The Biographer's Tale (2 page)

I was somewhat distracted by counting the
O
s—which included the
oo
sounds represented by
U
s—in Ormerod Goode's words. In the late afternoon gloom he was like some demonic owl hooting
de profundis
. The sonorous
O
s were a code, somehow, for something truly portentous. I shook myself. I was more than a little slewed.

So I nodded solemnly, and accepted the loan of the three volumes, still in their original paper wrappers, protected by transparent film. They filled the next two or three giddy days when, having decided what I was
not
going to do and be, I had to make a new life.

Volume I,
A Singular Youth
, had a frequently reproduced print of a view of King's College, Cambridge, on the cover.

Volume II,
The Voyager
, had a rather faded old photograph of the Bosphorus.

Volume III,
Vicarage and Harem
, had a brown picture of some stiff little children throwing and catching a ball under some gnarled old apple trees.

It was all very uninspiring. It was like a publishing version of the neighbour who insists on showing you his holiday snaps, splashes of water long smoothed out, ice-creams long digested and excreted. I flicked through the pages of old photographs reproduced in little clutches in the middle of each book. Scholes Destry-Scholes had been sparing with visual aids, or maybe they had not been considered important in the late 1950s and early '60s. There was a photograph of Sir Prosper Bole, MP, looking like God the Father, and one of the three buttoned-up and staring Beeching sisters with scraped-back hair—“Fanny is on the right.” I assumed Fanny was Bole's mother. There was a very bad drawing of a youth at
Cambridge, resting his head on his hand. “Elmer (Em) drawn by Johnny Hawthorne during their Lakeland jaunt.” There was a map of Somaliland and a map of the Silk Road, and a picture of a ship (“The trusty
Hippolyta
”) listing dangerously. Volume II had a lot more maps—Turkey, Russia, the Crimea—a
cliché
of the Charge of the Light Brigade, another of the Covered Bazaar in Constantinople, a photograph of a bust of Florence Nightingale, a ridiculous picture of Lord and Lady Stratford de Redcliffe in fancy dress as Queen Anne grandees receiving Sultan Abdulmecid, and what I took to be Sir Elmer's wedding photographs. He appeared, in a grainy way, to have been darkly handsome, very whiskered, tall and unbending. His wife, who also appeared in a miniature silhouette, in an oval frame (“Miss Evangeline Solway at seventeen years of age”), appeared to have a sweet small face and a diminutive frame. Volume III was even less rewarding. There were a lot of photographs of frontispieces of Victorian books, of poetry and fairy stories. A lot more maps, vicarage snapshots and more conventional views of the Bosphorus. They all had that brownish, faded look. I looked on the back flap, then, for information about the author himself. I think most readers do this, get their bearings visually before starting on the real work. I know a man who wrote a dissertation on authors' photos on the back of novels, literary and popular. There was no photograph of Scholes Destry-Scholes. The biographical note was minimal.

And so I began reading, in a mood at once a grey-brown smoky penumbra, induced by the illustrations, and full of jagged shafts of bright lightning on purplish vacancy, induced by my own uncertain future. Odd lines of Scholes's description of Bole's life have become for me needle-like mnemonics, recalling alternate pure elation and pure panic, purely
my own
, as Bole prepares to fail his Little Go, or sneaks out to stow away on a vessel bound for the Horn of Africa. Most of these mnemonics are associated with Volume I. For it has to be said that as I progressed, the reading became compulsive, the mental dominance of both Bole and Destry-Scholes more and more complete. I do not pretend to have discovered even a quarter of the riches of that great book on that first gulping and greedy reading. Destry-Scholes had, among all the others, the primitive virtue of telling a rattling good yarn, and I was hooked. And he had that other primitive virtue, the capacity to make up a world in every corner of which his reader would wish to linger, to look, to learn.

“There were giants in those days.” Bole used that phrase frequently—in his speculative work on the Hittites, in his history of the Ottomans, in his work on Cromwell. Bole himself crammed more action into one life than would be available to three or four puny moderns—and I include, amongst action, periods of boredom in a consular office in Khartoum, periods of studious seclusion in Pommeroy Vicarage in Suffolk, working on his translations, romances, and poems. He traveled
long distances on sea and land—and along rivers, exploring the Danube as a student and the Nile as a middle-aged grandee. He went to Madagascar and wrote on lemurs. He travelled the Silk Road from Samarkand. He spent years in Constantinople, the city which, perhaps more than any human being, was the love of his life. He conducted secret negotiations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Cairo and Isfahan. He was—and this is soberly attested—a master of disguise, could pass himself off as an Arab, a Turk or a Russian, not to mention his command of Prussian
moeurs
and Viennese dialect. He fought in the Crimea, and gave moral and practical support to Florence Nightingale, whom he had known as a young woman, frustrated by family expectations in the days when his great friend Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) had wanted to marry her. He was part of Monckton Milnes's dubious circle of Parisian sexual sensationalists, as Destry-Scholes proved conclusively with some fine work in the archives of Fred Hankey and the Goncourts in Paris. He had known everyone—Carlyle, Clough, Palmerston, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, Richard Watson Dixon, Swinburne, Richard Burton … And yet, beside this incessant journeying, political activity, soldiering and dining out he had found time to write enough books to fill a library. Nowhere had been visited without a record of his travels, which would include an account of the geography and climate, the flora and fauna, the history, political and military, the government, the beliefs, the art and architecture, the oddities and distractions of places as diverse as the Sudan and Austria-Hungary, Finland and Madagascar, Venice, Provence and, always returning, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul,
Stamboul. He wrote histories—one of the great days of Byzantium, one of its fall, one of the Ottoman rulers, one of the reign of William the Silent, as well as his more technical works on Cromwell's New Model Army and military organisation under Louis XIV. If he had done nothing else—as Destry-Scholes points out—he would be remembered as a great translator. His collections of Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish fairy tales are still current in reprinted forms. His loose translation of the early eighteenth-century divan poetry of the great Tulip Period “boon companion,” Nedim, once rivalled Fitzgerald's
Omar Khayyám
in popularity, with its haunting rhythms and hedonist chants. He translated the Arab chivalric romance,
The History of Antar
, all thirty-three volumes, as well as several erotic oriental works for the furtive presses of Fred Hankey and Monckton Milnes.

The most exciting of these translations—Destry-Scholes certainly thought so, and conveys the excitement—was his version of the travels of the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller, Evliya Chelebi. Elmer Bole's translation included those passages expurgated by the Ritter Joseph von Hammer, the first Western translator, who had felt it proper to omit, for instance, Evliya's initiation into “all the profligacies of the royal pages, the relation of which, in more than one place, leaves a stain upon his writings.” Bole had also followed Evliya through bath-houses where the Ritter had stopped at the door. Evliya Chelebi had, it appears, had a vision of the Prophet, in his twenty-first year, in which, stammering as he was, blinded by glory, he had asked, not as he meant to, for the intercession of the Prophet
(shifaa't)
but for travelling
(siya'hat)
. Travelling had been granted, in abundance. Elmer
Bole, undertaking his dangerous journeys disguised as a Turkish bookseller, had used Evliya's other name, Siyyah, the Traveller, and Evliya's dream-stammering, written in Arabic, transliterated according to William Jones's system, appeared on the front pages both of Bole's account of his Syrian escapade, and of Destry-Scholes's second volume,
The Voyager
. I was delighted, as humans are delighted when facts slot together, when I saw the significance of these lines.

Bole wrote many romances of his own, all popular in their day, all now forgotten.
A Humble Maid at Acre, Rose of Sharon, The Scimitar, The Golden Cage of Princes, A Princess Among Slaves
are a few of the titles. He also wrote verse, also now forgotten. A verse-novel,
Bajazeth
, collections of lyrics
—Shulamith, How Beautiful Are Thy Feet, A Spring Shut Up, The Orchard Walls
. The lyrics are conventional, and the novels are wooden, melodramatic and stilted. This judgement has its importance, beyond the unmournable disappearance of the romances, because it has a bearing on what is generally (in this, as in everything I say, of course, I follow Destry-Scholes) acknowledged to be Elmer Bole's literary masterpiece.

This was his translation, if it was a translation, of Evliya's account of his travels through Europe, his exploration of “the seven climates,” setting off from Vienna, where he had been secretary to Kara Muhammad Pasha's embassy in 1664, travelling through Germany and the Netherlands, as far as Dunkirk, through Holland, Denmark and Sweden, returning through Poland, via Cracow and Danzig, to the Crimea, after a journey of three and a half years. This European exploration was well attested, and constantly referred to by Evliya in his accounts of his Middle Eastern travels. The problem was that
no manuscript existed, and experts, including the Ritter von Hammer who had searched salerooms and bazaars, had come to believe that he never wrote the European volume being, as the Ritter puts it, “probably prevented by death when he had completed his fourth volume.”

Elmer Bole, however, claimed to have found the manuscript of Evliya's fifth volume, wrapped as packing round a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of tulips, in an obscure curiosity shop deep in the Bazaar. He had compared it to that manuscript of Eusebius which was in use as a cover for a milk-pitcher. Scholars, including, especially, Scholes Destry-Scholes, had made exhaustive attempts to rediscover this lost manuscript, in Istanbul, in London, in the libraries to which Bole's papers had been bit by bit dispersed, in the attics and dusty ottomans of Pommeroy Vicarage. It had never come to light, and many scholars, both Anglophone and Turkish, had concluded that it had never existed, that the
Journey Through Seven Climates
was an historical novel, a pastiche, by Bole himself.

Destry-Scholes came down, cautiously, arguing every inch of his conclusions, on the other side. His argument, a delicious example of 1950s pre-theoretical intuitive criticism, derives in part from the extraordinary deadness and badness of Bole's acknowledged fictions. They are vague, verbose and grandiose. Bole's Evliya, like the earlier Evliya, is precise, enumerative, recording buildings, customs, climates with scrupulous (and occasionally tedious) exactness. He notices things about the personal cleanliness (or lack of it) in Germany, about the concealed ostentation of rich Dutch burghers, the behaviour of women servants in Stockholm and Krakow—
things which, as Destry-Scholes points out with effortless comparative cultural knowledge, would have been those things a Turk in those days, far from home, would have noticed. The account is full of lively action, dangers from pirates and footpads, amorous encounters with mysterious strangers, conversations with connoisseurs and savants, discussions of the price of tulips and the marketing of new strains from the Orient, comparisons of Turkish and Dutch tastes in these precious bulbs (the Dutch prefer closed cups, the Turks pointed petals like daggers). How, asks Destry-Scholes, could Bole have known all this well enough to
inhabit it imaginatively
with such concrete detail, such delightfully provocative
lacunae
. He remarks on the fact that Bole's translation is written, not in high Victorian English but in a good approximation of seventeenth-century prose, the prose of Aubrey and Burton, Walton and Bunyan. When I have one of my frequent fits of wishing to disagree with Destry-Scholes, I tell myself that his “voice,” this put-on vocabulary, this imaginative identification, were perhaps in themselves enough to transmute Bole the banal follower of Scott and Lytton into Bole the inventor of Evliya Chelebi. But it is hard to disagree with Destry-Scholes for long. He knows what he is talking about. It was his belief that Evliya's manuscript was given to the young Nedim, who may have taken it on his own travels. I am getting ahead of myself. I have not got to Nedim.

Another possible argument for Bole's authorship—also, it has to be said, carefully considered by Destry-Scholes—is his capacity to soak up knowledge, to make himself an expert on matters of historical or linguistic or aesthetic scholarship. His
knowledge of Ottoman court ceremonies, of religious tolerance and intolerance under successive rulers of the Sublime Porte, his study of the weaponry of Cromwell's forces, his investigations into British military hygiene, are remarkable—as of course, in another vein, is his study of pornographic Roman jars, or his famous collection of
phalloi
, from many cultures. He read, and wrote, as the great Victorian scholars did, as though a year could contain a hundred years of reading, thought and investigation. I have often wondered what has happened to my own generation, that we seem to absorb so pitifully little. I have strange dreams of waking to find that the television and the telephone have been uninvented—would those things, in themselves, make the difference? Would it be desirable?