The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  Their flat was a surprise, after the modern beauty of Puck’s Girdle. It was a mixture of exaggerated Regency and Victorian Gothic, with carved silver thrones, peacock-feathered china, thick shimmering velvet curtains, and hosts of small lamps, with jewel-coloured shades—emerald, crimson, cobalt—casting pools of delimited golden light amongst thick shadows. We ate a salad of smoked halibut and marinated mushrooms, a jugged hare with chestnuts and spiced cabbage, a lemon syllabub and feathery biscuits. I mention this food—I hate food in ordinary novels, though I would forgo none of Proust’s, or Tolstoy’s, or Balzac’s—because I saw I was horribly hungry, having lived on my own meagre and incompetent cookery in Willesden, and, much more than the champagne and burgundy, it made me feel spoiled, and soft, and unreal. And because they had gone to some trouble, for me (and for Fulla) and this was generous, since I had cut them with their own blunt instrument, and accused them of snuff movies. Fulla ate fiercely, and with obvious pleasure.

  We sat on heaped velvet cushions, and drank Turkish coffee. Erik and Christophe devoted their considerable charm to getting Fulla to talk. She told fearful tales of possible lurches in the population of pollinators (including those of the crops we depend on for our own lives). Tales of the destruction of the habitats by humans, and of benign and necessary insects, birds, bats and other creatures, by crop-spraying and road-building. Of the vanishing of migratory corridors, even where habitats existed. Of the over-dependence on the farmed honeybee, which was all too successful as a competitor for nectar and pollen, but which was not necessarily either the best or the safest pollinator for many plants. She spoke of the rapid spread of the mite Varroa jacobsoni, which originated in the Far East and is ravaging the hives, now, of almost the whole world. Of the dangerous Africanised bees moving northwards in the Americas. Of the need to find other (often better) pollinators, in a world where they are being extinguished swiftly and silently. Of the fact that there are only thirty-nine qualified bee taxonomists in the world, whose average age is sixty, and of whom only two, both over eighty, are training successors. Of British bumble-bees, of which there were once five species, one already extinct. Of population problems, and feeding the world, and sesbania, a leguminous crop which could both hold back desertification, because it binds soil, and feed the starving, but for the fact that no one has studied its pollinators or their abundance or deficiency, or their habits, in sufficient detail. (It is pollinated by leaf-cutter bees, Megachile bituberculasta, Chalicodoma sp. Xylocopa sp. These bees can be managed, as they will breed in reed stems, bamboo, blocks of wood.)

  She described—in detail—a world of small deaths and vanishings, of long strings of unconsidered, unexamined, causes and effects, of baffled creatures and lumpen human decisions. She was practical and furious.

  Erik and Christophe said that they knew that people went on ecological holidays.

  “Further unbalancing and disturbing the disturbed Galápagos—” cried Fulla.

  “It needn’t be there. It could be anywhere. It could be useful. It could provide funds and helping hands—”

  The money, said Fulla, goes to glamorous things like tigers and pandas, which are doomed anyway. The tourists want to see shiny fish and parrots and monkeys. Not bees. Not beetles.

  They could learn, said Christophe.

  Fulla said she had a project studying Mediterranean bees. Many of our plants are derived from Mediterranean plants, and we need to find viable alternatives to the honeybee. Possibly very quickly. But the EU and everyone else think bees means honeybees, and funding comes under apiculture, which is circular, and that is that.

  Her eyes flashed. Her hair flared and glittered. If we sent you tourists, said Erik, could you teach them?

  Could you use them?

  Fulla said she would need several semi-trained people—parataxonomists—or the tourists would simply be trampling nuisances. But there were no parataxonomists.

  Christophe said that it appeared that Phineas was on the way to becoming a parataxonomist.

  I said, sipping my grappa, that I was a drop in the ocean.

  Erik said oceans were made up of drops.

  Christophe poured more grappa.

  Fulla said, anyway, she was off back to Turkey herself in exactly a fortnight.

  That was the first I had heard of that, but I said nothing. I said nothing, then.

  We went home to Fulla’s little flat and went to bed. (I had told Vera I was out and would not be back for the night. She was up and about again, wandering the house, occasionally turning the marbles.) I still said nothing. I had no idea what to do with myself. None at all.

  I decided to return to see Ormerod Goode. I rang and made an appointment—from Vera’s house, using Vera’s phone. I had done so much work, and indeed, so much writing, but had nothing to show for any of it except this manuscript, which for obvious reasons, cannot be public property. I had had a further thought about Scholes Destry-Scholes which I should have had much earlier. I wanted at least to put that point to Ormerod Goode, before admitting defeat.

  Goode sat in his brown study and offered me nothing. He asked how I was doing, and I said badly. I told him about the three brief lives, the fact that they contained obvious lies, and the existence of the shoeboxes. I made a halting attempt to describe the cards and the photographs.

  “Is that all?” said Ormerod Goode, without entering into any discussion of Ibsen, Galton or Linnaeus.

  I said it was. It was all. (I had not mentioned the marbles, I should say, or the trepanning instrument.)

  Goode said it was not much. He added, musing, that I appeared to have little aptitude for biographical research. He attempted to mitigate this severity by saying that he was sure he himself would be just the same, which was why he had chosen place-names to study. Public property, can’t move off, he said. Stay put. Interconnected. Satisfactory.

  I said there was one thing he might be able to help me with. I had realised that one of the few “facts” I had about Scholes Destry-Scholes was that he had perhaps drowned in the Maelstrøm. It struck me that my only informant about that had been Ormerod Goode himself. I wondered exactly where he had seen the information?

  It hardly mattered, said Goode, considering the dearth of other material, surely.

  I said it did matter, to me personally, though I took his point about my failure as a potential biographer.

  “I got it from Jespersen in the Scandinavian Department,” said Goode. “He showed me the cutting. He collects anything to do with the Maelstrøm. Myths and legends, films and cartoons, metaphors in poems, news items, any old grist to his mill. He’s mildly dotty. He told me. He said something like, ‘You know that odd chap who came and talked about biography? He seems to have been sucked into my funnel-thing.’ You can’t quote that, of course, that isn’t what he said, which I certainly don’t remember with any exactitude after all these years. I don’t know how anyone ever believes hearsay witnesses in courts of law, do you, Nanson? I could take you up to see Jespersen, if you like. He lives along the top corridor in the Roman Jakobsen building.”

  So we went to see Thorold Jespersen. A word I was quite fond of, in my post-structural, post-psychoanalytic days, was “over-determined.” In terms of this story (for what else am I writing?) Thorold Jespersen was over-determined. I suppose if he had been young and brisk and surgical I should have been equally satisfied to find him in the story, because of the element of shock or wonder. But there he was, in a dusty attic, behind a dusty table loaded with precarious heaps of leather volumes and yellowing papers, and crumbs. There should have been spiderwebs, but there weren’t. His window was a semi-skylight, and just as filthy as the window of Gareth Butcher’s room where the Critical Theory seminars had taken place. Indeed, this one had a rim of lively green slime, or moss, round its veiled dimness. He had two noticeboards on the non-mansard walls, covered (I was later allowed to survey them) with photographs and drawings and steel engravings and geographers’ charts of the Maelstrøm. Jespersen
sat in the gloom, in a nest of ivory hair, his long white beard wound into his papers, his long white hair merging into it, his papery-white, wrinkled face and his pale, cracked lips, revealing walrus-horn yellow teeth, peering between his locks with watery blue eyes (purging rheum, as Shakespeare said) under jutting headlands of white brows (with crumbs in them. There were crumbs everywhere. Also dropped currants, or maybe mouse droppings). The room, and the man, looked as though there should have been a smell of rotting, but there wasn’t. It was all dry, and dusty. It took him a moment or two to recognise Ormerod Goode. When he did, he asked him in a high, spider-thread of a voice, if he had had any luck with his barrow.

  “Barrow?”

  “Louven How, Green Swang, Cock Lake Side.”

  “Black Cock, the Lake. They still perform a lek there. I don’t know how much longer. They’re threatened with extinction. Dig’s going well, yes. They used to think Black Cock was the Devil, but it’s only a bird.”

  “Pity,” said Jespersen vaguely. There was a silence. Goode introduced me.

  “Phineas Nanson. He’s got a question about the Maelstrøm.”

  “Ah, the explorer. Come to the right place.”

  Not an explorer, I said. Nanson, son of Nanson. A researcher, I said, leaving it vague.

  “Ah,” said Jespersen. “Just as well. Dangerous, the Maelstrøm. Treacherous. Tricky. Some people think it’s the same hole as Dante’s Ulysses went down. The end of the world. The known world.” He said, “Lots of ways to the Underworld, all on land. Facilis descensus Averni. In pits and mountain bellies. This is the watery one.”

  Goode said I wanted to know about someone who had apparently drowned in it. He said, rather firmly, that he remembered Jespersen mentioning it.

  “Ah yes. I’ve got a file of those. Drowned and disappeared. As many suicides as Beachy Head, but mostly never recovered. A good way to disappear. Your man’s name, young man?”

  “Scholes Destry-Scholes,” I said.

  “Ah—” he said, and rose up (he was over six foot and very thin). “Let me see.”

  His filing system seemed more orderly than his desktop suggested.

  I imagined, even at this point, that there would turn out to be nothing. His dry fingers shuffled dry pages.

  “Here,” he said. “Here it is. There’s a photograph. Out of a newspaper. Here it is. British writer presumed drowned.”

  I was about to see the face of Destry-Scholes.

  Jespersen creaked towards me, and handed me the newspaper cutting.

  “Hope is extinguished for the British writer, Scholes Destry-Scholes, who left the fishing-port on the island of Vaerøy, in the Lofoten Islands, in a small boat a week ago. The boat was found, with no-one aboard, not far from the Moskenes Current, more famous by its fifteenth-century name, the Maelstrøm. Mr. Destry-Scholes was on a solitary fishing and walking holiday, and had expressed an interest in the famous whirlpool. Mr. Destry-Scholes achieved some success with his three-volume biography of the larger-than-life British eccentric, explorer, diplomat, scientist and writer, Sir Elmer Bole. His publishers say he was hoping to submit another work shortly, and had been researching both in Norway and in South Africa. The search for authenticity in scholarship can have its dangers. They were not sure who his current subject was. They described him as reclusive, uncommunicative and solitary.”

  The photograph that accompanied this text was of a dark rowboat, floating on a choppy dark water, with three gull-colonised rocks and a stocky mountain in the background. “Lots of those,” said Professor Jespersen cheerfully. “Lots of that motif, the empty boat on the water. I’ve got nearly fifty of them. They like to get Mosken in, and the gannets. Picturesque.”

  The paper was the Yorkshire Post. I could, in theory, have gone and searched its archive. But I didn’t think I would. I stared at the empty boat, and the dark newsprinted water, and thanked Jespersen, and thanked Ormerod Goode, and went home.

  I have nearly reached the end of this story. Not of my life, but of that segment of the tapeworm that began in one dusty-windowed room in Prince Albert College, and ended in another, with a photograph of an empty boat. I have admitted I am writing a story, a story which in a haphazard (aleatory) way has become a first-person story, and, from being a story of a search told in the first person, has become, I have to recognise—a first-person story proper, an autobiography. I detest autobiography. Slippery, unreliable, and worse, imprecise. (I am trying to avoid the problem of the decay of belief in the idea of objectivity by slipstreaming towards the safer, ideologically unloaded idea of precision. I don’t think this tactic quite works.) Autobiography, as I write, is fashionable. The “flavour of the moment.” (Can I perpetrate a phrase like that? Let it stand. Try anything once.) Everyone is writing his or her “memoir.” They resemble each other like Galton’s photographs, or eighteenth-century portraits as perceived by Ibsen. They are rather repulsive. I was brought up as a child to believe in self-effacement, and as a student to believe in impersonality.

  So I am going to stop writing this story. The problem is, I have become addicted to writing—that is, to setting down the English language, myself, in arrangements chosen by me, for—let it be admitted—pleasure. I have become addicted to forbidden words, words critical theorists can’t use and writers can. Words to describe the different scents of Fulla’s and Vera’s skins. This is difficult but not impossible. I have just discovered that Linnaeus made a taxonomy of smells, too. Fragrantes (fragrant), Hircinus (goaty), Ambrosiacos (ambrosial), Tetros (foul), Nauseosos (nauseating), Aromaticos (aromatic) and Alliaceos (garlicky).

  Fulla is goat and aromatic. Vera is fragrant and—not garlicky—but lily and daffodil. Cool and rooty, with vanishing flowers touched with green, in deep corollas and tubes. Fulla is the sharp spicy air of the compositae, almost bitter, almost harsh, but enticing. Vera’s hair is ferny and Fulla’s hair is—this is hard—honeysuckle is too sweet, hawthorn too almond, I am thinking hedges, not the precise smell—there is a touch of ragwort and fennel, mixed with dog rose. Interesting to know whether this precision—which has cost me a lot of pencil biting, staring into space, imagining absent odours with intense recollected pleasure—would communicate accurately to anyone else the erotic delights of either? A further question—would these two skins (these two women) smell different to anyone whose skin smells differently from my own? For my nose flares myself as it flares them. I am getting baroque. Back to what I was writing, which was a renunciation of writing.

  In terms of writing—of the way this story has funnelled itself into a not unusual shape, run into a channel cut in the earth for it by previous stories (and all our lives are partly the same story, beginning, middle, end)—in terms of writing, this looks like a writer’s story. PGN was a mere Critick, steps centre-stage, assumes his life, Finds his Voice, is a Writer. That was the way it would almost have had to have been in the 1920s (a good time for Writers, though not the best). But I feel a kind of nausea at this fate for my hero, myself. It doesn’t seem very much of an anything. To be addicted to writing is not to want to be, to become, a Writer.

  • • •

  So. If I were telling the “1920s” version of Phineas G. Nanson, it would end with an “epiphany.” (Another forbidden word, though still allowed in Joyce criticism.)

  And there was an epiphany, there was very precisely an epiphany, so I shall write it down, for pleasure, cliché and all, and then stop writing. Or how shall I see what to do?

  Fulla taught me how to set up the stag-beetle experiment. She provided plastic boxes, little coloured bee-labels, a delicate little hand-held balance to weigh my captives. She also talked enthusiastically to Erik and Christophe about setting up various projects—worldwide—between taxonomists, pollination studies, and intelligently motivated tourists and wanderers. She could have been the managing director of a global company, I thought. She had vision, and prevision, she saw to details. I went back to my job. There was a presumption that I would help Fulla with pollinatio
n tourism in due course. Vera also went back to work, pale and composed. We massed the marbles randomly in a great glass bowl I bought her for a present. We stood them where the soft light filtered through them. I have never said how much more beautiful and variegated Destry-Scholes’s marbles were, with their rich colours and forms, than mass-produced modern ones. We put the lids on the shoeboxes, and the tribal lists of marbles in the suitcase. We did not discuss these moves. Her first day back at work went well. She came home to me, white and smiling. We made love. Fulla set out to spend a month in the Middle East, for the Anatolian Project, leaving me in charge of the beetles.

  So for a week or two I watched these strange creatures excavate the rotten tree trunks, fly noisily across the clearing, strut, display, fight and mate. It did seem to become clear that the largest—the heaviest—always won. I tried to be what I thought of as detached and scientific, and think of my population by numbers. But I ended up by giving them literary names of horned gods—Hern and Moses, Horus and Actaeon (the smallest, who always got crunched). The females I called Moira, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. A rather lost scuttling one I called Norn. The males jousted along twigs and promontories, jabbing and weaving with their serrated pincers, butting and rushing not unlike the stags themselves. The project was to reverse, dislodge, overturn the antagonist. The fallen combatant would return, but never more than twice. After three falls he crept away, and the triumphant beetle would mate with the waiting female, who would obligingly raise her rear. The females showed no preferences, and mated with all winners. I am, as this narrative shows, an obsessive lateral researcher, and I began to poke about in the literature of entomology for beetle-jousts. I found references in W. D. Hamilton’s great essays on life in rotting wood, and fighting males in fig wasps and other insects. Hamilton remarked that in his experience of arranged tournaments between stag beetles the second largest came out the winner. He added that this was possibly because such arranged battles usually took place in cardboard boxes, whereas in real life the beetles liked to confront each other along twigs or edges; where sheer weight would be more useful. He also remarked that he did not share Konrad Lorenz’s belief that extravagantly developed weapons on male creatures were necessarily designed only for display, or to attract females. A weapon is a weapon, according to Hamilton, who has a gloomy view of competition between creatures which appeals to my own sense of the nature of things. He said that his observations led him to think that Lorenz’s belief that animals, unlike humans, did not fight to the death, was false. There was at least as much real desire to damage, in my subjective opinion, among my beetles, as there was ritualised weaving and avoidance. I got rather sorry for Hern, who was smaller than Moses and bigger than Horus and Actaeon. He went for Moses with great vigour and recklessness, and was ruler of the roost when I had abstracted the patriarch. The patriarch, returned to his tree-trunk, easily dislodged the briefly triumphant Hern. I therefore, on my own initiative, glued a small brass nut to Hern’s back before releasing him again—he turned the scales at 1.2 grams more than Moses with this artificial gravitas. I was pleased to see that, once he was heavier, even though his horns were shorter, he was able to dislodge Moses for the ritual three times. I had proved something. I wasn’t sure what. I wrote it all down, and removed the brass nut, whereupon Moses resumed his dominance.