The Biographer's Tale (15 page)

I thought about Destry-Scholes's narrative. The journey to Lapland, I said, was what interested me. They had the manuscript itself, they said, Linnaeus's own account of his journey north. They fetched it out—leather-bound, its ink now root-brown on onion-skin tawny paper. The Maelstrøm, I murmured, would interest me. And the last part of the journey, the climbing in the TorneÃ¥ fells. Fulla Biefeld looked up from her trays of dead bees. “He didn't go there,” she said, in her flat, singing, Swedish voice. “He never went to the Maelstrøm. He never went to TorneÃ¥.”

Shifty, Ormerod Goode said.

I said I was sorry. The document I was working on had a very circumstantial description of those parts of his journey.

“He
said
he went there,” Fulla Biefeld said. “It is Linnaeus's little untruth. Big lie, maybe. The weather stopped him from going to Maelstrøm. He just rowed about in a little boat and did a trip to Rörstadt. And the Kaituma trip, you know, was another 840 miles, in less than two weeks available. He never went. He romanced it.”

I said nothing. I thought about Destry-Scholes, who, it was beginning to appear, had romanced further what Linnaeus had already romanced. I looked at Linnaeus's scribble. The librarian with practised hands turned to Linnaeus's curious drawing of the plant he named
Andromeda—Andromeda polifolia
, marsh andromeda or bog rosemary, previously known as
Chamaedaphne
. I attach a photocopy of a copy of
his drawing, as I find myself unable to describe its particular kind of incompetence, neither endearing nor ridiculous. The legend in the middle, between the human personification and the botanical representation, reads:

His description of the relations between mythic woman and flower was both far-fetched and in a way sexy. One of the pollination-men read it out to me in English, mellifluously.

“I noticed that she was blood-red before flowering, but that as soon as she blooms her petals become flesh-coloured. I doubt whether any artist could rival these charms in a portrait of a young girl, or adorn her cheeks with such beauties as are here and to which no cosmetics have lent their aid. As I looked at her I was reminded of Andromeda as described by the poets, and the more I thought about her, the more affinity she seemed to have with the plant; indeed, had Ovid set out to describe the plant mystically
(mystice)
he could not have caught a better likeness …

“Her beauty is preserved only so long as she remains a virgin (as often happens with women also)—i.e., until she is fertilised, which will not now be long, as she is a bride. She is anchored far out in the water, as always on a little tuft in the marsh and fast tied as if on a rock in the midst of the sea. The water comes up to her knees, above her roots; and she is always surrounded by poisonous dragons and beasts—i.e., evil toads and frogs—which drench her with water when they mate in the spring. She stands and bows her head in grief. Then her little clusters of flowers with their rosy cheeks droop and grow ever paler and paler …”

Andromeda polifolia

The flower, I observed, looked sexier than its mystic counterpart. One of the things I did know about Linnaeus was that his taxonomy was based on the sexuality of plants. We had all read our Foucault,
Les mots et les choses
. I had looked it up again when I first made the identification of Destry-Scholes's arctic pilgrim.

What follows is not of course what went through my head as I stood amongst the pollination people in the Linnean strongroom. It is what I have later revisited and adumbrated for this document. I have resisted the temptation to insert several pages of Foucault. One of the reasons why I abandoned—oh, and I
have
abandoned—post-structuralist semiotics, was the requirement to write page upon page of citations from Foucault (or Lacan or Derrida or Bakhtin) in support of the simplest statement, such as that a scene of Shakespeare may be simultaneously comic and tragic—which earlier critics were able to say without all this paraphernalia. But it would be very wrong of me not to give these thinkers their due where it matters—and Foucault did fit Linnaeus's desire for a complete taxonomy into a view of language and languages which extends beyond and includes it. The pleasure, for me, I suppose,
as I write, is that this time I was thinking of Foucault, and even more of Linnaeus, amongst
things
, shaved fish-skeletons, great blue butterflies, leather bindings, drawings done by the man himself even if the drawings involved (why not?) levels of meaning, analogies between plants and other creatures, real and invented, accurate and far-fetched.

Linnaeus calculated that the 38 organs of generation, containing 4 variables of number, figure, situation and proposition, allowed 5,776 combinations which were sufficient to define the
genus
. From the precise definitions afforded by the 5,776 combinations, it was possible to give precise names to the entire vegetable and animal kingdom, and these names would indicate all the relationships, all the connections (manifest or hidden, Foucault says) between the plants of the same kind, and further, of related kinds. Natural history, for Linnaeus, according to Foucault, was fundamentally designed to order and to name the world. The French word I have translated as “order” is
“disposition
,” and the translation isn't quite right. It means “place,” “arrange”
—order
is too strong. Linnaeus took the sex of plants and the sexual organs of other living things as the basis of his system. This wasn't inevitable. Cuvier, for example, was interested in the morphology of bones as a starting-place. Foucault makes the point that we moderns do not like the idea of an
immobile
nature, which is to some extent implicit in a classificatory system—we like, he says elegantly, “a swarming continuity of beings who communicate amongst themselves, mingle and perhaps transform themselves, shift shapes, one into the other.” He himself remarks precisely that the essence of the idea isn't in the conflict of these two visions of nature, but in the relationship,
precisely between words and things. It all resides, he says,
“dans le réseau de nécessité qui en ce point a rendu possible et indispensable le choix entre deux manières de constituer l'histoire naturelle comme une langue.”
His two ways of making a language were the System and the Method. The System is Linnaeus, the taxonomy, the mapping and naming of a finite structure. Linnaeus published his thesis
—Praeludia Sponsaliarum Plantanum
—in 1729. It expatiated in a learned way on stamens and pistil, pollen (sperm), seeds (ova), castration and infertility. Also on polyandry, polygyny, incest, concubinage and marriage-beds of petals, with a strong erotic charge. He aroused considerable moral opprobrium with this work. I looked at his sad little Andromeda, with her far-fetched fictive, mystic and figurative senses. The network of myth and legend intertwines like vines or ivy with the branches of the Linnean system, through his predilection for classical nomenclature. His butterflies are Greek and Trojan heroes, and here was a curious concrete image of the net of connections, even containing drawings of an inadequately attached chain of links, a crossing-place of languages. I murmured something anodyne about the sexuality of plants and the librarian opened another volume for me, showing me the complicated plans of the flower, leaves, sepals, petals, as bridal chambers for monogamous or polygamous weddings, “public” and “clandestine.” The whole family of ferns, mosses, algae, fungi, he called
Cryptogamia
(plants that marry secretly). The Dutchman said, surprisingly, that many of Linnaeus's drawings of polygamy and cryptogamy were felt to be satirical representations of the clandestine relations of the Swedish court. I bent my head over the spidery black petal-divisions, tiny lettering, linking lines. Other heads bent beside mine.

We were plunged into darkness.

There was a sound of ratcheting, or switching, and a further, more ominous sound of locks rolling into sockets. It was a violently thick, absolute darkness; if the eyes waited to adjust to it, all they were exposed to was black and more black, complete absence of light. I am a mildly claustrophobic person—I try to keep it in control—and I began immediately to persuade myself that I perceived an increase in the mustiness or fustiness of the air. Things rose in my throat—unuttered, battened-down howls or sobs of fear, a gulp of burning acid. I backed away from the group—I instinctively seek solitude at extreme moments. I felt my way along Linnaeus's leather-bound volumes, to where I believed the strongroom door to be—whether because I thought I might open it, or because I desired to be first out when it was opened from outside, I don't know. It was a primitive and ignoble rush towards an exit, even a locked one. Someone said there was a power-cut. Someone else asked if there was anyone in the building who was not locked in with us. Someone else said that it was possible the janitor had gone home. I began to tremble, and continued to shuffle round the wall …

My questing face, my gaping mouth, my desperate nostrils were suddenly muffled in softness—I thought of bats, but it was more as though I had plunged into thick fine moss, which smelled ferny and animal at once, and was suffocating me. I beat out with my hands and encountered yielding soft flesh (under cloth). I slipped to my knees, losing consciousness, and my hands ran down solid thighs, strong knees, warm, muscular. The door opened, and I found myself at the feet of Fulla Biefeld, staring up inside her skirt at the slight wiriness of her pubic hair pressing against what appeared to be alternately
crimson and emerald knickers (no doubt an effect of the lack of oxygen to my brain). The stalwart legs were furred with strong, brass-gold hairs. I let myself lose consciousness completely—I felt it coming over me and went along with it, it seemed the best thing. My nose was alive with Fulla Biefeld's sex. Linnaeus knew nothing about pheromones.

She bent fiercely and solicitously over me. Her hair was a great cage of zigzag lines of honey-light, after the dark. It had odd scarlet flashes in it, as my eyes adjusted. I closed them again, and murmured, deliberately exaggerating my weakness, “Claustrophobia.”

“I thought you meant to trample me down,” she said.

I kept my eyes closed, and my posture submissive.

Someone else brought me a glass of water. After a time I was able to come out, blinking, into the light. The party was breaking up. I arranged, with the librarian, to return, to see whether their archive would produce any sign of the passage of Scholes Destry-Scholes. Fulla Biefeld was hovering near my shoulder. If I wished, she said, she would look over the document I was researching, which appeared to have some anomalies. Who was its author?

Why did I not want to tell her?

“Scholes Destry-Scholes,” I said. “He wrote a biography of Sir Elmer Bole.”

“I don't know that name.”

“He was a Victorian polymath. Among other things—many other things—he studied leaf-cutter bees near Troy.”

She did not show any particular interest in either Destry-Scholes or Bole. I said I could not give her the typescript, which was not mine, and was my only copy. She said that in
that case, if I accompanied her to a pâtisserie in Piccadilly she would glance over it for me, and suggest—if relevant—leads I could follow up. I demurred. She pointed out that I would not meet so very many Swedish-speakers and taxonomic specialists who had also written term papers on Linnaeus's Lapp journey. This was indisputably true. So I followed her into Piccadilly and sat down to a cappuccino, over a starched tablecloth, under pink lights, surrounded by slightly swooning Muzak. Fulla Biefeld put on wide, narrow oval-lensed glasses, surrounded like those of the male couple in Puck's Girdle, with iridescent titanium. She frowned over Destry-Scholes's carbon.

“This is a tissue of truths and half-truths and untruths, I rather suspect.” The Swedish sing-song was more pronounced out of the strongroom. “It is true Linnaeus was interested in superstition and magic. But all this spirit-journey is most unlikely, most. On the other hand, the
Furia Infernalis
is authentic. There are inauthentic fabrics here suspended from authentic hooks. Why would anyone do that?”

I said I didn't know. I didn't. Maybe Destry-Scholes was trying to become a fiction writer. I did not mention the feeling I had had, evolved from the readerly solipsism, that he was trying to deceive or illude me, me personally. I reflected that I had become quite unused to reciprocal conversation. I said flatly that I wasn't sure where to go next. I might have to give up this project for lack of information. I expected it would be no great loss, I heard myself saying, more especially if what I had found was all a tissue of lies. Fulla Biefeld agreed with this, more forcefully than I could have wished. Conversations, I thought grindingly again, went two ways. Courtesy required
me to ask her a question, a quid pro quo. I asked her how she had become a palaeoecologist. She replied, rather crossly, that she did not call herself a palaeoecologist. She was a bee taxonomist. She was a bee taxonomist in training.