The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  False analogy, said Fulla Biefeld, and the desire to construct a theory of everything from received ideas close at hand, were very dangerous. But you had to admire his inexhaustible ingenuity.

  I wrote back—she tempted me into writing back—that in terms of false analogy I was, so to speak, metaphysically baffled by the bee orchid and the eyes on butterfly wings. I understood the argument (Darwinian) for the production of these solid living analogies, I understood the argument that a resemblance could be perfected over millennia by a flower, or the scales on a wing, by natural selection—but I couldn’t really believe it. It still had a quality of designed poetry that left me baffled. I said I wasn’t answering her point, I was adding one of my own.

  Card 45, she told me, was Linnaeus’s endorsement of Réaumur’s account of the hatching of a chicken covered with hair, after the crossing of a rabbit and a hen.

  Card no. 46

  All the Darwin rabbit letters that have survived are those which followed the publication of Galton’s paper “Experiments in Pangenesis by Breeding from Rabbits of a pure variety, into whose circulation blood taken from other varieties had previously been largely transfused.” This was read at the Royal Society on March 30th 1871. These letters refer to a continuation of the experiments, also with negative conclusions … Those who read the letters below cannot doubt that Darwin knew the nature of the experiments, and knew that Galton was assuming that the “gemmules” circulated in the blood. The whole point was to determine whether the hereditary units of a breed A could be transfigured by transfusion of blood to members of a breed B and would “mongrelise” the offspring conceived later by B. Was the “blood” indeed as supposed in folk-language all over the world a true bearer of hereditary characters?

  Card no. 47

  Dec. 11. 69. My dear Darwin, I wonder if you could help me. I want to make some peculiar experiments that have occurred to me in breeding animals and want to procure a few couples of rabbits of marked and assured breeds, viz: Lop-ear with as little tendency to Albinism as possible. Common rabbits, ditto. Angora albinos … Pray excuse my troubling you; the interest of the proposed experiment—for it is really a curious one—must be my justification …

  March 15, 70.

  My dear Darwin,

  I shall hope in a week from now to give you some news and by Saturday week definite facts about the rabbits. One litter [?doe] has littered today and all looks well with her … I grieve to say that my most hopeful one was confined prematurely by 3 days having made no nest and all we knew of the matter was finding blood from the cage and the head of one of the litter. She was transfused from yellow and the buck also from yellow. Well the head was certainly much lighter than the head of another abortion I had seen, and was certainly irregularly coloured, being especially darker, about the muzzle, but I did not and do not care to build anything upon such vague facts and have not even kept the head. As soon as I know anything I will write instantly and first to you. For my part, I am quite sick with expected hope and doubt …

  Card no. 48

  Letter of Charles Darwin in Nature, April 27, 1871

  “Pangenesis.” In a paper, read March 30th 1871 before the Royal Society, and just published in the Proceedings, Mr. Galton gives the results of his interesting experiments on the inter-transfusion of the blood of distinct varieties of rabbits. These experiments were undertaken to test whether there was any truth in my provisional hypothesis of Pangenesis. Mr. Galton, in recapitulating “the cardinal points” says that the gemmules are supposed “to swarm in the blood.” Now in the chapter on Pangenesis in my “Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,” I have not said one word about the blood, or about any fluid proper to the circulating system. It is, indeed, obvious that the presence of gemmules in the blood can form no necessary part of my hypothesis; for I refer in illustration of it to the lowest animals, such as the Protozoa, which do not possess blood or any vessels; and I refer to plants in which the fluid, when present in the vessels, can not be considered as true blood … I have said that “the gemmules in each organism must be thoroughly diffused; nor does this seem improbable, considering their minuteness and the steady circulation of fluids through the body.” But when I used these latter words and other similar ones, I presume that I was thinking of the diffusion of the gemmules through the tissues, or from cell to cell, independently of the presence of vessels—as in the remarkable experiments by Dr. Bence Jones, in which the chemical elements absorbed by the stomach were detected in the course of some minutes in the crystalline lens of the eye;… Nor can it be objected that the gemmules could not pass through tissues or cell walls, for the contents of each pollen grain have to pass through the coats, both of the pollen tube and embryonic sac. I may add, with respect to the passage of fluids through membrane, that they pass from cell to cell in the absorbing hairs of the roots of living plants at a rate, as I have myself observed under the microscope, which is truly surprising.

  When, therefore, Mr. Galton concludes, from the fact that rabbits of one variety, with a large proportion of the blood of another variety in their veins, do not produce mongrelised offspring, that the hypothesis of Pangenesis is false, it seems to me that his conclusion is a little hasty …

  Card nos. 49–51

  Letter of Francis Galton in Nature, May 4, 1871

  “Pangenesis.” It appears from Mr. Darwin’s letter … that the views contradicted by my experiments … differ from those he entertains. Nevertheless, I think they are what his published account of Pangenesis are [sic] most likely to convey to the mind of a reader. The ambiguity is due to an inappropriate use of three separate words: “circulate,” “freely” and “diffused.” The proper meaning of circulation is evident enough—it is a re-entering movement. Nothing can justly be said to circulate which does not return, after a time, to a former position. In a circulating library, books return and are re-issued. Coin is said to circulate, because it comes back into the same hands in the interchange of business. A story circulates, when a person hears it repeated over and over again in society. Blood has an undoubted claim to be called a circulating fluid, and when that phrase is used, blood is always meant …

  Freely means “without retardation” as we might say that small fish can swim freely through the larger meshes of a net; now it is impossible to suppose gemmules to pass through solid tissue without any retardation …

  I do not much complain of having been sent on a false quest by ambiguous language, for I know how conscientious Mr. Darwin is in all he writes, how difficult it is to put thoughts into accurate speech, and again, how words have conveyed false impressions on the simplest matters, from the earliest times. Nay, even in that idyllic scene which Mr. Darwin has sketched of the first invention of language, awkward blunders must of necessity have often occurred. I refer to the passage in which he supposes some unusually wise ape-like animal to have first thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey so as to indicate to his fellow-monkeys the nature of the expected danger. For my part, I feel as if I had just been assisting at such a scene. As if, having heard my trusted leader utter a cry, not particularly well articulated, but to my ears more like that of a hyena than any other animal, and seeing none of my companions stir a step, I had, like a loyal member of the flock, dashed down a path of which I had happily caught sight, into the plain below, followed by the approving nods and kindly grunts of my wise and most respected chief. And I now feel, after returning from my hard expedition, full of information that the suspected danger was a mistake, for there was no sign of a hyena anywhere in the neighbourhood, I am given to understand for the first time that my leader’s cry had no reference to a hyena down in the plain, but to a leopard somewhere up in the trees; his throat had been a little out of order, that was all. Well, my labour has not been in vain; it is something to have established the fact that there are no hyenas in the plain, and I think I see my way to a good position for a lookout for leopards among the branches of the trees. In the meantime, Vive P
angenesis! Francis Galton.”

  Card no. 52

  In view of the previous correspondence lasting for nearly two years—referred to only in words which Darwin alone could appreciate: “followed by the approving nods and kindly grunts of my wise and most respected chief”—I think this letter of Galton’s in Nature is one of the finest things he ever wrote in his life; it is few men who have such a great opportunity and use it so bravely. Vive Pangenesis!

  Card no. 53

  It is a biographer’s duty to illustrate the real strength of his subject’s character, not merely to call it great. I know of no case in which a disciple’s reverence for his master has exceeded that shown by Galton for Darwin in this matter. I doubt if any natures the least smaller than those of Darwin and Galton would have sustained their friendship unbroken, even for a day, after April 24th 1871. I feel that the self-effacement of Galton in this instance is one of the most characteristic actions of his life; but it is not one that a biographer can disregard, however great his reverence for Darwin.

  I (Phineas G. Nanson, that is, the ur-I of this document) feel I should intermit here the transcription of the Hybrids and Cluster—my hybrids and cluster—to comment more particularly on card 53, which, as will not have escaped an attentive reader, is not about hybrids or mixtures, but very clearly about biography, about the relation of biographer to subject. I have to admit that I was moved by Galton’s eloquence, by his linguistic indignation, by his beautifully sustained and nuanced linguistic/evolutionary metaphor for what amounted to Darwin’s betrayal of his friend and cousin. I hoped, and briefly I believed, that the first-person biographer, who here suddenly and surprisingly makes a statement of faith, was no other than Scholes Destry-Scholes himself. After all, he had written at least part of a biography of Galton, in his vivid description of Galton’s journeys through Ovampoland to Lake Ngami and his visionary experiences there. It was Galton the explorer, in some sense, who had played with the laugh of a hyena, the cough of a leopard and the kindly grunts of Charles Darwin. I liked to think that he had stopped to record his admiration for his subject and to state his sense of “a biographer’s duty.” It was, however, my duty as his biographer, to check the sources, and on my next visit to the British Library I rapidly discovered that the words I had taken to be those of Scholes Destry-Scholes were in fact the measured tones of Karl Pearson, Galton’s first biographer, author of The Grammar of Science, whose activities at University College London were inspired and financed by Galton. (The Biometric Laboratory, the Eugenics Laboratory, the Galton Professorship of National Eugenics [later Human Genetics], the Chair of Statistics, the Annals of Eugenics, Biometrika …) When I found this out—the discussion of the rabbit episode is in Volume 11 of Pearson’s very weighty four-volume work—I assumed for some time that Destry-Scholes had copied it out so carefully because he approved of it, shared its emotion and its definition of the relations between biographer and biographee. Then, as I read further in Pearson, at once entranced and slightly repelled by the apostolic fervour of his devotion to Galton, I began to wonder. Respected modern biographers after all are not remarkable for their reverence for their subjects, or for their subjects’ beliefs. Pearson’s belief in Eugenics I discovered to have been fervent. He states (Vol. IIIA, p. 435—I cannot bring myself to imitate Destry-Scholes’s insouciant lack of reference) that Galton’s “life-aim” had been “to study racial mass-changes in many fields, with the view of controlling the evolution of man, as man controls that of many living forms.” This was of course written in innocent ignorance of the uses to which such ideas were to be put, and our present nervous horror of such declarations would no doubt have surprised those idealistic late Victorians. Pearson goes on to believe that Galton will have a place in the history of civilisation equal to that of Darwin in science:

  Galton taught a new morality, an unwonted doctrine of altruism—like all new creeds, difficult to accept and easy to pour scorn on: “Help the strong rather than the weak; aid the man of tomorrow rather than the man of today; let knowledge and foresight control the blind emotions and impetuous instincts wherewith Nature, red-clawed, drives man, mindless and stupefied, down her own evolutionary paths.” “Awake my people,” was Galton’s cry, like that of a religious prophet of the older time. He was an agnostic, in that he saw the weakness of the creeds so far proclaimed by man, suffice, as they may, for many less deeply-probing minds; yet as his niece said to the biographer, he was a religious agnostic; the term seems to me an apt one.

  Here we have, in the passage in quotation marks, a mundane version of a tendency which I was beginning to suspect has been (possibly deliberately) extravagantly elaborated by Destry-Scholes. The prophetic utterances and adjurations ascribed by Pearson to Galton are Pearson’s own, and I believe—having now read much further in Galton, whose style is intellectually agnostic and questing and always open—a trait which enabled him to accept Darwin’s volte-face with wit and equilibrium—that stylistic analysis would show that Galton could not have written that sentence. However, this rhetorical device is neither here nor there beside the indisputable fact that Galton never reached Lake Ngami (any more than Linnaeus ever sailed to the Maelstrøm, or travelled to Torneå). In the case of Linnaeus what we may charitably call the distortions of fact were his own, and are thus in themselves biographical facts. (I am becoming infected by the Victorian sonorous reasoning of Pearson. Just when I had come to believe that I was finding a style of my own, entirely freed from post-post-structuralist clutter.) But Galton never claimed to have reached Lake Ngami, and even denied—to his companions’ annoyance—that his intention had been to reach Lake Ngami. Nor have I ever found any source for the visions Destry-Scholes ascribes to him on the shores of that lake, though it is only fair to record scrupulously that many of the elements—for instance, Galton’s vision of the hanging body of the wretch crucified by Roman soldiery—can be found in his autobiographical memoirs, or his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. He states that his vision of the crucified body came without religious overtones, simply a body.

  What was Destry-Scholes up to? There’s the question, my question. I formed a tentative hypothesis, after reading Pearson, that he was conducting an experiment in the nature of biographical narrative. There is a difference between the kind of biography Pearson wrote, the kind Destry-Scholes wrote of Elmer Bole, and the modern critical, or psychoanalytical, biography. The modern way of characterising Pearson is as a “hagiography” (would he, would Galton, have smiled or frowned at the religious connotations of this?). It could be compared to John Cross’s biography of his wife, George Eliot, with its full, but tendentious and bowdlerised quotations. But there is a sense in which what may appear to be the redundant fullness of quotation, of illustration, saves such hagiographical words from bias. For Galton’s voice speaks beside his disciple’s, and in a different style. And what modern readers, eager for a thesis, a hypothesis, would find redundant, appear to readers on a quest like mine to be facts, to be even things, to be nuggets of pure quiddity. And if you have an ear, the sound of truth, the fall of a sentence, the inspissated muddle of a real controversy of which the end is not known, is there for both instruction and delectation. Pearson did not know (even) about genes. He and Galton did know about Mendel.

  I find I need to record—because I appear to be, because I am, unsympathetic to Pearson—his reaction to Galton’s burial, which he confines to a footnote (IIIA, 435):

  †Francis Galton’s remains were placed in the family vault constructed in the churchyard by his father. He lies by his parents, Samuel Tertius and Violetta (Darwin) Galton … Galton no doubt expressed a wish to lie there, and a simpler village churchyard, more remote and peaceful, could scarcely be found. Yet cremation, as in the case of Herbert Spencer, or of Galton’s own brother, Erasmus Galton, would have seemed to his biographer a more fitting end for what must one day perish. It is with pain that I think even to-day of Francis Galton’s mortal remains coffined in a vault.

/>   What a strange, what a moving thing this footnote is. How full of curious, precise, local feeling. Here is a man fully aware of the emotions that are aroused by the idea of “a simple village church-yard, remote and peaceful.” A man, moreover, obsessed with genealogy and ancestry, who records and respects his subject’s desire to be buried (I avoid, as he did, the anthropomorphism, “to rest”) where his parents are buried. Yet this man’s own emotions are also powerful. He has a “religious agnostic” belief that cremation is purer, more appropriate, symbolically and in fact. He leaves his reader with the merest frisson of a suspicion that his love of the dead man finds the idea of his bodily deliquescence revolting, that the disintegrating corpse haunts his imagination. I do not really know whether this feeling can legitimately be read into his phrase “It is with pain that I think even to-day …” I only know that I did myself so read it, before I was checked by wondering whether I was reading into it. And then, there is his use of the word “biographer.” All he can now be to his friend, he seems to say, is his biographer. At the same time, he claims for that rôle the right to pronounce on what would seem to be—in the context of his and his subject’s beliefs and principles (despite his subject’s expressed wish, we note, but note also that it is from him, the biographer, that we have our information about this wish)—what would seem to be the appropriate ceremony with which to take leave of “what must one day perish.”

  What did Destry-Scholes think the rôle of a biographer was? Why did he tell lies and write parodies? I was finding it increasingly difficult to disentangle his ideas about his three Personages—and the threads ran out all the time, from Linnaeus to Artedi, from Galton to Darwin and Pearson—from my own quest for a way to look at the world, for some kind of direct collision on my part with things. All right, also with facts. Looking back on my own times, what most strikes me is that we have developed endlessly subtle styles and techniques to reveal the secret meaning behind the apparent meaning, to open up the desires and assumptions behind what people say and explain about what they feel and believe. And all that can really be read into what we write is our own desire to translate everything, everyone, all reasoning, all irrational hope and fear, into our own Procrustean grid of priorities. The world is very old, and modern theories of the mind and its politics are very recent and very local. They have not stood the test of time (beware cliché, PGN) as Plato’s metaphors of the Cave or Empedocles’ account of the atomic universe have.