The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  Before he set out for Lake Ngami, he spent some time with the bushmen at Tounoubis. They regaled him with stories of the fabulous beasts who lived on the shores of the lake, and in the bush beyond. One had the spoor of a zebra and the horn of a gemsbok, mounted centrally on its forehead. FG wrote to his mother that the skins of this beast, stolen by a party of Kubabees, were quite new to all who saw them. “I really begin to believe in the existence of the beast [the unicorn],” he wrote, “as reports of the animal have been received in many parts of Africa, frequently in the North.” The bushmen also gave detailed descriptions of a kind of cockatrice—a climbing tree-snake with the comb of a guinea fowl and a cry like the clucking of a hen, but without the legendary wings. FG observed the bushmen’s drawings with interest. “One of their habits is to draw pictures on the walls of caves of men and animals and to colour them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonisation and few of them, and indeed, few wild Bushmen, now exist … I was particularly struck with a portrait of an eland as giving a just idea of the precision and purity of their best work.” In later life, he collected a description of a wild Bushman, from a tribe living in caves in the Drakenberg, and his method of drawing.

  “He invariably began by jotting down upon paper or on a slate a number of isolated dots wch presented no connection or trace of outline of any kind to the uninitiated eye, but looked like the stars scattered promiscuously in the sky. Having with much deliberation satisfied himself of the sufficiency of these dots, he forthwith began to run a free bold line from one to the other, and as he did so the form of an animal—horse, buffalo, elephant or some kind of antelope—gradually developed itself. This was invariably done with a free hand, and with such unerring accuracy of touch, that no correction of a line was at any time attempted. I understood from the lad that this was the plan which was invariably pursued by his kindred in making their clever pictures.”

  FG offers this, in his discussion of Mental Imagery, as an example of the projection of a complete mental image on to the paper. He follows it immediately with a description of the map-making abilities of the Eskimo, who could draw from memory accurate charts of the icy bays and inlets explored in their canoes. (Explored, it is also claimed, in spirit journeys undertaken by shamans who have never set flesh-foot in the accurately depicted estuaries, peninsulas, pools and promontories.) Karl Pearson, FG’s biographer, commenting on his description of the Bushmen’s prowess, and his extrapolation of it into the evidences of the mental imagery of our ancestors of the Ice Ages, remarks that FG’s artistic interest would have been aroused by the discovery of the cave paintings in Lascaux and other sites, made after his lifetime. These too, it is now generally thought, had shamanistic powers, could evoke presences or lead out souls into the fluid eternal pursuit of hunter and hunted, eater and eaten. Maybe it is not even fanciful to connect FG’s observed reference points, “stars scattered promiscuously,” with some astrological divination. “Below, the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.”

  [Quaere. Delete this?? S D-S]

  IT WAS A DREADFUL and dangerous journey from Tounoubis to Lake Ngami. It was unbearably hot, and unbearably dry; there was no water to be had for 3½ days out of Tounoubis, and several of his oxen perished, not being fresh, in the remorseless heat. When he came there, he recorded a “waking vision” which came to him as he lay sleepless by the camp-fire at night.

  “But in the dark, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!” So A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which contains a lucid dissertation on the mental constructions of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. Shakespeare must have had a lively interest in mental imagery. Both Hamlet and Antony discourse upon shapes, whales or dragons, discerned in the random configurations of cloud formations. I have made some study of the mental activities which go on when we observe a stump, or something glistening in the dark holes between leaves, and take them for living creatures, a small dog, a raven, or a pair of bright eyes belonging to a hidden cat, large or small. I have noticed, walking in English parkland, that during the approach to an indeterminate object—say a large rock, with mossy growths, or a small log, the mind continues, from the minimal evidence, or sketched points of reference given, to construct the supposed creature. I have created whole ravens—heavy beak, claws, pinion-feathers, watchful eye—from what had to be reconstructed, seen again, as a hawthorn root. Here several times I have seen a lion crouched—tufted ears, shoulder muscles, softly lashing tail—where there was nothing but the movement of a bush in a breeze and a light catching on some shiny object, creating a vision of eyes to watching eyes. Something of this kind must have happened to me that night, but on a scale so awful and disgusting that I hesitate to relate it. Indeed I shall relate it only to attempt a rational exorcism. I believe the initial images may have risen in my poor brain, induced in part by our visit to Elephant Fountain, where the heaps of bones of those great beasts have suggested to the natives that it is a graveyard to which they go to die, to lay themselves down amongst their forebears and companions. Be that as it may, I suddenly saw the whole foreshore—on which there were a moderate number of big pebbles, small boulders, driftwood, etc. etc.—spread with bones. These bones were human bones, cloven skulls, severed spines, smashed femurs and tibia, little heaps of tiny phalanges and metatarsals. They gleamed white in the moonlight, and ruddy near at hand, in the light of the camp-fire. Wherever I looked, my gaze seemed, as it were, to invest these dry bones with flesh. I thought irresistibly of Ezekiel in his valley of the dry bones. “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord … And behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them.” Ezekiel made his bones a living army but my creative eye went no further than to invest these with raw, slippery flesh, livid or freshly bleeding, hacked about and mauled, to which unspeakable things had been done. I had performed much butchery on beasts, in my sporting days, and in my explorations, and I was cognisant of the organs and limbs of the human body, from brain to toenail, from my medical days. But I can hardly believe that the horrible tortures, the ingenious mincing and carving up to which this mass of manhood had been subjected, came from my own subconscious. My mind retches at it still. Parts joined together in fantastic conjunctions—nipples with eye-sockets, and other unspeakable concatenations—all in pain, in pain. I walked amongst them, trying to discern a whole man, and came upon a half-flayed, severed head on a pole, out of which—I swear it—my own eyes looked at me sorrowfully. As if to say, why have you brought me to this pass?

  “These heaps of flesh were inanimate but not immobile. They so to speak writhed or flowed together, moulding themselves into new forms. I was put in mind of some beautiful sad lines of Alfred Tennyson’s poem for Henry Hallam’s lamented brother Arthur, so tragically cut off. It was published anonymously just as I left for this unknown country: Henry pressed a copy into my hand as we parted. It is a fantastical, fragmentary poem, but its grief rings true, and is a grief for the whole earth, for the loss of a faith.

  “The hills are shadows and they flow

  From form to form, and nothing stands;

  They melt like mist, the solid lands

  Like clouds they shape themselves, and go.

  “I wish I had not thought of this then, for now I always see these shadowy hills blood-red, and formed of blood.”

  He sailed for England in January 1852 and arrived in April, exactly two years after his departure. On his arrival, he learned that Henry Hallam had died in Italy, in 1850, soon after he left, and that Henry’s sister, Julia Hallam, to whom he had been—to what extent is not clear—
emotionally attached, was a bride of two months’ standing. In his Memories of My Life, published as late as 1908, he describes his relief on reaching the schooner in Walfish Bay. He sums up.

  “This bald outline of a very eventful journey has taken little notice of the risks and adventures which characterised it … They must be imagined by the reader, otherwise the following paragraph will seem overcharged, which it is not.”

  But the following paragraph is hardly charged at all. He begins it: “I had little conception of the severity of the anxiety under which I had been living until I found myself on board the little vessel that took me away, and I felt at last able to sleep in complete security.”

  The rest of the paragraph is innocuous: summary thanks that he lost no men, survived grumbling and mutinous servants and the breaking-in of cattle, and the help of “an indolent and cruel set of natives speaking an unknown tongue.” He mentions tribal wars, “which had to be stopped before I could proceed” and undependable food. He thanks Andersson—who ultimately died in Damaraland—and Hans. His paragraph is undercharged. English reticence, or sheering away from what he set out to tell?

  III

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

  HE WAS a public man, and he made a daily public progress. He set out at two o’clock from Victoria Terrace, and walked to the Grand Hotel. He dressed carefully, always in the same clothes—a black, broadcloth frock-coat, black trousers, concertinaed at the ankles over highly polished, high-heeled black boots, a carefully folded umbrella, a glistening silk top-hat, a little fence of miniature medals. His white beard, and his white hair surrounded his sallow, unsmiling face, like the copious flare of a halo. He was a tiny personage, and carried himself stiffly erect, full of a dignity at once self-important and threatening. His lips were thin; his eyes, under their snowy ledges, have been called, finely, “fierce badger eyes.” Cartoonists found him easy to “take”; their images proliferated, all recognisable projections, all the same, all different. He knew he was looked at. He had constructed himself to be looked at. Famous men walk behind, or inside, a simplified mask, constructed from inside and outside simultaneously. He groomed his parchment skin and his sleek boot-leather to turn back the light to the onlooker. The onlookers, even as they watched the precise, dandified advance, knew they saw the outside, not the inside. They let their imaginations flicker round the inchoate “inside,” which remained bland and opaque. He belonged to them, their countryman. They had never been sure if they liked him.

  His effigies were round him in his lifetime. In his latter days, his statue stood outside the National Theatre, larger than life, looming through the snow. He was photographed, diminutive and bristling amongst the dignitaries, at ceremonies of dedication. There was a Platz named for him in Gossensass. There was a proposal to make a waxwork double of him to preside over a Freie Bühne festival in Berlin. They wrote to ask for the loan of an old suit. “Be so good as to tell this gentleman that I do not wear ‘old suits,’ nor do I wish a wax model of myself to be clothed in an ‘old suit.’ Obviously I cannot give him a new one, and I therefore suggest he order one from my tailor, Herr Friess, of Maximilianstrasse, Munich.” Sculptors and painters found him somehow inordinate. He had, he informed one of them, the largest brainpan ever measured by a certain German expert. Another, having asked him to remove his spectacles, was appalled by the disparity between his eyes.

  “One was large, I might almost say horrible—so it seemed to me—and deeply mystical; the other much smaller, rather pinched up, cold and clear and calmly probing. I stood speechless a few seconds and stared at those eyes, and spoke the thought that flashed into my mind: ‘I wouldn’t like to have you as an enemy.’ Then his eyes and his whole body seemed to blaze, and I thought instinctively of the troll in the fairy tale who pops out of his hole and roars: ‘Who is chopping trees in my forest?’ ”

  He was a man mjök trollaukinn, with “augmented inhumanity” as one ludicrous translation has it. He wrote:

  To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.

  To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

  Division and self-division. The trolls ensconced in the blood and under the pelt of the human creature; the writer, watching himself, summing up, delivering judgement. He wrote surrounded by a swarm of red-tongued gutta-percha trolls. “There must be troll in what I write,” he said. His monstrous troll came out only in extremis, when things were impossibly difficult. “Then I lock my door and bring him out. No other human eye has seen him, not even my wife … He is a bear, playing the violin, and beating time with his feet.”

  So there he was, man and troll, badger and bear, black integument and lined parchment sac containing blood, bones, and busy creatures, proceeding towards the Grand Hotel, in Christiania, in Norway, which he did not want to think was home. “Up here among the fjords I have my native land. But-but-but: where do I find my homeland?” “Ten years ago, after my second absence of ten years, when I sailed up the fjord, I literally felt my chest contract with revulsion and a feeling of sickness. I felt the same during my whole stay; I was no longer myself among all these cold and uncomprehending Norwegian eyes in the windows and on the pavements.” In the South, he thought of the North.

  He turned his ship’s

  Prow from the north,

  Seeking the trail

  Of brighter gods.

  The snow-land’s beacons

  Quenched in the sea.

  The fauns of the seashore

  Stilled his longing.

  He burned his ships.

  Blue smoke drifted

  Like a bridge’s span

  Towards the north.

  To those snow-capped huts

  From the hills of the south

  There rides a rider

  Every night.

  He was a northerner who went south for light, for distance, in order to see the north, in light, from a distance. He crossed the Alps on May 9th 1864. On April 1, 1898, in Copenhagen, he spoke of the transition.

  “Over the high mountains the clouds hung like great, dark curtains, and beneath these we drove through the tunnel and, suddenly, found ourselves at Mira Mara, where that marvellously bright light which is the beauty of the south suddenly revealed itself to me, gleaming like white marble. It was to affect all my later work, even if the content thereof was not always beautiful.” He had “a feeling of being released from the darkness into light, emerging from mists through a tunnel into the sunshine.”

  He was, or had been, a narrow northern Puritan. He was shocked, and then exhilarated, by the excess of energy of Michelangelo and Bernini. “Those fellows had the courage to commit a madness now and then.” The Norwegians, he recalled contemptuously, “speak with intense complacency of our Norwegian ‘good sense,’ which really means nothing but a tepidity of spirit which makes it impossible for those honest souls to commit a madness.”

  It was his great desire to commit a madness like Michelangelo. Was it for fear of tepidity and dim light only that he fled Norway? Was there a madness, already committed, working away like yeast in the Norwegian small beer of his past, ready to explode the bottle? As a letter-writer, he was inhibited, crabbed, tortuously formal, uncommunicative. After leaving his home town, he never returned there, though on the occasion of his mother’s death he wrote a stilted letter to his sister Hedvig, saying that he was just setting off for Egypt, but would like to receive letters. Later, he wrote to his father, who did not preserve the letter, but sent a reply, which was preserved, in which he said, “I tried to read your letter, but I couldn’t understand it, I felt ashamed …”

  It is doubly difficult for a famous man, once returned to his native land, not to make a pious pilgrimage to the place of his birth. Spectators of the public life are interested in its beginnings, in the source. It is patently untrue to claim that he himself was indifferent or uninterested. In 1881 he began an autobiography, rapidly abandoned, expressing surprise that a street had bee
n renamed for him. “Or so at any rate the newspapers have reported, and I have also heard it from reliable travellers.” He recorded a grim town—“nothing green; no rural, open landscape”—full of the sound of weirs and, penetrating the watery roar, “from morning to dusk, something resembling the sharp cries of women, now shrieking, now moaning. It was the hundreds of sawblades at work on the weirs. When later I read of the guillotine, I thought of those sawblades.” In the tall church, raised by a Copenhagen master builder, the child was exposed, by his nursemaid, sitting in the open window of the tower, high, high up. The unexpected sight of him there caused his mother to scream and faint. In the church, too, lived a demonic black poodle with fiery red eyes, the sight of which, at that same window, had shocked a watchman into falling to his death, bursting open his head in the square below. “I felt that the window belonged to me and the church poodle,” he wrote. Then he gave up his autobiographical enterprise. It clearly never tempted him into revisiting those scenes. Something forbade him. He stayed away.

  Sometimes he described how he set his characters in motion. How, one may ask, does such a man set about constructing another human being, in some sense ex nihilo, an individual who was not there before, and now exists, but whose very identity must leave space for the creative puppet-mastery of a director, the defining touches of a costumier and a maquilleuse, the deliberate accidents of directed light-rays and non-functional, even painted, cloth, chairs and tables? Above all, how does he make such a person “real,” whatever that is, and yet leave that “reality” sketched and incomplete, to be fleshed out, to be wormed into, to bulge and sag around the unimagined, unaccommodating perhaps, body, voice—and history, and soul, and human limitations—of an actor? And not even one, definitive, magisterial actor, but a succession of these too fleshy ghosts each filling out different pouches and pockets? How could he collaborate, in his work of imagination, with these unknown helpers or opponents?