A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  The chief character was reported as first disliking and fearing his employer but later admiring him – disliking him because the boy-men, his employer’s classmates, all disliked him and shunned him; fearing him because he spoke always sternly to the chief character; admiring him because he seemed not to care that his classmates disliked him and shunned him and because he went on reading or writing in his study every evening in such a way that he, the chief character, could never suppose what his employer might have seen in his mind, much less what he might have felt; admiring him also because he trained during many an afternoon for a certain long-distance race conducted by the school and later came from far back in the field and won the race.

  The boy in the classroom mentioned earlier seldom recalled any character from any book. In the books that he read were too many so-called adventures. The characters in those books took part in one after another so-called adventure whereas the boy wanted to read about male and female characters falling in love with one another. The boy himself often fell in love – mostly with girls of his own age but often with young women and sometimes with young men. A few months before he had begun to read for the third or the fourth time about the image-boy-man whose surname was part of the title of a book of fiction, the boy had fallen in love with the girl in whose mind, so he supposed a few months later, was an image of a marble statue. Sometimes the boy wished that he could write books instead of merely reading them. The girl-characters or the young-women-characters in his books would understand why the boy-characters had fallen in love with them, but the boy could never have found the words for writing about such a matter. Nor could he have found the words for writing about boy-characters or young-men-characters who were able to prevent other persons from knowing what images they, the characters, saw in their minds or what feelings those images gave rise to, although he sometimes wished to write about those matters also.

  The boy reading in the classroom wanted to conceal his thoughts and feelings from the girl who was looking into the volume mentioned earlier. A few days before, the boy had given the girl to understand that he had fallen in love with her, but he was still waiting to learn what this had caused the girl to think or to feel.

  When the boy had taken from one of the shelves in the classroom the book about the fictional character whose fictional feelings remained unknown, the girl had taken from another shelf a certain volume of an encyclopedia. The older children knew that the volume contained illustrations of statues of naked men and women. The boy himself sometimes looked at the image-breasts of the image-women and at the smooth image-places between their image-thighs. The boy could not recall the girl’s having previously looked into the volume, but while he was reading that a fictional boy-man sat reading or writing in his fictional study he suspected that the girl was looking at the image-details between the image-thighs of the naked image-men.

  Two patches of dried gum lay on a mostly white page. The patches had formerly held in place a coloured reproduction of a painting. The title of the painting and several other details were still printed at the foot of the page. The man remembering these details could not recall the title of the painting but he recalled that its subject was a group of naked women beside a pool in a large room with a tiled floor and marble columns. The man could not recall any detail of any of the images of the women, but he recalled that he had stared at detail after detail on many an afternoon from his eleventh to his fifteenth year.

  On each of the afternoons mentioned, the boy had found the reproduction mentioned in a book containing numerous reproductions of paintings but only one in which were images of naked women. He had then looked at the images of the women for as long as he had dared before he replaced the book and then reached for the book of fiction that he was presently reading during each afternoon. This book was one or another work by a famous author of fiction who had been born in England one hundred and twenty-seven years before the boy had been born. The boy had first been recommended to read these works of fiction by an aunt who was one of his father’s unmarried sisters and after he had boasted to her that he, the boy, was capable of reading the books that adults read. His aunt had told him that the famous author had not belonged to their church but that his books of fiction would be safe to read. She had then given the boy permission to take down one or another of those books from the tall glass-fronted bookcase in the parlour of the house where she lived with her two unmarried sisters and their unmarried brother.

  The house mentioned was a farmhouse surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside. The view of countryside ended in one direction in a distant line of trees and in another direction in a line of cliffs overlooking an ocean. During each of the years mentioned earlier, the boy had spent several weeks of his summer holidays in the house. During each of those weeks, he had read often from one or another book of fiction by the famous author mentioned and had looked often at the reproduction of the painting mentioned earlier until the day during the summer holidays of his fifteenth year when he had found, on the page where the reproduction had previously lain, only the two patches of dried gum mentioned earlier.

  Thirty and more years after he had found the two patches mentioned, the man who had been the boy mentioned was standing on one of the cliffs mentioned and was trying to remember what he had read about in the many books of fiction by the famous author mentioned, none of which books he had read since the summer holidays of his fifteenth year. The man had brought his wife and their two children to the cliffs during their summer holidays. While the man was standing on the cliff, his wife and their children were scrambling down a steep path into a bay or cove where waves broke against a strip of sand at the foot of the cliff. Before the man had turned to look across the grassy countryside towards the nearest farmhouse and to try to remember what he had read about in the parlour of that house more than thirty years before, he had been pleased to hear his wife and their children calling to one another and laughing on the steep path. During the previous year, his wife had been often ill and had spent several periods in one or another hospital.

  While the man looked towards the nearest farmhouse, there appeared in his mind an image of a sailing ship lying on a reef within sight of cliffs. Tall waves were breaking against the ship, and the wind had torn the sails from the masts. Groups of people were huddled on the deck of the ship. Other people were trying to launch lifeboats. Noticeable among these people was a man who was taller and more enterprising than his fellows and who helped to launch several lifeboats and to guide people into the boats.

  The man standing on the cliff took an interest in the few details that he seemed to remember from books that he had read. He had been trying for some years to complete the final draft of a long work of fiction, although he had excused himself from writing during the previous year on account of his wife’s illness. While he stood on the cliff, he seemed about to learn something that would be of much use to him as a writer of fiction but he was not observant enough to notice such a detail in his mind as that the image of the wrecked sailing ship in his mind was not an image of any sort of nineteenth-century vessel. Not until twenty years later would the man notice that the details of the imageship were those of a line drawing of a Portuguese caravel from the fifteenth century. The man knew hardly anything about any sort of ocean-going vessel, but in his twelfth year he had copied into a school exercise book as part of a so-called project a line drawing of a caravel. As part of the same so-called project, he had searched several pages in his atlas for places bearing names that seemed to be Portuguese. One such place that he found was the island named Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean, which island his teacher had not previously known about and which she supposed at first to be a fictional island in some or another book of fiction that the boy had read.

  Sometimes while the man saw in his mind the image of the foundered ship, he saw also indistinct images of persons struggling in the ocean or being swept onto the shore. Some of these images may have first appeared to the man whi
le he had read, more than thirty years before, some or another book by the famous author; others of the images may have first appeared while he had been reading a certain book about shipwrecks on the south-west coast of Victoria. This book had been recommended to him by one of the sisters of the woman who had recommended the works of fiction by the famous author. The sister, who was, of course, another of the boy’s aunts, had recommended especially the chapter in the book reporting the wreck of a certain vessel, sixty years before the boy’s birth, in a small bay beneath tall cliffs about thirty miles from the farmhouse where the four unmarried siblings lived. The wreck of this vessel was famous, so the aunt told the boy, because only two persons had survived it: a young apprentice seaman and a young female passenger. The young seaman had saved the young woman from drowning, and their story was later reported in newspapers in Australia and England. According to the aunt, many people expected that the two young persons would later marry, but they went their separate ways.

  On every night that he spent at the farmhouse, the boy heard before he fell asleep the sounds of the ocean in the bay or cove beneath the nearby cliffs. After he had read the chapter about the famous wreck, he saw often before he fell asleep images of a young man and a young woman whom he had dragged to shore and whom he had carried from the beach to a cave under a tall cliff where he had laid her down before going in search of grass and bunches of foliage to cover her and to keep her warm, all the while averting his eyes so that she might later fall in love with him because he had behaved differently from many another young man who would have stared at her nakedness.

  While the man mentioned earlier was going down from the cliffs to join his wife and their children in the bay or cove, an image occurred to him of the corpse of a tall young man lying on a beach with a wrecked vessel in the background. The head of the image-corpse rested on a folded arm in the same way that the head of the young man, during his life, had rested often before sleep. When the man had first read, as a boy, the passage that had given rise to one of the very few images that would survive from among the countless images that occurred to him while he read the works of the famous author – when the man had first read about the folded arm of the corpse, he was far from wondering at the skill of the author of the passage, who had not needed to name the corpse but had merely reported the detail of the folded arm, after which every reader of the passage would have known the name. Instead, the boy had lain before sleep for many weeks afterwards with his head resting on a folded arm from a wish to acquire one of the distinctive qualities seemingly possessed by characters in works of fiction.

  A young man was using a sliver of a blade from a safety razor to cut around the margins of a rectangular illustration of the size of a postage stamp. The illustration was of a bald man of middle age. The young man intended to remove the illustration from the page of the book where it had been printed and then to place his right hand over the illustration and then to slide it across the page and then to slip it between the pages of an opened exercise book lying beside the book where the illustration had been printed.

  The exercise book belonged to the young man and was almost filled with handwritten notes that he had made during the previous few months from the book beside it. This book, which comprised more than six hundred pages, belonged to the State Library of Victoria, and the young man had to take care that his removing the illustration would not come to the notice of a man of middle age who wore a grey dustcoat and who sat in a high wooden structure that reminded the young man of a pulpit in some or another cathedral and who looked continually downwards at the many tables radiating outwards from beneath him and at the many persons who were seated at the tables and who had books in front of them.

  The illustration of the bald man was the last of four illustrations that the young man had cut from the book in front of him, the title of which was TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUTHORS. The contents of the book were short accounts of the lives and the published works of hundreds of writers from many countries. At the head of each account was a small black-and-white reproduction of a photograph of the writer concerned. On every weekday during the previous two months, the young man mentioned, who worked as a so-called clerical officer in a state government department, had visited the State Library during his lunch hour and had read from the book, the contents of which were arranged in alphabetical order according to the surnames of the authors. The first of the four illustrations mentioned was of a man with long black hair and a full black beard and had been removed by the young man from the very early pages of the book. The second illustration was of a man with short blond hair and had been removed from the middle pages of the book as had the third illustration, which was of a man wearing a patch over his left eye. The fourth illustration came from the last pages of the book.

  Several weeks after the young man had removed the four illustrations, and several days after he had moved from his parents’ house to a cabin or shed that was called by its owner, the young man’s landlord, a self-contained backyard bungalow, he, the young man, took out the illustrations from the envelope where he had stored them and fastened them with adhesive tape to the wall above a card table in a corner of the so-called bungalow. The young man intended to use the card table as his desk for as long as he lived in the bungalow and to write there during evenings and at weekends the first of the works of fiction that he intended to write. The young man intended to search in bookshops during his lunch hours for one after another of the published works of the four men whose images were on the wall, and then to buy those works and to read them closely. Often afterwards while he sat at his card table, so the young man hoped, he would look up at one or another illustration, would remember something of what he had read in the book from which he had cut the illustration, would remember also something of what he had read in one of the published works mentioned, and would then be enabled to write some or another passage of fiction that he could not otherwise have written.

  On a certain day in the forty-eighth year after the young man had fastened to the wall of the so-called bungalow the four illustrations mentioned, and when the older man who had previously been the young man had long since stored in some of the hanging files where he stored such things both the illustrations and the few pages on which he had written the beginnings of the few abandoned works of fiction that he had written during the year and more when he sat from time to time at the card table beneath the illustrations – on that day, the older man learned that he could recall from the illustrations only black image-hair and a black image-beard from the first, no image-detail from the second and not even the name of the subject of the illustration, a black image-eye-patch from the third, and a bald image-head from the fourth. Once having learned these facts, the man decided to report them in a work of fiction that he was then planning to write. Soon afterwards, he decided to report in the same work the following facts.

  The man could no longer recall whether or not he had read any work of fiction by the writer whose appearance and whose name he could no longer recall.

  The man could recall no phrase or sentence from the one work of fiction that he could recall having read from the works of the writer with the black hair and the black beard. However, the man could recall that his reading of the last page of that work had caused to appear in his mind an image of a man walking alone across mostly level and treeless grassy countryside. The man seemed to recall also that the image-man walked boldly and resolutely even though he could not have known his whereabouts in the mostly level and treeless image-countryside that surrounded him, given that he had stepped down impulsively not long before from a railway train that was travelling across a vast country in which were countless districts of mostly level and treeless grassy countryside.

  The man could recall no phrase or sentence from the one work that he could recall having read by the man with the bald head. Nor could the man recall any image that had appeared in his mind while he was reading the work.

  The man could recall two short passa
ges from the one work that he had read from the works of the man with the eye-patch. The man seemed to recall a number of images that had appeared in his mind while he had read the work, but he suspected that these images had appeared some years later while he was reading a biography of the man with the eye-patch. The two short passages are:

  A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?

  BLOOM: (Darkly) You have said it.

  and

  BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.

  The man could recall nothing of what he had learned about the man with the black hair and the black beard from the book where the four illustrations had been printed. He could recall his having learned from that book that the man whose name he could not recall had spent all of his adult life in a small town on a narrow grassy plain with an ocean on one side and with forest-covered mountains on every other side. He, the man, could recall his having learned from the book mentioned that the man with the eye-patch had dressed conservatively but had worn several rings on his fingers. (After he had recalled this, the man had recalled also that he himself, soon after he had learned about the several rings, had begun to wear a ring with a rectangle of black onyx set in nine-carat gold.) He could recall his having learned that the man with the bald head had claimed to believe that the greatest good available to any person was sensual pleasure; that the man had claimed to despise as hypocrites the persons of the so-called middle class or respectable class who claimed to believe otherwise; and that the man claimed that he wrote in order to prove his claims. Finally, the older man could recall that he himself, during the year and more when he had lived in the so-called bungalow, had claimed to believe what the bald-headed man had claimed to believe and had even tried to write fiction in order to prove his claims.