A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  During the year before the man stood beside his wife in the cubicle mentioned, he had worked during many a night in a building with glass walls. Sometimes his wife had telephoned him in the building and had cried out to him that she would swallow all her supply of medicines if he did not come home at once and listen to her reports of the plots against her. The man was usually able to persuade his wife to wait until he had finished his work, after which he would return home at once. Once, the man had ended a telephone call while his wife was crying out to him and had declined to pick up the receiver when the telephone had sounded again soon afterwards. Later, his wife had arrived in a taxi at the building with glass walls and had cried out to him through the walls.

  During the last months before the man stood beside his wife in the cubicle mentioned, she had been absent for so long from her place of work that she no longer received salary payments. She no longer dressed or did housework or shopped but kept mostly to her room, sometimes crying out and often smoking cigarettes. After she had ceased to consult her doctors, her husband had himself consulted them and had sometimes telephoned them, but neither doctor would agree to visit his wife in her home. One evening, however, after the man had told one of the doctors by telephone that his wife had already swallowed some of her supply of medicines and was threatening to swallow the remainder, the doctor had advised the man to call an ambulance and to have his wife taken to the emergency department of the nearest public hospital.

  The man standing beside his wife in the cubicle mentioned had expected to go on standing beside her for at least an hour, but his wife’s crying out had seemed to persuade the doctors to deal with her promptly. After his wife had cried out for no more than ten minutes, the man became aware that a young female doctor was standing beside him.

  The man could never afterwards recall the appearance of the young female doctor mentioned, although he recalled that she had seemed to him good-looking. The man recalled afterwards only the surname of the young doctor and her way of looking at him while he explained to her, even while his wife continued to cry out against him, what had brought him and his wife to the hospital. The surname of the young doctor had told the man that her parents had been born in one or another country beside the Baltic Sea. The young doctor’s way of looking at him had told the man that she was alert to the feel of things while she listened to him and then while she signed the page or pages that caused some or another employee of the hospital to arrange by telephone for a police van to arrive at the emergency department and for the two policemen in the van to remove his wife from the cubicle and to confine her, still crying out, in the van and then to take her, still crying out, to a nearby hospital for the so-called mentally ill where she was interviewed, still crying out, by a doctor and afterwards taken, still crying out, to a room that her husband supposed, after he had later seen, through the small window in the door of the room, the upholstered walls and floor of the room, was a padded cell.

  The man aged sixty and more years had never read any sort of report of the fictional events reported in the previous five paragraphs of this work of fiction. Nor did he expect ever to read any sort of report of the fictional events reported in the following paragraph.

  Four husbands and their wives, all of them aged fifty years and more, travelled every year from their homes in various suburbs of Melbourne to a certain city in the south-west of Victoria to attend a so-called three-day racing carnival, on the third day of which was run a famous steeplechase. On one or another evening during their stay in the city mentioned, the husbands and their wives travelled about forty kilometres from the city to a nearby town where they dined and drank in a fashionable hotel overlooking a pier or jetty and a view of the ocean. Each year, while one of the husbands and his wife travelled from the city mentioned to the town mentioned, the husband preferred not to mention to his wife that a certain overgrown cemetery, set far back from the road between the city and the coastal town, contained the grave of a certain man whose wife had been, more than a hundred years before, the postmistress at a certain township a short distance inland and whose daughter had written, long after the death of her parents, a novel comprising three volumes and containing a passage in which a woman trying to care for an insane husband was reported as writing for help to a woman known only by a surname and a place name.

  The seven paragraphs following this paragraph comprise a summary of a portion of a certain unpublished work of fiction. The man who was the author of the unpublished work supposed from time to time after his fortieth year that he remembered the portion summarised below. In fact, the man remembered only certain words and phrases from the work, although he saw clearly in his mind from time to time a series of events or image-events such as had surely occurred to him while he was writing the work.

  A boy aged ten years walked with a dog in an easterly direction across a paddock of mostly level grass during the first hour of daylight on a morning of thick frost during one of the first years after the Second World War. The boy was walking towards a line of trees that reached along one side of the paddock, which was part of a dairy farm where his father was employed as a sharefarmer. The dairy farm was one of many such farms in the district around, which was a district of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees on its eastern boundary. The trees were the nearest trees of a forest, much of which had already been cleared of trees and almost all of which would be cleared before the boy had reached his thirtieth year.

  Most of the dairy farms in the district mentioned had been so thoroughly cleared that no tree remained in any of the mostly level grassy paddocks. However, the paddock where the boy was walking had along its eastern boundary a thick stand of the timber and undergrowth that had formerly covered the whole district. The boy thought of this timber as an outlying island of the forest-continent far to the east.

  While the boy walked towards the stand of timber mentioned, he looked sometimes at a thin column of smoke above the place where the trees and the undergrowth were most dense. The boy had never been to that part of the farm, but he knew that the smoke came from a hut in a clearing there. The hut was the home of the owner of the farm, who was a bachelor aged about forty years. The boy’s father had told him that the owner of the farm had chosen to spend all his adult life in the hut and to allow his sharefarmer to live in the house where the owner’s parents had lived until their death and where the owner had lived as a boy.

  The boy had often seen the owner of the farm, who arrived at the farmhouse on horseback nearly every day in order to confer with the boy’s father. The boy saw nothing in the appearance or the behaviour of the owner that might have explained why he lived as a bachelor in a hut in an island of forest, but he, the boy, often arrived at his own explanation.

  The boy himself liked to be alone among stands of trees or even on mostly level grassy countryside. Whenever he was alone in such places, he felt as though he had been joined by some or another invisible female companion of about his own age who understood his interest in solitary places and in many other matters without his needing to explain himself. The boy sometimes supposed that the owner of the farm was sometimes visited in his hut among the trees and the undergrowth by a sympathetic but invisible female companion.

  The boy hoped that he might one day meet up with an actual female person not unlike the invisible female companion mentioned above. And although he had learned from his father that the owner of the farm lived mostly a hermit’s life and was not known to have travelled out of the district where he had been born and brought up, this did not prevent the boy from supposing that he, the owner, still waited for some or another female person to learn of his existence and to find her way to the stand of timber and the undergrowth and then to the hut in the clearing.

  The reader should remember that the boy mentioned is the chief character of an unpublished work of fiction mentioned in a recent paragraph of this work of fiction. If the author of the unpublished work had read a certain celebrated work of fiction in
the French language, he might have recalled, while he wrote about the matters summarised in the previous two paragraphs, a certain passage reporting some or another personage’s having placed one day on a certain windowsill a certain rare orchid in the hope that the flower on the rare plant might be pollinated if only some other person in the same quarter of the same city had put that day on some or another windowsill a plant of the same rare kind and then a nearby passage reporting the unlikely meeting on the same day of two male characters whose sexual needs, so to call them, were so unusual that they had been hardly ever satisfied but which needs were well satisfied soon after the unlikely meeting.

  The boy and the dog were searching for a cow that was named Stockings for her three white legs on a red-brown body. The cow was known to have calved recently. Cows on the many treeless dairy farms in that district were obliged to calve in mostly level grassy paddocks, but when a cow was about to calve on the farm owned by the bachelor she was free to follow her instincts and to go in among the trees and undergrowth as though to protect her calf from predatory animals. While he approached the nearest of the trees, the boy saw in his mind image after image that had appeared in his mind while he had read, a few months before, a certain book of fiction that had been first published in Sydney eight years before his birth. The chief character of that book was referred to always as the red heifer or the red cow. Towards the end of that book, the narrator reported that the district where the chief character lived with other members of a herd of wild cattle was being cleared of its trees and undergrowth. The boy had hoped while he read that the chief character and the calf that she had recently given birth to might be reported as having found one last stand of trees and undergrowth where she and her calf could survive and where she might even meet up, in the future, with some or another male survivor from the wild herd.

  The matters reported in the previous paragraphs were earlier reported in a long work of fiction that was read by one literary agent and four publishers but was never published. While the long work was being read by one or another of the persons mentioned, the author of the work completed a work of fiction different in many ways from the long work. This work of fiction was published first as a hardcover book and then as a paperback book. A number of reviewers praised the book. Some months after the book had been published, the author of the book was invited to lunch in a fashionable restaurant by the editor of what was often described as a leading literary quarterly. During the lunch, the editor told the author that he was being widely talked about as a rising star among authors of fiction, although the author felt sure that the editor had not read the recently published book. The editor then asked the author if he had anything suitable for publication in his, the editor’s, literary quarterly, as though the author might have had always on hand a variety of works of fiction ready for sending to any editor who might request some or another work. (The author had worked intermittently for nine years on the unpublished work and for four years on the published work.) The author later sent to the editor an edited version of certain passages from the work that had been rejected by four publishers. The passages reported, among other matters, some of the matters reported in earlier paragraphs of this section of this work of fiction. The editor later published the passages mentioned in what was often described as a leading literary quarterly.

  In the mind of a man aged nearly seventy years, a few details appeared of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion. The man waited, but no further image-details appeared to him. He then went on packing the travelling bag that he was going to take with him on a journey that he was obliged to make by railway train to a distant city.

  The image of the young woman had appeared to the man while he was putting into his travelling bag a certain book that he had first read more than twenty years before but had not since read. In earlier years, the man had bought some thousands of books and had read many of them. In more recent years, the man had bought hardly any books and had mostly read books that he had first read many years before. Most of the books that the man had bought and had read were books of fiction.

  The book that the man put into his travelling bag was not a book of fiction but a report by a man who had spent a year and more during the Second World War in a telegraph station recently built by the Royal Navy on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. The book contained perhaps twenty illustrations: small reproductions of black-and-white photographs. Some of the illustrations were of persons who lived permanently on Tristan da Cunha at the time when the author was stationed there, but no illustration was of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion.

  The man about to travel had wanted, many years before, to write a long work of fiction with the title Masthead of the World, which phrase he had found in a long poem the title of which was ‘Tristan da Cunha’. The long poem had been written by a man who had been born nearly forty years before the birth of the man who was about to travel. The poet had spent his early years in South Africa but had almost certainly never seen the island that was the subject of his long poem, according to his most recent biographer. According to this biographer, the poet knew the island of Tristan da Cunha only from photographs or from reproductions of photographs. The man about to travel supposed that one at least of those photographs must have shown the island as it had appeared in the first illustration that he himself had seen of Tristan da Cunha: as a distant conical mountain with its upper parts concealed by clouds. The man about to travel supposed also that the poet must have heard or must have read an account of the roaring noise made almost continually by the ocean against the cliffs beneath the meadows where the houses of the inhabitants were clustered.

  The long work of fiction mentioned above had never been written. The work had been intended to comprise entries from the diary of a man who had lived during all of his life in one or another suburb of Melbourne but who reported the events of his life as though he had lived always on Tristan da Cunha. The man who intended to write the work had made notes for only one section before he abandoned the work. That section would have reported the experiences of the chief character after he had begun to court a certain young woman in the way that the young women were courted by the young men on Tristan da Cunha. Every Friday evening, the young man visited his best friend, a young man who lived with an older brother, a younger sister, and their parents in a house of many rooms in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne. During his first hours in the house, the visiting young man would take part with the father of the family and his two sons in tournaments of ping-pong, darts and carpet bowls. Later, the visiting young man would excuse himself and would sit for an hour and more in the darkened living room, where his friend’s younger sister and their mother sat from seven every evening until midnight watching television programs. The men of the house seldom watched television programs, and so the young visitor was almost always alone with the mother and her daughter during his hour and more in the darkened room. The daughter mostly ignored the young visitor, but he was encouraged by the mother’s sometimes talking to him while some or another advertisement was showing. On Tristan da Cunha, the mother’s engaging him in conversation would have told him that she acknowledged him to be courting her daughter.

  The man about to travel might have said that he remembered a few scenes from the book that he was packing among his luggage. The book, of course, contained no scenes; it consisted of nothing but words arranged in sentences. The few scenes that the man might have mentioned had appeared in his mind while he read and were all set, as it were, in an image-space intended to represent the interior of a certain house on Tristan da Cunha, which interior was not represented by any of the illustrations mentioned earlier.

  Every item mentioned in the following three paragraphs is to be understood as being an image-item.

  A young man who worked by day in a telegraph station on a remote island visited on many an evening a certain house on the island. During most of his time in the house
, the young man sat beside a certain young woman on one of the beds in the house, which comprised a large living area and a smaller sleeping area with a curtain between. While the young man and the young woman sat together, the curtain mentioned was drawn back, so that he and she remained in full view of the persons in the living area, who were the parents and the siblings of the young woman along with one other person. This other person was a young man who had spent all his life on the remote island and who visited on many an evening the certain house mentioned, there to sit silently a little way in from the door in order to signal to the people of the house that he was courting the young woman who lived there.

  During much of his time in the house, the man from the telegraph station helped the young woman to read more fluently. For some years past, the remote island had been without a school, and many of the young persons on the island were hardly able to read or to write. Recently, the chaplain attached to the telegraph station had set up a school and had distributed reading books to young adults wishing to read more fluently. The young woman mentioned above was of all the young adults on the remote island the most eager to read more fluently. On every night when the young man from the telegraph station visited her house, he brought for the young woman one or more reading books and sat beside her while she read them. During most of the time while the young woman read, she and the young man leaned against one another, and their nearer hands were clasped out of sight beneath the bed coverings.