Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [30]
to reproduce them in talk with anyone else. When I tried to explain some notion of Hugo's it sounded flat and puerile, or else quite mad, and I soon gave up the attempt. After that Dave rather lost interest in the book; nothing is true or important for Dave which can't be maintained in an oral discussion. However, he had during this time, and contrary to my instructions, showed the book, which he had taken home to finish, to one or two other people who were also very impressed by it. Since I knew how much the whole project would displease him, I had felt myself bound to conceal Hugo's identity. I had presented the thing to Dave as a dramatic exercise, rather remotely based on conversations which I had had with a variety of people. But now in a little while I found myself being regarded in certain circles as a kind of sage, and many of my friends pressed me to let them see the manuscript. Eventually I did show it to a few more people and began to get used to the idea that it should circulate a little. All this time I was still working on it, and drawing additional matter from my current conversations with Hugo. I had continued to keep my friendship with Hugo completely secret from all my other friends. I did this at first out of a jealous desire to keep my remarkable find to myself, and later on also because I feared that Hugo might discover my treachery. People were now constantly suggesting to me that I should publish the thing, at which I just laughed. But the notion was attractive to me all the same. It was attractive at first in the way something can attract one when one knows one will never do it. As publication was so absolutely out of the question I felt it was quite safe to brood upon it in imagination. I thought what a remarkable book it would make, how original, how astonishing, how illuminating. I amused myself inventing titles for it. I would sit holding the manuscript in my hands, and then I would fancy it reproduced a thousand-fold. I suffered continually at that time from a fear of losing the manuscript, and although I typed out two or three copies I still felt it very likely that somehow or other they would all be destroyed and the thing lost for ever--which I couldn't help thinking would be a pity. Then one day a publisher approached me directly with a proposal for its publication. This took me by surprise. I had never been spontaneously approached by a publisher before and such condescension rather turned my head. It occurred to me that if this book were a success, which I couldn't doubt, this might smooth my way considerably in the literary world. It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown. If I could leap to fame in this way my career as a writer would be made. I set this idea aside, telling myself that the project was an impossible one. I couldn't palm off Hugo's ideas as my own. Most of all, I couldn't use material drawn from my intimacy with Hugo to present the public with a work which would fill Hugo himself with repulsion and disgust. But the idle dreams of publication which I had nourished earlier now unmasked themselves as a real will. I became obsessed with the notion that I would publish. A sort of fatality drew me towards it. I saw all my past acts as leading inevitably to this end. I remembered a drunken evening during which I passed in fantasy through every stage of the process which should bring the dialogue into print. By then the idea had too great a reality in imagination for it to be long before it should become actual. I rang up the publisher at his home. He knew of my reluctances, and arrived early the next morning with the contract, which I signed with a flourish of abandon and a splitting headache. After he had gone I took out the manuscript and looked at it as one looks at the woman for whom one has lost one's honour. I entitled it The Silencer and added an author's preface to the effect that I owed many of the ideas contained therein to a friend who should be nameless, but that I had no reason to believe that he would approve of the form