Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  The book that I was reading when I made the decisions just mentioned was a book of fiction that had been reviewed most favourably in the TLS. The author of the book was an Englishman who was himself a reviewer for the TLS. One of his earlier books had been awarded a prize on account of its merit. The book that I had decided not to go on reading had been published by a London publishing house whose distinctive logo was on the spines of many of my books. I had often walked into the room where most of my books were displayed and had tried to look around the room as though I was a visitor seeing it for the first time and had persuaded myself that the first thing such a visitor would notice was the number of books with a certain distinctive logo on their spines.

  After I had written the previous paragraph, I went to one of my bookshelves and took down a book bearing the logo mentioned in the previous sentence. As I reached for the book, I was aware that I had supposed for the past thirty years and more that the logo was an image of an object that I called in my mind an urn with leaves and flowers trailing down from the sides of it. While I looked just now at the logo on the spine of my book, I understood that I had seen for the past thirty years and more as details of leaves and flowers two letters of the alphabet.

  After I had made the decisions mentioned above, I decided not to put the book by the Englishman back in its place on my shelves. I then decided that I no longer wanted to have the book in my possession. I then decided that the book just mentioned was not the only book of mine that I no longer wanted to possess. I then began to look at the spine of one after another of the books that I had read during a period of nearly twenty years before that day. I found those books with the help of the notebook in which I had listed for nearly twenty years all the books that I read and the dates on which I finished reading the books. While I looked at each spine, I tried to remember one or more words from the book or, failing that, one or more of the images that had appeared in my mind while I read the book or, failing that, one or more of the feelings that I had felt while I read the book or, failing that, one or more of the details that I remembered from the mornings or afternoons or evenings when I read the book or from the places where I had been while I read it. If I could remember while I stared at the spine of a book none of the things mentioned just above, then I removed the book from my shelves.

  Some books kept their places on my shelves as a result of my remembering a few words from their texts. For example, I remembered from somewhere in the text of The Good Soldier Švejk, by Jaroslav Hašek, which I had read twelve years before, the phrase ‘on the mournful plains of East Galicia’ and also the Serbian curses ‘Fuck the world!’, ‘Fuck the Virgin Mary!’, and ‘Fuck God!’ Some books kept their places on my shelves as a result of my remembering one or more images that had passed through my mind while I read the books. For example, I remembered having seen in my mind sixteen years before, while I read one or another passage in Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, an image of a walled mansion surrounded by grasslands. Some books kept their places on my shelves as a result of my remembering one or another feeling that I had felt while I read them. For example, I remembered having felt seventeen years before, while I read Auto-da-fé, by Elias Canetti, a desire to write at some time in the future a piece of fiction about a man who preferred his library to all other places. Some books kept their places on the shelves as a result of my remembering one or more details from the time when I read the book or the place where I read it. For example, I remembered having read twelve years before in Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis, a passage reporting the arrival of a butterfly through a window into the room where the writer of the narrative was writing while I was travelling in a train through the suburbs of Melbourne and while the doors and the windows of the train were open because the time was afternoon and the season was summer and while specks of dust were being blown onto the pages of the book in my hands and while I would stop following the narrative from time to time in order to observe the writer’s way of interrupting his narrative from time to time in order to report one or another detail from the time when he was writing or the place where he was writing.

  The exercise described above occupied for more than two weeks the time that I would otherwise have spent in reading books from my shelves. At the end of the two weeks and more, I calculated that I had stood in front of the spines of more than nine hundred books and that I had removed from my shelves a few more than three hundred. When I had begun the exercise described above, I had intended to remove from my house all of the books that I would have removed from my shelves when I had finished the exercise, but when I saw the three hundred lying all around the floor and the many gaps that they had left on the shelves, I decided to give the three hundred one more chance. During the next few days, I picked up one after another of the three hundred and let it fall open in my hands. I then began to read from one or the other of the pages lying open. I read always from about the middle of the page to the end but never past the end. If, while I read, I felt the least desire to read at some time in the future any page or pages of the book other than the page I was then reading, bearing in mind that I had not yet begun to read for the first time many of the books on my shelves and that I had already been reading books for more years than I would be reading them in the future if I lived a life of average length, I would put the book back in its place on my shelves. If I did not feel such a desire, I would put the book on the floor.

  After I had performed the exercise described just above, I counted a few more than a hundred books still on the floor. I then cut my name from where I had written it on the flyleaf of each of these books. I then stacked the hundred and more books in cardboard cartons ready to be removed from the house. I had never previously removed any book from my house. Even duplicate copies were kept in a cupboard to be given in the future to my children.

  While I had been performing the exercise described above, I had intended to take the discarded books to one or another second-hand bookshop and to sell as many as the proprietor wanted to buy and to give him or her the remainder. But when the books were in the cardboard cartons, I imagined a certain sort of young person standing in the future in the bookshop where my discarded books would be on the shelves. The young person would be the sort of person that I had been when I bought on the advice of the young man in Cheshire’s Bookshop a subscription to the London Magazine. After I had imagined the young person in the second-hand bookshop just mentioned, I prepared to take the cartons of books to Fairfield.

  During the years when I had lived in the suburb where I lived, I had taken each week a parcel of wastepaper and cardboard in the boot of my car from my house to the nearby suburb of Fairfield. At Fairfield a chute had been installed at the side of a large paper-manufacturing plant. Down this chute the people from many suburbs around threw their wastepaper. As soon as my children were old enough, they used to go with me on Sunday mornings and help me throw our wastepaper down the chute. I would occasionally hear one of the children say of some drawing he or she had abandoned or of some school exercise book that had been filled that it ought to be taken to Fairfield. For many years, the children would have known nothing else about Fairfield than that wastepaper was dumped there.

  When I dumped at Fairfield the discarded books mentioned above, my children had reached an age when they no longer cared to travel in my car for pleasure, but even if one or both of them had wanted to come with me on the days when I dumped the books, I would not have allowed it. I had decided that the books deserved to be dumped, but I would still not have wanted my children to see books – many of them hard-covered books with brightly coloured dust-jackets – being thrown down the chute at Fairfield. I wrote the word days in the first sentence of this paragraph because I did not dump all of the books together. The chute at Fairfield seems always to have at least one car parked beside it with a person carrying cartons from the car to the dumping-place. I did not want to be seen dumping books. One carton was all that I could safely dump each week without being
noticed. I was even wary of the workmen who came from time to time with forklift vehicles to clear away the dumped matter. If I dumped more than one box of books on any one day, so I thought, I increased the chance of my being seen by some workman who would then leap from his seat on his vehicle and hurry to collect the books in some empty dumped carton and who would hail me as though I must have made some terrible mistake.

  The discarded books mentioned above were the first books that I removed from my shelves, let alone from my house, but I have dumped other books at Fairfield since my first book-dumping there. During the years since then, I have come to expect more from the books that I begin to read. I buy many fewer books than I used to buy. I seldom buy a book for no other reason than that I have read a favourable review of it, and not since the early 1980s have I bought a book simply as a result of having read a favourable review in the TLS. During the last ten years, I have come to expect not only that something of the experience of reading a book should stay with me but that the writing of the book should seem to have cost the writer much effort and that the sentences of the book should seem to have been composed so that the prose is different from the prose of newspapers and magazines.

  The books that I have dumped at Fairfield in recent years have included a few that had been on my shelves for some time until I found them wanting. Occasionally, I have judged books for a literary award and have been allowed to keep my copy of each book entered. Most of the books that have been allotted to me on such occasions have been thrown down the chute at Fairfield. As a teacher of writing, I sometimes receive through the mail an unsolicited book from a publisher whose salespersons suppose that I require my students to read certain texts. Sometimes an author himself or herself sends me his or her latest book. Some of the books that I receive in these ways are taken to Fairfield soon afterwards, although I would never be so harsh as to tell the sender of any such book what I had done with it.

  Nowadays I read fewer books than in past years, and many that I read are books that I have read at least once previously. Nowadays I do not buy a book until I have first looked into its pages.

  I still subscribe to the TLS, but I read in each issue only the few pages that interest me, and I seldom read the reviews of books of fiction. As soon as I have read what I have wanted to read in an edition of the TLS, I throw it into the carton that my wife and I call the Fairfield box. One day recently, a visitor to our house – a man who is an author of published fiction and who has a room full of books in his house – tried to persuade me that I ought to keep each issue of the TLS on some of the empty shelves in the rooms made vacant after my children had left home. After the visitor had left, I tried to remember words that I had read in the TLS during the twenty-eight years since I had first become a subscriber or any other details that I remembered in connection with any passage that I had read in any issue. The following paragraphs report all that I remembered.

  At some time in the late 1960s or the early 1970s, the front page and part of the second page was given over to a review of an edition in either the French or the English language of the diaries of a parish priest who had lived and died in the eighteenth century in the countryside of France. The man had lived an unexceptional life and was seemingly no different from hundreds of other parish priests in the countryside of France in the years not long before the Revolution. However, he had written a diary that was kept in secret during his lifetime but was made public after his death – as he had almost certainly intended it should be. The diary revealed that the man was an atheist who hated the Church whose minister he was. He hated the Church for being, as it seemed to him, an ally of the oppressive nobility. The man who celebrated Mass and prayed for the king each day wrote that he would have spat on the Founder of Christianity if he had existed and that he dreamed of a day when the peasants of France would rise up and kill their tyrannical rulers.

  At some time in the late 1970s, I began to read an essay translated from the French language. I had never previously heard of the author, but I have seen his name in print from time to time since the day when I saw his essay in the TLS. As I write these words I cannot recall the first name of the author. His surname is Derrida. I read only a short way into the essay before finding it incomprehensible. And yet, I have always remembered one sentence: To write is to go in search.

  I cannot remember when I read a certain poem by a poet I had first become interested in during the 1960s: Philip Larkin. The speaker in the poem claimed to work all day and to get half-drunk at night and to wake in the early hours and to understand that he would one day die. I came close to cutting out this poem from the pages of the TLS in the way that I had cut out many items years earlier, as mentioned previously. What kept me from cutting out the poem was its title, which I took to be a word in the French language and which I considered pretentious as a title for a poem. I had never previously seen the word and I cannot recall having seen the word since, even though I may have read the word and even an explanation of its meaning in English in the pages of my copy of one or more of The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, or Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life.

  No more than a year after the death of the critic Lionel Trilling, whenever that event may have taken place, the essay that he had been working on when he died was published on the front page and the second page of the TLS. I can remember thinking while I read Lionel Trilling’s essay that the prose I was reading was clearer than the prose in any essay that I had ever previously tried to read in the TLS. I cannot remember the topic of the essay, but I remember that the writer began by stating that a course he taught at one or another university in the USA was the most popular course among first-year students of literature at the university. The course was on the fiction of Jane Austen, and the writer supposed that the students were attracted to the course because they supposed they would see in their minds while they followed the course the ordered green fields of the English countryside in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.

  I have no way of knowing when I read an essay with the title ‘Woodbine Willie Lives’, by a poet whose surname was Fuller. I remember the article not for its argument but for the details I read in it of an experiment reported in a book I have been too unenterprising ever to find and read, although I have read many references to it: a book by a man named Richards. In the book, so I believe, are accounts of experiments in which undergraduates at Oxford or Cambridge – two places that I have always confused in my mind – preferred from a number of passages of poetry whose authors were not revealed to them the doggerel by the parson nicknamed from the cigarettes that he handed to the troops in the trenches in World War One, even though one of the other authors was William Shakespeare.

  I have no way of knowing when I read in the TLS a review of a biography of a woman novelist whose books were all best-sellers and earned her large sums of money. The writer herself gained little of pleasure or profit from these earnings. She bought a large house in the English countryside when she was still unmarried, but the bedrooms in the house were soon occupied by relatives who depended on her support. In order to support her large household, she had to write for much of the day and night. When she wrote in her study by night, her relatives complained that the noise of her typing kept them awake. In order to spare her relatives, the writer took to writing by night on a card table set up in a bathroom in a distant wing of the house. When she was no longer a young woman, she was courted by a man who had been an army officer in World War One. She married the man, who then retired from whatever he had been doing beforehand and became one more of her dependants. Soon after the marriage, he, the husband, brought to the country house the man who had been his batman during the war. The husband and his former batman persuaded the writer to buy for them a model railway system, which they installed in the grounds of the house. While the writer oversaw the household or tried to write her next book, her husband rode around the grounds on a model locomotive large enough to
carry not only himself but his pillion passenger and former batman, whose name was Gerald.

  The man with his chin in his hands

  On the Monday of the second week after he had begun the final year of his secondary education, my only son, the elder of my two children, washed and dressed and ate his breakfast as though he intended to go to school but remained in his room for all of the morning. I was surprised and concerned, but I did not knock on my son’s door. My son had been a well-behaved child, but for several years he had disliked listening to advice from his parents, and he had politely refused to discuss with his mother or me his choice of subjects for his final year at school or his plans for the future. On the morning just mentioned, I went to the room where I usually did my writing, but I was too anxious about my son to write. For most of that morning I took down from my shelves one or another book and turned a few pages. I had already persuaded myself that my son was going to drop out of school. He had never threatened to do so, and he had obtained high marks in certain subjects throughout his secondary school years, but sometimes a teacher had reported that my son seemed to lack interest in one or another subject, and for some months he had seemed never to have a schoolbook or any other sort of book in his hands. On the Monday mentioned above, my son and I made separate lunches in the kitchen at the same time, but we did not speak. While I was at my desk early in the afternoon, I heard him walking at intervals in and out of the back door. When I believed he was out in the backyard, I looked through the kitchen window and saw him stoking a small fire in the incinerator. I supposed he was burning pages from a diary or letters.