The Great Pursuit

'What did you do then?' asked MacMordie.

'Got myself a machine-gun and told her the first bear I saw coming into the house I'd blow its fucking head off. So the bears got the message and took to the woods and now it's all fine up there.'

It was all fine at sea too. Piper woke the next morning to find himself in a floating hotel but since his adult life had been spent moving from one boarding-house to another, each with a view of the English Channel, there was nothing very surprising about his new circumstances. True, the luxury he was now enjoying was better than the amenities offered by the Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth, but surroundings meant little to Piper. The main thing in his life was his writing and he continued his routine on the ship. In the morning he wrote at a table in his cabin and after lunch lay with Sonia on the sundeck discussing life, literature and Pause O Men for the Virgin in a haze of happiness.

'For the first time in my life I am truly happy,' he confided to his diary and that band of future scholars who would one day study his private life. 'My relationship with Sonia has added a new dimension to my existence and extended my understanding of what it means to be mature. Whether this can be called love only time will tell but is it not enough to know that we interrelate so personally? I can only find it in myself to regret that we have been brought together by so humanly debasing a book as POMFTV. But as Thomas Mann would have said with that symbolic irony which is the hallmark of his work "Every cloud has a silver lining", and one can only agree with him. Would that it were otherwise!!! Sonia insists on my re-reading the book so that I can imitate who wrote it. I find this very difficult, both the assumption that I am the author and the need to read what can only influence my own work for the worse. Still, I am persevering with the task and Search for a Lost Childhood is coming along as well as can be expected given the exigencies of my present predicament.'

There was a great deal more in the same vein. In the evening Piper insisted on reading what he had written of Search aloud to Sonia when she would have preferred to be dancing or playing roulette. Piper disapproved of such frivolities. They were not part of those experiences which made up the significant relationships upon which great literature was founded.

'But shouldn't there be more action?' said Sonia one evening when he had finished reading his day's work. 'I mean nothing ever seems to happen. It's all description and what people think.'

'In the contemplative novel thought is action,' said Piper quoting verbatim from The Moral Novel. 'Only the immature mind finds satisfaction in action as an external activity. What we think and feel determines what we are and it is in the essential areness of the human character that the great dramas of life are enacted.'

'Ourness?' said Sonia hopefully.

'Areness,' said Piper. 'Are with an A.'

'Oh.'

'It means essential being. Like Dasein.'

'Don't you mean "design"?' said Sonia.

'No,' said Piper, who had once read several sentences from Heidegger, 'Dasein's got an A too.'

'You could have fooled me,' said Sonia. 'Still, if you say so.'

'And the novel if it is to justify itself as a mode of inter-communicative art must deal solely with experienced reality. The self-indulgent use of the imagination beyond the parameter of our personal experience demonstrates a superficiality which can only result in the unrealization of our individual potentialities.'

'Isn't that a bit limiting?' said Sonia. 'I mean if all you can write about is what has happened to you you've got to end up describing getting up in the morning and having breakfast and going to work...'

'Well, that's important too,' said Piper, whose morning's writing had consisted of a description of getting up and having breakfast and going to school. 'The novelist invests these events with his own intrinsic interpretation.'

'But maybe people don't want to read about that sort of thing. They want romance and sex and excitement. They want the unexpected. That's what sells.'

'It may sell,' said Piper, 'but does it matter?'

'It matters if you want to go on writing. You've got to earn your bread. Now Pause sells...'

'I can't imagine why,' said Piper. 'I read that chapter you told me to and honestly it's disgusting.'

'So reality isn't all that nice,' said Sonia, wishing that Piper wasn't quite so highminded. 'We live in a crazy world. There are hijackings and killings and violence all over and Pause isn't into that. It's about two people who need one another.'

'People like that shouldn't need one another,' said Piper, 'it's unnatural.'

'It's unnatural going to the moon and people still do it. And there are rockets with nuclear warheads pointing at one another ready to blow the world apart and just about everywhere you look there's something unnatural going on.'

'Not in Search,' said Piper.

'So what's that got to do with reality?'

'Reality,' said Piper reverting to The Moral Novel, 'has to do with the realness of things in an extra-ephemeral context. It is the re-establishment in the human consciousness of traditional values...'

While Piper quoted on Sonia sighed and wished that he would establish traditional values like ask her to marry him or even just climb into bed with her one night and make love in a good old-fashioned way. But here again Piper had principles. In bed at night his activities remained firmly literary. He read several pages of Doctor Faustus and then turned to The Moral Novel as to a breviary. Then he switched off the light and resisted Sonia's charms by falling fast asleep.

Sonia lay awake and wondered if he was queer or she unattractive, came to the conclusion that she was closeted with some kind of dedicated nut and, hopefully, a genius and decided to postpone any discussion of Piper's sexual proclivities to a later date. After all the main thing was to keep him cool and collected through the publicity tour and if chastity was what Piper wanted chastity was what he was going to get.

In fact it was Piper himself who raised the issue one afternoon as they lay on the sundeck. He had been thinking about what Sonia had said about his lack of experience and the need for a writer to have it. In Piper's mind experience was equated with observation. He sat up and decided to observe and was just in time to pay close attention to a middle-aged woman climbing out of the swimming bath. Her thighs, he noted, were dimpled. Piper reached for his ledger of Phrases and wrote down, 'Legs indented with the fingerprints of ardent time,' and then as an alternative, 'the hallmarks of past passion.'

'What are?' said Sonia looking over his shoulder.

'The dimples on that woman's legs,' Piper explained, 'the one that's just sitting down.'

Sonia examined the woman critically. 'They turn you on?'

'Certainly not,' said Piper, 'I was merely making a note of the fact. It could come in useful for a book. You said I needed more experience and I'm getting it.'

'That's a hell of a way to get experience,' said Sonia, 'voyeurizing ancient broads.'

'I wasn't voyeurizing anything. I was merely observing. There was nothing sexual about it.'

'I should have known,' said Sonia and lay back in her chair.

'Known what?'

'That there was nothing sexual about it. There never is with you.'

Piper sat and thought about the remark. There was a touch of bitterness about it that disturbed him. Sex. Sex and Sonia. Sex with Sonia. Sex and love. Sex with love and sex without love. Sex in general. A most perplexing subject and one that had for sixteen years upset the even tenor of his days and had produced a wealth of fantasies at variance with his literary principles. The great novels did not deal with sex. They confined themselves to love, and Piper had tried to do the same. He was reserving himself for that great love affair which would unite sex and love in an all-embracing and wholly rewarding totality of passion and sensibility in which the women of his fantasies, those mirages of arms, legs, breasts and buttocks, each particular item serving as the stimulus for a different dream, would merge into the perfect wife. With her because his feelings were on the highest plane he would be perfectly justified in doing the lowest possible things. The gulf that divided the beast in Piper from the angel in his truly beloved would be bridged by the fine flame of their passion, or some such. The great novels said so. Unfortunately they didn't explain how. Beyond love merged with passion there stretched something: Piper wasn't sure what. Presumably happiness. Anyway marriage would absolve him from the interruptions of his fantasies in which a predatory and beastly Piper prowled the dark streets in search of innocent victims and had his way with them which, considering that Piper had never had his way with anyone and lacked any knowledge of female anatomy, would have landed him either in hospital or in the police courts.