Barley Patch (10 page)

The game mentioned earlier would have begun on some or another occasion when I saw myself as travelling from the shadowy foreground into the brightly lit distance, past the bridge and the river and then across the grassy countryside. On that occasion, I would have decided that I was viewing my admired illustration from the wrong direction, as it were. For a few moments, I would have seen the calendar-illustration as other than a patch of painted scenery hanging in a shabby room in the place that I called the world. During those moments, the source of the light behind the dark trees might have been a sun hardly different from the sun that shone often on my own world—not a painted image of a sun but an actual sun. For a few moments, I would have understood that the clump of trees and the verandah were the dark background and that what I had taken for the distant background was brightly lit foreground. The persons around the verandah were of little account. Anyone peering in on them from the darkness behind them mattered even less. The true subject-matter was yet to be seen. The game, if ever I had succeeded at it, would have consisted of my seeming to travel to the end of the grassy countryside while the light around me intensified and while I strained to make out the first details of the land that began where the painted places ended.

I can hardly believe nowadays that I wrote for thirty years and more before I arrived at the decision reported in the fourth paragraph of this piece of fiction: before I gave up a certain sort of writing. I can only suppose that I wrote during those thirty and more years so that I could explicate whatever mysteries seemed to require explication in the territory bordered on three sides by the vaguest of my memories and my desires and on its fourth side by a strangely lit horizon in a remembered reproduction of some or another famous painting. I can only suppose that I wrote fiction for thirty and more years in order to rid myself of certain obligations that I felt as a result of my having
read
fiction. Something else I can hardly believe nowadays: during those thirty and more years, I sometimes recalled my childhood ploy of seeing, or seeming to see, places further off than certain painted places, and yet what I recalled seemed quite unconnected with what I was doing as a writer of fiction. Not until the afternoon mentioned in the fourth paragraph of this piece of fiction did I understand how many were the blank pages; how ample was the space on the far side of every piece of fiction that I had written or had read.

I can make one last attempt to answer the question why did I write what I wrote for thirty and more years? Perhaps I wrote in order to provide myself with the equivalent in the invisible world of Tasmania and New Zealand in the visible world.

I am not unwilling to travel on land. On a memorable occasion nearly fifty years ago, I travelled by land almost to the southern border of Queensland. A year afterwards, I travelled by land to the eastern shore of the Great Australian Bight. Even nowadays, I travel sometimes to the far west of Victoria; to a small town mentioned earlier in this piece of fiction. I do not however, travel through air or across water. I have several reasons for not travelling thus, but I mention here the only reason that belongs in this piece of fiction. My view of the world has in the foreground a roughly L-shaped tract of land reaching from Bendigo through Melbourne to Warrnambool. I look often across this foreground in my mind, and always in a westerly or a north-westerly direction. In the middle ground is mostly level grassy countryside not without trees or even stands of forest. In the background is the wider world, as I call it, which most often appears to me as a series of far-reaching plains. If ever I had wished to visit the wider world, I would have had to plan my route so that I could travel first through the foreground and then through the middle ground mentioned above.

I look often across my mind in a westerly or a north-westerly direction, but I am not unable to see in my mind what might lie behind me. I am not unable to see in a subdued light, as though they lie beyond not sea but coloured glass, the islands of Tasmania and New Zealand.

Once only, I dared to step off the solid land that comprises my nearer view of the world. I travelled across water from Melbourne to Tasmania in order to accept an invitation to a gathering of writers. On the night before I left Melbourne, I was unable to sleep. On the day of my departure from solid land, I began to drink beer. When I arrived on the boat or ship or vessel or whatever it was called, I was drunk, and I remained so during most of my time in Tasmania. I recall hardly anything of the landscape that I passed through while I was conveyed by motor-car from Devonport to Launceston and then, twenty-four hours later, back to Devonport. All this happened more than twenty years ago, but I still regret that I did not see the midlands of Tasmania.

For several years before my visit to Tasmania, I had corresponded with a young man who lived with his wife in a rented cottage in a small town in a district that he called the Midlands. (He never failed to use an upper-case “M” in his letters.) The man had been, some years before, a student in my fiction-writing classes and was still writing fiction in his rented cottage, which, so he claimed in his letters to me, was at the very heart of the Midlands. I had seen a few photographs of lakes and seashores and mountains in Tasmania before I had begun writing letters to my former student, but I had never seen in any photograph any landscape such as he described in one of his letters to me. When I read in that letter that he had travelled on a day of sunshine and cold breezes to a place out of sight of his rented cottage and had looked all around him at the silent, level land and had lost all sense that he lived on a large island surrounded by the Southern Ocean, I had supposed that my friend was reporting not an actual experience but something imagined. (As a teacher of fiction-writing, I had always been ready to believe that some of my students had been possessed of imagination, although I was never comfortable when the word came up in discussions.)

As for New Zealand, I had never supposed that I could travel thither, but if ever I had been able to get aboard a tramp-steamer that could take me and my cargo of beer from Melbourne to Dunedin or to Christchurch, I would have wanted only to look at the Canterbury Plains before I found a ship that would take me back across the Tasman Sea. A student of mine during the late 1980s, a young woman, had written in a piece of fiction a few paragraphs about the landscape around her birthplace, which was a town named Geraldine. If I were to report in this piece of fiction my feelings towards the young woman, some readers might suppose that I had fallen in love with the young woman. In fact, during the years when I was a teacher of fiction-writing I felt towards many a female student of mine what I felt towards the young woman from Geraldine. I would begin to feel thus while I was reading one or another piece of fiction written by the woman in question. In the presence of the woman, I would feel hardly otherwise than I felt towards any other student of mine. At all times, I did my best to ensure that my admired female students would not divine my feelings towards them. At all times too, I did my best not to treat any admired student more favourably than I treated my other students. And yet, whenever I was reading certain passages of fiction written by the admired student I became anxious on her account. I wanted no sadness or anxiety to be visited on her. I wanted the course of her life to be untroubled. I wanted her to succeed as a writer of fiction, to fall in love only with persons worthy of her, and always to feel connected with some or another remembered or longed-for landscape. When I learned one day that the young woman from Geraldine had a husband who had been born in Melbourne, I hoped that he was worthy of her, by which I meant that I hoped he would one day visit the Canterbury Plains as a pilgrim in earlier times might have visited a remote shrine; would one day look all around him at the silent, level land and would lose all sense that he was standing on a large island bounded on the one side by the Tasman Sea and on the other by the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes, when I was trying to report in one or another passage in my fiction the connection between one or another fictional personage and one or another fictional landscape, I would suppose that one or another of my readers might later have overlooked the passage that I was trying to write in the same way that I had overlooked the foreground and the middle-ground and even the background of the painting mentioned not long before in this piece of fiction and might have seemed to see behind my fiction, as it were, a semblance of the Midlands of Tasmania or of the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand.

But to speak plainly, an imagination would surely be of benefit to a writer.

A famous writer in the United States of America wrote during my lifetime a bulky book of fiction set, as the expression goes, in ancient Egypt. To speak plainly, the author must have exercised his imagination strenuously while he wrote. I felt no more urged to read his book than I have felt urged to read any of the many books of fiction written by contemporaries of mine in this country and set in earlier times. If ever I had been curious about the daily doings of the ancient Egyptians or about the contents of their minds, I would much rather have done my own speculating here in this suburb of Melbourne than trust the speculations of someone in New York City. Likewise, on the few occasions when I have found myself daydreaming about some or another Australian bushranger or so-called historical figure, I have never felt urged to check the details of my musings against the imaginings, to speak plainly, of some or another present-day novelist.

Surely I have paused at least once during a lifetime of reading and have admired the passage in front of me as a product of the writer’s excellent imagination.

I can recall clearly my having paused often during my first reading of the book of fiction
Wuthering Heights
, which reading took place in the autumn of 1956. I can recall equally clearly my having paused often during my first reading of the book of fiction
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, which reading took place in the winter of 1959. I doubt that I paused in order to feel gratitude or admiration towards any authorial personage. (The only picture I had seen of Thomas Hardy had reminded me of my father’s father, whom I had met several times when he was an old man with a drooping moustache and whom I always remembered as one of the least likeable of persons. The only picture I had seen of Emily Brontë had reminded me of the youngest of my father’s four unmarried sisters, whose company I could never enjoy—not because she was an unlikeable person but because I felt always obliged to avoid mentioning in her presence anything even remotely connected with sexuality.) I think it more likely that I paused in order to contemplate my own achievements as a reader; in order to feel grateful for my seeming to possess a certain mental adroitness or in order merely to savour my astonishment at the unexpected appearance of certain perspectives in far parts of the place that I call my mind.

I would first have paused during my first reading of
Wuthering Heights
in order to dwell on the strange-seeming circumstance that I had given to the character of Catherine Earnshaw in my mind the appearance of the young woman, hardly more than a girl, who had become not long before my steady girlfriend, to use an expression from the 1950s.

I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction. I should remind him or her also that I have hardly ever during the past thirty years given a name to any character in any work of fiction of mine. Even so, I feel urged to give to the fictional young woman, hardly more than a girl, who was first mentioned in the previous paragraph, the name “Christine.” I feel so urged because although I suspect that the elderly woman who was once my steady girlfriend is not a reader of fiction and may not be aware that her first steady boyfriend became, many years after she had last seen him, a writer of fiction, still I suspect that one at least of the elderly woman’s friends or acquaintances may be a reader of fiction and may, perhaps, read these sentences of fiction hereabouts while the elderly woman is still alive.

I would have later paused in order to dwell on the strange-seeming circumstance that the fictional character Catherine Earnshaw had turned away from the friend of her girlhood, the fictional character Heathcliff, in somewhat the same way that I was expecting Christine to turn away from me soon, as she did in fact turn away. The motives of the fictional character might have been variously interpreted, but Christine’s motives would have been clear to me. She was going to turn away from me because I seemed hardly interested in her own concerns, ambitions, daydreams. I knew that I should have been thus interested. I had read sometimes, in magazines intended for women, passages recommending that young persons should express an interest in one another’s concerns. Even so, I seldom remembered, while I was with Christine, to ask about her concerns. Instead, I spent much of my time with her in explaining how one or another poem or work of fiction that I had read recently had affected me or had influenced me to want to write in future a sort of poetry or a sort of fiction different from the sort that I had previously wanted to write. If the thought had once occurred to me that I was talking too much about my own concerns, then I might have reassured myself with the thought that Christine would surely consider herself amply compensated when she read in the future some or another published piece of poetry or fiction alluding to a personage of her appearance or with her concerns; or else I took it as inevitable that we would separate but hoped my subsequent solitariness might be helpful to me as a writer.

I would have paused during my first reading of
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
in order to dwell on the strange circumstance that I had seemed to give to the character of Tess Durbeyfield in my mind the appearance of a certain young woman of about my own age who was at that time a classmate of mine in the teacher-training college where I was then studying. I hereby remind the reader of all that I reminded him or her at the beginning of the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph. I now report that I feel urged to give to the fictional young woman who was first mentioned in the sentence before the previous sentence the name “Nancy.” I feel so urged because I suspect that the elderly woman who was once a classmate of mine may have been throughout her life a reader of fiction.