The Biographer's Tale

  On each re-reading I transferred more of my attention from the myriad-minded Bole to his discreet historian. It was a surprise that Bole knew the morphology of Mediterranean solitary bees, the recurring motifs of Turkish fairy tales, the deficiencies of the supply-lines of the British army. It was, on reflection, even more of a surprise that Scholes Destry-Scholes knew all that Bole knew, had tracked down his sources and corrected his errors, where necessary (they were frequent). Not only that, Scholes Destry-Scholes was able to satisfy the reader’s (that is, my) curiosity in that he knew more of Bole’s subjects than Bole did, or could. He had the benefit of Paul Underwood’s exemplary revelations at the Church of the Chora. He had read the secret military telegrams—including those about Bole’s activities—which Bole had no access to.

  It is true that the force, the energy, the first fierce gaze of desire, the first triumphant uncovering or acquisition were Bole’s. He was a free agent, Destry-Scholes followed in his footsteps. (I found myself in my wilder moments of naked abandon chanting “King Wenceslas” to myself on hot summer evenings, a can of beer in one hand, The Voyager in the other. “Mark my footsteps, good my Page, Tread thou in them boldly. Thou shalt find the winter’s rage, Freeze thy blood less coldly.”) Destry-Scholes’s work was a miracle of metamorphosis. Bole was always Bole. Even his Burtonian versions of seventeenth-century Turkish had a Bolean ring, so to speak. But Destry-Scholes was subtle. He could write like a connoisseur of faience, like a brisk strategic analyst, like John Addington Symonds or even like George Eliot, where it was appropriate—some of his accounts of Evangeline’s attitudes to Bole’s curious mystical beliefs could have come out of Daniel Deronda.

  He could write, as I have suggested, like a good literary critic, pointing out salient words and echoes of other texts. He could describe alien cultures in a supremely tactful and intriguing paragraph—his own account of the Turkish hamam, the bathhouse, is not, as far as I can ascertain, derived from Bole, but from other sources, or from personal knowledge.

  Or from personal knowledge. This faceless writer constructed this edifice of styles, of facts, and even wrote in the first person where it seemed to him appropriate to do so. Sometimes it seemed as though he thought he was doing journeyman-work, making a record, simply. Sometimes there appeared to be a glimpse of pride in his own mastery, his art, you might even say. I had a vision of him sitting over a desk in lamplight, deftly twisting a Rubik’s Cube into shape. Or, in a more complex vision, selecting the tesserae—blue, green, ivory, white glass, gold and silver, laying them at different angles on their bed of colour to reflect the light in different ways.

  The project may have come to me in a dream. I am not being fanciful, simply precise. I woke one morning and thought, “It would be interesting to find out about Scholes Destry-Scholes.” I had a vague memory of a dream of pursuit through dappled green and gold underwater caverns. Of rising to the surface and of seeing a pattern of glass balls, fishermen’s floats, on the surface of the sea, blue, green, transparent.

  “I could write a biography,” I said to myself, possibly even aloud, “of Scholes Destry-Scholes.” Only a biography seemed an appropriate form for the great biographer. I never had any doubt about that. I had discovered the superiority of the form. I would write one myself.

  I made an appointment to discuss this idea with Ormerod Goode. He gave me dark, syrupy sherry on this occasion, Oloroso. I was offered no choice, though the half-full bottle of the spirituous Glenmorangie stood amongst the clean glasses. I had brought the three volumes to return to him, and explained my project. He smiled mildly, and said I could keep them until I had contrived to procure copies of my own, which could easily be done from good secondhand bookshops. He said that it might be possible to continue to hold my postgraduate scholarship, if I were to change subjects and transfer to Goode himself as supervisor. This—although it lacked the drama of renunciation—seemed a prudent course of action. He asked about the dissertation I was about to abandon—had abandoned. Its title was “Personae of female desire in the novels of Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and Somerset Maugham.” I sometimes thought it should have been “Female personae of desire in the novels of Firbank, Forster and Maugham” and could not make up my mind as to whether this changed the whole meaning completely, or made no difference at all. I did not discuss it with Goode, who simply nodded solemnly when I told him, and remarked that there was certainly no one else in the department who would be interested in a biographical study of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

  “You must understand,” he said, “that I have no particular competence in the field either. I am a philologist, a taxonomist of place-names. I met the man, but it cannot be said I knew him.”

  “You met him?” I said, swallowing my excitement. “What was he like?”

  “I hardly remember. Blondish. Medium-sized. I have a bad memory for faces. He came to give a lecture in 1959 on the Art of Biography. Only about half a dozen students attended, and myself. I was deputed to manage the slide projector. I invited him to a drink, but he wouldn’t stay. Of course, when I heard the lecture I hadn’t read the biography, didn’t realise it was out of the ordinary, or I’d have pressed him harder, perhaps. I had a problem I wanted to get back to, I remember. I was waiting for him to go away. He probably noticed that.”

  We looked at each other. I sipped the unctuous sherry. He said, “Come to think of it, I can give you your first research document. He left his notes. Well, a carbon copy of the notes of his lecture. I put it in a drawer, meaning to send it to him, and didn’t. It was only a carbon, I expect he had the top copy. I’ll hunt it out.”

  His filing-cabinet was orderly. He handed me the desiccated yellow paper, with the faint blue carbon traces of typing. Three foolscap sheets. “The Art of Biography.” The full-stops had made little holes, like pinpricks. I put it in my bag, with the returned biography. I said,

  “How do you suggest I set about finding out about his life?”

  “Oh, the usual ways, I suppose. Go to Somerset House, look up his birth and death. Advertise in the TLS and other places for information. Contact his publishers. Publishers change every three or four months these days, but you may find someone who remembered him, or some letters in an archive. That’s the way to begin. I’ve no idea if he was married or anything. That’s for you to discover. All I know for certain is how he died. Or probably died.”

  He poured more sherry.

  “Probably died?”

  “He drowned. He drowned off the coast of the Lofoten Islands. Or at least an empty boat was found, floating.”

  I didn’t know where the Lofoten Islands were. I vaguely assumed they must be not far from the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, the haunts of Bole.

  “The Lofoten Islands, you know, off the north-west coast of Norway. He may have had an idea of taking a look at the Maelstrøm. There was a small item in the press—I remembered, because I had read the book, I had an interest. The Norwegians said they had warned him, when he set out, about the dangerous currents. He was on a solitary walking holiday, the press said. I was a bit surprised. It’s my stamping-ground, I thought, not his, full of nice linguistic titbits and old legends. He was never found, but then, he wouldn’t have been.”

  My imagination wouldn’t form an image of the Lofoten Islands.

  “You’ll have to find out what he was doing there, too,” said Goode, cheerfully. “Detective work. What fun.”

  I went home, quite excited. It seemed to me I was about to embark on new ways of working, new kinds of thought. I would talk to people who, like Goode, remembered the man, remembered facts and events, and with any luck, remembered more, and better. I would hunt down Destry-Scholes, I told myself, I would ferret out his secrets, I would penetrate his surface compartments and lay bare his true motives. I then thought, how very nasty all these metaphors were, and one at least of them contained another word (“penetrate”) I had vowed for ever to eschew.

  Moreover, the clichéd metaphors weren’t accurate. I
didn’t want to hunt or penetrate Destry-Scholes. I wanted, more simply, to get to know him, to meet him, maybe to make a kind of a friend of him. A collaborator, a colleague. I saw immediately that “getting to know” Destry-Scholes was a much harder, more anxious task than hunting or penetrating him would have been. It required another skill, which carried with it yet another word I most vehemently avoided—“identify.” I hate marking essays by female students who say plaintively that they can’t identify with Mrs. Dalloway or Gwendolen Harleth. It is even worse when they claim that they do “identify with” Sue Bridehead, or Tess (it is almost always Hardy). What on earth does “identify” mean? See imaginatively, out of the eyes of? It is a disgusting skinned phrase.

  Destry-Scholes certainly never “identified with” Elmer Bole, though I think it is clear from his writings that most of the time he liked him, or liked him well enough. Bole didn’t annoy him, morally or intellectually, even when he betrayed friends, even when he wrote badly. Or else he was a supremely tolerant man (Destry-Scholes, I mean). It occurred to me that it was a delicious, delicate tact, being, so to speak, the third in line, organising my own attention to the attention of a man intent on discovering the whole truth about yet a third man.

  I was brashly confident in those early days. I wrote off to the publisher of the biography, Holme & Holly, which had been subsumed in an American conglomerate, which had been bought by a German conglomerate. I addressed my letter “To Whom It May Concern.” I wrote, and paid for, an advertisement in the TLS—“letters, information, manuscripts, anything helpful for a biographical study of Scholes Destry-Scholes, biographer of Sir Elmer Bole.” I went to Somerset House and made my own first discovery. Scholes had indeed been born in Pontefract, on July 4th 1925; but his given name had been not Scholes Destry-Scholes, but Percival Scholes Destry. His parents were Robert Walter and Julia Ann Destry née Scholes. It had to be the same man. Two men cannot be born in the same small town on the same day with Destry and Scholes in their name. He must have given up the Percival for reasons of his own, and doubled the Scholes for other reasons—did he love that side of his family better? I know about not liking one’s given name. My mother must have thought Phineas was an inspiration—I remember her saying, when I was a little boy, and cried because I was bullied for being odd, that I would grow up to be glad to be unusual, to have something remarkable about me, if only a name. I think Percival—or any diminutive—Percy, Perce—would have been worse than Phineas for a little boy in a provincial Yorkshire town. I wondered, in a moment of random inspiration, if he had chosen his name because its rhythm matched that of Ford Madox Ford, who had remade himself as an Englishman after the First World War.

  Of course, I immediately read, and re-read, and annotated Destry-Scholes’s notes on “The Art of Biography.” A large part of these three pages was, unfortunately, simply typed-out quotations from Elmer Bole, including the famous references to the red and green apples, with the terse instruction “explain and discuss.” He appeared to have conceived his lecture as a primer—and to a certain extent a theoretical enquiry—for aspiring biographers. This in a sense included me, although, of course, the lecture was delivered many years before my birth. I found it hard to put aside my ingrained habits of suspicion and contentiousness, even before the simple reasonable tone of the document, which said many things I had already thought might indeed have been written by the friend and colleague I was looking for. I could not throw off a 1990s need to think a 1950s critic both naïve and disingenuous. He wrote:

  About Facts

  First find your facts.

  Select your facts. (What to include, what to omit.)

  Arrange your facts.

  Consider missing facts.

  Explain your facts. How much, and what, will you explain, and why?

  This leads to the vexed question of speculation. Does it have any place, and if it does, on what basis?

  He had also written:

  A Hypothetical Situation

  We may say, “He travelled by train from Edinburgh to London.” We know that, because we have the ticket, let us say, as well as knowing where he dined in London and whom he visited in Edinburgh. We do not have to adduce the railway ticket. A biography is not an examination script.

  We may also say, “He would have seen, from the train, Durham Cathedral where he was married.” But we do not know. He might have been looking the other way. He might have been asleep. He might have been reading The Times—or War and Peace, or the Inferno, or the Beano. He might have looked out of the window on the other side of the train and witnessed a murder he was not sure was a murder, and never reported.

  If he were a character in a novel, the novelist would have a right to choose between The Times, War and Peace, the Inferno and the Beano, and would choose for his own reasons, and would inevitably be right. Though if he did not explain the Beano, he might lose a little credibility, unless he were a surrealist.

  A biographer must never claim knowledge of that which he does not know. Whereof we cannot know, thereof must we be silent. You will find that this requirement gives both form and beauty to a good biography. Perhaps contrary to your expectations.

  On another page, he had written:

  Values

  A life assumes the value of an individual. Whether you see that individual as unique or as a type depends on your view of the world and of biography; you will do well to consider this before setting pen to paper. (There are many possible positions to take up.)

  You may believe in objectivity and neutrality. You may ask, “Why not just publish a dossier with explanatory footnotes?” Why not indeed? It is not a bad idea. But you are probably bitten by the urge [change this silly metaphor, SD-S] to construct a complete narrative. You may be an historian or a novelist manqué, or that rara avis, a true biographer. An artist-biographer, we may nervously and tentatively claim.

  An artistic narrative in our time might analyse the leitmotifs of a life, as a music critic analyses the underlying form of a Wagnerian opus. A good biographer will do well to be lucidly aware of the theoretical presuppositions he is making use of in such an analysis. In our time, the prevailing sets are Freudian, or Marxist, or vaguely liberal-humane. The Freudian belief in the repetition-compulsion, for example, can lead to some elegant discoveries of leitmotifs. The Marxist belief that ideology constructs the self has other seductions. We are not now likely to adopt mental “sets” of national pride, or hero-worship, though both of these are ancient propensities, like ancestor-worship, from which none of us are free. We cannot predict, of course, future sets of beliefs which will make our own—so natural to us—look naïve or old-fashioned.

  I was particularly moved by Destry-Scholes’s note to himself about the metaphor. I was delighted by his choice of adjective—“silly,” the straightforward, right adjective for that metaphor, as I was delighted by his preoccupation with silly metaphors. There was an affinity between us. It would reveal itself in other ways, I was sure.

  Whilst I was waiting for answers to my letter and advertisement, I thought I would walk in Destry-Scholes’s traces, at least in the place where I myself was most at home, the British Library. I asked, jokingly, at the issue desk if it was known where he had sat, or when he had come, but such records are not kept. It is known where Karl Marx sat, because he never moved away from his singular place. I had the silly idea that if I were to move round the whole reading room, from Row A to Row Z, and to sit once in every seat, I would necessarily have sat where Destry-Scholes had sat. I had no idea of the shape of his bottom (I imagined it thin) or of the cut of his trousers (I imagined them speckled tweed). I found it necessary to have some image, however provisional.

  I proceeded in an orderly way, ordering all the books in the extensive bibliographies of Destry-Scholes’s three volumes. I read the three volumes themselves again and again, mostly at home in bed, noting new riches and felicities of interpretation at each reading. I also embarked on a course of scholarly study of my own, giving m
yself a competence in Byzantine art, Ottoman history, folklore motifs, nineteenth-century pornography, the history of the small-arm, and the study of Middle Eastern Hymenoptera—this turned out to be the area of Bole’s gentleman-amateur expertise which excited me the most. I was a keen bug-collector and bird-watcher as a boy. I knew the names and species of most British butterflies. I spent a pleasant few days sitting along rows EE and FF in the library, studying bee books, ancient and modern.

  During a lunch-time stroll in the little Bloomsbury streets surrounding the library, my eye was caught by the image of the Bosphorus I knew so well, in a tray of bargain books. I acquired, that day, both A Singular Youth and The Voyager in copies which had belonged to someone called Yasmin Solomons (“Yasmin from Woody, with love on your birthday, May 23rd 1968”). The shopkeeper rummaged for a long time in boxes and shelves but could not come up with Vicarage and Harem. This meant, that at least in the case of the first two parts, I could now interleave and annotate Destry-Scholes’s record of Bole, with my own record of Destry-Scholes.

  I wanted both to read everything Destry-Scholes had read, and to go beyond him, to know more, not only those things I could know simply because I came later, when more work had been done; I wanted to notice things he had missed. I was full of pointless pride when I was able to insert in The Voyager, next to Destry-Scholes’s reproduction of Bole’s drawing of the reproductive organs of Bombus lucorum, a neat copy of my own of the expert, Chris O’Toole’s, recent drawings of the huge penis, knobbed and hairy, concealed inside the modest folds of the male organ, its presence unsuspected by Bole, and not indicated by Destry-Scholes.