LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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       Experimenting

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      After completing my two-volume life of Coleridge, I continued to wonder about scientific discovery during the period of his lifetime, between 1772 and 1834. This was the high-water mark of British Romanticism, one of the best-known and best-loved periods in the whole of English literature. So why was so little known about the science, and the scientists, of this same era? Was the divisive influence of C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ still at work? In 1999 I gave a speculative lecture at the British Academy entitled ‘Coleridge Among the Scientists’. It had a mixed reception.

      Most people could quote the names of at least a dozen poets and writers of this period. Yet the only scientific name popularly known between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin was – probably – that notorious and fictional bio-engineer Victor Frankenstein. Was science – were scientists – so entirely irrelevant to the huge imaginative achievement of Romanticism? After all, one of Coleridge’s greatest friends was the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, who eventually became President of the Royal Society. Coleridge had once promised Davy, in a memorable moment of scientific enthusiasm, that he would ‘attack Chemistry like a shark’. Later he suggested that he and Davy – together with Wordsworth – should set up a chemical laboratory together in the Lake District. Finally he wrote to Davy that most brilliant, seminal and provoking remark which had so struck me, that the passion of Hope made Science ‘Poetical’.

      Nevertheless, it was still traditionally assumed that all the poets – like William Blake – hated and distrusted science; while all the scientists – like Isaac Newton – despised and disdained to talk to the poets. The antagonism, so to speak, was mutual. As Blake famously exclaimed: ‘Bacon and Newton, sheathed in Dismal Steel’.

      This position was vividly illustrated by Blake’s powerful picture of Newton, drawn in 1795, a demonic figure bent grimly over his measuring compasses, reducing the entire world to geometry and mathematics. Here, it was argued, began the fatal division between Imagination and Reason, between Arts and Sciences. Indeed, two hundred years later a modern version of this figure, an enormous bronze statue of Blake’s Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi (1995), but now with explicit suggestions of Frankenstein’s monster, was solemnly placed in the courtyard of the new British Library in Euston Road, London, thus guarding Cerberus-like the entrance to one of the great centres of learning in the Western world.

      So

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