Read The Biographer's Tale Online
Authors: A. S. Byatt
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Psychological, #Biographers, #Psychological Fiction, #Bildungsromans, #Coming of Age, #Biography as a Literary Form, #Young Men
I think, up to that juncture, I had been
grateful to
Vera for allowing me to sleep with her. I did not realise, until I was faced with the straightforward ferocity of Fulla's desire, how much I had supposed that I was a small, insignificant being to whom the beautiful, secretive Vera was simply being
kind
. Fulla set me aglowâwith sex, but also with a kind of pleasure in myself I'd never known. I liked my body. I liked Phineas G. Nanson. Andâit has to be admittedâI wanted to show this new, strutting, gleaming Phineas G. to Vera. I wanted to bring to herâto
give
herâsome of my new-learned inventiveness.
I thinkâfrom reading novelsâthat there is a compulsion, faced with two women, to decide that one is “the real one” and that the other is
“only”
something or other.
Only
for sex,
only
for relaxing, even
only
for friendship, as opposed to the Romantic welded dyad. Which I suddenly see, having had
that thought, in terms of the hermaphrodite silver paperknife with which I laid about Erik and Christophe. A weapon for cutting paper. We have a cultural need to present it to ourselves this way. Only, I didn't. I wanted to go from Fulla to Vera (and back to Fulla) forever. I even wanted to teach Vera to look at me. Covered with the love-bites of a Swedish bee-taxonomist. It was a long way from Ormerod Goode and the Glenmorangie. I suppose he too had his life as a body with other bodies. I'd never thought about it, despite his erotic scribblings in dusty seminars. So I went to see Vera. As usual, and not as usual. When I got there, she was bent over some new arrangement of Destry-Scholes's marbles. This one entailed a central circular figure, I remember, with one very large, slightly chipped one in the centre, with yellowish clear glass round a spiralling blue core of lattice-work, with a red vein spiralling inside it. From the circle she had made long radiating tentacles, or flagellae, on some principle I couldn't discover. They bent around, at their ends, to form a swastikalike form. She did not look up when I came in. She looked somehow different. I immediately knew that she knew about my adventures. I approached, crabwise. Myâthat is, Destry-Scholes'sâthat is, Vera'sâshoeboxes were on a side-table.
“I got the boxes out,” she said, from inside a tent of dark silk.
I went, not to the boxes, but to her. I asked, inanely enough, what she was working on. She said, liquid, it didn't matter. Really, it didn't matter.
I saw, then, round drops of liquid splashing on to the round glass marbles, running down into the baize â¦Â She sniffed, discreetly, almost inaudibly. I very nearly turned on
my heel to retreat. But I didn't. I put my hand on the ripple of her weeping shoulders. I stroked the dark hair. Mum. Terrified of losing her. I said, in the end, as more tears rolled on more marbles,
“Shall I just go away?”
“I'm sorry to be like this. Perhaps it's better.”
“I'll go then.”
“I can't expect you to get wound up in my problems. We aren't like that, I knowâ”
“Vera. What is it?”
“I can't go on.”
“With me? I understand, of courseâ”
“Don't be stupid. With
my job
. I did something unforgivable.”
It was nothing to do with me. I breathed oxygen, I gathered her in my arms, I called her my love, my darling (words until then unknown in the Nanson vocabulary, at least with that possessive adjective). I led her to her sofa and held her wet face against my shirt, where the tears spread and trickled. Tell me, I said, tell me. She did. I don't recall that anyone had ever trusted me with anything
like that
before. I stroked her hair, like a tamer with a frightened creature.
She had taken a series of photographs from a scan of the base of the skull, the nape of the neck, the spine, of a young man who had had an earlier operation for a rare cancer of the neck, which had entailed removing his arm and shoulder. He had, it had appeared, made a complete recovery, had learned to live one-handed and scarred, in a swashbuckling series of painted jackets, and brilliant caps on his shaven crown. And then there had been troubling symptoms. They had done the
scan, to investigate. Vera had hung rows of photographs on a lightscreen, and through the plates the light had showed the filaments and sproutings of the cancer, wound round and into the vertebral column, obscuring its form, eating its edges, reaching for the bone-marrow. They were, said Vera, lovely photographs. We couldn't have got anything so delicate, so precise, even five years ago. There were a lot of them. The young man's eye ran from one to the other; the surgeon pointed out the invasive malignant cells, with a red laser, and Vera watched the young man read his deathâhis inevitable deathâin the details of her work.
And suddenly she began to weep uncontrollably, as she saw his lips tighten, and his throat constrict, and his eyes stare. She wept and wept and fell to the ground, and had to be helped away by the surgeon, who should have been helping the dying man with the deadly knowledge. My darling, my love, I murmured into her hair. I said that perhaps the young man had been grateful, that she cared so much. She said no, he had given her a cold, faraway,
malignant
look, the young man, because she was alive, and making an unnecessary scene, and he was vanishing down a tunnel, out of touch. I wiped her tears, I kissed her, I said truthfully I had not known how she had walked so calmly in the valley of the shadow, day after day. As I wiped her face with my handkerchief and told her she was brave, I remembered Erik and Christophe and their duck-egg blue ones, and Fulla's tongue on her handkerchief on Erik's blood on my own face. Fulla had defended me, and now I felt enough of a man to console Vera. I told Vera she could not be kind to anyone if she was not kind to herself. She said she had
no life
although she was not dying, only this austere
vocation, and I said, solid Phineas (truthful Phineas), yes, she did, she did have a life, she had me.
We went to bed in the dark. She said she did not want me to see her face all swollen, and as a result she did not see Fulla's love-bites. I felt with my lips and fingertips the slow tears still welling between her closed eyelids. I noticed, I thought that Vera's scent, which I thought of as silvery, combined quite differently with my own from the way Fulla's did, which I thought of as golden. How did I get to these synaesthetic metaphors? Vera (my love, my darling) is a darting silver fish, a sailing moon in an indigo sky, quicksilver melting into a thousand droplets and recombining. Fulla is gold calyx strenuously spread in gold sunlight, Fulla is golden pollen clinging to bee-fur, Fulla is the sailing fleets of dandelion clocks. Fulla is lion-pelt, cats' teeth. I do not think I have got lyricism quite right yet. The urge to commit it is overwhelming. The results not so. But it can all stay in, for the moment. We think in clichés because clichés are ideas which have so to speak proved their Darwinian
fitness
over time (I say nothing, here, of truthfulness). I could compare Fulla and Vera to tea and coffee, or Glasgow and Birmingham, but clichés are requisite here, like tap-roots into the common (in every sense) consciousness from which slightly adapted, new mutations are generated.
We lay there in the dark. She had let go her grip on my arms, her fingers were relaxed, though the tears were still brimming over. I curled myself round her limp body with careful protectiveness, stretching my spine to encompass her contracted one, my sex stirring in the cleft of her white (invisible)
bottom. I had the idea of massaging the nape of her neck (I read signs badly) but desisted, after my touch induced a massive shudder. So I stroked her hair, and face, and ears, over and over, and she wept, more quietly, less convulsively. In the morning, she was still weeping. I said she shouldn't go to work, she should go to the doctor. She said the surgeon had advised that. I said, “I'll stay with you.” She tried to say no, but I saw that she needed me. She accepted. I thought then, Fulla wouldn't know where to find me, and then, that I must get in touch with her whilst Vera was at the doctor's, and arrangeâarrange what?âwell, at least the next stage of the stag-beetle experiment.
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 cardsâor 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 âI 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. 28â29, 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 â¦
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 pointâbut there are a good many pages that I felt myself incapable of judging. So I am returning the mutilated copy, hoping â¦Â that Professor Karl Pearson might see it â¦Â 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”âa 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.