A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  Something else that caused the young man to envy the published author was his having been born and spent his childhood and youth in Virginia, which existed for the young man as a desirable image-landscape in his mind: a landscape of mostly level green countryside with fold after fold of dark-blue hills in the background. The mostly level green countryside was variegated with dark stripes and patches that were plantations or clumps of trees. Somewhere in the level countryside was the image-racecourse that had appeared in the first coloured feature film that the young man had watched. He had been no more than five or six years at the time and had understood nothing of the narrative. The only images that he later recalled were of perhaps twenty racehorses jumping one after another quickset fence during a famous steeplechase. The jockey astride each horse wore a jacket of various colours variously arranged. All of the jockeys appeared to be men, although one jockey was actually a young woman, hardly more than a girl. The young man seemed sometimes to remember a series of images connected with this young woman, although he supposed few of the images would have appeared in the film. The series included images of the disguised young woman’s falling from her mount at one of the fences, of the disguised young woman’s lying injured or unconscious on the grass, of her lying afterwards on a bed or a stretcher, of a pair of hands unfastening button after button at the front of a richly coloured jacket, thereby exposing a singlet or undergarment faintly rounded at either side by a female breast.

  The man aged somewhat more than sixty years was hardly surprised at his failing to recall even one word or phrase from the work of fiction by the much-praised author that the young man of somewhat more than twenty years had read. The young man had read the work of fiction during the first week of the long summer holidays of the first year when he had been a teacher in a state primary school. He had worked for five years as a state public servant after he had left school but then he had completed a course lasting one year for mature-age persons wanting to train as primary teachers in state schools. As a public servant, the young man had tried to devote evenings and Sundays to writing fiction and poetry but had written little. As a primary teacher, he was on holiday for nine weeks of each year. He had hoped to devote these weeks to writing fiction and poetry. During the first- and second-term holidays, he had written little but he still hoped to write much during the summer holidays. He hoped to write for most of each day and then to read during the late afternoon and the evening.

  The young man had spent most of the first two days of the summer holidays reading the work of fiction by the much-praised author mentioned above. In the afternoon of each of those days, the young man began to drink beer while he read. Often, he held his glass of beer so that the afternoon sunlight passed through the beer and onto the page that he was then reading. The young man had, as yet, only a vague understanding of what took place in his mind while he was reading one or another work of fiction, and so he supposed that his enjoyment of the book by the much-praised author was caused by the rich imagery of the book, and whenever he had reached a state of mild drunkenness he would celebrate what he thought of as the richness of the imagery by causing a yellow glow to fall on one or another page of text.

  The image-rays of sunlight mentioned in the first sentence of this section of the present work of fiction seemed to the man remembering them to have been more richly coloured by far than the sunlight mentioned in the previous paragraph. The man recalling the image-rays forty and more years after they had first appeared in the mind of the young reader of fiction – that man saw the image-rays as falling through one or another upper window of a house of two storeys in the countryside of Virginia. The house belonged to the parents of one or another of the two young persons who were asleep on a double bed in one or another room on the upper storey of the house, but the parents were in Europe for the time being and the house had been empty until the two young persons, a young man and a young woman, had arrived there a few hours before the image-rays mentioned had fallen through the upper window mentioned and onto the bed where the young persons had first discussed several matters and had then copulated and had afterwards fallen asleep.

  The man aged more than sixty years seemed to remember also another sort of image-ray as having fallen in the mind of the younger man. The much-praised author of the book of fiction mentioned had seemingly tried to report to his readers some of the images that had appeared in the mind of the young female person while she slept. The older man could hardly believe that the younger man had been impressed by the attempted report but he, the older man, remembered that the younger man had wished that he might one day write in some or another work of fiction a passage half so impressive as the passage reporting the appearance of pale image-rays in the dark image-water where the young image-woman lay in her mind while she dreamed after she had first discussed several matters and had then copulated and had afterwards fallen asleep.

  In the mind of a man aged forty and more years, image after image appeared of glass after glass containing one or another golden-brown alcoholic drink. One of the image-drinks the man recognised as beer. Others of the image-drinks he supposed were whisky or rye or bourbon. The man himself had sometimes drunk whisky, but the other two drinks he had only read about in works of fiction by authors from the United States of America, where he had never been. The image-glasses were only a few of those that were reported as having been drunk on most days by the narrator of a certain book that the man had finished reading a few days previously.

  The book mentioned had been praised as a work of fiction and had been awarded a prize that was awarded only to works of fiction, but the man mentioned believed many of the reports in the book to be accurate reports of events from the life of the author of the book.

  As the man aged forty and more years chose to understand the matter, the author of the book mentioned had stayed at home alone on day after day during one period of his life while his wife was at work. The author and his wife had agreed that she would work for a year and more so that he would be free to write at last the work of fiction that he had wanted for many years to write. On most of the days when his wife had gone to work, the author had tried for a few hours but had failed to write what he had hoped to write. He had then typed a thousand and more words from the English translation of one or another of the many volumes of a famous work of fiction in the French language. He had then added the typed pages to the stack of similar pages that he kept in a folder in his desk. He had then visited one or another bar in his neighbourhood and had drunk there until an hour before his wife was expected to return home.

  The man aged forty and more years had read the book mentioned late on night after night while he sat in a building with glass walls beside one of the gates of a certain university in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The man was employed as a security guard, and for much of his time he sat in the building with glass walls and ensured that none but so-called authorised motor vehicles passed through the nearby boom gates into the grounds of the university. During the last hours of each evening, before the man locked the boom gates and then set out on a motor scooter to patrol the grounds of the university, few cars approached the boom gates, so that the man was mostly free to read. He would have been free to write also, if he had so wished.

  When the man had begun to work in the building with glass walls, he had assured his wife that he would use his free time in the late evenings for writing fiction. More than two years before the man had begun to work in the building with the glass walls, he had agreed with his wife that he would stay at home each day for two years while she went to work. Each day, he would do an agreed amount of housework and would supervise their two children when they were not at school. During the remainder of the day, the man would write the long work of fiction that he had wanted for many years to write. Before the first of the two years had ended, however, the man understood that he would not be able to write the long work of fiction. During each day of his first months alone at home, the man had written several
hundred words of the long work. In later months, he had spent much of his time doing crossword puzzles or having his left hand play against his right hand at Scrabble or simply reading one or another of the many works of fiction that he owned. During the last hour before his wife arrived home, the man would type an adaptation of four hundred words from a work of fiction that had been published in London forty-eight years before his birth. The chief character of the work was a man who earned barely enough to support himself and his wife and children by writing four thousand words of fiction on every working day. While he wrote the adaptation mentioned, the man would change all the proper nouns and some of the common nouns in the original work and would sometimes insert a variant word or phrase and would then draw a line through it. On many an afternoon, the man would sip from a flask of vodka while he wrote the adaptation, although he would always hide the flask before his wife arrived home. He sipped so that he would show no sign of agitation if his wife later asked him, as she sometimes asked, how much writing he had done during the day and if he then lifted out of his filing cabinet and held open in front of her the folder where he stored the few pages that he himself had composed on top of the many pages that he had adapted from the work in which the chief character had written four thousand words on every working day. Towards the end of the second year that the man had spent at home, he told his wife that he had finished the first draft of his work of fiction but that he would have to write a further draft before he submitted the work to any publisher. Even if his wife had not insisted that he should become employed again, the man would not have wanted to spend any more time alone in his house doing crossword puzzles or playing Scrabble or adapting passages from the book whose chief character wrote four thousand words each day, just as the author of the book was reported to have done.

  During the first weeks after he had begun to work in the building with glass walls, the man mentioned spent the last hours of each evening in reading one or another biography of one or another writer of fiction. The first such book was a biography, published not long before in London, of the author of the book of fiction that the man had adapted during his two years at home. The man learned from the biography that the author, its subject, had lived for much of his life in circumstances very like those of the chief character in the adapted work of fiction, who had written four thousand words of fiction on every working day even though he was often in debt and even though his wife was shrewish and addicted to alcohol. The man learned also from the biography that the author, its subject, had sold for publication during the twenty-six years before he had died during his forty-seventh year twenty-seven books, many of them comprising three volumes. The second book that the man read in the building with glass walls was the book mentioned earlier, which had been awarded a prize for fiction but which the man believed to be mostly autobiography.

  Late on some of the first evenings while he sat reading in the building with glass walls, the man had thought of how easily he might complete the writing of a book that would appear to be fiction but would be hardly more than a report. But then he had thought of the lives of the two men he had read about during the evenings mentioned. The subject of the first book had been married first to a woman who had died from the effects of alcohol and then to a woman who was later committed to a so-called infirmary for the insane. The subject of the second book had been later divorced from the woman in whose apartment he had pretended to be writing fiction. He had been taken to hospital at least once as a result of his drinking and had several times been admitted to what he called in his book an insane asylum. The life of the man in the building with glass walls seemed, by comparison, uneventful. Unless the unthinkable should happen – unless he or his wife should lose control of their drinking or become mentally ill, then the chief events of his life and therefore, so he supposed, the only possible subject for any seeming-autobiography that he might succeed in writing, was the books that he had read.

  A man of more than sixty years still saw often in his mind a series of images that he had first seen more than thirty years before while he was reading a work of fiction that had originally comprised three volumes, the first of which had been first published twenty-two years before his birth and the third of which had been published ten years before his birth. In the following report of the series mentioned, each noun or pronoun refers to an image-person or an image-place or an image-thing; each verb refers to an image-action; and each modifier refers to an image-quality or an image-condition.

  Two women, strangers to one another, were returning home by horse-drawn coach from Melbourne to separate districts in the south-west of Victoria. One woman, who was shabbily dressed, had gone to Melbourne in connection with the recent death there of her husband. The other woman, who was respectably dressed, had gone to Melbourne to arrange for her husband to be returned home, even though he had been certified as insane and confined in a lunatic asylum. The shabbily dressed woman would have been obliged to travel on the outside of the coach if the other woman had not shamed one of the men inside so that he gave up his seat. By way of thanks, the shabbily dressed woman gave her surname and her address to the fashionably dressed woman and promised to help her if asked in the future. The address of the shabbily dressed woman consisted only of two words denoting some or another township or district unknown to the respectably dressed woman.

  Later in the series of images, the wife of the insane man waited among a group of strangers on a jetty or pier in the south-west of Victoria for the arrival from a distant anchored ship of a small boat in which a number of male figures were discernible. The group on the jetty or pier was watching one particular male figure who was struggling against several of the others. A man on the jetty or pier announced with evident excitement to the wife that a lunatic was being brought ashore. The struggling man went on struggling while the boat was being moored and then while the other men were trying to get him onto the jetty, but ceased to struggle when his wife approached and put a hand to him.

  Later again, the wife found herself unable to care for her insane husband in the cottage attached to the post office in the small town where she was postmistress. The wife wrote for help to the woman that she herself had previously helped on the coach. The wife sent the message by post to the address that consisted of two words only. A few days later, the shabbily dressed woman arrived by coach and set about keeping house for the wife of the certified lunatic.

  The man of more than sixty years, if he had looked into the matter, might well have concluded that he had called to mind the above-mentioned image-events more often than he had called to mind any other images deriving from any other text. If the man had not thus concluded, then he would certainly have concluded that his remembering the above-mentioned image-events caused him to become more alert to what he called the feel of things than did any other memory of image-events.

  Some or another reader of this work of fiction may be surprised by the remainder of this paragraph, but I assure that reader that the man of more than sixty years valued above all other passages in the several thousand works of fiction that he had read those passages that made him alert to what he called the feel of things. Whenever the man had begun to read some or another work of fiction, he had hoped to become, at some time during his reading, at least as alert to the feel of things as he had been as a child whenever he had watched, towards the end of some or another film, some or another scene in which an unlikely character, or a character previously belittled or despised, had brought about the events that delivered freedom to a captive character or joy to a grieving character or peace of mind to a troubled character. Or, the man had hoped to become, at some time during his reading, at least as alert to the feel of things as he had been whenever he watched a sporting event in which some or another person or animal succeeded against all odds, as a journalist or a commentator might have reported the matter.

  The man aged more than sixty years often supposed that he was more affected by image-persons and image-events than by ac
tual persons and events, as though he possessed an image-self whose image-thoughts and image-feelings were more powerful than their actual counterparts. The man often wished that he could have read, if not a published report, then at least a typewritten or even a handwritten report of certain image-events that had appeared in the mind of a man aged fifty and more years while he sat alone on many an evening and tried to write some or another work of fiction that he would never complete. Some of those image-events are reported in the following paragraphs as though they are fictional events in this work of fiction.

  A man aged forty years and more stood beside his wife late at night in a cubicle in the emergency department of a public hospital in a suburb of Melbourne. The man’s wife, who was fastened by straps to a wheeled stretcher, cried out continually. The curtains had been drawn around the cubicle, but the man understood that his wife’s cries could be heard by the many patients and visitors and nurses and doctors in the emergency department. The man’s wife cried out that her husband wrongly considered her insane or that he had plotted for some time past with persons from her place of work to have her dismissed for incompetence and later confined to a locked ward in a hospital. The man knew better than to try to dissuade his wife from crying out, or to try to stifle her cries with a hand. His wife had cried out in this way from time to time during the past five years. In earlier years, she had cried out only occasionally, but in recent years she had cried out often, especially during the night. On many nights during the past year, she had woken her husband with her cries and had then kept him awake during the night with her reports of the plots against her at her place of work. Whenever, for the sake of peace, her husband had agreed that her reports seemed persuasive, she had demanded that he accompany her next day to her place of work and there confront the plotters. Whenever her husband had disputed her reports, she had cried out loudly enough to be heard in the neighbouring houses or she had struck him. Sometimes her husband had struck her in return.