Cosmological vertigo

Nicholas Wroe interviews Richard Holmes at the Guardian about his new book, which sounds utterly delightful (additional coverage here and here). The whole profile is well worth reading, but I will excerpt just this lovely bit at the end:

"My own first experience with a big telescope, the 'Old Northumberland' at Cambridge Observatory, an 11-inch refractor built in 1839, left me stunned. We observed a globular star cluster in Hercules, a blue-gold double star, Beta Cygni, and a gas cloud nebula (whose name I forgot to record, since it appeared to me so beautiful and malignant, according to my shaky notes like an 'enormous blue jellyfish rising out of a bottomless black ocean'). I think I suffered from a kind of cosmological vertigo, the strange sensation that I might fall down the telescope tube into the night and be drowned. Eventually this passed."

This is from a footnote to a section about Herschel looking through a telescope. Footnotes are a wonderful part of the armoury of a biographer. In this book the structure is like a series of sliding panels that go back and forth, but I wanted a sense of a chronological narrative, so I used footnotes to step outside the story. Also in this note are two of Thomas Hardy's characters in the late 19th century, terrified at realising how small they were in the universe, and Edwin Hubble in the 1930s. It's important to me that the reader is imaginatively held by the characters to the extent that they really do hope something for them and really do dread something for them. Breaking the chronology works against this, but there are still other interesting things I want to tell them, one of which can be my own personal response to the things I'm describing. So the footnote provides a bridge to the reader which allows me to break the chronology but not, I hope, the mood of the main story.

I have been in love with Holmes's writing for a long time now. I remember reading Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (on Simon Schama's recommendation, probably c. fall of 1992) and being altogether blown away by its charms and peculiar excellence, and then during my first few years of graduate school I devoured his literary biographies. I love the Coleridge one also, and am often recommending the Johnson-Savage bio, but the one that most fully transported me - it reads as though it were written in a kind of frenzy or fury, and though it is a long book I think I read it over only one or two sittings, it is simply impossible to put down - is the Shelley biography, which has been recently reissued by the New York Review of Books.

Catch-up

Crime fiction jag this week: I went to the stacks with the thought of perhaps checking out some of Susan Howatch's novels to read again, only really I have read them so many times that the rereading potential is fully leached out of them. Susan Hill's name caught my eye, and I took a few of those instead, and read them with great enjoyment over the rest of the week: the first three of the Simon Serrailler books, The Various Haunts of Men, The Pure in Heart and The Risk in Darkness. Her protagonist is perhaps slightly too reminiscent of P. D. James's Adam Dalgliesh, who I have always found intolerably affected, but the books are an interesting mix of the conventional (in a good sense) and the rule-breaking. Well worth reading if you are fond of the British police procedural. Then I read M. J. Rose's The Venus Fix, which had been sitting untouched on the shelf and happened to catch my eye - also quite satisfactory.

Meanwhile, considerable riches in the latest issue of the NYRB. I particularly enjoyed Geoffrey Wheatcroft's James Bond piece (available to all - hmmm, I must get those Ben Macintyre books, they sound great!) and Jonathan Spence's piece about China specialist and historian of science Joseph Needham (subscriber-only - I was utterly enraptured by Needham's history of embryology when I first came across it in the early days of reading for breeding book), and there's all sorts of other good stuff too.

Perhaps the most extraordinary piece, though, is Richard Holmes's essay on Theophile Gautier. I've been a huge fan of Holmes's writing ever since I fell in love (c. 1992-93?) with Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. This one is also subscriber-only, but I will take the liberty of pasting in a few paragraphs of Holmes's prose for the hallucinatory intensity of his historical imagination, in this case autobiographical:

In 1974, I had gone to live in Paris, just after completing Shelley: The Pursuit. I was aged twenty-nine, living in a fifth-floor attic room near the Gare du Nord on £100 ($150) a month and supporting myself by freelance journalism, most of it published by The Times in London. At least once a fortnight, well after midnight, I used to walk down to the all-night Bureau de Poste near the Bourse, anxiously carrying my new article in a brown manila envelope.

In the cavernous hall of the Bureau, pleasantly perfumed with Gitanes and cow gum and lino polish, I would stick on the big blue Priorité label and gingerly slide the envelope through the grill, surreptitiously watching till the Existentialist night clerk had actually put it in the Special Delivery canvas bag, hung on a brass hook behind his seat. Then our eyes would meet and occasionally I would get a reassuring greeting along the lines of "Ça va, vous, heh?"

Then came the triumphant stride back up the boulevard Magenta and the sharp left turn into the steep, narrow, cobbled, and deserted Marché Cadet (where Gautier's friend Gérard de Nerval was once arrested for removing his trousers in public), now smelling faintly of crushed peaches. Next a quick lateral diversion past Gautier's own tall, shadowy house at 14, rue de Navarin (with a salute to his mistress in the house opposite, no. 27), and finally several congratulatory ballons de rouge at a quiet little café I knew near the place Anvers off Pigalle, which always remained open until 4 AM.