This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

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There she remains as a fantasy figure for the next twenty years, though she never quite went to bed with him. Instead she did secretarial work, accompanied him on walks, nursed him when ill, and tried to prevent him taking opium, which led to their eventual estrangement in 1812.

In the formal ode, Sara is simply an unnamed ‘virtuous Lady’. In the draft verse letter (not published in full until 1988) she is ‘O Sister! O Beloved! … dear Sara … My Comforter! A Heart within my Heart.’ In a memorable bird image, Coleridge also describes her voluptuously as ‘nested with the Darlings of [her] Love’, and feeling in her embracing arms

Even what the conjugal & mother Dove

That borrows genial warmth from those she warms,

Feels in her thrill’d wings, blessedly outspread! …

Here too, in pursuing him, I had an instructive experience. I discovered that Greta Hall had become a small girls’ boarding school, so I wrote to the headmistress asking permission to visit. It turned out that Coleridge’s study on the top floor was now the sixth-form dormitory. Accordingly I was granted a half-hour afternoon inspection, under Matron’s watchful eye, while the girls were safely away, out in the fields playing hockey.

After we had inspected the room, I asked Matron if I might climb out of the dormitory window onto the flat roof, where Coleridge had often sat writing. As I stood examining the magnificent view, and thinking of his secret beloved Asra, I suddenly saw at my feet two bottles of Vladivar vodka, and a box of Black Russian cigarettes carefully wrapped in cellophane against the weather.

When I climbed back in, Matron asked if I had found ‘anything biographically interesting’. As I prepared to answer – ‘A biographer is an artist upon oath’ – an angelic-looking blonde sixth-former appeared in the doorway behind Matron, and fixing me with a mute appeal, silently shook her head. ‘Yes, Matron,’ I replied gravely. ‘Clear signs of artistic inspiration.’ Still standing behind Matron, the girl mouthed a silent ‘Thank-you’ at me, spread her arms in a strange airborne gesture, and slipped away.

Of course I felt the subversive spirit of Coleridge’s Asra had been in close attendance. Yet, on reflection, not merely as the angel, but also as the kindly Matron, who possibly knew more than she was letting on. This reminded me that Asra was both angel and nurse to Coleridge. Much expanded, almost to the length of a short story (named, after one of Coleridge’s own poems, ‘An Angel Visitant’), this incident went down in the left-hand side of my notebook as a warning against both the charms and the perils of romanticising. Places of ‘inspiration’ might genuinely retain something of their force over time, and it was vital to capture this. But the biographer should also be on guard against vodka.

A different kind of alchemy transfused Coleridge’s friendship with the young chemist Humphry Davy. When they were both in their twenties, Coleridge volunteered to take part in Davy’s early experiments with the intoxicating nitrous oxide (laughing gas) at the Bristol Pneumatic Institute. Davy’s scientific account of gas euphoria turned out to have extraordinary parallels with Coleridge’s poetic account of opium hallucinations, as described in ‘Kubla Khan’.

‘I lost all connections with external things,’ recorded Davy, ‘trains of vivid visible Images rapidly passed through my mind … With the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed … “Nothing exists, but Thoughts! – the Universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!” … I was now almost completely intoxicated … I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals …’

Davy and Coleridge also corresponded about the nature of pain, and the possibilities of gas-based anaesthetics for use in surgical operations. Coleridge later went to his friend’s chemistry lectures, and enthused: ‘I attended Davy’s lectures to enlarge my stock of metaphors … Every subject in Davy’s mind has the principle of Vitality. Living thoughts spring up like Turf under his feet …’ To Davy himself he made a crucial connection: ‘Science being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was Poetical.’

This led me to look at Davy’s biography, and more generally at the relations between science and literature. For the first time I began to consider how a scientific biography might differ from a literary one. In particular, in my own field of Romantic literature, the connection between Coleridge and Davy made me wonder why the poets and writers of the Romantic period were always presented as hostile to science. Had we unknowingly imported twentieth-century ideas about the notorious split between the ‘Two Cultures’ into Romantic biography? Was there in fact such a thing as Romantic science, and a vital new form of biography to go with it? This is what I began to explore in my next book, The Age of Wonder.

The left-hand side of my notebook became crowded with questions and speculations, many naïve. Did the Romantic men of science (‘men in white coats’) have inner emotional lives comparable in intensity to those of the poets; and if so, what kind of writings would bear witness to this? It seemed possible that scientific biography should be less about individual ‘genius’, and more about teamwork and the social impact of discovery. This might demand something closer to group biography, and a sense of the extended ‘ripple effect’ of science throughout a community. It also raised the pressing question – in the figures of the astronomer Caroline Herschel, the novelist Mary Shelley and the mathematician Mary Somerville – of why women had been excluded from science, in contrast to the way they were establishing themselves in literature.

So from a narrow initial study of Coleridge and Davy, The Age of Wonder (2009) expanded to become the biography of a whole generation, including over sixty writers and scientists, and the very moment when the word and concept of ‘scientist’ itself actually emerged in 1833.

I have subsequently come to feel that the meeting of the two great modes of human discovery – imaginative literature and science – has become one of the most urgent subjects for modern biography to study and understand. I believe this is particularly so in both Britain and America. You could say that if our world is to be saved, we must understand it both scientifically and imaginatively.

I often think of something Sylvia Plath once said: ‘If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand.’ This leads me to suppose that biography is something else again: ‘a handshake’. A handshake across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders, and across ways of life. It is a simple act of complex friendship.

It is also a way of keeping the biographer’s notebook open on both sides of that endless mysterious question: What was this human life really like, and what does it mean to us now? In this sense, biography is not merely a mode of historical enquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith. That is what I believe. Putting my hand on my Black n’ Red notebook, that is what I swear to.