A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  Do not suppose that a few moments of intense feeling of themselves revealed much to me. But after I had reflected for long on the events just described, I began to foresee the peculiar course that my life would take in the future: I would seek in books what most others sought among living persons.

  I reflected as follows. My reading about the personage in the book had caused me to feel more intensely than I had previously felt for any living person…At this point, dear niece, you may be preparing to revise your previous good opinion of me. Please, at least, read on…If I had been utterly candid with you from the beginning of our correspondence, you might have broken with me long ago. To whom, then, could I have written my many hundreds of pages? To whom could I have addressed this most decisive of letters? My being able to write even these few pages today is justification a hundredfold for whatever reticence and evasion I may have practised before now.

  You read and interpreted rightly just now. I declare to you freely that I felt as a child and have felt ever since more concern for certain characters in books than for my own sisters and brothers, more than for my own mother and father even, and certainly more than for any of the few friends I have had. And in answer to your urgent question: you, dear niece, stand somewhat apart from the persons just mentioned. You are, it is true, a blood relation, but our having never met and our agreement that we should never meet allows me often to suppose that we are connected through literature only and not through your father’s being my younger brother. Then again, that you are a blood relation of mine should lessen the strangeness of my revelations. You must have been from an early age not unfamiliar with aloofness and solitariness among the branches of our family. I am by no means your only unmarried uncle or aunt.

  If you are still inclined to judge me harshly, dear niece, remember that I have done little harm to any living person during my bachelor’s life. I was never a brute or unfaithful to any wife; I was never a tyrant to any child. Above all, consider my claim that I never chose to live as I have lived. My own conscience has reassured me often that I have dreamed and read only in an effort to draw nearer to the people who are my true kindred; the place that is my true home. My acts and omissions have had their origins in my nature and not in my will.

  And now you wonder about my religious faith. I was not deceiving you whenever I mentioned in earlier letters my weekly churchgoing, but I have to confess to you that I long ago ceased to believe in the doctrines of our religion. I have read as much as I could bring myself to read of the book from which our religion has been derived. I was able to feel for no character in that book the half of what I have felt for many a character in books scarcely mentioning God.

  Do not be dismayed, niece. I have sat in church every Sunday while our correspondence has gone forward, although stolidly rather than devoutly, and more as some English labourer of the previous century sat in his village church in one or another of my most admired books. I use my time in church for my own purposes but I cause no scandal. From under my eyebrows, I look at certain young women. My only purpose is to take home to my stone farmhouse and my bleak paddocks a small store of remembered sights.

  You must remind yourself, niece, that I see very few young women. I spend a few hours each week in the town of Y—, where numerous young women are to be seen in shops and offices and on the footpaths. But I have observed during my lifetime a great change in the demeanour of young women. The weatherboard church in this isolated district is perhaps the last place where I could hope to see young women dressed modestly and with eyes downcast.

  But I have not explained myself. I am interested in the appearance and deportment of young women in this, the everyday visible world, for the good reason that the female personages in books, like all other such personages together with the places they inhabit, are quite invisible.

  You can hardly believe me. In your mind at this very moment are characters, costumes, interiors of houses, landscapes and skies, all of them faithful images of their counterparts in descriptive passages in books you have read and remembered. Allow me to set you right, dear niece, and to make a true reader of you.

  I have had no education to speak of, but a man may learn surprising things if he spends all his life in the same house and most of that life alone. With no chatter or argument in his ears, he will hear the persuasive rhythms of sentences from the books that he keeps beside his bed. With his eyes undistracted by novelty, he will see what those sentences truly denote. For long after I had first fallen in love as a result of my reading, I still supposed that the objects of my love were visible to me. Did I not see in my mind, while I read, image after image? Could I not call to mind, long after I had closed this or that book, the face, the clothing, the gestures of the personage I loved – and of others also? Whenever I think of how readily I deceived myself in this simplest of matters, I wonder in how many other matters no less simple are persons deceived who will not inspect the contents of their own minds nor look for the source of what appears there. And I beg you, dear niece, not to be prevented by the welter of sights and sounds in the great city where you live; not to be deceived by the glibness of the educated; but to accept as truths only the findings of your own introspection.

  But I am preaching at you, when my own example should serve. You will believe me, niece, when I tell you that I learned, in time, that all the contents of all the books that I had read or would read were invisible. Whatever personages I had loved, or would love in the future, were for ever hidden from me. Certainly, I saw as I read. But what I saw came only from my poor stock of remembered sights. And what I saw was only a scrap of what I believed I saw. An example will serve.

  Last night, I was reading yet again from a book the author of which was born before the midpoint of the previous century but lived until the year before my own birth. I had read only a few words referring to the chief female personage of the book before the appearance in my mind of the first of the images that another sort of reader would have supposed to have originated by some means in the text of the book. Being by now well skilled in such tasks, I needed only a moment of mental exertion before I recognised the source of the image just mentioned. Note first that the image was of a detail only. The text referred to a young woman. Would you not expect that any image then arising in my mind would be an image of a young woman? But I assure you that I saw only an image of a corner of a somewhat pale forehead with a strand of dark hair trailing across it. And I assure you further that this detail had its source not in any sentence of the text but in the memory of the reader of the text, myself. Some weeks before, while I sat in my usual seat in a rear corner of the church, I observed from under my eyebrows a certain young woman as she returned to her seat from the communion rail. I observed many details of her appearance, and all were of equal interest to me. Neither in the church nor at any time afterwards did I think of any of those details as being connected with any personage in any book that I had read. And yet, dear niece, the image of a strand of dark hair and a corner of a forehead are all that I can see, for the time being, of a personage who has been dear to me for longer than I have been writing my letters to you.

  Much might be learned from all this, dear niece. I myself have certainly learned much from many similar discoveries. Item: if, for the sake of convenience, we call the subject matter of books a world, then that world is wholly invisible to the residents of the world where I write these words and where you read them. For I have studied the images not only of personages but of those details we suppose to be the settings of books and suppose further to have arisen from words in the text. The same book whose chief female character is visible to me presently as only a strand of hair trailing across a forehead, that same book contains hundreds of sentences describing a variety of landscapes in the south of England. I have observed myself to read all of those so-called descriptive sentences while seeing in my mind only one or another of precisely four details from the scattered coloured illustrations in a magazine that had belonged to my dead sist
er and still lay about this house. All of the illustrations were of landscapes in the midlands of England.

  But you have read enough of arguments and demonstrations, and I have almost lost my thread. Trust me to know that the personages I have been devoted to since boyhood have been invisible to me, as have their homes, their native districts, and even the skies above those districts. At once, several questions occur to you. You assume, correctly, that I have never felt drawn towards any young woman in this, the visible world, and you want me to explain this seeming failure in me.

  I have often myself considered this question, niece, and I have come to understand that I might have brought myself to approach one or another young woman from this district, or even from the town of Y— if even one of the following two conditions could have been fulfilled: before I had first seen the young woman, I would have had to read about her, if not in a book then in passages of the sort of writing such as appears in the sort of books that I read; alternatively, before I had first seen the young woman I would have had to know that the young woman had read about me as described earlier in this sentence.

  You may consider these conditions overly stringent, niece, and the chance of their being fulfilled absurdly remote. Do not suspect for a moment that I devised these conditions from a wish to remain solitary. Think of me, rather, as a man who can love only the subjects of sentences in texts purporting to be other than factual.

  There has been only one occasion when I felt myself drawn to treat with a young woman of this, the visible world without any bookish preliminaries. When I was still quite young, and still not reconciled altogether to my fate, I thought I might strengthen my resolve by learning about other solitaries: monkish eremites, exiles, dwellers in remote places. I happened to find in a pile of old magazines that someone had lent to one of my sisters an illustrated article about the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. I learned from the article that the island is the loneliest inhabited place on earth, lying far from shipping routes. The cliffs around the island allow no ship to berth. Any visiting ship must anchor at sea while the men of Tristan row out to her. These things alone were enough to excite my interest. You know the situation of this farm: a strip of land at the very southern edge of the continent, with its boundary on one side the high cliffs where I often walk alone. You should know also that the nearest bay to this farm is named after a ship that was wrecked there during the previous century. But my interest in the lonely island increased after I had learned from the magazine article about a disaster that had happened some forty years before my birth. A boat carrying all the able-bodied men of the island was lost at sea, and Tristan became a settlement of mostly women and children. For many years afterwards, so I read, the young women prayed every night for a shipwreck to bring marriageable men.

  There came into my mind an image of a certain young woman of Tristan da Cunha, and whenever I looked up from my paddocks to the cliffs I thought of her as standing on the highest cliff of her island and staring out to sea. I was impelled to visit the library in the town of Y— and to consult a detailed atlas. I learned, with much excitement, that the island of Tristan da Cunha and the district where this farm is situated lie almost on the same latitude. I learned further that no land – not even the speck of an island – lies between Tristan and this coast. Now, dear niece, you must know as I know that the prevailing winds and currents in this hemisphere are from west to east, and so you can anticipate the conjectures that I made after I had studied the atlas. If the young woman on the cliff tops of the island of Tristan had written a message and had enclosed the message in a bottle and had thrown the bottle into the Atlantic Ocean from a cliff on the western side of her island, then her message might well have been carried at last to the coast of this district.

  You may be inclined to smile as you read this, niece, but after I had first conjectured thus, I began the habit of walking once each week along the few beaches near this farm. While I walked, I composed in my mind various versions of the message from the young woman of Tristan. I found no bottle, which should hardly surprise you, but I was often consoled to think that a message such as I had imagined might lie during all my lifetime in some pool or crevice beneath the cliffs of my native district.

  You have another matter to raise. You want to argue that each of the personages I have devoted myself to had her origins somewhere in the mind of the author of the writing that first brought her to my notice. You suggest that I might have studied the life and the pronouncements of the author in order to discover the reality, as you might call it, beneath my illusions, as you might call them. Better still, I might read a suitable work by a living author and then submit to him or her a list of questions to be answered in writing and at length.

  In fact, dear niece, I tried long ago but soon abandoned the line of investigation noted above. Most of the authors concerned wrote their books during the previous century and died before my birth. (You must have observed that I learned my own style of writing from those worthies.) I read just enough about the lives of the authors of my admired books to learn that they were vain and arrogant persons and much given to pettiness. But what of the present century? A great change has occurred in books during this century. The writers of those books have tried to describe what they had better have left unreported. The writers of the present century have lost respect for the invisible. I have never troubled myself to learn about the writers themselves. (I exclude from these remarks a certain writer from a small island-republic in the North Atlantic. I learned of the existence of his books by a remarkable chance and read several in translation, but I could not bring myself afterwards to compose any message for him in his cliff-bound homeland.)

  I have come to hope, dear niece, that the act of writing may be a sort of miracle as a result of which invisible entities are made aware of each other through the medium of the visible. But how can I believe that the awareness is mutual? Although I have sometimes felt one or another of my beloved personages as a presence nearby, I have had no grounds for supposing that she might even have imagined my possible existence.

  On a day long ago, when I was somewhat cast down from thinking of these matters, I wrote my first letter to you, dear niece. I sought a way out of my isolation by means of the following, admittedly simplistic, proposition: if the act of writing can bring into being personages previously unimagined by either writer or reader, then I might dare to hope for some wholly unexpected outcome from my own writing, although it could never be part of any book.

  How many years have passed since then you and I alone know, and this, as I have told you, is my last letter. However little I may know of it, I remain hopeful that something will come of this writing.

  Something will come of this writing. I was born in Transylvania in the seventeenth century of the modern era. I became in my youth a follower of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi. When the Prince went into exile after the War of Independence, I was one of the band of followers who went with him. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, we arrived at the port of Gallipoli as invited guests of the Sultan of Turkey. Shortly afterwards, I wrote the first of my letters to my aunt, the Countess P—, in Constantinople. We followers of Prince Rákóczi had hoped that our exile might not be for long, but almost all of us remained for the rest of our lives in Turkey, and even those few who left Turkey were never allowed to return to their native land, my native land. For forty-one years, until almost the last year of my life, I wrote regularly to my aunt. I wrote to her almost a full account of my life. One of the few matters that I chose not to write openly about was my solitary state. Only a few of the exiles were women, and all of these were married. Most of us men remained solitary throughout our lives.

  Dear Reader

  The following is adapted from one of the seven pages about the life and the writing of Kelemen Mikes in the Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, 1984.

  The Letters from Turkey were regarded by critics for a long time only as a source for the history of
the exiles. Much futile research was done in an attempt to find traces of the mysterious Countess P— who proved never to have existed. Mikes never sent his letters to any ‘aunt’ but copied them into a letter-book, which was found after his death.

  Publisher’s Note

  The authors of the books referred to in ‘A History of Books’ are believed to include Miguel Ángel Asturias, Giorgio di Chirico, Charles Dickens, Margaret McKenzie, Mikhail Petrovich Artzybashev, James Joyce, Frank Wedekind, R.C. Sherriff and Vernon Bartlett, George Borrow, John Clare, Christopher Brennan, Thomas Hardy, Herman Hesse, Gerald Murnane, Roger Longrigg, Joseph Conrad, Elias Canetti, Brian Aldiss, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James T. Farrell, François Mauriac, William Styron, Frederick Exley, George Gissing, Henry Handel Richardson, Frank Dalby Davison, D.M. Body, Roy Campbell, Robert Musil, Gyula Illyés, Emily Brontë, André Maurois, Jack Kerouac, Sándor Márai and Halldór Laxness.