Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  For as long as he lay in the upper room, the chief character was in a light-hearted mood. Having found himself in the presence of God, the chief character directed towards God the sort of wordless message that he seemed able to send in his dreams. The content of the message was that there should be no hard feelings between God and the chief character. The flashing or winking from the wing-case of the Beetle-god then ceased. The chief character could no longer make out the orange-yellow markings or any other details in the shade beneath the bush. He understood that he had been politely dismissed; that nothing needed to be discussed between God and himself; that he ought to leave God to attend to his own affairs while he, the chief character, went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction.

  While the chief character lay in the upper room of the hospital, the images that appeared to him were in no apparent order. He had always thought of the images in his mind as being arranged somewhat in the way that the names of townships were arranged on maps of mostly level countryside and that the images were connected by feelings in the way that the names of townships were connected by lines denoting roads. Whenever an image first appeared to him in the upper room, the image seemed to have appeared from behind one or another detail in the previous image, as though he was moving continually towards the seeming background of an illustration with no visible horizon. Sometimes, he felt for a moment before the appearance of an image as though the power of the image preceded it. And sometimes an image would be a mere detail, although his everyday mind, so to call it, was always aware of the undisclosed whole. He was aware, for example, that a certain blurred image of yellow-green fabric seen from close-up was a detail of an image of his father’s youngest sister as she would have appeared to him when he was hardly more than an infant. For a moment before the appearance in the upper room of the image of the yellow-green fabric, he had felt as though he was the object of strong affection. He understood from this and from the image of the yellow-green fabric that he had been embraced as a child, perhaps warmly and often, by his youngest aunt, she who had once tried to live as a nun in a building of several storeys. Strangely, so it seemed to him later, he was visited in the upper room by no image of either of his parents. He had never had reason for supposing that his parents were lacking in affection for him, and yet he had met up with no image of either parent among the images that had come into his view when he had seen into his essence, as he might have called it.

  A brief section of the unfinished work of fiction would have reported the matters that are summarised in the following three paragraphs.

  Very early in his life, the chief character became accustomed to thinking of his mind as a place. It was, of course, not a single place but a place containing other places: a far-reaching and varied landscape. He was sometimes aware that mountain-ranges and fast-flowing rivers and even, perhaps, an ocean might have existed on the farther side of his mental country, but he was not curious about such matters. He could never foresee himself tiring of the districts that most appealed to him. Those districts seemed to comprise long views of mostly level grassy countryside with lines of trees seemingly always in the distance. The countryside was watered by a few shallow creeks and by swamps that were mostly dry in summer. The houses were set far back from the road, and some were of two storeys. The interiors of the houses were little-known to him, even though he sometimes speculated as to the contents of the books in some of the libraries or the subject-matter of the paintings in some of the hallways or drawing-rooms as though he could have learned from one or another page or from the background of one or another painting some secret of much importance to him.

  The father of the chief character had among his cousins seven siblings who had begun life as the children of a poor share-farmer and his wife in the south-west of Victoria. The children, both boys and girls, had worked beside their parents before and after school in the milking-shed. During their teenage years, the siblings worked full-time for their parents or on other farms. Only two of the seven married. The others, two females and three males, lived throughout their lives under the one roof. By means of hard work and thrift, the unmarried siblings became wealthy. When the chief character was still a small child, the siblings owned a large grazing property far inland from the coastal district where they had spent their childhood. On some or another day in the early 1940s, the chief character had been taken by his parents on a visit to the large grazing property. He was not yet four years of age, and he afterwards recalled only a few details from the visit.

  The large grazing property was in a district of mostly grassy countryside that had been occupied for more than a century by a small number of families well known for their wealth. The siblings’ property had been formerly owned by one such family. The house on the property had been copied from some or another house in England. The house comprised two storeys and a tower that reached upwards beyond the second storey. At some time during his visit to the grazing property, the chief character was led to the top of the tower by the younger of the female cousins of his father. (He supposed, long afterwards, that he had begged his parents for some time beforehand to be taken to the top of the tower.) His female guide had led him by the hand up the spiral staircase in the tower. At the top of the staircase was a sort of balcony, so the chief character recalled later, but around the balcony was a wall of stones or bricks too high for the chief character to see above. His guide had knelt or had crouched and had lifted him by the armpits so that he could see the view. At some time afterwards, presumably, he had forgotten whatever details he may have noted in the view from the tower, which view would have been of mostly level grassy countryside with lines of trees in the middle and the far distance. However, he had never afterwards forgotten that he had rested himself, while he looked into the distance, against the changeable shapes of the first female breasts that he afterwards recalled himself resting against.

  In the hallway of the house on the large grazing property was a wooden pedestal on which was a dome of clear glass under which was a parrot perched on a branch. The chief character had known from the first that the parrot was the preserved body of a dead bird, but he had longed to inspect the coloured feathers from close-up. He had studied illustrations of parrots in a book owned by his father’s youngest brother but he had never seen an actual bird. As soon as the young woman had led him down from the tower on the large grazing property, he had asked her in a pleading voice to lead him to the parrot so that he could study it through the glass. The young woman then led the chief character into the hallway of the house of two storeys where she would later live unmarried for forty years with her four unmarried siblings; she lifted the glass dome away from the stuffed remains of the living parrot; then she watched with seeming approval while he ran his fingers through one after another zone of feathers on the stuffed likeness—through the light green and the dark blue and the pale yellow.

  One or another section of my never-completed work of fiction would have begun by reporting that the chief character decided during the last few months of his secondary schooling that he was called by God to be a Catholic priest.

  The chief character liked to watch from the inside of some or another windowpane while rainwater fell against or trickled down the outside. He was watching thus in his classroom on the first floor of a building of two storeys on a day of rain four months before his final examinations, the so-called matriculation examinations. He was confident of passing the examinations and of obtaining a so-called Commonwealth scholarship that would enable him to study arts at university. Afterwards, so he supposed, he would train for a year as a teacher in secondary schools. He was indifferent towards so-called careers. He wanted only to be tolerably well paid and to be free during his evenings and his weekends to write poetry and, perhaps, prose fiction. He watched the rain on the window of his classroom as though the window overlooked a street parallel to the main street in some or another large town in the countryside of Victoria during one of the many years when he would teach Engli
sh and history at the high school in the large town and would live as a bachelor in a self-contained flat on the upper floor of so-called business premises near the centre of the town. Even when the window was not blurred by rain, the man who lived behind the window could see through it no further than the nearest buildings. He understood that the large town was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside and scattered trees but he believed that he was more likely to write poetry or prose fiction of worth if he was prevented from seeing the horizon in any direction. During the four years before he would be able to watch the rain trickling down the window of the upstairs room near the centre of the large town, so the chief character understood, he would be obliged to mix with young persons, both male and female, in a university. At some time during those years, he might decide to approach one or another young female person in the hope that he and she might later go out together, as the saying was, and later still might even become boyfriend and girlfriend.

  I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain trickling on the window of his classroom, would have preferred to be already an older man remembering certain events or even regretting that certain events had never taken place rather than to be still a young man preparing to experience those events.

  At some time during the day of rain, the chief character would have looked through a certain booklet from among a collection of booklets displayed at the rear of his classroom, so I would have reported if I had gone on with my abandoned work. The chief character had noticed the booklets often before but had never looked into them. For some months afterwards, he would suspect that he had been led to look into the booklets by what he called the intervention of Divine Providence. Each of the booklets in the collection was intended to persuade young men to apply to train as priests or lay-brothers in one or another religious order. The booklet that the chief character looked through contained both text and illustrations. A number of the illustrations were of a building of two storeys. From one of these illustrations the chief character learned that the building was surrounded on three sides at least by mostly level grassy countryside that was not without trees. From captions beneath the illustrations, the chief character learned that the building housed the novitiate of a certain religious order; the place where young men trained as novices of the order during the first year after they had joined the order. In short, as I reported in an earlier section of this present work of fiction, the chief character of my abandoned work of fiction had decided to apply to join the religious order in question before he had read the text of the booklet published by the order. The illustration that the chief character was looking at when he made his decision was an illustration of the interior of a room of the sort that was occupied by each of the novices of the order. The room was furnished with a bed and a table and a chair and a cupboard. The table was so placed that a person sitting at it would face the window of the room. Given that the view through the illustrated window was a view wholly of sky, the chief character supposed that the room was on the upper storey of the building of two storeys. Soon after he had supposed this, the chief character saw in his mind an image of rain trickling down a window that overlooked some or another view of the Riverina district of New South Wales in his mind. While he watched the image of the trickling rain in his mind, the chief character of my partly completed work of fiction was pleased to suppose that he had found a means of going to live in an upper room of a building of two storeys without first having to go to university, where he might have had to spend his time studying books of small interest to him or preparing to approach one or another young woman.

  Six months before the day of rain mentioned above, during two days of his summer holidays, the chief character had read all of the three hundred and more pages of Elected Silence, by Thomas Merton, published in London by Hollis and Carter in 1954 but first published several years before in the USA. The chief character had never heard of the book or its author before he received it as a prize at the end of his second-last year of school, and several times while he read it he supposed that the book had come into his hands through the intervention of Divine Providence. Elected Silence was the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who had been a teacher and a poet before becoming a monk in a Cistercian monastery in the USA. Merton had been prepared to give up his writing when he entered the monastery, but his superiors had allowed him to write poetry and had later encouraged him to write essays and to have them collected and published. (The chief character did not know it, but I learned some years ago from a biography of Thomas Merton that the royalties from his books became the chief source of income for the monastery and that their author was often exempted from following the rule of the monastery and was allowed, when he so wished, to live alone and to go on with his writing in the so-called hermitage, which was a weatherboard cottage in a grove of trees in the grounds of the monastery.) After he had read the book, the chief character had made inquiries and had learned that the Cistercian Order had a monastery in Australia but he had been disappointed when he found that the monastery was in hilly countryside only thirty miles from Melbourne.

  The religious order with its novitiate in the Riverina district had been founded in Italy during the eighteenth century by a pious Italian priest, so the chief character learned from the booklet that had persuaded him to join the order. Both priests and lay-brothers of the order wore a black soutane and a black cloak. Both soutane and cloak had an insignia of scarlet embroidered over the wearer’s left breast. The special work of the order in Australia was to visit one after another parish and to conduct there a mission, something that has been described elsewhere in this work of fiction. When the priests were not conducting missions they lived a strictly regulated life in one or another monastery of the order. This was much to the liking of the chief character. He had no wish to live as a parish priest in some or another suburban or rural presbytery under the notice of his parishioners. Even when he worked on the mission, he would be looking forward to returning to his monastery and working on his latest poem.

  The chief character was not easily able to persuade his parents to allow him to go to the Riverina district instead of to university. Whenever his parents reminded him of the benefits to be got from an education at university, the chief character would recite in his mind certain phrases from the poem ���The Scholar-Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. He recited the phrases in order to see more clearly the connections between himself and the chief character of the poem. For the chief character of my unfinished fiction, the Riverina district would be the retired ground preferred by the scholar-gipsy: the lone wheat-fields and the river bank o’ergrown. The cloak that the scholar-gipsy wrapped around himself was a likeness of the black cloak that the chief character would wear as a novice shut away from the world. The most striking connection, however, was reported in the note that preceded the poem. The young man who had inspired the poem, he who had left university and had taken up with the gipsies, claimed to have discovered that the gipsies could do wonders by the power of the imagination and had resolved to learn their arts.

  When the parents of the chief character gave their permission for him to join a religious order of priests, they were won over by his seeming sincerity and piety, or so the reader of my unfinished fiction might have supposed. Certainly, he had developed during the weeks after the rainy afternoon mentioned previously a keen longing to join the religious order of his choice. What he most longed for, however, was not to preach or to minister to other persons but to attend to his own salvation, as he would have expressed the matter. And whenever he thought of himself as attending thus, he saw himself in the future as reading or writing at a table in an upstairs room or as kneeling in a chapel or standing before an altar with his eyes closed and his head bowed.

  Even during the last weeks before he travelled to the Riverina district in order to study for the priesthood, the chief character felt no strong affection for the personages that he knew as God or Jesus
or Our Lady or the angels and saints. Even when he told his parents that he was called by God to the priesthood, he did not feel as though the above-named personages felt any strong affection for him. He felt as though the personages were remote from him and perhaps indifferent towards him for the time being but prepared to look on him favourably if he could prove himself worthy of them. This would require from him much more than mere virtuous living or the recitation of prayers. His becoming worthy required him to see further than most persons saw; to see into the places, wherever they were, where the personages most clearly manifested themselves; to dare even to see the personages themselves as they saw one another.