A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  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 her 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.

  But the man could always put an end to his gloom by looking along the far-reaching home-straight of the vast racecourse in his mind and observing a fifth contender for the Gold Cup of Remembered Fiction. As a racing commentator might have said, this contender was going strongly – as strongly as anything else in the field. The man in whose mind this fifth contender had arisen and who could not keep himself from trying to foresee the outcome of any race-in-progress, this man foresaw that the finish might be, in the language of racing commentators, desperately close, but he foresaw that the fifth contender would be the winner at last.

  The fifth contender was a sentence: the opening sentence of a piece of fiction. A few vague images hung about the man’s mind whenever he heard the sentence in his mind, but they meant little to him. The man was not even sure whether the images had arisen when he had first read the fiction that followed on from the opening sentence or whether he had imagined them, so to speak, at a much later date. The man seemed to have forgotten almost all of the fiction except for the opening sentence: The boy’s name was David.

  Whatever else the man might have forgotten from his experience of reading the fiction that followed on from the sentence just above, he had not forgotten the exhilaration that he had felt as he read the sentence for the first time; and he recalled the substance of the long message that he had written to the author of the fiction as part of his, the teacher’s, assessment of the piece; and he recalled the substance of the comments that he had later made to the class where the fiction was read and discussed.

  The boy’s name was David. The man, whatever his name was, had known, as soon as he had read that sentence, that the boy’s name had not been David. At the same time, the man had not been fool enough to suppose that the name of the boy had been the same as the name of the author of the fiction, whatever his name had been. The man had understood that the man who had written the sentence understood that to write such a sentence was to lay claim to a level of truth that no historian and no biographer could ever lay claim to. There was never a boy named David, the writer of the fiction might as well have written, but if you, the Reader, and I, the Writer, can agree that there might have been such a boy so named, then I undertake to tell you what you could never otherwise have learned about any boy of any name.

  This and much more the man, whatever his name was, had understood from his first reading of the first sentence of the piece of fiction by a man whose name he soon afterwards forgot. And in his comments on that sentence the man, so he had thought at the time and for long afterwards, had come as close as he would ever come to explaining the peculiar value of fiction and why persons such as himself devoted much of their lives to the writing and the reading of fiction.

  During a lifetime of watching horse-races or televised images of horse-races and of listening to radio broadcasts of horse-races, the man mentioned often in this fiction but never named had seen a comparatively small number of a sort of finish in which the eventual winner had not been considered even a likely placegetter a short distance from the winning post. Racing commentators described such a winner as having come from nowhere or from the clouds or from out of the blue. The man liked this sort of finish above all other sorts. Even if he had lost money on one of the beaten horses in such a finish, he could later appreciate the complex interplay of feelings that the last part of the race and, at the very last, the finish of the race had caused to occur in the minds of the persons interested in the race.

  Finishes such as those described just above were rare enough in races over shorter distances and almost unheard of in long-distance races. In those races, the leading few usually remained in the lead during the last phase of the race, the rest having tired and fallen far behind. But the man of this fiction had seen occasionally a group of leaders unexpectedly tire and falter near the end, and an unthought-of horse arrive ahead of them. And towards the end of the race mentioned most often in this piece of fiction, the man became aware of the arrival on the scene, as a racing commentator might have said, of a previously unthought-of contender.

  Perhaps ten years before the fictional time when this piece of fiction began, the man most often mentioned in this piece had been in his office on a cold, cloudy afternoon during the mid-year break between the first and second semester. Few students were on the campus. This was one of the few periods of the year when the man could sometimes read or write fiction for several hours without interruption. Then, while he was reading or writing, the man was visited, as he was liable to be visited at any time during the year, by a person who had heard about his course and wanted to learn more about it before applying to enrol.

  The person visiting was a young woman. Something about her made him feel warmly towards her at once, and what she told him made him feel even more so, but he tried to deal with her in the same calm and courteous way in which he tried to deal with all his students. He and
the young woman talked for perhaps twenty minutes, after which time they farewelled each other and the young woman went away. At the time when the man supposed that an important race in his mind was approaching its end, he had never seen the young woman or had any communication with her since the cold and cloudy afternoon when she had visited him in his office, perhaps fifteen years before.

  Most of what the young woman had told the man is no part of this piece of fiction. The reader needs to know only that the young woman had not long before been disowned, as she expressed it, by her parents because she would not follow some or another career or profession. She had then left her parents’ house in a northern state of Australia and had moved to Tasmania and had found employment as an assistant to the chef in a fashionable restaurant. Only recently, so she explained to the man in his office, the chef in the fashionable restaurant, together with his wife, had invited her to join them in establishing a restaurant of their own with all three of them as partners. The young woman had been flattered by this offer, so she told the man in his office, but she had not yet accepted it. She was unable to think of herself as having any career or profession. For some years past, she had wanted to devote herself to writing fiction. She had heard of the fiction-writing course conducted by the man, and she had travelled from Tasmania on that cold and cloudy afternoon to learn more about the course and to help her chances of gaining entry to the course.

  The man, whatever his name was, remembered perhaps fifteen years afterwards only a summary of the advice that he had given to the young woman, whatever her name was, after she had reported to him what was summarised in the previous paragraph. The man remembered that he had told the young woman that he would never advise any person to give up the opportunity to follow some or another career or profession so that the person might write fiction; that she ought to go back to Tasmania and to become a partner in the establishing of the new restaurant; but that she ought to write during the next few months a piece of fiction. If she wrote such a piece of fiction, so the man told the young woman, and if she sent the fiction to him during the next few months, he would read it at once and would tell her soon afterwards in writing whether or not he had been impressed by the fiction. If it happened that he had been deeply impressed, so the man said, then she might with good reason apply to enrol in his writing course.

  During the months following the cold and cloudy afternoon mentioned above, the man would sometimes note, while he was opening his mail in his office of a morning, that none of the envelopes seemed likely to have been sent from Tasmania and to contain the typescript of a piece of fiction. During the years following the afternoon mentioned, the man would sometimes recall one or another moment from the afternoon.

  The man had never been able to recall clearly the appearance of any person. What he recalled were what he called details connected with the presence of the person. What he recalled in connection with the young woman who had visited him from Tasmania was the earnest tone of her voice and the paleness of her complexion and a wound on her wrist that he had found himself often staring at during their interview. Down the side of her pale left wrist was a long mark made, he supposed, by a knife that had slipped while she worked as a chef. A scab had formed over the wound, but a narrow zone of red remained around the scab.

  During the years when he was a teacher of fiction writing, the man of this fiction had read aloud to his students and had urged them to consider many hundreds of statements by writers of fiction or anecdotes about those writers. In the years after he had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing the man had forgotten most of those statements and anecdotes, but he sometimes remembered having told one or another class that the writer Flaubert had claimed, or was reported as having claimed, that he could hear the rhythms of his still-unwritten sentences for pages ahead. Whenever the man had told this to a class, he had hoped to cause his students to reflect on the power of the sentence over the mind of a certain sort of writer; but he, the man, had often supposed that the claim, or the reported claim, by Flaubert was much exaggerated. Then, about five years after he had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, and while he was watching in his mind the last part of what he sometimes called the Gold Cup of Remembered Fiction, he recognised that a previously unthought-of contender in that race was a sentence as yet unwritten.

  If the man had had an ear for sentences as acute as Flaubert had had, or was supposed to have had, he, the man, might have heard in his mind the rhythm of the sentence mentioned above long before it had joined in with the other contenders in the race in his mind. But the man could hardly claim that he heard the rhythm of the unwritten sentence in his mind even while he was aware of the sentence as a late contender in the race. What the man might have claimed instead was that he was aware of what he might have called details connected with the meaning of the sentence. While the still unwritten sentence seemed about to claim the leaders, as a racing commentator might have said, the man in whose mind the race was being run was still unaware of the meaning of the unwritten sentence. But the man was aware that the meaning would be connected with the greenness of the island of Tasmania in his mind, with the white and the red of skin marked by a knife in his mind, and with a person in his mind who had not written any fiction or who had begun long ago to write a piece of fiction but had since left off writing.

  Last Letter to a Niece

  My Dearest Niece

  With this letter, our long-standing correspondence comes to an end. The reasons for this will become clear while you read the following pages. Yes, this letter must be my last, and yet I begin it with the same message that I sent in all my earlier letters. I remind you yet again, dear niece, that you are not obliged to reply to me; and I add yet again that I almost prefer not to hear from you, since this allows me to imagine many possible replies.

  This letter has been the hardest to compose. In all my earlier letters I wrote the truth, but in these pages I have to write what might be called a higher truth. First, however, I must set the scene for you, as usual.

  The time is evening, and the sky is almost dark. The day was fine and calm, and the stars will all be visible shortly, but the ocean is strangely loud. The weather must be bad far away in the west, because a heavy swell is running and I can hear, every half-minute, the loud crack as some huge wave breaks against the cliffs. After each crack, I imagine I feel under my feet the same tremor that I would feel if I were standing on one of the cliffs; but of course the cliffs are nearly a kilometre away, and the old farmhouse stands rock-solid as always.

  As a child and a young man, I was known as the reader of the family. While my brothers and sisters were playing cards or listening to the gramophone, I would be sitting in a corner with a book open in front of me. I was always lost in a book, so my mother used to say. She, the wife of a dairy farmer and the mother of seven children, had little opportunity to read, but that simple remark of hers stays in my thoughts as I write this last letter. What did my mother understand of body, mind, soul, that caused her to report of her eldest son, while his body and face and eyes were clearly in her sight, that he was somehow within the confines of the smallish object held in his hands and, moreover, unsure of his whereabouts?

  Something else my mother said of me: I was a bookish person. After you have read this letter, niece, you may choose to understand my mother’s remark in other than its obvious sense. My mother would have meant that I read a great many books, but she was, in fact, wrong. If my hard-worked mother had cared to look closely, she might sometimes have seen that the book I held up to the kerosene lamp at the kitchen table on some evening in winter was the same that I had shielded with my hand from the sunlight on the back veranda on some Sunday morning of the previous summer.

  When I write ‘book’, I mean, as you surely know, the sort of book that has characters, a setting, and a story. I have seldom troubled myself over any other sort of book.

  In many a letter during past years, I named for you one or another book that had affected
me. As well, I mentioned certain passages in each book and told you that I often took pains to recall my first reading of each passage. I wonder how much you divined of what I am now about to tell you in full. The truth is, dear niece, that I have been, from an early age, powerfully drawn towards certain female characters in books. I am almost reluctant, even in such a letter as this, to write in everyday language about my feelings towards these personages, but you might begin to understand my situation if you think of me as having fallen, and ever since remained, in love with the personages.

  Picture me on the day when I first learned what it was that would inspire and sustain me from then onwards. I am hardly more than a child. I am sitting on the lowest of the tier of sandstone blocks that support the rainwater tank on the shady, southern side of the house. This is my favourite place for reading by day in mild weather. The bulk of the tank-stand protects me from the sea wind, and if I lean sideways I sometimes feel against my face a trailing leaf or petal from the nasturtiums that grow out of the cracks between the topmost stones and down over the cream-coloured surface behind me. I am reading a book by an Englishman who died nearly fifty years before my birth. The book was presented to me as suitable for older children, but I was to learn much later that the author intended the book for adults. The action of the book purported to have taken place nearly a thousand years before the author’s birth. Among the major characters of the book was a young woman who later became the wife of the chief character and, later again, was rejected by him. At one or another moment while I was reading from the later pages of the book a report of the circumstances of this female character, I had to stop reading. Rather than cause embarrassment to either of us, I will describe my situation at that moment by calling on one of those stock expressions that can yield surprising meaning if one ponders them word by word. I tell you, dear niece, that my feelings got the better of me for a few moments.