Who Wants Facts?

Believed to be a hoax when first published Peterley Harvest now belongs to the literary underground; that old coal mine, deep in the Welsh Valleys, where all the unknown masterpieces are kept, safe from the blitzkriegs of fashion and commerce.

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To turn life into art you must exile yourself from it; the withdrawal causing pain and sadness that produces their own exquisite reward: we luxuriate in the graceful calm of an antique passion. The typical aesthete, revelling in the after-effects, the echoes not the full rich sound, of love, should avoid its sudden completion. The act itself a coarse anti-climax, splashes of paint that destroy the delicate brushwork. There should be tender kisses, the holding of hands, the long, sad goodbyes, letters that emphasise our distance; these playful ruses keeping the love object safely over the border until the mid-day heat fades into the cool of the late evening, that cold Autumn sunset. Always the aesthete prefers the beauty of his own melancholia to the ecstasies of the lover’s bed. To contemplate the nude not ravish the naked body.

’Tis but to change idle fancies for memories wilfully falser…’

Arthur Hugh Clough, in Amours de Voyage, wrote the classic description of the aesthete in love; that aloof but fragile sensibility that yearns for love’s passion but is unable to lose itself long enough to act. This love affair a journey that never reaches its destination. 

A few decades later David Peterley became a character in Clough’s masterpiece; then, having lived out Claude’s existence, he decided to recount it, though in prose not poetry. But how do you describe a life where its most important moments are those where nothing happens; the love affair unconsummated, its failure ruminated upon? A novel would be too dull; the biography rather boring, nobody wants to read some sad sod who never gets the girl but who insists on telling us all about it, on and on. “Get stuck in there mate” the inevitable, frustrating response. The task seems impossible, unless one is a genius writing In Search of Lost Time.

A solution was found: the autobiography would be written as a novel; the frisson of fakery - is Peterley real? what events are true? how many of these anecdotes (about writers, publishers, politicians) reliable? - creating an excitement that substitutes for action. The cognoscenti to be amused. The result is one of the great autobiographies, for The Private Diary of David Peterley is wholly literature; that unwelcome guest, loud, crude, loquacious Mr Fact, having been put in his place, in the outhouse, where he is neither heard nor seen, the servant forgetting to serve him his sherry.

…as I looked, the two tides seemed to merge in one and become like the pulse of a single heart; and I doubted if I should lever be able to distinguish between them, even if I watched for generations the microcosm below. Rather, I grew certain that if I watched long enough any distinction would become meaningless…

By the book’s end even the author has lost his way, unsure whether he is in the land of fiction or on the island of his own life. We leave him on a boat rocking in a storm, somewhere between Australia and England. To remain there forever, fortunately for us, the grateful and the impressed.