Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  I drove my motor-car from Melbourne to the coastal city that has been mentioned several times already in these pages. The time of year was late winter, and I remembered that the time of year had been late winter also when I had travelled by railway-train to visit my uncle fourteen years before and had talked with him about plovers and other matters. The hospital where I met with him was on the northern side of the coastal city, far from any view of the Southern Ocean; the view from his room was of mostly level grassy paddocks with lines of trees in the distance.

  I spoke with my youngest uncle for nearly an hour. He was weak and haggard, and his skin was yellow, but he seemed no less cheerful than of old. We spoke about his father’s farm, of the tall cliffs visible from every paddock of the farm, and of the sounds of the ocean that were heard from every paddock except on the few days of the year when the north wind blew from the plains inland. We spoke about the birds that he and I had observed, and I reminded him about the white-fronted chat, the bird that lived the life of a species from the inland plains even though gales from the Southern Ocean would sometimes bend sideways the clumps of rushes where its nest was hung. We spoke mostly, however, about horse-racing: about successful or unlucky bets we had made; about champion horses we had seen; about racing colours we had admired or about racehorse-names we had thought witty or inspired. As I prepared to leave him, I suggested to my youngest uncle that he should not have been surprised if my interests, in later years, had been different from his own, given that Boy Charlton had had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself. In all the time while we were together, that was the nearest we came to referring to my books of fiction.

  We were still outwardly cheerful as I prepared to leave, although we both surely knew that we would never meet again in the place that is sometimes called this world, as though to suggest that at least one other world may exist. When we came to shake hands, my youngest uncle thanked me for what he called my wonderful companionship during our earlier years together. I was so surprised that I was able to grasp his hand and to look him in the eye and then to stride to the door of his room and for some little distance along the corridor of the hospital before I began to weep.

  While I drove back to Melbourne, I came to understand that the hour while my uncle and I had talked together in the hospital might have been the first time for as long as I could remember when I had kept out of my mind all thoughts of books of fiction that I had written or of books of fiction that I hoped to write in future and perhaps, too, of books of fiction that other persons had written and that I had read. While I had talked with my uncle, he and I had behaved as though I had never written any book of fiction and as though I had no intention of writing any book of fiction in the future. We had restricted ourselves to talking about views of ocean and of mostly level grassy countryside, about birds, and about horse-racing, as though none of those topics had ever found its way into a book of fiction. I might have said afterwards that I had survived for an hour without fiction or that I had experienced for a little the life I would have led if I had never had recourse to fiction. I might have said that that life would not have been impossible to lead if only I could have accepted its chief hardship: if only I could have accepted that I would never be able to suggest to another person what I truly felt towards him or her.

  I have reported in the previous seventy-eight paragraphs numerous events, few of them seeming to be connected with my conception. Admittedly, my father and my mother have been referred to, but surely I could conjecture, postulate, speculate more boldly as to how those two came together?

  No, I could not. Whatever I might have hoped to achieve when I began this piece of fiction, I am not going to be able to explain how I came to be conceived.

  During my lifetime, I have seen many writers of fiction praised for something called psychological insight. This faculty is said to enable the writers to explain why their characters behave as they are reported to behave in the writers’ works of fiction. I would be surprised if any reader or critic claimed to have found anywhere in my fiction an entity deserving to be called a character. And even supposing that some far-seeing reader or critic has glimpsed, among the mazes of my sentences, some shape or phantom of a man or a woman, I would defy such a reader or critic to endow such an illusion with anything that might be called a trait of anything that might be called a character. Any personage referred to in my fiction has its existence only in my mind and finds its way into my fiction only so that I might learn why it occupies in my mind the position that it occupies there.

  Yes, I have referred to the man who released the pheasants as my father. Likewise, I have referred to a girl seen from a distance on a certain afternoon as my mother, but I am unable to compose sentences that might even begin to explain how the breeder of pheasants and the wearer of the pale-coloured frock even came to meet, let alone to be drawn to one another and finally to copulate.

  If I have not stated it previously, then I state it here. This work of fiction is a report of scenes and events occurring in my mind. While writing this work of fiction, I have observed no other rules or conventions than those that seem to operate in that part of my mind wherein I seem to witness scenes and events demanding to be reported in a work of fiction.

  In the impossible circumstance that I possessed an imagination, I might, perhaps, be able to bring the breeder of pheasants and the pale-clad girl in the distance, his step-cousin, into the one bed, but I prefer to report a series of unlikely events that composed itself I know not when in some or another far paddock of my mind. The events comprise no more than an exchange of several letters between two persons who had never met and were never to meet, along with the speculations and, perhaps, the imaginings of each of the two persons. One of the persons was a young unmarried man living in a district of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of cliffs and an ocean in one direction and in the other direction the beginnings of a district of plains. The other person was a young unmarried woman living in a building of more than one storey. I cannot explain how the exchange of letters began, unless to suggest that the two young persons may have been distant relatives. Early letters would have included reports of books that each of the writers had read or hoped soon to read. Later letters would have reported details from the childhood of each writer. Such a sympathy and such an understanding would have developed between the writers—and readers, as they ought also to be called—that each might sometimes have speculated as to how differently the two might have lived if they had learned from one another early in life what they had later learned from their letters. And if even one of the two had been able to do so, then he or she would have called into being an imagined courtship and marriage and even an imaginary child of the marriage.

  Much of what has been written in the preceding few pages might be said to have been misleading. The true account of my conception is simply told. Being no more than the conjectured author of this work of fiction, I can have come into existence only at the moment when a certain female personage who was reading these pages formed in her mind an image of the male personage who had written the pages with her in mind.

  Some or another conception has been reported at last. This text is surely at an end.

  A personage, or even a person, who reports the events preceding his or her conception should surely not end the report at the moment of conception. Although the existence of the personage or person might be said to have begun at conception, his or her lasting awareness of things was then far from having begun.

  My own report should end with the following account of a few moments during the summer when I became two years of age. The sunlight is strangely bright, as though the previous two years of my life have been lived in darkness. My father has taken me into a strange house. As for the whereabouts of the house, I will seem to recall long afterwards that my father and I arrived at the house after we had travelled for some distance along the road that led towards a place called Kinglake from our own house in the mostly level grassy country
side of Bundoora, north of Melbourne.

  While my father talks with the man of the house, a woman picks me up and carries me towards a doorway within the house. The smooth skin of the woman and her pleasant voice appeal to me. Beyond the doorway is darkness. The woman steps through the doorway, still carrying me in her arms. From somewhere in the darkness, the woman takes up a small object and then puts it into my hands. Outside again, in the bright sunlight, I see that the object is some sort of home-cooked biscuit or cake. The woman urges me to eat the object, but I want only to admire the colour of the object, which is a golden yellow. As soon as the woman has set me down, I take the object back through the doorway. I am eager to watch again while the eloquent yellow stands out from the blackness.

  PART 2

  Seemingly, this text is still far from the end. What remains to be reported about my having decided to write no more fiction?

  A hasty reader of the previous pages may still be waiting to learn why I gave up writing fiction more than fifteen years ago. A more careful reader may already be on the way to learning why I gave up. The hasty reader and the careful reader alike are perhaps curious to know what I happened to be writing on the bustling afternoon when I stopped writing fiction without even having questioned myself as the poet Rilke had recommended. Each sort of reader is welcome to the information that I was writing, on the bustling afternoon, the latest of the hundreds of pages that I had written during the previous four years in an effort to put together a longer and more dense piece of fiction than I had previously put together. The title of the abandoned piece of fiction had occurred to me at some time before I had written the first words of the piece, just as every other title of every other work of fiction of mine had occurred to me. The title in question was O, Dem Golden Slippers.

  The hundreds of pages mentioned in the previous paragraph have lain for more than fifteen years in one of the filing cabinets that stand against the walls of the room where I sit writing these words. In the same filing cabinet are scores of other pages comprising notes and early drafts that I wrote before I began to write the first of the hundreds of pages. All of the pages mentioned are in hanging files each of which is accurately labelled, but I prefer not to look into those files today. I prefer to report the few details that have stayed in my mind for more than fifteen years rather than to look again at the pages that I struggled to write for four years until I suddenly gave up the struggle on the bustling afternoon mentioned earlier.

  The first section of my abandoned work of fiction was a report of something that I had heard from a mature-age student of my fiction-writing course some years before I began to write the work. I reported that a certain young man who had spent all his life in a small town in north-eastern Tasmania daydreamed often of going to live in Hobart, which he saw in his mind as a city of many-storeyed office-buildings surrounded by suburbs where not a few of the houses were of two storeys. On a certain day during his last year of secondary school, the young man saw in a newspaper a portion of the text of an advertisement directed to young persons about to leave school. The young man learned from the portion of text that board and lodging would be found in Hobart for successful applicants. The young man had then begun to draft an application in his mind even before he had learned what sort of training course or occupation was being advertised. I reported finally that the young man had escaped from his small town to Hobart and thence to Melbourne whereas the chief character of the work of fiction of which my report was the beginning—that character had escaped in a different direction. He had spent most of his early life in one or another suburb of Melbourne. During his last year of secondary school he saw, in a booklet published by a religious order of priests, a black and white reproduction of a photograph of a large building of two storeys overlooking a view of mostly level grassy countryside in the Riverina district of New South Wales. He had decided to apply to join the order of priests even before he had learned what his life’s work would be if his application was successful.

  An early section of the unfinished work of fiction was set, as it were, in what used to be called a flat on the second storey of a block of flats in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Some of the windows of the flat overlooked a park where open grassy expanses were crossed by lines of trees. The tenants of the flat were a young man and a young woman who lived together although they had not yet been married. The time when the fictional passage was set in the flat was the early 1960s.

  During the many years since the 1960s, many persons have written inaccurate accounts of that decade. Many of those persons have written, for example, that the decade was a period of liberation or of sexual freedom. I was a young man in my twenties during the 1960s. I was well aware of a mood of expectation among younger persons. We sensed that things would change for the better in the near future. In the meanwhile, however, no great changes seemed to have taken place. In the late 1960s, for example, one of my girl-cousins, a daughter of one of my father’s younger brothers, travelled in secret from Melbourne to Sydney and there gave birth to a so-called illegitimate child. The child was taken at once to a so-called babies’ home, there to await adoption. In the late 1960s, for example, a young woman of my acquaintance who spent the 1970s and every decade thereafter as a follower of the latest trends and fashions—that young woman lived for a week of her annual holidays with her boyfriend in a holiday-flat on the Mornington Peninsula but posed throughout the week as his wife and wore a mock wedding-ring and a mock engagement-ring.

  On Friday evenings and on Saturday evenings, several young men would visit the flat that was the fictional setting mentioned earlier, there to drink beer and to talk and to watch television and, perhaps, to try to learn by some or another means how each of them might one day persuade some or another young woman to live with him in a flat although the two had not yet married.

  According to my unfinished work of fiction, one or another young man, on one or another Friday or Saturday evening, had looked through the partly opened window of the bathroom of the second-storey flat while he was urinating without having turned on the light in the bathroom. The young man had then hurried back to the lounge-room of the flat and had told the persons gathered there that a young woman was undressing in a bedroom of an upstairs flat in the neighbouring block of flats. All of the young men in the lounge-room hurried into the bathroom and took turns to look out through the partly opened window. One of the young men was intended to be the chief character of the whole work of fiction. He will be called from here onwards the chief character.

  The chief character had not previously seen a naked adult female person, although the young woman in the neighbouring flat had been too far away for him to appreciate the details of her nakedness. On the next evening when he visited the second-storey flat, he took with him the pair of binoculars that he had bought during the late 1950s, when he had been working as a junior clerk in a building of many storeys near the centre of Melbourne in the first year after he had finished his secondary education. Only a few months after he had begun to work as a junior clerk, the first consignment of Japanese binoculars arrived in Australia. The advertised price of a pair of these binoculars was three times his weekly wage, but he bought a pair without hesitation. Until then, the only binoculars available in Australia had been German binoculars costing at least twenty times the weekly wage of a junior clerk. His father had owned a pair of German binoculars for several years during the mid-1930s. He had bought the binoculars from the proceeds of winning bets on racehorses but had later pawned them and had never afterwards redeemed them. The chief character had for long supposed that his father had had to pawn the binoculars so that he could afford to buy an engagement ring and later to be married.

  When he had bought his binoculars, the chief character had had no reason to save money for the future. He supposed he would remain unmarried for many years and even throughout his life and would devote his free time to writing poetry and prose fiction or to going to race-meetings and devising methods of betting pr
ofitably on racehorses. From time to time, he felt himself attracted to some or another young woman who worked in the building of many storeys. Sometimes he would even try to devise a strategy for approaching the young woman and beginning a conversation with her. But even at such times, he did not feel obliged to save any of his meagre weekly wage for the purpose of buying in the future a block of land in an outer suburb of Melbourne where he and his wife-of-the-future would later live in a weatherboard house with three bedrooms. He did not feel thus obliged because he had learned that the Education Department of Victoria had such a need for teachers that a person aged at least twenty-one years could acquire a trained primary teacher’s certificate after only one year of study in a teachers’ college. The chief character supposed that if he lapsed in future from his bachelor-vocation, he would undertake a year of training and would become a primary teacher. As a married man, he would then be eligible for appointment to one or another small school in the countryside of Victoria where a so-called official residence stood beside the schoolyard. He and his wife could live in the residence, paying only a nominal rental, for as long as he chose to remain at that school.

  The chief character had seen a number of school residences in the countryside of Victoria. Each was a weatherboard cottage painted cream with dark-green trimmings. Sometimes, at his desk by day in the building of many storeys, or in his rented room of an evening, he would feel the desire to live in the future in a school residence even though he had at that time no interest in any young woman. At such times, he foresaw himself and his wife of the future inside their cream and green cottage on a certain Saturday afternoon in the future. His wife of the future may have been sometimes only a faint image, but other details of the scene were clear and memorable. The season would have been summer, and the view from every window of the cottage would have been of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance, except that all the window-blinds would have been drawn against the heat and the glare. The young husband and wife who lived in the cottage would have been preparing to rest for an hour in their bedroom after having unpacked their weekly shopping and eaten lunch. The faint sounds of the broadcast of a horse-race would have come from a radio in the kitchen.