The Biographer's Tale (33 page)

I could write about the Turkish hillside where I am sitting. I am in charge of an experimental transept in a scattered strip of red tulips
(Tulipa agenensis, Tulipa julia, Tulipa armena)
mixed with two kinds of anemone,
coronaria
and
Ranunculus asiaticus
. We are studying the pollinators of red bowl-shaped flowers. These have no nectar, and are odourless, or at least
with no scent detectable by humans. Some, many, have dark centres at the base of the bowls. We have also created models of flowers, using coloured, odourless plastic cups (red, blue, yellow, green, brown, white) mounted on sticks 15–25 cm high (the average height of the red guild flowers). We also have a spread of groups of 9 cm red petri dishes—one plain red, one containing a dead female beetle, one with a black patch, larger than the beetle. We have discovered, we think, that the red guild flowers are pollinated by
Amphicoma
beetles, which appear to be attracted by the red colour, and especially by the red-black contrast. This is interesting because beetles were previously believed to be unconcerned with colour, possibly unable to see it. Beetle-pollinated plants tend to be strongly scented with what Linnaeus would have called
nauseosos
smells—dung, fermentation, decay, ripe and overripe fruit.

We are also watching a small halictid bee,
Lasioglossum (Evylaeus) marginatum
, and a large anthophorid bee,
Synhalonia plumigera
, both of which visit the red flowers, but not exclusively.

Our plastic cups and petri dishes (containing a few drops of detergent to catch the landing beetles and prevent any emission of volatiles) are not romantic, though they are curious. But the drifts of red flowers on the sparse hillside are brilliant and lovely.
Tulipa agenensis
, also known as
oculis-solis
(the tulip of the eye of the sun), is a sumptuous crimson with velvet black stamens and pointed petals. The crimson and the black are glossy as lacquer: the flowers are stiff and delicate.
Tulipa armena, Tulipa julia
, take varying forms, sometimes pure scarlet, sometimes yellow feathered, sometimes black-bowled,
sometimes not. There are geraniums and eremurus. The eighteenth-century Ottoman Sultan Ahmed, whose reign was the
lale devri
, the Tulip Era, grew millions of tulips in the mountains, and despatched hundreds of gardeners and slaves to grub up millions more. After his fall, these hillside nurseries fell into desuetude. Before we came here, Fulla and I went to Istanbul, took boats along the Bosphorus, visited Topkapi and saw the formal tulips wound into garlands in the glazed tiles of Ahmed's apartments. Fulla disliked the harem. She is happier here, in the fresh air, on the mountainside. I do not say that she does not find the tulips beautiful; I do not even say that she does not admire the artifice of the glazier and the mosaicist who also found them beautiful. I sent a series of postcards of the mosaics in St. Saviour in Chora to Vera in Willesden. I sent a glittering glass peacock, shimmering in tesserae of rich blue and emerald green, streaked with shocking pink and iridescent with gold.

Literature is threaded in my brain along with my daily language. I remember Browning from childhood.

I remember Tennyson's goddesses coming down the Idalian hillside for the judgement of Paris.

I discovered, after we had been working for some time, that the
Anemone coronaria
(crown anemone, poppy anemone), blood-red, dusky-centred, sooty and powdered (which we simulate with our petri dishes), is the fabled flower which first bloomed from the spilled blood of Adonis, enlivened by Aphrodite, who sprinkled ambrosia on it. Golding's Ovid goes:

Sir Philip Sidney thought that poets made better flowers than Nature.

Not so. As long as we don't destroy and diminish it irrevocably, the too-much-loved earth will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it. It is all we have. I have to stop writing now—I can see Fulla, coming up the mountainside, quick and surefooted as a golden goat,
bringing yogurt and honey. I have just time to remember that Fulla is the name of a minor Norse goddess—a handmaid of Frigga, who kept the jewels of the Queen of Heaven, and spent her time tending woodland and forests, fruit trees and hives, cloudberries, blackberries and golden apples. Here she comes, with that amazing wing of crinkled hair, like an electric pulse, like a swarm, like an independent creature. I can see her severe little face. How beautiful upon the mountains are her sturdy feet in their Ecco sandals. That is an over-the-top sentence. And Fulla is at the top, and I must stop writing and put away this notebook.

I am very grateful to those who have patiently and intricately answered more than usually outlandish requests for information. Chris O'Toole, at the Hope Entomological Institute in Oxford, has provided me with help on bees and taxonomy, on pollination and leks. He even made suggestive and useful plotting suggestions in that regard. I have appropriated his experiment on the pollination of red-bowled flowers, and transferred it from Israel to Turkey. It was also Chris who provided me with the names of the beetle that carries Dutch elm disease and the parasitic wasp that preys on the beetle. The beetle is
Scolytus scolytus
, formally known as
Scolytus destructor
. The parasitic wasp is
Phaeogenes nanus
.

Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at the Galton Laboratory, University College London, has also been endlessly courteous, showing me Galton's memorabilia in his laboratory, suggesting reading on Galton, and even weighing the nut he once attached to the back of a stag-beetle, in the interests of fictive accuracy.

Claudine Fabre-Vassas provided conversation and a steady supply of books by and about Linnaeus, some, of books not available in English, in French translations.

I am grateful also to Gina Douglas, the Librarian of the Linnean Society, who showed me Linnaeus's collections, library and manuscripts, and with whom I was briefly enclosed in the strongroom in the dark. She suggested further reading on Linnaeus which proved extremely exciting.

My Danish friend and translator, Claus Bech, provided all sorts of information, linguistic, entomological and mythic. He told me about the minor goddess Fulla, translations of “stag-beetle,” and many other things.

John Saumarez-Smith, most resourceful of booksellers, suggested and found many books, including Blunt on Linnaeus. And I could not have done without the resources and unfailing courtesy of the London Library and its staff.

I am, as always, grateful to Gill Marsden for precision, energy and moral support when most needed. Also to my agent, Michael Sissons, for wisdom and enthusiasm, and to Jenny Uglow, most imaginative, most patient, and most intelligent of editors. My husband, Peter Duffy, saved me from many errors and found the right name for the Strange Customer's wine.

The mistakes are, as always, all my own.

A patchwork, echoing book like this should acknowledge its sources. A long reading-list is inappropriate, but the following books were indispensable:

I also used Robert Ferguson's biography,
Henrik Ibsen
(1996), and
The Sayings of Henrik Ibsen
, ed. Roland Huntford (1996). D. W. Forrest's life of Galton
(Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius
, 1974) was very helpful, as was the collection of essays on Linnaeus edited by Tore Frängsmyr
(Linnaeus: The Man and His Work
, 1994). I suspect the germ of the novel lies long ago in my own first reading of Foucault's remarks on Linnaeus and taxonomy in
Les mots et les choses
. Lyall Watson's fascinating
Jacobson's Organ
(1999), which is a study of the sense of smell, uses Linnaeus's taxonomy of smells. It arrived just as I was finishing my book, and I was able to add information from it.

A. S. B
YATT
is one of Britain's leading writers. Her novels include
The Game, Possession
(winner of the Booker Prize in 1990) and the sequence
The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life
and
Babel Tower
. She has also written two novellas, published together as
Angels and Insects
, and four collections of shorter works:
Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
and
Elementals
. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.

ANGELS & INSECTS

In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutible as the behavior of insects. And in “The Conjugal Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by a real historical personage.

Fiction/Literature

BABEL TOWER

Frederica's husband's violent streak has turned on her. She flees to London with their young son and gets a teaching job in an art school, where poets and painters are denying the value of the past and fostering dreams of rebellion, which hinge upon a strange, charismatic figure, the unkempt and near-naked Jude Mason.

Fiction/Literature

THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE

Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to escape postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire,
The Biographer's Tale
is a provocative look at “truth” and our perennial quest for certainty.

Fiction/Literature

THE CHILDREN'S BOOK

when children's book author Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined.

Fiction/Literature

THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE

In this collection of fairy tales for adults, the title story describes the relationship between a world renowned scholar of the art of storytelling and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle found in an Istanbul bazaar. Byatt renders this interaction of the natural and supernatural not only convincing, but inevitable.

Fiction/Literature

ELEMENTALS

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince. Striving to master color and line, a painter solves his artistic problems when a magical water snake appears in his pool. Elegantly crafted and suffused with wisdom, these tales are a testament to a writer at the height of her powers.

Fiction/Literature

THE GAME

The Game
portrays the sibling rivalry between Cassandra and Julia who, as little girls, played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled after Arthurian romance. Now they are hostile strangers, until a man they loved and suffered over reenters their lives.

Fiction/Literature

IMAGINING CHARACTERS

In this innovative book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré bring their sensibilities to bear on six novels they have loved: Jane Austen's
Mansfield Park
, Charlotte Brontë's
Villette
, George Eliot's
Daniel Deronda
, Willa Cather's
The Professor's House
, Iris Murdoch's
An Unofficial Rose
, and Toni Morrison's
Beloved
.

Literary Criticism

THE MATISSE STORIES

Each of these narratives is inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, and each is about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling. Beautifully written, intensely observed,
The Matisse Stories
is fiction of spellbinding authority.

Fiction/Literature

PASSIONS OF THE MIND

Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath, Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison, or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

Literary Criticism

SUGAR AND OTHER STORIES

These short stories explore the fragile ties between generations and the dizzying abyss of loss and the memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and return to our own with knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

Fiction/Literature

THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN

A tale of a brilliant and eccentric family fatefully divided,
The Virgin in the Garden
is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.