The Biographer's Tale
Page 25
All this activity happened towards sunset, which is also, of course, the time when the Rangers close the park. I was once or twice politely ejected from my hollow by mounted men. On one occasion, when dusk had advanced suddenly and unexpectedly, I looked up into the trees and saw a long green flash, bright green, what I thought of as artificial green—between the branches. I rubbed my eyes, which were bleary with staring at beetles. More green flashes. Then a rushing and a rustling and a loud, rasping screech. There was not one parrot, but a whole flock of emerald birds, pink-billed, long-tailed, some with rose-red collars, gathering and roosting in the tree above me. I thought—I really thought—they were a hallucination. But they were dropping real guano, and their conversation was lively. I don’t know why I was so moved, so deeply moved, by this manifestation of the tropics in English oaks. The English sunset caught their feathers in a way the dying light where they originated could never quite have done. I don’t know what it meant. It could equally have been a sign that I should stay in England—since all, including bright tropical birds, was possible here—or whether, more eccentrically, I should take it as a good omen, that I should travel, and help Fulla with the pollinators, the swamps, the savannahs, the dry hillsides. What it said to me, oddly—in the moments before the Ranger came and moved me on, kindly enough, observing that the feral rose-ringed parakeets were on the increase and might prove to be a pest—what the vision of these very real, chattering birds said to me, was, that the senses of order and wonder, both, that I had once got from literature, I now found more easily and directly in the creatures. As a boy my hair had prickled at the beauty of a Shakespeare sonnet, or a Yeats rhythm, or Donne’s bright hairs and brittle bones. That was gone. But I was left with the peculiar conker-leather brown of the elytra of Lucanus cervus L, the pink hook of strong beaks, horns and claws, stamens and pistils, the beat of demonic wing-cases, and descending circles of brilliant rose and emerald wings.
* * *
A farewell to Literature doesn’t, all at one blow, get rid of a new-found addiction to writing. I used to notice, scornfully enough, in my callow days as a pre-critical reader, that bad writers are inspired to put pen to paper by unfamiliar surroundings. By holidays, by tourism, by travel. I write this in a small notebook I brought to record the creatures in. I am indeed on a holiday—on the holiday, promised by Erik and Christophe. They told me to go anywhere in the world, and I am here. The manuscript, that is the document, of all that other writing, is on my machine (and backed up on disk) in London. I have seen golden cloudberries, sea pink and sandwort, scurvy grass (a kind of cabbage, which grows into a thick green mesh), marsh marigolds and a kind of giant hemlock. The air smells of seaweed and salt-water. It is balmy because of the Gulf Stream, and cool and wild because we are far to the north of the Arctic Circle. We have seen the great sperm whales sounding, and grey sea-eagles circling; we have seen puffins nesting, stockfish hung out to dry, and thousands of gulls of all kinds wheeling, and shrieking, and plunging and tearing at flesh, bobbing on white wave-crests and diving into dark water from a clear sky. We have walked causeways, mountain paths and bog-trails. We have sailed through the Trollfjørd, where impossible crags go up and up, dark above us. We have come south through the Lofoten Islands and are now at Vaerøy, where the houses are built along a wide shore, sheltered by a broad mountain ridge. We have seen storms come racing over the horizons and pelt our windows; we have smelled wild winds, and basked in the sun of the Stranden beach at Heia, under a twelve-hundred-foot vertiginous vertical wall of rock. Tomorrow—which is our last day—we shall take an accompanied boat trip to the island of Mosken, and take a look—from a safe distance—at the Moskenes Current, the Maelstrøm. I suppose this is why I have been unable to resist the urge to start scribbling again (did I say that Destry-Scholes’s fabrication of Linnaeus’s fabrication of his visit to the Maelstrøm was a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe?). I shall look at the current—I can imagine its heaving and racing and rushing and suck, but what I shall see will be different—and I shall know no more than I know now about the whereabouts of Destry-Scholes. We wondered if he too had paced the lovely beach at Heia. We read about the whales who had been swallowed by the whirlpool and cast up on the shores, and about the mythical draugen, a kind of ghost-demon who farms under the ocean, whose oats and corn are sometimes caught in the gills and stomachs of deep-sea fish.
I say our last day, but it has been one long day, for the midnight sun has never set. We found a strange, urgent kind of perpetual wakefulness had come upon us, which we allayed with love-making, in white Norwegian beds, in the open air, in coves, on mountainsides, amongst rocks on beaches. Vera, whom I think of in darkness, has become palely golden in all this space of air and hard rock and tenacious sparse vegetation. She is happy. I realise I did not believe she could be other than sad and cautious. She throws back her head and laughs into the wind, in which her dark hair streams and whips.
That is enough writing. That is dangerously on the edge of the unacceptably—what? Emotional, romantic? Happy? You don’t write about happiness.
Tomorrow, as I said, we are going to see the Maelstrøm. And I have got to stop writing, because Vera has woken up, and is smiling, and holding out her arms.
* * *
I was flipping through this notebook, and I saw what I wrote, a year ago now, saying pompously and untruthfully that you don’t write about happiness. There was also a kind of fastidious nausea about writing about exotic places, which I set down baldly, which persists. Though, come to think of it—I have only just thought of this as I take up my pen—there is a good use to which I could put all this persistent itch to write down different words and sentences in English. I could write—not autobiographical travel books—but useful guides, with bits of “real” writing in them for those necessary nondestructive ecological tourists. I could mix warnings with hints, descriptions with explanations, science with little floating flashes of literature, which still haunt me and will not be exorcised. I could combine my two splendidly dovetailed lives as tourist manager and parataxonomist, with a kind of ghostwriting, a ghost of writing.
I could write about the Turkish hillside where I am sitting. I am in charge of an experimental transept in a scattered strip of red tulips (Tulipa agenensis, Tulipa julia, Tulipa armena) mixed with two kinds of anemone, coronaria and Ranunculus asiaticus. We are studying the pollinators of red bowl-shaped flowers. These have no nectar, and are odourless, or at least with no scent detectable by humans. Some, many, have dark centres at the base of the bowls. We have also created models of flowers, using coloured, odourless plastic cups (red, blue, yellow, green, brown, white) mounted on sticks 15–25 cm high (the average height of the red guild flowers). We also have a spread of groups of 9 cm red petri dishes—one plain red, one containing a dead female beetle, one with a black patch, larger than the beetle. We have discovered, we think, that the red guild flowers are pollinated by Amphicoma beetles, which appear to be attracted by the red colour, and especially by the red-black contrast. This is interesting because beetles were previously believed to be unconcerned with colour, possibly unable to see it. Beetle-pollinated plants tend to be strongly scented with what Linnaeus would have called nauseosos smells—dung, fermentation, decay, ripe and overripe fruit.
We are also watching a small halictid bee, Lasioglossum (Evylaeus) marginatum, and a large anthophorid bee, Synhalonia plumigera, both of which visit the red flowers, but not exclusively.
Our plastic cups and petri dishes (containing a few drops of detergent to catch the landing beetles and prevent any emission of volatiles) are not romantic, though they are curious. But the drifts of red flowers on the sparse hillside are brilliant and lovely. Tulipa agenensis, also known as oculis-solis (the tulip of the eye of the sun), is a sumptuous crimson with velvet black stamens and pointed petals. The crimson and the black are glossy as lacquer: the flowers are stiff and delicate. Tulipa armena, Tulipa julia, take varying forms, sometimes pure scarlet, sometimes yellow feath
ered, sometimes black-bowled, sometimes not. There are geraniums and eremurus. The eighteenth-century Ottoman Sultan Ahmed, whose reign was the lale devri, the Tulip Era, grew millions of tulips in the mountains, and despatched hundreds of gardeners and slaves to grub up millions more. After his fall, these hillside nurseries fell into desuetude. Before we came here, Fulla and I went to Istanbul, took boats along the Bosphorus, visited Topkapi and saw the formal tulips wound into garlands in the glazed tiles of Ahmed’s apartments. Fulla disliked the harem. She is happier here, in the fresh air, on the mountainside. I do not say that she does not find the tulips beautiful; I do not even say that she does not admire the artifice of the glazier and the mosaicist who also found them beautiful. I sent a series of postcards of the mosaics in St. Saviour in Chora to Vera in Willesden. I sent a glittering glass peacock, shimmering in tesserae of rich blue and emerald green, streaked with shocking pink and iridescent with gold.
Literature is threaded in my brain along with my daily language. I remember Browning from childhood.
The wild tulip at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell
Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell.
I remember Tennyson’s goddesses coming down the Idalian hillside for the judgement of Paris.
And at their feet the crocus brake like fire.
I discovered, after we had been working for some time, that the Anemone coronaria (crown anemone, poppy anemone), blood-red, dusky-centred, sooty and powdered (which we simulate with our petri dishes), is the fabled flower which first bloomed from the spilled blood of Adonis, enlivened by Aphrodite, who sprinkled ambrosia on it. Golding’s Ovid goes:
This sed, she sprinckled Nectar on the blood, which through the power
Thereof did swell like bubbles sheere that rise in weather cleere
On water. And before that full an howre expired were
Of all one colour with the blood a flowre she there did find.
Sir Philip Sidney thought that poets made better flowers than Nature.
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done—neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
Not so. As long as we don’t destroy and diminish it irrevocably, the too-much-loved earth will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it. It is all we have. I have to stop writing now—I can see Fulla, coming up the mountainside, quick and surefooted as a golden goat, bringing yogurt and honey. I have just time to remember that Fulla is the name of a minor Norse goddess—a handmaid of Frigga, who kept the jewels of the Queen of Heaven, and spent her time tending woodland and forests, fruit trees and hives, cloudberries, blackberries and golden apples. Here she comes, with that amazing wing of crinkled hair, like an electric pulse, like a swarm, like an independent creature. I can see her severe little face. How beautiful upon the mountains are her sturdy feet in their Ecco sandals. That is an over-the-top sentence. And Fulla is at the top, and I must stop writing and put away this notebook.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to those who have patiently and intricately answered more than usually outlandish requests for information. Chris O’Toole, at the Hope Entomological Institute in Oxford, has provided me with help on bees and taxonomy, on pollination and leks. He even made suggestive and useful plotting suggestions in that regard. I have appropriated his experiment on the pollination of red-bowled flowers, and transferred it from Israel to Turkey. It was also Chris who provided me with the names of the beetle that carries Dutch elm disease and the parasitic wasp that preys on the beetle. The beetle is Scolytus scolytus, formally known as Scolytus destructor. The parasitic wasp is Phaeogenes nanus.
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at the Galton Laboratory, University College London, has also been endlessly courteous, showing me Galton’s memorabilia in his laboratory, suggesting reading on Galton, and even weighing the nut he once attached to the back of a stag-beetle, in the interests of fictive accuracy.
Claudine Fabre-Vassas provided conversation and a steady supply of books by and about Linnaeus, some, of books not available in English, in French translations.
I am grateful also to Gina Douglas, the Librarian of the Linnean Society, who showed me Linnaeus’s collections, library and manuscripts, and with whom I was briefly enclosed in the strongroom in the dark. She suggested further reading on Linnaeus which proved extremely exciting.
My Danish friend and translator, Claus Bech, provided all sorts of information, linguistic, entomological and mythic. He told me about the minor goddess Fulla, translations of “stag-beetle,” and many other things.
John Saumarez-Smith, most resourceful of booksellers, suggested and found many books, including Blunt on Linnaeus. And I could not have done without the resources and unfailing courtesy of the London Library and its staff.
I am, as always, grateful to Gill Marsden for precision, energy and moral support when most needed. Also to my agent, Michael Sissons, for wisdom and enthusiasm, and to Jenny Uglow, most imaginative, most patient, and most intelligent of editors. My husband, Peter Duffy, saved me from many errors and found the right name for the Strange Customer’s wine.
The mistakes are, as always, all my own.
A patchwork, echoing book like this should acknowledge its sources. A long reading-list is inappropriate, but the following books were indispensable:
Michael Meyer, Henrik Ibsen—a biography in three volumes, 1967, 1971 and 1971. Also Michael Meyer’s translations of Ibsen’s plays.
Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 4 volumes, 1914–1930.
Wilfrid Blunt, The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus, 1971.
I also used Robert Ferguson’s biography, Henrik Ibsen (1996), and The Sayings of Henrik Ibsen, ed. Roland Huntford (1996). D. W. Forrest’s life of Galton (Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius, 1974) was very helpful, as was the collection of essays on Linnaeus edited by Tore Frängsmyr (Linnaeus: The Man and His Work, 1994). I suspect the germ of the novel lies long ago in my own first reading of Foucault’s remarks on Linnaeus and taxonomy in Les mots et les choses. Lyall Watson’s fascinating Jacobson’s Organ (1999), which is a study of the sense of smell, uses Linnaeus’s taxonomy of smells. It arrived just as I was finishing my book, and I was able to add information from it.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A. S. BYATT is one of Britain’s leading writers. Her novels include The Game, Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990) and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works: Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Elementals. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.
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