The Biographer's Tale Read Free Page A

the unmournable disappearance of the romances, because it has a bearing on what is generally (in this, as in everything I say, of course, I follow Destry-Scholes) acknowledged to be Elmer Bole’s literary masterpiece.
    This was his translation, if it was a translation, of Evliya’s account of his travels through Europe, his exploration of “the seven climates,” setting off from Vienna, where he had been secretary to Kara Muhammad Pasha’s embassy in 1664, travelling through Germany and the Netherlands, as far as Dunkirk, through Holland, Denmark and Sweden, returning through Poland, via Cracow and Danzig, to the Crimea, after a journey of three and a half years. This European exploration was well attested, and constantly referred to by Evliya in his accounts of his Middle Eastern travels. The problem was thatno manuscript existed, and experts, including the Ritter von Hammer who had searched salerooms and bazaars, had come to believe that he never wrote the European volume being, as the Ritter puts it, “probably prevented by death when he had completed his fourth volume.”
    Elmer Bole, however, claimed to have found the manuscript of Evliya’s fifth volume, wrapped as packing round a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of tulips, in an obscure curiosity shop deep in the Bazaar. He had compared it to that manuscript of Eusebius which was in use as a cover for a milk-pitcher. Scholars, including, especially, Scholes Destry-Scholes, had made exhaustive attempts to rediscover this lost manuscript, in Istanbul, in London, in the libraries to which Bole’s papers had been bit by bit dispersed, in the attics and dusty ottomans of Pommeroy Vicarage. It had never come to light, and many scholars, both Anglophone and Turkish, had concluded that it had never existed, that the
Journey Through Seven Climates
was an historical novel, a pastiche, by Bole himself.
    Destry-Scholes came down, cautiously, arguing every inch of his conclusions, on the other side. His argument, a delicious example of 1950s pre-theoretical intuitive criticism, derives in part from the extraordinary deadness and badness of Bole’s acknowledged fictions. They are vague, verbose and grandiose. Bole’s Evliya, like the earlier Evliya, is precise, enumerative, recording buildings, customs, climates with scrupulous (and occasionally tedious) exactness. He notices things about the personal cleanliness (or lack of it) in Germany, about the concealed ostentation of rich Dutch burghers, the behaviour of women servants in Stockholm and Krakow—things which, as Destry-Scholes points out with effortless comparative cultural knowledge, would have been those things a Turk in those days, far from home, would have noticed. The account is full of lively action, dangers from pirates and footpads, amorous encounters with mysterious strangers, conversations with connoisseurs and savants, discussions of the price of tulips and the marketing of new strains from the Orient, comparisons of Turkish and Dutch tastes in these precious bulbs (the Dutch prefer closed cups, the Turks pointed petals like daggers). How, asks Destry-Scholes, could Bole have known all this well enough to
inhabit it imaginatively
with such concrete detail, such delightfully provocative
lacunae
. He remarks on the fact that Bole’s translation is written, not in high Victorian English but in a good approximation of seventeenth-century prose, the prose of Aubrey and Burton, Walton and Bunyan. When I have one of my frequent fits of wishing to disagree with Destry-Scholes, I tell myself that his “voice,” this put-on vocabulary, this imaginative identification, were perhaps in themselves enough to transmute Bole the banal follower of Scott and Lytton into Bole the inventor of Evliya Chelebi. But it is hard to disagree with Destry-Scholes for long. He knows what he is talking about. It was his belief that Evliya’s manuscript was given to the young Nedim,