerouac who, at the very end of his drunken career, comes back to France looking for his lost family roots in Brittany, searching for the Lebris de Kéroack in Satori in Paris.
My real reasons for self-identification I now see as rather different: they involved the confrontation with religious upbringing and lost faith, Stevenson’s Calvinism having some equivalence to my Catholicism. 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
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.
TWO
1968 : Revolutions
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 seventeen, took opium and committed suicide by mistaken overdose—or “OD”, as it was succinctly called on the ground-floor. Chatterton lived at the end of the eighteenth century, but I had a strange feeling that I was writing about someone in the same house.
It was a restless time. The window of my attic room overlooked the shunting yards of Paddington station, and my dreams were shaken by the whistle and roar of departing trains. The sense of movement and change was everywhere. News of disturbances in Paris had been reported piecemeal in the English papers for weeks, but largely in terms of isolated disruptions by students at Nanterre, or syndicalistes at Renault. Then I began to get letters from friends already in the city, speaking in confused, rapturous terms of the long “sit-ins”, the great marches and demonstrations, people coming from all over Europe—Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam—to celebrate the new spirit of Liberté, and take part in some huge, undefined événement. It was a carnival, they wrote, and a revolution too. The world would never be the same again, the authorities were cracking, the old order was in retreat.
A letter from Françoise, a girl I’d met after the Cévennes journey, now a student in Paris, reached me; it was carried over by a lorry-driver as the French post had gone on strike:
Across the boulevard a dark-blue Peugeot was lying on its side burning. Its wheels in the air meant the whole city had turned upside down. The pavements glittered with broken glass, and the flames shone on our posters flyleaved up the trees. The night stank of riot gas, and my eyes ran with tears—of happiness! At the bottom of the rue des Ecoles the wall below the barred windows of the Medical Faculty was painted with enormous graffiti in red—Imagination au Pouvoir … The CRS surged by in their black boiler suits and visored helmets, swinging their long batons like madmen who didn’t understand our sanity. I saw a little old lady with a Samaritaine carrier-bag walk straight through them untouched … Everyone in the cafe was cheering and embracing each other, bringing in the latest news. It is like a dream come true!
I read this with mixed feelings, half-excited and half-sceptical. Then, one evening at my window, staring out into the quiet English night and hearing the distant clankings, I tuned my radio to Luxembourg and heard with astonishment that they were trying to burn down the Bourse. It was a live report—French state radio had been forbidden live coverage—and the noises seemed to fill my room. I could hear the huge crowds shouting, the crack of CRS gas-canisters, the brittle, thrilling sound of breaking glass, the sudden ragged bursts of cheering. And suddenly the idea of “the Revolution” came to life in my head, and I knew that it was something I had to write about. It was not the destruction that excited me but the sense of something utterly new coming into being, some fresh, immense possibility of political life, a new community of hope, and above all the strangely inspired note—like a new language—that sounded in the voices of those who were witnessing it. It was a glimpse of “the dream come true”, the golden age, the promised land.
Moreover, I identified it—immediately, naïvely—with that first French Revolution as seen by the English Romantics some hundred and eighty years before. The gap in time, the great and complex historical differences, for a moment meant nothing to me. For what I was feeling, what my friends were feeling, seemed to be expressed perfectly by the Romantics, and by no one else.
’Twas a time when Europe was rejoiced,
France standing at the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again.
So William Wordsworth had written, when in July 1790 he set off to walk through France on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.
There were moments when the student barricades round the Sorbonne and in parts of the Latin Quarter really did seem to be re-enacting the events of 1789-94 (though no Robespierre arrived and no Terror began). The huge open debates in the courtyard of the Sorbonne and in Paris theatres like the Odéon seemed to be emulating, if not the great ideological discussions of the first Assemblée Nationale—in many ways the climax of the entire eighteenth-century Enlightenment—at least the more fervid and impassioned meetings of the Cordeliers and the Club des Jacobins. If there was no Robespierre there were many who looked and sounded like the young, handsome, long-haired and insolent Saint-Just.
When on 27 May de Gaulle took mysterious flight from Paris to an unknown destination (actually he went by helicopter to consult with General Massu at an army base in Germany), many people drew the parallel with Louis XVI’s fatal flight to Varennes of autumn 1792. If history was not exactly repeating itself then at the least it was in a strange state of theatrical correspondence. It was a replay, a rerun, a harmonic echo across nearly two centuries.
The whole ethos of the Sixties—that youthful explosion of idealism, colour, music, sex, hallucinogenic states, hyperbolic language and easy money (“the counter-culture”, as the sociologists called it)—was based on a profoundly romantic rejection of conventional society, the old order, the establishment, the classical, the square (and also, in fact, austerity).
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,