Read The Biographer's Tale Online
Authors: A. S. Byatt
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Psychological, #Biographers, #Psychological Fiction, #Bildungsromans, #Coming of Age, #Biography as a Literary Form, #Young Men
The Biographer's Tale (23 page)
Card no. 75
My first idea of composite portraiture arose through a request by Sir Edmund du Cane, then H.M. Inspector of Prisons, to examine the photographs of criminals in order to discover and to define the types of features, if there be any, that are associated with different kinds of criminality. The popular ideas were known to be very inaccurate, and he thought the subject worthy of scientific study. I gladly offered to do what I could, and he gave me full opportunity of seeing prisons and of studying a large number of photographs of criminals, which were of course to be used confidentially.
At first, for obtaining pictorial averages, I combined pairs of portraits with a stereoscope, with more or less success. Then I recollected an often observed effect with magic lanthorns, when two lanthorns converge on the same screen, and while the one is throwing its image, the operator slowly withdraws the light from it and throws it on the next one. The first image yields slowly to the second, with little sense of discordance in the parts that at all resemble one another. It was obviously possible to photograph superimposed images on a screen by the simultaneous use of two or more lanthorns. What was common to all of the images would then appear vigorous, while individual differences
would be too faint for notice. Then the idea occurred to me that the pictures themselves might be severally adjusted in the same place, and be photographed successively on the same plate, allowing a fractional part of the total time of exposure to each portrait.
Card no. 76 18 May 1871, Dresden
I have often thought about what you once wrote, that I had not taken up the standpoint of modern scientific knowledge. How could I overcome this failing? But is not each generation born with the prejudices of its time? Have you ever noticed in a painting of a group from some previous century a curious kind of family likeness between people of the same period? So it is in the field of intellect too. What we profane creatures lack in knowledge I think we possess, to a certain degree in intuition or instinct. And a writer's task is essentially to see, not to mirror; I am conscious of a peculiar danger to myself in indulging the latter tendency.
Card no. 77
I have successfully made many composites both of races and of families. The composites are always more refined and ideal-looking than any one of their components, but I found that persons did not like being mixed up with their brothers and sisters in a common portrait. It seems a curious and rather silly feeling, but there can be no doubt of its existence. I see no other reason why composite portraiture should not be much
employed for obtaining family types. Composites might be made of brother and sisters, parents and grandparents, together with a composite of the race, each in their due proportions, according to the Ancestral Law (see chapter on Heredity). The result would be very instructive, but the difficulty of obtaining the material is now overwhelming. Male and female portraits blend well together with an epicene result.
Card no. 78
Stephen Sinding on modelling statue for theatre. “I worked and worked and couldn't get it right. I discarded one effort after another. While I was working on the sixth it occurred to me to ask Ibsen to take his spectacles off. He laid them aside and looked at me. I have never seen two eyes like those. One was large, I might almost say horribleâso it seemed to meâand deeply mystical; the other much smaller, rather pinched up, cold and clear and calmly probing. I stood speechless for a few seconds and stared at those eyes, and spoke the thought that flashed into my mind: âI wouldn't like to have you as an enemy!' Then his eyes and his whole body seemed to blaze, and I thought instinctively of the troll in the fairy tale who pops out of his hole and roars: âWho's chopping trees in
my
forest?'Â ”
Card no. 79
THIN PERSON:
There are two ways in which a man can be himself.
A right way and a wrong way.
You may know that a man in Paris
Has discovered a way of taking portraits
With the help of the sun. Either one can produce
A direct picture, or else what they call a negative.
In the latter, light and dark are reversed;
And the result, to the ordinary eye, is ugly.
But the image of the original is there.
All that's required is to develop it.
Now if a human soul, in the course of its life,
Has created one of those negative portraits,
The plate is not destroyed. They send it to me.
I give it treatment, and by suitable means
Effect a metamorphosis. I develop it.
I steam it and dip it, I burn it and cleanse it
With sulphur and similar ingredients
Till the picture appears which the plate was intended to give.
I mean, the one known as the positive.
But when a soul like yourself has smudged himself out
Even sulphur and potash can achieve nothing.
PEER:
Then one must come to you as black as a raven To be sent back as white as a dove?
These cards, as may be imagined, took me back to the shoebox full of photographs. As I said, some of these were in fact faded cuttings from newspapers, carefully pasted to postcards. There were photographs of General de Gaulle, Stalin, an African ruler in leopardskin ceremonial costume, two wartime weddings, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose as little girls. There were picturesque ancient peasant
women, their faces furrowed with taut wrinkles, their eyes lost black dots. There were workmen in Sunday best, or brawnily stoking furnaces in picturesque clouds of steam. There were also cadavers on mortuary slabs and black-and-white reproductions of Mantegna's foreshortened dead Christ and Holbein's rigid horizontal oneâboth, it appeared, cut from illustrations in books. There were a great many babies, hairless and tufted, scowling and simpering. There were also several portraits of the dead, laid out before burial, amongst whom I was able to identify Galton and Ibsen. I have written that photographs partake of death. There were several postcards of Julia Margaret Cameron's posed women, with heavy tresses and heavy arms and heavy breasts, representing Persephone, Pomona, Maia, ripeness. These were impressions on the photographic plate of living, breathing flesh, and warm hair, shadows of where sunlight had fallen on the lump of bosom or the hollow of collarbone or the red lips which appeared heavily black. Great bunches of roses and lilies, romantic tangles of ivy, domes of eyelids, all imitating the stillness of death for the long attention of the lady under the velvet pall, all now bones and dust, having passed through wrinkles and swollen ankles, unless they were taken early, as many wereâall consigned, like Galton, to peaceful churchyards, under stone angels, of which there were also photographs in the shoebox, drooping or staring upwards. The photographs of the truly dead are not shocking as the photographs of the living are shocking. For one thing, their eyes are decently closed, and not dead paper spaces.
Galton and Ibsen resembled each other in death, as they did not, much, in life, except in that sense Ibsen himself
accurately remarked on, in which all people of a certain period resemble each other, like family portraits. Galton was a large man and Ibsen was tiny, but in these photographs Ibsen, in his frock coat as far as the taut white sheet across his stomach, is more imposing than Galton in a soft nest of white cloth, like snow against a grey sky. Both menâin life as in deathâhad lipless mouths, Ibsen possibly because he tightened his face perpetually in a rictus of bad temper, Galton because, it is clear, he was born that way, with a long, mild, slit of a mouth. Both faces, in death, have floating remnants of silver-white hair. Ibsen's is a little tousled, which is touching, and the ghost of his immense mutton-chop whiskers floats above his collar. Both have the sharp noses of the deadâGalton's is cavernousâand
can be seen not to be breathing
. How? Both have what I will call “the same” expression, which is one of complete (completed) exhaustion, so that those who look at the photograph are glad that it is all over, whatever it was. That is, those who look are glad that the dead man is now dead. I do not, as Karl Pearson did not, use the words “at peace” or “at rest.” Who knows? But they are not bad to look at, these death's heads, and they resemble each other. In life, photographs of Galton show someone mildly vacuous, withdrawn a long way behind the chalky patient face. Ibsen is always combative, always
cross
, even in the photograph taken when he was paralysed, propped in his chair, in 1905. A composite of these two would approximate an elderly stone angel.
None of the photographs in the box had any markings to suggest that it representedâhad snappedâScholes Destry-Scholes.
Henrik Ibsen on his death bed, May 1906
Francis Galton taken after death, January 1911
There were, however, clearly also snipped from books, some of Galton's famous composites.
“Composite made from Portraits of Criminals convicted of Murder, Manslaughter, or Crimes of Violence.” The plate has eight blurred images of what may on the whole be described as dignified, resigned and, perhaps to a lesser extent,
apprehensive
male figures. These are said to be made up of 3, 8, 7, 9 and 5 components each. Their faint imprecision makes them ghostly, more than ghastly. Galton noted that in his criminal composites “the special villainous irregularities have disappeared and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed.” Destry-Scholes had also acquired a copy of Galton's Plate showing the composite images of officers and men of the Royal Engineers (5 officers, 12 officers, 11 privates, 30 privates), but not one of what Pearson considered his greatest achievement, the “Jewish Type.” There were three of the composites Galton had made of coins and medals, the images of Alexander I, Napoleon and Cleopatra, taken from coins and medals. Galton had photographed the collected individual coinsâin Alexander's case, dividing them into “Indian” and “Greek” collections, and had added his own composites in the centre. He commented that in each case the composite image was more lifelike and more handsome and ideally beautiful than any of the individual onesâadding that Cleopatra (hook-nosed, sharp-jawed) would be found hideous by any modern standards of beauty. It is hard not to agree with him that his superimpositionsâpossibly partly because of a stereoscopic effect, and a sense, to a modern eye, that the subject
has moved at the crucial moment of the opening of the camera shutterâ
do
have more liveliness and are better proportioned than their component images. (Though something is lost of the stylised horned and serpentine-curled heads of the Indian Alexanders.) Destry-Scholes also had two of Galton's composite family images, one of three sisters, each taken full-face and in profile, then amalgamated to make what did look like a fourth sister, the Family Face, and one of a whole family, several generations, men and women, grandparents and children, uncles, nieces, amalgamated ingeniously into not one but several compositesâ“men,” “women,” “children,” “men and women together.” It was possible, I thought, to see why the subjects of these images resented them. Something had been taken away by being added.
There was also a plate with photographs of eighteenth-century portraits of five women, all with the same long, oval face, composed mouth and elaborate high powdered hairstyle, except for one, who wore a sort of floppy bonnet with a rose at the apex of her brow. The composite, in the centre, was more animated than any of the single ladies. I came across them, much later, in my researches. They were Linnaeus's wife Sara Lisa, and his daughters Lisa Stina, Louisa, Sara Stina and Sophia (his darling, the books say, the beauty of the family they say, too, though I prefer the severe carved look of the others). I have been unable to find any reference, anywhere, to Galton making a composite of Linnaeus's daughters. Perhaps, nevertheless, he did. They are an excellent subject for one. The resemblances are striking, the differences subtle. Perhaps Destry-Scholes made the composite, for his own amusement, having collected the others. There is no evidence, no evidence at all, that any of the photographs are his work, or represent anyone associated with him.