The Biographer's Tale (4 page)

The project may have come to me in a dream. I am not being fanciful, simply precise. I woke one morning and thought, “It would be interesting to find out about Scholes Destry-Scholes.” I had a vague memory of a dream of pursuit through dappled green and gold underwater caverns. Of rising to the surface and of seeing a pattern of glass balls, fishermen's floats, on the surface of the sea, blue, green, transparent.

“I could write a biography,” I said to myself, possibly even aloud, “of Scholes Destry-Scholes.” Only a biography seemed an appropriate form for the great biographer. I never had any doubt about that. I had discovered the superiority of the form. I would write one myself.

I made an appointment to discuss this idea with Ormerod Goode. He gave me dark, syrupy sherry on this occasion, Oloroso. I was offered no choice, though the half-full bottle of the spirituous Glenmorangie stood amongst the clean glasses. I had brought the three volumes to return to him, and explained my project. He smiled mildly, and said I could keep them until I had contrived to procure copies of my own, which could easily be done from good secondhand bookshops. He said that it might be possible to continue to hold my postgraduate scholarship, if I were to change subjects and transfer to Goode himself as supervisor. This—although it lacked the drama of renunciation—seemed a prudent course of action. He asked about the dissertation I was about to abandon—had abandoned. Its title was “Personae of female desire in the novels of Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and Somerset
Maugham.” I sometimes thought it should have been “Female personae of desire in the novels of Firbank, Forster and Maugham” and could not make up my mind as to whether this changed the whole meaning completely, or made no difference at all. I did not discuss it with Goode, who simply nodded solemnly when I told him, and remarked that there was certainly no one else in the department who would be interested in a biographical study of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

“You must understand,” he said, “that I have no particular competence in the field either. I am a philologist, a taxonomist of place-names. I met the man, but it cannot be said I knew him.”

“You met him?” I said, swallowing my excitement. “What was he like?”

“I hardly remember. Blondish. Medium-sized. I have a bad memory for faces. He came to give a lecture in 1959 on the Art of Biography. Only about half a dozen students attended, and myself. I was deputed to manage the slide projector. I invited him to a drink, but he wouldn't stay. Of course, when I heard the lecture I hadn't read the biography, didn't realise it was out of the ordinary, or I'd have pressed him harder, perhaps. I had a problem I wanted to get back to, I remember. I was waiting for him to go away. He probably noticed that.”

We looked at each other. I sipped the unctuous sherry. He said, “Come to think of it, I can give you your first research document. He left his notes. Well, a carbon copy of the notes of his lecture. I put it in a drawer, meaning to send it to him, and didn't. It was only a carbon, I expect he had the top copy. I'll hunt it out.”

His filing-cabinet was orderly. He handed me the desiccated yellow paper, with the faint blue carbon traces of typing. Three foolscap sheets. “The Art of Biography.” The full-stops had made little holes, like pinpricks. I put it in my bag, with the returned biography. I said,

“How do you suggest I set about finding out about his life?”

“Oh, the usual ways, I suppose. Go to Somerset House, look up his birth and death. Advertise in the
TLS
and other places for information. Contact his publishers. Publishers change every three or four months these days, but you may find someone who remembered him, or some letters in an archive. That's the way to begin. I've no idea if he was married or anything. That's for you to discover. All I know for certain is how he died. Or probably died.”

He poured more sherry.

“Probably died?”

“He drowned. He drowned off the coast of the Lofoten Islands. Or at least an empty boat was found, floating.”

I didn't know where the Lofoten Islands were. I vaguely assumed they must be not far from the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, the haunts of Bole.

“The Lofoten Islands, you know, off the north-west coast of Norway. He may have had an idea of taking a look at the Maelstrøm. There was a small item in the press—I remembered, because I had read the book, I had an interest. The Norwegians said they had warned him, when he set out, about the dangerous currents. He was on a solitary walking holiday, the press said. I was a bit surprised. It's my stamping-ground, I thought, not his, full of nice linguistic titbits and old legends. He was never found, but then, he wouldn't have been.”

My imagination wouldn't form an image of the Lofoten Islands.

“You'll have to find out what he was doing there, too,” said Goode, cheerfully. “Detective work. What fun.”

I went home, quite excited. It seemed to me I was about to embark on new ways of working, new kinds of thought. I would talk to people who, like Goode, remembered the man, remembered facts and events, and with any luck, remembered more, and better. I would hunt down Destry-Scholes, I told myself, I would ferret out his secrets, I would penetrate his surface compartments and lay bare his true motives. I then thought, how very nasty all these metaphors were, and one at least of them contained another word (“penetrate”) I had vowed for ever to eschew.

Moreover, the clichéd metaphors weren't accurate. I didn't want to hunt or penetrate Destry-Scholes. I wanted, more simply, to get to know him, to meet him, maybe to make a kind of a friend of him. A collaborator, a colleague. I saw immediately that “getting to know” Destry-Scholes was a much harder, more anxious task than hunting or penetrating him would have been. It required another skill, which carried with it yet another word I most vehemently avoided—“identify.” I hate marking essays by female students who say plaintively that they can't identify with Mrs. Dalloway or Gwendolen Harleth. It is even worse when they claim that they
do
“identify with” Sue Bridehead, or Tess (it is almost always Hardy). What on earth does “identify” mean? See imaginatively, out of the eyes of? It is a disgusting
skinned
phrase.

Destry-Scholes certainly never “identified with” Elmer Bole, though I think it is clear from his writings that most of the time he liked him, or liked him well enough. Bole didn't annoy him, morally or intellectually, even when he betrayed friends, even when he wrote badly. Or else he was a supremely tolerant man (Destry-Scholes, I mean). It occurred to me that it was a delicious, delicate tact, being, so to speak, the third in line, organising my own attention to the attention of a man intent on discovering the whole truth about yet a third man.

I was brashly confident in those early days. I wrote off to the publisher of the biography, Holme & Holly, which had been subsumed in an American conglomerate, which had been bought by a German conglomerate. I addressed my letter “To Whom It May Concern.” I wrote, and paid for, an advertisement in the
TLS
—“letters, information, manuscripts, anything helpful for a biographical study of Scholes Destry-Scholes, biographer of Sir Elmer Bole.” I went to Somerset House and made my own first discovery. Scholes had indeed been born in Pontefract, on July 4th 1925; but his given name had been not Scholes Destry-Scholes, but Percival Scholes Destry. His parents were Robert Walter and Julia Ann Destry née Scholes. It had to be the same man. Two men cannot be born in the same small town on the same day with Destry and Scholes in their name. He must have given up the Percival for reasons of his own, and doubled the Scholes for other reasons—did he love that side of his family better? I know about not liking one's given name. My mother must have thought Phineas was an inspiration—I remember her
saying, when I was a little boy, and cried because I was bullied for being odd, that I would grow up to be glad to be unusual, to have something remarkable about me, if only a name. I think Percival—or any diminutive—Percy, Perce—would have been worse than Phineas for a little boy in a provincial Yorkshire town. I wondered, in a moment of random inspiration, if he had chosen his name because its rhythm matched that of Ford Madox Ford, who had remade himself as an Englishman after the First World War.

Of course, I immediately read, and re-read, and annotated Destry-Scholes's notes on “The Art of Biography.” A large part of these three pages was, unfortunately, simply typed-out quotations from Elmer Bole, including the famous references to the red and green apples, with the terse instruction “explain and discuss.” He appeared to have conceived his lecture as a primer—and to a certain extent a theoretical enquiry—for aspiring biographers. This in a sense included me, although, of course, the lecture was delivered many years before my birth. I found it hard to put aside my ingrained habits of suspicion and contentiousness, even before the simple reasonable tone of the document, which said many things I had already thought might indeed have been written by the friend and colleague I was looking for. I could not throw off a 1990s need to think a 1950s critic both naïve and disingenuous. He wrote:

He had also written:

On another page, he had written:

I was particularly moved by Destry-Scholes's note to himself about the metaphor. I was delighted by his choice of adjective—“silly,” the straightforward,
right
adjective for that metaphor, as I was delighted by his preoccupation with silly metaphors. There was an affinity between us. It would reveal itself in other ways, I was sure.

Whilst I was waiting for answers to my letter and advertisement, I thought I would walk in Destry-Scholes's traces, at least in the place where I myself was most at home, the British Library. I asked, jokingly, at the issue desk if it was known where he had sat, or when he had come, but such records are not kept. It is known where Karl Marx sat, because he never moved away from his singular place. I had the silly idea that if I were to move round the whole reading room, from Row A to Row Z, and to sit once in every seat, I would necessarily have sat where Destry-Scholes had sat. I had no idea of the shape of his bottom (I imagined it thin) or of the cut of his trousers (I imagined them speckled tweed). I found it necessary to have
some
image, however provisional.

I proceeded in an orderly way, ordering all the books in the extensive bibliographies of Destry-Scholes's three volumes. I read the three volumes themselves again and again, mostly at home in bed, noting new riches and felicities of interpretation at each reading. I also embarked on a course of scholarly study of my own, giving myself a competence in Byzantine art, Ottoman history, folklore motifs, nineteenth-century pornography, the history of the small-arm, and the study of Middle Eastern Hymenoptera—this turned out to be the area of Bole's gentleman-amateur expertise which excited me the most. I was a keen bug-collector and bird-watcher as a boy. I knew the names and species of most British butterflies. I spent a pleasant few days sitting along rows EE and FF in the library, studying bee books, ancient and modern.