The Biographer's Tale Read Free

and practical support to Florence Nightingale, whom he had known as a young woman, frustrated by family expectations in the days when his great friend Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) had wanted to marry her. He was part of Monckton Milnes’s dubious circle of Parisian sexual sensationalists, as Destry-Scholes proved conclusively with some fine work in the archives of Fred Hankey and the Goncourts in Paris. He had known everyone—Carlyle, Clough, Palmerston, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, Richard Watson Dixon, Swinburne, Richard Burton … And yet, beside this incessant journeying, political activity, soldiering and dining out he had found time to write enough books to fill a library. Nowhere had been visited without a record of his travels, which would include an account of the geography and climate, the flora and fauna, the history, political and military, the government, the beliefs, the art and architecture, the oddities and distractions of places as diverse as the Sudan and Austria-Hungary, Finland and Madagascar, Venice, Provence and, always returning, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul,Stamboul. He wrote histories—one of the great days of Byzantium, one of its fall, one of the Ottoman rulers, one of the reign of William the Silent, as well as his more technical works on Cromwell’s New Model Army and military organisation under Louis XIV. If he had done nothing else—as Destry-Scholes points out—he would be remembered as a great translator. His collections of Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish fairy tales are still current in reprinted forms. His loose translation of the early eighteenth-century divan poetry of the great Tulip Period “boon companion,” Nedim, once rivalled Fitzgerald’s
Omar Khayyám
in popularity, with its haunting rhythms and hedonist chants. He translated the Arab chivalric romance,
The History of Antar
, all thirty-three volumes, as well as several erotic oriental works for the furtive presses of Fred Hankey and Monckton Milnes.
    The most exciting of these translations—Destry-Scholes certainly thought so, and conveys the excitement—was his version of the travels of the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller, Evliya Chelebi. Elmer Bole’s translation included those passages expurgated by the Ritter Joseph von Hammer, the first Western translator, who had felt it proper to omit, for instance, Evliya’s initiation into “all the profligacies of the royal pages, the relation of which, in more than one place, leaves a stain upon his writings.” Bole had also followed Evliya through bath-houses where the Ritter had stopped at the door. Evliya Chelebi had, it appears, had a vision of the Prophet, in his twenty-first year, in which, stammering as he was, blinded by glory, he had asked, not as he meant to, for the intercession of the Prophet
(shifaa’t)
but for travelling
(siya’hat)
. Travelling had been granted, in abundance. ElmerBole, undertaking his dangerous journeys disguised as a Turkish bookseller, had used Evliya’s other name, Siyyah, the Traveller, and Evliya’s dream-stammering, written in Arabic, transliterated according to William Jones’s system, appeared on the front pages both of Bole’s account of his Syrian escapade, and of Destry-Scholes’s second volume,
The Voyager
. I was delighted, as humans are delighted when facts slot together, when I saw the significance of these lines.
    Bole wrote many romances of his own, all popular in their day, all now forgotten.
A Humble Maid at Acre, Rose of Sharon, The Scimitar, The Golden Cage of Princes, A Princess Among Slaves
are a few of the titles. He also wrote verse, also now forgotten. A verse-novel,
Bajazeth
, collections of lyrics
—Shulamith, How Beautiful Are Thy Feet, A Spring Shut Up, The Orchard Walls
. The lyrics are conventional, and the novels are wooden, melodramatic and stilted. This judgement has its importance, beyond