Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  My discovery, so to call it, of a country on the far side of fiction need not have affected me as a writer of fiction. If anything, I ought to have devoted myself more earnestly to writing the book of fiction that I was not to finish. I should have written with more respect for the personages in my fiction now that I knew them to have histories unknown to me; to be connected with places I could only speculate about. I might well have written thus if a certain complication had not developed in my writing about a certain personage in the book of fiction that I was never to finish.

  The reader of this work of fiction should recall that certain early sections of the unfinished work of fiction were set, as it were, in what might be called an imaginary building of two or more storeys. Several fictional personages first imagined the building and then set about imagining certain events that might one day take place in the building, but all except one of the personages later began to lose interest in the building. That personage was a young man who was called in earlier sections of this present work of fiction the chief character. If ever I had finished the work that I later abandoned, and if the finished work had later been published, then the reader would have learned that the chief character continued to be interested in the imaginary building, so to call it, throughout his fictional life, so to call it. Long after he had married and had become a father, and even after three of his poems and two pieces of his short fiction had been published in so-called literary magazines—even then, the chief character would often have imagined a young man not unlike himself at a desk in the imaginary building. (Although unable myself to imagine, I am able, of course, to write about fictional personages as though they have this ability.) The chief character sometimes tried to imagine the contents of the many thousands of pages that the imagined man would have filled with writing while he, the chief character, had had three poems and two pieces of short fiction published. If ever the unfinished work had been finished and published, then the reader would have learned also that the chief character made notes from time to time for a long work of fiction the whole of which would have been set in a building of two or more storeys and the chief character of which lived as a recluse in an upper-storey room where he filled many thousands of pages with writing that he showed to no one.

  The complication mentioned in the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph arose as a result of my having decided one day to inspect some of the many thousands of pages mentioned in the previous sentence. The easiest way for me to report this matter is to write here that I visited the building mentioned often in this work of fiction; that I walked past the seemingly unoccupied suites of rooms on the ground floor and past the empty chapel, where the altar and the tabernacle were bare although the sanctuary was still carpeted; that I climbed several sets of stairs and walked along several corridors past many empty rooms, some of them with dormer windows, until I found the room in which a certain male personage sat at a desk between a set of bookshelves and a room of steel filing cabinets; and that I stepped up behind the male personage and looked over his shoulder.

  The personage happened just then to be recording the progress, furlong by furlong, of a classic race for three-years-old colts and geldings in a place that no one but himself had any knowledge of. He was doing this in much the same way that a male personage was reported to have done similar tasks in my piece of fiction “The Interior of Gaaldine,” which is to say that he had beside him an opened double-page of some or another volume of nineteenth-century fiction and in front of him a handwritten page showing the names of ten or more racehorses and many other details. I looked for only a moment at the handwritten page. This was partly because I might otherwise have violated certain conventions affecting writers and their subject-matter and partly because I have long believed that a glance is the best means for discovering essential details. I saw the names Campanology, Nubian Servant, Rushy Glen, and Wildfell Hall. I saw the words emerald green, lilac, and yellow. I saw also several surnames, none of them belonging to any person that I could recall having met or having read about.

  While I walked away from the room and back along the first of the several corridors, I understood for the first time that a personage mentioned in a work of fiction is capable of devising a seeming territory more extensive and more detailed by far than the work itself. On my way to visit the male personage in his upper room, I had looked through each of the open doorways that I passed and had admired the glimpse after glimpse that I had got through window after window of detail after detail of mostly level grassy countryside with trees in the distance. I had been pleased by the spaciousness of my fictional landscape and by the illusion of variety that I got from my sequence of views. On my way back from the upper room, I took no note of the portions of landscapes that flashed at me through the various windows. I could only marvel at the vast and variegated country where lived the owners and the trainers and the jockeys of the throng after throng of horses in the race after race recorded on the page after page in all the steel filing cabinets along the wall of the room that I had come from.

  The personage who sat among the filing cabinets had written not a word about the country mentioned in the previous sentence. I had not needed to look into the cabinets in order to learn this. I had understood it in the way that a person understands certain matters in dreams or in the way that an author of fiction understands certain matters relating to the characters in his or her fiction. The personage recorded only names of racehorses, their positions at various points during races, the names of their owners and trainers and jockeys, and the colours worn by those jockeys. The filing cabinets around the personage contained only these details, and yet for every page in those crowded cabinets a suburban street, a country township, an inland plain with mountains in the distance rose to view in a territory as yet unknown to me. I felt the sort of giddiness that I might have felt as a child if I had crept towards the brink of a tall cliff overhanging an ocean or if I had climbed to the topmost vantage-point in a building of several storeys and had seen still no end to the level grassy countryside all around. I had for long supposed that a writer of fiction saw first in his or her mind or even, perhaps, imagined a fictional place inhabited by fictional personages or, as some would say, by characters, and afterwards wrote about that place and those personages. The man among the filing cabinets would have made no claim to be any sort of writer, least of all a writer of fiction. He sat at his desk with his pen in his hand and his page in front of him. The opened book at his left was for him not a fictional text but merely an accumulation in a certain order of the letters of the English alphabet from the varying occurrences of which he was able to calculate the fluctuating fortunes of the racehorses named on the page in front of him. And yet, for every detail that the man recorded I seemed to be made aware of the existence of one more of a barely discernible population who lived out their lives far from the scrutiny of any writer, let alone reader, in some or another Glassland or Gondal or farther-off Gaaldine.

  One matter I could not at first account for. Each of the four names that I had seen from among the list of names of three-years-old colts and geldings—each of those names surely alluded to one or another passage in this present work of fiction. But then I supposed that many of the population mentioned in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, whenever they strove to give distinctive names to their racehorses, would have sought out words and phrases relating to the most recondite of matters in the remotest of imaginable regions.

  Several years after the bustling afternoon mentioned in the first section of this work of fiction, I read for the first time a later edition of The Art of Memory, by Frances A. Yates, which had been first published in London in 1966 by Routledge and Kegan Paul. I learned from this book for the first time the detailed history of a set of beliefs and practices that I had previously known about only from references in other books. I learned from the book by Frances A. Yates that many a scholar from so-called classical times almost until so-called modern times discussed in theo
ry or used in practice a system that was intended to store for ready retrieval every fact or concept or notion or item of doctrine from any branch of the so-called arts and sciences that the scholar might ever have need of. (During much of the time while the system was in use, printed books did not exist.) A person using the system had first to establish in his or her mind an image of a building, preferably of several storeys each with several rooms. Such a building was often called in the book a memory palace. The person then placed in one after another position in one after another room on one after another storey of the image of the building one after another image of one after another object that would serve afterwards as the perceptible reminder of some or another item requiring to be remembered.

  In a later chapter of the book mentioned above, the author tries to explain the contents of a book the unwieldy title of which she replaces by the word Seals (Latin sigilli). The author of the book is Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic in 1600. Frances A. Yates explains that Giordano Bruno was a follower of the so-called Hermetic philosophy, one item of which seems to have been that each human entity is a replica of the divine organisation of the universe. The same author explains further that the so-called Trinity Seals described, and sometimes depicted, by Giordano Bruno in his book are the simplest visible representation of a memory-system designed to occupy not a palace of several storeys but the universe itself as it was understood by the Hermetics.

  I believe I may have learned less from reading books than I have learned from writing books, even those books that I later left off writing. While I was reading about the book mentioned in the previous paragraph, I seemed not to understand what I was reading. I seemed to be trying but failing to see in my mind images of a universe arranged around a vertical axis whereas every image that I had been aware of had been arranged around a horizontal axis. Soon after I had read about the book, however, I understood that I myself had written a book in which was mentioned, if not depicted, the simplest visible representation of a memory-system; a book in which were mentioned, if not depicted, sets of racing colours, racecourses, and even a few racehorses. My memory-system might have seemed to occupy no more than an upper room in a building of two or three storeys, but its figurative extent would have seemed to me no less than old Bruno’s hermetical labyrinth would have seemed to him. Tract after tract of mostly level grassy countryside, each with trees on its farther side—this would have been universe enough for me.

  During the months before the bustling afternoon mentioned in the very first section of this work of fiction, I used often to glance at a certain young woman while she and I and many other persons waited on a certain suburban railway station. I took note of the yellowish hair of the young woman and of the tilt of her nose. I hoped I would be able to keep an image of the young woman in my mind while I was writing a later section of the book of fiction that I was then writing. After I had abandoned that book of fiction, I sometimes regretted that no passage of my own fiction would ever bring to mind any image of the young woman. However, I remained hopeful that some or another image of her might appear in the future to some or another reader or writer of some or another page not of my making. Now, having brought to an end this present work of fiction, I am even more hopeful.

  In some or another room in a certain memory palace, some or another compiler of pages may already have had sight of her image. She is a trainer and also, perhaps, an owner of racehorses on a property in countryside resembling some or another district of New Zealand or of Tasmania. Near the centre of the property is a training track enclosing a swampy area that might be called today, in the place where I sit writing these words, wetlands. I could wish that the sighting mentioned above might have occurred on one or another morning when the young woman would have been loading one or another of her racehorses into a horse-float to be taken to one or another distant racecourse not yet mentioned in any work of fiction and, by definition, never able to be so mentioned. I could hardly doubt that the young woman’s helper would be a stern-faced older woman. Nor could I suppose that the building partly visible between trees in the middle distance would be other than a house with attic windows or an upper storey. As for the item dangling from the lapel of each woman—the shield-shaped card that will later admit her to the mounting-yard beside the distant racecourse—the badge on the breast of each female personage would be of black and of gold.

  GERALD MURNANE was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including Inland, The Plains, and Tamarisk Row, as well as a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane has been a recipient of the Patrick White Award and the Melbourne Prize. Barley Patch won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Works

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  About the Author