The Biographer's Distress

The biographer’s distress was nothing less than dazzling. 200 pages in, he’d discovered something electrifying about his subject, something that called into question the entire premise, the entire scaffolding by which he framed his subject in a golden dream of aspirations fulfilled, ambitions reached, and tragedies transcended. This one thing, this one maddening discovery, something he should’ve picked up along the way but didn’t, altered the entire thematic scheme. People are never any one single thing, people are networks, interrelational tessellations of imbricated realities. But if you’re going to do a biography, it’s helpful to have an overarching theme. People like a coherent personality, even though the actuality proves otherwise. People are different people depending upon who they’re around. Context is everything.

Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle was a swashbuckling poet of the late Victorian period writing and behaving in the manner of the aesthetes, the art-for-art’s sake crowd and their super-subtle sensibilities seasoned with hashish and absinthe. Birdwhistle’s biographer was an elderly man of the 21^st century named Abbott Aloysius Grady the Third who taught contemporary lit at Ragsdill University, a southern institution of learning and excellence. His biography of Birdwhistle took in the whole art scene and decadence of 1890s London, all of it liberally peppered with the luminaries of the time, Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater and Lucas Malet, the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, a Victorian novelist.

What Grady had discovered about Birdwhistle put him in a tizzy. Birdwhistle’s true name was Olivia Berrycloth, and Olivia was a woman. Grady’s biography up to that point had described a Byronic libertine with a feverish appetite for women and sensual pleasures. The feverish appetite part was true, but it hadn’t been the hunger of a male, but a female. Grady in no way found this objectionable, it simply nullified the previous 200 pages and all the work put into research and organizing and verifying details. This revelation of Birdwhistle’s true identity would require some changes, to say the least. Grady had been careful to insert in his biography that most of the stories surrounding Birdwhistle’s erotic odysseys were anecdotal and quite possibly apocryphal, so as to avoid any accusations of slander or pornography.

Would he? Have to change anything? Did it make a difference if Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle was a woman named Olivia Berrycloth? He could, except for all the name changes. That would be tedious, but not as tedious as rewriting 200 pages. He’d been somewhat prudent in handling the details of Berrycloth’s intimacies because the liaisons were not much more than breezy escapades, outrageous sexual encounters with no real basis in anything, except, perhaps the erotic black ink drawings of Aubrey Beardsley with their disproportionately protuberant organs, and gleefully hedonistic gymnastics. One thing was true: Olivia’s enactment of a swashbuckling Victorian Casanova named Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle had been rendered with exquisite panache. Her sexuality reversed, she was able to expand her repertoire of lustful exchanges exponentially. Great artistry, indeed.

He owed it to her. He, Abott Aloysius Grady the Third. A new biography. The right biography. Her biography. The biography of a woman who surrounded herself with the finest minds of her age, the most dissident, the most promiscuous and daring. Swinburne, Max Beerbohm, Lafcadio Hearn, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans. Wits dry as a Petit Chablis. The headstrong scholars of midnight deliriums. For Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle was not just invention, but a visitor from another dimension, and a determined woman's guise for unorthodox pleasures. This, the new biography, would map the exploits of a woman who’d maneuvered the rigid mores of late Victorian England without ending up in Reading Gaol, like her dear friend Oscar. With whom she’d shared cigars, and brandy, and tall tales of midnight romps. And who lived to be 102. Grady could barely call it a biography. It was more of a dual-ography, the biography of two people in one body. And now he, Abott Aloysius Grady, made three.

Mark Twain once said that biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written. Nor the woman. Especially when she’s occupied in being someone else. A man with a penchant for women. With a mind boiling over with wit. With an Edwardian waistcoat and a libertine’s smile. Where is the reality of this being? What turns them from a hypothesis into an unchained swain of flesh and blood? From a stream of spermatozoa into a hive of busy thought? We sit and polish the spring on a sewing machine, and that, for the moment is who we are. Said Olivia Berrycloth sewing a new reality through the mouth of Alistair Kismet Birdwhistle.