A History of Books (5 page)

The man succeeded in learning the poem and sometimes recited one or another stanza to one or another of his friends or his drinking companions, although none of them was interested enough to ask what sort of man had composed the poem. If anyone had so asked, he would have been told that the poet's patrons and admirers had been often affronted or distressed to learn that the author of poems expressing what he once called his love of rural objects often drank ale until he became ill or insensible. The man who sometimes recited the poem had first learned it after he had felt sympathy for the poet and after he, the man, had been annoyed that some of the poet's readers had begrudged him his weakness.

More than thirty years after he had learned the poem, the man could remember only the following lines from the first stanza.

We'd sooner suck ale through a blanket

Than thimbles of wine from a glass.

The man remembered also the following lines from the last stanza.

And we'll sit it in spite of the weather

Till we tumble dead drunk on the plain.

 

… Desperate eves,

when the wind-bitten hills turned violet

along their rims, and the earth huddled her heat

within her niggard bosom, and the dead stones

lay battle-strewn before the iron wind

…

yet in that wind a clamour of trumpets rang,

old trumpets, resolute, stark, undauntable,

singing to battle against the eternal foe,

the wronger of this world, and all his powers

in some last fight, foredoom'd disastrous,

upon the final ridges of the world …

A young man, hardly more than a boy, was whispering the quoted lines while he walked along a deserted street in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The young man had first read the quoted lines in an anthology of Australian poetry presented to him as a prize in his final year at secondary school and had learned the lines soon afterwards. The young man was walking from the house where he lived with his parents and his brother to his parish church. From time to time, he recalled that he had confessed to a priest on the previous day a number of so-called
mortal sins, and whenever he recalled this he felt a certain satisfaction.

The sky was dark except for a pale zone in the east, where the shape of a long, low mountain was visible. The young man had never visited the mountain or wanted to visit it. During daylight, when the mountain was clearly visible from many suburbs east and south-east of Melbourne, the young man seldom looked at the mountain. While he recited the quoted lines, however, he stared at one after another place where the uppermost parts of the mountain formed a dark line against the pale sky.

While the young man went on staring and reciting, he believed that he was just then about to learn something of value. A few moments before, he had been merely staring at one after another place where the dark mountain came to an end and the pale sky began. Then he had felt a certain alertness followed by an urge to recite the lines of poetry quoted above. This, so the young man supposed, was a series of events such as had led the poet to compose the lines that he, the young man, was now reciting. The poet had seen, on a certain evening or a certain morning before the young man had been born, a certain mountain with a zone of pale sky behind it, had then felt a certain alertness, and had then begun to compose a certain poem, parts of which the young man would recite nearly thirty years after the poet had died. The young man assumed that the sight of the mountain mentioned against the pale sky mentioned included such a detail, or such a detail of a detail, as would prompt a certain sort
of person to compose part of a poem. The young man went on staring while he walked and while he recited, as though he might soon learn from the sight of the dark mountain against the pale sky to the east of the suburbs of Melbourne what was the detail, or the detail of a detail, that had earlier caused him to become alert and to recite and might yet cause him to compose poetry.

The young man had heard about the poet whose words he was reciting only that he had spent most of his life in Sydney, that he had been educated by the Society of Jesus, that he had become a notorious drunkard and had lived an immoral life, but that he had been received back into the Catholic Church before his death. The young man had heard these things from a religious brother who had been one of his teachers at secondary school. (The young man had been pleased to hear that the poet had been reconciled at last to his church. Otherwise, he, the young man, might have felt anxious on behalf of the poet's immortal soul. The young man's teachers and also his father and his father's brothers sometimes told him that this or that person had died screaming for a priest, which seemed to the young man the worst of all possible deaths, even though his beliefs and opinions would soon be so changed that he would often tell his friends, only two years after he had looked at the mountain mentioned above and had recited the lines quoted above, that he would like to die screaming
at
a priest.)

During the months before he had recited, on a certain morning, the lines quoted earlier, the young man had tried to write one or another poem but had not succeeded. A few hours
after he had returned to his and his parents' house on the morning mentioned, the young man tried again to write a poem. First, he called to mind a certain dark image-mountain and a certain pale image-sky. He then looked at the image-place where the one image met the other image, but he failed to notice there any image-detail likely to cause him to become alert. It seemed to the young man that the image-mountain and the image-sky had long ago become image-details of an image-landscape in the mind of the poet who had composed the lines quoted earlier.

More than fifty years after the young man had walked along the deserted street as mentioned above, and when the man who had been the young man was setting out to write a certain piece of fiction, it seemed to the man as though the young man need not have lacked for any image-detail of any image-sight but as though he ought to have trusted that a dark mountain, a pale sky, the violet rims of wind-bitten hills, and even a drunkard-poet and his late repentance were already image-subject-matter for a piece of image-fiction that would not fail to be written.

When the man mentioned in the previous paragraph set out to write about the image mentioned there, he had read, twenty and more years earlier, a biography of the poet who had written the lines quoted earlier, although the man recalled from that experience only his having read that a certain woman, herself married, had offered herself to the poet when he was fifty-two years of age, himself married, and her senior by more than twenty years; that the woman and the poet had lived together for a time; but that the woman had quarrelled with the poet late on a certain evening
seventeen years before the man mentioned had been born, and had then set out walking while drunk along a certain road in Sydney in the early morning and had been run down and killed by a tram.

 

In the mind of a certain young man, an image appeared of a topographical map with a seacoast in the foreground, green and mostly level grassy countryside in the middle ground, and in the background the nearest trees of several woodlands or forests. An image-seaport appeared at the centre of the image-seacoast, and a few image-townships or image-villages appeared at intervals in the grassy countryside. The image-map was all that the young man had seen, or would ever see, of the districts in an unnamed country where were set, as it were, most of the works of fiction and the poems of a famous author who had been born in England ninety-nine years before the young man had been born. The young man would claim during the rest of his life that his having read during his twenty-first year the works of fiction mentioned had enabled him to leave off attending the church that his parents and his teachers had required him to attend and there trying to see in his mind images of the countryside of heaven and of the personages whose native landscape it was. The young man would forget during the rest of his life most of what he had seen in his mind and most of what he had felt while he had first read the works mentioned and would seldom look again into the works but would claim during the rest of
his life to be content merely to know that a certain intricate image-landscape still lay out of sight in his mind and that certain image-personages still enacted there not only the image-deeds that had once engaged him but other unreported deeds of their fictional lives.

After the young man mentioned had read the books of fiction mentioned and after he had left off going to the church mentioned, he dared to do or not to do certain things that he had previously feared to do or not to do. He dared, for example, at intervals during the first five years after he had read the books mentioned, to invite to accompany him to one or another race meeting or restaurant or cinema or theatre or so-called party or barbecue each of five young women, none of whom had belonged to the church that he had left off going to.

The first of the five young women mentioned told the young man after their second outing that she could no longer accompany him anywhere because she was giving serious consideration to a proposal of marriage from a man some years older than herself who was hoping soon to acquire on generous terms of sale a property suitable for dairy farming in a coastal district in the south-west of Victoria formerly covered by forest but recently converted by the state government into mostly level grassy countryside.

The second of the five young women shared a spacious twostorey apartment with two other young women who seemed to be often absent, as a result of which the young man and the young woman in question were often alone together in the apartment for
many hours after they had returned from some or another outing. During much of their time alone together, he and she lay on the couch in the lounge room while it was lit only by the glow of the ceramic columns of a gas heater. During the forty-eight years that followed the few months when he and she had had dealings with one another, the man who had been the young man supposed often that the young woman had wanted him to be much bolder with her than he had been while they had lain together in the glow mentioned. The young man had not been overly bold with the young woman because he could not forget what he had read in a certain letter that he had found protruding from the pages of a certain book of fiction on the mantelpiece of the lounge room mentioned on the morning after he and the young woman had gone on their first outing together and after they had lain together for several hours on the couch mentioned before the young woman had gone upstairs to her bedroom and the young man had slept for a few hours on the couch before returning to the bungalow where he lived in a nearby suburb. The letter mentioned had been sent to the young woman by a man whose age the young man had no way of knowing. The man had been in Sydney when he had written the letter and had been obliged to remain there for several months afterwards. He had tried to cheer the young woman by writing to her that the time would soon pass until he could return from Sydney and could again be as bold with her as he had so often been before he had left.

When he had first read the letter mentioned, the young man had not been able to decide whether the letter had lain where it
lay because the young woman, the person addressed in the letter, was a slovenly person or whether she had left the letter in the book of fiction so that he would find the letter and would read it. Nor was the young man able to decide why the young woman might have wanted him to read the letter if, in fact, she had so wanted.

The third of the five young women had been the young man's companion on only a few outings before she explained that she could not meet with him during the following two weeks but that she would willingly accompany him on one or another outing afterwards. During the second of the two weeks mentioned, the young man had been told by a girlfriend of the young woman that she and the man who had been her most recent boyfriend had spent much of the previous week arranging for her to have an illegal abortion. The young man chose at first not to believe the girlfriend, but once having believed her he chose to avoid the company of the young woman.

The fourth of the five young women was the younger sister of a drinking companion of the young man under mention, who drank beer until late on Friday evening each week in the house where the sister and the brother lived with their parents. The young woman was younger than the young man by five years and seemed always busy with her course at a primary teachers college, although she found time to chat with the young man whenever he approached her. Believing that the young woman had no boyfriend, the young man decided to ask her to accompany him on some or another outing but not until late in the year, when she
would have finished her examinations and assignments. During the months after he had decided this, the young man felt more cheerful than he had felt during any of his time in the company of any of the three young women mentioned previously. Late in the year, however, when the young man asked the young woman to accompany him on a certain outing, he learned that she had had a boyfriend for two years past although she and he met only on alternate weekends because he was the sole teacher at a primary school in a mountainous district north-east of Melbourne.

The fifth of the young women accompanied the young man on many an outing for five months. The young woman worked in a bookshop where the young man bought many books of fiction, although he did not tell her that he read the books in order to learn how he might bring nearer to completion the work of fiction that he had been writing for some years. The young man felt comfortable with the young woman after she had told him during their first outing that she had not long before broken off, as she expressed it, with a man who had meant a lot to her, as she expressed it, and that she would prefer not to become serious, as she expressed it, with another man for the time being. Later, the young man had learned from the young woman that the man she had mentioned to him had been a married man. Later again, the young woman had told the young man that she believed she needed a change in her life and that she was thinking of moving to Sydney or Brisbane. Later yet again, the young man wondered whether the young woman had been surprised, or even disappointed, when he had not tried to persuade her to go
on living in Melbourne and had not written to her after she had moved.