The Biographer's Tale (32 page)

The paper was the
Yorkshire Post
. I could, in theory, have gone and searched its archive. But I didn't think I would. I stared at the empty boat, and the dark newsprinted water, and thanked Jespersen, and thanked Ormerod Goode, and went home.

I have nearly reached the end of this story. Not of my life, but of that segment of the tapeworm that began in one dusty-windowed room in Prince Albert College, and ended in
another, with a photograph of an empty boat. I have admitted I am writing a story, a story which in a haphazard (aleatory) way has become a first-person story, and, from being a story of a search told in the first person, has become, I have to recognise—a first-person story proper, an autobiography. I detest autobiography. Slippery, unreliable, and worse, imprecise. (I am trying to avoid the problem of the decay of belief in the idea of objectivity by slipstreaming towards the safer, ideologically unloaded idea of precision. I don't think this tactic quite works.) Autobiography, as I write, is fashionable. The “flavour of the moment.” (Can I perpetrate a phrase like that? Let it stand. Try anything once.) Everyone is writing his or her “memoir.” They resemble each other like Galton's photographs, or eighteenth-century portraits as perceived by Ibsen. They are rather repulsive. I was brought up as a child to believe in self-effacement, and as a student to believe in impersonality.

So I am going to stop writing this story. The problem is, I have become addicted to writing—that is, to setting down the English language, myself, in arrangements chosen by me, for—let it be admitted—pleasure. I have become addicted to forbidden words, words critical theorists can't use and writers can. Words to describe the different scents of Fulla's and Vera's skins. This is difficult but not impossible. I have just discovered that Linnaeus made a taxonomy of smells, too.
Fragrantes
(fragrant),
Hircinus
(goaty),
Ambrosiacos
(ambrosial),
Tetros
(foul),
Nauseosos
(nauseating),
Aromaticos
(aromatic) and
Alliaceos
(garlicky).

Fulla is goat and aromatic. Vera is fragrant and—not garlicky—but lily and daffodil. Cool and rooty, with vanishing flowers touched with green, in deep corollas and tubes. Fulla is the sharp spicy air of the
compositae
, almost bitter, almost harsh, but enticing. Vera's hair is ferny and Fulla's hair is—this is hard—honeysuckle is too sweet, hawthorn too almond, I am thinking
hedges
, not the precise smell—there is a touch of ragwort and fennel, mixed with dog rose. Interesting to know whether this precision—which has cost me a lot of pencil biting, staring into space, imagining absent odours with intense recollected pleasure—would communicate accurately to anyone else the erotic delights of either? A further question—would these two skins (these two women) smell different to anyone whose skin smells differently from my own? For my nose flares myself as it flares them. I am getting baroque. Back to what I was writing, which was a renunciation of writing.

In terms of writing—of the way this story has funnelled itself into a not unusual shape, run into a channel cut in the earth for it by previous stories (and all our lives are partly the same story, beginning, middle, end)—in terms of writing, this looks like a
writer's story
. PGN was a mere Critick, steps centre-stage, assumes his life, Finds his Voice, is a Writer. That was the way it would almost have had to have been in the 1920s (a good time for Writers, though not the best). But I feel a kind of nausea at this fate for my hero, myself. It doesn't seem very much of an anything. To be addicted to writing is not to want to be, to become, a Writer.

• • •

So. If I were telling the “1920s” version of Phineas G. Nanson, it would end with an “epiphany.” (Another forbidden word, though still allowed in Joyce criticism.)

And there was an epiphany, there was very precisely an epiphany, so I shall write it down, for pleasure,
cliché
and all, and then
stop writing
. Or how shall I see what to do?

Fulla taught me how to set up the stag-beetle experiment. She provided plastic boxes, little coloured bee-labels, a delicate little hand-held balance to weigh my captives. She also talked enthusiastically to Erik and Christophe about setting up various projects—worldwide—between taxonomists, pollination studies, and intelligently motivated tourists and wanderers. She could have been the managing director of a global company, I thought. She had vision, and prevision, she saw to details. I went back to my job. There was a presumption that I would help Fulla with pollination tourism in due course. Vera also went back to work, pale and composed. We massed the marbles randomly in a great glass bowl I bought her for a present. We stood them where the soft light filtered through them. I have never said how much more beautiful and variegated Destry-Scholes's marbles were, with their rich colours and forms, than mass-produced modern ones. We put the lids on the shoeboxes, and the tribal lists of marbles in the suitcase. We did not discuss these moves. Her first day back at work went well. She came home to me, white and smiling. We made love. Fulla set out to spend a month in the Middle
East, for the Anatolian Project, leaving me in charge of the beetles.

So for a week or two I watched these strange creatures excavate the rotten tree trunks, fly noisily across the clearing, strut, display, fight and mate. It did seem to become clear that the largest—the heaviest—always won. I tried to be what I thought of as detached and scientific, and think of my population by numbers. But I ended up by giving them literary names of horned gods—Hern and Moses, Horus and Actaeon (the smallest, who always got crunched). The females I called Moira, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. A rather lost scuttling one I called Norn. The males jousted along twigs and promontories, jabbing and weaving with their serrated pincers, butting and rushing not unlike the stags themselves. The project was to reverse, dislodge, overturn the antagonist. The fallen combatant would return, but never more than twice. After three falls he crept away, and the triumphant beetle would mate with the waiting female, who would obligingly raise her rear. The females showed no preferences, and mated with all winners. I am, as this narrative shows, an obsessive lateral researcher, and I began to poke about in the literature of entomology for beetle-jousts. I found references in W. D. Hamilton's great essays on life in rotting wood, and fighting males in fig wasps and other insects. Hamilton remarked that in his experience of arranged tournaments between stag beetles the
second
largest came out the winner. He added that this was possibly because such arranged battles usually took place in cardboard boxes, whereas in real life the beetles liked to
confront each other along twigs or edges; where sheer weight would be more useful. He also remarked that he did not share Konrad Lorenz's belief that extravagantly developed weapons on male creatures were necessarily designed only for display, or to attract females. A weapon is a weapon, according to Hamilton, who has a gloomy view of competition between creatures which appeals to my own sense of the nature of things. He said that his observations led him to think that Lorenz's belief that animals, unlike humans, did not fight to the death, was false. There was at least as much real desire to damage, in my subjective opinion, among my beetles, as there was ritualised weaving and avoidance. I got rather sorry for Hern, who was smaller than Moses and bigger than Horus and Actaeon. He went for Moses with great vigour and recklessness, and was ruler of the roost when I had abstracted the patriarch. The patriarch, returned to his tree-trunk, easily dislodged the briefly triumphant Hern. I therefore, on my own initiative, glued a small brass nut to Hern's back before releasing him again—he turned the scales at 1.2 grams more than Moses with this artificial gravitas. I was pleased to see that, once he was heavier, even though his horns were shorter, he was able to dislodge Moses for the ritual three times. I had proved something. I wasn't sure what. I wrote it all down, and removed the brass nut, whereupon Moses resumed his dominance.

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.