Страница 75 из 77
Postscript By Rachel
JLhc lave been asked by a «Mr. Loxias» for my comments on a piece of fantastic writing by the murderer of my husband. I was inclined at first simply to ignore the request. I also considered resorting to legal action to prevent publication. However there has already been, and I am sure not accidentally, a good deal of publicity about the matter, and to stifle this «outpouring» might give it the interest of a secret document without in the end concealing what it said. Frankness is better and compassion is better. For we must, I think, feel or attempt to feel pity and compassion for the author of this fantasy. It is sad that when provided with the «seclusion» which he professes always to have wanted, what Pearson produces is a sort of mad adolescent dream, and not the serious work of art of which he imagined himself capable and of which he so incessantly told us.
I have certainly no wish to be unkind. The revived publicity about this hideous tragedy has caused me great suffering. That my own life has been «ruined» is a fact with which I have to live. I hope and believe that unhappiness has not made me bitter. I do not want to hurt anybody. And I do not believe that my frankness now can possibly hurt Bradley Pearson, who seems to be invincibly wrapped up in his own fantastic conceptions of what happened and of what he himself is like.
About his account of events there is little to be said. It is in it's main outline clearly a «dream» such as might interest a psychologist. And let me say here that I do not and ca
I spoke advisedly of an «adolescent» fantasy. BP is what might be called a «Peter Pan» type. He does not in his story describe his extensive past life, except for hinting that there were romances with women. He is the sort of man who likes both to hint at a past and to behave as if he were eternally twenty-five. (He speaks of himself as an ageing Don Juan, as if there were only a trivial difference between real and imagined conquests! I doubt if there were really many women in his life.) A psychiatrist would probably find him «retarded.» His tastes in literature were juvenile. He speaks grandly of Shakespeare and of Homer, but I doubt if he had read the former since schooldays or the latter ever. His constant reading, which of course he nowhere admits, was mediocre adventure stories by authors such as Forester and Stevenson and Mulford. He really liked boys' stories, tales of crude adventure with no love interest, where he could identify himself with some princely hero, a man with a sword or such. My husband often commented to me about this, and once tackled BP directly. BP was upset and I can recall him actually blushing very much at the charge.
BP was of course a person painfully conscious of inferiority. He was an unhappy disappointed man, ashamed of his social origin and his illiteracy, and stupidly ashamed of his job which he imagined made him a figure of fun. In fact he was, though not for that reason, a figure of fun to all of us. No one, before the tragedy, could mention him without smiling a little. He must have realized this. I suppose it is possible, and it is a shocking thought, that a man might commit a serious crime just in order to stop people from laughing at him. That BP was a man who hated being laughed at –is pretty clear throughout the story. The rather pompous self-mocking style is a defence and a sort of meeting people half-way if they decide to laugh.
Of course he turns everything topsy-turvy in his account of his relations with our family. He says rather coyly that we needed him. The truth was that he needed us and was a sort of parasite, an awful nuisance sometimes. He was very lonely and we all felt sorry for him. And I can remember occasions too when we made absurd excuses when he wanted to see us or hid when he rang the doorbell. His relations with my husband were crucial of course. His claim to have «discovered» my husband is ridiculous. My husband was already quite famous when BP after much begging, persuaded an editor to let him review one of my husband's books, and after that he made himself known to us and became, as I think my daughter once put it, «the family pussycat.»
BP ca