Читать книгу Sidetracks - Richard Holmes - Страница 10

SO CHATTERTON gallantly passed me on to Shelley. For four years I was immersed in the travelling, dreaming and writing of his biography (as I have recounted in Footsteps). But once I had finished, or at least survived the book, every instinct told me to get away from London. I took the ferry to Calais in the winter of 1974. I remained in France on and off for two years, writing articles and reviews in a little attic room in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, at 9 rue Condorcet (not far from the boulevard Montmartre and the Marché Cadet) which is glimpsed in various disguises in the pieces of this section. I would walk down at night, in those pre-fax days, to mail my articles express (the magic dark blue sticker) back to London from the all-night Bureau de Poste near the Bourse. I was still lonely here, but I got to know Paris, the Île de France, and Normandy, and had my own romantic adventures which I now think left their shadow, or perfume, on these pieces.

But what I was looking for was the next subject, something which would take me directly into the heart of French Romanticism, among a later and very different group of artists and writers. Within a few months, I thought I had found it. What I had discovered was the great portrait collection of the nineteenth-century French photographer, Felix Nadar, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, which was then in the rue Richelieu, with its old pen-umbrous reading-room lit by green glass reading lamps at each desk. As I imply in this first piece, it seemed that Nadar would provide a wonderful opportunity for a biographic ensemble, the study of a whole Romantic generation, something extraverted and flashlit, full of melodrama and gaiety and humour.

But quite unexpectedly, my researches drew me in another direction. I came across a series of striking studio portraits of two literary colleagues, the journalist Théophile Gautier and the poet Gérard de Nerval. These men had been friends since childhood, attending the Lycée Charlemagne together in the boulevard Saint-Antoine in the 1820s, growing up as youthful disciples of Victor Hugo, and both making brilliant but very different careers in the Paris of Louis-Philippe, the 1848 insurrection, and the Second Empire. Outwardly, Gautier’s career was a triumph, ending as one of the great established Parisian men of letters: a poet, a highly paid columnist in the newspaper La Presse, an intimate of Flaubert, and patron to Baudelaire who dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal to him.

But Nerval’s life appeared to be a disaster, increasingly rootless and poverty-stricken, ending in a series of internments in an asylum in Passy and eventual suicide in an alley leading down to the river Seine. The stark contrast in their destinies seemed to me to tell an essential story about Romanticism. So I felt my way along the interwoven paths of their biographies, beginning with a first journalistic sketch of Gautier, like a mirror image, visiting London. I then assembled and translated a collection of his autobiographical fantasy tales, My Fantoms, and out of this collection arose the story of ‘Poor Pierrot’. Here was a haunting mythical figure from the Commedia dell’ Arte, who came literally to life in the career of the mime artist Deburau. This Pierrot’s biography had a sadness and sudden violence which foreshadowed Nerval’s.

But when I came directly to Nerval himself, I found the path of traditional biography blocked, for the reasons I have explained in Footsteps. I wrote a 400-page biography of the two friends, ‘Poets in Paris’, but it never cohered and I felt gradually that I was lost in a maze of shifting journeys and identities. I was lost in France. When I came back to England in 1976, all that seemed to remain was a kind of echo-chamber of voices in my head, a kind of fragmented sound-track of their friendship.

As a last effort to record those voices, and at least mark the fading contours of my research before they disappeared entirely, I wrote a radio-play in that odd hybrid but fascinating form of ‘drama-documentary’ which was eventually produced for Radio Three by Hallam Tennyson. (It was a strange production, almost surreal in its unsettling effect on the actors, with Timothy West – a big, solid, confident figure like Gautier – superbly transforming his voice into the slight, unstable, tortured Nerval.) This is the last piece in this section, although the story itself–and my wanderings in France – were far from over. The discovery of radio, as a vehicle for biographical story-telling, moving effortlessly inside and outside its characters’ minds, shifting with magical ease between different times and locations, was a revelation and an inspiration to me.