A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  The man mentioned finally began to read the book mentioned in his fortieth year, according to the records that he kept of the books of fiction that he had bought and read. Thirty years afterwards, the man could remember nothing of his experience as a reader of the book. He knew that he had read the first hundred pages of the book because he had recorded that fact at some time during his fortieth year. He recalled, however, not one word of the text of the book, not one image that had appeared in his mind while he read the text, and not one thought or feeling that had occurred to him while he read. According to the man’s records, he had removed the book from his shelves four years after he had read the first hundred pages. He had then given the book, together with several other books by the famous German author, to a person who claimed to admire the author.

  Thirty years after the man mentioned had read the first hundred pages of the book mentioned, he remembered sometimes a certain afternoon when he had been alone in his house while his wife and their children were elsewhere. On that afternoon, the man had first caught sight of a blue disc and a black disc and a red disc on the spine of a certain book on one of his bookshelves and had regretted, as he had often previously regretted, that he had read a hundred pages of the book. The man had next caught sight of an image of part of a glass marble on the spine of another of his books. This book was a hardcover work of fiction that the man had not yet read, although he had often admired the dust jacket and had sometimes read from the dust jacket a short account of the contents, so to call them. The man had then gone to his son’s room and had fetched back to the lounge room, which contained the bookshelves previously mentioned, a jar of glass marbles. The man had then poured the marbles onto the carpet in the lounge room and had stood back from the marbles and had stared at them and had felt while he went on staring at the many-coloured mass of them something of what he had formerly hoped to feel whenever he had looked forward to reading the book of fiction by the famous German author.

  According to a passage on the dust jacket of the book with an image of part of a glass marble on its spine, the chief character of the book was reported in the book as supposing that each of his many glass marbles represented a racehorse and as having sometimes pushed some of those marbles around a mat so that he could see in his mind image after image of the running of a horse-race. The man mentioned in this section of the present work of fiction stared at the glass marbles on the carpet of his lounge room as though each represented a book of fiction that he had kept on his shelves and the contents of which he had tried to foresee before he had read the book.

  The man mentioned began on the certain afternoon mentioned to hear in his mind the name of one after another glass marble or of one or another book of fiction as though it was the name of one after another racehorse about to take part in a famous race. Of all the names that the man thus heard, the name that most affected him, as though the glass marble of that name was the most richly coloured, or as though the book of that name was the most memorable, was the name Das Glasperlenspiel.

  An image-sky unlike any actual sky that he had seen occupied the upper two-thirds of a reproduction of a photograph of a painting that occupied two adjoining pages of a large illustrated book lying open in front of a man aged about fifty years. Seated beside the man was another man of the same age who had been his friend since the two had been boys at primary school. The man with the book in front of him was the owner of the book and of several hundred other large illustrated books displayed in several glass-fronted cabinets in the room where the men sat. The room, which the owner of the books called his study, was at one side of a substantial house of brick in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne, which house the owner of the books had inherited from his father, who had been a wealthy bookmaker. The side of the room opposite the cabinets mentioned consisted mostly of tall windows overlooking fish ponds set among beds of ferns. The strangeness of the image-sky, so the owner of the book mentioned was explaining to the man beside him, consisted in its seeming to be lit not by a single source of image-light but by several such sources or by its being uniformly suffused with an image-light from no discoverable image-source. How else, so the owner of the book argued – how else to explain the appearance beneath one after another opening in the image-clouds of one after another zone of equally bright image-light on the imagelandscape occupying the lower third of the reproduction, which imagelandscape was an almost level grassland reaching back to a distant and dark-blue image-blur that might have been a line of image-trees or the nearest margin of an image-forest or, perhaps, an image-haze above still further image-grasslands.

  The explanation for the strangeness of the image-sky and of the whole image-landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, appearing, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place sometimes called the next world. How else, so the owner of the book argued – how else to explain the appearance in each of the zones of bright image-light in the image-landscape of an image-racehorse with an imagejockey up, so to speak, each racehorse and each jockey having flourished, so to speak, at some or another different period during the past two hundred and more years?

  The title of the painting that had been reproduced in the book mentioned was Immortals of the Turf, so the owner of the book told the man beside him while the two men sat and stared at one after another image-racehorse in one after another zone of image-light on the image-grassland mentioned. The name of the painter, according to the owner of the book, meant nothing to him, although he assumed that she was a living Englishwoman, given that the painting had been done only ten years before, that each image-horse had the name of an actual horse that had been bred and had raced in England, and that the foreground of the image-landscape might have seemed to some persons to resemble part of the actual landscape known as Newmarket Heath.

  The two men mentioned met often at one or another race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne, although they rarely visited each other. During his rare visits to the substantial home with the glass-fronted cabinets, the visiting man spent much time looking into the collection of large illustrated books kept in the cabinets, all of which books were about horse-racing. The visiting man owned perhaps five hundred mostly paperback books of fiction, which books stood on shelves that he had fitted to a wall in the lounge room of the house where he lived with his wife and their children in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. He and his wife had agreed soon after their marriage that he would buy one paperback book of fiction each fortnight. It was understood between them that he needed to read much fiction so that he himself could write the work of fiction that he hoped to write and to have published. Twenty years later, the man still bought and read books of fiction although he had not yet written the work that he had hoped to write.

  The owner of the books about horse-racing had never married, although he had spent much time for many years in the company of a divorced woman who lived in a house even more substantial than his own in a suburb adjoining his own suburb. Seven months before the day when the two men looked at the painting mentioned earlier, the divorced woman had learned that she would soon die from cancer. One week before the day mentioned, the woman had died. On the Saturday following the death of the woman, the man who had spent much time in her company reported to the other man, when they met at a certain race-meeting, that he, the owner of the substantial house and of the glass-fronted cabinets full of books, had been since his childhood a convinced atheist but that he had never considered himself a materialist and that he and the woman who had recently died had agreed some months previously that if some or another part of her remained alive after the event that other persons would call her death, then she would arrange for one of the racehorses that he backed on the Saturday following that event to win at odds of about twenty to one. Several hours after the convinced atheist, as he called himself, had reported thes
e matters, one of the horses that he had backed won a race at odds of a little more than twenty to one, and soon after he had collected his winnings he invited the other man to visit him for a few hours after the race-meeting.

  The other man had never been able to decide what he believed or did not believe in any field of human enquiry. While he was enjoying the snack and the expensive whisky that his host served him during his visit to the substantial house, he did no more than watch and listen while his host opened one after another large illustrated book from the glass-fronted cabinets, declaring repeatedly that he, the host, could never be a materialist while ever racehorses such as those illustrated with jockeys such as those illustrated contested races such as those illustrated on racecourses such as those illustrated, thereby convincing persons such as himself of the existence of as yet invisible racecourses on as yet invisible grasslands under as yet invisible skies where competed the immortals of the turf.

  In the mind of a young man aged about thirty years, an image appeared of a large farmhouse surrounded on three sides by groves of image-trees and groups of image-outbuildings. In front of the image-farmhouse was a wide view of far-reaching image-grasslands beneath a far-reaching image-sky filled with banks of image-clouds between which, at distant intervals, one or another shaft of image-sunlight fell onto one or another zone of image-grassland. In each of these zones stood an image-farmhouse surrounded on three sides as the earlier-mentioned image-farmhouse had been surrounded and having at its front the same wide view.

  More than once during each of the forty years after the first appearance of the images mentioned, the same images appeared again in the mind of the man mentioned. Sometimes the images appeared unexpectedly, but often the man caused the images to appear.

  During the first few of the forty years mentioned, the man mentioned was sometimes uneasy because the image-farmhouses mentioned resembled some or other farmhouses that he had seen in the distance in a certain district where he had sometimes travelled during his childhood, whereas the words that had first caused the images to appear were part of a work of fiction written about forty years before the man’s birth by a man who had become famous as a writer of fiction after having worked until he was about thirty years of age in the merchant marine, and whereas the work of fiction was set, so to speak, in fictional places resembling places in South America.

  During the few years mentioned, the young man was sometimes uneasy also because the image-farmhouses and the image-landscape comprised many image-details whereas the only words that he could afterwards recall from the work of fiction mentioned were the words slumbrous and estancia.

  During the few years mentioned, the young man was sometimes uneasy also because the work of fiction mentioned had been one of the texts that he was required to study during the second of the three years during which he had studied English at the University of Melbourne. During those three years, he had never understood how his teachers and his fellow students had been able to read the texts as they seemed able to read them or afterwards to talk and to write about the texts as they talked and wrote. His lecturers and tutors spoke as though he and his fellow students were practising literary criticism of the sort practised by the greatest of all literary critics, a man from some or another famous university in England; a man whose name the young man pretended to have forgotten as soon as he had completed his university degree although he could never forget the name or the one image that he had seen of the man: a reproduction of a photograph showing the famous critic wearing a jacket and an open-necked white sports shirt, as though his being a famous literary critic exempted him from having to wear the collar and tie worn by most university teachers of his time. The image-scenery mentioned in the previous paragraphs had first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was sitting in a tutorial, while the tutor was talking as a literary critic might have talked about the book of fiction mentioned earlier, and while he, the young man, had first tried to understand the words of the tutor but had then fixed his attention on the image-scenery and on the question whether or not such scenery might be supposed never to come to an end in any image-direction.

  After the passing of the first few of the forty years mentioned earlier, the man who had been the young man no longer felt uneasy on account of the image-scenery mentioned or of any other imagery that appeared in his mind. If the man happened during later years to recall his earlier uneasiness, he felt sympathy towards the young man who had supposed that the image-scenery appearing in his mind while he read must have appeared as a result of his having read some or other words or sentences. The man regretted the young man’s having once supposed that he ought to read fiction for some purpose other than to wait during the hours or the days after his reading for the appearance in his mind of images never previously read about or written about.

  An image of a lounge room appeared in the mind of a man who had spent nearly five hundred days in the room forty-five years before. The image-room was large and the image-furniture in the room was comfortable.

  The man mentioned remembered the room and the rooms adjoining it as the most comfortable of the many places where he had lived as a young man before he had married. After he had moved into the rooms, which had been advertised as a spacious partly furnished flat in the outer south-east of Melbourne, the young man had made only two changes. First, he had moved an armchair away from a wall in order to make way for his bookshelves. He hoped to become in the future the owner of books enough to cover the walls of the room where he would spend his evenings, but when he moved into the rooms mentioned he owned no more than a hundred books. The second change that the young man made was to take down from the walls the few pictures hanging there and to attach to one of the bare walls the first few of the many sheets of paper that he hoped to attach to every wall of the room.

  All but one of the few sheets mentioned was covered with large, neat handwriting done by the young man with a black felt-tipped pen. The one sheet not so covered was a page from an essay submitted by the young man for assessment during the previous year, when he had attended evening classes as a part-time student at the University of Melbourne. No reader of the sheet mentioned could have learned what the subject of the essay had been, but many a reader might have learned that the subject had to do with a certain book of fiction by an author who had spent much of his early life in the merchant marine. In the left-hand margin of the sheet mentioned were several sentences in handwriting different from that of the essay writer. One such sentence had been underlined with a red felt-tipped pen. The sentence read: You seem not to understand how morality works in literature. Beneath the sentence, another sentence had been written with a black felt-tipped pen in the handwriting of the essay writer: Worse, I do not understand what is morality or even what is literature.

  The young man who moved into the spacious flat, so to call it, had been trying for several years to write a certain long work of fiction. He had hoped to complete during his evenings and weekends in the flat the work that he had previously failed to complete in one or another rooming house or backyard bungalow. Soon after he had moved into the flat, however, the young man had begun to spend much time during evenings or at weekends in looking through his books of fiction for passages worthy to be copied onto sheets of paper and then attached to the walls of his lounge room or in copying such passages and attaching them to one or another wall.

  The man remembering the flat where he had lived forty-five years before remembered not one sentence from the many passages that had been copied onto sheets of paper and attached to walls. The man remembered, however, that a certain book on his shelves had provided more passages than had any other book. The book had been on the young man’s shelves for only a few weeks before he had begun to copy passages from it. The young man had bought the book in a bookshop in the central business district of Melbourne only a few hours after he had read a review of the book in a newspaper.

  The man remembering the book that he had read forty-five years be
fore saw in his mind several adjoining image-rooms in which the image-walls were covered with image-books on image-shelves. The image-rooms were part of an image-flat in an image-city in image-Europe.

  If ever the remembering man had set out to report in writing the further images that he connected with the book mentioned, then he might have written that the man who lived among the several rooms filled with books had no wife or child and was so devoted to the books that he later lost his reason and afterwards left the rooms filled with books and lived among criminals and outcasts. The remembering man might have written further that the owner of the rooms filled with books had a brother in a distant city. The brother was a medical doctor with a special interest in persons who had lost their reason. The brother kept under observation in a locked wing of his house a man who had not only lost his reason but followed a way of life opposed to reason. The man under observation used a language of his own devising, one principle of which seemed to be that an object could be denoted by any of a number of words depending on the mood of the person perceiving the object. The remembering man remembered that the young man had attached to many a prominent place on the walls of his lounge room one or another sheet of paper on which was transcribed one or another passage reporting the way of life of the man under observation.