The Biographer's Tale (5 page)

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.

But this pleasurable pride was, to use Destry-Scholes's word, silly, because he could not have known Chris O'Toole. The true delight was to track him through the maze of his and Bole's reading, and come unexpectedly on a trace of his presence, or even of a mistake he had made. Correcting his errors (unlike Bole's, they were
rarissimae
, shining little jewels hardly observable in moss—the analogy is from beetle-hunting)—correcting his errors gave me a peculiar thrill of achievement, of doing something solidly scholarly, adding to the sum of facts. But the thrill was just as great when, three-quarters of the way through a book I believed Destry-Scholes should have read, and had not, I would come upon his tracks—a quotation he had used from a critic or a soldier, or, often enough, a sentence he had included in his own work, lifted whole, or loosely rewritten.

Postmodernist ideas about intertextuality and quotation of quotation have complicated the simplistic ideas about plagiarism which were in force in Destry-Scholes's day. I myself think that these lifted sentences, in their new contexts, are almost the purest and most beautiful parts of the transmission of scholarship. I began a collection of them, intending, when my time came, to redeploy them with a difference, catching different light at a different angle. That metaphor is from mosaic-making. One of the things I learned in these weeks of
research was that the great makers constantly raided previous works—whether in pebble, or marble, or glass, or silver and gold—for tesserae which they rewrought into new images. I learned also that Byzantium was a primary source for the blue glass which is the glory of Chartres and Saint-Denis. The French, according to Theophilus, were skilled at making panes of blue glass from ancient vessels, such as Roman scent-bottles. They also recycled ancient mosaic cubes, making transparent what had been a brilliant reflective surface.

At this time I had a recurrent dream of a man trapped in a glass bottle, itself roughly formed in the shape of a man. Sometimes it was blue, sometimes green, sometimes clear with a yellowish cast and flaws in the glass. This man was and was not myself. I was also the observer of the events of the dream. Sometimes he was cramped by the bottle, sometimes a small creature scurrying at the base of a sheer glass cylinder. I mention this, because it seems to fit, but I do not offer any interpretation of it. I have done with psychoanalytic criticism.

It took me longer than it should have done, moving along D and G and even H as I found vacancies where I had not sat before, to realise that I was acquiring only second- or third-hand facts. I was not discovering Destry-Scholes, beyond his own discoveries. No answer came to my letter or to my advertisement. I realised I did not have much idea about how to look for any more facts. I decided that I would do something Destry-Scholes himself claimed often to have done in his own research. I would visit the house where he was born. It was, after all, the only place where I knew he had been—apart, of course, from Bole's birthplace, London home, Pommeroy Vicarage, Bosphorus
yali
and other brief resting-places. Pontefract
was the place to start. It was the place where Destry-Scholes was Destry-Scholes, as opposed to the biographer of Bole.

I would have liked to go to the Bosphorus, but it was financially out of the question.

Pontefract is a small town in Yorkshire with nothing much to recommend it, except a very large, largely ruined castle, where Richard II died. It must once have commanded a confluence of important roads and rivers, but now is famous only for a kind of liquorice coin called a Pontefract cake. I do not like liquorice, and wondered whether Destry-Scholes did. He might have felt a local pride in the local product. Or not. I went there on a coach, changing at York to a local bus.

I had the address of the house from which his birth had been registered; it was on the way out of the town, in the direction of a village called East Hardwick. I walked there, looking at shopfronts, bus stops, pubs, supposing I might feel his presence, and registering, accurately and honourably, that I felt nothing. His parents' names were what I thought of as “posh.” Robert Walter and Julia Ann—especially Julia—were not working-class names. I had expected number 8 Askham Way to be a substantial house, a house with an orchard, or anyway a big garden, where an imaginative boy might play, a house with gables and dormer windows. When I found 8 Askham Way, it was a red box in a row of red brick boxes, all attached to each other.

They had little strips of front garden, and, for the most part, little wrought-iron garden gates with latches. They had
tiled roofs and identical fronts—a thin door, with a high knob and a dull metal letterbox, beside a cramped bay window with leaded lights. Above the door were little porthole windows, and two square upper-storey windows, also leaded, with catches, not sashes. There was a laburnum tree in flower next to the gate of number 8, which had a well-kept lawn, and a border of Californian poppies. I do not know how long-lived laburnum trees are. I stood there, trying to think what to think. Askham Way is simply this row of red brick boxes set back from a main road. There is a new and shiny Texaco garage on the other side, which certainly does not date back to 1925. Nor do the street lamps, which are concrete and ugly. The house resembles, quite a lot, the square red brick box in which I was born in a suburb of Nottingham. I tried not to think of this. I don't like the place where I was born, and don't go there. Destry-Scholes's childhood is nothing at all to do with mine. The sky was blue with a few aeroplane exhaust trails, also things not to be seen in 1925. A woman came past me, carrying a brown imitation-leather bag of shopping (bread and bananas sticking out) and wearing a bright green beret. She asked if I needed help.

I said I was looking for a man who used to live there. Who was born there in the late twenties, I said, trying to make it less remote. She said she had only been there five months and couldn't help, and the people she had bought it from hadn't been there long, either. She smiled, and went down the path, and into the house, and shut the door.

I went on looking at the red box, trying to think what to think. I felt a feeling I used to have going into our own red box—that such boxes are the only
real
homes
real
people live
in—everything else is just images and fantasies. I also felt that they were traps, with their narrow doors, and boxy stairs, and busily divided-up little windows. Or like beehives, repeating similar cells.

I noticed that the woman was looking at me out of an upstairs window. She drew the curtains with a swish. After a moment, she appeared at the other upstairs window, looked at me again, and swished those curtains, too. She may have done that every evening. Or not.

I felt like a voyeur. I also felt like a failure. I could have said something different and she might have asked me to tea and told me about the Pontefract of the past. (It was quite improbable that she knew anything about the Pontefract of the past.) I could have knocked at the meagre door of every house in that meagre row, asking if there was anyone there old enough to remember.… But I wasn't going to. I was beginning to feel trapped by this ordinary place. I set off back to Pontefract, and the bus station. I could have walked round the Castle, but I didn't. It was just a castle. He had been born into that box, that was certain, but anything he might have felt as a boy, patrolling moats and dungeons, came under his own heading of Speculation, and was a little disgusting.

Thinking about the impossibility of the Castle made me see that I had, in some sense, registered the red box. I knew it. I had been there, even if I had not gone in.

Action of some kind was becoming necessary. I began to wonder if it had been foolish to address my letter “To Whom It May Concern.” I decided to use the telephone. One amongst
my many disadvantages as a biographical researcher is a horror of initiating phone calls. The switchboard lady at the mega-publishers was kind but unhelpful. Holme & Holly had been subsumed into Deodar Books, which had been swallowed by Hachs & Shaw. At Hachs & Shaw I was passed from voice-mail to voice-mail, forced to listen to the Rolling Stones and Ella Fitzgerald and a mournful snippet of plainsong. Finally I got an elderly female voice who said, as though I was a silly boy, “But you want the
archivist
. “I said I didn't know there was one, and what was the extension? The archive had been sold to the University of Lincoln, said the voice. You want
their
archivist. She had a moment's kindness. “Her name is Betty Middleton.”

I wrote to Betty Middleton, and continued my progress round the Reading Room. Rows L, M, N. Persian and Turkish ghazals, prayer book revisions, the siege of Vienna. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on a whim. Destry-Scholes had taken several of her
minor
sentences, and reset them. Betty Middleton answered. All that could be found were a few typed letters. Did I want copies? She was afraid they were not very exciting, she added, sounding like a human being.

When they came, I experienced a moment of pure discouragement. There were only about a dozen. Of these, three said, “I return the proofs herewith, as requested. I have not made any substantial changes. Yours sincerely, S. Destry-Scholes.” Two more pointed out minor errors in the accounting of royalties, and one asked, baldly, whether the royalties were overdue, or whether there were none and the publishers had not
seen fit to inform the author, as the contract required them to. One said, “I shall be very happy to meet you for lunch, on Thursday next, at the time and in the place you suggest.” One—the only one of any conceivable interest—asked if Mr. Holly knew any source of finance for authors wishing to undertake journeys for research purposes. “I have, as you know, already had a British Academy grant for my Istanbul trip. I should like to be able to take a look at the Maelstrøm. I wonder if you can help?”

There was no copy of any responses to these letters. They were all written on the same typewriter, and headed Jolly Corner Hotel, Gower Street. I went, of course, to look at this hotel, which was still there, another version of the blank façade in a repeating series, this time grey and, to my untutored eye, Georgian. I summoned up my courage, went in and asked if anyone would know anything about an author who appeared to have lived there in the early 1950s. The owners were Pakistani and friendly. They had been there five months. They didn't have any of the records of the previous owners. “It was a little dingy, you know, quite a bit of a sad sort of a place. We are modernising, and cleaning it up. We are trying to make it jolly, though we are seriously considering changing the name.”

I wrote to the archivist and asked if any of the answers to these messages had been preserved. She wrote back, still amiably, saying no, and that there was a note saying Aloysius Holly always replied in his own hand, on carefully selected postcards. I could see the royalty statements if I liked.

There was one more thing, she said. A packet that had been nagging her because it had been lying loose
under
the hanging folders in the cabinet. It did appear to contain a bundle
of sheets (thirty-seven to be precise) typed on what she was convinced was the same typewriter, on foolscap sheets of blue carbon. The material appeared to be biographical. There was even a mention of the Maelstrøm. She would be quite glad, she said, if I were able to identify the fragments positively as belonging to the Destry-Scholes archive, since she had no idea where else to put them. It would, she said, give the archive a little more body, so to speak. Would I like photocopies? She was afraid she would have to charge 5p per page.

I was excited by the idea of foolscap sheets of blue carbon, for I knew, as she did not, that the “Art of Biography” notes had been made in that form. I wrote back, saying I would like to have the thirty-seven pages, and enclosing a cheque.

They arrived a few days later. The numbering, Betty Middleton wrote, was her own, the archivist's numbering. The pages had been, so to speak, pushed in a crumpled way into the packet. She would confirm that they were all carbons, not top copies. As I would see, the typing stopped and started. Some pages were full and consecutive, others scrappy. Some were more worn than others. “He, or his typist, was not very good at page-endings or line-endings. He runs off, words are lost. I think you may be interested in the reference to the Maelstrøm. Odd,” wrote Betty Middleton. I did not know if she knew that Destry-Scholes had putatively disappeared in its maw. She added, “I am afraid these are very foul papers. My own opinion is that they form part of several works, not just one. I shall be interested to know what you think.”