205: Nearly eight years later, ...
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry,” Chapter 19 begins
19
NEARLY EIGHT YEARS LATER, I was earning my living as a writer: writing advertising copy, brochures, recipe booklets, press releases, answers to inquiries, and requests for brochures and recipe books. I was working for the Babbington Clam Council. It was, I told myself, an apprenticeship, and when asked about my work, I was quick to enumerate the many things I had learned from it. I tried not to admit to myself how much I enjoyed the work, how happy I would probably be if I were to stick at it. Instead, I spent my evenings, and stolen hours at work, trying to write that big book, and trying not to believe that Mr. Beaker might have been right, that I would never do it. But the harder I worked, the more confused and uncertain I became. I filled cartons with fragments, but of what complete construction they were fragments was not clear, and often when I should have been wrestling with a big idea I was wandering around Kittiwake Island.
Sitting at my desk one morning, I opened a letter from Robert Meyer, who was still wandering from place to place, accumulating degrees, writing letters, and, by his own account at any rate, breaking hearts. He had enclosed a clipping from the International Herald Tribune, an article about clams based on a press release that I had written.
In the space of a single moment, my life’s work was determined, for on the reverse of the clipping were several classified ads, in one of which a name caught my eye: Larry Peters. The publisher of the Larry Peters series was looking for people to write new installments, not only new adventures for Larry, but installments for other series as well. By responding to the advertisement, I learned that the several series of books for boys and girls published by this house were written by people working from character dossiers and plot outlines that the publisher himself supplied. When I had read the books as a boy, I had believed that they were written by Roger Drake, whose name appeared on the covers, and it never occurred to me that there might be many “Roger Drakes,” that the Larry Peters stories were the product of several hands, that the Roger Drake whose name appeared on each of the books was himself a work of fiction. Those stories that had appeared over the years, those stories of which I had been so fond, in which I thought I had found so much more than met the eye, beneath the text of which I thought I had been able to read a richer text about the way Larry lived with his family and his friends, the way he understood things, the way he felt about things, had been built on a deception.
Only after a careful rereading and a good deal of thought did I understand that underpinning my reading of the Larry Peters adventures, the only foundation beneath them, was what I had wanted to be there, nothing but what I had donated to Larry from my past, from my imagination. To a great degree, the Larry Peters I knew, the Larry Peters I had once wanted to be, had always been my creation, was even, perhaps, me.
[to be continued on Tuesday, March 1, 2022]
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In Topical Guide 205, Mark Dorset considers Fictional Reality: Writer and Reader as Collaborators in the Making Thereof from this episode.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.