The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  “His capital wherewith to begin consisted of a crate of live capercailzie, two bearcubs, and the skin of one of their parents. He was then so naïve that, seeing an auctioneer’s placard about a forthcoming sale of farm stock, in which was included ’20,000 Swedes,’ he, not knowing that in the language of farmers ‘swedes’ meant ‘turnips,’ confessed afterwards to a thrill of terror lest they should be his compatriots, and lest he himself might be pounced upon and sold as a slave together with them.”

  FG’s Art of Travel devotes several pages to a traveller’s outfit under the headings of Small Stores, Various (fish-hooks, scalpel, bistoury, awls, etc. etc.), Heavy Stores, Various (saddles, water-vessels, ammunition), Stationery (30 lbs, of ledgers, ink, books to read etc., “say equal to six vols. the ordinary size of novels”), Mapping Materials (31 lbs) and Natural History.

  “Arsenical soap, 2 lbs; camphor ½ lb; pepper ½ lb; bag of some powder to absorb blood, 2 lbs; tow and cotton, about 10 lbs; scalpel, forceps, scissors etc., ½ lb; sheet brass, stamped for labels, ½ lb … 16 pillboxes; cork; insect-boxes; pins; tin, for catching and keeping, and killing animals; nets for butterflies … 10 lb. Geological hammers, lens, clinometer, etc.… 4 lb.

  “Specimens. (I make no allowance for the weight of these, for they accumulate as stores are used up; and the total weight is seldom increased.)

  “Total weight of Natural History materials (for an occasional collector) … 30 lb.”

  He also took some odd and cumbersome things. What are we to make of his decision to make himself agreeable to Nangoro, King of the Ovampo, who were “under strict discipline, secret and very resolute,” by investing him with “a big theatrical crown that I had bought in Drury Lane for some such purpose”? It is certain that he offended Nangoro, when invited to eat with him, by refusing to take part in a cleansing ritual in which the host spat gargled water over the face of the guest—a counter-witchcraft expedient of Nangoro’s own devising. When the Damara chief, Jonker, would not reply to his request for passage, he mounted his riding-ox (he gives detailed instructions for breaking oxen to be saddled) and, jumping a river, trotted briskly up to Jonker’s hut, through the wall of which the ox pushed its head. FG was dressed in hunting pink, cap, cords and jackboots. What possessed him to travel all the way into the desert lumbered with this gear? It intimidated Jonker, briefly, and a treaty was made between the Namagua and the Damara, which barely survived FG’s departure, giving way to further massacres.

  He may also have offended Nangoro with his attitude to women; he rejected, summarily, his offer of the Princess Chipanga.

  “I found her installed in my tent in negress finery, raddled with red ochre and butter, and as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer’s roller. I was dressed in my one well-preserved suit of white linen, so I had her ejected without ceremony.”

  He preferred his women at an experimental distance. He was triangulating the country carefully, using his sextant and landmarks, which had to give way to lunar observations when he went beyond the limit of the landmarks, in North Damaraland and at Elephant Fountain. He spent time at the mission station in Barmen measuring a Hottentot lady.

  “I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape; but there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my footrule could be; and I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant, the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake: this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place where she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.”

  It may be that FG preferred human beings in a net of invisible lines of trigonometric measurement and triangulated distances from the moon. He observed of the Damara that there was “hardly a particle of romance, or affection, or poetry, in their character or creed, but they are a greedy, heartless, silly set of savages.”

  However, he loved, and closely observed, his cattle. He had nearly a hundred wild Damara cattle, broken in for the wagon, for packs, and for the saddle.

  “I travelled an entire journey of exploration on the back of one of them, with others by my side, either labouring, or walking at leisure; and with others who were wholly unbroken and who served the purpose of an itinerant larder. At night, when there had been no time to erect an enclosure to hold them, I lay down in their midst, and it was interesting to observe how readily they then availed themselves of the camp fire, and of man, conscious of the protection they afforded from prowling carnivora, whose cries and roars, now distant, now near, continually broke upon the stillness.”

  From his observation of these beasts, he formed a whole theory of “gregarious and slavish instincts” which he later—with due demurrers and qualifications—applied to men. The slavish aptitudes in man, he said, “are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of his subsequent civilisation.”

  He was a noticing and curious man and a good animal psychologist. He respected the oxen. “The better I understood them, the more complex and worthy of study did their minds appear to be. But I am now concerned only with their blind gregarious instincts, which are conspicuously distinct from the ordinary social desires. In the latter they are deficient; thus they are not amiable to one another, but show on the whole more expressions of spite and disgust than of forbearance or fondness.”

  He notes the solitude of the creatures embedded in the mass of other creatures.

  “They do not suffer from an ennui, which society can remove, because their coarse feeding and their ruminant habits make them somewhat stolid. Neither can they love society, as monkeys do, for the opportunities it affords of a fuller and more varied life, because they remain self-absorbed in the middle of their herd, while the monkeys revel together in frolics, scrambles, fights, loves and chatterings.”

  His respect for the creatures, which easily refers to their “minds” at a time when many thinkers believed the beasts were no more than machines or automata, is reinforced by his imaginative participation in their emotions.

  “Yet although the ox has so little affection for, or individual interest in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary severance from his herd. If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, he exhibits every sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again, and when he succeeds, he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body with the comfort of closest companionship. This passionate terror at segregation is a convenience to the herdsman …”

  He was interested in those independent-minded oxen who grazed apart from the herd, and showed an unusual inquisitiveness and desire to experiment. These, he observed, could be trained to be ridden, or to be lead-oxen; they were not by any means the normal leaders of the herd from within the herd, in flight or simple change of grazing-place, but individuals, with minds of their own. With his usual statistical acuity he worked out that these individuals were about one in fifty, and that a herd could not cohere, or act together, if this proportion were exceeded. He believed, however, that in the case of human beings it might be possible to change whole societies by breeding out slavishness and mere gregariousness, the crowd instincts, in human beings. Human beings, he believed, had been cowed by religious persecution and domination of chieftains with powerful executives, ready to stamp out individual protests.

  He hoped, with the aid of eugenics, for better. “A nation need not be a mob of s
laves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous, self-reliant men, knit to one another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense and elastic organisation.”

  This is one metaphor drawn from a web, or from knitting. So is the converse metaphor for the coherence, or cohesion, of the herd.

  “To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground whence the approach of a wild beast might be overlooked.”

  It is perhaps interesting, in view of the observations already made about FG’s lack of interest in sex, that he points out that his terrified and craven wild animals consisted of “oxen and cows whose nature is no doubt shared by the bulls.” Why was he—the precise scientist—so bland about the bulls? Why did he not ask himself why there were none? It seems a simple question.

  FG BECAME FAMOUS in his lifetime for his work on anthropometry and eugenics. That last word, since the dreadful events of the last war and before, has come to strike horror into the reading public, and that may be the reason why his extraordinary contributions to knowledge, on so many fronts, are forgotten. His inventions—identification by fingerprint, the weather balloon, the weather-map, the statistical bell-curve of standard deviation in populations, are not generally ascribed to him. Most of all, perhaps, his delicate researches into the nature of consciousness, of thought, of reflection, of the slippage of unremarked mental processes, have disappeared into oblivion unjustly. His fearless eccentricity, his unquenchable curiosity, led to many delicious discoveries. Who else would have thought of measuring the “inclination” to each other of a couple placed side by side at dinner, by calibrating on wax the weight they put on the chair-legs nearest to each other? His capacity to watch himself, to stand outside himself, to make his own consciousness the field and mirror of his enquiries, may appear to have the same innocent charm. But it had its dangers.

  He records, in his Memories, various such experiments. His first, made in his youth, was, he said, the result of a not uncommon youthful desire to “subjugate the body by the spirit.” He made the extraordinary decision to make all his involuntary processes subject to his will, which should “replace automatism by hastening or retarding automatic acts.” He nearly killed himself.

  “Every breath was subjected to this process, with the result that the normal power of breathing was dangerously interfered with. It seemed as though I should suffocate if I ceased to will. I had a terrible half-hour; at length by slow and irregular steps the lost power returned. My dread was hardly fanciful, for heart-failure is the suspension of the automatic faculty of the heart to beat.”

  His next effort, after investigating the connections between his mind and his body, was to investigate the mental condition of those who had, as he put it elsewhere, slipped down the unfenced precipice from the tableland of sanity. In this experiment he quite deliberately induced in himself a kind of paranoia, to “gain some idea of the commoner feelings in Insanity. The method tried was to invest everything I met, whether human, animal, or inanimate, with the imaginary attributes of a spy. Having arranged plans, I started on my morning’s walk from Rutland Gate, and found the experiment only too successful. By the time I had walked one and a half miles, and reached the cab-stand in Piccadilly at the east end of the Green Park, every horse on the stand seemed watching me, either with pricked ears or disguising its espionage. Hours passed before this uncanny sensation wore off, and I feel that I could only too easily re-establish it.”

  His third experiment, after consciousness and madness, was with religion. In his attempt to penetrate idolatry and fetishism, he shows perhaps, safe in his London respectability, a certain cultural inadequacy which is perhaps evidenced also in his foxhunting invasion of Jonker or his crowning of Nangoro. (Or is it possible that we moderns, mocking the certainties and the innocence of the Victorians, misinterpret these events also; is it possible that Nangoro smiled with satisfaction under his player’s tinsel in the mirror FG lent him?)

  He wrote:

  “The third experiment of which I will speak was to gain an insight into the abject feelings of barbarians and others concerning the power of images which they know to be of human handiwork. I had visited a large collection of idols gathered by missionaries from many lands, and wondered how each of those absurd and ill-made monstrosities could have obtained the hold it had over the imaginations of its worshippers. I wished, if possible, to enter into those feelings. It was difficult to find a suitable object for trial, because it ought to be in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings. I fixed on a comic picture, it was that of Punch, and made believe in its possession of divine attributes. I addressed it with much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behaviour of men towards it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed. The experiment gradually succeeded; I began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains towards his idol, and learned to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him.”

  He did not like conventional religion, though he submitted it, like everything else, to his questing intellectual stare. He even conducted a statistical survey of the longevity of those (queens, princes, bishops) regularly prayed for in churches, to see if the force of prayer improved their life expectancy. It did not. In his delicate analysis of mental imagery, he moved from systems of number maps and coloured mnemonics, to visions proper, distinguishing carefully between mental imagery, “after-images,” “phosphenes,” “light dust,” and hypnagogic processions, visualisations of named objects or involuntary showers of perfumed and metamorphosing roses. He recorded hallucinations and mirages, phantasmagoric crowds of faces and the curious combinations of dream objects—for instance a rolling, bullet-shaped head on a white surface, which turned out to be a conflated memory of a cheesemonger and his Dutch cheeses. He recorded Napoleon’s hallucinatory star and those of other great men. He remarked that all these dreams and visions appeared to be common functions of normal consciousness. “When popular opinion is of a matter-of-fact kind, the seers of visions keep quiet; they do not like to be thought fanciful or mad … But let the tide of opinion change and grow favourable to supernaturalism, then the seers of visions come to the front. The faintly perceived fantasies of ordinary persons become invested by the authority of reverend men with a claim to serious regard; they are consequently attended to and encouraged, and they increase in definition through being habitually ‘dwelt upon.’ ”

  He wrote a letter to Nature about a vision of his own, and apparently thought better of sending it. It is an arresting vision, and peculiarly interesting in his rigorous dissociation of it from the religious associations it might naturally have evoked. He was ill with bronchitis and influenza when it occurred.

  “When fancies gathered and I was on the borderland of delirium I was aware of the imminence of a particular hallucination. There was no vivid visualisation of it, but I felt that if I let myself go I should see in bold relief a muscular bloodstained crucified figure nailed against the wall of my bedroom opposite my bed. What on earth made me think of this particular object I have no conception. There was nothing in it of the religious symbol, but just a prisoner freshly mauled and nailed up by a brutal Roman soldier. The interest in this to me was the severance between the state of hallucination and that of ordinary visualisation. They seemed in this case to be quite unconnected.”

  “If I let myself go.” What did he mean? On this occasion, he did not. But, as we have seen, he had a kind of wild courage in regard to his investment of mana in cab-horses and Mr. Punch. And in the African interior he saw things, both real and visionary, which he found in some way unbearable—though he recorded some of the r
eal things, at least, in letters to his mother, with whom he was out of touch for two years. There were, for instance, the African women victims of one of Jonker’s raids.

  “I saw two poor women, one with both legs cut off at her ankle joints, and the other at one [sic]. They had crawled the whole way on that eventful night from Schelen’s Hope to Barmen, some twenty miles. The Hottentots had cut them off after their usual habit, in order to slip off the solid iron anklets that they wear. These wretched creatures showed me how they had stopped the blood by poking the wounded stumps into the sand.”

  He returned to these unfortunate women when recording his earlier medical experiences for his memoirs. He included them in an observation on the varying tolerance of pain.

  “The stumps had healed when I saw them. I asked how they staunched the blood. They explained by gesture that it was by stumping the bleeding ends into the sand, and they grinned with satisfaction while they explained.”

  In this version, both women had lost both feet.

  He recorded also “one of Jonker’s sons, a hopeful youth, came to a child that had been dropped on the ground and lay screaming there, and he gouged out its eyes with a small stick.”

  He records these events, even in his letters to his mother, with no great expression of emotion—indeed, with a curious echo of British schoolboy japes, which may be a commentary on how he felt after his ritual exposure to these.

  “The Ovahereros, a very extended nation, attacked a village the other day for fun, and after killing all the men and women, they tied the children’s legs together by the ankles, and strung them head downwards on a long pole, which they set horizontally between two trees; then they got plenty of reeds together and put them underneath and lighted them; and as the children were dying, poor wretches, half burnt, half suffocated, they danced and sung round them, and made a fine joke of it. Andersson desires to be particularly remembered to all. With my best love to all the family, relations and friends, collectively and individually, Ever affectly. yours, FG”