The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Page B

I always see these shadowy hills blood-red, and formed of blood.”
    He sailed for England in January 1852 and arrived in April, exactly two years after his departure. On his arrival, he learned that Henry Hallam had died in Italy, in 1850, soon after he left, and that Henry’s sister, Julia Hallam, to whom he had been—to what extent is not clear—emotionally attached, was a bride of two months’ standing. In his
Memories of My Life
, published as late as 1908, he describes his relief on reaching the schooner in Walfish Bay. He sums up.
    â€œThis bald outline of a very eventful journey has taken little notice of the risks and adventures which characterised it … They must be imagined by the reader, otherwise the following paragraph will seem overcharged, which it is not.”
    But the following paragraph is hardly charged at all. He begins it: “I had little conception of the severity of the anxiety under which I had been living until I found myself on board the little vessel that took me away, and I felt at last able to sleep in complete security.”
    The rest of the paragraph is innocuous: summary thanks that he lost no men, survived grumbling and mutinous servants and the breaking-in of cattle, and the help of “an indolent and cruel set of natives speaking an unknown tongue.” He mentions tribal wars, “which had to be stopped before I could proceed” and undependable food. He thanks Andersson—who ultimately died in Damaraland—and Hans. His paragraph is
undercharged
. English reticence, or sheering away from what he set out to tell?

III
    [The third document, to which I gave the provisional title “I …”]
    H E WAS a public man, and he made a daily public progress. He set out at two o’clock from Victoria Terrace, and walked to the Grand Hotel. He dressed carefully, always in the same clothes—a black, broadcloth frock-coat, black trousers, concertinaed at the ankles over highly polished, high-heeled black boots, a carefully folded umbrella, a glistening silk top-hat, a little fence of miniature medals. His white beard, and his white hair surrounded his sallow, unsmiling face, like the copious flare of a halo. He was a tiny personage, and carried himself stiffly erect, full of a dignity at once self-important and threatening. His lips were thin; his eyes, under their snowy ledges, have been called, finely, “fierce badger eyes.” Cartoonists found him easy to “take”; their images proliferated, all recognisable projections, all the same, all different. He knew he was looked at. He had constructed himself to be looked at. Famous men walk behind, or inside, a simplified mask, constructed from inside and outside simultaneously.He groomed his parchment skin and his sleek boot-leather to turn back the light to the onlooker. The onlookers, even as they watched the precise, dandified advance, knew they saw the outside, not the inside. They let their imaginations flicker round the inchoate “inside,” which remained bland and opaque. He belonged to them, their countryman. They had never been sure if they liked him.
    His effigies were round him in his lifetime. In his latter days, his statue stood outside the National Theatre, larger than life, looming through the snow. He was photographed, diminutive and bristling amongst the dignitaries, at ceremonies of dedication. There was a Platz named for him in Gossensass. There was a proposal to make a waxwork double of him to preside over a Freie Bühne festival in Berlin. They wrote to ask for the loan of an old suit. “Be so good as to tell this gentleman that I do not wear ‘old suits,’ nor do I wish a wax model of myself to be clothed in an ‘old suit.’ Obviously I cannot give him a new one, and I therefore suggest he order one from my tailor, Herr Friess, of Maximilianstrasse, Munich.” Sculptors and painters found him somehow inordinate. He