Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  On a certain cold and cloudy Saturday evening in the early 1960s, I stood with my youngest uncle in the paddock that he leased in the coastal district where he had spent all of his life. I had made a hurried trip from Melbourne to see my uncle at what seemed to me a turning-point in my life. I had left my place of work on the Friday evening and had travelled for more than four hours by railway-train to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I was due to travel back to Melbourne again on the Sunday afternoon. I had only a few hours on the cold and cloudy Saturday evening for learning from my uncle what I hoped to learn from him.

  I hoped to learn from my uncle that his bachelorhood was not the result of some fear or weakness; that his having no wife or girlfriend was merely a sign of some or another higher calling. I would have been satisfied to hear from him, for example, that his being a bachelor would allow him, if he so wished, to experience the peculiar joys and disappointments of an owner of racehorses. I had no reason for supposing that my uncle had ever wanted to write poetry or prose fiction, but I would have been satisfied to hear from him, for example, that his being a bachelor allowed him to read much more poetry or prose fiction than he would otherwise have read or to listen for hours each evening to so-called classical music on his radio or to study his books about Australian birds. Sometimes I even hoped he might tell me about a project that he had previously kept secret from me: some or another unending task that would allow me to think of him as a sort of scholar-gipsy of the back-roads of south-western Victoria. I had hurried to visit my uncle because a group of men that I had lately joined up with had seemed to assert that my uncle’s bachelorhood and my own solitariness were each a variety of illness.

  Six months before my hurried visit to my uncle, I had begun to spend Friday and Saturday evenings with a young man and a young woman in their rented flat on the first floor of a building of four storeys within walking distance of the central business district of Melbourne. On other nights of each week, I went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction in my rented bungalow in the backyard of a house at a distance of several suburbs from the building of four storeys, but I no longer had the strength to go on trying to write on every evening of the week. On most Friday and Saturday evenings, several other young men visited the first-storey flat. Sometimes, one or another young man would have a young woman with him, but most of the young men came alone, bringing several bottles of beer. The young men stayed in the flat until about midnight, talking together with the two persons who lived in the flat or, sometimes, watching television. On some evenings, all the persons in the flat would set out just before midnight to walk across the park at the rear of the building of four storeys to a cinema that was one of the first cinemas in Melbourne to show a so-called midnight movie. I went with the other young persons to the cinema, even though I would always fall asleep soon after the program had begun.

  The young man and the young woman who lived in the first-floor flat were not married. Neither I nor any of the young men who visited the flat knew of any other young persons who lived together without having married. Even the young persons who lived in the flat knew of no other young unmarried persons who lived together. (The reader has been told already that these fictional events are reported as having taken place in the early 1960s.) The young men who visited the flat envied the young man who lived there, but the young man himself often seemed discontented. Several months before I had begun to visit the flat, the young woman who lived there had left the flat and had lived elsewhere. She had left the flat after the young man who lived there had punched and beaten her. One of the conditions of her returning to the flat had been that the young man who lived there must consult a psychiatrist for the time being.

  Often, while I was visiting the flat, the young man talked to me and the other visitors about his group, as he called it. This was a group of five or six men of various ages who met on alternate Sunday mornings in the home of a general practitioner who was studying psychiatry. The young man talked as though each of us listening ought to join his group or a similar group in order to deal with his many problems.

  At some time during the fourth month after I had begun to visit the first-storey flat, I consulted the general practitioner mentioned in the previous paragraph. I told him that I visited the first-storey flat on Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but that I spent every other evening alone, trying to write poetry and prose fiction. I told him further that I had seemed lately to be losing the strength that I needed for trying to write poetry and prose fiction; that I had nowadays to drink several bottles of beer before I could begin to feel the strength that I need for trying to write. The doctor, so to call him, prescribed certain tablets that he said would be more helpful to me than beer. The tablets caused me to sleep during the hours when I would otherwise have been drinking beer and trying to write poetry and prose fiction, but I went on taking the tablets and consulting the doctor, so to call him. During the third consultation, he told me I was ready to join his Sunday-morning group.

  Most of the young men in the group seemed to be reformed alcoholics, but the young man who lived in the flat told me privately that several of them had what he called serious sexual problems. I had expected that the members of the group would be continually questioning and challenging one another, but for much of their time together they did little more than gossip. The doctor, so to call him, sat with the group but seemed to follow a policy of keeping silent unless asked a direct question. Only one man in the group used technical terms, so to call them. This man claimed to have read many books by the author that he referred to familiarly as Freud.

  I was asked few questions during my first session with the group, but early in my second session the man who used technical terms asked me whether or not I had a girlfriend. Having learned that I had no girlfriend, he asked me what efforts I was presently making to acquire a girlfriend. I answered that I was making no such efforts at present; that I spent all my free time at present trying to write poetry and prose fiction; that the few young women I met up with were none of them interested in poetry or prose fiction; that my leading a solitary life might better help me as a writer than if I were to acquire a girlfriend or a wife. The man then used many technical terms. I understood him to be telling me that my trying to write poetry and prose fiction was no more than my trying to find an imaginary girlfriend or wife. I understood from the demeanour of the other men in the group that they agreed with the man who used technical terms, even though most of them were unskilled in the use of such terms.

  I did not try to defend myself against the man who used technical terms, but when I left the group that morning I had already decided that I would attend only one more session. At that session, I would refute the claims of the man who used technical terms, so I had decided. I would defend solitary males and bachelors against the wordy arguments of European theorists. In the meanwhile, I would make a hurried trip to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I would walk with my uncle across mostly level grassy countryside and would draw strength from the company of a man who had kept up no fewer than three long-lasting courtships with good-looking young women but was still a bachelor.

  I had expected to feel much more comfortable walking with my uncle across his bleak paddocks than I had felt with the group of men in the doctor’s meeting-room, but I could not readily explain the reason for my visit. I had never told him that I no longer believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church, although he probably suspected as much. I could not even tell my uncle that I had joined a group of men who were patients of a doctor with an interest in psychiatry. I told him that I had been for a long time without a girlfriend but that I was amply consoled by the various dreams that I had of my future. One of those dreams, so I told my uncle, was my dream of owning racehorses in the future, which dream my uncle readily understood. Another of my dreams, so I told my uncle, was my dream of being published as a poet or as a writer of prose-fiction. This dream he claimed also to understand, although the only twentieth-centu
ry Australian authors that he seemed to have read were A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, and Ion L. Idriess.

  I told my uncle the merest summary of what I called my beer-drinking dream, and not only because he was not a drinker. After drinking large amounts of beer, I would usually feel reconciled to my present solitariness and to a life of bachelorhood. I would even count myself lucky not to have to endure the nervous strain and the financial costs of courtship and marriage. Some or another comfortable saloon bar would become for me in later life what his lounge-room was for the average married man, or so I often supposed while I was drinking. But sometimes when I was awake in the early hours and feeling gloomy after an evening of beer-drinking, then what I called my hangover-dream would appear to me. The dream began at some vague time in my future as a beer-drinking bachelor. One or another of my drinking-companions would decide that my bachelor’s way of life was only a posturing: a means of advertising my need for a girlfriend or a wife. This drinking-companion would be a married man with what is called nowadays a large extended family. A certain member of that family would be a young female person of presentable appearance or better who had led a sheltered life and had had few suitors. (I would always spare myself the task of trying to imagine the details of the history of the young female person.) My drinking-companion would have spoken favourably about me to the presentable young person for some time before he had even told me of her existence. Then he would tell me during a few drinking-sessions more about the young person than I might have learned if she and I had gone together for six months. I would then express my admiration for the young person, knowing that she would learn of it through our intermediary. Hints, intimations, even guarded messages would be relayed in each direction. I would be spared many of the anxieties of a conventional courtship. The day when the young female person and I would finally meet would be some sort of family celebration at the home of our go-between. The tub in the bathroom would be three quarters full of bottles and cans of beer and packs of crushed ice. No more would be required of me than to say something witty from time to time to the young person and not to fall over or to be caught urinating or vomiting in the backyard before I went home.

  I could never even have hinted to my uncle that I had also what I might have called my dream of last resort, although the men from the group that I had lately joined might have considered my dream little more than a masturbation fantasy. When none of my other dreams seemed of any worth, I sometimes saw in my mind one or another image of one or another of my female cousins as though she was of a mood to relent towards me and as though the image of her mother was far elsewhere in my mind.

  When the sun was setting below the cliffs in the distance, my uncle had still not told me anything in return for my confidences. Then a plover flew past, crying its mournful-sounding cry. My uncle told me that none of his farmer-neighbours seemed to know that two distinct species of plover inhabited the coastal district. I myself had not known this, even though plovers were among the birds that especially interested me because they laid and hatched their eggs in mere hollows scratched from the soil. I told my uncle that he was fortunate to be a bachelor who could study his bird books of an evening while his neighbours were dealing with their wives and children. My uncle then told me that he had for long feared he had been made sexually impotent by a kick that he had taken as a schoolboy. When he was ten years of age, so my uncle told me, he had been kicked viciously in the stones by a boy named Stanley Chambers.

  Surely some readers of these pages are able to think of the writer of the pages as being no more than the narrator of a work of fiction: a personage supposed by those readers to exist on the far side of their own minds for as long as they go on reading these pages. For the sake of those readers, whose prowess as readers of fiction I admire unreservedly, I report the following.

  I travelled back to Melbourne on the day after my youngest uncle and I had talked about plovers and other matters, but I never afterwards attended any Sunday morning group. I was no longer willing to listen to the opinions of the would-be psychiatrist and his ignorant patients. I was no longer willing to hear them talk as though a scribbling theorist in some or another gloomy city in central Europe had long before explained away the existence of a far-reaching network of images of swamps below tall cliffs and of racecourses among level grassy landscapes and of paddocks where quails and plovers lay low and of female personages seen from a distance, which far-reaching network was, in fact, no more than an image in my own mind. In short, I behaved as a fictional personage is obliged to behave; I remained true to my belief that no so-called real world could exist among the scene after fictional scene where I was believed to live and to write.

  Other readers of these pages may well think of the writer of the pages not as a conjectured personage but as a mere human person hardly different from themselves. For the sake of those readers, whose prowess as readers of fiction I could never admire, I report the following.

  I travelled back to Melbourne on the day after my youngest uncle and I had talked about plovers and other matters. Before a week had passed, I reported to the Sunday morning group what my uncle had told me about his having been kicked as a boy. I did not expect that the doctor and the members of the group would then advise me as to how my uncle, a man approaching middle-age, might overcome his fear, but I hoped that the doctor and the members of the group might repay my trust in them by suggesting how I might overcome some of my own fears. I listened while they talked at length. Afterwards, I went away disappointed and never returned. At the time, I could not have expressed the matter coherently, but I understood later that the speculations of the group were a sort of inferior fiction. I might even have said that each member of the group exercised a sort of rudimentary imagination. He struggled to explain his imagined world to me, who would later go home to my bachelor’s flat, there to struggle to write my own sort of fiction without even imagination to help me.

  Eleven years after my youngest uncle and I had last talked seriously together, my first book of fiction was published. During those eleven years, I had become a husband and later a father while he had remained a bachelor. During those years, I had met with him only occasionally. Soon after I had become a husband, I had taken my wife to meet him. Later, I had paraded my children in front of him. He and I had had little to say to one another during those eleven years. I had expected that my first book might disappoint my uncle, but I could not have predicted that he would react towards it as he did. He sent no message of any sort to me but he wrote to my brother that he, my youngest uncle, had disowned me for ever.

  While I was writing my second book of fiction, I thought hardly at all about my uncle who had disowned me. While I was writing that book, my uncle’s mother and two of his sisters died. When the book was published, only a few survived of my father’s eight siblings. Two of these were my bachelor-uncle and his youngest sister, my unmarried aunt: she who might have looked out from a second- or third-storey window in a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne on many a day during the year when I was born. Again, my uncle sent no message of any sort to me, but again he wrote to my brother. My uncle wrote that he had been far more disgusted by my second book than by my first. But his own disgust, so my uncle wrote, was a small matter by comparison with his most urgent concern. His youngest sister, the only one still alive of my four unmarried aunts, she who often referred to me as her first and favourite nephew, was eager to read my second book. He had persuaded her with some trouble that my first book could not possibly be of interest to her, and she had still not read it. Now, however, she could hardly be put off; she was pressing him to allow her to read my second book of fiction, which he considered not so much a book of fiction as an accumulation of filth. I have never heard from my brother what he wrote in reply to these complaints from my uncle.

  I know, even today, no more about the ailments liable to affect the human body than I knew, more than forty years ago, when I ceased to attend the Sunday morning group, about the ailments
affecting the mind. What little time I have had for learning during my adult life has been given to the study of what I call for convenience patterns of images in a place that I call for convenience my mind, wherever it may lie or whatever else it may be a part of. Even so, I read or hear sometimes about theories that I myself would never have had the wit to devise. One such theory, which I heard for the first time a few years after the early death of my youngest uncle, asserts that a person subjected to prolonged emotional stress, so to call it, is more likely than the average person to be afflicted by the disease of cancer.

  Seven months after the publication of my second book of fiction, I heard that my youngest uncle had been found to have cancer of the liver. He was aged fifty-five and had been in good health throughout his life. He had never smoked and had never drunk alcohol. According to his older brothers, no member of their parents’ families had been known to have any sort of cancer. (When I mentioned these matters to my mother at the time, she told me without smiling that my uncle’s cancer would have been caused by his sister’s cooking. This was the sister who had lived for a time in the convent of three storeys and who kept house for my uncle for some years before his illness became known. According to my mother, my youngest aunt had learned in the convent to be mean with food: to reheat leftovers and to bake cheap, doughy puddings.)

  My uncle had been told that he would live for no more than six months. During the first four of those months, I told myself that my uncle was obliged to make the first move towards reconciliation, given that I had not written my books of fiction with the intention of offending him. At some time during the fifth of those months, when I had still received no message from my uncle, I telephoned him and asked if he would care to have me visit him. He told me that he would be pleased to see me.