The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Read Free Book Online

was quite improbable that she knew anything about the Pontefract of the past.) I could have knocked at the meagre door of every house in that meagre row, asking if there was anyone there old enough to remember.… But I wasn’t going to. I was beginning to feel trapped by this ordinary place. I set off back to Pontefract, and the bus station. I could have walked round the Castle, but I didn’t. It was just a castle. He had been born into that box, that was certain, but anything he might have felt as a boy, patrolling moats and dungeons, came under his own heading of Speculation, and was a little disgusting.
    Thinking about the impossibility of the Castle made me see that I had, in some sense, registered the red box. I knew it. I had been there, even if I had not gone in.
    Action of some kind was becoming necessary. I began to wonder if it had been foolish to address my letter “To Whom It May Concern.” I decided to use the telephone. One amongstmy many disadvantages as a biographical researcher is a horror of initiating phone calls. The switchboard lady at the mega-publishers was kind but unhelpful. Holme & Holly had been subsumed into Deodar Books, which had been swallowed by Hachs & Shaw. At Hachs & Shaw I was passed from voice-mail to voice-mail, forced to listen to the Rolling Stones and Ella Fitzgerald and a mournful snippet of plainsong. Finally I got an elderly female voice who said, as though I was a silly boy, “But you want the
archivist
. “I said I didn’t know there was one, and what was the extension? The archive had been sold to the University of Lincoln, said the voice. You want
their
archivist. She had a moment’s kindness. “Her name is Betty Middleton.”
    I wrote to Betty Middleton, and continued my progress round the Reading Room. Rows L, M, N. Persian and Turkish ghazals, prayer book revisions, the siege of Vienna. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on a whim. Destry-Scholes had taken several of her
minor
sentences, and reset them. Betty Middleton answered. All that could be found were a few typed letters. Did I want copies? She was afraid they were not very exciting, she added, sounding like a human being.
    When they came, I experienced a moment of pure discouragement. There were only about a dozen. Of these, three said, “I return the proofs herewith, as requested. I have not made any substantial changes. Yours sincerely, S. Destry-Scholes.” Two more pointed out minor errors in the accounting of royalties, and one asked, baldly, whether the royalties were overdue, or whether there were none and the publishers had notseen fit to inform the author, as the contract required them to. One said, “I shall be very happy to meet you for lunch, on Thursday next, at the time and in the place you suggest.” One—the only one of any conceivable interest—asked if Mr. Holly knew any source of finance for authors wishing to undertake journeys for research purposes. “I have, as you know, already had a British Academy grant for my Istanbul trip. I should like to be able to take a look at the Maelstrøm. I wonder if you can help?”
    There was no copy of any responses to these letters. They were all written on the same typewriter, and headed Jolly Corner Hotel, Gower Street. I went, of course, to look at this hotel, which was still there, another version of the blank façade in a repeating series, this time grey and, to my untutored eye, Georgian. I summoned up my courage, went in and asked if anyone would know anything about an author who appeared to have lived there in the early 1950s. The owners were Pakistani and friendly. They had been there five months. They didn’t have any of the records of the previous owners. “It was a little dingy, you know, quite a bit of a sad sort of a place. We are modernising, and cleaning it up. We are trying to make it jolly, though we are seriously considering changing the name.”
    I wrote to the