The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  But this pleasurable pride was, to use Destry-Scholes’s word, silly, because he could not have known Chris O’Toole. The true delight was to track him through the maze of his and Bole’s reading, and come unexpectedly on a trace of his presence, or even of a mistake he had made. Correcting his errors (unlike Bole’s, they were rarissimae, shining little jewels hardly observable in moss—the analogy is from beetle-hunting)—correcting his errors gave me a peculiar thrill of achievement, of doing something solidly scholarly, adding to the sum of facts. But the thrill was just as great when, three-quarters of the way through a book I believed Destry-Scholes should have read, and had not, I would come upon his tracks—a quotation he had used from a critic or a soldier, or, often enough, a sentence he had included in his own work, lifted whole, or loosely rewritten.

  Postmodernist ideas about intertextuality and quotation of quotation have complicated the simplistic ideas about plagiarism which were in force in Destry-Scholes’s day. I myself think that these lifted sentences, in their new contexts, are almost the purest and most beautiful parts of the transmission of scholarship. I began a collection of them, intending, when my time came, to redeploy them with a difference, catching different light at a different angle. That metaphor is from mosaic-making. One of the things I learned in these weeks of research was that the great makers constantly raided previous works—whether in pebble, or marble, or glass, or silver and gold—for tesserae which they rewrought into new images. I learned also that Byzantium was a primary source for the blue glass which is the glory of Chartres and Saint-Denis. The French, according to Theophilus, were skilled at making panes of blue glass from ancient vessels, such as Roman scent-bottles. They also recycled ancient mosaic cubes, making transparent what had been a brilliant reflective surface.

  At this time I had a recurrent dream of a man trapped in a glass bottle, itself roughly formed in the shape of a man. Sometimes it was blue, sometimes green, sometimes clear with a yellowish cast and flaws in the glass. This man was and was not myself. I was also the observer of the events of the dream. Sometimes he was cramped by the bottle, sometimes a small creature scurrying at the base of a sheer glass cylinder. I mention this, because it seems to fit, but I do not offer any interpretation of it. I have done with psychoanalytic criticism.

  It took me longer than it should have done, moving along D and G and even H as I found vacancies where I had not sat before, to realise that I was acquiring only second- or third-hand facts. I was not discovering Destry-Scholes, beyond his own discoveries. No answer came to my letter or to my advertisement. I realised I did not have much idea about how to look for any more facts. I decided that I would do something Destry-Scholes himself claimed often to have done in his own research. I would visit the house where he was born. It was, after all, the only place where I knew he had been—apart, of course, from Bole’s birthplace, London home, Pommeroy Vicarage, Bosphorus yali and other brief resting-places. Pontefract was the place to start. It was the place where Destry-Scholes was Destry-Scholes, as opposed to the biographer of Bole.

  I would have liked to go to the Bosphorus, but it was financially out of the question.

  Pontefract is a small town in Yorkshire with nothing much to recommend it, except a very large, largely ruined castle, where Richard II died. It must once have commanded a confluence of important roads and rivers, but now is famous only for a kind of liquorice coin called a Pontefract cake. I do not like liquorice, and wondered whether Destry-Scholes did. He might have felt a local pride in the local product. Or not. I went there on a coach, changing at York to a local bus.

  I had the address of the house from which his birth had been registered; it was on the way out of the town, in the direction of a village called East Hardwick. I walked there, looking at shopfronts, bus stops, pubs, supposing I might feel his presence, and registering, accurately and honourably, that I felt nothing. His parents’ names were what I thought of as “posh.” Robert Walter and Julia Ann—especially Julia—were not working-class names. I had expected number 8 Askham Way to be a substantial house, a house with an orchard, or anyway a big garden, where an imaginative boy might play, a house with gables and dormer windows. When I found 8 Askham Way, it was a red box in a row of red brick boxes, all attached to each other.

  They had little strips of front garden, and, for the most part, little wrought-iron garden gates with latches. They had tiled roofs and identical fronts—a thin door, with a high knob and a dull metal letterbox, beside a cramped bay window with leaded lights. Above the door were little porthole windows, and two square upper-storey windows, also leaded, with catches, not sashes. There was a laburnum tree in flower next to the gate of number 8, which had a well-kept lawn, and a border of Californian poppies. I do not know how long-lived laburnum trees are. I stood there, trying to think what to think. Askham Way is simply this row of red brick boxes set back from a main road. There is a new and shiny Texaco garage on the other side, which certainly does not date back to 1925. Nor do the street lamps, which are concrete and ugly. The house resembles, quite a lot, the square red brick box in which I was born in a suburb of Nottingham. I tried not to think of this. I don’t like the place where I was born, and don’t go there. Destry-Scholes’s childhood is nothing at all to do with mine. The sky was blue with a few aeroplane exhaust trails, also things not to be seen in 1925. A woman came past me, carrying a brown imitation-leather bag of shopping (bread and bananas sticking out) and wearing a bright green beret. She asked if I needed help.

  I said I was looking for a man who used to live there. Who was born there in the late twenties, I said, trying to make it less remote. She said she had only been there five months and couldn’t help, and the people she had bought it from hadn’t been there long, either. She smiled, and went down the path, and into the house, and shut the door.

  I went on looking at the red box, trying to think what to think. I felt a feeling I used to have going into our own red box—that such boxes are the only real homes real people live in—everything else is just images and fantasies. I also felt that they were traps, with their narrow doors, and boxy stairs, and busily divided-up little windows. Or like beehives, repeating similar cells.

  I noticed that the woman was looking at me out of an upstairs window. She drew the curtains with a swish. After a moment, she appeared at the other upstairs window, looked at me again, and swished those curtains, too. She may have done that every evening. Or not.

  I felt like a voyeur. I also felt like a failure. I could have said something different and she might have asked me to tea and told me about the Pontefract of the past. (It was quite improbable that she knew anything about the Pontefract of the past.) I could have knocked at the meagre door of every house in that meagre row, asking if there was anyone there old enough to remember.… But I wasn’t going to. I was beginning to feel trapped by this ordinary place. I set off back to Pontefract, and the bus station. I could have walked round the Castle, but I didn’t. It was just a castle. He had been born into that box, that was certain, but anything he might have felt as a boy, patrolling moats and dungeons, came under his own heading of Speculation, and was a little disgusting.

  Thinking about the impossibility of the Castle made me see that I had, in some sense, registered the red box. I knew it. I had been there, even if I had not gone in.

  Action of some kind was becoming necessary. I began to wonder if it had been foolish to address my letter “To Whom It May Concern.” I decided to use the telephone. One amongst my many disadvantages as a biographical researcher is a horror of initiating phone calls. The switchboard lady at the mega-publishers was kind but unhelpful. Holme & Holly had been subsumed into Deodar Books, which had been swallowed by Hachs & Shaw. At Hachs & Shaw I was passed from voice-mail to voice-mail, forced to listen to the Rolling Stones and Ella Fitzgerald and a mournful snippet of plainsong. Finally I got an elderly female voice who said, as though I was a silly boy, “But you want the archivist. “I said I didn’t know there was one,
and what was the extension? The archive had been sold to the University of Lincoln, said the voice. You want their archivist. She had a moment’s kindness. “Her name is Betty Middleton.”

  I wrote to Betty Middleton, and continued my progress round the Reading Room. Rows L, M, N. Persian and Turkish ghazals, prayer book revisions, the siege of Vienna. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on a whim. Destry-Scholes had taken several of her minor sentences, and reset them. Betty Middleton answered. All that could be found were a few typed letters. Did I want copies? She was afraid they were not very exciting, she added, sounding like a human being.

  When they came, I experienced a moment of pure discouragement. There were only about a dozen. Of these, three said, “I return the proofs herewith, as requested. I have not made any substantial changes. Yours sincerely, S. Destry-Scholes.” Two more pointed out minor errors in the accounting of royalties, and one asked, baldly, whether the royalties were overdue, or whether there were none and the publishers had not seen fit to inform the author, as the contract required them to. One said, “I shall be very happy to meet you for lunch, on Thursday next, at the time and in the place you suggest.” One—the only one of any conceivable interest—asked if Mr. Holly knew any source of finance for authors wishing to undertake journeys for research purposes. “I have, as you know, already had a British Academy grant for my Istanbul trip. I should like to be able to take a look at the Maelstrøm. I wonder if you can help?”

  There was no copy of any responses to these letters. They were all written on the same typewriter, and headed Jolly Corner Hotel, Gower Street. I went, of course, to look at this hotel, which was still there, another version of the blank façade in a repeating series, this time grey and, to my untutored eye, Georgian. I summoned up my courage, went in and asked if anyone would know anything about an author who appeared to have lived there in the early 1950s. The owners were Pakistani and friendly. They had been there five months. They didn’t have any of the records of the previous owners. “It was a little dingy, you know, quite a bit of a sad sort of a place. We are modernising, and cleaning it up. We are trying to make it jolly, though we are seriously considering changing the name.”

  I wrote to the archivist and asked if any of the answers to these messages had been preserved. She wrote back, still amiably, saying no, and that there was a note saying Aloysius Holly always replied in his own hand, on carefully selected postcards. I could see the royalty statements if I liked.

  There was one more thing, she said. A packet that had been nagging her because it had been lying loose under the hanging folders in the cabinet. It did appear to contain a bundle of sheets (thirty-seven to be precise) typed on what she was convinced was the same typewriter, on foolscap sheets of blue carbon. The material appeared to be biographical. There was even a mention of the Maelstrøm. She would be quite glad, she said, if I were able to identify the fragments positively as belonging to the Destry-Scholes archive, since she had no idea where else to put them. It would, she said, give the archive a little more body, so to speak. Would I like photocopies? She was afraid she would have to charge 5p per page.

  I was excited by the idea of foolscap sheets of blue carbon, for I knew, as she did not, that the “Art of Biography” notes had been made in that form. I wrote back, saying I would like to have the thirty-seven pages, and enclosing a cheque.

  They arrived a few days later. The numbering, Betty Middleton wrote, was her own, the archivist’s numbering. The pages had been, so to speak, pushed in a crumpled way into the packet. She would confirm that they were all carbons, not top copies. As I would see, the typing stopped and started. Some pages were full and consecutive, others scrappy. Some were more worn than others. “He, or his typist, was not very good at page-endings or line-endings. He runs off, words are lost. I think you may be interested in the reference to the Maelstrøm. Odd,” wrote Betty Middleton. I did not know if she knew that Destry-Scholes had putatively disappeared in its maw. She added, “I am afraid these are very foul papers. My own opinion is that they form part of several works, not just one. I shall be interested to know what you think.”

  It was true that the foul papers were even shuffled as to order; pages 10–13 seemed to belong between pages 26 and 27. The reference to the Maelstrøm followed, naturally it seemed, some references to fjords, but after some thought, and consultation of syntax and common sense, I became convinced that it too had become misplaced, and should have been attached to what appeared to be a quite different narrative. I decided that what I had before me was three sections of three different biographical accounts. It was possible, of course, that they were meant to form parts of one book. Ms. Middleton confirmed, what I knew, really, that there had been no label or title on the package. The heroes, or central figures, of the passages were referred to with initials only, CL, FG and HI. This may have been a device to assist a poor typist, but I read it, involuntarily, as part of a teasing reticence, not to say wilful concealment that I was beginning to ascribe to my fictive Destry-Scholes, with his thin buttocks, speckled tweed trousers and cramped, identity-less dwellings. So we piece things together. I shall transcribe the narratives as I found them. The subjects were reasonably easy to identify, and I do not propose to mystify anyone. Anyone? Who is going to read this? I give them baldly, out of their original crumpled chaos. There were no headings. The Roman numerals are mine, as Miss Middleton’s (not transcribed) were Arabic.

  The Three Documents

  I

  [The first document, to which I gave the provisional title “L …”]

  AS HE STRUCK OUT of the country of the Lapps, he noted a horse’s jawbone hanging by the roadside.

  “By the road hung a maxilla inferiori equi, which had 6 incisores sat obtusos et detritos 2 caninos et distincto spatio, 12 molares utrinque. If I knew how many dentes et quales, and how many dugs each animal had, and ubi, I think I could devise a methodum naturalissimum omnium quadripedum.”

  THE MENTION of dugs and teeth suggests he was thinking of clarifications beyond the simple quadruped, though he had not, at this early point, conceived of the mammal. He noted it in his little notebook and continued on his way north. He was wearing, he tells us, “a little unpleated coat of West Gothland cloth with facings and a collar of worsted shag, neat leather breeches—purchased secondhand at an auction—a pig-tailed wig, a cap of green fustian, a pair of top boots and a small leather bag, nearly two feet long and not quite so wide, with hooks on one side so it can be shut and hung up.” In this bag he carried a shirt, two pairs of half-sleeves, two nightcaps, an inkhorn, a pen-case, a magnifying glass and a small spy-glass, a gauze veil as protection from midges, his journal and a stock of sheets of paper stitched together, to press plants between (both in folio), a comb, and his manuscripts on ornithology, his Flora Uplandica, his Characteres Generici. He had a short sword, and a small fowling-piece between his thigh and the saddle. It was Friday, 12 May 1732. He was twenty-five years old, all but about half a day.

  He travelled north round the Gulf of Bothnia on the coastal route to Umeå (about 400 miles), dismounting frequently to study a flower or a stone, or to snatch a young horned owl from its nest. Then he turned inland, travelling now due west into the country inhabited by the Lycksele Lapps. He set off up the River Umeå by boat, in perfect weather, noting:

  “It was an immense joy to observe at sunrise the tranquil stream, disturbed neither by the Naiads with their floods and torrents, nor by the soughing of Aeolus, and to see how the woods on either side of it were reflected to provide for the traveller a subterranean kingdom below the surface … Such of the giant firs as still defied Neptune smiled in the waters, deceptive in their reflection; but he and his brother Aeolus had taken revenge on many of them, Neptune devouring their roots and Aeolus casting down their summits.”

  He was disposed at times to think of the Lapps as innocent inhabitants of a primitive paradise, or of the late pastoral simplicity of Ovid’s Silver Age. “Their soil is unwounded by the plough, their lives
by the clash of arms. They have not found their way into the bowels of the earth; they do not wage wars to establish territorial boundaries. They wander from place to place, live in tents, lead the patriarchal life of the shepherds of old.” He took note, when he managed to reach the Lapp people, of their relations with the reindeer, “their estate, their cow, their companion and their friend.” He solved the problem of the clacking sound their hooves made on snow (their hooves were hollow) and correctly ascribed the pattern of small holes on most reindeer skins to the amorous activities of the gadfly, Oestrus tarandi, who deposits her eggs under their skins, and causes their frequent shifting flights across the snow. He observed that the gadfly was completely covered with hairs—a providence of the Creator, so that she could survive in the icy mountains.

  He was himself a genuinely devout Christian, and made considerable efforts to reach the scattered churches in these remote lands, where, he remarked, churchgoers often had to “wade up to the armpits through icy water, arriving half dead from cold and exhaustion.” The parish priests at Umeå punished their parishioners, who had to travel two whole days, if they missed major festivals. He arrived at Granön church to find it empty, as the pike had chosen that day to rise. At Jokkmokk he took against the ignorant priest and schoolmaster, who assured him that clouds in Lapland sweep over mountains, bearing away stones, trees and animals. CL tried to explain that it was the violent winds that moved the objects, and that clouds were composed of mist, of water bubbles. The two men sneered at the savant’s ignorance, and assured him that the clouds were solid, leaving solid and slimy traces of their passage on the mountains. These, CL replied, were vegetable, known as nostoc. The two men continued to mock.