The Biographer's Tale (3 page)

Like Destry-Scholes, I was most drawn to Bole's monographs on Byzantine mosaics and on Turkish ceramic tiles, especially those elegant and brilliant tiles from Iznik, with the dark flame-red (tulips, carnations) whose secret has been lost. Where did he find time to travel to Ravenna and Bulgaria, to spend so long staring, I ask myself (and Scholes asked himself, before me). Scholes permits himself to express surprise that Bole did not rediscover, or claim to rediscover, the chemistry of the Iznik red. He certainly haunted potteries, in Iznik and in Staffordshire, discussing glazes with the Wedgwoods. One of the most beautiful things I have ever read is Bole's account of the creation of light in the mosaics of Hadrian's Villa, Ravenna and Sancta Sophia, the rippling fields of splendour created by the loose setting of blue glass tesserae at various angles to catch the light, the introduction into these fields of light of metallic tesserae (first gold, then silver), the effect of
candlelight and polished marble to make soft, fluid, liquid light …

I say, the most beautiful thing I have read is Bole's account, and so it is, I stand by that. But it is displayed and completed by Destry-Scholes's account both of Bole's research (into the colour and composition of the beds of red glass on which the gold was set, into vessels of layered glass, with leaves of gold foil sandwiched between them) and of Christ in the church of the Chora in Istanbul, covered in plaster and unknown in the days of Bole's study. Destry-Scholes writes as though he were looking with Bole's eyes, describing in Bole's measured yet urgent paragraphs. Yet he introduces, tactfully, integrally, modern knowledge, modern debates, about perspective, about movement and stasis, which do not supersede or nullify Bole's thought, but carry it on.

Destry-Scholes believed that Bole's life was shaped by the ease with which he learned languages. He had the usual British schooling, for his time, in Latin and Greek, and could compose poems in either, with facility. Destry-Scholes says that these classical poems are better than his English effusions. My own Latin, I regret to say, although good enough to make a rough translation of the sense of his poem on Galla Placidia's mausoleum, is nowhere near good enough to assess its aesthetic qualities. I have taught myself to read the Greek alphabet, and therefore to recognise certain recurrent key Greek concepts from Plato and Aristotle. But I have to rely entirely on Destry-Scholes for his judgements of these works. (I do speak and write good French, and reasonable German, and
have always made a point of studying critical theory written in those languages in the words in which it was written and, indeed,
thought
. This linguistic interest of my own, this delight in linguistic parallels and differences, encouraged me to accept the justice of Destry-Scholes's interpretation of Bole's very different intellectual “set.” I know, in my small way, the pleasures of grammatical exploration, the seductions of different articulations and rhythms.) Bole went on in a purely scholarly way to acquire classical Arabic, which led him to Turkish, and to the Finno-Ugric language complex.

Destry-Scholes believed Bole's travels were to a certain extent dictated by romantic visions opened up by the acquisition of these tongues. Even Russian he appears to have learned as an exercise in a new alphabet, although he travelled several times to St. Petersburg and out towards Mongolia. He is on record as saying that his time spent disguised as a Russian student of religious history was undertaken initially out of pleasure in keeping up the rhythms of the speech. Destry-Scholes appears to have learned Bole's languages. He is able to comment knowledgeably—to quote—in Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, Arabic—as well as the usual Romance languages and German. It is part of the complex pleasure of his text that he is able to convey the complex pleasure of linguistic fluency from insider knowledge, so to speak. And if he had not been able to read Turkish manuscripts, he would never have made his most dramatic discoveries.

It occurs to me that I have just written a summary—one of many possible summaries—of Destry-Scholes's three volumes from the point of view of my own initial interest in them, which was that of a man in need of facts—of things—of facts.
I have listed facts, and facts about Bole's interest in other facts. That was the richness and strangeness I found in the text, and I am being true to my first excited understanding. Destry-Scholes found his bright idea in his understanding of the fundamental importance of linguistic forms in Bole's life. I found mine, I could say, provisionally, in Destry-Scholes's resourceful marshalling and arranging of
facts
. Nevertheless the facts I have listed are hardly of the kind which attract the British chattering classes to the endless consumption of biographies. I have hardly mentioned Bole's personal life. His loves, hatreds, rivalries and friendships are what these readers would look for, skipping his (and Destry-Scholes's) speculations about Byzantine
ekphrasis
or Lord Raglan's inadequacies in the field.

The wooden hagiography, written at his widow's behest by Thomas Pittifield, observes the Victorian conventions of respecting privacy and not speaking ill of the dead. Destry-Scholes wrote at the beginning of what I would call the first wave of Freudian biography. By the first wave, I mean those biographies which made the assumption, explicit or implicit, that the direction of a subject's libido (more particularly the unconscious and unacknowledged directions) is the single most important thing about his, or her, life. The second wave of psychoanalytic biography entails elaborate unmaskings of contrary and hidden senses and motivations, so that often the “real” story appears to be the exact opposite of the “apparent” story, a loving father must be an abusive rapist, an object of detestation and contempt must be a secret object of desire, and so on. Two tales for one. If Destry-Scholes considered a Freudian life of Bole, he rejected the idea quite deliberately—
I am sure of this, because of the tact with which he introduces a Freudian reading where it
is
appropriate, in Bole's aversion to self-mortifying clergymen, for instance, or in his failure ever to mention, anywhere, his maiden (unmarried, at least) aunt Theodora, who lived with the family from his birth until his final rupture with them at the time of his marriage—which Pittifield ascribes to a quarrel over financial settlements.

No, Destry-Scholes recounts Elmer Bole's personal life exactly as far as it can be known, and no further. His own magnificent coup in this area was provoked, rather beautifully, by a coded metaphor in Bole's field journals from the Crimea, a metaphor which he later discovered, in abundance, to abound in the lyrical poems. This metaphor is one of apples. Bole was peculiarly fond of the contrast between red apples and green apples. Destry-Scholes has an elegant statistical table showing the incidence, in Bole's published and unpublished works, of references to green apples, red apples, and the two together (the most frequent). In his account of his deciphering of this riddle Destry-Scholes permits himself to depart from his usual detached narrative tone (he was fortunate enough to live before the idea of “objectivity” was deconstructed) and take on the note of personal involvement and excitement of Symonds's
Quest for Corvo
(the analogy is Destry-Scholes's own).

The “red apple” was, of course, the Ottoman image for the Other, the Kingdom to be conquered—Rome, or later Vienna. High Byzantine Christian officials were also represented with red apples in their hands as a sign of office. So for some time, Destry-Scholes believed that the red apple represented
some desired promotion for Bole, and the green the bitterness of disappointment. It was only when ferreting through the Turkish correspondence of a pasha who was a friend of Bole, in whose
yali
on the Bosphorus he was believed to have stayed, that Destry-Scholes found the clue to the riddle.

The red apple was a Turkish lady, Yildiz, the sister of a pasha, who had a dashing reputation. The green apple was Bole's childhood sweetheart, Evangeline Solway, daughter of an impoverished evangelical clergyman. Destry-Scholes established that Bole had married both, in the same year, and had in the same year established two households, one in an old red-painted wooden house on the shore of the Bosphorus, and one in the little Old Vicarage at Pommeroy. Yildiz, the red apple, had borne three sons, called after Turkish poets, Nedim, Fuzûlî and Bâkû, and Evangeline had borne three daughters, Rose, Lily and Violet, who became the Principal of an Oxford women's college. Destry-Scholes points out that although Bole's associations with the red apple are of rich sweetness, warmth, fullness and ripeness, his associations with the green apple are not negative, but speak of tartness that makes the mouth water, of unexpected sharpness that makes sweetness sweeter, of firmness which is better than softness, and so on. He also quotes letters (found by himself) from Evangeline to her intimate friend, Polly Fisher, describing the advantages of her husband's long absences, in terms of a lessening of the terror of pregnancy, and an increase in delight on his return. “For we have tales to tell each other, whose mysteries would fade with daily intimacy, and to him returning from the sordid and teeming East, my little life of green grass and
clean sheets has freshness, a paradisal quality, he says, which is constantly renewed by absence.”

Destry-Scholes invokes
The Quest for Corvo
again, when, after his meticulous description of Bole's disappearance and the British reaction to it, he discusses Nedim's hypothetical arrival at the vicarage three years later, as a young man of about twenty-five years. As Destry-Scholes rightly says, decorum forbids any account of an event of which there is absolutely no record. You cannot, he says, introduce phrases like “What must the sorrowful widow have thought, seeing the handsome dark stranger carrying his small valise through the apple trees?” We know neither that Nedim forewarned her, nor that he did not. We do not know for certain that Nedim revealed his parentage to his stepmother and half-sisters, though, Destry-Scholes says cautiously, we must suppose that he did, or why did he come? We know, from Rose's letters, that he stayed in the vicarage for a year, and we know, from the Goncourts' journal (another brilliant
trouvaille
by Destry-Scholes) that when Nedim took up his post at the Sorbonne, as Professor of Finno-Ugric languages, Rose went with him, as we know that she was with him during his travels in Finland, which are described in the French account of his journey found in an antiquarian bookshop in Oslo by Destry-Scholes.

It is difficult to recall the state of febrile excitement I was in over my own release from a life of theoretical pedagogy. I
did
nothing about my new future. I sat in my little flat, or walked about in bare feet, and occasionally completely naked, to
mark my new state, but this brought me no nearer any sort of future. Perhaps because my own life was a fluid vacuum, I became obsessed with the glittery fullness of the life of Elmer Bole. Compared to the busy systems, the cross-referred abstractions, of the life I had renounced, the three volumes loomed in my mind as an almost impossible achievement of contact with the concrete world (always eschew the word “real” is an imperative I
have
carried over from my past) of arrangement of things and events for delight and instruction.

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.