The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  When I was a boy, I remember

  Two thoughts kept occurring to me, and made me laugh.

  An owl frightened by darkness, and a fish

  Afraid of water. Why did I think of them?

  Because I felt dimly the difference

  Between what is, and what should be; between

  Having to endure and finding one’s burden

  Unendurable.

  Every man

  Is such an owl and such a fish, created

  To work in darkness, to live in the deep;

  And yet he is afraid. He splashes

  In anguish towards the shore, stares at the bright

  Vault of heaven, and screams: “Give me the air

  And the blaze of day!”

  And:

  Almighty God, Creator and Preserver of all things, who

  On Lapland fells suffered me to ascend so high

  In Falun mines to descend so low,

  On Lapland fells showed me diem sine nocte, day without night,

  In Falun mines noctem sine die, night without day,

  On Lapland fells suffered me to be where cold is never-ending

  In Falun mines where heat is never-ending,

  On Lapland fells suffered me to see in one place all the four seasons

  In Falun mines not one of the four seasons

  In Lapland led me unharmed through so many mortal dangers

  In Falun through so many perils to health

  Praised be all Thou has created

  From the beginning to the end.

  For a wild moment, I thought that Destry-Scholes himself had written these poems, that I had, so to speak, met him naked. Then I thought that the second, with its references to Lapland and Falun, was much more likely to have something to do with—even to be written by—Linnaeus—and I do not wish to obfuscate things, or deny my own good intuition, so will state here that I later very quickly ascertained that Linnaeus had indeed written this paradoxical paean at the end of his (partly fictive) Lapland journey. Much later, I found out that the odd owl/fish paradox was by Ibsen. Heights and depths and confusion in both. Teasing and (perhaps pointlessly) suggestive.

  Vera Alphage asked if I would like to take this box—and possibly also the photographs—downstairs, to be looked at at leisure, in more comfortable circumstances. Her thin white fingers were pulling at the knot that held together the neck of the scarlet leather dolly-bag. I agreed that taking down the cards and the photographs would be a good first step. I picked up the contraption of straps and screws. I wondered, I said idly, what it was for.

  “Oh,” said Vera Alphage. “I know what that is. That is a trepanning instrument.”

  I was not quite sure what trepanning was. I associated the word with dangerous operations on board Napoleonic battleships. She elaborated.

  “It makes a small hole in the skull. It relieves pressure and was believed to increase intelligence and even to produce visionary states.” She spoke with a certain authority. “I don’t know why he would have had one.”

  Perhaps to enjoy visionary states, I suggested. It had elements of Russian roulette, she replied, almost tartly. Her fingers unloosed the last recalcitrant thread of the knot in the dolly-bag. It proved to contain—we counted them later—366 glass marbles, some obviously very old and beautiful, of many sizes, colours and patterns. There was also, in the dolly-bag, a small notebook, an old-fashioned cash book, in which someone had written: The Names of the Great Families, the Decads, the Sexes and the Hands, in order, with the Comings and Goings Thereof, the Signs, the Blazons and other Matters of Import to the Governance and the Issuing Forth and Return of the Sally-forces and the Defenders of the Posts and Portals. The writing was a schoolboy’s writing. It could have evolved—must have evolved—into the neat script of the index cards. Vera Alphage handed me the little book. It was almost entirely a list of names.

  Cyanea Spinel Arsenikon Radiolarion, Maidenhair Horsetail Cirrhus Bum Lung Oroubouros Crimson-wisp Cramoisie Nightshade Lamplight Tendril Goose-feather Plume Penna Argus Cuttle Spindrift Bloodrift Rust Amalekite Rahab Rapunzel Hemlock Goosegob Florian Hesper Jasper Whisper Pomegranate Pard Rip Portwine Gyr Tyr Fang Gentian Millipede Fumato Argile Nieve Schneewittchen Popocatapetl Spitfire Uvula Metatarsal Omoplat Cocky Nepenthe Kekule Claw Jormungandr Amphisbaena Moly Gloop

  These are only a few of the names from one of the lists. Vera Alphage said, “They all had names. They were all arranged in groups and armies.” She held one up to the light, a large, clear one, with a spiral lattice of cobalt in its centre, surrounded by a crimson and gold and white ribbon-system. “I love these,” she said. “I shall bring these down with the other things. I wonder if it would be possible to guess which name went with which marble?”

  We carried the two shoeboxes and the bag of marbles down the ladder into Vera Alphage’s white living-room with its lavender-coloured shadows. I made a quick prospecting foray through both the photograph archive and the card index. Neither showed any signs of order, even on examination. Some of the cards were in verse—I recognised fragments from Peer Gynt—and some were small narratives—a man taunting a dog through an iron gate, a man identifying a dead man on a mortuary slab, a fall from a paddle-steamer. There were also reflections on psychology, philosophy, evolution, hybridisation and so on. All on separate cards, with an illusion of equivalent importance given by the geometry of the cards themselves, the 8″ × 6″ rectangles, the fine shadowy feint of the grey lines, the single red line at the top, on which the heading should have been, and wasn’t. I caught a glimpse of a card about categorising the colours of glass eyes, which made me think of the marbles. Vera Alphage had laid out a row of the larger ones—some with formal lattice work, some with random coilings of different colours, and was holding them up to the light, one by one, and peering through them.

  “This brown is really a very deep purple,” she observed, “with golden worms in it.”

  I turned my attention to the photographs. There were several formal silvery Victorian portraits, and a few naughtyish Edwardian postcards of ladies in frilly knickers with their foot raised suggestively on a pouffe or a ladder. There were photographs either by, or in the style of, Nadar and August Sander. There were Picture Post photographs of soldiers bivouacking, and Tatler photographs of young ladies in riding-gear or ball-dresses. There were what appeared to be medical photographs of living growths and autopsies in progress. There were also a great many family snapshots. I thought, here surely, I shall encounter Destry-Scholes himself. A boy aged about ten with a fishing-net and a jam-jar of tiddlers suspended on string appeared to be a candidate. He had freckles, and a mop of pale hair, and a cheery expression and grey flannel knee-length shorts. (I assume they were grey. I read them as grey.) I looked at him, and at Vera Alphage. His face was unformed. There was no resemblance, and no absence of resemblance. Then I found a studio picture of a quite different ten-year-old boy, a lovely, raven-haired boy in profile with long lashes whose darkness at least resembled Vera Alphage’s. But he was joined by a studious-looking boy with a satchel, rather plump, also dark, and by a very thin boy sitting on a rock at the seaside gripping his knees, with a messy forelock drooping between his eyes. There were several groups of young graduates, with no indication of when they were taken, or where was the lawn on which they posed. There were two quite different groups of military and service men, in khaki shorts and air force blue (how did I tell this from black-and-white images?). Any or none of all these might have been Destry-Scholes. I hate photographs. I have what amounts to a phobia as far as photographs are concerned. I do not permit photographs of myself to be taken. (There are not many people who would ever consider wishing to take any.) Roland Barthes was right, in his book on photography, to say that photographs are essentially involved in death. This creature was living, and will be dead, a photograph says, according to Barthes. His book is a secret elegy for his mother, the photograph he cares for (and doesn’t reproduce) is one of her as a child, when she
was there and he himself was not. That was before his lifetime. I believe this life ended, cut short by an errant laundry-van, before he could have seen the agonising and remorseless record, by a Danish photographer, of the photographer’s mother’s last days, from her wistful stare on arrival in her hospital bed, apprehensive and resigned (partly)—to her curled, foetal, skin-on-sharp-bones final leathery state. All writing about photographs, including this writing I am at present engaged in, has something decayed (decadent) and disgusting about it. People have not understood (except Barthes to a certain extent) the horror of these snatched imprints of light and shadow on jelly (Hiroshima gave us a way, a clichéd way quickly, of seeing what it was to leave your shadow etched by brilliance when you were evaporated). The horror of mirrors is nothing to the horror of photographs. It is partly, too, as primitive peoples believe, that the identity is chipped or sucked away by the black hole in the shutter. Snap. Shot. Jaws. Gun barrel. I hate photographs. Destry-Scholes had collected them, possibly at least because he too hated them. I found his collection gruesome. All the eyes were dead, like fish on slabs. But it is possible that I exaggerate, for my own reasons, which I have therefore tried to adumbrate. Adumbrate is a good word, in this context; it sprang to the pen. I notice that my writing is becoming perhaps too impassioned. But then, what sort of a piece of writing is it, for what purpose, for which reader? I may be passionate or dispassionate as I choose, since this document has no importance anyway.

  I asked Vera Alphage if she thought any of the photographed faces might be Destry-Scholes. She said she didn’t know, adding strangely that it wasn’t the surface of faces that interested her. She was still holding the marbles up to the light, one after the other, like lenses. There was no longer much light. She said, without real enthusiasm, that she would poke about in the family photograph albums and see if she could find any matches, or hints. I asked then if I might be allowed to take away the index cards, to study them.

  “I don’t know you,” she replied. “I don’t know who you are, or why you want them. I can’t let them out of the house, especially since you at least appear to attach some importance to them. But you are welcome to come as often as you wish, and study them here. I lead a quiet life; you wouldn’t be disturbed. You have to come on my days off, which are, I’m afraid, irregular.”

  I asked, then, what she did. She replied that she worked in a hospital—St. Simeon’s. She did not at that time enlarge upon what she did in the hospital. I couldn’t tell whether she was a nurse, or a surgeon with delicate fingers, or an almoner, or an administrator. Or a psychiatrist, even? I am not, I have learned, good at human beings in the raw. I have no way of knowing who they are or what they want. We agreed that she would phone me on her next day off—“I am almost entirely at your disposal,” I said wildly, “apart from two days a week in Puck’s Girdle.” I gave her that phone number too. She did not ask what Puck’s Girdle was, any more than I had pursued the question of what she did in the hospital. We were, we are, tentative creatures, Vera Alphage and I. I formed the project of buying several packs of index cards identical in size to those Destry-Scholes had used. Photocopying was out of the question. I should have to rewrite his writings in my writing on my own cards. Fortunately our scripts, at least, are much the same size.

  I have just written that I am not good at human beings in the raw. This was about to be proved in quite another context.

  The Strange Customer returned once or twice to Puck’s Girdle, never when Erik and Christophe were there. I put that down to the fact that his days off might coincide with mine. He always asked for Pim or Pym (I never found out which) and added a surname, Proctor (or Proktor, or Procter). On his third visit, it may have been, he handed me a card with his name on it—no address—Maurice Bossey—and waited for signs of recognition, which were not forthcoming, for I did not recognise it. He also instituted a curious habit of consuming very small meals, whilst sitting at the bible-shelf and consulting the chained books. These were nothing so vulgar as sandwiches or buns. He would produce from a small leather satchel a metal plate or dish (possibly silver, even) and an unfolding three-pronged silvery fork, not unlike the trident of a retiarius. There was also a kind of gentleman’s flick-knife, with a fine, wicked blade. He would dissect a small quail, or cut paper-thin slices from a strip of bloody meat (fillet of beef, venison, veal? such things are outside my proficiency also). He would have a fresh roll and a little pat of butter in waxed paper, and this would be followed by fruit. He called me over once, to watch him dissect a ripe peach. I watched him insert his blade in the crease between the two rounds of the fruit, and then make a circle of overlapping half-moons round the kernel with fragments of pink flesh still adhering to it. He offered me a slice. I backed away. I did not want his fruit-flesh on a silver dish. On another occasion he called me over to watch him use yet another instrument—a long, fine corkscrew, a lacquered tube—to extract the cork from a half-bottle of Château Lacoste. He pushed it in with rhythmic screwing motions, and a smile on the corner of his mouth. He then produced two gilt-lined silver beakers, of a miniature kind, and poured me one. The wine was thick, rich, red and bubbled slightly. Again, it seemed important to refuse. I thought it was simply because I did not like him. He smelt vaguely of camphor, and beyond the camphor of a rather sickly incense, almost undetectable, but there. All this present writing of mine is making him sound rather suspicious, I know (I hope), but at the time all I felt was a vague unease, I think. We had a lot of eccentrics in Puck’s Girdle. Backpackers and parsons, elderly ladies in stalwart stockings and brogues, sun-seeking skeletally thin girl-women in silky shifts, beefy mountaineers, beardy ecologists. Maurice Bossey was barely odder than the norm. And I was so anxious to do well, to live up to the hopes Erik and Christophe had of me, to further their imaginative vision of the pleasures of travel.

  I was a failure as a semiotician, I do now see. I may be getting better at writing, now, when it is too late, but then I was slow, I did not read the signs.

  After a week or so, Vera Alphage wrote to say that she had a free day, and I was welcome to come and study the photographs and cards. I went back to Willesden, where a space had been made for me at a little writing-bureau in what appeared to be the spare bedroom—sparsely furnished, with a single bed, some sort of floral curtains, a patchwork quilt. I took a sandwich and an apple—I didn’t want Ms. Alphage to suppose she had to entertain me—but she brought up a bowl of watercress soup at lunchtime, a brown roll, and a piece of Brie. My initial feeling on confronting the cards, with so limited a time to read them in, was panic. I decided to read them all through, and to note—on paper—all the subjects of the “entries.” Then I would look at the groupings (if any) and copy out what I myself found most striking. What other approach could I use? It was all peculiarly unsatisfactory. Nor do I think now that I can record here, in full, my “findings.” It took me three visits to make a record of the contents of the box, which still appear to me so diverse and ramshackle that remembering them in any order or making any sense of them is no more than botching. I had the idea, which turned out to be hopelessly idealistic, that I should approach them with a completely open mind, a kind of researcher’s version of the tabula rasa, in order to understand the whole of Destry-Scholes’s purpose (if he had one) in accumulating the collection, and the subtleties (if any) of the ordering of the cards. “To find, not to impose,” as Wallace Stevens magnificently said. One of the reasons I had given up post-structuralist thought was the disagreeable amount of imposing that went on in it. You decided what you were looking for, and then duly found it—male hegemony, liberal-humanist idées reçues, etc. This was made worse by the fact that the deconstructionists and others paid lip-service to the idea that they must not impose—they even went so far as half-believing they must not find, either. And yet they discovered the same structures, the same velleities, the same evasions quite routinely in the most disparate texts. I wanted most seriously not to impose that sort of a reading, and, more pr
imitively, not to impose my own hypotheses about who Destry-Scholes was, or what he was doing. This was not difficult, as my hypotheses were very ghostly, thin air, no more.

  What shape do I give, in my mind, now, to that cubic mass of tiny writing?

  The salient bits were where two or three consecutive cards appeared to be on the same subject. Here for instance, is a little sequence beginning with card no. 21 (I asked Vera Alphage’s permission to number them—in pencil, lightly—and she agreed that I might).

  Card no. 21

  The young man’s name was Ludvig David. He dived from a second-floor window in a Roman apartment. He was unwell, suffering from a high fever, pouring with sweat and HI was of the opinion that he believed that the wavering, liquefying surface he saw below him was the spumy surface of a cool, profound, refreshing sea. Like HI himself, the exiles all felt a perpetual longing for the tossing seas of the North. It is also possible that the young man meant to end, either his temporary but intolerable pain, or his life itself, for more settled reasons. Whatever the reasons for the leap, HI made it his business to be present at the autopsy. He wrote to B, Ludvig David’s friend, with a precise description of the state of the corpse. “The skull was crushed at the apex, and the face was scraped, flayed in some sort, and bloodied. The arms and legs were intact, but the ribcage was crushed and the lungs ripped, which caused a great flow of blood.” HI peered doubtless into the cavern of the skull. The scalp and the features were rolled back like the skin of an onion.