Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  The Boy’s Name Was David

  T he man’s name was whatever it was. He was more than sixty years of age and he spent much of his time alone. He was never idle, but he was no longer in paid employment, and on the most recent census form he had described himself as a retired person.

  He had never thought of himself as having any profession or following any career. From about his twentieth to about his sixtieth year he had written some poetry and much prose fiction, and some of the fiction had been afterwards published. During those same years, he had earned a living by several means. In his forty-first year, he had found a position as a part-time tutor in fiction writing in an insignificant so-called college of advanced education in an inner suburb of Melbourne. His first students were all adults, some older than himself. So far as he could tell, they were not impressed by his credentials or his teaching methods, and he responded by being wary with them and giving away little of himself.

  He had been given to understand that he was only a stopgap; that he would keep his tutor’s position only until the college was able to appoint permanently as a lecturer one or another writer of note: someone whose reputation would lend prestige to the writing course. In the event he, whatever his name was, stayed on for sixteen years. By then, the place where he was employed had become a university and most of his students were not long out of school. How these things came about is no part of this piece of fiction.

  This piece of fiction begins a few years after its chief character had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, and at a time when he sometimes lived through several days without remembering that he had formerly been such a teacher.

  The man of this fiction had no interest in mathematics, but throughout his life he had loved arithmetic. He was fond of calculating such numbers as the approximate total of the breaths that he had drawn since the moment of his birth or of the bottles of beer that he had drunk since the well-remembered day when he had drunk the first of them. He had once arrived at a close estimate of the total length of time during which he had experienced the extremes of sexual pleasure. He daydreamed of quantifying things that had never before been measured. Whenever he was in a railway carriage or a theatre, he wished he could have been free to discover which person from among those present had the keenest sense of smell; which one had been most often frightened of another person; which one had the strongest belief in an afterlife…

  Most of the man’s arithmetical enterprises resulted in estimates only, but in some matters he was able to arrive at exact totals, for he was a diligent keeper of records. Calendars, bank statements, receipts, and such things he stored in his filing cabinets at the end of every year. And in keeping with his love of recording and measuring, he kept precise and detailed accounts of his work as a teacher of fiction writing.

  He was obliged to keep certain records, of course, so that he could award grades to his students at the end of each semester, but he went far beyond this. Not only for his own satisfaction, but also to avoid disputes with students over their grades, he devised and perfected during his first years as a teacher what he supposed must have been a unique means of arriving at a mark (on a scale from 1 to 100) for each piece of fiction that he assessed. His method was to record in the margins of every page of every piece of fiction every instance of his having had to pause in his reading. Whenever he was stopped by a spelling mistake or a fault of grammar; whenever he was confused by a badly shaped sentence; whenever he lost the thread of the narrative; whenever he became bored by what he was reading; at every such time, he put in the margin what he called a negative mark and, if time allowed, he wrote a note to explain why he had stopped and had made the mark. At the foot of each page he put a running tally of the number of lines of fiction that he had so far read and of the number of negative marks that he had made in the margin. At the foot of the last page he set out in full his calculation of the percentage of the fiction that had been free of fault. This percentage figure became the numerical mark for the piece of fiction.

  Of course, it was not only faults in the fiction that might have caused him to stop reading. He paused often from sheer enjoyment of a shapely sentence or from admiration of a thoughtful passage or from a wish to postpone the pleasure of reading further into a passage that promised much. Whenever he paused for reasons such as these he wrote a warm message to the author of the piece, but his method of assessment would have become too complicated even for him if he had tried somehow to have the outstanding passages cancel out some of the negative marks.

  He was always ready and waiting to defend his method of assessment if some querulous student had challenged him over it but no student ever did so, although not a few disputed his comments on particular passages that he had assessed as faulty. For year after year, he went on assigning to hundreds of pieces of fiction percentage marks that claimed to rank the pieces precisely.

  He was not required to keep any details of his assessment after he had sent the final results for all students to the administrative officers of the place where he worked. But being the person he was, he could never think of throwing away even a single page that recorded some of the workings of his mind. At the end of each year, he put into one of his filing cabinets the folders of ruled pages on which were recorded, among other details, the title of every piece of fiction submitted to him during the year, the number of words in each piece, and the percentage mark that he had allotted to the piece. The total of the pieces of fiction was never less than two hundred and fifty, and the total words in all the pieces was never less than half a million. Before he put his records away he would turn the pages, letting his eyes take in the columns of figures showing the percentage mark for piece after piece of fiction.

  As a boy, he had kept pages filled with batting and bowling averages for cricketers; he had pasted into scrapbooks pictures showing the finishing order of field after field of horses in famous races. Always during these months-long tasks, his hope had been that some surprising discovery would be his final reward; that the first columns of figures might prove to have been misleading, or that the horse that seemed likely to be beaten in a close finish had won after all. Fifty years afterwards, he was much more adept at devising games to satisfy his lifelong love of protracted contests and delayed but decisive results. He would have taken care throughout the year not to compare any of the several hundred marks that he had awarded. He knew, of course, which were the dozen or so most memorable pieces that he had read, but he had been at pains never to think of one as better than another. Now, at the end of the year, and six weeks and more after the last student had been seen on campus, he placed a crisp sheet of white paper over each page of his folder of results while he looked at the page. The paper was so placed that he saw only the first of the two numerals of the percentage mark for each piece of fiction. When he looked down any page, he knew only which pieces of fiction had earned ninety percent or more but not which piece had earned the highest mark.

  Of the half-formed images that came into the man’s mind while he scanned the titles of the pieces of fiction with ninety or more marks apiece, he was taken most by a glimpse of the highest-scoring pieces of fiction as the leading horses in an impossible race. On some vast prairie or pampa, hundreds of horses were approaching a crowded grandstand and a winning post. He was fond of dwelling on this image, with its promise of something about to be decided after having been for long in doubt.

  There was more to the exercise described just above than the comparatively simple experience of awaiting the outcome of a decisive event; more even than the more subtle pleasure of admiring the strong claims of each contender and marvelling or regretting that even such claims might be surpassed by the even stronger claims of another and yet another contender. There was also the question – simple for him to pose to himself but perplexing, if not impossible, to answer – what exactly was he thinking of whenever he claimed to remember each of these pieces of fiction? He saw on the page of his folder of pages a title, and sometimes he s
aw beyond this no more than an image that the title had given rise to. (He had always encouraged his students to choose as the title for a story a word or words connected with a central image or a recurring theme in the fiction. He discouraged them from choosing abstract nouns or phrases that related only in a general way to the fiction. Among the titles of the leading pieces, therefore, he was much more likely to see such as ‘Killing Ants’, ‘A Long Line of Trees’, or ‘Six Blind Mice’ than ‘The Request’, ‘Secrets’, or ‘The Tourist’.) Sometimes, other images would appear in his mind following on from the image connected with the title. Sometimes the succession of images was long enough for him to be able to say that he recalled the plot of the piece of fiction or the story. Sometimes he saw, in what he thought of as the background of his mind, an image of the author of the piece of fiction while one or another of the previously mentioned images remained in the foreground. Sometimes, whether or not he had seen in his mind any of the previously mentioned sorts of images, he saw an image of the classroom where he and a group of students had read the piece of fiction and had afterwards discussed it on one or another morning or afternoon of the past year. At such times, he sometimes heard in his mind particular comments from one or another reader or even the distinctive hush that always settled over a class soon after they had begun to read a piece of fiction that was far beyond the ordinary.

  The sort of image that hardly ever occurred in his mind while he read the title of a piece of fiction was the very image that he most wanted to occur. This was the image in his mind of parts of the actual text of the fiction: of a sentence or a phrase, or even of disjointed words.

  As a teacher, he had been fanatical in urging his students to think of their fiction, of all fiction, as consisting of sentences. A sentence was, of course, a number of words or even a number of phrases or clauses, but he preached to his students that the sentence was the unit that yielded the most amount of meaning in proportion to its extent. If a student in class claimed to admire a piece of fiction or even a short passage of fiction, he would ask that student to find the sentence that most caused the admiration to arise. Anyone claiming to be puzzled or annoyed by a passage of fiction was urged by him to find the sentence that had first brought on the puzzlement or the annoyance. Much of his own commentary during classes consisted of his pointing out sentences that he admired or sentences that he found faulty. At least once each year, he told each class an anecdote that he had remembered from a memoir of James Joyce. Someone had praised to Joyce a recent novel. Joyce had asked why the novel was so impressive. The answer came back that the style was splendid, the subject powerful…Joyce would not listen to such talk. If a book of prose fiction was impressive, the actual prose should have impressed itself on the reader’s mind so that he could afterwards quote sentence after sentence.

  The teacher who set such store by sentences, whenever he visualised as the last fifty metres of a mighty horse-race his looking for the piece of fiction that had most impressed him, regretted that he heard so little in his mind. If the images mentioned in a recent paragraph were few enough, the memories of sentences or phrases were fewer by far. He would have rejoiced if he could have witnessed a contest of sentences alone: if he could have repeated aloud to himself even a short sentence from each of the leading pieces of fiction so as to have had in his mind as the race came to an end only such visual images as arose from the remembered sentences. But he seldom recalled a sentence. The blurred and overlapping visual images took over his mind.

  During the first few years after the man, whatever his name was, had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, he remembered some of the images mentioned in the previous few paragraphs of this piece of fiction: the images that had arisen in his mind whenever he had watched the details of an impossible horse-race in his mind. In later years, the man found himself remembering many fewer images than he might have expected to remember. In one of those years, the man began to understand that his failing more and more to remember details connected with more than three thousand pieces of fiction might itself be imagined as the finish of a horse-race.

  The race just mentioned would be the last of all such races to be decided in the mind of the man, whatever his name was. The finish of the race would be very different from the finishes of the races that had been run in his mind at the end of most of his sixteen years as a teacher of fiction writing. In those earlier races, a closely bunched field had approached the winning post with first one and then another likely winner appearing. The last part of this last race would more resemble the last part of a long-distance steeplechase, when all but two or three entrants had dropped far behind. The entrants in the race would be every one of the more than three thousand pieces of fiction that the man had read and assessed while he was a teacher of fiction writing. No, the entrants would be every detail that the man might conceivably have remembered in connection with any of the more than three thousand pieces of fiction that he had read during sixteen years of his life. And the finish of this last race might itself last for a year at least, which would be in keeping with the duration of the whole race, which had already been in progress for more than five years before it came to the attention of the man in whose mind it was being run.

  The man could take his time over this race; could even forget about the existence of the race for days or weeks on end. The less he thought about the race, the fewer contestants might appear in his mind when he next looked out for them.

  At the fictional time when this piece of fiction began, the man, whoever he was, had been aware for more than two years that this last race, this race of races, was being decided in his mind. He was especially careful not to interfere with the fair running of the race. He wanted to give no help to any of the entrants, of which a dozen or more were in his view when he first became aware that they were, in fact, entrants in the most decisive of races. Whenever he looked at the progress of the race, which was only once in every few weeks, perhaps, he merely took note of which entrants were at the front of the field and then turned his attention to other matters, which is to say that every few weeks he asked himself what details he could still call to mind from all the pieces of fiction that he had read during his sixteen years as a teacher. Having asked this question of himself, he waited during an interval of a minute or two and observed the while what occurred in his mind.

  The man thought it would have been unfair of him to give any encouragement to any of the struggling leaders in the race. And so he took care to do nothing that might help to fix in his mind one or another image arising from one or another piece of fiction and might therefore help to unfix one or another image arising from some other piece of fiction. But even though he tried to do no more than observe, his many years as an observer of actual horse-races made it impossible for him not to try to predict the actual winner. He had sat in so many grandstands at so many racecourses and had foreseen the eventual winner in each of so many closely contested races that he could not keep himself from trying to predict the winner of the race in his mind.

  At the time when this piece of fiction began, no more than half a dozen contenders were in sight, and several of these were dropping back. The man who observed from time to time the progress of these stayers towards the finish line was surprised whenever he asked himself why these few and not some of countless other images were still in his view. The man could not remember the experience of reading for the first time any of the words and sentences that had first caused any of these images to arise in his mind. This failure to remember suggested to the man that he had never expected any of the images to remain in his mind long after countless other images no longer appeared in his mind.

  A young Australian man is drinking in a bar in East Africa. He finds himself staring more and more often at two young women of striking appearance, even while his African drinking mate warns him to take no notice of the Somali prostitutes.

  A young woman sits in a small boat in the shallows of a lake on a summer morning. The rest of h
er group are on a sandbar nearby. Among the group are a man who loves the woman and a man she hates. The two men are friends. The young woman is ill from the beer that she drank on the previous night in the company of the two men. At a certain moment while she tries to recall the details of the previous night, the young woman leans over the side of the boat and vomits into the lake.

  A young girl comes home from school and finds, as on most other afternoons, that her mother has spent the day in her room smoking, drinking coffee, and entertaining delusions.

  Late on a summer evening in the 1940s, a girl of twelve or thirteen years tries to explain herself to her mother. A few minutes before, the girl had been playing cricket in the backyard with some boys from the neighbourhood. The girl had often played cricket with the boys. She was known as a tomboy and was innocent of sexual knowledge. During the latest game, she had chased the ball into a shed. The eldest boy had followed her. He had taken out his erect penis and had tried to undo her clothes. The girl’s mother, who might well have been spying on the cricketers for some time previously, had come into the shed. Later, when the girl tried to explain herself, she had seen that her mother thought her partly to blame, even complicit.

  Each of the four previous paragraphs reports details of a central image surrounded by a cluster of lesser images that had arisen from several sentences of one or another piece of fiction. In none of those paragraphs are words quoted from any piece of fiction. For as long as the man who was aware of those images was aware of them, he was unable to quote in his mind from any of the sentences that had caused those images to arise.

  This continued to be a disappointment to the man, whatever his name was. In gloomy moments, he was ready to suppose that he had argued as a teacher of fiction to no purpose when he had argued that fiction was made up of sentences and sentences alone. In those gloomy moments, he was ready to suppose that he had got from the several thousand pieces of fiction he had taught his students to write only a cluster of images such as he might have got if his hundreds of students, instead of writing fiction, had met for a few weeks in his presence and had talked about their memories and imaginings.