The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  Over the next long, empty day, Vera wept and dozed and wept. I made her little meals. And I went back to work on the card index.

  My next grouping is drawn randomly from Destry-Scholes’s cards—or rather, not at random, but following some thread of connectedness, some clue of my own. I begin with a quotation I tracked down to Pearson’s biography, recognising his unique tone of voice with no trouble (Vol. IIIA, p. 411). It concerns Kantsaywhere, an eugenic Utopia written in Galton’s last year of life. It is card no. 411 in the shoebox. I do not think there is any meaning in this coincidence.

  Thinking over the problem of books that have had a lasting influence on mankind his thoughts turned to those ideal polities, Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Harington’s Oceana and Butler’s Erewhon. Why should he not exercise a similar influence on generations to come by writing his own Utopia, a story of a land where the nation was eugenically organised? A modern Gulliver should start his travels again and seek a bride in Eugenia. Only a fragment of this Utopia, which was termed “Kantsaywhere” has reached me, it deals with “The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere.” The book purports to be “Extracts from the Journal of the later Professor I. Donoghue [footnote ‘I don’t know you’!”] revised and edited in accordance with his request by Sir Francis Galton, F.R.S.” On my last visit to Galton on Dec. 28–29, 1910, I was told with an air of some mystery by his niece that he was writing a “novel,” that he would probably not mention it to me, but that if he did, I must persuade him not to publish it, because the love-episodes were too absurdly unreal. It is perhaps needless to say that I should have given no such advice. Galton was failing in physique but not in mind, when I talked with him less than three weeks before his death; and to recommend him to destroy what he had thrown time and energy into creating would have seemed to me criminal. If Swift had died before the issue of Gulliver’s Travels, or Samuel Butler before the publication of Erewhon, their relatives might possibly have destroyed with equal justification those apparently foolish stories. I do not assert that Galton had a literary imagination comparable with that of Swift or of Butler, but I feel strongly that we small fry have no right to judge the salmon to be foolish or even mad, when he leaps six feet out of our pool up a ladder we cannot ascend, and which to us appears to lead into an arid world. We must remember that Galton had set before himself in the last years of his life a definite plan of eugenics propagandism. He wanted to appeal to men of science through his foundation of a Eugenics Laboratory; he had definitely approached separate groups like the Anthropologists in his Huxley Lecture, and the Sociologists in his lecture before their Society and in his subsequent essays; he had appealed to the academic world in his Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford, and to the world that reads popular quarterlies in his Eugenics Education Society. But there are strata of the community which cannot be caught by even these processes. For these he consented to be interviewed, and for the still less readable section who read novels and only look at the picture pages of newspapers, he wrote what they needed, a tale, his “Kantsaywhere.” His scheme of proselytism was a comprehensive one, but I think Galton knew his public better than most men.

  An Ibsen or a Meredith with far more imaginative power would, if they had taught Galton’s creed, have struck above the level of those for whom Galton intended his tale …

  Card no. 413 Letter from G’s niece

  I was just thinking of writing to you about “Kantsaywhere” when your letter came. When I began the work of execution, my heart misgave me so much that I thought I would begin by merely “Bowdlerizing” it and then see. So I destroyed all the story, all poor Miss Augusta, and the Nonnyson anecdotes, and in fact everything not to the point—but there are a good many pages that I felt myself incapable of judging. So I am returning the mutilated copy, hoping … that Professor Karl Pearson might see it … Mutilated as it is, poor “Kantsaywhere” can never be published, and it is as safe from that as if it were destroyed altogether, but I think what remains might interest Prof. Pearson, and possibly, though I doubt it, be useful. Besides, if something survived, I should not feel quite so much like a murderess!

  Card no. 414 [Pearson, of course]

  No doubt those who took upon themselves to pass judgement on Galton’s last work were fully conscious of the responsibility they shouldered. But the fealty of a biographer is of a different kind; his duty is to give a full account of his subject; if there were weaknesses, they were compensated by strengths; if he is called upon to describe the actions of his subject when young, he must equally describe those of his old age.

  I insert now, out of sequence, two cards which seem to me to bear a relation to the final card in the “Kantsaywhere” group. I have read what little Pearson was able to salvage of “Kantsaywhere”—a rather childishly cheerful and dogmatic work, harmless enough unless you think all eugenic ideas are intrinsically evil. And, having seen some of Vera’s more terrible photographs, I am inclined to support research into genetic therapies. But I don’t like Utopias, and I don’t like Galton’s sanitised world, which he himself treats, perhaps, I’m not sure, with a milky kind of irony.

  Card no. 24 G on Energy

  Energy is an attribute of the higher races, being favoured beyond all other qualities by natural selection. We are goaded into activity by the conditions and struggles of life. They afford stimuli that oppress and worry the weakly, who complain and bewail, and it may be succumb to them, but which the energetic man welcomes with a good-humoured shrug, and is the better for in the end.

  The stimuli may be of any description: the only important matter is that all the faculties should be kept working to prevent their perishing by disuse. If the faculties are few, very simple stimuli will suffice. Even that of fleas will go a long way. A dog is continually scratching himself, and a bird pluming itself, whenever they are not occupied with food, hunting, fighting, or love. In those blank times there is very little for them to attend to besides their varied cutaneous irritations. It is a matter of observation that well washed and combed domestic pets grow dull; they miss the stimulus of fleas. If animals did not prosper through the agency of their insect plagues, it seems probable that their races would long since have been so modified that their bodies should have ceased to afford a pasture-ground for parasites.

  Card no. 99 G on the self (selves)

  I suspect that much of what we stigmatise as irresolution is due to our Self being by no means one and indivisible, and that we do not care to sacrifice the Self of the moment for a different one. There are, I believe, cases in which we are wrong to reproach ourselves sternly, saying, “The last week was not spent in the way you now wish it had been,” because the Self was not the same throughout. There is room for applying the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the particular Self at the moment of making retrospect being not the only one to be considered.

  Card no. 101 G on selves and cells

  We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body of each of us is composed. We only know that the cells form a vast nation, some members of which are always dying and others growing to supply their places and that the continual sequence of these multitudes of little lives has its outcome in the larger and conscious life of the man as a whole. Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind.

  Card no. 414 The Religion of Kantsaywhere

  Their creed, or rather, I should say, their superstition—for it has not yet crystallised into a dogmatic creed, is that living beings, and pre-eminently mankind, are the only executive agents of whom we have any certain knowledge. They look upon life at large, as probably a huge organisation in which every separative living thing plays an unconscious part, much as the separate cells do in a living person. Whether the following views were self-born or partly borrowed I do not know,
but the people of Kantsaywhere have the strong belief that the spirits of all the beings who have ever lived are round about, and regard all their actions. They watch the doings of men with eagerness, grieving when their actions are harmful to humanity, and rejoicing when they are helpful. It is a kind of grandiose personification of what we call conscience into a variety of composite portraits. I expect that the many visionaries among them—for there are visionaries in all races—actually see with more or less distinctness the beseeching or the furious figures of these imaginary spirits, either as individuals or as composites. There seems to be some confusion between the family, the racial, and the universal clouds of spirit-watchers. They are supposed to co-exist separately and yet may merge into one or many different wholes. There is also much difference of opinion as to the power of these spirits, some think them only sympathetic, others assign the faculty to them of inspiring ideas in men, others again accredit them with occasional physical powers. Everyone here feels that they themselves will, after their life is over, join the spirit legion, and they look forward with eager hope that their descendants will then do what will be agreeable and not hateful to them. I have heard some who likened life to the narrow crest of the line of breakers of a never-resting and infinite ocean, eating slowly and everlastingly into the opposing shore of an infinite and inert continent. But that metaphor does not help me much, beyond picturing what in their view is the smallness of actual life with the much larger amount of elements of potential life.

  Reading the whole of Pearson’s account of all this, I noticed that Galton had given his Utopians a central interest in composite photographs, which became both family and religious icons, being used in the (cheerful) funeral services. “In Kantsaywhere they think much more of the race than of the individual …”

  I add, as a footnote for Fulla, something else I found in Pearson, but not in Destry-Scholes’s shoebox. It is from a letter to his niece, Milly, Mrs. Lethbridge, who was responsible for the semi-destruction of Kantsaywhere. He is discussing, among other things, the design of his sister Emma’s tombstone, which was decorated with drawings of Galtonia—the Hyacinthus candicus, named for Galton himself by Professor J. Decaisne in Paris. It is a South African bulb, shooting up to five feet and more. I derive this information from Pearson’s footnote to Galton’s letter. The letter is dated December 17th 1904. It is on page 533 of Pearson, Vol. IIIB (I have been driven insane enough by Destry-Scholes’s lack of references to find myself unable to omit this one, even for no possible reader). Plate LVI facing page 534 is a line drawing of Galtonia.

  Dear Emma’s gravestone is not even yet put up … I send you a photo of the inscription which you will like to keep, all the more for having helped in drawing up the words. The Galtonias at either side are utter failures. The artist has no excuse, for he was supplied with many drawings; but accuracy is not the strong point of artists. They think as much of shadows as of substances, and a bandbox casts as black a shadow as a block of granite. (That metaphor might be worked up!) … The last rose of summer—the last rat of the year! You will have to keep and pet him or her. But the large probable families of rats are appalling. I heard that all the hives full of Ligurian bees in England, for many years, were descended from a single queen bee, sent by post to England from the Riviera. Is it possible?

  Galtonia (Hyacinthus candicus) from tropical South Africa

  I add some more random cards from the shoebox. They are random, that is to say, I picked them from their places (widely separated) and rearranged them in this document. The threads of connection are my own. In that sense at least, I am becoming the biographer of Scholes Destry-Scholes, or at least organising the quarry of secondary materials into an ur-shape, a preliminary form.

  Card no. 79 [Henrik Jaeger, Dagbladet, 27 Feb. 1891—my added ref. PGN.] [Review of opening of Hedda Gabler]

  “The applause weakened as the play progressed … Ibsen has treated the psychological conflicts portrayed here as Pasteur and Koch treat bacteria.”

  And Georg Göthe in Ny Svenske Tidskrift: “No dramatic talent can make a character as obscurely complex as Hedda Gabler really clear and dramatically consistent.”

  Card no. 113 [Georg Brandes to Professor C. J.

  Salomonsen, Dresden, 1874. PGN.] [Salomonsen a biologist. PGN.]

  The man sits there producing very little, unable to draw intellectual nourishment from the world around him because he lacks the organs to do so, and is rigidly set in all kinds of prejudices and eccentricities. He has a sure eye for only one thing, namely the prejudices of his homeland, everything that is obsolete in Norway and Denmark; but the lack of any systematic education makes him desperately limited. Fancy—he seriously believes in a time when “the intelligent minority” in these countries “will be forced to enlist the aid of chemistry and medicine in poisoning the proletariat” to save themselves from being politically overwhelmed by the majority. And this universal poisoning is what he wants. The Germans, too, amongst whom he has lived for so long (without getting to know a single intelligent one and without reading more than one or two books a year—literally), the Germans too he knows very incompletely, and his acquaintance with one or two crazy Catholics has led him to throw in his sympathy with the Catholic faction, the while he calls himself a Freethinker. In short he is lost in an endless chaos of characterlessness.

  Card no. 2 [From Ibsen’s Balloon Letter to a Swedish Lady, despatched by Ibsen from the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. In this letter (passages not collected by S D-S), he tells her he can’t send the letter by carrier pigeon because he has no doves, wch. are the birds of hope. “In this cramped ground, but owls and ravens build. No messengers for a lady.” He has been up the Nile with a group of international fellow-passengers

  Eleven cocks from France, four Spanish stallions …

  A kind of ram from Switzerland … and of course

  A herd of German wild pigs, almost tamed.

  Ibsen’s Swedish Lady was Fru Frederika Limnell. PGN]

  Where personality is lacking,

  Where there is neither hatred, indignation,

  Nor joy, no beat of pulse nor flush of blood,

  Glory is but a dry rattle of bones.

  Who has not seen Juno in his mind’s eye

  Pale in her wrath as she surprised her lord?…

  But the Egyptian gods were otherwise.

  Static, they never, like the gods of Greece

  And men, sinned, groped, and raised themselves from sin.

  And so this culture, from millennia old

  Lies like a bloodless mummy in a crypt.

  [Galton’s niece, an ancestral Queen Bee, Ibsen’s Swedish Lady, pointless hooks into my own story. And goddesses, too, for I have discovered that Fulla is a Scandinavian nature-goddess, handmaid to Frigg.]

  Card no. 134

  Although philosophers may have written to show the impossibility of our discovering what goes on in the minds of others, I maintain an opposite opinion. I do not see why the report of a person on his own mind should not be as intelligible and trustworthy as that of a traveller upon a new country, whose landscapes and inhabitants are of a different type to any which we ourselves have seen. It appears to me that inquiry into the mental constitution of other people is a most fertile field for exploration, especially as there is much in the facts adduced here, as well as elsewhere, to show that original differences in mental constitution are permanent, being little modified by the accident of education, and that they are strongly hereditary.

  Destry-Scholes had as usual not bothered to annotate this, and in my mind I wrongly for some time associated it with the citations from Ibsen amongst which I have now placed it. It is in fact from a paper in Mind (Vol. IX, pp. 406–13, 1884) on “Free-Will, Observations and Inferences,” by Galton. Destry-Scholes can never have imagined me when he left this amorphous dossier. I suppose the only reader he can have imagined was himself, and he must have had a photographic memory, quite extraordinarily well-tra
ined, to know his way around all this. I was quite pleased with my running-down, in indexes, of the previous citation, which took time. I then found that I could have found it in Pearson—whom I increasingly respect, at least as a constructor of thorough footnotes and index.

  Card no. 98 [Reported speech of HI]

  Before I write one word, 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 stage setting, the dramatic ensemble, all of this 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 bears himself, what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.

  Card no. 137 [Reported speech of HI]

  As a rule I make 3 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 the 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.