The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  “I want you,” said Fulla, “to help me with an experiment.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, no, they don’t hurt each other, usually. Unlike the aggressive Anthidium. No, it’s just male territorial dancing. These creatures are getting rare. There’s a belief that the biggest always wins. Unlike territorial battles in butterflies, where the one in possession always beats off the challenger. What we need to do is label the males, and remove them one by one, and record their weights, and the fights, and the winners, as we remove and return them. You can keep them quite safely in plastic boxes with airholes and damp sand—so they don’t dehydrate—and I’ll give you a set of coloured, numbered discs to attach to them. We did a very successful series of observations on male Osmia rufa bees by this method.”

  “Why me?”

  “Well, you appear to be underoccupied. And I have to go to Turkey. And also back to Oxford. And I want to know about these creatures, before we extinguish them.” She hesitated. “You know,” she said, “the first insect I collected was one of these. I found it dead in the road, on a holiday. I put it in a box and labelled it “stag beetle.” I used a Swedish word I thought I’d made up, hjortbagge, literally stag plus beetle. Then they told me that was wrong, the word is ekoxe, literally oak-ox, which is much less accurate, I think. Your friend Linnaeus called it Lucanus cervus, which does mean stag beetle. So I thought I’d been fanciful, but later I discovered that the old Swedish word was truly hjortbagge. I’d imagined it rightly. I collected a lot of other things as a little girl—snailshells and seed-pods, and butterflies and many other beetles—and just gave them names from nowhere, for fun. I remember putting an elm-bark beetle—Scolytus destructor it was called then—it’s been renamed Scolytus scolytus—in a matchbox and labelling it The Valise Bug. It’s a rather boring beetle, though it makes wonderfully patterned interconnecting tunnels in the bark of elms—they look like great centipedes—or dragons. It looks like a neat little zipped-up leather suitcase. Of course, it isn’t really boring, it spreads Dutch elm disease, it’s changed the whole landscape of Europe.” She stopped a moment. I said,

  “Do you think everyone collects things when little?”

  Moths brushed through my mind, multi-coloured tiny glass spheres glistened. What was I doing?

  “I don’t know. I used to hold parties for bugs in boxes. I never liked dolls. Dead human beings that had never lived, I always thought. With nasty sickly-sweet faces. Then I got interested in fitting the bugs together. Then into fitting the insect world into the rest of the world. Boxes in boxes. Of course, all the naming’s arbitrary. The new genetic groupings—the clades—are going to sweep away the Linnean families and genera and species, and reconnect everything quite differently. It’s possible, for instance, that a mushroom is more nearly related to you than to a chrysanthemum or a slime-mould.”

  I said I would like to help her with her project. She was right that I had no function in the world at present. I said I would like to help her, but I wouldn’t know how to start without her.

  “That’s OK,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of time to set it up. Before I go.”

  And she lay back spreadeagled on the turf, amongst dried rabbit-pellets and deer fewmets, amongst the secret entrances to the nests of bumble-bees and slow-worms, amongst gossamer and starry daisies and dandelion clocks and roaring golden dandelions, and her amazing hair spread like another life-form over the grasses and things flew into it and slid over it on bellies and innumerable tiny feet.

  And she opened the top two buttons of her shift, so I could clearly see her freckled brown breasts in their lacy cups. They put me in mind of bird’s eggs, or the shadowy entrance to foxgloves. And when she saw me looking, she put up her quick little hands and pulled my face down between them. All of me, all of me, trembled and exploded.

  We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts, of me. I could have stroked her, or gripped her, or licked her, all that long way back, but putting it off, waiting, keeping still, looking uninterested, was so much more exciting …

  She was staying in someone’s flat in Fulham. I followed her scent up the dark stairs of the house (it was an attic flat). And …

  I began this piece of writing with the moment when I decided to stop being a post-structuralist literary critic. It seems a long time ago. I seem to remember that I began with a revulsion from Empedocles’ idea of the fragmented body-parts in search of each other. I think I was so taken by Ormerod Goode’s revelation of Destry-Scholes’s biography of Elmer Bole precisely because the over-determinism of Literary Theory, the meta-language of it, threw into brilliant relief Destry-Scholes’s real achievement in describing a whole individual, a multi-faceted single man, one life from birth to death. I appeared to have failed to find Destry-Scholes himself. I have to respect him for his scrupulous absence from my tale, my work. It will be clear that I too have wished to be absent. I have resisted and evaded the idea that because of Destry-Scholes’s absence my narrative must become an account of my own presence, id est, an autobiography, that most evasive and self-indulgent of forms. I have tried both to use my own history, unselfconsciously, as a temporal thread to string my story (my writing) on, and to avoid unnecessary dwelling on my own feelings, or my own needs, or my own—oh dear—character. It will be clear to almost any attentive reader, I think, that as I have gone along in this writing (we are now at page 161, ms) I have become more and more involved in the act of writing itself, more and more inclined to shift my attention from Destry-Scholes’s absence to my own style, and thus, my own presence. I now wonder—after the last few pages I have written about the birds and the bees (and the stag beetles) and Fulla B—whether all writing has a tendency to flow like a river towards the writer’s body and the writer’s own experience? I began with what I still consider a healthy desire to eschew the personal (the tangential, the coincidental). Yet I am now possessed by a burning desire to describe making love to Fulla Biefeld, and, worse than that, to describe how that experience differs from the (no less intense, whatever a reader may think) experience of making love to Vera Alphage. And the intensity of the liberation into writing lyrical (banal but shocking-to-me) sentences about foxgloves and freckles, spiderwebs and hairs.

  I had already—before the loss of my job, before the impulsive picnic—arranged to visit Vera Alphage on the next day. I wondered, out of a mad sense of either decorum or personal inadequacy—whether to cancel. I felt in some primitive way that Fulla’s musk was all over my body, lingering in every crevice. Fulla’s love-making is fierce and wholehearted, not prolonged but repetitive (I was pleased by my capacity to rise to these repeated occasions). She cries out, she laughs, you would not suppose her to be the rather grim and severe world-moralist I met in the Linnean Society strongroom. She is all liquid gold, all grip and drive. She bites nicely. I had little blue florets, I found in my shower-room, in the hollows of my collar-bone and stepping along my hip from my groin. When I saw this shadowy blue, with its rose-and-black gooseflesh, on my skin, in my naked solitude, I thought of Vera. Not, as you may imagine, because I thought Vera might detect Fulla’s activities from the blossoming of my belly. How could she not, indeed, when you think about it, but I am slow to read signs, as I have said before, and also, there was a half-chance, for Vera always made love with her huge eyes closed and the long lashes damp on the dark shadowed hollow beneath them. No, I thought of Vera, because I always, always think of Vera when I see that particular blue, of bruises and shadows, of the dark where the pulse of her blue vein beats in her wrist, or the root of her elegant neck, or the inside of her white thigh. I think also of the almost-midnight blue, the night
-blue, she has chosen for the background to her photographs of our invisible inner lives, made with frequencies of light our human eyes cannot see. I thought of Vera, it has to be said, as Fulla pushed her warm little face fiercely along the bones of my hip and pelvis, I thought of the life of the bones, under, in the invisible world of the body, Vera’s world. I thought of them together. Fulla wandered the plains of my flesh, causing every hair to rise to her, and inside my nerve-strings sang Vera. (I am getting better at my lyricism, but am not sure that last sentence works. Let it stand. Who will ever read all this stuff, anyway. And, it’s true.)

  I think, up to that juncture, I had been grateful to Vera for allowing me to sleep with her. I did not realise, until I was faced with the straightforward ferocity of Fulla’s desire, how much I had supposed that I was a small, insignificant being to whom the beautiful, secretive Vera was simply being kind. Fulla set me aglow—with sex, but also with a kind of pleasure in myself I’d never known. I liked my body. I liked Phineas G. Nanson. And—it has to be admitted—I wanted to show this new, strutting, gleaming Phineas G. to Vera. I wanted to bring to her—to give her—some of my new-learned inventiveness.

  I think—from reading novels—that there is a compulsion, faced with two women, to decide that one is “the real one” and that the other is “only” something or other. Only for sex, only for relaxing, even only for friendship, as opposed to the Romantic welded dyad. Which I suddenly see, having had that thought, in terms of the hermaphrodite silver paperknife with which I laid about Erik and Christophe. A weapon for cutting paper. We have a cultural need to present it to ourselves this way. Only, I didn’t. I wanted to go from Fulla to Vera (and back to Fulla) forever. I even wanted to teach Vera to look at me. Covered with the love-bites of a Swedish bee-taxonomist. It was a long way from Ormerod Goode and the Glenmorangie. I suppose he too had his life as a body with other bodies. I’d never thought about it, despite his erotic scribblings in dusty seminars. So I went to see Vera. As usual, and not as usual. When I got there, she was bent over some new arrangement of Destry-Scholes’s marbles. This one entailed a central circular figure, I remember, with one very large, slightly chipped one in the centre, with yellowish clear glass round a spiralling blue core of lattice-work, with a red vein spiralling inside it. From the circle she had made long radiating tentacles, or flagellae, on some principle I couldn’t discover. They bent around, at their ends, to form a swastikalike form. She did not look up when I came in. She looked somehow different. I immediately knew that she knew about my adventures. I approached, crabwise. My—that is, Destry-Scholes’s—that is, Vera’s—shoeboxes were on a side-table.

  “I got the boxes out,” she said, from inside a tent of dark silk.

  I went, not to the boxes, but to her. I asked, inanely enough, what she was working on. She said, liquid, it didn’t matter. Really, it didn’t matter.

  I saw, then, round drops of liquid splashing on to the round glass marbles, running down into the baize … She sniffed, discreetly, almost inaudibly. I very nearly turned on my heel to retreat. But I didn’t. I put my hand on the ripple of her weeping shoulders. I stroked the dark hair. Mum. Terrified of losing her. I said, in the end, as more tears rolled on more marbles,

  “Shall I just go away?”

  “I’m sorry to be like this. Perhaps it’s better.”

  “I’ll go then.”

  “I can’t expect you to get wound up in my problems. We aren’t like that, I know—”

  “Vera. What is it?”

  “I can’t go on.”

  “With me? I understand, of course—”

  “Don’t be stupid. With my job. I did something unforgivable.”

  It was nothing to do with me. I breathed oxygen, I gathered her in my arms, I called her my love, my darling (words until then unknown in the Nanson vocabulary, at least with that possessive adjective). I led her to her sofa and held her wet face against my shirt, where the tears spread and trickled. Tell me, I said, tell me. She did. I don’t recall that anyone had ever trusted me with anything like that before. I stroked her hair, like a tamer with a frightened creature.

  She had taken a series of photographs from a scan of the base of the skull, the nape of the neck, the spine, of a young man who had had an earlier operation for a rare cancer of the neck, which had entailed removing his arm and shoulder. He had, it had appeared, made a complete recovery, had learned to live one-handed and scarred, in a swashbuckling series of painted jackets, and brilliant caps on his shaven crown. And then there had been troubling symptoms. They had done the scan, to investigate. Vera had hung rows of photographs on a lightscreen, and through the plates the light had showed the filaments and sproutings of the cancer, wound round and into the vertebral column, obscuring its form, eating its edges, reaching for the bone-marrow. They were, said Vera, lovely photographs. We couldn’t have got anything so delicate, so precise, even five years ago. There were a lot of them. The young man’s eye ran from one to the other; the surgeon pointed out the invasive malignant cells, with a red laser, and Vera watched the young man read his death—his inevitable death—in the details of her work.

  And suddenly she began to weep uncontrollably, as she saw his lips tighten, and his throat constrict, and his eyes stare. She wept and wept and fell to the ground, and had to be helped away by the surgeon, who should have been helping the dying man with the deadly knowledge. My darling, my love, I murmured into her hair. I said that perhaps the young man had been grateful, that she cared so much. She said no, he had given her a cold, faraway, malignant look, the young man, because she was alive, and making an unnecessary scene, and he was vanishing down a tunnel, out of touch. I wiped her tears, I kissed her, I said truthfully I had not known how she had walked so calmly in the valley of the shadow, day after day. As I wiped her face with my handkerchief and told her she was brave, I remembered Erik and Christophe and their duck-egg blue ones, and Fulla’s tongue on her handkerchief on Erik’s blood on my own face. Fulla had defended me, and now I felt enough of a man to console Vera. I told Vera she could not be kind to anyone if she was not kind to herself. She said she had no life although she was not dying, only this austere vocation, and I said, solid Phineas (truthful Phineas), yes, she did, she did have a life, she had me.

  We went to bed in the dark. She said she did not want me to see her face all swollen, and as a result she did not see Fulla’s love-bites. I felt with my lips and fingertips the slow tears still welling between her closed eyelids. I noticed, I thought that Vera’s scent, which I thought of as silvery, combined quite differently with my own from the way Fulla’s did, which I thought of as golden. How did I get to these synaesthetic metaphors? Vera (my love, my darling) is a darting silver fish, a sailing moon in an indigo sky, quicksilver melting into a thousand droplets and recombining. Fulla is gold calyx strenuously spread in gold sunlight, Fulla is golden pollen clinging to bee-fur, Fulla is the sailing fleets of dandelion clocks. Fulla is lion-pelt, cats’ teeth. I do not think I have got lyricism quite right yet. The urge to commit it is overwhelming. The results not so. But it can all stay in, for the moment. We think in clichés because clichés are ideas which have so to speak proved their Darwinian fitness over time (I say nothing, here, of truthfulness). I could compare Fulla and Vera to tea and coffee, or Glasgow and Birmingham, but clichés are requisite here, like tap-roots into the common (in every sense) consciousness from which slightly adapted, new mutations are generated.

  We lay there in the dark. She had let go her grip on my arms, her fingers were relaxed, though the tears were still brimming over. I curled myself round her limp body with careful protectiveness, stretching my spine to encompass her contracted one, my sex stirring in the cleft of her white (invisible) bottom. I had the idea of massaging the nape of her neck (I read signs badly) but desisted, after my touch induced a massive shudder. So I stroked her hair, and face, and ears, over and over, and she wept, more quietly, less convulsively. In the morning, she was still weeping. I said she shouldn
’t go to work, she should go to the doctor. She said the surgeon had advised that. I said, “I’ll stay with you.” She tried to say no, but I saw that she needed me. She accepted. I thought then, Fulla wouldn’t know where to find me, and then, that I must get in touch with her whilst Vera was at the doctor’s, and arrange—arrange what?—well, at least the next stage of the stag-beetle experiment.