One Leg Too Few by William Cook

Author:William Cook [Cook, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781409051923
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Egged on by Mavis, Dudley expanded on his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis. ‘You don’t go to an analyst to find out who you are,’ he explained. ‘It’s to find out how to get to what you know you are.’ Peter looked nonplussed. ‘You don’t have the courage to get to it,’ Dudley told him. ‘You don’t have the courage to display it.’ Yet such a concept was utterly alien to Peter. In any relationship, however close, there is usually one important subject about which two people disagree. For Peter and Dudley, that subject was psychoanalysis. For Dudley it was a kind of religion, part of what freed him up as a performer. Dudley’s comedy was revelatory. Peter’s was all about concealment. Despite his sporadic attempts to embrace the faith, he remained an unbeliever.

The interview shed fresh light on their contrasting working methods. ‘I can only work from my direct experience in life,’ said Dudley. ‘I feel there’s an endless vat of material there, but I think Peter probably works in a different way.’ ‘I think mine is more fantasy,’ said Peter. ‘I started writing at school and that couldn’t have come from experience. The early formation of the character E.L. Wisty, the man on the park bench who talks endlessly about everything and knows nothing, that wasn’t based on anybody I’d met – it came from inside me. I’ve written a lot of stuff which is fantasy, which you could say was along the same lines as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. I don’t think I use my background as much as Dudley does with his writing.’

But writing was one thing. Performing was another. For Dudley, the memory of Peter’s drunken first night, and Dudley’s self-defeating efforts to (literally) prop him up still smarted. ‘I tend to drink too much,’ admitted Peter. ‘Why?’ asked Mavis. ‘I don’t know,’ said Peter. ‘I think it’s a symptom of boredom, really.’ That was as close as he ever came, in public, to an admission of his addiction and the possible reasons for it. A deep, abiding fear of boredom was what drove Peter on – and, eventually, what stalled him. ‘I get bored very easily,’ he said. ‘I tend to get up late. I read the newspapers, then I sort of hang around the house. I sometimes, very occasionally, go out shopping with my girlfriend. I do very little during the day and I’m very much aware that I’m doing nothing, which annoys me. Yet so far – we’ve been running sixteen weeks – I haven’t actually done anything positive about it.’

For all his new-found self-awareness, Dudley seemed even more downbeat about his private life. He was living alone, he told Mavis, cohabiting with a cat called Stanley. ‘I have a lot of aggression in me which I’m terrified of letting out because I feel it is destructive,’ he said. ‘But it’s not really,’ he added, somewhat plaintively. ‘It’s very creative in many ways.’ Yet his piano playing had ground to a halt (‘I don’t really know why’) which rather undermined this theory.

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