Peter & Susan at Six Panels

I have received up to 900 mails and letters concerning Peter and Susan. They say We would be interested to learn more of their lives and hopes, basically what they are like. I can do this. It is best to start a short while ago.
Peter and Susan were, as far as they could tell, immersed in a book. For example, when they came across Lily she mentioned that she had been on holiday in the Mediterranean only the other day and had enjoyed reading a book in which they were mentioned. It is not clear if they were characters in that book, which was a fiction. It might have just been their names. Peter and Susan would have listened to Lily and taken note of this. Which is probably why it came about – their interest in people in books. Their immersion in them.

Peter and Susan went to see Peggy McFarrell’s “A Not So Final Curtain” with its accounts of theatre life and those who lived it. After the opening within this show of (the fictional) Dan Mulcahy’s (fictional) show “Dappled” there was an interval and Peter and Susan, in the Circle Bar, bumped into some friends and discussed the play so far. Eloise, one of the friends, said that the play was quite Pirandelloesque. Peter didn’t know what that meant so he asked Eloise to explain. It was after this Italian playwright, Pirandello, who wrote a famous play in which the characters were in an unfinished play and were wandering around trying to find its author. Peter said “Perhaps it wasn’t a very good play.”

Even so it started them thinking. Perhaps they could take the initiative more. But although they discussed how they might do this, every time they determined to ‘up sticks’ or ‘do something about it‘ Peter would get a headache and Susan would fall asleep.

But ‘Peter and Susan’; ‘Peter and Susan Strike Out’; ‘Peter & Susan Spend a Day at Amper Sands’, ‘Peter and Susan start to feel somehow not really real, substantial or present at all ’ – these were all things that happened to them. And more or less, these things ended properly. Things were tied up. Except, as you might expect, for those situations in which open-ended anxious feelings were closed down without resolution as in the fourth volume as in the list above. They would be closed down because Peter and Susan did not enjoy the fatigues, the staring, the flaccid restlessness, the intermittent sense of a lack of project. You and I might think they should suck it up isn’t this just what it’s like? but they thought at times that you should press it back down and at other times they thought that it should be possible to let it flow out – how bad could that be?

In “Peter and Susan go to the Eiger” the two of them got quite far up, about halfway through, and probably they could have gone on but Peter said “We’ve done quite a lot” and Susan said “It’ll be much the same” and they agreed to “Come back another day and do the second half.” They said to each other “Even from here you can see for miles.”

It was not a new situation, this. It had been in place since the end of the last war which ended in 1945. Before the war and during it the sense of project was to the forefront of the things people thought about and felt.
But in the chapter ‘Peter and Susan Strike Out’ which was mentioned above, while it was certainly the case that the two friends or were they brother and sister or were they lovers or were they married? Which may be germane or if it is not then what happens to them can happen to all kinds of people. Of course, it is just about possible that they were all these things although that would mean that some quite basic taboos had been transgressed. Given the context, however, this is not necessarily an insuperable problem. In that chapter they would be tidying or cleaning, going to the shops, the 101 things that must be done, things that must be planned and allowed for, things that made up a background but were not rigid, they could do them in any order, more or less. It was Susan who put the cat among the pigeons by saying “If you take away the background then all is foreground.” Peter replied “And as like as not, more foreground will come forward and all that was remembered is forgotten.” After which Susan said “When the foreground moves into the background you are truly at sea.” She was referring to a situation in which the foreground had been dealt with and consequently, given that there was also no background, there remained a desolated place. Susan said that the background was practically featureless – it had always been there so why look anymore? – and the foreground, normally so eventful, so impelling, had become overly familiar, not so much that its events were similar but their incursion into the lives of Peter and Susan had become predictable, what was expected.
◀The Grand Parent
Excursion in 3 Panels▶

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