by A. S. Byatt
HENRIKSEN: I don’t see why. And I really could do with some money, I do have to admit, my children are sick, my wife is hungry …
HI: If you don’t see why, you aren’t my son. There lies the catch. If you are my son, you know how a man must walk his cold road alone, with the imaginary imps and the troll-shapes and the Great Boyg in the darkness behind him, where he likes to imagine them, but doesn’t too much like to take a good, direct look. And no, the line I was going to say was not “Get thee behind me.” It is a good line. I’ve had it prepared, for this eventuality.
HENRIKSEN: Can’t you just take my hand?
HI: No. Here is some money. Take it or leave it. It goes with the line, “I gave this much to your mother. It ought to be enough for you.”
HENRIKSEN: [Picks up the money, weeping.]
HI: You see? You are a drunk. And I am the demon.
Now, go home. I am going home. I don’t expect to see you in my chair again.
HENRIKSEN: (weakly defiant) You never know.
HI: You can’t repeat a scene like this. I was always particularly good at last acts.
Take your money, my son, and go home.
I wasn’t sure what to make of these three odd pieces of writing. I found them both intriguing and irritating. The irritating aspect—well, the most irritating, there were others—was the air of perfunctory secrecy or deception about the whole enterprise. What was the point of withholding the identification of the protagonists (if that was what they were) for so long? I had no trouble identifying Ibsen, even before his name crept in at the end. There are not so very many great Norwegian dramatists with white whiskers. I also had little trouble with Carl Linnaeus, since if you look up Linnaea Borealis or Systema Naturae in any decent encyclopaedia you find potted biographies of the great taxonomist with no trouble. I took longer sorting out Francis Galton, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, cousin of Charles Darwin, now forgotten because the idea he believed to be his great contribution to humanity—the idea of eugenics, as a statistical, scientific, progressive, political and ethical way of life—is regarded with horror by all right-thinking men after what the National Socialists made of it. I discovered that there still exists a Galton Professor of Human Genetics. I discovered, in fact, all sorts of leads about all three heroes of these fragmentary narratives—no doubt, at some point in this narrative, I shall find myself impelled to reveal some of these discoveries. Nobody likes keeping discoveries to himself. But my project was not to start projects of research into Linnaeus, Galton and Ibsen. My project was to discover, to come to grips with, Scholes Destry-Scholes. I had now read three unpublished pieces by him. In a sense I knew a lot more about him than I had. And in another sense, I knew nothing at all.
I could start work on Ibsen, Galton and Linnaeus, as I had worked on the movements and preoccupations of Sir Elmer Bole. There were tiny factual connections, which might lead directly to Destry-Scholes. Linnaeus had visited the Maelstrøm. Destry-Scholes’s letters to his publishers asking about grants to go to South Africa may have been to do with Galton’s youthful trek into Ovampoland. Or I could do a semiotic analysis of those teasing half-concealments, in an attempt to reconstruct the man who invented them. There were also odd moments where the professional biographer revealed his own preoccupations. I might track him through his unconscious (or conscious) assumptions. Even that became almost immediately almost impossible. For one thing, a semiotic analysis shows only the choice of available sign systems, from the culture in which the signs were made—in Destry-Scholes’s case, a 1950s prestructuralist culture. A semiotic analysis is not an instrument designed to discover a singular individual. Indeed, it assumes that there is no such thing. It could be argued (a dreadful phrase I find myself using, still, in extremis, when I want to hedge or hide or prevaricate)—it could be argued that Destry-Scholes himself, in evading the identification of his “characters” for so long, was intending to show that identity, that the self, is a dubious matter, not of the first consequence.
It could equally be argued that he made such a to-do about it because the identity of his people was of consequence, because the events he narrated only made sense if the narration concerned these people precisely, and no others.
I found myself, ludicrously, reacting as if Destry-Scholes had put together the three faded blue carbons under the hanging folders in the Lincoln University archive, in order to baffle and intrigue me, me personally, Phineas G. Nanson. All this writing was a conundrum bequeathed by him to me.
I wasn’t born, when he drowned, if he did drown.
It has been dinned into me that objectivity is an exploded and deconstructed notion. But subjectivity—the meeting of two hypothetical subjects, in this case Scholes Destry-Scholes and myself—is just as suspect, since it can’t be looked at objectively.
A drowned, or possibly drowned, biographer, in 1965, could have had no conceivable reader in mind for this limp cache of unbegun and unended stories.
I also could not help thinking about the three stories, or parts of stories, as though, taken together, they were all part of some larger work in progress. They presented a single problem to me; it was very tempting to turn them into a singular object. They had intriguing, pointless symmetries. The appearance, early on in the Galton and Linnaeus tales, of jawbones and teeth. Animals. Magic. There appeared to be a real, urgent voice in the storytelling when the narrator got on to magic, in all three cases.
I have always been intrigued by those very large advertising installations, which show you an image, made up of a series of vertical stripes, for a calculated number of minutes, and then flick, or revolve, the stripes, to constitute (to reveal) a quite other image. So there may be a silver car on a snowy mountaintop, which can flicker, in its orderly way, into a soft-drinks bottle full of rising bubbles, which in turn can become a pair of huge breasts in a black lace brassière. Between scene-shifts, or metamorphoses, there is an illusion that the vanishing vision is partly obscured by bars of smoky steel and then time’s revolution brings in the car, the bubbles, the breasts, also briefly barred.
I had the fanciful idea that the three personages were like stripes or bars behind which lurked the figure of Destry-Scholes. There is a sense, also, in which those things remind one of Venetian blinds, though they do not work on the same principle. I wasn’t clear whether I thought that Destry-Scholes was the grey shadow, or metal, which connected all the bright pictures, or whether he was the brightly painted surface of the blind, through the interstices of which the empty sky—grey, or blue, or even roseate as it might be—could be glimpsed in orderly strips. The image doesn’t really work, though it leaves the residual pleasure of the idea of a beast behind bars who is simultaneously the gaps in a flat screen. I should never have made a real writer; I can’t think my images through. This one connected to the rather moving idea—imposed, as far as I could see, by Destry-Scholes upon Ibsen—of the famous man walking the streets behind a pasteboard mask of himself. (Maybe the idea was Ibsen’s, quoted by Destry-Scholes—he seemed to work like that.) It is partly because of this idea of masks and effigies that I have taken to thinking of the “three” as personages. The other, more urgent reason, is because “personage” is not, as far as I know, a literary critical term in current use or abuse. (I can’t call them “characters,” or “persons,” or “men.”)
Another way of looking at those billboards is to think of them as the picture bricks we all had as kids. If you get the right sides of the cubes facing out in your tower, suddenly you have four pictures. A grenadier, a clown, a dragon, a magician. Three personages, and Destry-Scholes.
But if he was in the picture, the construction-work became not his, but someone else’s, mine. And the last thing I have any interest in writing—I mean this—is an autobiography.
I am interested in Scholes Destry-Scholes because he was interested in Elmer Bole, because he wanted to find out facts about Elmer Bole. I am not interested in myself. It was difficult being a literary schoolchild—I was ofte
n nearly put off what turned out to be my vocation by the urgings of pedagogues who assured me I would “discover myself” by reading, that I would “understand myself” by “identifying” with—well, whom? Robin Hood? Hamlet? Gregor Samsa? Prince Myshkin? No, no, the true literary fanatic, the primeval reader, is looking for anything but a mirror—for an escape route, for an expanding horizon, for receding starscapes, for unimaginable monstrosities and incomprehensible (strictly) beauties. Also for meaning, for making sense of things, always with the proviso that complete sense cannot probably be made because of the restrictions of small things like death, and the configuration of the folds of our electrically charged, insensible grey matter. I got into post-structuralism out of a true intellectual passion for coherence and meanings. I am trying to record the events which followed my decision to give up that way of looking at things, as an intellectual ordering of this search for meaning. I am not writing an autobiography. I am writing in the first person for the sake of precision, because this procedure allows me to say certain things I am reasonably sure of. I have once or twice started a sentence in this last paragraph or two with a more or less automatic address to an imaginary reader. “Have you noticed those billboards …” I wrote, and crossed it out. Worse, I ascribed opinions to this person. “You might think everyone has to be interested in himself,” I wrote, and scratched it out. Who is this “you”? No one. Or me, and I know what I think, I think.
I was for this reason very interested in Destry-Scholes’s presentation of Ibsen’s paring-away of his human relations in search of his Self. It seems likely to me that if I had been born into an earlier generation I might have had to have some idea of my Self, might have had a go at the Nanson onion, or the Nanson king of infinite space bounded in a nutshell. I do exist on the earth, and would like to be of some use, and find a meaning or two. (The meaning is beyond all of us.)
I am not very good at finding out who Scholes Destry-Scholes was because I am not very interested in finding out who I am.
He, on the other hand, was very good at finding out other personages, but left no tracks of who he was. Because of not knowing who he was? Or not choosing that anyone else should? Or am I just the wrong, incompetent, seeker?
If I were to write about myself, where would I start? Arbitrarily, let me decide, with my socks. Socks are a fact. Mine are not new, and all have matted patches under the ball of the metatarsal joint, which in my case is protuberant. Unlike many people I know, I don’t have lots of odd socks, because I take them off and roll them immediately into a single ball, which I put in the laundry-bag until I empty that into the launderette, and I repeat this process before leaving the launderette. It is nonsense to say you always have odd socks. This reads like a bit of Beckett, not like an autobiography. It is a fact, but it has a displaced, odd, surreal look. What colour are the socks? Most are stained navy. Some were once white but couldn’t now be said to be white; they are white with dust and earth strained repeatedly through them. I have two pairs with red white and blue (thin) stripes above the white/earthy necks (is that the right word? If a sock doesn’t have a neck, like a womb or a bottle, what does it have?). Red, white and blue is a surprisingly frequent combination in national flags, something I’ve never understood, since I find it neither striking nor beautiful. Yellow, red and blue would be better, but only children’s socks, or very expensive socks, are those colours, and not many flags. I suppose if I offered this paragraph to a psychoanalyst as an example of free association, he/she would say it was evasive, but the truth is that I am more interested in things like why choose red, white and blue than in my own feet (or psyche), and what I have learned from this paragraph is that writing down one fact leads to another unrelated fact (socks, national flags) and this is restorative to the baffled minds of despondent researchers.
I could go on to some other aspect of my daily life. Bookshelves, for instance, except that those could be seen as a portrait, a taxonomy of the mind. The truth is I began to feel very despondent. I had no idea where to go next. I did have a strong urge to follow up all the clues in the three documents, to pursue Linnaeus, Galton and Ibsen jointly or severally, as I had tracked Destry-Scholes through the life and works of Elmer Bole. But where would it stop? Linnaeus would lead to Swedenborg, Galton to Darwin, Ibsen to Strindberg or Shaw, and I would run like a ferret from library to library, shelf to shelf. There is no end to the pursuit of knowledge, no limit, no bound (socks, washeterias, seraglios, shamans, beehives, apparitions, overcoats, mosaics, starry skies …). Also my income was diminishing, as were my human contacts, and for the same reason—I had lost my few teaching assignments with my change of thesis and director. And I had no knowledge of Ormerod Goode’s research field, the Anglo-Saxon place-names, the ancient Icelandic myths. I took the typescripts about the three personages to Goode, however. I had told him a little about my search through the life and works of Bole. He had not really offered much of a comment. Indeed, he seemed faintly detached, as though his expectations of my project were diminishing.
He turned over the three part-manuscripts. I described them as he did so, identifying L, G and HI for him. “Quite, quite,” he said, not looking up, as though there was no problem about this. I said that I was further forward, in that I knew something, and no further forward, in that I did not know where to look next. He had not offered me a drink at all, on this occasion. He said, still sifting Destry-Scholes’s papers,
“I see. A taxonomist, a statistician, a button-moulder.”
He added, “I thought of writing on Ibsen myself, at one point. His use of the folk tale. I was deflected.”
I said that I did not see what to do next.
He agreed that it was difficult to see what to do next.
I said I could clearly look into these three lives, but where would that lead?
He said, “Have you got a life yourself, Nanson? What do you do with your spare time.”
It looked as though it was all spare, I replied, evading the question, which he had no right to ask.
“You don’t look well,” he said, though I had not been aware of him looking directly at me throughout this encounter. “You look peaked. You should take a holiday, perhaps. Get away from all this for a break. Go hiking, perhaps, or take a train, or a boat, to somewhere else. With a friend.”
I said that I had insufficient means to go anywhere at all. Especially since I had lost my teaching.
There was something to be said, said Ormerod Goode, for a part-time job, if one could be found. “Personally I have never objected to a little manual labour,” he said, not making it clear whether he meant for himself or for his students. “Puts things in perspective,” he said, vaguely. I chose to believe he was saying I was a failure. I said I would think about it, and rose to leave. He looked at me, then.
“There is something shifty about all that shamanistic stuff in the Linnaeus document,” he said. “Something decidedly shifty.”
“Shifty?” I repeated.
“If you look into it,” he said, “I think you’ll find that that’s so. But I don’t know that you will be much the wiser.”
I was perhaps stung by this last remark into making a decision to visit the Linnean Society. I had noticed its existence once or twice already, on my way to exhibitions in the Royal Academy. It has a secret-looking door inside the arch of the Palladian grandeur of Burlington House. I telephoned, and asked if the Society’s collections were open to the general public. By appointment, I was told. Use of the Society’s library was also available by appointment. Linnaeus’s own collections were held in an atmospherically controlled strongroom, but someone would be happy to show them to me. His collections? I asked. The Society was founded in 1788 when the collections were purchased, after Linnaeus’s death, by James Edward Smith, who became its first President. It moved the collections to Burlington House in 1857. Many of Linnaeus’s specimens had been destroyed or dispersed, but what was left was substantial. What was I particularly interested in? The fish, the ins
ects, the library? As I thanked the courteous voice on my telephone, it came to me, I remember, that this would be my first contact with things. Not Destry-Scholes’s things, but things, nevertheless. I felt a thrill in my fingertips.
I set out on foot from King’s Cross, where I lived, to Piccadilly. I was watching my pennies, which was increasingly necessary, and getting some exercise, both. Keeping fit is a major problem for sedentary scholars. Ormerod Goode was right that I was “peaked.” An odd word. I wondered what its derivation was. The post-structuralist I had been would have taken pleasure in a pun—Goode had perceived, without looking, that I was piqued by his lack of interest, by his non-offer of a drink. I looked up “peaked” in the OED. I have one I bought in a sale, which is compact, that is one volume, but very large and cumbersome, and can be read with a lens which has its own little light that makes an island of a word in a sea of invisibly tiny print. I have to read it crouched over it, on the floor. “Peaked,” to my disappointment, had no etymological source, but was said to be colloquially derived from “peaked,” meaning the point, or summit, of a mountain, or hill, thus a face sharpened or thinned by illness or malnutrition. I do have a sharp face. It is a word I would apply to it. I also think it is a word Goode would apply, being a place-names man with a prejudice in favour of the Anglo-Saxon. I believe, though, I did look peaked, not only because I am naturally thin and sharp. It is difficult, in view of all the subsequent events, to remember clearly the sense of aimless desolation with which I set out to walk to Piccadilly. Aimless is the wrong word. I had too many aims, towards all points of the compass, including the entirely arbitrary one of Piccadilly.