The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  Such descriptions as he left of this process—few, as always, fewer than one might reasonably hope or expect—are disappointing in this regard. They could have been written by a novelist, or even—stretching the imagination a little—by a biographer. There is perhaps a little more emphasis on the body and the voice, but this is scratching for grains in sand. In a way, his accounts are platitudes, multiplied in other records of other observers. Nevertheless, the precise form of his platitudes, his own platitudes, cannot be without interest; we should, if everything were accessible to know, be interested also in the precise combination of flora in his intestine, or layered convolutions in his brain. Do we have instruments for dissecting platitudes finely enough to yield precise local truths?

  “Before I write one word,” runs this rare confidence, then, “I must know the character through and through, I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual; the staging, the dramatic ensemble, all that comes naturally and causes me no worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I have to have his exterior in mind also, down to the last button, how he stands and walks, how he carries himself, what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.”

  Now we may ask—must ask, indeed, since it appears pointless to raise hypothetical theoretical barriers against such a profound and natural human curiosity—where these imagined humans come from? As we shall see, he compares them, ingeniously or disingenuously, to strangers met on a train. He observed those he met on trains, as a naturalist observes new and familiar species. With an overtone of moral judgement, added to pure observation. He is on record as having driven himself into rage and hatred over some unknown fellow-traveller, a woman, who slept in his railway-compartment all the way from Rome to Gossensass, without once looking out of the window. “What a lazy woman! To sleep the whole way! How can anyone be so lazy?… Most people die without ever having lived. Luckily for them, they don’t realise it.”

  But the people he, to use a primitive phrase, “made up” must in some sense be not only watched strangers but spun from his own fabric, sensed inside his own stance, seen through one or the other of those terrible disparate eyes?

  “As a rule, I make three drafts of my plays, which differ greatly from each other—in characterisation, not in plot. When I approach the first working-out of my material, it is as though I knew my characters from a railway-journey. One has made a preliminary acquaintance, one has chatted about this and that. At the next draft I already see everything much more clearly, and I know the people roughly as one would after a month spent with them at a spa; I have discovered the fundamentals of their characters and their little peculiarities; but I may still be wrong about certain essentials. Finally, in my last draft I have reached the limit of my knowledge; I know my characters from close and long acquaintance—they are my intimate friends, who will no longer disappoint me; as I see them now, I shall always see them.”

  He took things from others, certainly. A very young woman sent him, in Dresden, a sequel to his dramatic poem Brand, which she had called Brand’s Daughters. She called it a religious book. He called it a novel. He bothered, unusually, to give her advice. He liked very young women. He enjoyed their admiration. Something more than talent is required, he told her. “One must have something to create from, some life experience … Now I know very well that a life in solitude is not a life devoid of experiences. But the human being is in the spiritual sense a long-sighted creature. We see most clearly at a distance; details confuse us; we must get away from what we desire to judge; summer is best described on a winter day.”

  Light like white marble, remembered amongst crisp snow under steel skies.

  Later he appropriated the same young woman’s confusion and folly to construct his doll-wife in his dolls’ house; she too had borrowed to pay for her sick husband’s travel, she too had forged a cheque. Nora arouses the sympathy of millions. Laura, whose acts were stolen, had periods of madness and shame. He did not choose to make, or keep, friends.

  “Friends are an expensive luxury; and when one sinks all one’s capital in a vocation and a mission in life, then one cannot afford to have friends. The extravagance of keeping friends lies not in what one does for them, but what, out of consideration for them, one omits to do. On that account, many intellectual shoots are crippled in oneself. I have gone through this, and on that account, I have several years behind me, in which I did not succeed in being myself.”

  The rigid gnome progressing towards his public table, his brandy-glass, his reserved, non-domestic space, was obsessed with the idea of being himself. He was so very sure, it appeared, that he had a true self to be, despite the dissipation of his appearances in portrait-busts and newspaper jokes. This self depended on the firm construction of frontiers between its consciousness of what it was, and the encroachments, tender, tentacular, boring (in both senses) above all maybe, judging, of others. Or maybe it was that he did not want to be, or at the very least did not want to have to see, the mask of the idea others constructed of him, as he, behind his ice-window, through his long-sighted lens, constructed them? Or maybe he did not want to have to be at all? Maybe this so-dreadfully desired, so elaborated real self was an absence of self, a freely-moving, flickering flame of knowledge and language, which should not be forced, or frozen, into any of the gestures required by the social touches and approaches through which most people discover themselves through others?

  “I know that I have the failing of not coming close to those people who want to open up completely. I can never bring myself to bare myself. I have a feeling that all I have available in personal relations is a false expression of that which I bear deep within me, and which is really myself; therefore I prefer to keep it locked up inside, and that is why we sometimes seem to stand as if we were observing each other at a distance.”

  And yet, the paradox. This man made his art precisely out of those communal motions, bodily touches, meetings of eyeballs, that as a man he could not bear. And he saw this form as another, a different (yet the same) threat to this “real self” so that he could write, excusing his inability to write letters at the end of his life.

  “I am almost afraid that I have struggled so long and so hard with the form of the drama, in which to a certain extent it is necessary for the author to kill and drown his own personality, or at any rate hide it, that I may have lost a great deal of what I myself prize most highly in a writer of letters …”

  Kill, drown. Strong, violent verbs. There was another. Petrification. Trolls turn to stone in the light of day, and monuments are public marble with empty eyes. So the effigy stepped precisely onwards, checking the time on his watch and chain. Blood had gone out of his veins, and liquid stone silted them, he told himself.

  Scene: The Grand Hotel. Various gentlemen, including Edvard Munch, the painter, are sitting at various café tables, in a wintry light. An inner room, at the right, contains a solitary table, behind which a man is sitting, his face and body obscured by a newspaper he is holding up. There is a feeling of expectancy. The gentlemen at the tables are also provided with newspapers, behind which they hide, looking out with suppressed excitement, from time to time. The Strange Customer, by contrast, is unmoving. His newspaper does not rustle.

  HI enters, far L. He closes the door behind him. It is snowing outside. He checks his watch, which is old and battered, and takes a small mirror from the crown of his silk hat; he combs his hair, and returns the mirror. He steps in a straight line between the tables, looking at no one.

  MUNCH: I’d watch it, if I were you. He doesn’t like company. I once invited him to join us, and he was quite rude to me.

  HI: [Hesitates briefly, frowning. Then he turns back to his path. Faces flicker round newspapers.]

  MUNCH: Tvertimod. On the other hand. You do as you please.

  HI: [Walks slightly more slowly, into the alcove.]

  I believe you cannot be unaware th
at that seat, sir, is mine. Reserved for me. Every day, without fail. They have even done me the honour of engraving my name on a small brass plate, which you will find behind your shoulders.

  The Strange Customer slowly lowers the paper. He leans back in the chair and stares at HI. There is an open bottle of brandywine and two glasses in front of him. He is wearing identical clothes, down to the row of miniature medals. He has the same thick white whiskers, bushy white hair, jutting brow. HI stops dead.

  STRANGE CUSTOMER: You didn’t expect me.

  HI: I don’t know you.

  STRANGE CUSTOMER: Oh, I think you do. I have my papers, they make it clear. I never go anywhere without my papers. They say who I am, who my parents are, where I don’t belong.

  HI: I see the waxwork man wheedled my suit out of someone. I’ll thank you for returning it. It is not worn out.

  STRANGE CUSTOMER: There’s no copyright in second-best suits. Your wife gave it to a beggar. I was that beggar. She didn’t recognise me. Just saw a generic pauper. All the same, I think you’ll agree, I have the family face. Comb the hair a bit, beg a clean shirt.

  [He too takes a little mirror out of his hat, and combs his whiskers.]

  HI: I don’t know you. I shall ask the manager to have you turned out.

  STRANGE CUSTOMER: You don’t know me?

  Can’t you tell the pig by its skin?

  Where are your eyes? Can’t you see I’m crippled

  The way you’re crippled, in my soul?

  Those are my mother’s lines. She can’t speak them, because she’s dead. I expect you didn’t know that. She died blind and a pauper. She never spoke ill of you. Indeed, she said you were irresistible. I have my papers. Do you want to see them?

  [He puts them on the table. HI makes no move to pick them up.

  The Strange Customer drinks down a glass of brandywine, and pours two new ones. He offers HI one, with a gesture. HI remains rigid.]

  You’re afraid of me, aren’t you? You haven’t much courage. You ran away from Rikke Holst’s father, on the beach, when he threatened you with a cudgel. She was only fifteen. Everyone knows that story. You’re afraid of heights. You’re afraid of shadows. You’re afraid of your poor old Dad and you’re afraid of Norway and us crude, quarrelsome Norwegians. But most of all, you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid of ghosts, walking out of the dark, mopping and mowing at you out of mirrors and firelight. I’ve read every word you’ve written, several times. It’s all soaked in the sweat of your fear, written with the sour ink of your cringing terror. Of me. Of my trollsnout which is so very recognisably your trollsnout, don’t you think? Now you see me, you see the likeness. He’s a fine figure, your son Sigurd, my little brother—

  HI: I forbid you to speak of him!

  HENRIKSEN: I was going to say only, he doesn’t resemble your secret self, old man, as I do.

  HI: Nobody resembles a man’s secret self. Do you not know, you can walk the whole earth and never find two identical faces?

  HENRIKSEN: Or two identical onions? But you can peel them all, layer after layer, down to the centre, down to the juicy quick, and, just as you tear into that, and the last bit of onion-juice stains your fingers, they resemble each other—enough.

  HI: You have made quite a study of my work.

  HENRIKSEN: Oh, I know it by heart. It is pumped in and out of my degenerate heart, along with the gemmules that carry the pith of you through the pith of me. I am tainted with poetry in my heart-juices. As Oswald’s brain and his spinal cord were full of the animalculae that swam out of his father.

  HI: Your metaphors overreach themselves.

  HENRIKSEN: Oh yes? And who wished to go too far—like Michelangelo, like Bernini? We are not respectable Norwegians, neither of us. We have troll-blood in our veins, we are trollaukinn. You brought him up safe from that knowledge—

  HI: You are wrong. And I told you not to mention him.

  HENRIKSEN: All your people. All your little imps, all the half-selves you play with, shut away in your room—they have trollsnouts, like you and me. They are like marble busts, but underneath the lovely white surface—so still, so gleaming, so subtle, lurk a pompous horse-face, an obstinate mule, a daft dog, a gross bull, or a sycophant grinning dog.

  HI: A farmyard, in fact.

  HENRIKSEN: All the poor beasts we men use and pervert, and misshape by breeding for fat and docility. All the poor beasts whose nature the old Lapp wizards knew that we shared intimately. All the things with fur and tails and claws and fangs that fell on Peer Gynt in his trollfather’s cavern. Do you know, I have often thought that this very place where I sit—this inner temple, set apart for one who is no mere mortal—is a troll-cavern. Or maybe a loft, where a man may commune with his residual wildness. In the form of a duck, perhaps. Do you remember the old loft where you and your sister Hedvig played at being wild things, owl and eagle, grey mouse and fire-eyed cat, magic swans, white horses and running wolves? You took her, too, very gently, but you took her, and shot her, and stuffed her, and put her on show.

  HI: Are you pretending to be my conscience?

  HENRIKSEN: And who would have a better right? No, no. I am not the thin person, nor the button-moulder, I’m not interested in judgement. [He laughs.] I am the Great Boyg. I am myself. I force you to go round. And round. And round. I am everywhere you look. It would have been better for Peer Gynt to go straight onwards, don’t you think? Even to touch the nasty thing. Not dead. Not alive. Slimy. Misty. Won’t you sit down in our cavern, and drink a glass of your brandywine? It has to be your brandywine, because I haven’t got a penny to pay for it.

  HI: [Comes forward, sits down, and takes a glass.]

  I like the image of the marble busts with the beast faces. That’s worthy of being one of mine.

  HENRIKSEN: Please, feel free to adapt it.

  HI: As you say, poets are thieves. The one thing I never thought you would be—O Boyg—is an intelligent reader.

  HENRIKSEN: Hypocrite lecteur. Mon semblable, mon frère.

  HI: I will concede, I have been afraid of you. I knew you walked the earth, somewhere. Somewhere up there, in the cold. I imagined you with great burning scarlet eyes and a black curly pelt—

  HENRIKSEN: The church poodle?

  HI: I was only sixteen.

  HENRIKSEN: She was only a poor young servant-woman. And generous, to a fault.

  HI: You can’t know that. You weren’t born.

  [Both laugh, and drink brandywine. Henriksen calls for another bottle. Ibsen purses his thin lips.]

  HI: I have heard you were a drunkard.

  HENRIKSEN: And I have heard of you being carried shouting through the streets of Munich, quite incapable. And Dresden. And Rome. I have heard of you taunting chained dogs in Ischia, as though they were demons. Malevolent demons, with red eyes and black pelts.

  HI: You must have had something else to do with your life. Other than picking up facts, and exaggerations, and naughty tales about a man who doesn’t know you.

  HENRIKSEN: Oh yes. I have had things to do. I will tell you what I have done, since curiosity has gone only one way in this matter. I have been a smith, in a forge, pumping the flames with the great bellows. You would have recognised me well enough, in that shape, with my great leather apron, and my hammer, like Thor of old. I am also a skilled fiddle-maker. The devil has all the best tunes. I blow the flames, I drive on the dancers. My first wife was a quiet soul, with a light burning in her that consumed her quick enough. She had lovely hair and lovely breasts but she turned into a bundle of hot dry sticks and died choking. We lost our lovely boy, Jens, too, to a fever. He had a face like an angel. With the old trollsnout poking through, of course, all the same. Then I married Trina Marie—she liked me. I needed to be liked, and there was another little one, Björn, who took the smallpox from her. Both gone. I followed them to the churchyard. He lay in her arms, on her breast. The flames had gone out of the pockmarks, they were like scuffed marble, my little dead family. Now I am married to Ida
. People call her Fru Ibsen, she’s so proud. Haunches like a drayhorse, my good Ida, a child-bearing woman. We have five, five little Ibsens, with your eyes, old man, and your stubby fingers, and one with your thin lips. Three in the churchyard, with the soft skin rotted off the sweet skulls, which are still constructed like your mighty brainpan. (I know about that too.) Two sickly girls left to us. Have you never once thought, in all those years, of all this swarming life that came out of an act of yours when you were a boy of sixteen? I have buried five of your grandchildren, Henrik Ibsen, and wept for each one. Have you never thought of them? [He weeps.]

  HI: No. You are drunk.

  HENRIKSEN: They are your grandchildren. I have my papers to prove it.

  HI: You are weeping because you are drunk, you are drunk.

  HENRIKSEN: So you know one thing about me. I wrote a poem, you know, for the Lillesand Temperance Society. But I don’t find good metaphors when I’m sober. I lack courage. I inherited a certain timidity.

  [He weeps.]

  HI: I despise drunks. Including myself, from time to time.

  HENRIKSEN: It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark. A man should meet his ghosts fearlessly, and embrace them.

  HI: And what, on this cold earth, would a man gain by that?

  HENRIKSEN: Rest for his soul. Healed sores. Friendliness, calm.

  HI: And why should a man want those things? At the price of kissing all those cold lips, of sitting in the stink of brandywine and the splash of maudlin tears? Come, Hans Jacob Henriksen, my son, you know me better than that. I am going to say to you what I was always going to say to you when we should meet, the lines I had written for myself, the old curmudgeon, when you asked me for money, as I supposed you would. I am going to insult you, and we are going to part.