When Richard Holmes set out years ago for south-central France, at 18, with a backpack and a preposterous-looking hat, he believed himself to be on the trail of Robert Louis Stevenson. He did not yet suspect that he had found his career. As he portrayed himself later, he made for a ludicrous figure, rummaging about, snuffling around, shredding the French language as pear juice streamed down his face. “I suppose a foreign affaire de coeur would have been the best thing of all; and that, in a way, was what I got,” he observes in the beguiling “Footsteps,” his masterly mash-up of memoir and biography.
Since that 1964 expedition Holmes has camped regularly in the 19th century. He is temperamentally well suited to the Romantic age. He does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams. Moonlight glints off his pages. Certainly no one has made the practice of biography sound so appealing. Here is Holmes, in a “glowing mist,” just after a 5 a.m. coffee in the French fields: “Then I went down to the Loire, here little more than a stream, and sat naked in a pool cleaning my teeth. Behind me the sun came out and the woodfire smoke turned blue. I felt rapturous and slightly mad.” He does for biography what Cheryl Strayed did for the Pacific Crest Trail.
Fifty-three years after that liquefied pear, Holmes remains no less ecstatic about tracking the dead and fixing them on the page. At the same time he is cleareyed about the blisters and bug bites, the hardships and mysteries that follow from entering into “an imaginary relationship with a nonexistent person, or at least a dead one.” Some hauntings have yielded essays rather than books. On one occasion, after Holmes slipped into a literary crevasse — the documentation having failed him — it yielded none. Sometimes the past is simply irrecoverable; you can’t get there from here. From his many years with Shelley he emerged spent, “grizzled, anecdotal, displaced.”
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