The Art and Craft of Telling Lives

It is not often the case that a writer of fiction simultaneously publishes a new novel and a volume of essays that serves as--”manifesto” is too strong a word--an instruction manual, say, or collection of blueprints by which her own stories and novels are imagined, built and given context and the stories and novels of her like-minded contemporaries are read and relished. With “The Biographer’s Tale” and “On Histories and Stories,” A.S. Byatt delivers this two-pronged potential pleasure--and provocation: provocation because, with the essays open in one hand and the novel in the other, it becomes the reader’s task to determine whether the storytelling lives up to all the telling about stories.

The A.S. Byatt of “On Histories and Stories,” a collection that derives, in part, from lectures she gave at Emory and Yale universities, is a generous writer. She is generous to the writers she sees as her literary ancestors and colleagues, and she is unusually generous to her readers, whom she invites to step behind the curtain to observe the set-building and scene-painting, the research and rehearsal that precede the enactment of her own fictions. Byatt is generous but with a purpose: She is determined to demonstrate that the classic contemporary novel--the novel of inquiry into the self and its relationship to its surrounding social and political culture (as written, for example, by her sister, Margaret Drabble, Byatt rather ungenerously implies early on)--is far less durable than the historical novel she and a group of her contemporaries produce. “A writer can rebel in various ways against the novel of sensibility, or the duty (often imposed by literary journalists) to report on, to criticise, contemporary actuality,” Byatt observes. “You can write anti-novels .... Or you can look back at forms in which stories are not about inner psychological subtleties, and truths are not connected immediately to contemporary circumstances.”

Where are these truths to be found? For Byatt and the people she sees as her companions in this literary journey--among them John Fowles, Anthony Burgess, Penelope Fitzgerald, Pat Barker and Graham Swift--it’s the past, particularly the Victorian past and the period encompassing the two world wars. Byatt cites the epigraph to Fitzgerald’s “The Blue Flower’: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” In these shortcomings--in the interstices of these receded eras, in the overlooked or under-examined dilemmas, dramas and their players--there is a “new possibility of narrative energy.” The past offers a way of rescuing and reviving the dead; it is a means by which to understand the present; it is a chance to attend to the “marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded” (women, people of color); it makes possible huge narrative spans and welcomes the use of more elaborate and figurative language; it is an invitation to ghosts to visit and it helps assuage the writer’s sense of living in “an aftermath, an unheroic time with no urgency and no images.’In trying to retrace the evolution of this interest in historical fiction, which is far more a British (or European: Byatt names Roberto Calasso and Italo Calvino among the practitioners) than an American phenomenon, Byatt argues that the realization that all history is fiction, which is by now a staple remark in this sort of discourse, led to a new interest in fiction as history. She identifies the influence of Darwinian ideas and of ideas, originating in the study of geology, about the nature of deep time; both “give rise to changes in the forms, as well as the subjects of fiction.” And she quotes literary critic Sally Shuttleworth, who describes fictions like Byatt’s “Possession” and “Angels and Insects” as the “retro-Victorian novel” and believes that discoveries in science brought upon the Victorians “a decisive crisis of faith, a sense that the world was shaking under them. For the post-modern era, no such form of crisis seems possible, for there are no fixed boundaries of belief.”

Certain dilemmas persist for a writer of fiction, whether the investigation is of the self or the past: how to create drama and suspense, how to convey and engage feeling and interest, how to embrace ideas in stories, how to respond--as all stories and novels in some sense do--to the work of earlier writers: how to arrive at those truths that are of such concern to Byatt. For Byatt, the sharper spiritual and intellectual predicaments of the past--crises of faith and shaking worlds--have freed her imagination, clearly, but her relationship to the past is also a very personal one: “[M]y sense of my own identity is bound up with the past, with what I read and with the way my ancestors, genetic and literary, read,” she explains. “The older I get,” she adds, “the more I habitually think of my own life as a relatively short episode in a long story of which it is part.”

How does all this translate into actual work? More than once, Byatt invites us into her own private laboratory--or library. Ardent reading, she maintains, gives birth to avid storytelling. She shows us how she arrived at her more successful books, among them “Possession” and “The Conjugial Angel” and “Morpho Eugenia,” the novellas published together as “Angels and Insects.” For “The Conjugial Angel,” which was inspired by the “untold” and “occluded” story of Emily Tennyson (who was engaged to her brother’s great friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the man whose death occasioned “In Memoriam”), she immersed herself in Tennysoniana, then found herself coming to a point where she “felt a strong inclination to stop with the information I had .... I had the facts my imagination wanted to fantasise about.” With “Morpho Eugenia” she went a different way: She read books about “ants, bees, Amazon travels, Darwin, books about Victorian servant life, butterflies and moths” and then allowed herself to contrive “an entirely fictitious tale.”

These two reports from the Byatt workshop appear to shed some light on “The Biographer’s Tale,” which in “On Histories and Stories” Byatt summarizes thus: The novel, she says, “is about these riddling links between autobiography, biography, fact and fiction (and lies). It follows a post-structuralist critic who decides to give up [on criticism], and write a coherent life-story of one man, a great biographer. But all he finds are fragments of other random lives--Linneas, Galton, Ibsen--overlapping human stories which make up the only available tale of the biographer. It is a tale of the lives of the dead which make up the imagined worlds of the living. It is a study of the aesthetics of inventing, or re-inventing, or combining real and imaginary human beings.”

“The Biographer’s Tale” wants to be about all of this, to be sure, but wanting to take on compelling ideas about biography and literature, fact and fiction, the Victorians and the moderns becomes unwieldy if the story into which they are knit fails to come to life. In conceiving of her narrator, Phineas G. Nanson, an ex-poststructural critic and biographer in the making who longs to be connected to “things,” Byatt has not implemented the lessons she offers in her essays. She reads and researches, both as abundantly as ever, but she neither fantasizes nor sufficiently fictionalizes, as she did to considerable effect in “Angels and Insects” and “Possession” both. She sets Nanson on an intellectual journey--to write the life of Scholes Destry-Scholes, the biographer of Sir Prosper Bole, a famous writer, traveler and translator--but she never gives him a plausible personal journey to go with it , and as a result both her narrator and her reader disappear under an avalanche of insufficiently mediated reading and research.

When Nanson at one point happily concedes that “I am not very good at finding out who Scholes Destry-Scholes was because I am not very interested in finding out who I am,” he may be embodying Byatt’s stated lack of interest in inquiries into the self, but this is no excuse for his remaining a fundamentally closed, static, almost willfully dull character. The reader follows Nanson with increasing weariness as he makes his way through the intricacies of Destry-Scholes’ archive, which includes long unpublished biographical sketches of Carolus Linnaeus (botanist and taxonomist), Sir Francis Galton (scientist and traveler), and Ibsen; countless index cards which (despite their many interesting asides on the subject of biography, writing and science) fail to cohere; and two substantial collections of photographs and marbles.

Working here in the literary equivalent of collage, Byatt offers a rich array of scraps and oddments, but the completed arrangement never quite takes off as a narrative. Nanson does come flickeringly to life when he takes a job at Puck’s Girdle, a fantastical travel agency run by two marvelously eccentric travel agents, Erik and Christophe, and when he falls into (alas rather improbable) love affairs with Fulla Biefeld, a Swedish pollination ecologist, and Vera Alphage, Destry-Scholes’ niece, who tries to help him map out her uncle’s mind. Of the latter, Nanson says at one point that “[t]he irritating aspect--well, the most irritating, there were others--was the air of perfunctory secrecy or deception about the whole enterprise.” It is hard not to feel the same way about this labored new novel of Byatt’s, which stands in such opposition to the fertile, lucid and passionate thinking and writing on display in her essays.