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with my own record of Destry-Scholes.
    I wanted both to read everything Destry-Scholes had read, and to go beyond him, to know more, not only those things I could know simply because I came later, when more work had been done; I wanted to notice things he had missed. I was full of pointless pride when I was able to insert in
The Voyager
,next to Destry-Scholes’s reproduction of Bole’s drawing of the reproductive organs of
Bombus lucorum
, a neat copy of my own of the expert, Chris O’Toole’s, recent drawings of the huge penis, knobbed and hairy, concealed inside the modest folds of the male organ, its presence unsuspected by Bole, and not indicated by Destry-Scholes.
    But this pleasurable pride was, to use Destry-Scholes’s word, silly, because he could not have known Chris O’Toole. The true delight was to track him through the maze of his and Bole’s reading, and come unexpectedly on a trace of his presence, or even of a mistake he had made. Correcting his errors (unlike Bole’s, they were
rarissimae
, shining little jewels hardly observable in moss—the analogy is from beetle-hunting)—correcting his errors gave me a peculiar thrill of achievement, of doing something solidly scholarly, adding to the sum of facts. But the thrill was just as great when, three-quarters of the way through a book I believed Destry-Scholes should have read, and had not, I would come upon his tracks—a quotation he had used from a critic or a soldier, or, often enough, a sentence he had included in his own work, lifted whole, or loosely rewritten.
    Postmodernist ideas about intertextuality and quotation of quotation have complicated the simplistic ideas about plagiarism which were in force in Destry-Scholes’s day. I myself think that these lifted sentences, in their new contexts, are almost the purest and most beautiful parts of the transmission of scholarship. I began a collection of them, intending, when my time came, to redeploy them with a difference, catching different light at a different angle. That metaphor is from mosaic-making. One of the things I learned in these weeks ofresearch was that the great makers constantly raided previous works—whether in pebble, or marble, or glass, or silver and gold—for tesserae which they rewrought into new images. I learned also that Byzantium was a primary source for the blue glass which is the glory of Chartres and Saint-Denis. The French, according to Theophilus, were skilled at making panes of blue glass from ancient vessels, such as Roman scent-bottles. They also recycled ancient mosaic cubes, making transparent what had been a brilliant reflective surface.
    At this time I had a recurrent dream of a man trapped in a glass bottle, itself roughly formed in the shape of a man. Sometimes it was blue, sometimes green, sometimes clear with a yellowish cast and flaws in the glass. This man was and was not myself. I was also the observer of the events of the dream. Sometimes he was cramped by the bottle, sometimes a small creature scurrying at the base of a sheer glass cylinder. I mention this, because it seems to fit, but I do not offer any interpretation of it. I have done with psychoanalytic criticism.
    It took me longer than it should have done, moving along D and G and even H as I found vacancies where I had not sat before, to realise that I was acquiring only second- or third-hand facts. I was not discovering Destry-Scholes, beyond his own discoveries. No answer came to my letter or to my advertisement. I realised I did not have much idea about how to look for any more facts. I decided that I would do something Destry-Scholes himself claimed often to have done in his own research. I would visit the house where he was born. It was, after all, the only place where I knew he had been—apart, of course, from Bole’s birthplace, London home, Pommeroy Vicarage, Bosphorus
yali
and other brief resting-places. Pontefractwas the place to