The Great Pursuit

Chapter 23

Nine months later Search for a Lost Childhood by Frederick Frensic, published by Corkadales, price £3.90, came out in Britain. In America it was published by Hutchmeyer Press. Frensic had had to apply some direct pressure in both directions and it was only the threat of exposure that had persuaded Geoffrey to accept the book. Sonia had been influenced by feelings of loyalty, and Hutchmeyer had needed no urging. The sound of a familiar female voice on the telephone had sufficed. And so the review copies had gone out with Frensic's name on the title-page and the dust jacket. A short biography at the back said he had once been a literary agent. He was one no longer. The name on the door of the office in Lanyard Lane still lingered but the office was empty and Frensic had moved from Glass Walk to a cottage in Sussex without a telephone.

There, safe from Mrs Bogden, he was Piper's amanuensis. Day after day he typed out the manuscripts Piper sent him and night after night lurked in the corner of the village pub and drowned his sorrows. His friends in London saw him seldom. From necessity he visited Geoffrey and occasionally went out to lunch with him. But for the most part he spent his days at his typewriter, cultivated his garden and went for long walks sunk in melancholy thought.

Not that his thoughts were always depressed. There remained a deep core of deviousness in Frensic which nagged at the problem of his predicament and sought ways to escape. But none came to mind. His imagination had been anaesthetized by his terrible experience and each day Piper's dreary prose reinforced the effect. Distilled from so many sources, it acted on Frensic's literary nerve and kept him in a state of disorientation so that he had no sooner recognized a sentence from Mann than he was flung a chunk of Faulkner to be followed by a mot from Proust or a slice of Middlemarch. After such a paragraph Frensic would get up and reel into the garden to escape his associations by mowing the lawn. At night before going to sleep he would excise the memory of Bibliopolis by reading a page or two of The Wind in the Willows and wish he could potter about in boats like the Water Rat. Anything to escape the ordeal he had been set.

And now it was Sunday and the reviews of Search would be in the papers. In spite of himself Frensic was drawn to the little shop in the village to buy the Sunday Times and the Observer. He bought them both and didn't wait until he got home to read the worst. It was best to get the agony over and done with. He stood in the lane and opened the Sunday Times Review and turned to the book page and there it was. At the top of the list. Frensic leant against a gatepost and read the review and as he read his world turned topsy turvy once again. Linda Gormley 'loved' the book and devoted two columns to its praise. She called it 'the most honest and original appraisal of the adolescent trauma I have read for a very long time'. Frensic stared at the words in disbelief. Then he rummaged in the Observer. It was the same there. 'For a first novel it has not only freshness but a deeply intuitive insight into family relationships...a masterpiece...' Frensic shut the paper hurriedly. A masterpiece? He looked again. The word was still there, and further down there was even worse. 'If one can say of a novel that it is a work of genius...' Frensic clutched the gatepost. He felt weak. Search for a Lost Childhood was being acclaimed. He staggered on up the lane with a fresh sense of loss. His nose, his infallible nose, had betrayed him. Piper had been right all along. Either that or the plague of The Moral Novel had spread and the days of the novel of entertainment were over, supplanted by the religion of literature. People no longer read for pleasure. If they liked Search they couldn't. There wasn't an ounce of enjoyment to be got from the book. Frensic had painstakingly (and the word was precise) typed the manuscript out page by ghastly page and from those pages there had emanated a whining self-pity, an arrogantly self-directed sycophancy that had sickened him. And this wretched puke of words was what the reviewers called originality and freshness and a work of genius. Genius! Frensic spat the word. It had lost all meaning.

And as he lumbered up the lane the full portent of the book's success hit him. He would have to go through life bearing the stigma of being known as the author of a book he hadn't written. His friends would congratulate him...For one awful moment Frensic contemplated suicide but his sense of irony saved him. He knew now how Piper had felt when he had discovered what Frensic had foisted on him with Pause. 'Hoist with his own petard' sprang to mind and he acknowledged Piper's triumphant revenge. The thought brought Frensic to a standstill. He had been made to look a fool and if the world now considered him a genius, one day they would learn the truth and the laughter would never cease. It was a threat he had used against Dr Louth and it had been turned against him. Frensic's fury at the thought spurred his deviousness to work. Standing in the lane between the hedgerows he saw his escape. He would turn the tables on them yet. Out of the accumulated experience of the thousand commercially successful novels he had sold he could surely concoct a story that would contain every ingredient Piper and his mentor, Dr Louth, would most detest. It would have sex, violence, sentimentality, romance and all this without an ounce of significance. It would be a rattling good yarn, a successor to Pause, and on the dust jacket in bold type there would be Peter Piper's name. No, that was wrong. Piper was a mere pawn in the game. Behind him there lay a far deadlier enemy to literature, Dr Sydney Louth.

Frensic quickened his pace and hurried across the little wooden bridge that led to his cottage. Presently he was sitting at his typewriter and had inserted a sheet of paper. First he needed a title. His fingers hammered on the keys and the words appeared, AN IMMORAL NOVEL by DR SYDNEY LOUTH. CHAPTER ONE. Frensic typed on and his mind flickered with fresh subdeties. He would incorporate her graceless style. And her ideas. It would be a grotesque pastiche of everything she had ever written and with it all there would be a story so sickly and vile as to deny every precept of The Moral Novel. He would stand the bitch on her head and shake her till her teeth rattled. And there was nothing she could do about it. As her agent, Frensic was safe. Only the truth could hurt him and she was in no position to tell the truth. Frensic stopped typing at the thought and stared into the distance. There was no need to concoct a story. The truth was far more deadly. He would tell the history of The Great Pursuit just as it had happened. His name would be mud but it was mud already in his own eyes with the success of Search, and besides he owed a duty to English literature. To hell with English literature. To Grub Street and all those writers without pretensions who wrote for a living. A living? The ambiguity of the word held him for a moment. Who wrote for a living and the living too. Frensic tore the sheet from the typewriter and started again.

He would call it THE GREAT PURSUIT, A TRUE STORY by Frederick Frensic. The living deserved the truth, and a story, and he would give them both. He would dedicate the book to Grub Street. It had a good old eighteenth-century ring to it. Frensic's nose twitched. He knew he had just begun to write a book that would sell. And if they wanted to sue, let them. He would publish and be damned.

In Bibliopolis the publication of Search made no impression on Piper. He had lost his faith. It had gone with Frensic's visit and the revelation that Dr Sydney Louth had written Pause. It had taken some time for the truth to sink in and he had gone on writing and rewriting for a few months almost automatically. But in the end he knew that Frensic had not lied. He had written to Dr Louth and had had no reply. Piper closed the Church of The Great Tradition. Only the School of Penmanship remained and with it the doctrine of logosophy. The age of the great novel was over. It remained only to commemorate it in manuscript. And so while Baby preached the need to imitate Christ, Piper too returned to traditional virtues in everything. Already he had abolished pens and his pupils had moved back to quills. They were more natural than nibs. They needed cutting, they were the original tools of his craft and they stood as reminders of that golden age when books were written by hand and to be a copyist was to belong to an honourable profession.

And so that Sunday morning Piper sat in the Scriptorium and dipped his quill in Higgins Eternal Evaporated Ink and began to write: 'My fathers' family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name being Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Piper...' He stopped. That wasn't right. It should have been Pip. But after a moment's hesitation he dipped his quill again and continued.

After all in a thousand years who the dickens would care who had written Great Expectations? Only a few scholars who could still read English. The printed works would have perished by then. Only Piper's own parchment manuscripts bound in the thickest leather and filled with his perfect hieroglyphic handwriting and gold illuminated lettering would stand the test of time and lie in the museums of the world, mute testimony to his dedication to literature, and to his craftsmanship. And when he had finished Dickens, he would start on Henry James and write his novels out in longhand too. There was a lifetime's work ahead of him just copying the great tradition out in Higgins Eternal Ink. The name of Piper would be literally immortal yet...

The End