The Biographer's Tale (20 page)

I am not quite sure in what order to recount the next few parts of my tale, as I find that my memory for exact sequences is faultier than I would wish. I feel a desire in myself—an aesthetic desire—to punctuate my assimilation of Destry-Scholes's shoeboxes (for I began to try to make sense of the photographs as well as of the cards, with some success, as will be seen) with my encounters with the Strange Customer. It shows at least that I was now leading two lives—three, if you count Ormerod Goode as separate from the card index. I had not told him of my latest discovery. I was saving it up. Four, in fact, if you count Fulla Biefeld, in Oxford. I cannot now remember how often I went back to Willesden. A feeling of panic—that I
must
get a record of the cards before Vera Alphage grew bored or resentful—was replaced by a calm rhythm of consecutive work, as I came to see that she enjoyed my presence there, and even looked forward to my visits. At around this time, Erik and Christophe took off for an exploration
of the northern islands of Japan. They left me in charge—I worked four, instead of two, days a week. This meant that my visits to Willesden took place in the evenings. Yes, that is how it was, at that time.

The Strange Customer asked me if I had favourite Web sites. I spoke of various useful travelling ones, hotel chains, art historical troves, etcetera. He said that was not what he meant. He said he would leave me a list of the ones he and Pym (or Pim) had found particularly helpful. I thanked him. He offered me a cigar. He had one of those curious little implements which nick a small hole in the top of a cigar. It had a very small, very sharp little pronging blade. I said I didn't smoke. Maurice Bossey said, levelly and expressionlessly, that I didn't do much, did I? I said I would try to help him if he would be a little more explicit about what he wanted. (Did I
really
say that? Yes, I did, I remember clearly, some memories ingrain themselves like light on photographic film.) He said he was glad that I intended to be helpful, or the reputation of Puck's Girdle might have been thought to be at stake. He smoked his fat cigar at me—burning cigar-tobacco has an element of
rot
in it, I find, an element of burning something already stale and decaying—and I asked him not to, as I am asthmatic. He referred to my “poor little lungs” and puffed more and closer, coils and clouds of dark, thick fume. (No, I am doing
too much writing
now. Cross that out? Leave it for the moment.) (Anyway, it
was
fume, and it was in coils.)

He opened his wallet and produced a very fine paper that contained nothing but a series of Web addresses.

“Try those,” he said, “as a stimulus to a sluggish imagination. Your dear employers are altogether quicker, I'm sure …” He considered me.

“There's not very much of you, is there? Do they take you along with them, ever? Are you part of the crew, so to speak?”

“I mind the shop,” I told him.

“Well, don't mind it with too tight lips,” he said. “Allow a few things to get out or go in. A smile, a chuckle, a bit of information, a snippet of gossip from time to time.”

I said I didn't know any gossip.

He said he was dreadfully afraid that might be true.

Cards 21–26 I called in my mind the “drowning and autopsy cluster.” Fulla Biefeld wrote back very promptly in answer to my queries, and said that the cards I had sent her were related to Linnaeus. One described his theory that swallows spent the winters under water, under the ice in deep lakes (a theory, she told me, very widespread at the time). The other was a contemporary description of the death of Peter Artedi, who had wandered into an unfenced canal in Amsterdam in an inebriated state, and had been identified in the mortuary by Carolus Linné. Artedi, Fulla Biefeld said, was a person of much greater intelligence than Linnaeus himself, and his classification of the
umbelliferae
, published by Linnaeus after his death, had been a model for much of Linnaeus's own work. His system was also thought of, by our own contemporaries, despite having known nothing (of course) about evolution, as an ancestor of cladism, the classification of species by phylogeny, in which each named taxon should have a unique evolutionary history. He was more rigorous and less fanciful than
Linnaeus, said Fulla Biefeld. His death at twenty-nine was a long time ago. What exactly was I trying to find out? Scientists could not understand people like me who spent their time on past errors and culs-de-sac, however amusing. She enclosed an article on the effects of the blanket use of pesticides and weedkiller in certain Californian orchards. Such studies
should
be being carried out in East Anglia, in Bavaria, in Spain, and they were not. She was happy to give me any more help I needed.

My next definitive cluster—starting with card 42, but with some gaps this time, and some uncertainties of classification, might be called “hybrids and mixtures.” It begins with the Hydra of Hamburg.

Card no. 42

Card no. 43

Cards 44 and 45 were both in Swedish. I sent copies of these, too, off to Fulla Biefeld. I give her answers now, since I am not writing to any strict consecutive chronology, and since they reinforce my decision to call this the “hybrid” cluster.
The first turned out to concern Linnaeus's experimental creation of the first fertile plant hybrid—
(Tragopogon pratensis x T. porrifolius)
and his description in
De Sexu Plantarum
(1760) of his manipulation of the flowers of
Mirabilis, Cannabis
and other species, by cutting off the stamens, binding paper round the pistils, etc. in order to confirm the basic principle of botany—that pollination—pollen on the stigma of the pistil—was necessary if the seeds were to ripen.

Fulla Biefeld added, on her own initiative, that many of the plant hybrids identified by Linnaeus were nothing of the kind. He believed, she told me, that both animals and plants consisted of two substances—pith (or marrow) and bark,
medulla
and
cortex
, of which the pith/marrow was inner, the bearer of vital and generative powers, whilst the bark stood for the “outer,” primarily the nutritive faculty. The pith/marrow stood for the female in reproduction (the pistil in plants), the bark corresponded to the “male principle” (the stamens).

Fulla Biefeld was scornful (or perhaps simply dismissive) about these theories. Linnaeus had come, she said, to tell his disciples that the
will
resided in the female principle, the ability to expand and contract. In this context he cited the one-celled amoeba, the “lowest of all creatures”
(Volvox Chaos dicta)
, which was “pure marrow” and hence could assume all conceivable shapes.

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

Card no. 47

Card no. 48

Letter of Charles Darwin in
Nature
, April 27, 1871