{"product_id":"this-long-pursuit-isbn-9780307742346","title":"This Long Pursuit","description":"\u003cp\u003eRichard Holmes’s luminous meditation on the art of biography explores the fascinating relationship between fact and fiction through his own personal experience as a biographer. Ranging widely over art, science, and poetry, Holmes describes a pilgrimage of the heart that has taken him across three centuries. He powerfully evokes the lives of women both scientific and literary: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes investigates the reductive myths that have overshadowed some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the opium-soaked Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary William Blake. This great chronicler of the Romantics has produced a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[Holmes] does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams.” \u003ci\u003e—The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A glorious series of essays on the art of life writing. . . . Heaven for his fans [and] the best account imaginable for the richness of his form.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I am a Richard Holmes addict. . . . Only Holmes, who is so deeply versed in the people and culture of eighteenth-century science, could tell these stories with such verve and resonance.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eOliver Sacks\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Elegant. . . . Nobody has thought longer or harder about the nature of biography as a literary form than Holmes.” —\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Holmes’s style pleasingly resembles that of his fellow Englishman, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. Like that celebrated man of letters, Holmes comes across as contagiously curious, casually erudite, and just a bit daft. . . . In spending so much of his life chronicling the lives of poets, he has, to the delight of his readers, become one.” \u003ci\u003e—The Christian Science Monitor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRichard Holmes \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Wonder, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review’\u003c\/i\u003es Best Books of the Year. His balloon book, \u003ci\u003eFalling Upwards,\u003c\/i\u003e was a \u003ci\u003eNew Republic\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of the Yearand one of \u003ci\u003eTime Magazine’s\u003c\/i\u003e Top 10 Non-fiction Books of the Year.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHis other biographies include \u003ci\u003eShelley: The Pursuit \u003c\/i\u003e(winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), \u003ci\u003eColeridge: Early Visions \u003c\/i\u003e(winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), \u003ci\u003eColeridge: Darker Reflections \u003c\/i\u003e(an NBCC finalist), and \u003ci\u003eDr. Johnson \u0026amp; Mr. Savage \u003c\/i\u003e(winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). \u003ci\u003eThis Long Pursuit \u003c\/i\u003ecompletes the autobiographical trilogy begun in \u003ci\u003eFootsteps \u003c\/i\u003e(1985)\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Sidetracks \u003c\/i\u003e(2000).\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHolmes was awarded the OBE in 1992. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization.\u003c\/p\u003e1 Travelling\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Every so often I close one of my working notebooks (there are nearly two hundred of them now, dating from 1964, the earliest in soft blue crumpled cardboard from Woolworths, the most recent in glossy black spiral-bound A5 hardback, from Black n’ Red) and begin to reflect on the whole journey, and the time left, and what if anything I have learned along the way. I look back at the highways and byways of biography, my own \u003ci\u003eFootsteps \u003c\/i\u003eand my \u003ci\u003eSidetracks\u003c\/i\u003e, and most of all on my strange, unappeased sense of some continuous, intense and inescapable pursuit. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I remember, for instance, the early summer of 1974, when I had just finished my first book, a biography of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was eight hundred pages long and I was nearly thirty. I had travelled in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy in search of my fiery, footloose poet. I felt like a veteran after a long campaign in the field. I felt grizzled, anecdotal, displaced. What’s more, I found that I had returned with two conclusions about writing biography that were certainly not taught back home in academia. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The first was the Footsteps principle. I had come to believe that the serious biographer must \u003ci\u003ephysically \u003c\/i\u003epursue his subject through the past. Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed. Not just the birthplace, or the blue-plaque place, but the temporary places, the passing places, the lost places, the dream places. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He – or she – must examine them as intelligently as possible, looking for clues, for the visible and the invisible, for the history, the geography and the atmosphere. He must feel how they once were; must imagine what impact they might once have had. He must be alert to ‘unknown modes of being’. He must step back, step down, step inside the story. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The second was the Two-Sided Notebook concept. It seemed to me that a proper research notebook must always have a form of ‘double accounting’. There should be a distinct, conscious divide between the objective and the subjective sides of the project. This meant keeping a double-entry record of all research as it progressed (or, as frequently, digressed). Put schematically, there must be a right-hand side and a left-hand side to every notebook page spread. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On the one (the right) I would record the objective facts of my subject’s life, as minutely and accurately as possible (from the letters, the diaries, the memoirs, the archives). But on the other (the left) I would also record my most personal responses, my feelings and speculations, my questions and conundrums, my difficulties and challenges, my travels and my visions. Irritation, embarrassment, puzzlement or grief could prove as valuable as excitement, astonishment, inspiration or enthusiasm. The cumulative experience of the research journey, of being in my subject’s company over several years, thus became part of the whole biographical enterprise. Only in this way, it seemed to me, could I use, but also hope to master, the biographer’s most valuable but perilous weapon: empathy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e One incident from long before the Shelley days, during my novice pursuit of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes a decade previously, became an unlikely talisman. It never got into \u003ci\u003eFootsteps\u003c\/i\u003e, but lay quietly on the left-hand page of my very first notebook for over twenty years. Only much later, when I began to lecture about biography, did I find myself unexpectedly retelling it. To my surprise, it went through various versions, until it had finally metamorphosed from a traveller’s tale into a kind of biographer’s parable. In its developed form it went like this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I first explained that I was eighteen, and in following Stevenson through the wild Cévennes, I usually slept out deliberately like him under the stars, in a small sleeping bag without a tent, \u003ci\u003eà la belle étoile\u003c\/i\u003e. But sometimes I was reluctantly forced (by the spectacular Cévennes storms) to spend a night at one of the little remote country inns or hostels. In those days you had to present a passport to be entered in the \u003ci\u003efichière\u003c\/i\u003e, with your name, age and occupation included in the details. Under occupation, I had specified with great optimism ‘Writer’. Of course I had published absolutely \u003ci\u003enothing \u003c\/i\u003eat that point. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I handed over my passport to Madame at the reception desk, the same thing always seemed to happen. ‘Ah, Monsieur ’Olmez,’ she would exclaim grimly as she filled in the little buff index card, ‘I see you are a waiter.’ I reflected painfully on this for some days, and then thought of putting in ‘Travel Writer’. But then I could immediately hear the even grimmer response. ‘Ah, Monsieur ’Olmez, I see you are a table waiter.’ \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This tale, suitably embellished with Gallic accents and hand gestures, became known as my ‘travelling waiter joke’. Yet it gradually revealed to me a serious lesson in professional humility. Because in a sense that’s exactly what a biographer is: someone who waits, who \u003ci\u003eawaits\u003c\/i\u003e, who pays attention, who is constantly alert, who attends upon his subjects, who is \u003ci\u003eat their service \u003c\/i\u003efor a long period of faithful employment. Waiting done well, I reflected, involves a lot of legwork. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Accordingly, my next pursuit, in the service of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lasted, on and off, for nearly fifteen years and progressed through some thirty two-sided notebooks. It took me to the English West Country and Lake District, to Germany, to Italy, to Sicily, to Malta, and finally to a quiet garden on Highgate Hill in London. It ended in nine hundred pages over two volumes. We both aged considerably in the process. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Coleridge was himself the master of the notebook – over seventy of them survive, thanks to the life’s work of the Canadian scholar Kathleen Coburn. The first was begun in Bristol in 1794, when he was twenty-one; the last was left incomplete at his death in Highgate in 1834. They provide a wonderful underground river for the biographer, an entry into Coleridge’s mind and heart, his inner life, not least in his relations with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and his secret beloved or \u003ci\u003efemme fatale\u003c\/i\u003e, his ‘Asra’, Sara Hutchinson. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The notebooks are as multifarious, elusive and incorrigible as the man. They contain his fantastic reading lists, his extraordinary nightmares, his brilliant lecture notes, his hectic fell-walking diaries, his endless self-psychoanalysis sessions, his battles with opium addiction, his excruciating medical symptoms (teeth, lungs, bowels), his sexual hauntings and obsessions, his labyrinthine thoughts about science and religion, his ghastly puns and his moving prayers. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They are also full of wonderful oddities: the draft of a comic novel, the recipe for making waterproof shoe polish, accounts of erotic dreams (partially in Greek and usually connected with food), the sayings of his child Hartley, notes on the sounds of different bird- song, or observations on different kinds and modalities of rainfall. All the time, like the underground river of ‘Kubla Khan’, there is a continual bubbling up of images that would appear in both his poetry and his later criticism; but also a continuous stream of self-definition. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I remember discovering, like a sudden gold-strike, this description of a tiny waterfall on the River Greta, which he wrote when he first came to the Lake District in 1800: ‘Shootings of water threads down the slope of the huge green stone ... The white Eddy-rose that blossomed up against the Stream in the scollop, by fits and starts, Obstinate in resurrection – It is the Life that we live.’ \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It instantly struck me that Coleridge was describing himself – ‘obstinate in resurrection’. Now I can never see a stream flowing over a stone, with that bubbling backwash of foam (so brilliantly defined as the ‘Eddy-rose’), without thinking of his biography. There is his complex, mysterious and in many ways disastrous life, which was nevertheless perpetually renewed, miraculously foaming back in words, ‘obstinate in resurrection’. It was indeed the life that he lived. I gradually realised it was also the Life that I needed to write. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Coleridge’s travels were geographical as well as metaphysical, and true to the Footsteps principle I followed him faithfully. In exchange, Coleridge taught me many lessons about biography during these research trips or solitary pursuits. I followed his walk over the wild Quantock Hills and down to the tiny seaport at Watchet where he began \u003ci\u003eThe Ancient Mariner \u003c\/i\u003ewith Wordsworth in 1797.\u003cbr\u003e Here the Bristol Channel surges out towards the Atlantic, producing one of the most astonishing tidal swings in the whole of northern Europe, rising and falling over thirty feet in twelve hours. Watching the fishing boats locked in its muscular grasp, I understood something new about the submarine ‘Polar Spirit’ of the deep, that pursued the Mariner after he had killed the albatross; and more than that, some- thing of the huge tides that had always swept through Coleridge’s own life. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I went out to Göttingen in Germany, where he had attended the scientific lectures of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1799, read the \u003ci\u003eNaturphilosophie \u003c\/i\u003eof Friedrich Schelling, from which his own ideas about Nature, Form and the Unconscious would eventually develop in ‘genial coincidence’. He became fascinated by the story of the \u003ci\u003eWalpurgisnacht \u003c\/i\u003e(or Witching Night) on the nearby Brocken mountain, which later appears in Goethe’s \u003ci\u003eFaust \u003c\/i\u003e(1808). Typically, Coleridge had climbed the Brocken to interview the legendary ‘Brocken spectre’ for himself, in a mixed spirit of scientific and poetic enquiry. Clambering up after him through the dark colon- nades of the Harz forest, I came across a different kind of witchcraft. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Panting up through a clearing of pine trees, I burst upon a sort of surreal Faustian theatre set. It was decked with skull-like signs announcing ‘\u003ci\u003eHalt! Hier Grenze!\u003c\/i\u003e’, and promising imminent death. I had stumbled upon the huge, sinister double border fence, sown with landmines and automatic machine-guns, dividing East and West Germany. Like the moment twenty years before, when, naïvely retracing Robert Louis Stevenson’s \u003ci\u003eTravels with a Donkey in the Cévennes\u003c\/i\u003e, I had come down to his symbolic river bridge at Langogne, and to my profound dismay found that it was broken and impassable, his time literally divided from my time. This was another sharp lesson in the irrecoverability of the past.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301875044581,"sku":"NP9780307742346","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307742346.jpg?v=1767742509","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/this-long-pursuit-isbn-9780307742346","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}