The Biographer's Tale - Hardcover

Byatt, A.S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411143 ISBN 13: 9780375411144

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of Possession and Angels and Insects comes an ingenious new novel about love and literary sleuthing: a dazzling fiction woven out of one man's search for fact.
It tells the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted young graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of "real life" by writing a biography of a great biographer. For what could be more real than biography, the "art of things, of arranged facts"? But Phineas quickly discovers that facts can be unreliable, and a "whole life" hard to find. No matter how hard he tries, he unearths only fragments--disconnected manuscripts, bones and husks, strands of poetry, boxes of marbles, undated photographs. How does one put together the idea of a person?

Phineas tracks his subjects' journeys to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic in a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic, scientific and erotic. He meets others who are building wholes from bits and pieces: a beautiful radiographer, ecologists, anthropologists, even travel agents offering the trip of your dreams. But they seem only to make his task more difficult. And as he tries to sort through the cabinet of curiosities that is the past, he must also decide his own future, and face the most difficult puzzle of all: which woman will guide him out of this dizzying labyrinth and back into his own life?

With The Biographer's Tale, A. S. Byatt--hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for 1,001 nights"--asks provocative questions about our perennial quest for certainty, about "truth" in biography, about the nature of the imagination and the meaning of meaning, even as she spins a tantalizing yarn of detection and desire.

About this title

About the Author

A. S. Byatt's novels include 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, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. 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.

From the Back Cover

"Phineas G. Nanson decides to write a biography of the noted biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, believing biography to be the ultimate art of factual arrangement and Destry-Scholes to be the ultimate biographer. . . . [He] finds little material on Destry-Scholes himself and a plethora on Destry-Scholes' many interests. . . . [The Biographer's Tale] is all written in Victorian narrative style, and it's all fascinating. . . . We wonder what is happening to poor Phineas, lost in research and out of a job. We feel his frustration as he follows one research trail after another to a dead end. . . . When the book returns to the life of Phineas, present-day London, the writing is spare and comic. Characters emerge, brilliantly dawn and alive on the page."
–-Joanna Rose, The Oregonian

"With The Biographer's Tale A.S. Byatt embarks the reader on a wild ride-part sleuth tale, part academic parody a la Borges, part Victorian chronicle. . . . The constant back-and-forth . . . proceeds flawlessly, and the story is not devoid of plot twists, which infuse energy into the narrative. As for Byatt's prose, it is at once powerful and poetic. Byatt's sentences reverberate like great music. . . . Not just a novelist, she's also an erudite writer who keeps her readers on their intellectual toes with historical, literary, philosophical, scientific and historical references on virtually every page. . . . A feast for the brain . . . an impressive achievement, a literary mosaic at once exotic, academic, esoteric, engaging, and disconcerting." –-Jean Charbonneau, Denver Post

"Wise, sharp-witted . . . [A..S. Byatt] rarely misses a chance to build authority and authenticity. . . . As in her Booker Prize-winner, "Possession" (1990), some of her people are sniffy, self-important academics. But, again following "Possession," these unpleasant bookworms generate some exciting, provocative scenes. . . . It offers many gems along with enough intellectual depth to please the over-educated. Miss it at your peril." –-Peter Wolfe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Phineas G. Nanson is an unlikely hero, but the perfect protagonist-narrator for A.S. Byatt's comic tale . . . Not surprisingly, Nanson's research . . . evolves, by intricately layered turns, into . . . another delicious A.S. Byatt novel. . . . [The Biographer's Tale] drips with equal measures of learning and wit, and, I might add, not a little satire about the ways that high theory deadens literary practice, and how competing notions about what constitutes a legitimate "biography" make seeing a life, any life, both steady and whole nearly impossible. . . . Savvy readers will watch in something approaching amazement as Byatt weaves seemingly disparate stories . . . into the (nearly) unified tale . . . . It is, as they used to say about British novels of an earlier age, a rattling good tale, at the same time that it is about the peculiar mix of detective work and personal involvement that goes into the making of biography." –Sanford Pinsker, Providence Sunday Journal

Reviews

An intellectual romp that doubles as a detective story, Byatt's new novel finds her as imaginative, witty and provocative as ever. A postgraduate at a nameless English university, narrator Phineas G. Nanson decides to abandon his studies as a poststructuralist literary critic to become a biographer instead. He chooses as his subject one Scholes Destry-Scholes, who himself was a biographer of genius. Destry-Scholes's magnum opus was a biography of the Victorian polymath Sir Elmer Bole, a famous explorer, soldier, diplomat, scientist, travel writer, novelist and poetAin short, almost a caricature of a certain British type. As Nanson searches for clues to Destry-Scholes's life, the novel acquires layers of complexity. Nanson finds fragments written by Destry-Scholes about three men: Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. Like Nanson, the reader realizes the identity of these figures only gradually, for the fragments are oblique and mystifying. To his dismay, Nanson discovers that the revered Destry-Scholes has taken great liberties with the facts, inventing false incidents and inserting imaginary details. This calls into question the whole issue of biographical accuracy and allows Byatt, who all along has been taking swipes at poststructural literary criticism, to introduce arch observations about the current fad of psychoanalytic biography. The plot broadens when Nanson falls in love with two women simultaneously: one is a Swedish bee taxonomist; the other is Destry-Scholes's niece, a hospital radiographer. This is only one of the many mirror images here, for Bole had also married two women. In addition to the theme of doubles and doppelg?ngers, Byatt's (Possession; Angels and Insects) familiar preoccupation with insects, myths, spirits, metamorphoses and sexuality all come into play. The book is an erudite joke carried off with verve and humor. American audiences may not be quite so patient as the British, however, in indulging Byatt's many tangents. This book will appeal to discriminating readers ready for intellectual stimulation. 7 illustrations. 40,000 first printing. (Jan. 24)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Byatt, a Booker Prize-winning novelist with a love for fantasy as well as philosophy, is also a scholar and a critic, and she slyly explores the interface between the imagined and the factual, the felt and the reasoned, in this merrily satiric tale about a hesitant young man in search of a fuller life. Bored with his postmodern literary-criticism courses, the physically diminutive Phineas Gilbert Nanson seeks a more tangible subject in biography, diligently reading a recommended three-volume life of a little-known polymath written by a forgotten biographer named Scholes Destry-Scholes. So taken is Phineas with this magnum opus, he decides to become the biographer of a biographer. He devotes many hours to studying Destry-Scholes' inconclusive notes about three unidentified gentlemen, who gradually come into focus as the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, the English scientist Sir Francis Galton, and the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, a trio Byatt uses brilliantly in an intriguing metaphysical inquiry into our mania for naming, categorizing, and ordering. Phineas then has the great good luck of meeting Destry-Scholes' niece, the lunar beauty Vera. He also takes a job at a very strange, possibly sinister travel agency and gets involved with a passionate bee taxonomist named Fulla, the blazing sun to Vera's silvery moon. As he realizes that biography is no more true than any other story, little Phineas evolves from a brittle boy into a happily sensual man, a metamorphosis echoed in his steadily improving prose style. Byatt parlays her hero's awakening into a nimble and provocative pondering of our contradictory desires to belong and to be unique both as individuals and as a species wreaking havoc on the planet. Ardently literary, Byatt nonetheless reminds readers that life itself is what matters and that no work of art can come close to the sheer wonder of nature. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Reminiscent of Byatt's beloved Possession, this new work features Phineas G. Nanson, who tries to make sense of life by writing the biography of a famed biographer. With a nine-city author tour and a 40,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I made my decision, abruptly, in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher's famous theoretical seminars. He was quoting Empedocles, in his plangent, airy voice. "Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads." He frequently quoted Empedocles, usually this passage. We were discussing, not for the first time, Lacan's theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body. There were twelve postgraduates, including myself, and Professor Ormerod Goode. It was a sunny day and the windows were very dirty. I was looking at the windows, and I thought, I’m not going to go on with this anymore. Just like that. It was May 8th 1994. I know that, because my mother had been buried the week before, and I'd missed the seminar on Frankenstein.

I don't think my mother's death had anything to do with my decision, though as I set it down, I see it might be construed that way. It's odd that I can't remember what text we were supposed to be studying on that last day. We'd been doing a lot of not-too-long texts written by women. And also quite a lot of Freud—we'd deconstructed the Wolf Man, and Dora. The fact that I can't remember, though a little humiliating, is symptomatic of the “reasons” for my abrupt decision. All the seminars, in fact, had a fatal family likeness. They were repetitive in the extreme. We found the same clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lures and deceptions beneath, no matter what surface we were scrying. I thought, next we will go on to the phantasmagoria of Bosch, and, in his incantatory way, Butcher obliged. I went on looking at the filthy window above his head, and I thought, I must have things. I know a dirty window is an ancient, well-worn trope for intellectual dissatisfaction and scholarly blindness. The thing is, that the thing was also there. A real, very dirty window, shutting out the sun. A thing.

I was sitting next to Ormerod Goode. Ormerod Goode and Gareth Butcher were joint Heads of Department that year, and Goode, for reasons never made explicit, made it his business to be present at Butcher's seminars. This attention was not reciprocated, possibly because Goode was an Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Norse expert, specialising in place-names. Gareth Butcher did not like dead languages, and was not proficient in living ones. He read his Foucault and Lacan in translation, like his Heraclitus and his Empedocles. Ormerod Goode contributed little to the seminars, beyond corrections of factual inaccuracies, which he noticed even when he appeared to be asleep. No one cared much for these interventions. Inaccuracies can be subsumed as an inevitable part of postmodern uncertainty, or play, one or the other or both.

I liked sitting next to Goode—most of the other students didn't—because he made inscrutable notes in ancient runes. Also he drew elaborate patterns of carved, interlaced plants and creatures—Celtic, Viking, I didn't know—occasionally improper or obscene, always intricate. I liked the runes because I have always liked codes and secret languages, and more simply, because I grew up on Tolkien. I suppose, if the truth were told, I should have to confess that I ended up as a postgraduate student of literature because of an infantile obsession with Gandalf's Middle Earth. I did like poetry too, and I did—in self-defence—always know Tolkien's poems weren't the real thing. I remember discovering T. S. Eliot. And then Donne and Marvell. Long ago and far away. I don't know, to this day, if Ormerod Goode loved or despised Tolkien. Tolkien's people are sexless and Goode's precisely shadowed graffiti were anything but. Plaisir, consommation, jouissance. Glee. He was—no doubt still is—a monumentally larger man. He has a round bald cranium, round gold glasses round round, darkly brown eyes, a round, soft mouth, several chins, a round belly carried comfortably on pillars of legs between columnar arms. I think of him, always, as orotund Ormerod Goode, adding more Os to his plethora, and a nice complex synaesthetic metaphor—an accurate one—to my idea of him. Anyway, there I was, next to him, when I made my decision, and when I took my eyes away from the dirty glass there was his BB pencil, hovering lazily, tracing a figleaf, a vine, a thigh, hair, fingers, round shiny fruit.


I found myself walking away beside him, down the corridor, when it was over. I felt a need to confirm my decision by telling someone about it. He walked with a rapid sailing motion, lightly for such a big man. I had almost to run to keep up with him. I should perhaps say, now, that I am a very small man. "Small but perfectly formed" my father would say, several times a day, before his disappearance. He himself was not much bigger. The family name is Nanson; my full name is Phineas Gilbert Nanson—I sign myself always Phineas G. Nanson. When I discovered—in a Latin class when I was thirteen—that nanus was the Latin for dwarf, cognate with the French nain, I felt a frisson of excited recognition. I was a little person, the child of a little person, I had a name in a system, Nanson. I have never felt anything other than pleasure in my small, delicate frame. Its only disadvantage is the number of cushions I need to see over the dashboard when driving. I am adept and nimble on ladders. But keeping up with Ormerod Goode's lazy pace was a problem. I said, into his wake, "I have just made an important decision."

He stopped. His moon-face considered mine, thoughtfully.

"I have decided to give it all up. I’ve decided I don’t want to be a postmodern literary theorist."

"We should drink to that," said Ormerod Goode. "Come into my office."

His office, like the rest of our run-down department, had dirty windows, and a dusty, no-coloured carpet. It also had two high green leather wing-chairs, a mahogany desk and a tray of spotless glasses which he must have washed himself. He produced a bottle of malt whisky from a bookcase. He poured us each a generous glass, and enquired what had led to this decision, and was it as sudden as it appeared. I replied that it had seemed sudden, at least had surprised me, but that it appeared to be quite firm. "You may be wise," said Ormerod Goode. "Since it was a bolt from the blue, I take it you have no ideas about what you will do with the open life that now lies before you?"

I wondered whether to tell him about the dirty window. I said, "I felt an urgent need for a life full of things." I was pleased with the safe, solid Anglo-Saxon word. I had avoided the trap of talking about "reality" and "unreality" for I knew very well that postmodernist literary theory could be described as a reality. People lived in it. I did, however, fatally, add the Latin-derived word, less exact, redundant even, to my precise one. "I need a life full of things," I said. "Full of facts."

"Facts," said Ormerod Goode. "Facts." He meditated. "The richness," he said, "the surprise, the shining solidity of a world full of facts. Every established fact—taking its place in a constellation of glittering facts like planets in an empty heaven, declaring here is matter, and there is vacancy—every established fact illuminates the world. True scholarship once aspired to add its modest light to that illumination. To clear a few cobwebs. No more."

His round eyes glowed behind his round lenses. I found myself counting the Os in his pronouncements, as though they were coded clues to a new amplitude. The Glenmorangie slid like smooth flame down my throat. I said that a long time ago I had been in love with poetry, but that now I needed things, facts. "Verbum caro factum est," said Ormerod Goode opaquely. "The art of biography is a despised art because it is an art of things, of facts, of arranged facts. By far the greatest work of scholarship in my time, to my knowledge, is Scholes Destry-Scholes’s biographical study of Sir Elmer Bole. But nobody knows it. It is not considered. And yet, the ingenuity, the passion."

I remarked, perhaps brashly, that I had always considered biography a bastard form, a dilettante pursuit. Tales told by those incapable of true invention, simple stories for those incapable of true critical insight. Distractions constructed by amateurs for lady readers who would never grapple with The Waves or The Years but liked to feel they had an intimate acquaintance with the Woolfs and with Bloomsbury, from daring talk of semen on skirts to sordid sexual interference with nervous girls. A gossipy form, I said to Ormerod Goode, encouraged by Glenmorangie and nervous emptiness of spirit. There was some truth in that view, he conceded, rising smoothly from his wing-chair and strolling over to his bookcase. But I should consider, said Ormerod Goode, two things.

Gossip, on the one hand, is an essential part of human communication, not to be ignored. And on the other, a great biography is a noble thing. Consider, he said, the fact that no human individual resembles another. We are not clones, we are not haplodiploid beings. From egg to eventual decay, each of us is unique. What can be nobler, he reiterated, or more exacting, than to explore, to constitute, to open, a whole man, a whole opus, to us? What resources—scientific, intellectual, psychological, historical, linguistic and geographic—does a man—or a woman—not need, who would hope to do justice to such a task? I know, I know, he said, that most biographies are arid or sugary parodies of what is wanted. And the true masterpiece—such as Destry-Scholes's magnum opus—is not always recognised when it is made, for biographical readers have taste corrupted ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375411143
• ISBN 13: 9780375411144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320