A History of Books (12 page)

The man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction in the belief that the power of fiction was sometimes able to resist, if not to overcome, the power of fact. The man understood that a fact could never be other than a fact, even though it might be reported in a work of fiction, but he believed that any fictional event or any fictional character might be said to have acquired a factual existence as soon as the event or the character had been reported in a published text.

The man mentioned had to accept as a fact that a certain young woman had drowned in a certain well in a certain foreign country thirty and more years before he had been born, but he was able to accept as an image-fact that a certain young image-woman stared into an image-well where pale image-rays
appeared on a dark image-background in the mind of a man who was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write.

The man who was aged nearly seventy years left off making notes and felt as he had sometimes felt during the past fifty years whenever he had left off writing some or another work of fiction or even some or other notes. The man felt as though writing fiction was too easy. It seemed to the man the easiest of tasks to report image-deeds done by image-persons in image-scenery or even to report the image-thoughts of the image-persons. It had been too easy, for example, for him to report many years before in a certain work of fiction that a certain image-man had read a report of a certain young woman's having drowned in a certain well. It had been too easy for him to report the image-details in his mind as though they were no more than actual details in some or another actual scenery that surrounded him continually. A more demanding and a more worthy task would have been for him to write as though the report he had read had been part of a work of fiction: as though the young woman who had drowned was a fictional young woman, one of those entities likely to become an image-entity in his mind and whose image-fate it would be useless for him to wish changed.

 

An image of a stern-faced man, aged about forty years, appeared in the mind of a man of about the same age who was writing the last paragraph of a long work of fiction. The words that this
man was writing were the same words that comprised the last paragraph of the work of fiction in which the chief male character was a stern-faced man. This work had been first published ninety-two years before the birth of the man who was writing, and the author of the work had died a year later. The man who was writing was therefore under no obligation to seek permission to include the last paragraph of the work in his own work. In fact, the provenance of its final paragraph was not mentioned anywhere in the text of the man's work or in the preliminary pages of any edition of the published work, although the text of the man's work included, in separate passages, the title of the earlier book, the name of its author, and a summary of part of its contents.

The man's book was reviewed and noticed in various publications and was even the subject of a few essays and so-called scholarly articles. Some reviewers and commentators approved of the man's book and some did not, but none mentioned that the man had used for the ending of his book the ending of a famous book from the previous century. Perhaps the reviewers and commentators considered that the man's having appropriated the ending of the famous book was so obvious as to need no comment. The man suspected, however, that the reviewers and commentators, even though they wrote fluently and at length about what they called the subject matter or the themes or the meaning of book after book, were like himself in that they were unable to remember any more than a few words or phrases from the text of any book that they had read.

The man in whose mind was an image of a stern-faced man had been hardly more than a boy when he had first read the famous book mentioned above. He had read the famous book twice more during his adult years. If anything, the later readings lessened rather than increased the sum of his recollections of the book, which is to say the words and sentences of the text. At the same time, the later readings seemed to give rise in his mind to numerous images, a few of them attributable to passages in the text but most seemingly arising from the man's need to have in his mind images of undulating treeless countryside and of some or another young female person who chose often to frequent such countryside and even to consent to being accompanied there by a certain young male person.

The stern-faced image-man mentioned in the first sentence of this section of the present work of fiction kept mostly to an image-room at one side of an image-house built of image-stone. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the image-company of the other image-persons in the image-house, or perhaps he preferred his image-room because an image-window there overlooked a wide image-view of undulating treeless image-countryside where he had spent much image-time during his image-childhood in the company of a certain young female image-person.

The writer of a book the last paragraph of which had been taken from a certain famous book was nearly seventy years of age before he understood that a single image-person might owe his or her image-existence to more than one passage from one or another book or even from more than one book. The writer came
to understand this after he had begun to observe that the image of the stern-faced man mentioned earlier appeared less often before an image-window and more often at an image-desk. The writer could only suppose that the image-man was writing at the image-desk and could only suppose that what he was writing was an image-work of image-fiction. The writer could only suppose that the image-fiction was such as he himself would have written if he himself had been at the image-desk near the image-window overlooking the treeless image-countryside. What he would have written would have seemed to him a report of scenes and events in a country adjoining a country named Gondal which country the author of the famous book mentioned earlier had written about throughout her lifetime, although none of what she wrote had been published as any sort of book, and which country was the native country of the female entity, so to call her, who later became, as it were, a famous female character in a famous work of fiction.

 

The goddesses had left the dining room, and the gods were about to sip their brandy and to puff on their cigars. Before the conversation had begun to grow raucous, a few of those seated at the far end of the room heard the same faint sound that a few of the others had claimed to have heard on the previous evening: perhaps the same sound that some of the goddesses had claimed during dinner to have heard while they were reclining naked beside their bathing pool during the quiet hours of the afternoon.

The residents of heaven were, by definition, unable to be troubled or irritated, but they were able to be piqued by curiosity, and even a distant knocking, until its source was discovered, might well have seemed to the more sensitive deities to gainsay their reputation for omniscience.

An archangel from the household staff was ordered to investigate. He reported that he himself had seemed to hear what their lordships and ladyships had seemed to hear. He was well aware, so he said, that he and his employers were residents of a realm where nothing could be said to be impossible; even so, their having heard a knocking sound was hardly to be believed. What he and they had seemed to hear seemed to have sounded from the far side of the outer wall of the building. He begged their lordships and their ladyships to recall that they were dining for the time being in the farthest west wing of the farthest west of the many mansions in that part of the universe, and as he and they well knew, the farthest west mansion adjoined on its farther side the country known to many of its inhabitants as Earth, between which and their own country there had been no communication since the universe in its present form had come into existence.

In short, reader, the gods and goddesses, or as many as took an interest in such matters, were obliged to address a disquieting possibility. The fabric of the universe as they knew it might not have been seamless. Some less than immortal being from a much less than heavenly zone of the universe was claiming their attention or, at the very least, was signalling to them that he or she had learned their address.

Even so disconcerting a development could not keep the divinities from their usual pleasures. While the would-be intruder, presumably, went on knocking throughout the next day, the gods, and many of the goddesses, attended race-meetings, rode to hounds, and took part in or watched as spectators a variety of sports and contests. Those who preferred to stay indoors played one or another of a variety of board games or card games praised by their admirers, with laborious humour, as being fiendishly or diabolically complicated.

The reader may have expected to read that the divine personages spent their days in vast art galleries contemplating magnificent paintings and sculpture, in concert halls listening to sublime music, or in libraries reading profound literature. In the heaven described here, no art galleries or concert halls or libraries existed. No one painted or sculpted or composed music or wrote literature because no one was urged to find so-called meaning behind so-called appearances. Where the everyday was the ultimate, there was nothing to do but play.

I have to correct an earlier statement. A small reference library existed in a comparatively modest mansion in an out-of-the-way district of heaven. The contents of most of the books there might have seemed to you and me, reader, a sort of astronomy except that they lacked the speculation that characterises the subject as we know it. The other books were dry reading indeed, being a sort of annal or chronicle except that each volume reported the events of an aeon rather than a year.

In this library, a few days after the knocking had been first
heard, an angelic personage who considered himself or herself or itself a capable amateur historian unearthed, as he/she/it put it with clumsy humour, the explanation for the unusual event. It was recounted in a certain chronicle that a certain god much given to caprice and whimsy had long before set a small door in the farthest west wall mentioned previously. (For the sake of this narrative, it must be supposed that the door was well concealed on both sides and that the god concerned had later forgotten about it.)

The gods and goddesses knew little and cared less about Earth, but once the existence of the door had become widely known, their fondness for competing and speculating and betting caused them for several evenings to outlay large sums of heavenly currency on the answer to the question: what was the field of endeavour of the person knocking? (They were too ignorant of earthly matters to bet on the identity of the knocker.)

The meagre information available in their library caused a majority of the divinities to bet that the person knocking was some or another prophet or the founder of some or another religion. A sizeable minority staked their money on the person's being a composer of music or a painter or sculptor. The smallest minority bet that the person at the concealed door was some or another writer of poetry or plays or even of prose fiction.

The gods and goddesses would have had no opportunity for speculating or wagering if their library had included the sort of book that filled the library of the writer of these paragraphs and if even one god or goddess had read the last pages of a certain one of those books, which pages the writer had read
often. The book, which was first published in 1958, was a translation from the French language into the English language of a biography of a certain writer of prose fiction who was reported by his biographer as having seen that final door at last fly open at which, before him, no one had ever knocked.

The divine ones, however, knew nothing about the biography mentioned or about its subject and were able to enjoy much suspense and much anticipation of profit from betting while one of their number went one evening at last to the place where the knocking had sounded for day and night after day and night and found there the concealed door and opened it, and greeted the person standing on its further side and got from the person an account of himself or herself and afterwards politely dismissed the person and then closed the door or, perhaps, left the person standing at the open door while he or she, the god or goddess, hurried back to the crowded dining room and there blurted out that the person at the door claimed to be the author of an enormous work of prose fiction although he seemed no more than an asthmatic little poofter from a place called Paris.

 

In the mind of a man who was barefoot and wearing only shorts and a singlet and was drinking beer in a room where the drapes were drawn against the sunlight, an image appeared of a man who was wearing what the first-mentioned man was wearing and who was drinking what the first-mentioned man was drinking in a room such as the first-mentioned man was in.

If an image of a man can be said to be of a certain age, then the image-man mentioned and the man mentioned were of the same age: forty-seven years and two hundred and twenty-two days. The man did not know it on the day mentioned, but he was to live for at least a further twenty-two years from that day. If an image-man can be supposed to suspect such things, then the image-man surely suspected that he had not long to live although he may not have suspected that he would die on the following day, which was, in fact, the day when he died.

To express the matter otherwise: the first-mentioned man was drinking beer in his shorts and singlet on the day when he became as old as the image-man had been when he had died, seventeen years before, as a result of a haemorrhage in some or another digestive organ. His death, as one of his biographers wrote, was a typical alcoholic's death.

The first-mentioned man had sometimes supposed that he himself would die a typical alcoholic's death, although he drank mostly beer whereas the image-man, so to call him, had drunk mostly stronger drinks. The first-mentioned man had even supposed at one time that he would live the sort of life lived by the image-man. The man had first supposed this after he had read during his twentieth year a work of fiction by the man who later became the image-man. Nearly fifty years after he had read the work of fiction, the man could recall in detail many of the feelings that he had felt while reading, although he recalled from the text of the book only the words
you drive all day and you're still in Texas
.