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consider this before setting pen to paper. (There are many possible positions to take up.)
    You may believe in objectivity and neutrality. You may ask, “Why not just publish a dossier with explanatory footnotes?” Why not indeed? It is not a bad idea. But you are probably bitten by the urge [change this silly metaphor, SD-S] to construct a complete narrative. You may be an historian or a novelist
manqué,
or that
rara avis,
a true biographer. An artist-biographer, we may nervously and tentatively claim
.
    An artistic narrative in our time might analyse the
leitmotifs
of a life, as a music critic analyses the underlying form of a Wagnerian opus. A good biographer will do well to be lucidly aware of the theoretical presuppositions he is making use of in such an analysis. In our time, the prevailing sets are Freudian, or Marxist, or vaguely liberal-humane. The Freudian belief in the
repetition-compulsion, for example, can lead to some elegant discoveries of
leitmotifs.
The Marxist belief that ideology constructs the self has other seductions. We are not now likely to adopt mental “sets” of national pride, or hero-worship, though both of these are ancient propensities, like ancestor-worship, from which none of us are free. We cannot predict, of course, future sets of beliefs which will make our own—so natural to us—look naïve or old-fashioned
.
    I was particularly moved by Destry-Scholes’s note to himself about the metaphor. I was delighted by his choice of adjective—“silly,” the straightforward,
right
adjective for that metaphor, as I was delighted by his preoccupation with silly metaphors. There was an affinity between us. It would reveal itself in other ways, I was sure.
    Whilst I was waiting for answers to my letter and advertisement, I thought I would walk in Destry-Scholes’s traces, at least in the place where I myself was most at home, the British Library. I asked, jokingly, at the issue desk if it was known where he had sat, or when he had come, but such records are not kept. It is known where Karl Marx sat, because he never moved away from his singular place. I had the silly idea that if I were to move round the whole reading room, from Row A to Row Z, and to sit once in every seat, I would necessarily have sat where Destry-Scholes had sat. I had no idea of the shape of his bottom (I imagined it thin) or of the cut of his trousers (I imagined them speckled tweed). I found it necessary to have
some
image, however provisional.
    I proceeded in an orderly way, ordering all the books in the extensive bibliographies of Destry-Scholes’s three volumes. I read the three volumes themselves again and again, mostly at home in bed, noting new riches and felicities of interpretation at each reading. I also embarked on a course of scholarly study of my own, giving myself a competence in Byzantine art, Ottoman history, folklore motifs, nineteenth-century pornography, the history of the small-arm, and the study of Middle Eastern Hymenoptera—this turned out to be the area of Bole’s gentleman-amateur expertise which excited me the most. I was a keen bug-collector and bird-watcher as a boy. I knew the names and species of most British butterflies. I spent a pleasant few days sitting along rows EE and FF in the library, studying bee books, ancient and modern.
    During a lunch-time stroll in the little Bloomsbury streets surrounding the library, my eye was caught by the image of the Bosphorus I knew so well, in a tray of bargain books. I acquired, that day, both
A Singular Youth
and
The Voyager
in copies which had belonged to someone called Yasmin Solomons (“Yasmin from Woody, with love on your birthday, May 23rd 1968”). The shopkeeper rummaged for a long time in boxes and shelves but could not come up with
Vicarage and Harem
. This meant, that at least in the case of the first two parts, I could now interleave and annotate Destry-Scholes’s record of Bole,