Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  Some weeks after I had visited the monk, I received from him a letter together with a photograph. He explained in the letter that he had sent the photograph to me because I seemed rather interested in the practice of meditation. The photograph was of a small weatherboard house or cottage with a row of fruit-trees behind it. The monk explained in his letter that the building had been the home of the farm-manager and his family during the many years when the monastery and its farm had been the country retreat of a family whose wealth derived from their owning the largest firm of stationery suppliers in Melbourne. The monk explained further that the building had been used for some years by the monastery as a hermitage; from time to time, one or another monk would retire to the building and would live there alone for one or more weeks while he devoted all of his free time to prayer and to meditation. The monk himself, so he wrote, had recently spent some time in the building.

  I had looked for some time at the photograph before I had read the letter. Before I had learned that the image in the photograph was of a hermitage, I had been sure that the image was of a so-called rural-school residence: a cottage such as had been built beside many a school in the countryside of Victoria in the first half of the twentieth century for the teacher and his family. While I stared at the image of the cottage, I recalled certain passages in the work of fiction that I had recently abandoned. In those passages, the chief character was reported as foreseeing that he would one day turn aside from his vocation; that he would give up living as a bachelor and a writer of poetry and prose fiction and would become a primary teacher and would marry and would listen to radio broadcasts of horse-races on Saturday afternoons while he looked at the mostly level grassy countryside around the school as though images of what he most desired might be visible behind the lines of trees in the distance.

  I wrote to the monk, thanking him for the photograph and explaining that I was too busy to visit him again for the time being, which was true. Then, perhaps two months later, when I had stepped, as I often did, into the totalisator agency in a suburb adjoining my own suburb, I saw the monk in a far corner, reading one of the form-guides on the wall. He was dressed in casual clothes, and I guessed at once that he had left the monastery for good although he had never given me any hint that he might do so. I felt a certain disappointment that I might never visit the Cistercian monastery again, but I greeted the monk cheerfully and learned that he had indeed left the monastery for good; that he had found board and lodging with a middle-aged widow only a few streets away from where we then stood; and that he would like to go with me to the Saturday races at the first opportunity.

  When I called for the monk on the following Saturday, he was outside the widow’s house, dressed appropriately for the races and with a pair of binoculars hanging from his shoulder. I happen to be rather knowledgeable about binoculars and I saw that the monk was carrying a pair that would have been imported from Japan nearly forty years before. I asked him where he had bought the binoculars. He told me without smiling that he had stolen them from the monastery on the day before he had left the place for good.

  Before I had left home for the races, my wife, who had never met the monk, told me to invite him to our house for lunch on the Sunday of the following weekend. She said that she felt sorry for the monk, who would surely be struggling to make friends in the outside world, as she called it. When I let the monk out of my car on the way home from the races, I invited him as my wife had instructed me. He said that he would be pleased to accept. Then he asked me if he could bring his girlfriend. I was surprised that he had acquired a girlfriend already, but I told him that she would be welcome.

  The lunch was a dull occasion. My wife and I struggled to keep conversation going. She told me afterwards that she had sensed a certain tension between our two guests. I recall today very little about the monk’s girlfriend except that she was blonde and somewhat plump and dressed in pink.

  I never saw the monk again. Three weeks after the Sunday lunch mentioned above, on a Saturday when I was at the races, the girlfriend of the monk called on my wife at our home and begged to be allowed to confide in her. She, the girlfriend, lived, so she said, in a nearby suburb and was anxious to confide in somebody. What she confided to my wife might be summarised as follows. She, the girlfriend, had first met the monk about six months before when she had visited the monastery for what she called counselling after what she called the sudden break-up of a relationship. She had stayed for a week in the guest-house at the monastery. (She explained to my wife that the strict rules of the Cistercian Order had been relaxed somewhat in recent years so that women could stay as guests of the monastery and could meet with some of the priests and lay-brothers during their recreation-hour of an evening. She had talked often with the monk, and they had seemed to be drawn to one another. She had given the monk her telephone number, and after she had returned home he had spoken to her often for long periods late at night. He had telephoned her in secret, and against the rules of the monastery, from a little-used telephone extension on the upper storey of the building.) During her second visit to the monastery, the monk had promised to leave his order and to marry her soon afterwards. He had left the monastery in due course, after which she and he had had what she called an intense sexual relationship, but then he had told her that he suspected his true vocation was to the celibate life. Two weeks ago, he had left Melbourne for the inland city in New South Wales where he had spent his childhood. She had not heard from him since, and she was thinking of setting out after him.

  Something that ought to be explained is my having begun again to write fiction only a few years after I had stopped, so I thought, for good.

  Four years after I had stopped writing fiction, my seventh book of fiction was published. Some of the book consisted of pieces of fiction that had been published previously in so-called literary magazines, but each of the other three pieces I had written in order to explain one or another of three matters that I could have explained by no other means than by writing a piece of fiction. One of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had become tired of reading book after book of supposedly memorable fiction and then being unable to remember, a year or more afterwards, any sentence of the text or any detail of my experience as a reader. Another of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had not been misguided whenever I had struggled from time to time during the previous forty years to devise a set of racing colours in which one or another arrangement of one or another shade of blue or of green explained about me something that could have been explained by no other means than by the appearance of a set of racing colours. The third of the pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had stopped writing fiction several years before (and had presumably stopped again after having written the text that explained this) and to offer to readers of good will a hint as to what sort of project I now preferred to fiction-writing.

  The few reviews of my seventh book of fiction that came to my notice were, on balance, favourable reviews. The most favourable was written by a person who had previously praised other books of mine and found much meaning in them. Towards the end of the review, the reviewer began to comment on the third of the pieces mentioned above. I expected to read that the reviewer had understood my explanation and had taken my hint. I read instead that the reviewer admired the trick of perspective and other items that I had not known were in the piece.

  I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.

  My piece of fiction of ten years ago had the title “The Interior of Gaaldine.” When I chose that title, I supposed that most readers of good will would have recognised the provenance of the word Gaaldine. Perhaps most of those reader
s did so recognise the provenance of the word, but no reviewer seemed to have done so. I had supposed it was common knowledge among readers of my sort of fiction that the sisters who were the authors of some of the best-known works of English fiction in the nineteenth century had written extensively during their youth, and even during their adult life, about so-called imaginary countries, one of which was named Gondal. I had supposed further that many of those readers must have read at some or another time a certain entry written in her diary by one of the sisters mentioned when she was in her seventeenth year, which entry was often quoted as evidence that the writer was as much concerned with the so-called imaginary countries as with her everyday life, so to call it, and which entry reported, among other things, that the inhabitants of Gondal were just then discovering the interior of Gaaldine. For the diversion of my readers, I had the narrator of my piece of fiction report at one point in his narration that he had heard the name of a certain female character as Alice, when the readers would have known, or so I supposed, that the name of the character was Ellis, which had once been the pen-name of the writer of the diary-entry mentioned above, she in whose mind lay the country of Gondal. I even put at the very end of my piece of fiction the names of the three personages from Gondal or, rather, the names of the three characters from one or another of the texts set, so to speak, in Gondal, so that the very last words of the piece of fiction would be the name of the female personage whose presence in the mind of the young woman Emily Brontë caused her later to write about the character named Catherine Earnshaw in a work of fiction set, as it were, far away from Gondal.

  I included in my piece of fiction of ten years ago what I supposed was a broad hint that the narrator of the piece had been persuaded during the writing of the text that no more fiction need be written, whether by himself or by any other writer of fiction. The narrator had become aware that the fictional texts already in existence gave way or led back to a series of fictional settings or mental landscapes that could not be thought of as coming to an end. The narrator might have become thus aware either by his reflecting on the series that began with the fictional scenery around the fictional place named Wuthering Heights, the fictional place named Gondal, and the fictional place named Gaaldine, or by his reflecting on the processes called in my piece of fiction decoding or gutting, by means of which the narrator of the typescript mentioned in the text caused fictional horse-races to take place in the fictional country named New Arcadia.

  According to the diary-entry mentioned previously, the fictional inhabitants of Gondal had been prompted some time before to learn what lay beyond the boundaries of their fictional country. In my first published book of fiction, which appeared in print thirty-three years ago, the narrator reported, among other matters, that the chief character saw in his mind from time to time certain fictional personages whose district was bounded on one side by tamarisk trees. The narrator reported also certain details of what those personages might have seen from time to time in their own minds, but he reported mostly what they might thus have seen while they were concerned with such events as seemed to take place in their own district. If ever the narrator had reported that one or another of the fictional personages was prompted to learn what lay beyond the boundaries of his or her fictional country, then he, the narrator, would have reported that the personage saw in his or her mind a certain green-gold blur that occupied most of the horizon along one side of his or her district.

  For much of the time while I was writing what later became my first published book of fiction, I had in mind a certain dusty backyard in an inland city of Victoria. At the rear end of that yard stood a fence of wire netting. On the far side of the wire netting was the yard behind the house where lived a man who was sometimes described by his neighbours as the mad old bachelor. This man bred a rare variety of poultry known as brown leghorns. The birds were kept in pens and cages while the backyard was used for growing grasses and grains for feeding to the birds. Along the wire netting mentioned earlier was what the owner of the birds called his patch of barley. If ever I myself had written a diary-entry comparable to the diary-entry mentioned above, I might have written that the people of the tamarisks were of a mind to discover the interior of the barley patch.

  During the sixteen years when I was a teacher of fiction-writing, I read many books and articles by writers or about writers, and I collected many hundreds of statements that I thought might be of use to my students. Some of the statements I could hardly understand; others I disagreed with; but I put most of the statements in front of my students so that they might learn more than my own views. One statement that I kept for year after year among my notes but seldom read to the students reported how the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev claimed to have discovered many of the characters that he wrote about. According to the statement, Turgenev first met up with many of the characters while he slept. Certain personages seemed to appear to the writer in his dreams. The personages seemed to importune him; they seemed to beg him to write about them; they seemed to yearn to become characters in his writing.

  During most of the years before I stopped writing fiction, I would have afforded little cheer to any personage who had begged me in a dream to allow him or her into my fiction. I would have tried to explain to the personage that he or she would still be no more than a personage, even if I were to report his or her existence in my fiction. I would have tried to explain that no sort of character could be said to exist in my fiction; that anyone mentioned in my fiction could be never more than a fictional personage, even if he or she might have seemed to resemble some or another person who lived in the place often called the real world or some or another character mentioned in some or another work of fiction. In fairness to myself, however, I might have tried to explain that the state of existence of the personages in my fiction was by no means wretched; that many such personages appeared against a background of mostly level grassy countryside; and that many a personage was the object of my continual curiosity, so that I longed to be on familiar terms with the personage, even if my only means of achieving this might have been the preposterous project of my becoming myself a personage in my own fiction.

  On a certain day while I was trying to write the work of fiction that I would never complete, and while I was thinking confused thoughts about fictional characters and fictional personages and about the scenery where fictional events were reported as taking place and the scenery that might have lain out of sight beyond that scenery—one day, the thought occurred to me that the writer Ivan Turgenev had wrongly interpreted what he had seemed to see while he slept. He was reported as having seen personages pleading to be allowed into his works of fiction, but I wondered whether the writer had mistakenly interpreted the sighs, the groans, and the gestures of the personages. I supposed that Ivan Turgenev had been no less conceited than most writers of fiction. I supposed that he believed the characters in his fiction enjoyed a more satisfying existence than was enjoyed by the lost-seeming wayfarers who had come from he knew not whence in order to trouble his sleep. I then supposed further that the lost-seeming ones were not at all lost; that they stood on the outermost border of their native territory and pleaded with the writer of fiction not to try to write about them but to put away his writing and to join up with them: to become an inhabitant of their far-reaching countries or continents.

  Whether or not I had correctly interpreted Ivan Turgenev’s experience, I was myself much encouraged by my speculations. Now, at last, I might answer with conviction many a question that had for long bothered me. During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction—during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about—not
only in sleep but during those waking moments the strangeness of which can hardly be described by the dreamer, much less suggested by a writer of fiction. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about. Such a character looked often from the region of the text towards that further region or dreamed about it. Such a character, perhaps, remembered often some or another personage who had never left that further region but remained safely there, never mentioned or referred to in any passage of fiction. Now, I might try to glimpse in my own mind some of what might be glimpsed in the mind or remembered or dreamed of but never written about. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction.

  It was never my intention to give a name to the country mentioned in the previous sentence, but a certain name later attached itself to that country. The name seems to me sometimes such a name as a child might devise for an imaginary country. At other times, the name seems connected with certain passages in my own fiction, as though I had sometimes alluded to the country even before I had become convinced of its existence. The name attached itself while I was reading soon after its publication The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, first published in London in 1994 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In that book are many detailed accounts of the so-called imaginary countries written about by the Brontë siblings during their childhood and afterwards. A recurring name in those accounts is Glasstown. The name, of course, denotes a town or a city, but I soon found myself thinking of the name Glassland as though it denoted a country where fictional personages lived in the state of potentiality.