Literary Pilgrimages

...Don't let the ghosts get you," fellow countrymen warned...

...Instead, he became obsessed with biography and presumed he could recapture Stevenson's Boliemian spirit merely by recreating his trip...

...Nevertheless, he was hardly detached—especially in his treatment of the women in Shelley's life...

...Holmes had returned there to write a novel about students in the '60s...

...Holmes soon found, however, that the traveler could not be divorced from the boy in Scotland, or the saint of the South Seas...

...I smoked a pipe, which was often a useful point of conversation with people I met on the road: shepherds, woodsmen, old grandfathers out for a stroll near the village cemetery, farmers working the corner of a remote upland field...

...Holmes, preferring to forgo animals, had "Le Brun," a comical-looking battered brown felt hat...

...Nerval was altogether a split personality...

...I exchanged tobacco as many times as words, and English flake could be sweet under the loneliness of the stars.'" Stevenson's companion on his journey had been his small pack donkey, Modestine...

...but maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present...

...Most of all, though, Richard Holmes comes across as a chameleon...

...For Footsteps tells us less about Romantic revolutionaries of the 1960s (or 1790s) than the narcissistic spirit of the 1970s...

...You would never catch them...

...The rejection was sobering: "My taste for travel and my ear for footsteps had diminished, it seemed...

...Readers of The Pursuit came away with the impression that, by the time of Shelley's drowning, his marriage was largely dead, and that had he escaped he might well have gone off with Claire...

...Her influence, we are told, spawned "one of the most brilliant literary circles that has ever existed,' a group of English rebels consisting of Byron, Shelley, Haz-litt, Keats, and her own daughter—Mary Shelley...

...Holmes' original scholarship was exhaustive...

...Still, he sees the "passionate friendship" between the two as "an emblem of the Romantic revolt, a refusal to conform to the conventional patterns and expectations of society...

...I was 30, and it was time to consider the way I should go myself...

...Holmes admits he "fell in love" with Mary's volatile stepsister, and that "Claire was the source of much mischief at certain points, and frequently led me to be unfair...

...I set out to follow him as accurately as I could," Holmes explains, "without modern maps (until Florae) but going by the old tracks and roads between every village and hamlet...

...That revelation led to "a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps...

...The girlfriend who had introduced him to the new French revolution now taught him to read Tarot cards, since they seemed to employ the sign language of Nerval's private imagery...

...if 1 wrote anything at all, I thought it would be poems about walking, sw imming, climbing hills and sleeping under the stars...

...Certainly it provoked even more conversation than pipe tobacco...

...Although he managed to save himself, his book on Nerval was so confused that no publisher would touch it...

...In fact, he came close to repeating the 19th-century poet's suicide...

...This, in turn, helped him realize that Stevenson was less in search of pleasure than the answer to a momentous personal question...

...As a young bluestocking theorist she had lived in Paris during the Revolution, became involved with an American entrepeneur and had a child by him...

...The final section of Footsteps takes us back to France in 1974...

...The youthful biographer identified with those aspects of his subject that had most troubled Victorian scholars: Shelley's political doctrines, his hallucinations, his creed of free love and penchant for menages a trois, even his self-destructive drives were seen in a sympathetic light...

...Holmes has since repudiated this notion (also explored in a novel by Elinor Wylie...

...It never crossed my mind that I might write about Stevenson...

...Holmes delineates the revival of the Romantic ideals of that time: "Many of the catchwords and concerns of the [1960s], indeed the very idea of 'revolution' itself as a flamboyant act of self-assertion—'the language of personal rights'—found either inspiration or confirmation in the generation of the 1790s...

...Hyde...

...He observes, for instance, that "there is something frequently comic about the trailing figure of the biographer: a sort of tramp permanently knocking, knocking at the kitchen window, and secretly hoping he might be invited in for supper...

...Stevenson wrote Dr...

...Blake's poetry of vision and defiance ('The Tigers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction,' from The Proverbs of Hell, was one of the most popular graffiti...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...With my sense of meeting Shelley afresh, of approaching him from the inside, I felt I could not afford to open myself up to the shaping interpretation of a previous generation...

...Coleridge's and Southey's plan to found a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River...

...It begins by telling how in 1964, when he was only 18, he decided to retrace Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through France's Cevenne Mountains, described in Travels with a Donkey...

...The pilgrimage was a pastoral fantasy come true: "At farms, when I asked for water for my bottle, I was almost invariably given cold citron or red wine as well...

...Coleridge's, and later Thomas de Quincey's interest in drugs and dream states...

...Here was a hero for the New Left...

...But as in the past, he quickly lost interest in the present...

...His companions were the diaries of the poet, Mary, and of course the ubiquitous Claire...

...1 embarked on it, and finished it, in all innocence from a literary point of view...

...HOLMEs'THIRD EPISODE is dated 1972.Nowhewas pursuing the Shelley household through Italy...

...Holmes' book next skips to 1968, the year of "the new French Revolution" at the Sorbonne...

...My outward life," he says, "took on a curious thinness that I find difficult to describe...

...And he believes Claire helped him understand "much that was best and most revolutionary in Shelley's attitude to love...

...A letter he received in London from a French girlfriend moved him to retrace Wordsworth's path upon graduating from Cambridge in 1791, to see whether Paris was heralding another age in which youth could say, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven...

...Eleven years later, Holmes again reveals an intense involvement with his subjects in Footsteps: A dventures of a Romantic Biographer (Viking, 288 pp., $18.95), a peculiar combination of autobiography and travelogue...

...Should he pursue Fanny Osbourne—or was it better for a writer to remain single and boyish...

...Yet, says Holmes, "More and more I felt I was following Nerval into the dark, and had lost him on that inner journey...

...The biographer plunged into a universe of dreams, and eventually near madness, as he traced his latest subject's drift toward insanity...

...he examined evidence with a fresh eye, and his conclusions were well argued...

...and the poet "saw" himself a week before his own death...

...Beyond protecting the wearer from rain and sunstroke, it was meant to convince passers-by that the wearer was harmless, and apparently did...

...For Holmes, "the Cevennes was a different initiation...

...The madcap poetic groupie, Claire Clairmont, mother of a child by Byron, became Shelley's soul mate in the book, while Mary Shelley was portrayed as a cold intellectual, increasingly depressive and out of sympathy with her husband's unorthodox schemes...

...None of his preoccupation is directly alluded to in Travels with a Donkey, yet as Holmes demonstrates, Stevenson's real purpose was to reveal himself both to Fanny (whom he married) and to his stern Calvinist father...

...He entered a world of ghosts so deeply that in developing a photograph he had taken of a villa where the Shelleys had lived, he discovered the figure of "Willmouse"—the beloved little son who died in Naples (probably the then householder's child crept into the picture...

...Like the people he sought to illuminate, Holmes appears to have been particularly fascinated with Doppelgangers...

...In place of the unworldly idealist familiar from 19th-century studies, Holmes portrayed a revolutionary, slightly perverse figure (one thought of John Lennon...

...He had fallen in love with an older American woman who was married...

...Mary Woll-stonecraft's championship of the rights of women—all these spoke directly to the generation of May '68.' Once in France, Holmes quickly lost interest in Wordsworth and grew infatuated with the shade of Mary Woll-stonecraft...

...Shelley's notion of free loveand passive resistance, understood as an early form of Flower Power, 'Make Love Not War...

...Shelley told of "The Magus Zoroaster" who "met his own image walking in the garden...

...Modern Italians care little for Shelley, while only places associated with him interested Holmes...

...Sometimes he mocks his own approach...

...Their personalities became so vivid to him, he could not bear to read the standard biographies (nor has he to this day, he confesses...

...This time his deflection was the Symbolist poet Gerard de Nerval (whose real name was Labrunie...

...The experience transformed her into a passionate thinker who no longer saw the world in ideological terms...

...In pursuing these men to the very edge of mental collapse, Holmes tried to become their doubles—to enter literally into their thoughts and feelings, to experience their lives...

...Despite his chance encounters, though, the adventure made Holmes appreciate the ultimate solitariness of walking alone...

...He camped along the way, as Stevenson had done...