by Tom Sharpe
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 subtleties. 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 Pursuit. 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 virtue 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 father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name 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 …
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Epub 9781446474617
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Published by Arrow Books in 2002
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Copyright © Tom Sharpe 1977
Tom Sharpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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First published in 1977 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
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ISBN 9780099435495