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?'
