Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  From that day hence my destiny altered. All three had returned from the Siege of Strasbourg. The eldest, saved from the retreat from Moscow, took me with him to learn what he called my duties. I was still a frail child, and the cheerfulness of his younger brother charmed me through my work. A soldier who served them as a batman had the idea of giving up some of his nights to me. He used to wake me before dawn, and take me for walks over the hills surrounding Paris, breakfasting me on fresh bread and cream from the farms and dairies.

  And I remember, most of all, what I can never quite remember, what always hovers just beyond the reach of memory, beyond the horizon of recollection, beyond the endless searchings of the heart. This is the last, the deepest return….

  WOMAN’S VOICE Marie-Antoinette Labrunie, née Laurent, born Paris 1785, died Gross-Glogau, Silesia, 1810. A brave simple woman who chose to accompany her husband to the wars, and to leave her only child behind in France….

  NERVAL She died at the age of twenty-five from the exhaustions of the war, killed by a fever caught while crossing a bridge heaped with dead bodies, when her carriage nearly overturned. My father, who was forced to rejoin the army at Moscow, later lost her letters and her jewels in the rapids of the Beresina.

  I never saw my mother; the portraits of her were either lost or stolen. I only know that she resembled an engraving of those times, made after Prud’hon or Fragonard, that was called ‘Modesty’. The fever from which she died has had me in its grip three times, at moments which form in my life three regular, periodic divisions. Always, at these moments, I have felt my spirit overcome with the images of mourning and desolation that surrounded my cradle.

  The letters that my mother wrote from the shores of the Baltic, or the banks of the river Sprey and the Danube, were read to me how many, many times! The feeling for the marvellous in life, the taste for distant travelling, were for me no doubt the result of these first impressions, and also the long period I spent in that remote countryside deep in the woods.

  (music bridge and the sound of a pen scratching)

  My dear friend: all is accomplished. I have been discharged by Dr Blanche. I have no one to accuse now except myself and my own impatience, that has led me to be excluded from the Paradise. Henceforth I work and give birth in labour … Officially I admit that I have been sick. But I cannot agree that I have been mad, or even subject to hallucinations. If I offend Medicine, then I shall throw myself at her feet – when she reveals herself as a goddess. Your friend, Gérard de Nerval, Initiate and Vestal.

  GEORGE BELL As autumn deepened into winter, Gérard’s circle of endless walking gradually grew narrower. No longer did he visit Saint-Germain, the hills above Montmartre, or the crooked streets of Saint-Denis. He lodged in little hotels round the Louvre and Palais-Royal, haunts of his youth, and wandered about the back streets round Les Halles and Châtelet, scribbling on proofs in the public reading rooms, drinking at the cheap cafés, window-gazing in the arcades. He was badly in debt and hardly earned enough from his writing to keep body and soul together. We, his friends, caught the merest glimpses of him.

  ALPHONSE KARR Gérard had so many good friends, Gautier, Dumas, Méry, George Bell, Arsène Houssaye … all anxious to help him, to give him a meal, or a roof over his head. But Gérard refused, he refused steadfastly. It was quite simple. He feared that he would never be able to write anything again. You see he was sensitive, he was born in a certain way, he had a certain attitude … he was I suppose, a gentleman.

  MAXIME DU

  CAMP On the 20th January the snow had fallen thick over Paris, it looked faintly sinister. Théophile Gautier had just turned up at the office to talk about his book Captain Fracasse, which he was having trouble in starting. Suddenly Gérard walked in; he was wearing a black jacket that was so thin it made me shiver just to look at him. I said: ‘You’re dressed a bit lightly for going out in this bitter weather, aren’t you?’ He answered: ‘No, I’m not, I’m wearing two shirts – nothing could be warmer.’

  Gautier, as his old college friend and fellow writer, had the right to greater frankness than I, and said: ‘It’s snowing pneumonia and pissing down bronchitis. There are plenty of people here with more than one overcoat who would be only too pleased to lend you one until your dying day!’ Gérard said: ‘No – the cold does you good. Look at the Eskimos, they never get ill.’

  Then breaking the conversation, he said: ‘I’ve bought something very rare, the junk sellers are so stupid that they never know what they are selling. I’ll show you – it’s the belt that Madame de Maintenon wore when she acted in Esther at Saint-Cyr.’ Carefully unwrapping a piece of crumpled paper, he took out a piece of kitchen sash-cord. It was thin, tightly plaited, strong and looked brand new. Gautier and I exchanged a wink: ‘Yes, it’s very interesting.’

  All three of us left the office together. The weather was freezing. The carriage wheels grated and groaned as they drove through the packed snow. Gautier said: ‘Gérard, come and lunch with me. I’ll give you one of my famous risottos!’ Gérard refused. I said: ‘Look, it really is very cold, I’ve got a spare room for you at my apartment.’ Gérard pulled out a twenty-franc coin that he had just been given. I can see it now: a Louis Dix-Huit piece dating from 1814, the end of the Napoleonic War. Gérard said: ‘Thank you, but I don’t need anything, I’m all right for the week.’ Then he left us; I think he was frightened we would press him. The next time I saw him was at the mortuary.

  NERVAL 24th January 1855 …

  My dear, kind aunt: tell your son that he does not know that you are the best of mothers, and of aunts. When I shall have triumphed over everything, you will have your place in my Olympus, just as I have my place in your house. Do not expect me this evening, for the night will be black and white.

  (music bridge)

  That night I had a delicious dream, the first for a long, long time. I was in a tower that went so deeply into the earth, and so high into the sky, that it seemed as if my entire life would be consumed in climbing up and going down. Already all my strength was spent, and I was on the point of giving up, when a door in the side of the tower appeared. A spirit appeared before me and said: ‘Come with me, my brother! …’ He had the looks of one of the poor mental patients I had helped to nurse, but transfigured and full of understanding. I do not know why I thought he was called Saturnus.

  We were now in a countryside filled with the fiery glow of stars. We stood still gazing up at this spectacle, and the spirit placed his hand on my forehead … All at once, one of the stars I had been watching in the sky began suddenly to grow and expand, and the divinity of all my dreams appeared before me, smiling. She was dressed in a sort of Indian costume, as I had once seen her many years before. She walked along between us, and wherever her feet touched, flowers and plants and sweet meadow grass rose from the earth behind her.

  She said to me: ‘The trial to which you were submitted has come to its end. These stairs without number where you have exhausted yourself, climbing up and going down, were the stages of the ancient illusions which confused your thought. And now you may recall that day when you turned to the Blessed Virgin, and sought relief from delirium. It was necessary that your prayer should be carried to her by a simple soul, free from all earthly ties. Such a soul you have found beside you, and that is why it is permitted for me to come and encourage you.’

  The joy this dream spread through my heart brought me a sweet awakening. Dawn was about to break. I wanted to leave a material sign of the apparition that had consoled me, and I wrote on the wall these words: ‘You visited me this night.’

  EYE WITNESS There was the blackened shop of a key-cutter on the left, with a sign, shaped like a huge key, standing out against the frosty snow-laden sky.

  COMMISSIONER

  OF POLICE This morning at approximately seven-thirty a.m. the deceased was found hanging from the bars of a locksmith’s shop in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne … He had hanged himself with a length of sash-cord. There were no signs o
f violence on the corpse.

  NERVAL

  When Christ, raising his thin arms to the sky

  As poets do, under the sacred trees,

  Had lost himself in long dumb miseries,

  Thinking ungrateful friends planned treachery:

  He turned to those awaiting him below

  (Kings, sages, prophets, in their dreams by day,

  But now in sleep they dully lay),

  And cried aloud: ‘There is no God! Oh, no!’

  Unstirred they slept. ‘My brothers, have you heard?

  My brow has touched the timeless vault of heaven

  Bleeding and torn, I suffered many days.

  ‘I cheated you. Abyss! abyss! abyss!

  God shuns the victim to the altar given

  There is no God … no God!’ They slept unstirred.

  III

  Five Gothic Shadows

  INTRODUCTION

  THE BLEAK,URBAN MELANCHOLY of Nerval’s story had haunted the end of my time in France. When I got back to England I went to ground for a year in a shepherd’s cottage in a little hamlet called Stone-cum-Ebony, on the edge of Romney Marsh on the Kent–Sussex border. It was a small, beautiful land of orchards and sheep fields, where I grew vegetables, chopped firewood, brewed my own beer, drove an ancient motorbike to the local co-op, and took a more earthy and extroverted approach to life and work. I was luckier in love, too: Joanna, who worked as a student nurse in the local hospital, came to teach me apple-picking in the long summer evenings, and wander with me along the frozen dikes in winter, talking to the grave solitary herons that watched us with unblinking eye.

  I was still hunting my Romantic subjects, and still obsessed with their images of loneliness and despair, but now slowly I began to find a new tone, a lighter tune. I turned back to English writers, and sought among the sturdy eccentrics of the Regency and the Victorians for some different path towards another major figure. But it was a long time before I could really escape from Shelley. Meanwhile, I was encouraged by a noble succession of literary editors at The Times, without whom I would have been marooned and penniless: Michael Ratcliffe, Ion Trewin and Philip Howard. I shall never forget their patience with my deadlines, and their generosity with my copy-corrections, often phoned through from a wind-blasted red call-box that stood at the crossroads between Stone and Appledore. Philip once told me that he employed a special sub-editor exclusively to correct what he kindly called my ‘eighteenth-century spelling'.

  Through them I was free to produce a whole series of strange, rapid character sketches and historical essays, what Lytton Strachey once called ‘portraits in miniature'. I now think these are fundamental to the art of biography, the ability to give a snapshot impression of a whole life caught from one fleeting but revealing angle. It is the very opposite (or complementary) discipline to the huge, factually accumulated chronicle; and really great biography (that rare thing) invariably contains both.

  Often these pieces were inspired by that sound – but much mocked – journalistic standby, the centenary article. I learned to honour this convention, because it is the opportunity for some lost or undervalued fragment of human history to be recovered. It is the chance for some partly-forgotten figure to step back – if only for a moment – into the modern limelight. It is the chance of a second lifetime, as it were. I came to believe that this is a vital part of the biographer’s special contract with the past: all is not lost, your time will come again, justice may yet be done.

  These sketches gave me a new freedom to experiment with biographical style and story-telling. I tried out different narrative voices, entered into each Life at odd angles, read facts dangerously through fiction or poetry, risked melodrama, facetiousness and sentimentality. The great thing was simply to summon up for one moment a living breathing shape, to make the dead walk again, to make the reader see a figure and hear a voice. (Hence perhaps my fascination at this time for ghost-stories, which are of course not realities but metaphors for reality.) Above all I aimed for a new lightness of touch, and speed of effect, trying to give each piece the shape of a short story. My editors counselled that ideally such a piece should be capable of holding any reader’s attention in a crowded train, to the point where they missed their station. Indeed, to the point where they are sidetracked.

  Not so easy, of course. I once observed someone reading one of my pieces on a train, between Tonbridge and Ashford, on the way back to Romney Marsh one winter’s evening. It was a salutary experience. Over several minutes an expression of lively interest steadily faded to one of judicial blankness, soon followed by deep and blameless sleep. Later I cheered myself with the thought that perhaps I had succeeded in sidetracking their dreams.

  The five pieces I have gathered here are united by such an ambition. The eccentricity of their subjects, Romantic themes gone astray, gothic grotesques, gargoyles, ghost tales, were in fact my renewed attempt to find my way back to the solid central ground of Romanticism: passion, idealism, shared endeavour. (The glimpse of Mill’s life with Harriet Taylor promised this.) They were also, I now suppose, a kind of personal exorcism that had to take place, there on Romney Marsh (where the first piece begins). The last, which goes back much further, to a single gothic incident in Tudor history, began innocently enough as an admiring book review. I include it (the only review) because it became a kind of talisman: the example of a superbly dedicated scholar who demonstrated how wonderfully the true track of the past – in this case another kind of sidetrack – could still be recovered.

  THE SINGULAR AFFAIR OF THE REVEREND MR BARHAM

  THE CASE OF the Reverend Richard Harris Barham, a minor canon of St Paul’s and the pseudonymous author of the once universally popular Ingoldsby Legends, is in every respect a most singular affair.

  The curious reader may possibly recall a tale told by M. R. James entitled ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ in which an apparently pious and exemplary cleric is revealed in his private diaries to have been the victim of a series of appalling visitations which lead to his eventual destruction. Though Barham was to hold, in real life, a Divinity Lectureship and the honorary position of Senior Cardinal’s Stall, there can be naturally no evidence that the late Provost of Eton intended anything like a personal reference in his fiction. Nevertheless, certain uncomfortable resemblances between the romance and the reality are not altogether easy to shake off. In the course of my researches in the archives of Canterbury, across the wild sheep fens and treacherous byways of Romney Marsh, and under the lone lamp of my attic study, I was continually and not always agreeably reminded of them.

  The external facts of Barham’s life are, except for a number of odd lacunae, a charming picture of the buoyant, clubbable Anglican life of Regency and early-Victorian England. Barham was born in the cathedral city of Canterbury in December 1788, only son of Alderman Barham, a local worthy who lived a few yards away from the Precinct Gates at 61 Burgate Street. The Alderman was a great drinker of port, and on his decease he weighed 27 stone and his front door had to be especially widened for the exit of his coffin. Of Barham’s mother, little was at first known except for contradictory rumours of high spirits and low health.

  Barham was sent to St Paul’s School, Westminster, where he successfully combined the roles of inveterate hoaxer and head boy, and then to Brasenose, Oxford, where he joined a crack dining and debating club, the Phoenix, and ran somewhat wildly into debt and dissipation, but survived to collect a degree in 1811. Among his friends were Richard Bentley, the future publisher, and Theodore Hook, the bohemian novelist. Back at Canterbury, he came into the estate of Tappington Everard, was articled to an attorney, and pursued a frolicsome life among the theatrical set, forming another club – the Wigs – where on at least one occasion port and eloquence degenerated into swords and prejudice.

  Then abruptly, at the age of twenty-five, Barham reformed. He took clerical orders, and moved to a series of somnolent rural curacies at Ashford, Westwell, and finally at Warehorne on the very edge of th
e hills overlooking Romney Marsh – that ‘recondite region’, as he later wrote, productive only of sheep, eels, smuggling, witchcraft and pestiferous mildews. He married a local girl, kept a gun, a dog and a vegetable patch, and resolutely bred children. For four years, between 1817 and 1821, he lived in this remote seclusion, keeping a diary, composing certain literary papers, and riding between the stout Georgian brick church of Warehorne on the knoll, and the low, flint, Early English chapel of Snargate in the misty depths of the Marsh below, where, through the genial plurality of the Anglican Establishment, he also occupied the incumbency as parson. Warehorne, it might have seemed, was the last outpost of the civilized world. Snargate, with the baleful invitation of its name, the first outpost of an altogether different region.

  In Barham’s thirty-fourth year came another abrupt transformation. Through the unexpected intervention of a friend in London, he captured a minor canonry at St Paul’s, moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, rose to an appointment in the Chapel Royal, and made a rapid path in gentlemanly journalism, contributing to John Bull and Blackwood’s. In 1831 he was a founder member of the Garrick Club, and soon his squat, humorous figure, with its curious drooping left eyelid and pale, almost white eyelashes, was a regular feature of the literary dining tables, along with Hook, Sydney Smith, young Boz, Cruickshank and Harrison Ainsworth. In 1837, Bentley asked him to contribute a comic series to the newly founded Miscellany, and the first issues saw Oliver Twist running at the front, and what were to become the opening numbers of The Ingoldsby Legends – verse and prose stories from ‘Tom Ingoldsby’s’ family chest – bringing up the rear.