The Biographer's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 hersaying, 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:
    About Facts
    First find your facts
.
    Select your facts. (What to include, what to omit.)
    Arrange your facts
.
    Consider missing facts
.
    Explain your facts. How much, and what, will you explain, and why?
    This leads to the vexed question of speculation. Does it have any place, and if it does, on what basis?
    He had also written:
    A Hypothetical Situation
    We may say, “He travelled by train from Edinburgh to London.” We know that, because we have the ticket, let us say, as well as knowing where he dined in London and whom he visited in Edinburgh. We do not have to adduce the railway ticket. A biography is not an examination script
.
    We may also say, “He would have seen, from the train, Durham Cathedral where he was married.” But we do not know. He might have been looking the other way. He might have been asleep. He might have been reading
The Times
—or
War and Peace,
or the
Inferno,
or the
Beano.
He might have looked out of the window on the other side of the train and witnessed a murder he was not sure was a murder, and never reported
.
    If he were a character in a novel, the novelist would have a right to choose between
The Times, War and Peace,
the
Inferno
and the
Beano,
and would choose for his own reasons, and would inevitably be right. Though if he did not explain the
Beano,
he might lose a little credibility, unless he were a surrealist
.
    A biographer must never claim knowledge of that which he does not know. Whereof we cannot know, thereof must we be silent. You will find that this requirement gives both form and beauty to a good biography. Perhaps contrary to your expectations
.
    On another page, he had written:
    Values
    A life assumes the value of an individual. Whether you see that individual as
unique
or as a
type
depends on your view of the world and of biography; you will do well to