The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  In the end, all I can do, is read the biographer’s paragraph on his subject’s dead body and make an imaginative stab at the penumbra of his words. My own ideas of the duties of a “biographer,” of “thinking with pain,” “of mortal remains,” of “a fitting end for what must one day perish” confer life, but not necessarily more truth, on what Pearson had, in his own terms, quite adequately expressed.

  But no string has an end. Like spider-silk unreeling.

  I have managed to trap myself in digressions, if there can be digressions in a project that appears alternately to have too little and too much form. I start too many hares. (What does that mean? I have never seen a hare run. I am an urban animal. Ah, but in the mind’s eye … And whose voice is that, with its plangent Ah, but …?) I shall go back to my list of what was, before I or Destry-Scholes interrupted it, a reasonably coherent “hybrids and mixtures” cluster.

  Card no. 54

  June 5th 1888,

  The sea’s magnetic power. The longing for the sea. Human beings akin to the sea. Bound by the sea. Dependent on the sea. Must return to it. One species of fish is a vital link in the chain of evolution. Do rudiments of it still reside in the human mind? In the minds of certain people.

  Images of the teeming life of the sea and of “what is lost forever.” The sea operates a power over one’s moods, it works like a will. The sea can hypnotise. Nature in general can … She has come from the sea. Became secretly engaged to the Strange Passenger … At heart, in her instincts—he is the one with whom she is living in marriage …

  Card no. 55

  PROFESSOR RUBEK: All the same, I can assure you they’re not simply portrait-busts.

  MAIA: What else are they then?

  PR: There’s something subtle and equivocal lurking below the surface of all those portraits … a secret something that the mob can’t see.

  MAIA: Oh?

  PR: Only I can see it—and how it makes me laugh! On the surface, there’s the “striking likeness” as they call it, that they all stand and gape with wonder at. But deep down underneath, there’s the pompous self-righteous face of a horse, the obstinate muzzle of a mule, the lop-eared, shallow-pated head of a dog, a greasy hog’s-snout … and sometimes the gross brutal mask of a bull!

  MAIA: (indifferently) All the dear old farmyard, in fact.

  PR: Just the dear old farmyard, Maia. All the animals that man has perverted for his own ends, and who in their turn have perverted man.

  Card no. 56

  Besides, the lad has no obvious defects,

  And seems well-built. True, he’s only got one head,

  But my daughter is no better off in that respect.

  Three-headed trolls are going right out of fashion.

  Even two heads are rare nowadays,

  And they are not what they used to be.

  Card no. 57

  Well, well, my son, we must give you some treatment

  To cure this human nature of yours.

  PEER: What will you do?

  OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS: In your left eye I’ll make a little cut, so that you’ll see awry But all you see will seem bright and fair. Then I’ll nip out your right window-pane—

  PEER: Are you drunk?

  OLD MAN: [Lays several sharp instruments on the table.]

  Here you see the glazier’s tools.

  We’ll blinker you, like a surly bull.

  Then you’ll see your bride is beautiful.

  And there’ll be an end to these illusions

  Of dancing sows, and cows playing harps—

  The last card may be thought to be more appropriately a part of my next cluster, which I have tentatively called “(Composite) portrait photography.” Or possibly “Composite portrait (photography).” It was easy enough to identify the quotations from Peer Gynt and When We Dead Awaken. The fish/sea card, which might also go into my “drowning” cluster, is part of Ibsen’s notes for The Lady from the Sea. Writing down the reference to the Strange Passenger reminds me of my own Strange Customer, Mr. Maurice Bossey.

  I looked at some of the Web sites he had listed. They were, as I believe I had always suspected, sites of a pornographic nature. They showed pictures—both still and moving—of … I don’t have to write down what they were of. I could find a string of little, cold, categorising words. Pederasty. Paedophilia. Sado-masochism. Sadism. Some of the collars and claws and forks and chains and things were quite funny. Some of the flesh was, too. Like rubber balloons. Some of the photographs were better than others, you got convincing gouts of blood (well, they were real, in some place, at some time, I imagine, I suppose). There are other words. Pain. Hurt. Damage. I suddenly saw the point, so to speak, of the semiotic thrust of all Maurice Bossey’s little implements, his knife, his screw, his piercer-and-cutter. All these photographs were intermingled (from site to site) with idyllic or Edenic holiday “suggestions.” The photography for some of these was very lovely. Gold-skinned pre-pubertal boys ran across white sands under waving palm-trees, and rolled, open-legged, in the softly curling edges of the surf. Next to them, naked babies played in pools, patting liquescent sand-towers with sharp spades.

  I had never liked Maurice Bossey. Now the thought of him made me feel sick. (That is the way I am. It is no good pretending to a breadth of sympathy I don’t have. And don’t want to have. I know a victim when I see one, however sweetly he smiles.)

  The real problem was that the sickness I felt spread over into my feelings about my absent employers, so gently, so variously hedonistic, so comprehensive in their provision of pleasure for everyone. Had they left me alone with Bossey as a test? Or did they not know about Bossey, was he a contact of the absent Pim or Pym whom they had never once mentioned? The images of the unpolluted beaches on Pacific atolls which were part of Puck’s Girdle’s furniture of human dreams merged in my mind with these sweet images of terror and pain, and would not be separated again, as though sun and sand were filmed over with the sickly scent of blood. (A mixed metaphor. Let it lie.)

  I had no one to talk to about any of all this. I intended to present Ormerod Goode with my selective and arranged account of the card-box, when it was done. That left Vera Alphage, who appeared to wish to keep a pleasant distance. She did not, for instance, ask me how I was getting on, though she continued to provide tasty little snacks. Then one day, as I was leaving, she called me into her little sitting-room. She had set up a green-felted card-table—there was a bizarre moment when I expected her, like Miss Havisham, to require me to “play.” I first thought she was playing some intricate and unusually numerous kind of solitaire against herself. I then recognised Destry-Scholes’s marble collection, deployed across the green field in little clusters and lines, of varying colours and sizes. She said,

  “I had the idea, in an idle moment, of seeing whether I could fit Uncle’s names to his marbles, so to speak. You know—he’s got this list of names, and then the lists of the clans and cohorts and so on of the army—if it is an army and not a hierarchical society, or an imaginary kingdom, or whatever. Then I got rather annoyed—you find you’ve got six possible marbles to one name, and six possible names to one marble, and others that are just baffling. I decided to start by dividing them into colours. Blue, green, brown, purple, white and clear, red, pink, and so on. I got out the table because I had to put what I call the overlaps or links—ones that are equally blue and green, or yellow and brown—between the major groups. The ones that are merely flecked with one colour, but predominantly another, I’ve put with the colour.

  “Then I’ve divided the colours into opaque and transparent. Then I’ve got oddities, like turquoise, and fawn. And a couple of iridescent ones. Like opals. There’s a whole group of names which are merely precious stones—Jade, Jasper, Chrysolite—though not Opal—and some, like Sapphira that are almost stones, or Smaragdine, which turns out to be an old word for emerald, and Sardonyx. And Topaz. The only one that looks much like a topaz is also the perfect candidate for Tiger’s Eye.”
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  I was interested in her little circles of spheres—perhaps even more so because I felt a pointless but aesthetically interesting affinity with my own clusters of cards. I said,

  “The cards in the card index are falling into related clusters. Like the sea, as a theme. Or composites.”

  “I thought some of those old photos looked rather like Galton’s composites,” she said, revealing knowledge I hadn’t known she had.

  “You know about Galton?”

  “Not really. But I know quite a lot about photography, one way and another. I thought one of the marble-armies might be, so to speak, marine. I’ve got Bladderwrack, Wrasse, Tsunami, Maelstrøm, Crest, Chronofoam (whatever that is—it could be a kind of shaving cream). I’ve got Atoll, Sea-green Ink, Painted Ocean, Wake—which could mean all sorts of things, but there’s one or two with trails of bubbles that look just like wakes—”

  I said that “sea-green ink” might be an abbreviation of “sea-green incorruptible” and refer to Robespierre. She said that there were the names Thermidor and Fructidor and one called Pimpernel, which might be to do with The Scarlet Pimpernel. Then, she said, there were the names of body parts. Thorax and Omoplat, Cervicle, Bum, Lung and Cocky, though that went with all sorts of other groupings, poultry and human attributes like Sultry and Snazzy …

  I said it seemed impossible to reconstitute such an arbitrary system.

  She said it was not arbitrary, each marble had been carefully and uniquely named.

  She said she loved the little glass balls absolutely in themselves, they were magical. She held up several to the light, and we peered through them. White worms or ribbons twisted wildly through emerald and amethyst caverns. A spiral danced round itself, pink and gold, in clear glass with a blueish cast. Vera Alphage handed me two particular ones.

  “I thought Bum couldn’t be hard to identify. I thought one of these must be Bum.”

  One had two white hemispheres in transparent toffee, like the summits of hard-boiled eggs. One had a scarlet opaque object, with a startling resemblance to the male organ of generation, inside a transparent turquoise veiling. She said, “I don’t know what sort of age he was when he started naming them. Little boys call the whole system indifferently, “Bum.” Later they differentiate.”

  I pointed out that this system was not constructed by a little boy. Little boys don’t know words like Smaragdine and Omoplat. Vera Alphage said that she had the feeling that the collection had accumulated over a very long period, that he had started with maybe half-a-dozen cherished marbles—and had added, and added, “as one does.” Her empty little room showed no sign of a collector’s passion. I said this was an interesting theory, but where was her evidence? She said that the little notebooks showed a development in the handwriting—some was quite infantile, and the lists in this handwriting were short.

  She said, “There is a possible grouping of atomic energy names. There is Fusion, and Fission, and Neutrino and Cloud Mushroom. And in that case Atoll would go with Mushroom Cloud, of course. But then Cloud Mushroom might go with Seaweed, and Bonsai, and Chrysanthemum and Miso, a kind of Japanesey group.”

  I said surely the lists themselves, the order in which they were presented, gave some clue. I thought of my painstaking numbering of the cards. She said, “But the same names appear in different orders in several of the lists. They obviously changed allegiances, that is to say, categories.” She said, “Often, he doesn’t name the lists, themselves. Just little signs, like hieroglyphs, or picture-writing.”

  I said that was just like his not-quite-system in the boxes.

  She held up a very large rose and emerald and cobalt whirl. “Do you think this is Aurora Borealis? Or”—she held up one with a gold rim and a flare of transparent crimson like a dancer’s skirt—“this?”

  I said I wasn’t quite sure what she hoped to achieve.

  She said she had no hope of ever understanding the system. But by process of elimination, she wondered whether it would be possible to fix a name to each marble. She did believe each had had one name and one only.

  She looked at me defensively. She said, “It’s a silly idea.” She put out her arms to roll all her groups into an indiscriminate cluster. I put my hand on hers, instinctively, to stop her. I took hold of her wrist. I felt the blood pulse under my fingers and saw it jump blue under her white skin. (There was a marble called Azurevein, somewhere.) I said, holding on to her wrist, that it wasn’t a silly idea, no more silly than what I was doing myself. We were both mapping the mind of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

  There was a blue flicker of electricity in the blue veins and my own fingertips.

  I let go. What else was I to do?

  I see the next cluster, the photography cluster beginning with card no. 75, as the (composite) portrait photography, or composite portrait (photography) cluster. And what came in between, my non-existent reader may well ask. All sorts. A description of an overcoat. A list of high and low tides (I don’t know where). A few bits of poetry on subjects I can’t track down (time passing, in various languages, roots and flowers, ditto). None of these are obviously connected to the three personages, though a reasonable guess would be that they might be, must be. Anyway, here are some of the photos.

  Card no. 75

  My first idea of composite portraiture arose through a request by Sir Edmund du Cane, then H.M. Inspector of Prisons, to examine the photographs of criminals in order to discover and to define the types of features, if there be any, that are associated with different kinds of criminality. The popular ideas were known to be very inaccurate, and he thought the subject worthy of scientific study. I gladly offered to do what I could, and he gave me full opportunity of seeing prisons and of studying a large number of photographs of criminals, which were of course to be used confidentially.

  At first, for obtaining pictorial averages, I combined pairs of portraits with a stereoscope, with more or less success. Then I recollected an often observed effect with magic lanthorns, when two lanthorns converge on the same screen, and while the one is throwing its image, the operator slowly withdraws the light from it and throws it on the next one. The first image yields slowly to the second, with little sense of discordance in the parts that at all resemble one another. It was obviously possible to photograph superimposed images on a screen by the simultaneous use of two or more lanthorns. What was common to all of the images would then appear vigorous, while individual differences would be too faint for notice. Then the idea occurred to me that the pictures themselves might be severally adjusted in the same place, and be photographed successively on the same plate, allowing a fractional part of the total time of exposure to each portrait.

  Card no. 76 18 May 1871, Dresden

  I have often thought about what you once wrote, that I had not taken up the standpoint of modern scientific knowledge. How could I overcome this failing? But is not each generation born with the prejudices of its time? Have you ever noticed in a painting of a group from some previous century a curious kind of family likeness between people of the same period? So it is in the field of intellect too. What we profane creatures lack in knowledge I think we possess, to a certain degree in intuition or instinct. And a writer’s task is essentially to see, not to mirror; I am conscious of a peculiar danger to myself in indulging the latter tendency.

  Card no. 77

  I have successfully made many composites both of races and of families. The composites are always more refined and ideal-looking than any one of their components, but I found that persons did not like being mixed up with their brothers and sisters in a common portrait. It seems a curious and rather silly feeling, but there can be no doubt of its existence. I see no other reason why composite portraiture should not be much employed for obtaining family types. Composites might be made of brother and sisters, parents and grandparents, together with a composite of the race, each in their due proportions, according to the Ancestral Law (see chapter on Heredity). The result would be very instructive, but the diff
iculty of obtaining the material is now overwhelming. Male and female portraits blend well together with an epicene result.

  Card no. 78

  Stephen Sinding on modelling statue for theatre. “I worked and worked and couldn’t get it right. I discarded one effort after another. While I was working on the sixth it occurred to me to ask Ibsen to take his spectacles off. He laid them aside and looked at me. I have never seen two eyes like those. One was large, I might almost say horrible—so it seemed to me—and deeply mystical; the other much smaller, rather pinched up, cold and clear and calmly probing. I stood speechless for a few seconds and stared at those eyes, and spoke the thought that flashed into my mind: ‘I wouldn’t like to have you as an enemy!’ Then his eyes and his whole body seemed to blaze, and I thought instinctively of the troll in the fairy tale who pops out of his hole and roars: ‘Who’s chopping trees in my forest?’ ”

  Card no. 79

  THIN PERSON: There are two ways in which a man can be himself.

  A right way and a wrong way.