Helping himself to what was really a tumbler of Scotch, with a little water on top for the sake of appearances, he launched into a description of his book, most of which I had heard before and all of which I was to hear several times again.
"It's extremely dense in texture, you see. A multiplicity of themes, interwoven and illuminating each other, and written so that every sentence contains a complex nexus of possible meanings, giving rise to a variety of possible interpretations. Meaning is packed within meaning, so that the whole thing unfolds like the many skins of an onion. The book moves forward in the ordinary literal or historical sense, but its real movement is dialectical and moral, and the conclusion is reached by the pressure of successive renunciations, discoveries of error, and what the careful reader discerns to be partial truths."
"Tough stuff."
"Not really. The simple reader can be quite happy with a literal interpretation. It will seem to be the biography of a rather foolish and peculiarly perverse young man, born to live in the Spirit, but determined to escape that fate or postpone it as long as possible because he wants to explore the ways of the world and its creatures. It will be quite realistic, you see, so that it may even appear to be a simple narrative. A fool could find it idle or even tedious, but he'll press on because of the spicy parts.
"That's the literal aspect. But of course there is the allegorical aspect. The life of the principal character, a young academic, is the journey of a modern Everyman, on a Pilgrim's Progress. The reader follows the movement of his soul from its infantile fantasies, through its adolescent preoccupation with the mechanical and physical aspects of experience, until he discovers logical principles, metaphysics, and particularly scepticism, until he is landed in the dilemmas of middle age – early middle age – and maturity, and finally to his recovery, through imagination, of a unified view of life, of a synthesis of unconscious fantasy, scientific knowledge, moral mythology, and wisdom that meets in a religious reconciliation of the soul with reality through the acceptance of revealed truth."
"Whew!"
"Hold on a minute. That isn't all. There's the moral dimension of the book. It's a treatise on folly, error, frustration, and exploration of the blind alleys and false theories about life as currently propagated and ineffectually practised. The hero – a not-too-bright adventurer – is looking for the good life in which intellect is at harmony with emotion, intelligence integrated through recollected experience, sentiment tempered by fact, desire directed towards worldly objects and controlled by a sense of humour and proportion."
"I'm glad to hear there is going to be some humour in it."
"Oh, it's all humour from start to finish. The deep, rumbling humour of the fulfilled spirit is at the heart of the book. Like Joyce, but not so confined by the old Jesuit boundaries."
"That'll be nice."
"But the crown of the book is the anagogical level of meaning, suggesting the final revelation of the twofold nature of the world, the revelation of experience as the language of God and of life as the preliminary to a quest that cannot be described but only guessed at, because all things point beyond themselves to a glory which is greater than any of them. And thus the hero of the tale – because it is a tale to the simple, as I said – will be found to have been preoccupied all his life with the quest for the Father Image and the Mother Idol to replace the real parents who in real life were inadequate surrogates of the Creator. The quest is never completed, but the preoccupation with Image and Idol gradually gives way to the conviction of the reality of the Reality which lies behind the shadows which constitute the actual moment as it rushes by."
"You've bitten off quite a substantial chunk."
"Yes indeed. But I can chew it because I've lived it, you see. I gained my philosophy in youth, took it out into the world and tested it."
"But Johnny, I hate to say this, but what you've allowed me to read doesn't make me want to read more."
"You haven't seen the whole thing."
"Has anyone?"
"Hollier has a complete typescript."
"And what does he say?"
"I haven't been able to tie him down to a real talk about it. He says he's very busy, and I suppose he is, though I think reading this ought to come before the trivialities that eat up his time. I'm shameless, I know. But this is a great book, and sooner or later he is going to have to come to terms with it."
"What have you done about publication?"
"I've written a careful description of the book – the plan, the themes, the depths of meaning – and sent it to all the principal publishers. I've sent a sample chapter to each one, because I don't want them to see the whole thing until I know how serious they are and what sort of deal they are prepared to make."
"Any bites?"
"One editor asked me to have lunch with him, but at the last moment his secretary called to say that he couldn't make it. Another one called to ask if there were what he called 'explicit' scenes in it."
"Ah, the old buggery bit. Very fashionable now."
"Of course there's a good deal of that in it, but unless it's taken as an integral part of the book it's likely to be mistaken for pornography. The book is frank – much franker than anything else I've seen – but not pornographic. I mean, it wouldn't excite anybody."
"How can you tell?"
"Well – perhaps it might. But I want the reader to experience as far as possible everything that is experienced by the hero, and that includes the ecstasy of love as well as the disgust and filthiness of sex."
"You won't get far with modern readers by telling them that sex is filthy. Sex is very fashionable at present. Not just necessary, or pleasurable, or natural, but fashionable, which is quite a different thing."
"Middle-class fucking. My jail-buggery isn't like that at all. The one is Colonel Sanders' finger-lickin' chicken, and the other is fighting for a scrap of garbage in Belsen."
"That might sell very well."
"Don't be a crass fool, Sim. This is a great book, and although I expect it to sell widely and become a classic, I'm not writing nastiness for the bourgeois market."
A classic. As I looked at him, so unkempt and messy in the ruin of a once-good suit of my own, I wondered if he could truly have written a classic novel. How would I know? Identifying classics of literature is not my job and I have the usual guilt that is imposed on all of us by the knowledge that in the past people have refused to recognize classics, and have afterwards looked like fools because of it. One has a certain reluctance to believe that anybody one knows, and particularly anybody looking such a failure and crook as Parlabane, is the author of something significant. Anyhow, he hadn't permitted me to read the whole thing, so obviously he thought me unworthy, a sadly limited creature not up to comprehending its quality. The burden of declaring his book a great one had not been laid on me. But I was curious. As custodian of The New Aubrey it was up to me to find out if I could, and record genius if genius came into my ken.
Identifying classics may be considered outside my capacity, but several fund-granting bodies are prepared to take my word about the abilities of students who want money to continue their studies, and after Parlabane had left I settled to the job of filling in several of the forms such bodies provide for the people they call referees, and the students refer to as "resource persons". So I turned off whatever part of me was Parlabane's confidant, and the part which was the compiler of The New Aubrey, and the part – the demanding, aching part – that yearned for Maria-Sophia, and set to work on a pile of such forms, all of which had been brought to me at the last moment by anxious but ill-organized students, all of which had to be sent to the grantors immediately, and upon which it was apparently my task to affix the necessary postage; the students had not done so.