A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

The remembering man remembered that the young man had had no visitors to his spacious flat. The young man had a few friends in distant suburbs, and they sometimes offered to visit him, but he persuaded them against it. He wanted no one to step into his spacious flat before he had covered every wall with sheets of handwriting. The young man wanted to demonstrate to any visitor that he, the young man, preferred to the visible world a space enclosed by words denoting a world more real by far.

  The remembering man remembered that the young man had written a long letter to one of his friends when he, the young man, foresaw that he might soon finish his task of covering the walls of his lounge room with handwritten sheets. In the letter, the young man claimed to have begun writing a work of fiction in which the chief character was suspected by his friends of having lost his reason because he believed that fiction was superior to what was commonly called reality and because he lived in accordance with this belief. The man slept on a bed of pages removed from books of fiction. His bedsheets and blankets were inscribed with passages of fiction. He attached pages of fiction to his skin beneath his underclothes. When he masturbated, he caught his seed on an outspread double-page of fiction.

  The remembering man had never been able to remember more than a few of the events that had followed the young man’s sending the long letter mentioned. Nor had the remembering man been able to remember from the work of fiction from which the young man had transcribed so many passages any more than a few of the fictional events that had taken place after the chief character of the work had sent to his brother in a distant city a telegram with the message: AM COMPLETELY CRACKERS.

  In the mind of a man aged more than sixty years, an image appeared of a young woman seated on a swing and rising high into the air against a background of dense foliage. Before the image had appeared, the man had been hoping to recall one or more of the images that had appeared in his mind more than twenty years before, while he was reading a book that he seemed afterwards to have almost forgotten. He seemed almost to have forgotten the book, and yet he was hoping to recall and then to report in writing some or another image connected with his having read the book.

  The book mentioned was described by its publisher as a frank and revealing autobiography. The author was an Englishman and a contemporary of the man who had read at least part of the book but had later seemed to forget it. Before the book had been published, its author had become famous as the author of many books of the sort known as science fiction. The title of the autobiography was a play on words, one of its two possible meanings being that the author as a boy and as a young man had been an habitual masturbator.

  The man seeing the mental image of the young woman on the swing could hardly believe that such an image-person or such an image-swing had been mentioned in the autobiography. The young image-woman had the image-clothes and the image-hair-style of an upper-class young woman of the eighteenth century, and even the dense image-foliage behind her was such as the man had seen only in illustrations of paintings from long before his own time.

  From his reading of the autobiography the man retained only two memories. He remembered that he had left off reading towards the end of the book and had never afterwards resumed. He remembered also an image that had surely appeared to him during his reading: an image of a girl or a young woman seated in a shabby armchair in a small house in a working-class suburb of a provincial city in England: near the girl or the young woman were two boys or boy-men.

  The man supposed that the image of the young woman on the swing was derived from some or another illustration that he had seen at the time when he was reading part of the autobiography mentioned. The man himself knew little about the so-called visual arts, but he remembered that his wife had bought each week for their children, more than twenty years before, one after another illustrated segment of a series with the title GREAT ARTISTS. Having remembered this, the man visited the home of the son of his who was presently the custodian of the series mentioned.

  In his son’s house, the man saw, on the cover of a certain segment of the series mentioned, an illustration of a painting of a young woman seated on a swing and rising high into the air. The man learned from an inspection of the illustration that the painting included two other image-persons apart from the young image-woman. These two were an image-man who was pushing the young image-woman from behind and an image-man who was lying beneath the image-swing and was gazing upwards at the exposed image-thighs of the young image-woman. The man later learned from the passages of text accompanying the illustration that the young image-woman was the wife of the image-man who was pushing her from behind and was the mistress of the image-man who was gazing at her image-thighs. The man understood from what he read that the painting of the young woman and of the two men was considered a masterpiece.

  The man who is the subject of this passage of fiction often found himself living in his mind the image-life of some or another image-person who had taken his interest in some or another work of fiction that he was reading. The man sometimes found himself living in his mind, if only for a few moments, the image-life of some or another image-person who had taken his interest in some or another illustration that he was looking at. While the man stared at the illustration of the painting that was reported to be a masterpiece, he was not at all interested in living in his mind, even for a few moments, the image-life of the image-man standing behind the young image-woman or of the image-man lying among the image-foliage beneath her. He felt no wish to be, even for a few moments, the husband or the lover of the young image-woman in the purported masterpiece. Even though he remembered having left off reading the autobiography mentioned earlier, the man would have preferred to live the image-life of one of the image-boys or image-boy-men in the shabby image-house in the provincial image-city mentioned earlier: to have stood, whenever the need arose, with his imagebrother in front of their image-sister; to have masturbated promptly; and afterwards to have gone back to his task of trying to write fiction.

  In the mind of a young man of about twenty-five years, an image appeared of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who sat on an image-plank suspended by image-ropes from an image-branch and who moved herself backwards and forwards by pushing a bare foot against the soil beneath her. In the mind of the same young man were also image-sounds, as though the young image-woman sang part of an image-song while she moved backwards and forwards or as though an image-radio, out of sight in the image-background, broadcast the image-words In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia set to an image-tune that he, the young man, would never afterwards succeed in remembering.

  The young man mentioned made no attempt to draw nearer in his mind to the young image-woman mentioned but went on watching her from the distance that seemed to have been fixed between them. He suspected that his trying to approach might cause her image to retreat into the image-background, which seemed to consist at first of fold after fold of dark-blue imagemountains in the upper right-hand corner of a topographical image-map of the United States of America and later of the grey-blue image-haze that was the farthest image-sight in all image-landscapes. Rather than try to approach the young image-woman, the young man tried to fix her in his mind. He had not yet learned that it was not in his power to fix any sort of image in his mind; that he had no need so to fix any image; that every image in his mind was already fixed there and would remain there, even though he might seem at times unable to recall one or another such image. Nor had the young man yet learned that he might have been himself watched from a distance by some or another entity whose image he had once watched from a distance and had tried to fix in his mind but had afterwards lost sight of.

  The young man had listened, as a boy of ten years, to part of a certain program broadcast by radio. Not having heard the earlier part of the program, the boy did not know what had caused the two chief personages to become separated from one another as young persons so that they had to spend their later lives searching for one another in one after another landscape or c
ity of the United States of America. Towards the end of the program, the boy’s mother had turned off the radio, as a result of which the boy had not learned until nearly fifteen years later, when he read as a young man the long poem from which the radio program had been adapted, that the two separated personages had finally met up with one another when the male personage was on his deathbed. Sometimes during the fifteen years mentioned, he who had been the boy mentioned had heard in his mind the voices of a male and a female personage calling to one another as two such voices had once called during part of the radio program mentioned. Sometimes, during those fifteen years, he who had been the boy mentioned had supposed that the personages were separated because the female of the two had died and because her spirit had not then gone to heaven or to any such afterworld but had travelled through the United States of America in search of the male personage. On one after another prairie or beside one after another wide river or among one after another range of mountains, the spirit personage was perhaps able to look out for and finally, even, to see the living personage, but the living personage could never look out for or see the spirit personage. If the two were to meet up at last, they could hope for no more than that the spirit personage, the female of the two, might become a presence fixed in the mind of the living personage, the male of the two.

  The young male person who was aware of what is reported in the previous paragraph knew about the landscapes of the United States of America only what he had learned from a few films and from a few copies of the National Geographic Magazine. Knowing only this, and not knowing that the separated personages mentioned were reported in the text of a poem as having met up at last when the male of the two was dying in a city in the north-east of the country, the young male person, whenever he hoped that the separated personages would meet up at last, chose to suppose that they met up at last in a landscape such as he had studied in a certain illustration in one of the first issues that he had ever seen of the National Geographic Magazine, which illustration was of fold after fold of dark-blue mountains near the border of the state of West Virginia.

  The first image mentioned in this section of this work of fiction is an image in the mind of a young man of a young woman, hardly more than a girl. That image first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was reading one of the many works of fiction that he read in the hope of learning how to write a work of fiction that he had planned for a long time to write but had not yet begun to write. The young man had read the work mentioned because he had read previously that the work was an outstanding example of a so-called school of so-called realist writing that had flourished in the United States of America between the two World Wars. The young man had begun to read the work of fiction mentioned first in order to learn how he himself ought to write if he should choose to become a realist writer; second to learn how a certain fictional young man had thought and felt in a fictional suburb of a fictional Chicago twenty years before the young man had been born; and third to surmise how some or another actual young man might actually have thought and felt at the time mentioned.

  The young man mentioned was an undiscerning reader who believed that any book published in the United States of America must have been at least as meritorious as any book published in his own country. Even so, the young man had begun to be uneasy while he was reading the work of fiction mentioned. He had hoped, when he had begun reading, to see in his mind image after image of young persons living out their lives in an image-Chicago. He had seen, at first, a number of such images, but had then begun to see in his mind an image of an author with close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed spectacles who sat in front of a typewriter by means of which he put onto paper word after word and sentence after sentence intended to bring to the mind of reader after reader seeming-image after seeming-image of seeming-reality.

  An image of a room lit by afternoon sunlight appeared in the mind of a man aged about forty years. The man was reading a book in which were published interviews with well-known American or European writers of fiction and of poetry. The image-room was filled with image-furniture such as would have been fashionable thirty years before the birth of the reading man. The most noticeable piece of image-furniture was a glass-fronted image-bookcase from which the man had taken down or had looked into or had read one after another book during several summer holidays in his boyhood. The image-book that he remembered most clearly had been illustrated with reproductions of famous paintings, one of which was a painting of a group of naked young women.

  The man aged about forty years was reading the book mentioned in the hope of becoming more skilled at writing fiction. During many of the previous twenty years, the man had written several short works of fiction and had tried to have them published. Two years before he had begun to read the book mentioned, the man had seen first one and then a second of his short works published, each in a different literary magazine. During the previous two years, however, the man’s first novel, which he had worked at intermittently for fifteen years, had been rejected by three publishers. After the third of these rejections, the man had applied for entry as a mature age student to a course in the arts faculty of a so-called college of advanced education in a distant suburb of the city where he lived. The course mentioned included several units in fiction writing taught by a writer whose novels had won prestigious literary awards. One of the writer’s novels, the theme of which, so to speak, had been the confrontation between Indigenous people and pastoralists, had been turned into the script for a successful film. While the man was waiting to learn whether or not he had been accepted into the course mentioned, he had bought the book mentioned much earlier and had begun to read it. When the image of the sunlit room had appeared in the man’s mind, as was mentioned earlier, he had been reading a report of an interview with a famous author of fiction in the French language.

  If a certain man aged more than sixty years had set out to report every appearance in the minds of certain younger men of an image of a certain sunlit room, then the man aged more than sixty years would have reported that the image of the sunlit room had first appeared in the mind of a young man aged about twenty-five years while he was reading a book of fiction given to him by a young woman who had previously been his girlfriend. The young man had persuaded the young woman to be his girlfriend after he had been for several years without a girlfriend and soon after he had decided not to approach any young woman in the future unless she had been, or was still, a member of the church that he had formerly belonged to. The young woman was a member of the church mentioned and had spent her first seventeen years in a small town in a mountainous district north-east of Melbourne. The young man often saw her image in his mind against a background of fold after fold of dark-blue image-hills reaching back from the suburbs of his native city towards mountainous districts that he had never visited. The young woman had been the girlfriend of the young man for several months before she told him that they should no longer see each other. At their last meeting, the young woman had given the young man as a present an English translation of a book by a famous writer of fiction in the French language. The young man had read the book with care, hoping to learn from it some or another message from the young woman. Fifteen years later, when he was reading the book of interviews mentioned earlier, and when he and the young woman had been married for thirteen years, the man who had been the young man supposed that he had been given the book only because the famous writer had remained throughout his life a member of the church mentioned earlier and that the young woman had admired him for this. When the man was aged about forty years, he recalled from his having read the book mentioned only an image of a man aged perhaps sixty years who was writing at an image-table near an image-bookcase in an image-room filled with image-afternoon-sunlight. The image-man was writing to his image-wife. He and she had lived for many years in separate image-suites of the same image-house and had communicated only by means of image-pages of image-handwriting.

  The man who is the subject of these pa
ragraphs never afterwards considered that he had become a more capable writer of fiction as a result of his having read, at about the age of forty years, the published report of the interview with the famous writer in the French language. Even so, the man still remembered, more than twenty years after he had read the report, an image that had appeared to him while he read. The image was of a room filled with afternoon sunlight. Noticeable in the image-room were a glass-fronted image-bookcase and an image-table where a famous image-man, aged perhaps sixty years and more, sat writing. The remembering man could remember, at the age of sixty and more years, hardly any of the words in the report of the interview mentioned but he remembered still a statement to the effect that all the fiction written by the famous writer was part of his effort to rediscover the faraway world of his Jansenist, provincial childhood.

  In the mind of a man aged somewhat more than sixty years, an image appeared of an image of rays of sunlight appearing in the mind of a young man of somewhat more than twenty years. When the image had appeared in the mind of the younger man, he was reading a work of fiction by a much-praised author aged somewhat more than thirty years who lived in the United States of America. When the image of rays had appeared in his mind, the young man was sitting in the lounge room of a spacious flat that he rented in an outer suburb of Melbourne. The time of day was late afternoon, and rays of sunlight shone through the large windows of the spacious flat and onto some of the many illustrations that the young man had cut from magazines or from dust jackets and had fastened to the walls of the lounge room. Each illustration was of a writer of fiction or of poetry, and one of the writers was the much-praised author mentioned above. The author wore a shirt with stripes of many colours and had a cigar in his mouth.

  When the young man had fastened to his wall the photographic portrait of the much-praised author, he, the young man, had been trying for several years to write one or another poem or short story worthy of being published in one or another literary magazine. Afterwards, whenever he looked at the image-shirt or the image-cigar in the portrait, the young man envied the much-praised author his being able to wear such a shirt and to hold such a cigar in his mouth as though the colours of the shirt and the bulk of the cigar were signs of the contents of the author’s mind – contents so rich and various and distinctive that he had been able first to write nearly a hundred thousand words of fiction, then to have the fiction published in New York City as a hardcover first novel, and then to announce that he was close to having finished his second work of fiction.