A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  On the day mentioned earlier, the older man could recall many of the images that had appeared in his mind late on many an evening after the young man had got up from his card table and had lain in the bed beside the card table and had recalled a certain evening not more than a year before when he had been invited to the house where one of his fellow clerical officers lived with his parents and his younger sister and where he, the young man, had observed often during the evening the face and the body of both the younger sister and her mother. The older man recalled that the young man had decided during the evening mentioned that he would include in the work of fiction that he was then writing a certain two female characters of the so-called middle class or respectable class a mother and a daughter who were hypocrites. The older man could recall in detail many of the images mentioned earlier in this paragraph but of the work of fiction mentioned he could recall nothing.

  Between two pages, each of which was covered with printed words comprising part of a work of fiction, a narrow strip of blank paper appeared. The pages were part of a magazine with a paper cover and of a size supposedly suitable for carrying in a handbag or in a large pocket. The strip of paper was no more than a few millimetres wide and was attached to the spine of the magazine in the same way that the surrounding pages were attached. A boy of fourteen years was holding the pages of the magazine far apart so that he could look more closely at the narrow strip of paper. When he had looked more closely, he saw that the outer edge of the strip was jagged, as though a person had wanted to remove from the magazine as much as possible of the page of which the strip had been a part and had held a pair of scissors so close to the spine of the book that the person was unable to make one continuous cut but had to make successive strokes and to lift the blades away from the paper after each stroke. When the boy had looked more closely still, he saw that the strip of paper was bunched a little at one end and torn a little at the other end, as though the person who had used the scissors had afterwards tried to tear away the strip of paper so that no trace would remain of the page of which the strip had been the inner margin.

  The boy mentioned was sitting in a corner of the lounge room of a house in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The boy lived in the house with his parents and a younger brother. In the corner where the boy was sitting was a bookcase containing about thirty books and perhaps a hundred magazines of different kinds. The boy had read a few of the books and had looked into all of the others. He had read several of the articles in each of the magazines.

  More than fifty years after the boy had sat in the lounge room and had found in a certain magazine the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember from all the words that he had read and from all the illustrations that he had looked at in all the magazines mentioned some of the details of each of two black-and-white illustrations and some of the words from the caption beneath one of the illustrations. The last-mentioned illustration had been printed in one or another issue of a magazine with the title WALKABOUT. The man remembered from the illustration certain details of certain images of young female persons. The persons were members of a group of perhaps ten such persons. Some of the persons had seemed to the boy to be young women and some had seemed to be older girls. More than one of each sort of person had a child standing beside her or resting in her arms or sucking at one of her breasts. Some of the persons were sitting and some were standing but all were facing the camera. Each of the persons wore a piece of cloth in front of her groin but no other covering. At the centre of the seated persons was seated a bearded man who seemed to the boy very old. The boy had often read the caption beneath the illustration of these image-persons, but the man remembered from the caption only that the bearded man had had the title King before his name and that the female persons were his wives.

  The second of the two illustrations mentioned had been printed on the page the innermost margin of which was described in a previous paragraph. The illustration had been of a naked young woman sitting on a narrow expanse of sand in front of an expanse of rock that the boy had always supposed to be the base of a tall cliff beside a small bay or cove. The young image-woman had been sitting in such a way that her groin was hidden from the camera although her breasts were visible.

  The boy mentioned had first seen the image of the naked young woman more than a year before he had found the strip of paper mentioned. When the boy had first seen the image, he had supposed that the pages of fiction surrounding the illustration included a report of the presence in a seemingly deserted bay or cove of a naked young woman. Later, the boy had learned that the pages of fiction reported seeming-events that might have taken place during the nineteenth century in one or another western state of the United States of America. The boy had then concluded that the image of the naked young woman had been printed in the magazine for no other reason than to enable a certain sort of boy or young man in whose mind was often an image of some or another isolated bay or cove beneath tall cliffs – to enable him to see more readily in such a place an image of a naked young woman.

  More than fifty years after the boy mentioned had found the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember no phrase or sentence from any page that he had read in any of the books that were kept in the shelves mentioned earlier. He sometimes remembered, however, a few words from one of the last pages in one of the books and what might be called the import of one of the sentences on that page.

  A certain book on the shelves mentioned had been read and praised by many thousands of persons since its publication in the third decade of the twentieth century, so the boy had learned from the dust jacket of the book during one of the years before he had found the strip of paper in the magazine mentioned earlier. The boy might have set out to read the book if he had not learned also from the dust jacket that many passages in the book reported seeming-events that might have taken place in England or in France or in Belgium during the First World War. The boy chose never to read about soldiers and battles or about weapons and machinery or about bombed houses and ruined landscapes; he preferred to read about unremarkable image-scenery where an image-person not greatly different from himself might have lived a mostly uneventful image-life, going sometimes to an image-race-meeting, looking out always for a young image-woman who might fall in love with him, reading often from one or another book that brought to his mind unremarkable image-scenery and mostly uneventful image-lives, perhaps even writing a work of image-fiction set in unremarkable image-scenery where an image-person not greatly different from himself might have lived…

  Although he had chosen not to read the book mentioned, the boy had looked once into the last few pages of the book. (He would look thus often during the next fifty and more years. Often in some or another bookshop or beside the bookshelves in the house of some or another friend, he would look into the last few pages of some or another book that had been praised by critics and reviewers or had been recommended to him by some or another friend. He did this partly in order to decide whether or not the whole book deserved to be read but partly in the hope of feeling again what he had felt often as a boy: that a book of fiction could not, by definition, come to an end; that what had been created could not be later annihilated; that the image-persons and the image-scenery brought into being whenever a certain sort of reader read what a certain sort of writer had written – that such image-realities must continue their image-existence even though another sort of writer might report long afterwards that they were no longer remembered.)

  The boy mentioned remembered for long afterwards his having learned that the noise of guns sounded to a certain fictional young man during the last minutes before he died a fictional death like the noise of the waves in the bay or cove beneath steep cliffs where he had spent his summer holidays as a boy in the fictional south-west of a fictional England.

  An image of a man and an image of a young woman appeared at the base of a tall image-cliff. These images appeared in the mind of a certain you
ng man while he was sitting beside a campfire at the base of a tall cliff and trying to explain to a certain young woman what he remembered having read in certain passages of a certain book that he considered, so he told the young woman, a neglected masterpiece of English literature. Since the young man spoke as though the image-persons were actual persons, they will be thus described in the following paragraphs.

  The image-cliff was not a bare rocky cliff such as might have overlooked a bay or a seacoast but a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and forming one side of something that was reported in the so-called neglected masterpiece as being a dingle, which word the young man had never looked for in any dictionary, preferring not to have to call into question the images that had first appeared in his mind while he was reading a work of fiction. At the base of the cliff was mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Near one such clump a small tent was pitched. Perhaps ten paces away, near another clump, a second tent was pitched. About halfway between the two tents, a kettle of water hung above a campfire. One of the tents belonged to the man mentioned and the other tent to the young woman mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. Both the man and the young woman were noticeably tall, and the young woman had red hair.

  The man and the young woman had lived in their respective tents since their first meeting, which had taken place several weeks before. At that meeting, the young woman had struck the man but had later made peace with him. During the weeks when the young woman and the man had lived in their tents, they had often taken their meals together or had drunk tea together at the campfire between the tents. At such times, they had debated many matters, and the young woman had sometimes threatened to strike the man. Sometimes, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to learn certain words and phrases in the Armenian language, which the man had learned from books for no other reason than that he felt driven to learn foreign languages. At one time, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to conjugate in several of its tenses and moods the Armenian verb siriel, I love. In the course of this lesson, the man and the young woman were obliged to speak, in the Armenian language, such sentences as ‘I have loved’, ‘Love me!’ and ‘Thou wilt love’. At a later time, beside the campfire, the man proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry at some time in the future and should then go to live in America. At a later time still, the young woman left the dingle without the man’s knowing and did not return. A few days later again, the man received from the young woman a long letter telling him, among other things, that she was setting out alone for America and that she had declined his proposal of marriage because she believed he was at the root mad.

  The young man who was trying to report what he remembered from the book that he considered a masterpiece – that young man was able to remember not only the summary of events reported in the previous paragraph but words and phrases from the supposed masterpiece. Forty and more years later, the older man who had been the young man could recall only an image of a male person and a female person beside a campfire, the male uttering words in some or another foreign language and the female trying to repeat the words.

  The older man was able to remember rather more details of a scene in which a young man and a young woman sat beside a campfire within sight of a tall cliff. At the base of the cliff was the entrance to a cave. The entrance was large enough for several persons to have walked through, but the farther parts of the cave were in darkness. The young woman, who had lived as a child in the district surrounding the cave, had told the young man that the Aborigines who had formerly lived in the district believed that a supernatural being lived in the cave.

  The young man and the young woman had brought what they called a picnic lunch to the bank of the stream that flowed past the cliff and the cave. On the stony bank of the stream, the two persons had made a campfire in order to boil water for tea. Later, they had eaten their lunch and had drunk their tea while sitting on opposite sides of the campfire.

  The young man had never proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry, but it seemed to be understood between them that they would do so during the coming year or, perhaps, the year after. The young man and the young woman lived far apart. He had spent his childhood and his youth in various suburbs of Melbourne but he was now the sole teacher at a small primary school in the district surrounding the cliff that had a cave at its base. She had spent her childhood and her youth in a small town in the district mentioned but now lived in Melbourne with an aunt and an uncle. He and she met only during every alternate weekend, sometimes in Melbourne and sometimes in the small town mentioned. They had few opportunities to be alone together anywhere but in the small motor car owned by the young man.

  The young man and the young woman had long before told one another that they were interested in what they called literature. While they drank their tea on opposite sides of the campfire, the young man went on talking about the book that he had earlier called a neglected masterpiece. He told the young woman that he admired the style of the author of the book, which style had been praised by some commentators as one of the most exemplary prose styles of the nineteenth century. He, the young man, said that he sometimes observed himself falling into the style of the author mentioned while he, the young man, was writing one or another of the long letters that he wrote each week to the young woman. Above all, so the young man said to the young woman, he admired the author mentioned for having written the neglected masterpiece in such a way that no reader or commentator had been able to decide whether the work was fiction or autobiography or a blend of the two.

  When the young man and the young woman had set out on their so-called picnic, the young man had supposed that the site of the picnic would be a place beneath a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and that he and the young woman would make a campfire on mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Having thus supposed, the young man formulated a certain plan. If he could be supposed to have formulated his plan in the style of the writer that he so much admired – the writer of the so-called neglected masterpiece – then the young man could be reported as having decided to take with the young woman, on the day of the picnic, many more liberties than he had previously taken with her.

  The young man had abandoned the plan mentioned soon after the young woman had led him down to the stony bank of the stream with the cave at its base. And yet, after he and the young woman had drunk tea on opposite sides of the campfire, and while they walked together along the stony bank of the stream near the opening of the cave at the base of the cliff, the young man had confided for the first time to the young woman that he had already begun to write what he hoped would be the first of a number of works of fiction that he would write. The young man and the young woman had then debated several matters.

  An image of mostly level grassy countryside appeared in the mind of a man while he was trying to learn by heart a poem believed to have been written a hundred and fifteen years before his birth. In certain image-places in the middle distance or the far distance of the image-countryside, the man caused to appear areas of bare image-soil on which were strewn image-branches and image-twigs, as though a hedgerow or a copse or a spinney or even a line of trees had previously stood in each of the bare image-places but had recently been removed.

  The image-countryside was intended by the man mentioned to represent a certain small district in England where the man who had written the poem mentioned had spent his first forty years before he had been confined in first one and then a second asylum for lunatics during his remaining thirty years. The man learning the poem had read more than twenty-five years before, in a book the title and the author of which he had later forgotten, the claim that the poet’s having been confined for thirty years was in large part the result of the trees’ and the hedgerows’ having been removed during his lifetime from the small district just mentioned. The person making this claim had written in an essay
that the poet had been so attached to the earlier landscape that its destruction had unbalanced his mind. The poet, so the writer of the essay had claimed, had relied on the landscape and the plants and birds and animals living in it to remind him continually of where he was and even of who he was. The man trying to learn the poem had taken this claim to mean that the poet conceived of his own mind as an image-landscape comprising mostly level grassy countryside with image-hedgerows and image-copses and scattered image-trees.

  The man trying to learn the poem thought of his own mind as an image-landscape and had sometimes tried to write one or another poem while he seemed to have one or another detail of that landscape in view. The man, however, had failed as a poet and had even failed somewhat as a man, or so he supposed. He had thus failed because he had never seen clearly enough the details of his image-mind. He had too often speculated about what could have been known only to the personages who lived out their lives behind the windows glinting in the late afternoon near some or another line of distant image-trees: the name of one or another flowering plant or the nesting place of one or another bird among the grass of the mostly level image-countryside.

  The man trying to learn the poem was reminded of his most serious lack whenever he recalled the poet’s supposing often during his later life that he and his wife of twenty and more years had never met and that his close companion was still the girl who had been his close companion during his schooldays and his early youth. The man trying to learn the poem might himself have been accompanied by the sort of image-female who had followed the poet even into one after another lunatic asylum if only hers had not been merely an image-childhood in some or another remote image-place.