12
I THINK THAT MOST READERS of the Larry Peters books dreamed of being a friend of Larry’s, of being found washed up on Kittiwake Island one morning, carried to the big house on an improvised litter, nursed back to health by Marie and Mrs. Peters, and then adopted into the Peters circle. The attitude inspired in me by the Larry Peters books was fundamentally different. I didn’t want to be like Larry Peters; I wanted to beLarry Peters.
I wanted his chum Rocky King to be my chum on exactly the terms that existed between him and Larry. I wanted his brilliant and unpredictable dad to be my dad. I wanted his fussy, cuddly mother to be my mother. I wanted Marie to turn down my sheets. I wanted to sit up at night, after everyone else was asleep, and trade confidences and wisecracks with my saucy sister Lucy. I knew that this was, in all the ways that most people would have considered important, impossible. But I understood even then that there were ways in which it was not only possible but, for me, necessary, necessary in a way that only the things we truly want to do, truly derive pleasure from doing, are necessary, however complex and demanding they may be. If Roger Drake had been able to imagine Larry and all the rest of them and the context for them, surely I could manage to imagine myself as Larry, could imagine a complete and consistent enough set of details to fill the chinks in Mr. Drake’s portrait of Larry with details about myself, to have Larry say what I would say during the breakfast conversations on the mornings when there was no adventure to interrupt, when the Peterses could stretch out and relax, putter in the garden, read the papers, listen to a record, play the piano, go for a swim.
I spent a lot of time within the Larry Peters books, playing at being Larry, but I never thought of myself as escaping into them, never thought of myself as retreating into them to get away from a world that wasn’t what it ought to have been, never thought of myself as making my way across Murky Bay in the hope of finding something better or leaving something worse behind, never, that is, until my great-grandmother died.
In Topical Guide 198, Mark Dorset considers Reality: Real and Fictional; Imagination: As a Means of Escape from Real Reality; Fantasies: Metamorphosis or Transformation; and Death from this episode.
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🎧 198: I think that most readers ...