A History of Books (10 page)

Some or another reader of this work of fiction may be
surprised by the remainder of this paragraph, but I assure that reader that the man of more than sixty years valued above all other passages in the several thousand works of fiction that he had read those passages that made him alert to what he called the feel of things. Whenever the man had begun to read some or another work of fiction, he had hoped to become, at some time during his reading, at least as alert to the feel of things as he had been as a child whenever he had watched, towards the end of some or another film, some or another scene in which an unlikely character, or a character previously belittled or despised, had brought about the events that delivered freedom to a captive character or joy to a grieving character or peace of mind to a troubled character. Or, the man had hoped to become, at some time during his reading, at least as alert to the feel of things as he had been whenever he watched a sporting event in which some or another person or animal succeeded against all odds, as a journalist or a commentator might have reported the matter.

The man aged more than sixty years often supposed that he was more affected by image-persons and image-events than by actual persons and events, as though he possessed an image-self whose image-thoughts and image-feelings were more powerful than their actual counterparts. The man often wished that he could have read, if not a published report, then at least a typewritten or even a handwritten report of certain image-events that had appeared in the mind of a man aged fifty and more years while he sat alone on many an evening and tried to write some or another work of fiction that he would never complete.
Some of those image-events are reported in the following paragraphs as though they are fictional events in this work of fiction.

A man aged forty years and more stood beside his wife late at night in a cubicle in the emergency department of a public hospital in a suburb of Melbourne. The man's wife, who was fastened by straps to a wheeled stretcher, cried out continually. The curtains had been drawn around the cubicle, but the man understood that his wife's cries could be heard by the many patients and visitors and nurses and doctors in the emergency department. The man's wife cried out that her husband wrongly considered her insane or that he had plotted for some time past with persons from her place of work to have her dismissed for incompetence and later confined to a locked ward in a hospital. The man knew better than to try to dissuade his wife from crying out, or to try to stifle her cries with a hand. His wife had cried out in this way from time to time during the past five years. In earlier years, she had cried out only occasionally, but in recent years she had cried out often, especially during the night. On many nights during the past year, she had woken her husband with her cries and had then kept him awake during the night with her reports of the plots against her at her place of work. Whenever, for the sake of peace, her husband had agreed that her reports seemed persuasive, she had demanded that he accompany her next day to her place of work and there confront the plotters. Whenever her husband had disputed her reports, she had cried out loudly enough to be heard in the neighbouring houses or she had struck him. Sometimes her husband had struck her in return.

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.