The Genius and the Goddess [antikvár]

"/ I I HE trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, I "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never -L makes sense." "Never?" I questioned. "Maybe from God's point of view," he conceded. "Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Thomas á Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance." And when I asked, "To what?" he waved a square brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves. "To the Best that has been Thought and Said," he declaimed with mock porten-tousness. And then, "Oddly enough, the closest to reality are always the fictions that are supposed to be the least true." He leaned over and touched the back of a battered copy of The Brothers Karamaiov. "It makes so little sense that it's almost real. Which is more than can be said for any of the academic kinds of fiction. Physics and chemistry fiction. History fiction. Philosophy fiction----" His accusing finger moved from Dirac to Toynbee, from Sorokin to Carnap. "More than can be said even for Biography fiction. Here's the latest specimen of the genre." * 7 * THE GENIUS AND THE GODDESS From the table beside him he picked up a volume in a glossy blue dust-jacket and held it up for my inspection. " The Life of Henry Maartens" I read out with no more interest than one accords to a household word. Then I remembered that, to John Rivers, the name had been something more and other than a household word. "You were his pupil, weren't you.^" Rivers nodded without speaking. "And this is the official biography.^" "The official fiction," he amended. "An unforgettable picture of the Soap Opera scientist—you know the type —the moronic baby with the giant intellect; the sick genius battling indomitably against enormous odds; the lonely thinker who was yet the most affectionate of family men; the absent-minded Professor with his head in the clouds but his heart in the right place. The facts, unfortunately, weren't quite so simple." "You mean, the book's inaccurate.^" "No, it's all true—so far as it goes. After that, it's all rubbish—or rather it's non-existent. And maybe," he added, "maybe it has to be non-existent. Maybe the total reality is always too undignified to be recorded, too senseless or too horrible to be left unfictionalized. All the same it's exasperating, if one happens to know the facts, it's even rather insulting, to be fobbed off with Soap Opera." "So you're going to set the record straight.^" I presumed. "For the publid* Heaven forbid!" » 8 •