A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  My father told me the story of the Farm with seeming relish, but I tried while he talked to compose in my mind arguments in defence of the Farm. I had lived at the Farm for only a few days, but each morning I had gone with Nunkie and his son, my cousin, and the Holy Foundress to early mass in the semi-public chapel of a nearby convent; each evening I had prayed with the others at dusk in the room where the big bookcase stood; each day I had walked between the fruit trees for ten minutes, imitating the even paces of one or another priest I had once seen walking on the paths around his presbytery while he read the divine office for that day. Perhaps I was discovering the power of ordered behaviour, of ritual. Perhaps I was merely devising for myself one more of the imagined worlds I had devised throughout my childhood. Although I was hardly fond of the Holy Foundress, I admired her for having tried to set up what I thought of as a world of her own, a world apart from or concealed within the drab world that most people inhabited, a small farm almost surrounded by suburbs.

  My own imagined worlds before then had been located each on an island of the same shape as Tasmania, which was the only suitable island I knew of. The people of those worlds had been devoted to cricket or to Australian Football or to horse-racing. I had drawn elaborate maps showing where the sportsgrounds or racecourses were situated. I filled pages with coloured illustrations of the football jumpers of the many teams or of the coloured caps of the cricket teams or of the racing silks of the racing stables. I had spent so much time in preparing these preliminary details for each of my imagined worlds that I had seldom got as far as to work out results of imagined football or cricket matches or of imagined horse-races.

  I had destroyed or lost all the pages showing the details mentioned above, but sometimes during the year before I arrived at the Farm I had felt a peculiar longing and had wanted my adult life to be so uneventful and my future home to be so quiet and so seldom visited that I could spend most of my life recording the details of an imaginary world a hundred times more complicated than any I had so far imagined.

  The people at the Farm seemed not to read newspapers, although I feel sure today that Nunkie and the Reformed Gambler must have looked through the results and reports of cricket matches during the summer. Perhaps they kept the newspaper out of sight of the children, or cut out the sporting pages and burned the rest. When I asked Nunkie, on my first day at the Farm, where the newspaper was, he told me that the people of the Farm were not especially curious about events in the secular world. Nunkie’s expression, ‘the secular world’, gave me even then, on my first day, the pleasant sensation that I was inside a world inside what others considered to be the only world.

  After Nunkie had answered my request for a newspaper, he had taken me to the bookshelves in the main room at the Farm. He told me I was welcome to read any book from what he called the library, provided that I first sought his approval of my chosen book. I saw names of authors such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray on some of the nearest books, and I asked Nunkie whether the library contained any modern books. He pointed to a shelf containing many of the works of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

  On the day after Nunkie had shown me the library, I looked more closely at the books. When he arrived home that afternoon from the state school where he taught, I asked him whether I could read a book from an upper shelf: a book the spine of which I had looked at often during that day. The title of the book was Fifty-two Meditations for the Liturgical Year.

  As soon as I had seen the title mentioned above, I had done, probably for the first time, two things that I have done many times since then: I first imagined the contents of a book of which the title was the only detail known to me; and I then derived from my imagining much more than I later derived from my looking into the text of the book.

  I have to remind the reader that this piece of fiction is set in the year 1950. In that year, and for many years afterwards, the word meditation denoted only a little of what it has since come to denote. In the year in which I wanted to read the book mentioned above, there were no doubt a few scholars or eccentrics in the city of Melbourne who knew something about meditation as it was practised in so-called eastern religions, but neither Nunkie nor I knew of the existence of those scholars or eccentrics. The only sort of meditation that he or I was aware of was an exercise such as Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, had devised: an attempt by the person meditating to bring to mind as clearly as possible one or another of the events reported in one or another of the four Gospels and then to ponder on the behaviour and the words of Jesus of Nazareth as reported in connection with that event and then to feel certain feelings as a result of the pondering and finally to make certain resolutions for the future as a result of the feelings.

  Thirteen years after I had asked to be allowed to read the book mentioned above, I was anxious to have as my girlfriend a certain young woman who worked in a certain second-hand bookshop in the central business district of Melbourne. While I was thus anxious, I used to visit the bookshop every Saturday morning and to spend an hour and more looking around the shelves before buying one or another book and then trying to begin with the young woman while she sold me the book such a conversation as would persuade her that I was a young man who dressed and behaved unexceptionally but who saw inwardly private sights the descriptions of which would become in the near future the texts of one after another of the works of fiction that would make him famous. Whether or not I can claim that the young woman became my girlfriend, I can state that she and I went out together, as the saying used to go, for a few weeks during which time she sometimes described to me what she had seen inwardly as a result of her having read one or another book while I described often to her what I foresaw as the contents of one after another of the works of fiction of mine that would later be published, one of which works, so I promised the young woman, would include a character inspired by her. At the end of the few weeks mentioned in the previous sentence, the young woman went to live in another city, and she and I have never met up with one another or written to one another since then. However, I have learned from newspapers that the young woman later became a famous author, although not an author of fiction. The young woman later became a much more famous author than I became, and during the year before I began to write this piece of fiction, her autobiography was published. I have been told by a person who has read the autobiography that no passage in it refers to myself. Even so, the publication of the autobiography of the famous woman who had once been the young woman in the second-hand bookshop reminded me that I had still not kept the above-mentioned promise that I made. I am able to introduce the young woman into this paragraph, and so to keep my promise to her, for the reason that one of the books that I bought in the shop where she worked was a copy of the same book that I had wanted Nunkie’s permission to read, as was reported above. I had bought the book, and had given the young woman in the shop to understand that I would look into the book, because she was still a faithful Catholic and I wanted her to suppose that I had not lost all interest in religion and even that she might win me back to a certain degree of belief in the Catholic faith if she became my girlfriend. The paragraph that ends with this sentence is, of course, part of a work of fiction.

  After I had asked Nunkie whether I might read the book mentioned earlier, he had smiled and had told me that meditations were not for boys. He had then reminded me that it was time for our daily cricket match. This was played every evening between Nunkie and his son on the one side and the Reformed Gambler and myself on the other. We bowled underarm with a tennis ball on a paved area near the former dairy, and we observed complicated local rules as to how many runs were scored if the ball was hit into this or that area of the long grass in the orchard.

  Even though I knew nothing about non-Christian sorts of meditation, I had already, at the age of eleven, heard or read enough about certain great saints of the Church to know that those persons saw more in their minds while they prayed or meditated than mere il
lustrations of the gospel story. I had heard or read that certain great saints had sometimes gone into trances or been transported. No priest or religious brother or nun had ever, in my experience, suggested that his or her congregation or pupils should do more while praying than talk to one or another of the Persons of the Holy Trinity or the Blessed Virgin Mary, or one or another of the saints. I sensed as a child that my priests and teachers were uncomfortable when questioned about anything to do with visions or with unusual religious experiences. Those same priests and teachers were never reluctant to talk about hell or purgatory and the punishments meted out to the residents of those places, but they were reluctant to speculate about the joys of heaven. A child who asked for details about the celebrated happiness of the residents of heaven might well be told that the souls in heaven were content for ever to contemplate the Beatific Vision. This was the term used by theologians, so I learned as a child, for the sight that one saw when one saw Almighty God.

  For all that I was most curious to know what the souls in heaven enjoyed and what the great saints sometimes saw while they prayed or meditated, I was in no way curious to see God Himself. I write this in all seriousness. I had never wanted to meet God or to have with Him any more dealings than were absolutely necessary. I believed in Him; I was pleased to belong to the organisation that I believed to be His One, True Church; but I had no wish to meet Him and to have to make conversation with Him. I was much more interested in the place where God lived than in the Deity Himself.

  For most of my childhood, I could only dare to hope that I might one day see the landscapes of heaven. I was rather more confident that I would one day glimpse some of those landscapes while I prayed with intensity or while I meditated. And, of course, I was able to imagine beforehand something of what I hoped to glimpse in the future. The landscapes of heaven were lit by a light that emanated from God Himself. Near its source, this divine light was of an almost unbearable fierceness, but in the distant zones of heaven where I was most at home, it shone serenely, although by no means unwaveringly, so that the sky above the landscapes seemed sometimes like a sky at early morning in summer in the world where these details were being imagined, and sometimes like a sky at mid-afternoon in late autumn in that same world. The details of the landscapes themselves were by no means elaborate. I was content to compose my heavenly vistas by extending further and further into the background the simple green hills, some of them with a few stylised, tufted trees on top, that I had enjoyed staring at in pictures in the earliest of my picture books; by having a pale-blue stream wind between some of the hills; by situating on this or that hillside a farmhouse or a few cattle or horses, and behind just one of the furthest hills the church steeple or the clock tower of a peaceful village.

  The person who imagined the landscapes described above could hardly have been satisfied to contemplate mere details designed for infants, nor was he. My looking at the landscapes of the outer zones of heaven was always accompanied by the reassuring knowledge that heaven extended endlessly. My looking over a vista of green hills was only an introduction to the place that contained all places, even all unimaginable places. Soon, the simple green countryside would give way to unknown landscapes. And even more encouraging than the knowledge just described was a certain feeling that I often felt during my surveys of the little I had so far imagined.

  The feeling mentioned above was a feeling of being accompanied by and watched over by not so much a person as a presence. This presence was unquestionably a female presence. Sometimes I imagined that the presence and I were no more than children who had agreed to be girlfriend and boyfriend. Sometimes I imagined, though I was still a child myself, that the presence and I were adults and were wife and husband. Sometimes I imagined the face of the presence, sometimes even the clothes that the presence wore or the few words that the presence spoke to me. Mostly, I was content to feel the presence of the presence: to feel as though she and I were sharers in a pact or understanding that bound us together intimately but could not have been expressed in words. Although I would never during my childhood have asked such a question of myself, it occurs to me now to ask of the fictional child who is the chief character of this part of this piece of fiction the question what seemed to him the most desirable of the likely pleasures that he might enjoy in his imagined heaven. It is, of course, easy to ask a question of a fictional character but unheard of to receive an answer from such a character. Even so, I believe I should report here my belief that if the chief character mentioned above could be imagined as being able to answer the question mentioned above, then he could be imagined as answering that he most desired to discover, in a remote district of the landscapes mentioned previously, a place in which he and the presence that accompanied him always could settle.

  If this piece of fiction were a more conventional narrative, the reader might be told at this point that the parenthetical passage that began in the fifteenth paragraph before this paragraph has now come to an end and that I, the narrator, am about to continue narrating the events of the Sunday when the chief character of this piece of fiction was walking with his father after having seen an hour beforehand at the Farm a pale and plumpish young man who was the first of the settlers at Outlands that the chief character had seen. Instead, the reader is hereby assured that nothing of significance took place during the rest of the Sunday just mentioned, and the same reader is further assured that the next paragraph and many subsequent paragraphs will contain not a narrative of certain events but a summary of the significance of those events and of much more.

  I asked few questions about the settlement of Outlands while I was at the Farm, but I listened whenever a resident of the Farm or a visitor from Outlands said anything about the settlement in the far north-east of the state. Even years later, I was still able to learn details from one or another of my father’s relatives.

  The writer of the feature article mentioned much earlier seemed to have believed that the settlement in south-eastern Victoria was the oldest or even the only such settlement of its kind. That settlement was founded in the year when I was staying at the Farm, by which time Outlands had been in existence for at least one year. I have heard of another such settlement that was founded in the late 1940s. These settlements were hardly rivals, but I suspect that the settlers in the south-east, many of whose faces I had seen images of in the illustration mentioned earlier, might have been called mostly working-class persons, whereas the Outlanders might have been called mostly middleclass persons. I suspect further that the Outlanders would have wanted to be called a group of Catholic intellectuals. My father called them long-hairs, in accordance with his belief that men who had been to university wore their hair longer than did other men, had less common sense, and were less able with their hands.

  On the day after I had first met an Outlander and had learned something about the settlement of Outlands, I walked far out into the long grass between the neglected fruit trees at the Farm and founded a settlement of my own. I thought of my settlement as having the same name as the settlement that had inspired me, but for the sake of convenience I shall call my own settlement hereafter Grasslands.

  The founder of the settlement of Grasslands had never met any other child or adult who was less skilled than he was at representing things by drawing or painting or modelling. Other children had often laughed, and even teachers had smiled, at the distorted pictures and lumpish objects that the future founder of Grasslands had produced in art and craft classes. The same children and teachers praised the essays and stories that the future founder wrote in English composition classes. On the day when he prepared to found his settlement, the founder might have been expected to call on his skills as a writer and so to write a detailed description of the settlement and the settlers. But the founder knew he had much more to fear if his writing were discovered by one of the adults at the Farm than if one of those adults stumbled on his model in the grass. The founder knew that his writing would report what the settlers saw inwardly
as they lived their lives at the settlement and so, by implication, what he, the writer, had seen inwardly while he wrote.

  And so the settlement of Grasslands was founded not as the subject of a piece of writing but as a model or toy. And because the founder was so little skilled with his hands, he was unable to make from the excellent clay of the northern suburbs of Melbourne any sort of building other than a rough cube or trapezoid that later cracked apart in the sun. The animals in the paddocks at the settlement were pebbles. The settlers themselves were forked twigs found among the branches of the orchard trees.

  I never learned how many persons had settled at Outlands. While I stayed at the Farm I saw two young men and three young women who might have been newly recruited to Outlands or, perhaps, returning briefly to Melbourne to settle some private business or who might even have been on their way back to the secular world after having decided to leave Outlands. The young men seemed thoughtful; the young women seemed more ready to smile or joke, but I noted that they were all what my father called plain Janes. All of these young persons were unattached. I never heard of any married couples at Outlands, although I cannot believe couples would have been prevented from joining the settlement.

  I never met any of the leading settlers from Outlands. There seemed to have been two men prominent in the founding of the settlement: one a medical practitioner and the other a barrister and solicitor. Of these two, the legal man was much more often talked about at the Farm, and always with reverence. His surname ended with the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet. So, too, did the surname of the Reformed Gambler. (And, so too, of course, did Nunkie’s surname.) I understood that the Reformed Gambler had come to Australia from Italy as a young man. I concluded from all this – wrongly, as I shall explain later – that the surname of the admired legal man was an Italian surname.