Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  During the early 1970s, I earned my living as an editor of technical publications in what was called in those years a semi-government authority. I had been promoted a number of times in a few years, and my salary was a good deal more than that of the average man of my age. My wife was not employed during the early 1970s but cared full-time for our two children, and yet we lived comfortably from the one income and continued to reduce the mortgage on our house. While I sat in the cinema with my wife beside me and our car in the car park nearby and our two children in the care of a baby-sitter in our neat home, and while I watched certain images of the thin, dark man who lived in an abandoned building and earned no income, I remembered the place where I had lived during certain weekends of a certain year in the late 1950s.

  During the year just mentioned, I was in the second year of a course for a bachelor of arts degree and was enjoying free tuition and a living allowance as a bonded student of the Education Department of Victoria. I had only to finish my degree and a year-long diploma of education afterwards in order to become a secondary teacher with a secure career and a comfortable income. At some time during the year just mentioned, I decided that I wanted to be not a secondary teacher but an author of books of fiction. For some time during that year, I had been reading instead of the texts set for my course books of fiction by writers I admired and biographies of writers of fiction who had not earned regular incomes but had lived as bohemians or had worked occasionally at menial jobs. After I had decided to be an author of books of fiction, I no longer attended lectures but wrote fiction each day in the reading room of the State Library. At that time also I began to drink beer, my chief reason being that I wanted to spend each Friday evening in a hotel in Melbourne where, so I had heard, a group of bohemians gathered in a certain bar. One of the men I met in this bar worked in a bookshop by day but wanted to become the owner of a small press and to publish what he called avant-garde writings. This man had bought with a legacy from his dead father a small property north-east of Melbourne in a district that was also, so I had heard, inhabited by groups of bohemians. The property had been at one time a farm and orchard, but when its owner first took me there, the fruit trees were overgrown and the paddocks were full of long grass. The house was dirty and decayed, but the owner slept and ate in the back rooms at weekends and had begun to clean and restore the house and to set up his press in one or another room. On my first visit to the property, I decided to flee from my contract with the Education Department at the end of that year, when my failure as a student would have become known, and to live for the rest of my life in a certain shed that I had noticed a short distance from the house. The shed was full of junk and dirt and cobwebs, but in one wall was a window overlooking several paddocks of grass. I intended to clean and restore the shed and to spend my days there, writing fiction. Until such time as my fiction had been published and was earning money for me, I would support myself by working from time to time as a casual labourer.

  During many of the weekends in the later months of the year when I first decided to be a writer of fiction, I worked at cleaning and restoring the shed mentioned above. For some time, I would not tell the owner of the property that I intended to live for the rest of my life in his shed. I believe I was afraid that even he, who often said he wanted the output of his press to shock bourgeois society, would have tried to stop me. Perhaps my not telling the owner of the property was in some way the result of my supposing him to be a homosexual, although he had never seemed interested in me as a sexual partner. I have never been able to remember certain events from the last weeks of that year. Sometimes, when I have to explain to someone the reason for my having been first a university student and then a primary teacher and later a part-time university student and later again a graduate and an editor, I say that I had some kind of crack-up when I first went to university. I speak as though I had merely become exhausted by hard work, but from what I remember, I had decided to give up everything for the sake of being a writer of fiction. During the evening when I watched on a screen in a cinema images of the thin, dark man shivering from cold in an abandoned building, I saw an image of myself in the shed beside the paddocks of long grass. The image of myself was sitting at a crude desk and was writing. I could see nothing else in the image of my surroundings except for shelves of books.

  During the years when I worked first as a primary teacher and later as an editor, I went on writing fiction in the evenings and at weekends. On a certain day in a certain year in the early 1970s, which year would have been only one or two years after I had seen in a cinema the image of myself reported in the previous paragraph, I sent for the first time to a publisher a body of fiction that I had finished writing. A few weeks afterwards, an editor telephoned me from the offices of the publisher just mentioned. The editor told me that the body of fiction I had sent to her employers would be published as a book of fiction during the following year. One of a number of things that I did as a result of hearing this message from the editor of fiction was to persuade my wife to become again what she had formerly been: a full-time teacher in a private secondary school. Another thing that I did was to resign from my position with the semi-government authority and to become a full-time writer of fiction. I assured my wife at that time that if I failed to earn enough money in the future from my writing, I could always work as a freelance editor for my former employer and for other similar employers. Soon after I had resigned, the money that I had paid for some years past into a superannuation scheme was refunded to me. I used much of the money to buy a new desk and nearly a hundred books—most for myself but some for my children.

  At some time during the late 1980s, after I had begun the practice of dumping at Fairfield books that I considered unfit to be read but when I could still not find a place on my shelves for every book that I wanted to keep, I decided that I owned a number of books not so unfit for reading that I ought to dump them at Fairfield but not of such interest to me that I would read them during my lifetime. I thought of these books as being suitable for me to pass on to someone who might find them more interesting than I found them. When I tried to decide which person or persons I might pass the books on to, I saw an image in my mind of a small, thin boy with a book in his hands. I understood that this was an image of one or another of my grandchildren, although my children were at that time still in the last years of secondary school. From that time on, I thought of a certain sort of book that I owned as deserving to be kept for my grandchildren.

  Soon after I had decided that some of my books ought to be set aside for my grandchildren, I decided that I would store those books in the space between the ceiling and the roof of my house. I bought a few cheap planks from a timber yard and placed the planks across the timbers that ran above the ceiling of my house. I understood that the space where I was going to store the books for my grandchildren contained much dust, and so I wrapped each book in a plastic bag. I stacked the wrapped books in a cardboard carton and climbed with the carton up through the manhole in the ceiling of my house. During a period of several weeks, I stored three cartons of books in this way. My son and my daughter noticed me storing the first of the cartons, and I told them that the space above the ceiling was a convenient storage place for the things that they no longer used but did not wish to discard altogether. While I was storing the third of the cartons of books for my grandchildren, I saw three cartons that I had not previously seen in that place. I looked into the cartons and saw in each some of the books that I had bought for my son since the year when he had been born.

  The title of this section of this story is part of the last line of a poem by Philip Larkin with the title “A Study of Reading Habits.” As each year of my life has passed, I have become more interested in the workings of my mind. In recent years, I have come to believe that I might learn all of meaning that I could ever need to learn if only I could learn why I remember certain images and forget other images. At some time in the past, I would have read a certain poem by Philip La
rkin. At some time while I was writing the notes and the early drafts of this story, I would have heard in my mind the words quoted at the head of this section of this story and would then have decided to use those words as the title of this section of this story. Several days ago, while I was preparing to write the final draft of this story, I found in my copy of The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite and published in 1988 by The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber Limited, the complete text of the poem that contains the words that appear at the head of this section of this story. I read the poem slowly and got a certain amount of meaning from it, but a few hours after I had read the poem I could remember nothing of this meaning and none of the words of the poem except for the words at the head of this section of this story.

  Welcome to Florida

  During a certain year in the early 1980s, when my children were in their earlier years at secondary school, I came to understand that I could no longer go on staying at home by day and writing fiction and working occasionally as a freelance editor. If my children were to complete their secondary education and to go on to tertiary education, so I came to understand, then I would have to go back to working at a full-time job.

  I did not want to go back to work as a teacher or an editor and to find myself being supervised by persons who were my juniors when I had last worked full-time. I applied for a position as a security officer at a large private hospital in a nearby suburb. My application had to be accompanied by character references, and one of the persons I asked to write on my behalf was a man who had been my assistant ten years before when I had worked as an editor but who was now himself the chief publications officer in the administration of a college of advanced education. This man told me to tear up my application for the position of security officer and to apply for the position of lecturer in creative writing that had recently been advertised in the institution where he worked.

  I had learned from books of fiction and from certain references in articles in the TLS that creative writing was taught in universities in the USA, but I had not supposed that a person might earn a living as a teacher of creative writing in Australia. And yet, I earned my living for more than ten years by writing detailed comments in the margins of pages of fiction written by my students, by conferring with one student after another in my office, and by acting as chairperson during sessions when a class would read and then discuss a piece of fiction by someone from that class. In time, the institution where I worked became part of a university. As a member of a faculty of a university, I was asked each year to report on the number of conferences I had attended and the number of keynote addresses I had delivered and the number of research projects I had obtained funding for and the number of articles I had had published in refereed journals and the number of consultancies I had engaged in. I answered each such question by writing NIL in letters of a modest size and I returned each list of questions promptly to its sender and hoped I might be allowed to go on for a few more years teaching from February to November the eighty students who enrolled each year in my course and writing fiction from November to February. I hoped I would be able to resign from my position soon after my children had finished their tertiary education and had found secure positions. After the year in the early 1980s when I began to dump certain books at Fairfield, I looked forward to undertaking during my retirement the tasks described in the following paragraph. As a younger man, I had supposed that I would spend my retirement buying and reading new books and adding them to my collection and erecting new shelves and dusting the rows of books on the many shelves in the several rooms that I had filled with shelves of books and sometimes, of course, reading again a book I had read previously; but after I had taken my first load of books to Fairfield, I foresaw differently my reading and writing in the future.

  After I had retired from full-time work, so I supposed, I would examine continually the power of each of the books on my shelves. I would do this by the means described earlier in this story, but during my retirement I would have time to be more thorough and more stringent.

  During my retirement, I would test each book once each year. Once each year, I would stand in front of the spine of each book and wait to see in my mind some of the images that had first appeared there when I had read the book. No other sort of image would save a book as some books had been saved when I had first tested them in the early 1980s. On the other hand, I was not going to dump at Fairfield every book that failed my test. I would simply banish the failed books from my shelves. Many of the banished books would be worth considerable sums of money and, to be fair, some of the books that I had read only once in the early 1960s, when I had first begun to read books continually, were at a disadvantage, having been closed for many years longer than books read in more recent years. (Or, the opposite might have been true if my mind had been more impressionable in early years.) I would keep the failed books wrapped in plastic in cartons in the space above the ceiling or, if that space became crowded, in a spare room of the house.

  I looked forward to my retirement whenever I thought of the work I was going to do with my books. If, as I believed, those persons lived longest who had large or never-ending tasks to occupy them, then I was assured of a very long life. I could foresee no end to my task. For as long as I was alive, I would remember something at least from each of a small number of books. My life would have been one continuous experiment as to the worth of books. Of course, I would record in writing the results of the experiment. Readers of what I wrote might learn even before my death the comparative value to me of my best-remembered books or the comparative value of particular passages within one or more book. Or, a reader of my writing might study not the books but the man who partly remembered them. What sort of man, such a reader might ask, would remember this rather than that passage from this or that book? (If I had remembered wrongly, which is to say if I had believed one or more images in my mind to be connected with a book whose text seemed to another reader incapable of giving rise to such an image or images, then a reader of my writing would have a rich subject for study.) I need not write mere reports. I should be able to find connections between some of the images that I connected with separate books. I should be able, perhaps, to write one last book by connecting what I had retained from a lifetime of remembering images connected with my books. My last book would be a book of books: a distillation of precious imagery, and if I was able to arrange that the last page or the last paragraph was written on the last day of my life, then I would have advanced an argument that would remain forever indisputable; I would have pointed to my own life as evidence of the supremacy of one or another book.

  In certain moods, I foresaw the end of my life as being the opposite of what is reported above. As a result of one decisive event in my life, or, perhaps, as the end of a long and gradual process, I would turn away from books, never to be reconciled. I might leave the shelves standing in my house and the first editions and other valuable titles in place as part of my legacy for my children, but I would never again open the covers of a book. I would find other tasks to keep from my mind all thought of books or the images they had formerly given rise to. But even if I spent my retirement thus, I would still learn, even against my will, much about the books I had spurned. I could not help but notice, year after year, as I tried to forget whatever I had thought as a result of my reading, that some images remained with me long after other images had gone: that some books were harder to forget than other books. And when I thought of this sort of future for myself, I observed something that always surprised me. The act of writing was not so closely linked to the reading of books as I had for long supposed. Even as an aged book-hater, I would still be capable of writing. I might write a book about my efforts to remove all traces of books from my mind. I might even write a book containing no evidence that I had ever remembered having read a single book.

  During the first two weeks after my son had told me about the carton of books that had been delivered to the man with t
he chin in his hands, I waited each afternoon to hear that the man had returned to work and seemed much recovered or that he had been admitted to hospital after having become much more ill or that the kindly man and my son had called again at the flat in Fairfield and had found the man with his chin in his hands no better and no worse than before. If I had heard from my son on any afternoon during the two weeks just mentioned the third of the reports mentioned in the previous sentence, I would have hoped to hear as part of the report that the man with his chin in his hands had returned the carton of books to the kindly man, saying as he returned them that he very much appreciated the loan of the books but that he preferred to watch films and other programmes on his mother’s and his television set and video recorder rather than read books.

  During the two weeks mentioned in the previous paragraph, I often saw in my mind sequences of images more vivid and more detailed and more apt to recur than any sequence of images that I could remember having seen as a result of any book that I had read recently. Each sequence of images appeared as though on a screen in a cinema in my mind, but while I watched the images I felt as though I was writing certain passages of a book in my mind and as though each passage in the book would drive out of my mind each image from the film in my mind.

  On the screen in my mind, the mother of the man with his chin in his hands held her son in her arms on the day when he had been born. The mother admired the body of her son and saw in her mind an image of her son as a tall, strong man.