The Biographer's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

twisting a Rubik’s Cube into shape. Or, in a more complex vision, selecting the tesserae—blue, green, ivory, white glass, gold and silver, laying them at different angles on their bed of colour to reflect the light in different ways.
    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.
    â€œI 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 SomersetMaugham.” 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.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œYou met him?” I said, swallowing my excitement. “What was he like?”
    â€œI 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,
    â€œHow do you suggest I set about finding out about his life?”
    â€œOh, the usual ways, I suppose. Go to Somerset House,