Barley Patch (19 page)

During my lifetime, I have seen many writers of fiction praised for something called psychological insight. This faculty is said to enable the writers to explain why their characters behave as they are reported to behave in the writers’ works of fiction. I would be surprised if any reader or critic claimed to have found anywhere in my fiction an entity deserving to be called a
character
. And even supposing that some far-seeing reader or critic has glimpsed, among the mazes of my sentences, some shape or phantom of a man or a woman, I would defy such a reader or critic to endow such an illusion with anything that might be called a trait of anything that might be called a character. Any personage referred to in my fiction has its existence only in my mind and finds its way into my fiction only so that I might learn why it occupies in my mind the position that it occupies there.

Yes, I have referred to the man who released the pheasants as my father. Likewise, I have referred to a girl seen from a distance on a certain afternoon as my mother, but I am unable to compose sentences that might even begin to explain how the breeder of pheasants and the wearer of the pale-coloured frock even came to meet, let alone to be drawn to one another and finally to copulate.

If I have not stated it previously, then I state it here. This work of fiction is a report of scenes and events occurring in my mind. While writing this work of fiction, I have observed no other rules or conventions than those that seem to operate in that part of my mind wherein I seem to witness scenes and events demanding to be reported in a work of fiction.

In the impossible circumstance that I possessed an imagination, I might, perhaps, be able to bring the breeder of pheasants and the pale-clad girl in the distance, his step-cousin, into the one bed, but I prefer to report a series of unlikely events that composed itself I know not when in some or another far paddock of my mind. The events comprise no more than an exchange of several letters between two persons who had never met and were never to meet, along with the speculations and, perhaps, the imaginings of each of the two persons. One of the persons was a young unmarried man living in a district of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of cliffs and an ocean in one direction and in the other direction the beginnings of a district of plains. The other person was a young unmarried woman living in a building of more than one storey. I cannot explain how the exchange of letters began, unless to suggest that the two young persons may have been distant relatives. Early letters would have included reports of books that each of the writers had read or hoped soon to read. Later letters would have reported details from the childhood of each writer. Such a sympathy and such an understanding would have developed between the writers—and readers, as they ought also to be called—that each might sometimes have speculated as to how differently the two might have lived if they had learned from one another early in life what they had later learned from their letters. And if even one of the two had been able to do so, then he or she would have called into being an imagined courtship and marriage and even an imaginary child of the marriage.

Much of what has been written in the preceding few pages might be said to have been misleading. The true account of my conception is simply told. Being no more than the conjectured author of this work of fiction, I can have come into existence only at the moment when a certain female personage who was reading these pages formed in her mind an image of the male personage who had written the pages with her in mind.

Some or another conception has been reported at last. This text is surely at an end.

A personage, or even a person, who reports the events preceding his or her conception should surely not end the report at the moment of conception. Although the existence of the personage or person might be said to have begun at conception, his or her lasting awareness of things was then far from having begun.

My own report should end with the following account of a few moments during the summer when I became two years of age. The sunlight is strangely bright, as though the previous two years of my life have been lived in darkness. My father has taken me into a strange house. As for the whereabouts of the house, I will seem to recall long afterwards that my father and I arrived at the house after we had travelled for some distance along the road that led towards a place called Kinglake from our own house in the mostly level grassy countryside of Bundoora, north of Melbourne.

While my father talks with the man of the house, a woman picks me up and carries me towards a doorway within the house. The smooth skin of the woman and her pleasant voice appeal to me. Beyond the doorway is darkness. The woman steps through the doorway, still carrying me in her arms. From somewhere in the darkness, the woman takes up a small object and then puts it into my hands. Outside again, in the bright sunlight, I see that the object is some sort of home-cooked biscuit or cake. The woman urges me to eat the object, but I want only to admire the colour of the object, which is a golden yellow. As soon as the woman has set me down, I take the object back through the doorway. I am eager to watch again while the eloquent yellow stands out from the blackness.

PART 2

Seemingly, this text is still far from the end. What remains to be reported about my having decided to write no more fiction?

A hasty reader of the previous pages may still be waiting to learn why I gave up writing fiction more than fifteen years ago. A more careful reader may already be on the way to learning why I gave up. The hasty reader and the careful reader alike are perhaps curious to know what I happened to be writing on the bustling afternoon when I stopped writing fiction without even having questioned myself as the poet Rilke had recommended. Each sort of reader is welcome to the information that I was writing, on the bustling afternoon, the latest of the hundreds of pages that I had written during the previous four years in an effort to put together a longer and more dense piece of fiction than I had previously put together. The title of the abandoned piece of fiction had occurred to me at some time before I had written the first words of the piece, just as every other title of every other work of fiction of mine had occurred to me. The title in question was
O, Dem Golden Slippers
.

The hundreds of pages mentioned in the previous paragraph have lain for more than fifteen years in one of the filing cabinets that stand against the walls of the room where I sit writing these words. In the same filing cabinet are scores of other pages comprising notes and early drafts that I wrote before I began to write the first of the hundreds of pages. All of the pages mentioned are in hanging files each of which is accurately labelled, but I prefer not to look into those files today. I prefer to report the few details that have stayed in my mind for more than fifteen years rather than to look again at the pages that I struggled to write for four years until I suddenly gave up the struggle on the bustling afternoon mentioned earlier.

The first section of my abandoned work of fiction was a report of something that I had heard from a mature-age student of my fiction-writing course some years before I began to write the work. I reported that a certain young man who had spent all his life in a small town in north-eastern Tasmania daydreamed often of going to live in Hobart, which he saw in his mind as a city of many-storeyed office-buildings surrounded by suburbs where not a few of the houses were of two storeys. On a certain day during his last year of secondary school, the young man saw in a newspaper a portion of the text of an advertisement directed to young persons about to leave school. The young man learned from the portion of text that board and lodging would be found in Hobart for successful applicants. The young man had then begun to draft an application in his mind even before he had learned what sort of training course or occupation was being advertised. I reported finally that the young man had escaped from his small town to Hobart and thence to Melbourne whereas the chief character of the work of fiction of which my report was the beginning—that character had escaped in a different direction. He had spent most of his early life in one or another suburb of Melbourne. During his last year of secondary school he saw, in a booklet published by a religious order of priests, a black and white reproduction of a photograph of a large building of two storeys overlooking a view of mostly level grassy countryside in the Riverina district of New South Wales. He had decided to apply to join the order of priests even before he had learned what his life’s work would be if his application was successful.

An early section of the unfinished work of fiction was set, as it were, in what used to be called a flat on the second storey of a block of flats in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Some of the windows of the flat overlooked a park where open grassy expanses were crossed by lines of trees. The tenants of the flat were a young man and a young woman who lived together although they had not yet been married. The time when the fictional passage was set in the flat was the early 1960s.

During the many years since the 1960s, many persons have written inaccurate accounts of that decade. Many of those persons have written, for example, that the decade was a period of liberation or of sexual freedom. I was a young man in my twenties during the 1960s. I was well aware of a mood of expectation among younger persons. We sensed that things would change for the better in the near future. In the meanwhile, however, no great changes seemed to have taken place. In the late 1960s, for example, one of my girl-cousins, a daughter of one of my father’s younger brothers, travelled in secret from Melbourne to Sydney and there gave birth to a so-called illegitimate child. The child was taken at once to a so-called babies’ home, there to await adoption. In the late 1960s, for example, a young woman of my acquaintance who spent the 1970s and every decade thereafter as a follower of the latest trends and fashions—that young woman lived for a week of her annual holidays with her boyfriend in a holiday-flat on the Mornington Peninsula but posed throughout the week as his wife and wore a mock wedding-ring and a mock engagement-ring.

On Friday evenings and on Saturday evenings, several young men would visit the flat that was the fictional setting mentioned earlier, there to drink beer and to talk and to watch television and, perhaps, to try to learn by some or another means how each of them might one day persuade some or another young woman to live with him in a flat although the two had not yet married.

According to my unfinished work of fiction, one or another young man, on one or another Friday or Saturday evening, had looked through the partly opened window of the bathroom of the second-storey flat while he was urinating without having turned on the light in the bathroom. The young man had then hurried back to the lounge-room of the flat and had told the persons gathered there that a young woman was undressing in a bedroom of an upstairs flat in the neighbouring block of flats. All of the young men in the lounge-room hurried into the bathroom and took turns to look out through the partly opened window. One of the young men was intended to be the chief character of the whole work of fiction. He will be called from here onwards the chief character.

The chief character had not previously seen a naked adult female person, although the young woman in the neighbouring flat had been too far away for him to appreciate the details of her nakedness. On the next evening when he visited the second-storey flat, he took with him the pair of binoculars that he had bought during the late 1950s, when he had been working as a junior clerk in a building of many storeys near the centre of Melbourne in the first year after he had finished his secondary education. Only a few months after he had begun to work as a junior clerk, the first consignment of Japanese binoculars arrived in Australia. The advertised price of a pair of these binoculars was three times his weekly wage, but he bought a pair without hesitation. Until then, the only binoculars available in Australia had been German binoculars costing at least twenty times the weekly wage of a junior clerk. His father had owned a pair of German binoculars for several years during the mid-1930s. He had bought the binoculars from the proceeds of winning bets on racehorses but had later pawned them and had never afterwards redeemed them. The chief character had for long supposed that his father had had to pawn the binoculars so that he could afford to buy an engagement ring and later to be married.

When he had bought his binoculars, the chief character had had no reason to save money for the future. He supposed he would remain unmarried for many years and even throughout his life and would devote his free time to writing poetry and prose fiction or to going to race-meetings and devising methods of betting profitably on racehorses. From time to time, he felt himself attracted to some or another young woman who worked in the building of many storeys. Sometimes he would even try to devise a strategy for approaching the young woman and beginning a conversation with her. But even at such times, he did not feel obliged to save any of his meagre weekly wage for the purpose of buying in the future a block of land in an outer suburb of Melbourne where he and his wife-of-the-future would later live in a weatherboard house with three bedrooms. He did not feel thus obliged because he had learned that the Education Department of Victoria had such a need for teachers that a person aged at least twenty-one years could acquire a trained primary teacher’s certificate after only one year of study in a teachers’ college. The chief character supposed that if he lapsed in future from his bachelor-vocation, he would undertake a year of training and would become a primary teacher. As a married man, he would then be eligible for appointment to one or another small school in the countryside of Victoria where a so-called official residence stood beside the schoolyard. He and his wife could live in the residence, paying only a nominal rental, for as long as he chose to remain at that school.

The chief character had seen a number of school residences in the countryside of Victoria. Each was a weatherboard cottage painted cream with dark-green trimmings. Sometimes, at his desk by day in the building of many storeys, or in his rented room of an evening, he would feel the desire to live in the future in a school residence even though he had at that time no interest in any young woman. At such times, he foresaw himself and his wife of the future inside their cream and green cottage on a certain Saturday afternoon in the future. His wife of the future may have been sometimes only a faint image, but other details of the scene were clear and memorable. The season would have been summer, and the view from every window of the cottage would have been of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance, except that all the window-blinds would have been drawn against the heat and the glare. The young husband and wife who lived in the cottage would have been preparing to rest for an hour in their bedroom after having unpacked their weekly shopping and eaten lunch. The faint sounds of the broadcast of a horse-race would have come from a radio in the kitchen.

The chief character always tried to prolong a certain moment during this sequence of images: a moment when his image-self and his image-wife had lain on their image-bed to rest and when his image-self had closed his image-eyes. When he observed other sequences of images in which his image-self took part, he seemed never more than an observer and his image-self an entity to be observed. Only when his image-self seemed to rest in the dim image-room in the image-cottage surrounded by images of mostly level grassy countryside and lines of image-trees—only then did he seem likely, for however short a time, to be no longer an observer of images of himself but instead himself living an image-life. He tried to prolong the moment by staring, as it were, at the images in his mind of the few items of furniture in the room or of one or another window-blind with a crack in its fabric that let through a sliver of the dazzling light from outside, but what followed was as though his future self had fallen briefly asleep in the bedroom of the cottage and had dreamed one of the vivid and disturbing dreams that occurred to the chief character himself whenever he fell asleep in daylight. The cottage would seem a mere cabin with a single bed and a chair and a cupboard and with a window facing the sunlight of early afternoon. The cabin was one of a row of such cabins. The men who occupied the cabins were employed as grooms and track-riders on a large property where the mostly level grassy countryside was partitioned by white-railed fences as well as by lines of trees. The man who awoke in his cabin in the early afternoon may have begun work on that morning several hours before daylight. If he had raised the blind and had looked out through the window of his cabin, the man might have seen, beyond several lines of trees, the upper windows and the roof of a house of two storeys. The man understood this in the way that the narrator of his experiences seemed to understand certain matters in dreams. The man understood further that he had no wife or girlfriend and that he was far from being a young man, but that he might admire from a distance a certain young woman who came out each morning from the house of two storeys and who supervised the training of a stable of racehorses in a mostly level grassy place among stands of trees. Or, he would seem to be looking at the cottage from the outside, with the difference that the window-frames and other trimmings were painted orange-gold, and with the further differences that the cottage stood among a row of cottages in a street with gravel footpaths in a city in northern Victoria and that he was a child of four or five years standing on the footpath in front of the cottage and in the company of his mother and another woman. The women seemed to have stopped for no other reason than to speak derisively about the young married woman who lived in the cottage. The two women spoke as though the young woman was at that moment inside the cottage and was reading magazines or books when she might have been doing housework. The child understood further that the surname of the young woman had as its first syllable the word
Bells
. He learned some years later that the surname was of Italian origin and began with the letters B-a-l-s- . . . , but for as long as he seemed to be standing in front of the cottage he supposed that the surname of the young woman behind the drawn blinds was one of the superior sort of surname that denoted things seen or heard readily in the mind. He supposed that the colour of the window-frames and of other trimmings was the rich metallic colour of the bells denoted by the surname of the young woman or of the bells mentioned in a certain book that the young woman remembered having read behind her drawn blinds or of the bells depicted in one or another picture in one or another of her dim rooms.

When the chief character had first bought his binoculars, he had supposed that he would use them mostly for looking at fields of racehorses on the far sides of racecourses and occasionally for looking at birds in grassy countryside, but he had not hesitated to take his binoculars to the upstairs flat. During the year in the early 1960s when he was a regular visitor to the upstairs flat, the chief character was no longer a clerk in a building of many storeys but a teacher in a primary school in an outer suburb of Melbourne. He had earlier undergone a year-long course of teacher-training but not in order to live with a young wife in a cottage painted cream with dark-green trimmings; he had become a teacher so that he could apply to be transferred to a school far from Melbourne if ever he felt drawn in future to live among mostly grassy countryside. During the years while he had owned the binoculars, he had gone out on one occasion only with each of two young women, but he mostly saw himself as a bachelor who admired girls or women from a distance. He arrived with his binoculars at the upstairs flat hopeful that some or another magnified image from the opposite building might embolden him in his future dealings with young women but more inclined to suppose that whatever he might see through the binoculars would only show him more clearly what he was deprived of as a bachelor.