The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  Card no. 197

  The points I have endeavoured to impress are chiefly these. First, that character ought to be measured by carefully recorded acts, representative of conduct. An ordinary generalisation is nothing more than a muddle of vague memories of mixed observations. It is an easy vice to generalise. We want lists of facts, every one of which may be separately verified, valued and revalued, and the whole accurately summed. It is the statistics of each man’s conduct in small, everyday affairs, that will probably be found to give the simplest and most precise measure of his character. The other chief point that I wish to impress is, that a practice of deliberately and methodically testing the character of others and of ourselves is not wholly fanciful, but deserves consideration and experiment.

  [This is from Galton’s essay, “Measurement of Character.” PGN]

  Card no. 6 From Peer Gynt

  BUTTON MOULDER: The Master, you see, is a thrifty man.

  He never rejects as worthless anything

  Which He can use again as raw material.

  Now you were meant to be a shining button

  On the waistcoat of the world. But your loop broke.

  So you must be thrown into the rubbish bin

  And go from there back into the great pool.

  PEER: You don’t intend to melt me down with other dead men?

  BUTTON MOULDER: That is precisely what I intend.

  We’ve done it, you know, with a number of people.

  At the Royal Mint they do the same with coins

  That have got so worn you can’t see the face on them.

  PEER: But this is the most sordid parsimony!

  Oh, come on, be a sport and let me go!

  A button without a loop, a worn-out shilling

  What are they to a man in your Master’s position?

  BUTTON MOULDER: Oh, as long as a man has some soul left

  He’s always worth a little as scrap.

  And I add, myself, because presumably Destry-Scholes saw no need to copy out a passage so famous, Peer Gynt and the onion.

  You’re no Emperor. You’re just an onion.

  Now then, little Peer, I’m going to peel you

  And you won’t escape by weeping or praying.

  [Takes an onion and peels it layer by layer.]

  The outmost layer is withered and torn;

  That’s the shipwrecked man on the upturned keel.

  Here, mean and thin, is the passenger;

  But it still tastes a little of old Peer Gynt.

  And inside that is the digger of gold;

  Its juice is all gone, if it ever had any.

  The next one’s shaped like a crown. No, thank you!

  We’ll throw that away and ask no questions.

  Here’s the student of history, short and tough;

  And here is the Prophet, fresh and juicy;

  Like the man in the proverb he stinks of lies

  That would blind an honest man’s eyes with tears.

  This layer now that curls up so softly

  Is the sybarite living for ease and pleasure.

  The next one looks sick; it’s streaked with black.

  That might mean a priest; or it might mean a nigger.

  [Peels off several at once.]

  What a terrible lot of layers there are!

  Surely I’ll soon get down to the heart?

  [Pulls the whole onion to pieces.]

  No—there isn’t one! Just a series of shells

  All the way through, getting smaller and smaller!

  Nature is witty!

  When I had collected all these, I added a quotation from Linnaeus’s Nemesis about ghosts, Spöka, which in the early days I had asked Fulla to translate. I wasn’t sure it belonged here, but I wanted something from the third Personage to complete the arrangement. It fitted with the spirit bands of Galton’s Kantsaywhere, and, much earlier, with Destry-Scholes’s fanciful version of Linnaeus’s untruthful account of his journeyings in the far north. I had tucked Vera into her bed, and read Fulla’s neat, tiny, taxonomist’s script in her little living-room.

  Card no. 100

  They spoke of “spirits” in Holy Scripture, in ancient days, above all in the days of legend. You hear less about them in flourishing kingdoms, where they are mostly spoken of in the countryside. They are mostly extraordinary. I have never seen one.

  Frightened children believe in ghosts, most of all when they are outside, in the dark, or in the daytime when the shutters are closed. This becomes rooted in them, and stays for the rest of their days: the fear of blackness. Above all in cemeteries, and round gibbets. Out of a thousand tales, hardly a single one is true.

  The Holy Scriptures say that everyone has his angel, who, night and day, protects him from evil and comes to his aid in adversity. Does this being follow the body like its shadow?

  I tried to make sense of the shoebox. I tried to make sense of Destry-Scholes’s whole project, always supposing it was one project, and not three. It was not a forerunner of what we currently call group biographies. These are now fashionable because we don’t believe as Karl Pearson did, in great men, and we like to see human beings as parts of large social structures whose mechanisms and inter-relations we can uncover and describe. I had the feeling that Destry-Scholes’s Personages were somehow in his mind, interwoven—like the Persons of the Trinity. Why these three, I asked myself, trying to stand back. What were they three aspects of?

  A taxonomist, a statistician, a dramatist. Students in their own ways of the connectedness of things and people. Who separated out different aspects of these things and people for study. Like three nets laid over the nature of things with different meshes and weaves.

  Galton saw the separate Selves that inhabit one man as cells working together in one organism. Georg Brandes’s acid descriptions of Ibsen’s microscopic world described germs and bacteria, invasion and dissolution. It was Ibsen the tragedian, not Galton the eugenicist, who wanted to poison the lower classes.

  All three moved from microscope to macroscope, from the minute to the vast. Their descriptions of detail overlapped and interconnected—madly, sometimes, arbitrarily, arranged by Destry-Scholes (and also, lately, secondarily, by me). They were like one of Galton’s composite portraits, which were perhaps a clue to what Destry-Scholes had been reaching towards. Was the composite portrait the face of Destry-Scholes? Was it, seen in some mad mirror, my own?

  There was also the question, beyond the shoebox, of the three fictive fragments of biography, where the biographer had quite deliberately woven his own lies and inventions into the dense texture of collected facts. Was this a wry comment on the hopeless nature of the project of biographical accuracy, or was it just a wild and whimsical kicking-over of the traces? I seemed to understand that the imaginary narrative had sprung out of the scholarly one, and that the compulsion to invent was in some way related to my own sense that in constructing this narrative I have had to insert facts about myself, and not only dry facts, but my feelings, and now my interpretations. I have somehow been made to write my own story, to write in very different ways. They slipped in and out of focus, on a multiplicity of scales, from the minute to the vast. They formed one of Galton’s composite portraits—more blurry than the genetically homogeneous ones. Was the composite Destry-Scholes? Was it, since I had had to arrange and rearrange, Phineas G. Nanson? I had a sudden moment of appalling vision. I knew that whatever had driven Destry-Scholes to write the three fictive (lying, untruthful) biographical fragments, was whatever was (is) now driving me to form this mass of material into my own story, to write (as he did, for no reader) of my love for Fulla, my love for Vera, my fear of Maurice Bossey, my half-envy of the affections of Erik and Christophe. I saw also that all Destry-Scholes’s fiction had concerned ghosts and spirits, doubles and hauntings, metamorphoses, dismemberment, death. There are a very few human truths and infinite variations on them. I was about to write that there are very few truths about the world, but the truth about th
at is that we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend—not infinitely, but violently, but giddily—the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover. Children are afraid of the dark; a double walks at our side, or hangs from our flesh like a shadow; and we put a whole lifetime (which is brief indeed in the light even of history let alone of the time of the world) to discovering what these things mean for us—dark, and shadows.

  I found that I had in a way invented Vera and Fulla, whilst at the same time being constantly surprised by their independent and unpredictable reality. I saw them, for instance, in their own colours. Vera in the lovely blues and shining blacks and shimmering greys of the dark, and the half-light. Fulla in the colours of sunlight and pollen, yellow dust, the gold fur of bees. I could say that I had imagined a goddess of the night, and a goddess of the daylight, and I could add that once the mind has started spinning such dangerous metaphors it embroiders and elaborates them.

  But I must be very careful. For Vera is a real woman, not an angel of death. She is a real woman who spends her life studying proliferating cells, living and feeding, growing and killing. And Fulla is a rather opinionated idealist, who has a sense, yes, of the endlessly interconnected threads of the living surface of the earth, but who also, like all scientists, fights her own corner doggedly.

  Where has all this got me? Destry-Scholes’s Trinity is and is not Destry-Scholes (I keep saying that, I know, but he and they keep sliding in and out of focus). I am not sure I have much further to go in my researches. And I have decisions to make about my life.

  I needed to see Fulla. Moreover, I had promised to become her assistant in the stag beetle project, and I needed to observe her observing the creatures in order to become precise in my own watching and recording. I judged that Vera—who seemed somewhat calmer, and was sleeping, could be left for a time. I told her quite truthfully that I was helping someone with their research. (How useful the increasing acceptability of the slightly incorrect use of the plural possessive.) I phoned Fulla from a phone box. We met in Richmond Park, in the tournament glade. We met in the morning: the beetles seemed to be most active in the late afternoon, and in the crepuscular time before the park closed. Fulla had brought plastic boxes for the segregation of large horned males, and plastic boxes of Nordic sandwiches full of delicious shrimp, spring onion and watercress. She asked, as ants carried away our crumbs, how my research was going.

  What could I say? The whole thing was so mad and so tenuous, how could I describe it to a precisely concentrated taxonomist, keen on describing and saving plants and pollinators? I said I thought I would give it all up. I said I had come to the conclusion that literary scholarship was pointless, and so had embarked on biography, which was a form of history, and now thought that was pointless, too. Fulla was relaxed, in a way that suited her, and made my sensory equipment—all of it, nose, skin, eyes, ears—prickle with desire. Her pugnacious mouth was relaxed (I slid my tongue in and out, like a bee, between sips of apple-juice), her colourless lashes cast delicate shadows over thoughtful eyes. She said, you’ve got to have history. Even I, I need the museum I work in, I need the type specimens the old bug-hunters collected, I need all the knowledge all the dead field naturalists left, which we are still correlating. She spoke of the discovery of bower-birds from the evidence of Victorian hat-decorations. Of bees not seen since Alfred Wallace pinned the type on a card and labelled it. We need to get all this on the Net, she said, so that researchers in rainforests can log on to a complete taxonomy, and know what they have found, and what (if anything) is known about it.

  I said I had been trying to find out about Destry-Scholes. Who had been trying to find out about a taxonomist, a statistician, and a dramatist. Who had appeared, I said, explaining a very little, to have been more interested in what they had in common than in what made them unique. Who had seen them as overlapping and interwoven, like Galton’s composites. Before that, I said, he’d written about Elmer Bole, who had contained multitudes in one man, had been soldier, statesman, explorer, translator, linguist, even bee taxonomist. I know, said Fulla. His Turkish bees are in Oxford. Still only partly catalogued. He was good on solitary bees, said Fulla Biefeld. She had to confess to a predilection for solitary bees herself. Entomologists have emotions, like anyone else. She had always been both attracted and repelled by the idea of the super-organism. The bivouac of army ants, the hive of honeybees, the genetic repetition, the single will. Of course, she said, anyone going to an airport might suppose that humans are a super-organism. We are held together by threads of dependence as much as the ants. Mechanics and pilots, air traffic controllers and clerks, lift-operators and restaurant managers, police and passengers, electricians and painters and escalator-attendants and terrorist scanners—we’re all part of each other. Maybe your Destry-Scholes was trying to describe that. Without the Internet, before the Internet, we were a super-organism.

  “But you like solitary bees,” I said.

  “I like oddities and rarities,” said Fulla Biefeld, her faint accent more pronounced. She put a hand in the waistband of my trousers. Her strong little fingers pummelled and wriggled. I danced—my skin danced—to her rhythm. I said, fatuously, that I was only a cuckoo bee. I toiled not, neither did I spin. I thought, super-organisms would flourish in Kantsaywhere. Fulla’s fingers reached my erection. I thought (profoundly, banally) that all sex is the same, and every time is different. I turned to her with a little moan. (I am back in lyrical mode. Note at which juncture.) And at this juncture, precisely, there was a crashing and leaping in the trees on the rim of our grassy bowl.

  I thought at first it was a stag. It was horned and two-legged, its head crowned with fantastic curved and pointed peaks of platinum and shrill rose. It stood maybe seven feet high, aided by platform soles like those on which Greek tragic actors stamped the scene. It had supple leather legs, bounding and glistening, ornamented with glittering zips and buckles. It appeared to be flayed above the waist, but wore, in fact, a scarlet silk vest or shirt, clinging to wrists, pectorals, navel, ending half-way up the white neck like the line of a delicate decapitation. It appeared to have a curling tail, which was a complicated bunch of trailing leather and metal cords and thongs. It was laughing, with a huge full-lipped red mouth in a chalky skin; its nose was Grecian and its brows (like other parts of its anatomy) bulging. I thought of Dionysos, and of Hern the hunter, before I thought of mugging. Fulla went very still. The statistics for the possible victories of smaller males, amongst Lucanus cervus and other coleopteran males, are not wholly reliable, but wholly discouraging. He came straight at us, leaping down the slope, laughing. It was not possible to pretend to be invisible. A second figure appeared, in shadow, among the tree-trunks. This one was slight, slender, elegant in an Armani jacket and designer jeans. It was Christophe. He ran lightly after the laughing demon, caught at his dangling braids, touched his bottom. The other turned to embrace him. Fulla sat up and made a snorting noise. Christophe saw us.

  He was not disconcerted. He patted the rump of the Dionysos reassuringly, and strolled towards us.

  “A queer place to find you again, Phineas. I didn’t know you spent your days off on this beat.”

  “We are making observations,” I said.

  Christophe said he hoped the local fauna was displaying itself satisfactorily. The Dionysos laughed. Mildly, considering his fearsome aspect. Christophe introduced him as Dean. My friend, Dean. He came here sometimes on his day off, he said. Fulla was looking cross. I realised that this was not because we appeared to be pursuing stag beetles in the middle of a lek of gay men, but because Christophe, when last seen, had been, according to her view of the matter, attacking and damaging myself. This reflection caused me to remember that matters were, in fact, the other way round. Christophe’s paperknife scratches were still in evidence. I asked, in a very sm
all voice (I meant it to be bigger, but it was a squeak) how Erik was.

  Christophe said Erik was fine. He added that he had been trying to reach me, but I was not ever at home. I kept quiet. I didn’t want to give anyone at all Vera’s address. Christophe said that they had acted—reacted—hastily. That they hadn’t at all realised what I had been going through with Maurice Bossey. That they very much hoped I’d come back. That they were distressed I hadn’t got in touch. Dean, standing legs apart against the sun, smiled benignly. Christophe said he’d like to cook dinner for me (they’d never invited me home, before). He included Fulla in the invitation. She snorted again. Christophe said, with real Gallic charm, that they did in fact genuinely want her advice on whether actively useful taxonomical holiday cooperations were possible. Dean grinned more broadly. Fulla said she had had that idea herself. She looked now more like her sharp public self, and less like my earthwoman. I said the whole of my life, the whole of my life and work, needed rethinking. But it didn’t necessarily exclude a return to Puck’s Girdle. And I should like to come to dinner, I said. And me, said Fulla. Thank you. Christophe touched Dean’s arm. “We’ll be off,” he said. He turned back. “Oh, and Phineas. We owe you a holiday. You never took your holiday.”

  So Fulla and I dined with Erik and Christophe. I do not think they thought we were a couple. I do not know what they thought. I don’t know whether Christophe saw where Fulla’s fingers were when he emerged from the trees. Nor do I know—since I am listing what I do not know—what Erik made of Christophe’s forays into the territory of Hern the Hunter. I was more worried about Erik’s reaction to myself. He had urged my sacking, after all, not Christophe. He met us in the entrance hall of the Notting Hill house where their flat was, and crushed me in a bear-like embrace, stroking my legs and shoulders, ruffling my hair, roaring with laughter. He then, perhaps excessively, embraced Fulla too, lifting her from the ground, and welcoming her in rapid Swedish. His face was lost in the thicket of her hair.