Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  I can hardly believe, as I write this account, that I was able while the woman talked to me not only to hear her out calmly but to put one after another interpretations on her words. And yet, I recall that I soon decided while listening to the woman that her story of her man-friend was untrue and that she had brought me some of her own writing to read. After I had begun to believe this, I expected that I would not be able to refuse her when she handed her writing to me and asked me to read it. However, as tired and as dazed as I might have been, I was still determined, so I recall, to carry on the pretence that the writing I had been asked to read was the work of a man who was an admirer of my own writing but was unknown to me. This pretence, so I thought, would save me from having to tell the woman to her face that I had not thought highly of her writing. (I had never thought highly of any writing that had been shown to me by unpublished writers of the kind I have been describing.)

  She asked me, as I had expected, to read the contents of the briefcase. In a few graceful movements, she got up from her chair, opened the briefcase, let the bundle of pages fall onto my bed so that the uppermost page was conveniently placed in front of me, and then let herself out of my room. The previous sentence may not be an accurate report of events. I cannot remember her leaving her chair or the room, but certainly a time arrived when she was no longer in the room, and she is not in the room with me now, although she will surely return to this room, or to some other room that had already been reserved for me in some other city in Tasmania, in order to collect the briefcase and its contents and to learn my comments on what I might have read.

  More strange than my not remembering the woman’s leaving my room is my not remembering her having imparted to me the information I am about to record, which information is a summary of the life of the man said by the woman to have been the author of the pages left in my keeping.

  He had lived all his life in Tasmania. He was of about my own age but he had never once travelled the few hundred kilometres by sea that I had finally travelled between Tasmania and the mainland. He had been born in Hobart but had lived as a child for an equal number of years in both Hobart and Launceston and had never afterwards been sure of how to answer persons who asked him where he came from. During his years at secondary school, he had been at least an average student in most subjects but among the best few in English and geography. At the age of fifteen he had had a poem published in his school magazine and had confided to one of his teachers that he wanted to be a poet, but no evidence survives of his having written any other poem or any other piece of literary writing, and in his last year of school his teachers commented in his reports that he seemed to lack ambition. After secondary school, he obtained a place in the training college for primary teachers in schools in the government system. He followed the course for the required two years and earned his trained teacher’s certificate. At that time, in the late 1950s, teachers were in short supply. His certificate entitled him to a permanent place in the employment of the state government. At the time when his briefcase was delivered to my room in the Elimatta Hotel in Devonport, he had been a teacher in primary schools in Tasmania for thirty years.

  In his early years as a teacher, his junior rank had obliged him to teach in schools unpopular among his colleagues: schools in industrial towns or in government housing estates. As he became more senior, he was more able to teach where he chose, and he chose always to be an assistant teacher in a school in a middle-class suburb of a city. He never sought promotion to any position of responsibility, much less to any head teacher’s position. Most of his colleagues were driven at sometime during their careers to study by night for qualifications entitling them to enter the higher-paid grades of the teaching service, but the author of the pages at my elbow, who was close to fifty years of age, had been for fifteen years the most senior teacher in the lowest grade in the system of classification used in Tasmania.

  The author of the contents of the briefcase had never married. According to the woman who had brought the briefcase to me, the author, as I intend to call him from now on, had never been seen in the company of any person to whom he might have been linked romantically. Most young teachers in the 1950s lived in boarding houses or as boarders in family homes when they were living away from their own homes. The author as a young man would share a bathroom or a toilet with other persons but would always live in a detached or self-contained room with at least a gas-ring and a sink so that he need not observe the mealtimes of others. As his income increased, he began to live in small rented flats. He saved money each year. Most he put aside for a small house for his retirement; some he used to buy cheap furniture and fittings for the rented flats that he began to occupy after about his thirtieth year; the rest he put towards the cost of buying and maintaining the second-hand cars that he began to buy and to maintain after about his thirtieth year.

  He had stayed for no more than five years in any one place during his career. The life he lived was simple and blameless, and yet his colleagues and his neighbours could not leave him alone, and their questions and their scrutiny had always caused him to move on. The population of Tasmania had been never more than a few hundred thousands throughout his career, but he had been able to move seven times during his career to a place where he was scarcely known. At the time when I first heard of him, he was planning to make one further move at about the age of fifty and then to take advantage of a scheme for early retirement and to live for the rest of his life in a village more than thirty kilometres from any place where he had taught. He had lived at two different periods of his life in each of Launceston and Hobart, once at Burnie, once at Devonport, once in Wynyard, and once in New Norfolk. In each place, his routine was as reported in the following paragraph.

  He arrived an hour early at school and prepared the lessons for the day. He taught his class conscientiously throughout the day and did whatever other duties his head teacher assigned to him. He ate his cut lunch in the staffroom and took morning and afternoon tea in the same place and exchanged small talk there with his colleagues. After school, he shopped for his supplies and then went to his lodgings. On one afternoon each week, he would call at the local library to borrow and return several books, and on Friday afternoons, if any of his colleagues were in the habit of drinking at a hotel near the school, he would join them for an hour. After he had arrived home each evening, he remained indoors; he was never seen at any meeting or gathering by night. On Saturday, if a race meeting was held in the town or the city where he lived, he would always attend. Sometimes, in the winter, he was seen at a football match. On other Saturdays, he would walk for an hour in the late afternoon. He attended no church on Sunday or on any other day. His only outing on Sunday was a short walk late in the day. Each year while one or both of his parents was alive, he spent Christmas Day in their house. When his parents had died, he ate Christmas dinner at the home of his married sister, who was his only sibling. On Boxing Day each year, he arrived in one or another unfashionable hotel in one or another seaside town and stayed for a week. He took his short holiday partly so that he would be able to satisfy the questions of his colleagues in the first weeks of the new school year but also as a genuine break in his routine. In the hotel, he went to his room only to sleep. Each morning he walked, always in sports trousers and long-sleeved shirt, along the streets nearest the sea, or he sat on the foreshore and looked at the beach. In the afternoons, he sat in the bar of his hotel, drinking beer slowly and listening to radio broadcasts of cricket or tennis or golf or horse-races or watching televised reports of those events or talking with any other drinker who might have begun a conversation with him. In the evenings, he watched television programmes with other guests in the hotel lounge, again drinking slowly and talking with anyone who offered to talk to him. At the end of this week, he returned to his home and stayed indoors all day for most of the days until school resumed.

  The author sometimes invited to his home one or another of his colleagues. On perhaps one Friday each ye
ar, when the author was drinking with colleagues (always males), he would invite to his home some young man whose wife was staying with a sick parent or was in hospital after having given birth to her first child or (as often happened in later years) had recently separated from her husband. The two men would buy a few bottles of beer and a meal of fish and chips and would sit in the author’s lounge-room for three or four hours before the visitor would return to his home.

  Whatever odd sights the visitor might have expected to see in the rooms of the bachelor who had invited him home, he saw little worth reporting back to anyone who might have questioned him later. The furnishings would have struck most observers as drab and tasteless. There was a portable television set at least fifteen years old, a cheap mantel radio, and an old record-player with a dozen or so records. A few shelves of books were in a corner—mostly books about horse-racing in Europe and the USA. The rooms were bare of pictures. There were no vases or ornaments. The only unexpected item in the lounge-room might have been the filing cabinets. (There would have been only one cabinet during the first seven years of the author’s teaching career, but the number increased by one every seven years.) The author was never uncomfortable if his visitor stared at the filing cabinets or asked about them. In fact, these casual-seeming invitations to his home were part of a deliberate policy by the author. He hoped his visitor would tell his colleagues afterwards how little of note he had seen in the bachelor’s quarters. This, so the author hoped, would bring an end to any gossip that might have circulated about him. Whenever a visitor seemed curious about the filing cabinets, the author would say offhandedly that he did a bit of writing for a hobby. The author then gave one or another brief account of his hobby depending on how much the visitor seemed to be aware of all that might have been denoted by the word writing. To someone who had seemingly never opened a book since his years at the training college, when he had been compelled to read a novel, a play, and an anthology of poetry for his literature course, the author would say that he had been taking correspondence courses in the hope of learning how to write a best-selling crime novel so that he could give up teaching. To someone who might have had on his own shelves some of the Reader’s Digest condensed books, the author would say that he had had a poem published when he was at school and a poem or two published in obscure places over the years since then and that he had been trying for years to get together a small collection of poems that might one day be published. To the one man of the twenty and more who had heard that the owner of the filing cabinets was some sort of writer and who had then asked such questions as revealed that he sometimes read a novel or even a book of poetry or even that he may once have tried or thought of trying himself to write a novel or a book of poetry or even a single poem—to that man the author said that each of his poems had been published under a different name and that he preferred not to disclose these names, since he believed that the enterprise known as literature had taken a wrong course from the time when pieces of writing first began to be published with the true name of the author attached. From that time, so the author believed, critics and reviewers and commentators and all other persons who claimed to be able to distinguish good writing from bad writing had never had their skills fairly tested. The author wished that all writers of all texts that might have deserved to be considered as literature had either refused to put a name to any of their texts or had put to every text a different name. If the world had been as he wished, the author said to the one man mentioned earlier in this paragraph, readers would have been able to learn about the author of any text only what the text itself seemed to tell them, and persons claiming to be skilled at commenting on texts would have had to spend much effort in trying to establish which of the many texts published each year came from one or another previously published author. In that world, the author had said to the man mentioned above, no person claiming to be skilled at commenting on texts would be able to praise or to denigrate any piece of writing safe in the knowledge that he or she knew who was the author of that piece and knew that other texts by the same author had been praised or denigrated by other persons claiming to be skilled at commenting.

  Thus the author had lived for about thirty years. Now, he was within a few years of retiring under an early retirement scheme that allowed teachers employed by the government to leave work in their fifties. He expected to be left alone by his neighbours after he had retired. Anyone who heard that he was some kind of writer would suppose him to be one more middle-aged man trying to do in his retirement what he had dreamed of doing while he had worked for a living. As a retired man, he would be largely free from having to pretend. And yet he intended, as an extra safeguard of his privacy, to tell none of his former colleagues where he intended to live after his retirement. He had been on good terms with many of his colleagues during his career, but he considered none of them a friend. He had no friend, although the woman who had called at my room was somewhat close to him. He had known for many years where he wanted to spend his retirement, and he had made his last move as a teacher to a place far from the place he was going to retire to. When he left his last school, he would tell his colleagues that he intended to take a long holiday before deciding what next to do. In fact, he would use his savings to buy a cottage in the tiny township of N— on the river of the same name. (I had learned only the first letter of this name.)

  The man has given much thought to his choice of the place where he would live for the remainder of his life. He knows that Tasmania is considered a place of mountains and forests, but the township of N— is near the centre of the largest district of mostly level pastureland in the whole island. After his retirement, the author will see mountains and forests in the distance, but he will be surrounded near at hand by mostly level and grassy countryside.

  In the briefcase that the woman left with me are nearly two thousand pages. In the upper right-hand corner of each page is a date. The earliest of these dates is from the late 1950s; the most recent date is from this year. (In the text on many pages are other dates, but these are from a different calendar.) If the pages comprised a work of literature, I might report that the first thousand or so comprise an introduction to the work while the other pages are samples chosen at intervals from the narrative proper. If the pages comprised a work of literature, I might describe that work as a novel with many thousands of characters and a plot of infinite complications.

  The author of the pages in the briefcase has imagined an island-country of approximately the same shape as Tasmania but with about twice its area and twice its population. The name of the country is New Arcadia.

  The island-country of New Arcadia is situated with its mid-point at the intersection of the 145th meridian east of Greenwich and the line of latitude forty degrees south of the equator of a planet whose geography and history are similar to those of Earth except that the imagined planet contains no country corresponding to the country Australia. I have not yet learned from the pages I have read whether or not New Arcadia is a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations or the system by which the country is governed. The people of New Arcadia have similar racial origins to the people of Tasmania as it was in the 1950s, except that New Arcadia has considerably fewer people of Irish or Scots or Welsh origin. A less noticeable difference appeared to me as I looked through the pages. The persons in New Arcadia who own racehorses (a slightly larger proportion of the population than in Tasmania) often choose names for their horses such as few Tasmanians would have the knowledge or the wit to devise. A note in one of the early pages explains that the author got many of the names of New Arcadian racehorses from the books that he borrowed continually from libraries. Yet, when I read in the pages such names as Scholar-Gipsy, Laurids Brigge, La Ginistra, Clunbury, Das Glasperlenspiel, and Into The Millennium, I found myself thinking not of a primary teacher sitting alone of an evening in a shabby lounge-room but of men—and a few women—leafing through books in the libraries or on the verandas of sprawling houses set among clumps
of trees and wide lawns in far-reaching expanses of mostly level countryside.

  The reader should have guessed from the contents of the previous paragraph that the pages I have been looking at or writing about for most of this evening and of the day that preceded it and of the morning that preceded the day are part of a detailed chronicle of horse-racing in New Arcadia from the late 1950s until almost the present day. An introduction to the chronicle contains, among many other matters, maps of the racecourses of New Arcadia, lists of all owners and trainers and jockeys in the country, details of all the principal breeding studs, summaries of the annual balance sheets of all the racing clubs … By far the bulk of the pages left with me are filled with details of particular race meetings, but throughout the chronicle I found notes written by the author to explain his methods of devising his imagined world. (He seems to have intended from the first that one or another reader would one day see his text.) In addition to all these contents, the pages also include sample pages from a vast index of all the horses that have raced in New Arcadia during the past thirty years, with each race that each horse contested being listed by serial number beside the name of the horse.

  About 1,400 races are run in New Arcadia each year. I have learned from a note that the author has always fallen short of his ultimate aim, which is to report for every race every detail that is capable of being decided by the method he has devised for running races. (This is the term he uses. One of his notes begins: I have run three races every night for the past week…) Such details include the betting fluctuations for every runner; the amount, if any, invested on the horse by the owner(s), the trainer, and the proxy bettor for the jockey; and—what took the most time by far—the position of each horse after each two or three furlongs of each race.