Not By Facts Alone
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Not By Facts Alone By Lynne Sharon Schwartz A young researcher on the trail of an elusive dead writer meets a dauntingly combative woman scholar. They join forces, at first...
...Any "dismemberment of the imagined body" gets tricky when fact can't be distinguished from fiction (or, as in this novel, when historical figures morph into fictional characters...
...Puck's Girdle plans tailor-made, themebased trips, each with unique, precise goals...
...I simply live to avoid my previous life," Richard announces matter-of-factly...
...No longer arrested adolescents, they have their own wayward children to deal with, their own aging parents to worry over...
...illuminates the world...
...Lush, strawberry-blonde Fulla andpale, austere Vera (shades of Snow White and Rose Red) represent opposite poles of feminine allure...
...The facts—hilarious or poignant, startling or commonplace—are occasionally excessive, even assaultive...
...In the opening story, "Hurricane Carleyville," the Vietnam War pervades the action like a dark mist...
...he trips, bumps, chases his pets through a parking lot...
...Objective," as well as "real," "identify" and "epiphany," are words formerly banned by his theoretical studies...
...The context informing The Biographer's Tale is the rather less alluring one of taxonomy, the science of classification, especially as applied to biography...
...But work at Puck's Girdle is not all diversion...
...Insecure in her marriage, brooding her way through life, the 49-year-old heroine suns herself at a Key West resort while her unfaithful husband and her friend Hetherly, whom she wrote to while he was in Vietnam, go fishing...
...Once home, "then began the revenge of the ordinary world...
...All three serve as analogies for Phineas' project: "to explore, to constitute, to open, a whole man, a whole opus....' The problem with Destry-Scholes' notes, Phineas finds, is that goodly portions of them are invented...
...There he learned "magical thinking...
...The finest of this group is "The BigBreasted Pilgrim," told by an ex-Marine whose pregnant wife was killed in an auto accident, and who now acts as factotum for a prominent chef...
...they have the burden of long memory now...
...Ibsen, in creating a character, had to "penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul...
...If I run fast enough...
...there is no straining to show how fast they can take effect...
...Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that The Biographer's Tale reads like a footnote or appendix to Possession, as if Byatt were drawn back to a subject she hadn't quite exhausted, or wished to examine under a new aspect...
...There is a general sameness to the rueful stories of Perfect Recall...
...The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea" presents two assistants struck down by illness, living on the generosity of their employers...
...An image of space might signify emptiness or opportunity, but for all her humor, Beattie's tone—from dry to plangent— makes optimism feel like a stretch...
...But any flagging of attention is perilous, for each fact soon takes its place in an intricate web that embraces bioecology as well as biography...
...It's The Biographer's Tale (Knopf, 305 pp...
...Playful" in the relative sense: in the absolute, it is hardly a word one would attach to Byatt...
...When she was good, she was very very good...
...The invalids pass the time bantering through their idleness, gnawed by gratitude, reveling in the power of the weak...
...Ann Beattie would probably agree...
...It is not a damaging sameness, though, but rather the stern consistency of a Jane Austen or Don DeLillo, indeed of any masterful writer with a single subject and better than 20-20 vision...
...What links Destry-Scholes' subjects is the pursuit of an underlying structure...
...Entomology also featured in Byatt's 1992 novellas, Angels and Insects...
...Phineas' advisor extols facts...
...How life and art shape each other was the mystery to be unraveled...
...On the road in the rain in a broken-down truck pulling a trailer with a menagerie of animals, he can't get anything right...
...they have intimations of mortality...
...But too often the banal remained just that...
...the inventories of failure and futility...
...To call Byatt's design ambitious is an understatement...
...The best stories approach their subjects obliquely, as if moving closer and closer to a bonfire...
...Not onlyjobs, but love affairs andmarriages are rashly begun in blitheness or despair, or the blitheness born of despair...
...Her new book of stories, Perfect Recall (Scribner, 347 pp...
...Like a genie rising from a bottle, the novel swirls out of these notes, cited at length and demanding half a dozen voices that Byatt does expertly...
...the same wry recollections of zany escapades...
...25.00), is crammed with facts, as were her five previous collections spanning 24 years...
...So along with taxonomy, eugenics and literary strategies, travel as systematic exploration finds a place in the grand design...
...Only at the end are their ages revealed: 15 and 18...
...In Irons" shows the hero's marriage, in fact his will, destroyed by a dying man who holds him in thrall...
...As bafflingly as a Woody Allen hero, whom he resembles in nature but far exceeds in intellect, Phineas manages to keep their sexual attention...
...Rumor has it that Destry-Scholes died on a trip to the Maelstrom, the menacing whirlpool in Norway's Lofoten Islands...
...But no...
...Whether the reader can sustain an interest in Linnaeus' description of the customs of Lapland, or Galton's lists of the measuring equipment needed for anthropometric studies in South Africa is another issue...
...The symbiotic dependence of Richard and his employer is a recurrent motif: Rich older artists, often gay, charismatic but disorganized, offer a refuge to younger, uncertain men who can manage their lives for them...
...The characters arrive with dossiers that locate them on a generational and geographical grid...
...It also echoes Phaeogenes nanus, a parasitic wasp...
...But she was unreliable: At best, her wisdom and perfect-pitch style could illuminate banality into radiance...
...and the sudden, welcome leaps into pure lyricism, like cool water for a parched reader...
...The prognosis was rarely cheering...
...Ditto marriages...
...His employers absent, Phineas is troubled by a Strange Customer who makes unwelcome sexual insinuations...
...Not quite tragedy, just the everyday agonies, relieved by patches of escape or abandon...
...Mallarmé said that all poetry aspires to the condition of music...
...Fortunately a manuscript turns up, his notes for studies of Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish taxonomist, Francis Galton, the 19th-century eugenicist, statistician and cousin of Darwin, and Henrik Ibsen...
...Carleyville's world is a minefield, and only gradually do we see it's because of the war...
...For the first dozen pages Nelson Carleyville seems a figure of farce from a Buster Keaton movie...
...And like Destry-Scholes' first subject, Elmer Bole, who lived a double life with marriages and families in England and Turkey, Phineas ends up the lover of two women: Fulla, a Swedish paleoecologist who helps him in his research, and Vera, the niece of Destry-Scholes and a radiographer by profession (on her bedroom walls hang X-ray photos of bones—yet another catalogue...
...He ran fast enough, though now he wonders how come he survived and others didn't...
...Linnaeus saw the earth's flora and fauna as a single organism and proceeded to deconstruct it...
...Five of the stories are set in Key West, portrayed as a playedout paradise spoiled by tourists and construction, its gay culture sadly wilted by AIDS...
...24.00), the British novelist's more playful variation on the same theme...
...It turns out that the runaway girls have endured more childhood trauma than most lives can accommodate...
...a friend asks...
...If I make it to the tree...
...his name, he tells us, derives from nanus, the Latin for dwarf...
...A more delicate touch could make this moving...
...When they make their choices, they range from impulsive to irresponsible...
...How are discrete fragments of data to be assembled in a coherent whole...
...During a seminar on Lacan's "theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body," Phineas decides, understandably, that he has had enough of literary theory...
...instead it is interesting...
...They have come into their share of illness and despair...
...You turn to pick it up and you step on the cat's tail...
...Still fluid and deft, it has assumed weight and authority...
...Phineas himself, clearly no novelist, fails to grasp what impulse could have lured Destry-Scholes to extend chronicle into fantasy...
...What is it that makes everything so precarious if you're anywhere near it...
...Galton took the dimensions of a Hottentot woman by using trigonometry...
...In "Mermaids," again, the emotional climax—a devastating betrayal—is couched in an image of the war...
...Every established fact...
...In execution, alas, the sheer density of data threatens to crush the fictional armature: lonely Phineas' search for a meaningful way to spend his life...
...But it all means more because the characters have aged...
...on Galton's statistical scales of eye color and hip contours, they would line up diametrically...
...When his advisor gives him a biography of one Elmer Bole, Victorian polymath, translator and traveler, Phineas is enticed by Bole's absurdly vast accomplishments but even more by their chronicler...
...She often revisits matters of esthetics and epistemology cloaked in some elegant combination of her favorite genres: romance, mystery, fairy tale...
...He left few traces...
...Add to this an astonishing mass of erudition and embedded text—quoted and invented—plus the selfeffacing hero's affair with a descendant of his subject, and you might guess the book in question was A. S. Byatt's hefty and delectable Possession (1990...
...What opened as farce ends in utter dismay...
...The family curse," one character remarks in the title story...
...neither did Galton go to Lake Ngami in South Africa...
...You walk into a room and you knock over a table...
...His judgment is borne out by "The Women of This World...
...They can't afford to be flip...
...Their quest leads to knotty problems about the nature of biography and the blurred line dividing facts and creative embellishment...
...They muse that, "In a perfect world, all wines would be perfect...
...See the Pyramids" offers a casual summer day in the life of two young models tied to older men who live off their earnings...
...Between them, they half dragged, half held up a drunken mermaid...
...With that shocking stroke, Beattie makes you catch your breath, and for a moment all goes dark...
...Phineas' narrative, begun as an objective account of his studies, gradually and happily blossoms into autobiography...
...She seemed a product of the rebellion, yet scrutinized it ironically, with a cold, brisk intelligence, probing and reporting symptoms...
...As anyone familiar with her earlier fiction and criticism knows, Byatt's learning is encyclopedic and her powers of invention huge...
...Linnaeus never made the trip to the Maelstrom, rendered in vivid detail...
...Her first book, Distortions, in 1976, caused a sensation: Here was a fresh voice for a fresh time, witty, offhand, almost flip in its depiction of the sheer arbitrariness of life...
...In the process, Phineas finds a new path for his own life, which has been as impoverished as Boles' was rich...
...Likewise, in "The Infamous Fall of Howell the Clown," a woman attending a memorial gathering circles slowly around an entire family history, until at last, staring out at the night, she zeroes in on her collapsing marriage and blank future: "Outside there seemed, amid steam and stars, to be nothing but space...
...They join forces, at first tentatively, later passionately...
...The richness..., the surprise, the shining solidity of a world full of facts...
...Why not write a biography of the prodigious biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes (his name echoes that of the beetle preyed on by the wasp...
...Some of the material is piquant, though—like Galton's taste for self-induced psychotic states and for hybrids, illustrated by composite photographs of family members...
...The antithesis of everything sober and staid that had repelled her contemporaries...
...writing becomes an end in itself...
...He craves facts, things...
...What's ahead for most of these characters is more of the same...
...She has become the unofficial scribe of the postwar generation, the middle classes now looking uneasily at the far side of 50, whose youth was spent in the turmoil of the Vietnam War years, the drug years, the years of social eruption whose dust is still drifting...
...Things tumble from his grip...
...As a distraction from these dilemmas, Phineas takes a job at an idiosyncratic travel agency, Puck's Girdle, run by two gay men who offer friendship as well as employment—both of which he sorely lacks...
...Byatt's convoluted riddle of a novel suggests that all prose aspires to autobiography—the last thing one would have expected from a writer so ardently cerebral, so intriguing a hybrid of poet and pedant...
...In Possession the biographer's task was a sleuthing expedition: the clues came from poetry and the discovery was love...
...now, like hardened women, they get by on grim grit and resignation...
...The 11 stories in Perfect Recall are mostly longer and more leisurely than her previous ones...
...The fictional biographer Destry-Scholes surely sought himself in the elaborate adventures he conjured up for his real subjects...
...No longer sleeping around as much, they are on what they hope is the last of serial marriages or relationships...
...Over the years her work has deepened and relaxed...
...The first-person narrator, graduate student Phineas G. Nanson, is "a very small man...
...The novel's epigraph is a line from Goethe: "Who does not enjoy playing with analogies...
...Ibsen too, in Destry-Scholes' notes, was troubled by a Strange Customer—an alter ego or abandoned illegitimate son—who reminds him of what he prefers to forget...
...If the mermaid had been Hetherly's war buddy, he would have been accomplishing a noble, noble deed...
...they tend to merge in recollection, with a few stark details or notably eccentric characters standing out...
...The style, however, is not very different: We find the same extended passages of chatty dialogue, seemingly random but never aimless...
...Though it is laced with the quirky antics Beattie is famous for—in this case, repeated phone calls from George Stephanopoulos to arrange a dinner for the Clintons— it is a deeply melancholy tale...
...Friends, love, and work: Besides toying with a dubious biography, he has become socially useful, helping the ecologically militant Fulla study the mating rites of beetles...
...Scholarship, that patient amassing of facts Phineas' advisor reveres, seems no more trustworthy than fiction...
...At the story's conclusion, through a tragicomic accident, his escape route hits a dead end and he needs a new way out...
...But read as a whole, Beanie's gossip-laden tales chart the pulse of an era...
...At once admirable and exasperating, the novel asks what is the organizing principle of an ecosystem or of a voyage, of a collection of marbles, a piece of writing, a life...
...When their boat docks, she realizes they have spent the day romping with half-naked women dressed as mermaids...
...And Phineas, in seeking Destry-Scholes, has found himself: a fiction spun off from a fiction...
...She has also written six novels...
...While two women cope with the discovery of a brutal crime in a neighboring house, their boyish, petulant husbands linger at the table, irked by the sirens, "annoyingly like a woman's voice...
...If I zig left and right and agree that my mother can die...
...Although Phineas' life may be inventing itself from his research, at least now he has a life...
...Every few years a new collection would appear, the stories cunningly on target and wildly uneven...
Vol. 84 • January 2001 • No. 1
