The Biographer's Tale Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œProbably died?”
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œYou’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