During the years when I earned my living as a teacher of fiction-writing in a university, one or another of my students would sometimes call on me in my office and would claim that she could not write the pieces of fiction that I required her to write and would give as the reason for this that she did not understand what I meant by the word fiction. I used the words her and she in the previous sentence only because three-quarters of my students of fiction-writing were females.
While I was writing the previous sentence, I saw in my mind an image of the view from the chair that I used as my chair in one of the rooms that I used as my office during the years when I was a teacher in a university. The view was of part of the room as it would have appeared to me if ever I had been visited in my office by a certain young woman who was one of my students for two years but never visited me during those years. The young woman never visited me or asked me to explain what I meant by the word fiction, but she wrote as the last of her assignments while she was my student a piece of fiction that earned from me the highest numerical mark on a scale of 1 to 100 that I gave to any piece of fiction during the years mentioned above.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, I understood that the young woman mentioned there was listening to the words of a man who was talking about the writing of fiction. I could not see any image of the man, and I could not hear in my mind any words that the man was speaking, but I understood that the man was in the room and that the young woman was listening to the words of the man.
I understood these things in the same way that I understand many of the matters that I seem afterwards to have seen and to have heard while dreaming.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, I understood that the young woman mentioned there could not hear any words from the man mentioned there but that she was aware of what the man could well have spoken to her in the same way that I am aware of what could well have been spoken to me by images of persons that I seem afterwards to have been aware of while dreaming.
During the years mentioned in the first paragraph of this piece of fiction, I would sometimes say to one or another of my students in my office that any person who was paid to teach other persons how to write pieces of fiction should be able, in the presence of any number of those other persons, to write the whole of a previously unwritten piece of fiction and to explain at the same time what had seemingly caused each sentence of the piece to be written as it had been written. I would then write a sentence on a sheet of paper. I would then read the sentence aloud to my student. I would then explain to my student that the sentence was a report of a detail of an image in my mind. I would explain further that the image was not an image that I had seen in my mind recently for the first time or an image that I saw in my mind only at long intervals but an image that I saw often in my mind. I would explain that the image I had begun to write about was connected by strong feelings to other images in my mind.
I would then go on to tell my student that my mind consisted only of images and feelings; that I had studied my mind for many years and had found in it nothing but images and feelings; that a diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns. Whenever I had seen in my mind the image that I had begun to write about just then, so I would say to my student, I had felt the strong feelings leading from that image far out into the grassy countryside of my mind towards other images, even though I might not yet have seen any of those other images. I did not doubt, so I would tell my student, that one after another detail of one after another of those other images would appear in my mind while I went on writing about the image that I had begun to write about on the sheet of paper that was before me.
Having mentioned the sheet of paper, I would make as though to write a second sentence on it but instead would move the sheet to one side and would place a blank sheet in front of me. I would then write a sentence on the blank sheet. I would then read this sentence aloud to my student. I would then explain to my student that the sentence was a report of a detail of an image distinct from the image whose details I had already begun to report. The second image, so I would explain, had occurred to me while I was writing on the first sheet of paper. A number of images had occurred to me during that time. I would explain, just as they might have occurred to me if I had been performing any other task, but only the one image had caused me to feel that it was connected by feelings to the image that I had already begun to write about.
With the second sheet of paper still in front of me, I would prepare to write a report of another of the details of the second of the images that belonged in my piece of fiction. But then I would tell my student that I had already seen in my mind a third image that seemed to be connected by feelings to the second image or to the first image or to each image by a separate route. In fact, I might not yet have seen such an image, but I would tell my student that I had seen the image so that she would understand that the images belonging in a piece of fiction sometimes appeared so fast and so profusely that the writer of the fiction might despair of being able to report the details of the images before they disappeared again into his or her mind. I would then tell my student that I had sometimes as a younger writer despaired in this way but that I had learned in time that the images and the feelings in my mind were always in their rightful places in my mind and that I would always find my way among them. Sometimes, having told my student this, I would feel for a moment urged to tell her something further. I would feel urged to tell her that the patterns of images and feelings in my mind had become in time more extensive and more intricate whereas the thing that I called my body (or that I should have called, perhaps, the image of my body) had been decaying, causing me to suppose that my mind might go on existing when my body no longer existed. (As to the question whether or not I myself may go on existing after my body no longer exists, the person writing these words cannot answer until he has learned whether or not the entity denoted by the word I earlier in this paragraph is in the place denoted by the words my mind earlier in this paragraph. As to the question that might have occurred just now to someone reading this piece of fiction: who is the writer of these words if not the entity denoted by the word I in the previous sentence? – only a reader of this piece of fiction may answer that question and only after having looked into his or her own mind, which is the only place where the personage exists who is mostly aptly denoted by the words the implied author of this piece of fiction. I learned the term implied author from the book The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne C. Booth, which was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1961. Certain parts of that book helped me during the years when I worked as a teacher of fiction. Whenever during those years I used such a term as implied author or implied reader, I seemed to be explaining to my students what took place in my mind while I wrote or read a piece of fiction. But these matters cannot be explained in so few words, and any reader of these pages who has read certain parts of the book mentioned above will not accept my answer to the question above and will assumed that the flesh-and-blood author of this piece must be well aware of at least one implied author who has not been mentioned previously in this text.)
I would never tell my student about the matter mentioned in the previous paragraph, my reason being that I did not know whether or not my student was a person of good will. I cannot decide whether or not a person is of good will by any other means than by reading a piece of fiction written by the person. As to the question: why have I written about the matter mentioned in the previous paragraph when I do not know whether or not the readers of these paragraphs are persons of good will? – these paragraphs are part of a piece of fiction, and the writer of these words is safe forever from readers of ill will. As to the question: what had I to fear from a person of ill will who had learned from me the matter previously mentioned? – I had to fear that my supposing that my mind might go on existing when my body no longer existed would cause my student to suppose that my mind contained an image of a person named God or of a place named heaven or of something called eternity or something called infinity whereas each of these words, whenever I hear it or read it, causes me only to see in my mind the image of grassy countryside that I see whenever I look at the farthest visible parts of my mind.
All the images in my mind were in their rightful places, so I would tell my student, and knowing this, I did not feel panic or despair whenever the details of separate images occurred to me in such a way that I had to write in succession on two or three or more sheets of paper before I had reported more than one or two of the many details that I would have to report of the image that I had begun to write about on the first of my sheets of paper. The images were in their rightful places, and I would find my way in time from image to image, but I did not believe that the order in which the images first occurred to me must be the order in which they were fixed in my mind. I would then remind my student that a diagram of the images in my mind would resemble a cluster of small towns as marked on a map. I would then take from a drawer in my desk six manila folders that I kept there for this sort of occasion. Each folder was of a different colour. I would pick up the nearest at hand of the folders and would place inside it the first of the sheets of paper on which I had begun to report the first of the details of the images mentioned previously. I would then place each of my other sheets of paper into one or another of the other folders. (The reader should suppose that I had by then on my desk six sheets of paper, each with at least a phrase written on it.) The colours of the folders were important, I would tell my student. Like many people, I would tell her, I connected each colour in the world with a different feeling, but unlike many people, perhaps, I saw all the images in my mind as coloured. I was therefore able to decide which of the folders now on my desk was of the most appropriate colour for each of the sheets of paper that I wanted to store in them. I might then change one or more of the sheets from one folder to another, and while doing this, I might write on the front of each coloured folder a word, a phrase, or a sentence.
While I wrote on the front of each folder, I might explain to my student that some of the words that I was then writing might become the title of the whole piece of fiction. I would certainly explain to my student at some time during my instruction that I could hardly begin to write any piece of fiction before I had found its title; that the title of a piece of fiction ought to come from deep inside the piece; that the title of a piece of fiction should have several meanings, and that the reader should not learn these meanings until almost the whole of the piece had been read; that none of the titles of any piece of fiction written by me contained a noun denoting an abstract entity; and that I had not for as long as I had been a teacher of fiction-writing read any published piece of fiction with a title containing a noun denoting an abstract entity.
The piece of fiction of which this paragraph is the twelfth was not written in the presence of any of my students, but if it had been so written, each of the following six passages might have been written on one each of six manila folders before even the first draft of this paragraph had been written. The far fields of the Times Literary Supplement; Books are a load of crap; The man with his chin in his hands; Welcome to Florida; The Homer of the Insects; The man with the coloured folders. The colours of the six manila folders might have been respectively green, red, blue, orange, yellow, and buff or plain. If I had written in the presence of a student the words mentioned above on the folders mentioned above, I would then have picked up all six folders, holding each so as not to let fall any sheet of paper from inside it, and would have walked about the open space on the carpet at the centre of my office while I placed one after another of the folders at one or another point on the carpet but with no thought as to where I was placing each folder. If I had placed the folders as mentioned, I would then have told my student that the cluster of small towns in the expanse of grassy countryside suggested by the folders as they lay on the carpet might be approached from any of a number of directions, and that a person who had approached the cluster by way of one or another small town might then travel throughout the cluster from one small town to another by any of a number of different routes before he or she reached what had once been for him or her the far side of the cluster and looked towards further grassy countryside. If I had told my student this, I would then have walked away from the folders and would have sat down again at my desk as though I was about to begin writing while the folders and their contents were still lying on the floor behind me. If I had done this, I would have expected my student to understand that I might sometimes write about certain images as though I only remembered having seen them or as though I had only imagined having seen them. Or, instead of leaving all the folders on the floor after I had told my student what is mentioned above, I would have picked up one or another of the folders and would have placed it on my desk. I would then have picked up the remaining folders and would have thrust them into the drawer of my desk where I keep used envelopes and folders. I would then have sat down at my desk as though I was about to begin writing with only the one folder at hand. While I sat there, I would have hoped that my student saw in her mind a small town surrounded by grassy countryside with no end in sight or some other place surrounded by other places with no end in sight and that she saw herself as keeping to that small town or to that other place during the remainder of her life and as reporting detail after detail of image after image that seemed to surround her with no end in sight.
At some time while I wrote or prepared to write in my office, I would remind my student that what I was writing or preparing to write consisted or would consist only of sentences. At some time after I had written a number of sentences, I would point out to my student that the subject of nearly every sentence I had written was a noun or a pronoun or a noun phrase denoting a person. If I had been writing this piece of fiction in the presence of a student, I might have pointed out that this is the eleventh consecutive sentence that has such a subject. If any student had asked me to explain what I had told her about sentences, I would have told her, whether or not I believed her to be a person of good will, that I wrote fiction in order to learn the meaning of certain images in my mind; that I considered a thing to have meaning if the thing seemed to be connected with another thing; that even a simple sentence established a connection between the thing called its subject and the thing called its predicate; that I believed a writer of fiction with a better vantage point than mine could have composed a single far-reaching sentence with clauses to the number of the total of simple sentences and of clauses of all kinds in my published pieces of fiction plus one further clause to establish a connection such as I would never be able to establish, but that I would try to read such a sentence only if the subject of its main clause was a noun or a pronoun or a noun phrase denoting a person.
After my student had watched me writing and had heard me talking for some time, she would assure me that she had watched and heard enough. Before she left my office, I would tell her, as a last piece of advice, that she need not have learned the meaning of every image reported in a piece of fiction before she had finished writing the final draft. Nearly every piece of my fiction, I would tell her, included a report of an image whose connections I did not discover until long after the piece had been finished. Sometimes these connections had not appeared until I was writing a later piece of fiction, and then I would understand that the image in the earlier piece of fiction was connected with an image in the later piece. If I had ever had in front of me while I talked to a student in my office the first draft of the first five hundred words and more of the piece of fiction of which this paragraph is the fourteenth, I might have told her that the image whose details were reported in the second, third, and fourth paragraphs of that draft, which paragraphs have the same numbering in the final draft, seemed not truly connected with the other images reported in any of the six folders that would have been lying on my desk while I spoke. I might then have told my student that the true meaning of the image just mentioned might still not have appeared to me even while I was writing the final draft of the final paragraph of the report of the images reported in the folder in which that image was first reported, and that if the true meaning had not so appeared, I would report this as the last detail to be reported in the last sentence of that draft.
The far fields of the Times Literary Supplement
On a certain morning in my twenty-third year, when I was writing the first draft of what I hoped would be my first published piece of fiction – a novel of more than 200,000 words – I approached a young man who was only a year or two older than myself, to judge from his looks, but who had seemed to me whenever I had visited Cheshire’s Bookshop in Little Collins Street during the previous three years the most knowledgeable of all the sales assistants in the shop. I spoke to the young man the words that I had been rehearsing for a week. I told him that I was a regular buyer of books, mostly of fiction and poetry, and that I learned about the latest published works by reading every Saturday the Literary Supplement in the Age, but that I felt isolated from the world of English and European literature. I then asked the young man if he could recommend a publication that would keep me well informed about contemporary fiction and poetry overseas and if he could arrange through the subscriptions department of his bookshop a subscription for me to the publication.
The young man did not turn me away, and I felt grateful to him at once. He answered my inquiry, but he spoke as though he was wearied by having to explain to me something that was common knowledge among the people he mixed with. At the time, I was far from supposing that he might have learned his way of speaking from persons who seemed to him as superior as he seemed to me. Three years later, I enrolled for the first time at the University of Melbourne as an evening student of first-year English and heard the same way of speaking among most of the tutors and some of the lecturers. (Three years later again, when I was enrolled in third-year English, I saw the man from Cheshire’s Bookshop coming out of an evening tutorial in second-year English.) The young man looked past me from where he stood behind the counter in the bookshop while he told me that the premier literary periodical in the world was generally acknowledged to be the London Magazine. I was disappointed to learn that this was only a quarterly periodical, but I paid for a subscription and looked forward to receiving my first copy by surface mail some weeks or months later.
When my first copy arrived, I saw at once that the London Magazine was not what I needed, but I sat down to read it through. The first piece was called ‘The Golden Bowl’ and was by a Tony Tanner. I believed that I was about to read a piece of fiction. I hardly knew at that time what literary criticism was, and I had never heard of Henry James or of any of his books. For as long as I have read, I have been attracted by the promise of certain titles of works and especially by any title containing an adjective denoting a colour. As I began to read, I was imagining the details of an object shaped like a chalice or like the Melbourne Cup and appearing against a background of green fields such as I had seen in illustrations of Glastonbury. I was baffled by the first few paragraphs that I read, and I gave up as soon as I understood that I was reading someone’s comments on someone else’s book.
I would not have dared to go back to the young man in the bookshop to complain about his choice of a literary periodical, but I set about finding a better. Two years later, I saw in the literary supplement of the Age an advertisement for the Times Literary Supplement, and I took out a subscription.
For nearly twenty years, I read every page of every issue of the TLS. I even read the advertisements for bookshops (‘Russica and Slavica bought and sold’) and for professorships in West Africa and librarianships in Malta or Singapore. I read the letters to the editor, although I sometimes heard from the prose the same tone of voice that I had first heard from the young man in the bookshop and although I was often unable to understand what was at issue in the many disputes between letter-writers. I admired the intricate addresses of many of the authors who wrote in defence of their books (‘The Old Mill Cottage, St John’s Lane, Oakover, Shotcombe, near Dudbury, Suffolk’) and imagined those persons as living from the royalties of their books in remote green landscapes. For fifteen of the twenty years mentioned above, I cut out book reviews and essays and poems and a few letters, all of which I intended to read again in the future. One day in the late 1970s, when the pieces I had cut out had filled a drawer of one of my filing cabinets and when the residents of the city where I live had not yet been forbidden to burn waste matter in their backyards, I burned all the cuttings that I had kept from the TLS, having read none of them since I had filed them, and having decided that I was unlikely to read any of them during the next fifteen years.
During the twenty years or so mentioned above, I bought many thousands of dollars’ worth of books, mostly books of fiction, as a result of my having read reviews of the books in the TLS. Whenever a parcel of books arrived from my bookseller, I felt that I was a person of exceptional discernment as I opened the parcel and put the books on my shelves. I bought books other than those reviewed in the TLS, and each year the number of books that I bought was far greater than the number of books that I read, even though I read part of a book every day, but for most of the twenty years mentioned above I intended to read at least once every book that I owned. During most of those years, I would have said that I remembered some of the books that I had read far more clearly than I remembered others. During most of those years, I would have said that some of the books I had read were inferior or much inferior to others, but I had always read to the last page of any book that I had begun to read. One day in the early 1980s, I decided not to go on reading the book that I was then reading. On the same day, I decided that I would not in future read to the end of any book that I did not wish to go on reading. On the same day, I decided further that I had read in the past to the end of many a book when I ought not to have done so.
The book that I was reading when I made the decisions just mentioned was a book of fiction that had been reviewed most favourably in the TLS. The author of the book was an Englishman who was himself a reviewer for the TLS. One of his earlier books had been awarded a prize on account of its merit. The book that I had decided not to go on reading had been published by a London publishing house whose distinctive logo was on the spines of many of my books. I had often walked into the room where most of my books were displayed and had tried to look around the room as though I was a visitor seeing it for the first time and had persuaded myself that the first thing such a visitor would notice was the number of books with a certain distinctive logo on their spines.
After I had written the previous paragraph, I went to one of my bookshelves and took down a book bearing the logo mentioned in the previous sentence. As I reached for the book, I was aware that I had supposed for the past thirty years and more that the logo was an image of an object that I called in my mind an urn with leaves and flowers trailing down from the sides of it. While I looked just now at the logo on the spine of my book, I understood that I had seen for the past thirty years and more as details of leaves and flowers two letters of the alphabet.
After I had made the decisions mentioned above, I decided not to put the book by the Englishman back in its place on my shelves. I then decided that I no longer wanted to have the book in my possession. I then decided that the book just mentioned was not the only book of mine that I no longer wanted to possess. I then began to look at the spine of one after another of the books that I had read during a period of nearly twenty years before that day. I found those books with the help of the notebook in which I had listed for nearly twenty years all the books that I read and the dates on which I finished reading the books. While I looked at each spine, I tried to remember one or more words from the book or, failing that, one or more of the images that had appeared in my mind while I read the book or, failing that, one or more of the feelings that I had felt while I read the book or, failing that, one or more of the details that I remembered from the mornings or afternoons or evenings when I read the book or from the places where I had been while I read it. If I could remember while I stared at the spine of a book none of the things mentioned just above, then I removed the book from my shelves.
Some books kept their places on my shelves as a result of my remembering a few words from their texts. For example, I remembered from somewhere in the text of The Good Soldier Švejk, by Jaroslav Hašek, which I had read twelve years before, the phrase ‘on the mournful plains of East Galicia’ and also the Serbian curses ‘Fuck the world!’, ‘Fuck the Virgin Mary!’, and ‘Fuck God!’ Some books kept their places on my shelves as a result of my remembering one or more images that had passed through my mind while I read the books. For example, I remembered having seen in my mind sixteen years before, while I read one or another passage in Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, an image of a walled mansion surrounded by grasslands. Some books kept their places on my shelves as a result of my remembering one or another feeling that I had felt while I read them. For example, I remembered having felt seventeen years before, while I read Auto-da-fé, by Elias Canetti, a desire to write at some time in the future a piece of fiction about a man who preferred his library to all other places. Some books kept their places on the shelves as a result of my remembering one or more details from the time when I read the book or the place where I read it. For example, I remembered having read twelve years before in Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis, a passage reporting the arrival of a butterfly through a window into the room where the writer of the narrative was writing while I was travelling in a train through the suburbs of Melbourne and while the doors and the windows of the train were open because the time was afternoon and the season was summer and while specks of dust were being blown onto the pages of the book in my hands and while I would stop following the narrative from time to time in order to observe the writer’s way of interrupting his narrative from time to time in order to report one or another detail from the time when he was writing or the place where he was writing.
The exercise described above occupied for more than two weeks the time that I would otherwise have spent in reading books from my shelves. At the end of the two weeks and more, I calculated that I had stood in front of the spines of more than nine hundred books and that I had removed from my shelves a few more than three hundred. When I had begun the exercise described above, I had intended to remove from my house all of the books that I would have removed from my shelves when I had finished the exercise, but when I saw the three hundred lying all around the floor and the many gaps that they had left on the shelves, I decided to give the three hundred one more chance. During the next few days, I picked up one after another of the three hundred and let it fall open in my hands. I then began to read from one or the other of the pages lying open. I read always from about the middle of the page to the end but never past the end. If, while I read, I felt the least desire to read at some time in the future any page or pages of the book other than the page I was then reading, bearing in mind that I had not yet begun to read for the first time many of the books on my shelves and that I had already been reading books for more years than I would be reading them in the future if I lived a life of average length, I would put the book back in its place on my shelves. If I did not feel such a desire, I would put the book on the floor.
After I had performed the exercise described just above, I counted a few more than a hundred books still on the floor. I then cut my name from where I had written it on the flyleaf of each of these books. I then stacked the hundred and more books in cardboard cartons ready to be removed from the house. I had never previously removed any book from my house. Even duplicate copies were kept in a cupboard to be given in the future to my children.
While I had been performing the exercise described above, I had intended to take the discarded books to one or another second-hand bookshop and to sell as many as the proprietor wanted to buy and to give him or her the remainder. But when the books were in the cardboard cartons, I imagined a certain sort of young person standing in the future in the bookshop where my discarded books would be on the shelves. The young person would be the sort of person that I had been when I bought on the advice of the young man in Cheshire’s Bookshop a subscription to the London Magazine. After I had imagined the young person in the second-hand bookshop just mentioned, I prepared to take the cartons of books to Fairfield.
During the years when I had lived in the suburb where I lived, I had taken each week a parcel of wastepaper and cardboard in the boot of my car from my house to the nearby suburb of Fairfield. At Fairfield a chute had been installed at the side of a large paper-manufacturing plant. Down this chute the people from many suburbs around threw their wastepaper. As soon as my children were old enough, they used to go with me on Sunday mornings and help me throw our wastepaper down the chute. I would occasionally hear one of the children say of some drawing he or she had abandoned or of some school exercise book that had been filled that it ought to be taken to Fairfield. For many years, the children would have known nothing else about Fairfield than that wastepaper was dumped there.
When I dumped at Fairfield the discarded books mentioned above, my children had reached an age when they no longer cared to travel in my car for pleasure, but even if one or both of them had wanted to come with me on the days when I dumped the books, I would not have allowed it. I had decided that the books deserved to be dumped, but I would still not have wanted my children to see books – many of them hard-covered books with brightly coloured dust-jackets – being thrown down the chute at Fairfield. I wrote the word days in the first sentence of this paragraph because I did not dump all of the books together. The chute at Fairfield seems always to have at least one car parked beside it with a person carrying cartons from the car to the dumping-place. I did not want to be seen dumping books. One carton was all that I could safely dump each week without being noticed. I was even wary of the workmen who came from time to time with forklift vehicles to clear away the dumped matter. If I dumped more than one box of books on any one day, so I thought, I increased the chance of my being seen by some workman who would then leap from his seat on his vehicle and hurry to collect the books in some empty dumped carton and who would hail me as though I must have made some terrible mistake.
The discarded books mentioned above were the first books that I removed from my shelves, let alone from my house, but I have dumped other books at Fairfield since my first book-dumping there. During the years since then, I have come to expect more from the books that I begin to read. I buy many fewer books than I used to buy. I seldom buy a book for no other reason than that I have read a favourable review of it, and not since the early 1980s have I bought a book simply as a result of having read a favourable review in the TLS. During the last ten years, I have come to expect not only that something of the experience of reading a book should stay with me but that the writing of the book should seem to have cost the writer much effort and that the sentences of the book should seem to have been composed so that the prose is different from the prose of newspapers and magazines.
The books that I have dumped at Fairfield in recent years have included a few that had been on my shelves for some time until I found them wanting. Occasionally, I have judged books for a literary award and have been allowed to keep my copy of each book entered. Most of the books that have been allotted to me on such occasions have been thrown down the chute at Fairfield. As a teacher of writing, I sometimes receive through the mail an unsolicited book from a publisher whose salespersons suppose that I require my students to read certain texts. Sometimes an author himself or herself sends me his or her latest book. Some of the books that I receive in these ways are taken to Fairfield soon afterwards, although I would never be so harsh as to tell the sender of any such book what I had done with it.
Nowadays I read fewer books than in past years, and many that I read are books that I have read at least once previously. Nowadays I do not buy a book until I have first looked into its pages.
I still subscribe to the TLS, but I read in each issue only the few pages that interest me, and I seldom read the reviews of books of fiction. As soon as I have read what I have wanted to read in an edition of the TLS, I throw it into the carton that my wife and I call the Fairfield box. One day recently, a visitor to our house – a man who is an author of published fiction and who has a room full of books in his house – tried to persuade me that I ought to keep each issue of the TLS on some of the empty shelves in the rooms made vacant after my children had left home. After the visitor had left, I tried to remember words that I had read in the TLS during the twenty-eight years since I had first become a subscriber or any other details that I remembered in connection with any passage that I had read in any issue. The following paragraphs report all that I remembered.
At some time in the late 1960s or the early 1970s, the front page and part of the second page was given over to a review of an edition in either the French or the English language of the diaries of a parish priest who had lived and died in the eighteenth century in the countryside of France. The man had lived an unexceptional life and was seemingly no different from hundreds of other parish priests in the countryside of France in the years not long before the Revolution. However, he had written a diary that was kept in secret during his lifetime but was made public after his death – as he had almost certainly intended it should be. The diary revealed that the man was an atheist who hated the Church whose minister he was. He hated the Church for being, as it seemed to him, an ally of the oppressive nobility. The man who celebrated Mass and prayed for the king each day wrote that he would have spat on the Founder of Christianity if he had existed and that he dreamed of a day when the peasants of France would rise up and kill their tyrannical rulers.
At some time in the late 1970s, I began to read an essay translated from the French language. I had never previously heard of the author, but I have seen his name in print from time to time since the day when I saw his essay in the TLS. As I write these words I cannot recall the first name of the author. His surname is Derrida. I read only a short way into the essay before finding it incomprehensible. And yet, I have always remembered one sentence: To write is to go in search.
I cannot remember when I read a certain poem by a poet I had first become interested in during the 1960s: Philip Larkin. The speaker in the poem claimed to work all day and to get half-drunk at night and to wake in the early hours and to understand that he would one day die. I came close to cutting out this poem from the pages of the TLS in the way that I had cut out many items years earlier, as mentioned previously. What kept me from cutting out the poem was its title, which I took to be a word in the French language and which I considered pretentious as a title for a poem. I had never previously seen the word and I cannot recall having seen the word since, even though I may have read the word and even an explanation of its meaning in English in the pages of my copy of one or more of The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, or Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life.
No more than a year after the death of the critic Lionel Trilling, whenever that event may have taken place, the essay that he had been working on when he died was published on the front page and the second page of the TLS. I can remember thinking while I read Lionel Trilling’s essay that the prose I was reading was clearer than the prose in any essay that I had ever previously tried to read in the TLS. I cannot remember the topic of the essay, but I remember that the writer began by stating that a course he taught at one or another university in the USA was the most popular course among first-year students of literature at the university. The course was on the fiction of Jane Austen, and the writer supposed that the students were attracted to the course because they supposed they would see in their minds while they followed the course the ordered green fields of the English countryside in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.
I have no way of knowing when I read an essay with the title ‘Woodbine Willie Lives’, by a poet whose surname was Fuller. I remember the article not for its argument but for the details I read in it of an experiment reported in a book I have been too unenterprising ever to find and read, although I have read many references to it: a book by a man named Richards. In the book, so I believe, are accounts of experiments in which undergraduates at Oxford or Cambridge – two places that I have always confused in my mind – preferred from a number of passages of poetry whose authors were not revealed to them the doggerel by the parson nicknamed from the cigarettes that he handed to the troops in the trenches in World War One, even though one of the other authors was William Shakespeare.
I have no way of knowing when I read in the TLS a review of a biography of a woman novelist whose books were all best-sellers and earned her large sums of money. The writer herself gained little of pleasure or profit from these earnings. She bought a large house in the English countryside when she was still unmarried, but the bedrooms in the house were soon occupied by relatives who depended on her support. In order to support her large household, she had to write for much of the day and night. When she wrote in her study by night, her relatives complained that the noise of her typing kept them awake. In order to spare her relatives, the writer took to writing by night on a card table set up in a bathroom in a distant wing of the house. When she was no longer a young woman, she was courted by a man who had been an army officer in World War One. She married the man, who then retired from whatever he had been doing beforehand and became one more of her dependants. Soon after the marriage, he, the husband, brought to the country house the man who had been his batman during the war. The husband and his former batman persuaded the writer to buy for them a model railway system, which they installed in the grounds of the house. While the writer oversaw the household or tried to write her next book, her husband rode around the grounds on a model locomotive large enough to carry not only himself but his pillion passenger and former batman, whose name was Gerald.
The man with his chin in his hands
On the Monday of the second week after he had begun the final year of his secondary education, my only son, the elder of my two children, washed and dressed and ate his breakfast as though he intended to go to school but remained in his room for all of the morning. I was surprised and concerned, but I did not knock on my son’s door. My son had been a well-behaved child, but for several years he had disliked listening to advice from his parents, and he had politely refused to discuss with his mother or me his choice of subjects for his final year at school or his plans for the future. On the morning just mentioned, I went to the room where I usually did my writing, but I was too anxious about my son to write. For most of that morning I took down from my shelves one or another book and turned a few pages. I had already persuaded myself that my son was going to drop out of school. He had never threatened to do so, and he had obtained high marks in certain subjects throughout his secondary school years, but sometimes a teacher had reported that my son seemed to lack interest in one or another subject, and for some months he had seemed never to have a schoolbook or any other sort of book in his hands. On the Monday mentioned above, my son and I made separate lunches in the kitchen at the same time, but we did not speak. While I was at my desk early in the afternoon, I heard him walking at intervals in and out of the back door. When I believed he was out in the backyard, I looked through the kitchen window and saw him stoking a small fire in the incinerator. I supposed he was burning pages from a diary or letters.
In those days, my wife left for her place of work long before the children left for school and she arrived home long after they had arrived home. When she arrived home on the day mentioned in the previous paragraphs, she had no way of knowing that our son had not been to school that day. Even our daughter did not know. She went to the same school, but she was some years younger than her brother and usually left early for school after her girlfriend and her mother had called for her in their car. On the Monday evening after my son’s absence from school, neither he nor I spoke of it to his mother.
My son did not attend school on the Tuesday or any other day of the week mentioned above. On every day while he was at home, he kept to his room and I heard no sound from behind his door. On the Friday, I asked him while we were in the kitchen together at lunchtime whether he had been reading his schoolbooks that morning. He told me that he had not been reading any sort of books that morning. I reminded him that he would have fallen somewhat behind when he returned to school. He told me that he would not be returning to school.
On the Friday evening mentioned above, I told my wife that our son seemed to have decided to give up going to school. She spent much of that evening trying to learn from our son the reason for his decision and to persuade him to change his mind. She telephoned an educational counsellor and made an appointment for our son to consult him, but our son said that he would not keep the appointment. Throughout the weekend, my wife appealed to our son, but he would not relent. On the Sunday morning, when I was preparing to take the family’s wastepaper to Fairfield, he told me that he wanted to go with me. He carried out of his room a large cardboard carton that seemed to be filled with newspapers and put it into the boot of the car. While he was carrying his carton from the car to the chute at Fairfield, the wind lifted what I had thought was the topmost of many newspapers in the carton. The newspaper that I had seen was the only newspaper. The rest of the carton was filled with my son’s schoolbooks. They were all new books, bought only a few weeks before. Many were hard-covered books, but one on the top layer was a paperback, the cover of which had curled back somewhat. While my son balanced the carton on the sill of the chute, I could see that a corner of the flyleaf of the book had been cut away.
My son was out of the house on many days during the next four months. He would not tell his mother or me the details of what he was doing – only that he had registered for unemployment benefits and was looking for a job. Five years later, he let slip to me that he had been interviewed as an applicant for many jobs after he left school but that most interviewers had been no longer interested in him when he could not show them any of his reports from school, which he had burned in our backyard on the first day after he had stopped attending school.
In June of the year when he left school, my son found a job. At first he told me few details. I learned only that he was a process worker in an engineering works five kilometres from home. On fine days, he rode his bicycle to and from his place of work. On wet days, I would take him in my car in the morning, and he would travel home on two buses. When he travelled in my car, he would never allow me to drive him to the doors of his place of work; I had to stop around the corner and let him out so that he could walk the rest of the way. He worked in a large industrial estate. Towards seven in the morning, at which time he started work, the footpaths of the estate were crowded with women factory workers walking from bus stops, and the roads were crowded with male workers’ cars, most of them early models and scratched or dented.
In the later months of the year when he left school, my son went on working in the same place. He told me that his job was only a semi-skilled job but that he had been told when he began that he might be offered an apprenticeship in one or another skilled trade in the future. I asked him why he had chosen the job he was doing when he might have found a white-collar position, but he would not answer me.
Each night when my son arrived home from work, I resisted the urge to question him. He was always tired and short-tempered when he first arrived home, but I learned that he was more willing to talk after he had showered and eaten a meal. I was eager to learn that someone from the front office, as he called it, had taken him aside one day and had told him he would shortly be offered an apprenticeship in a skilled trade or even some other course the details of which I could not imagine but the result of which would be that he would be qualified for positions in management. My son never told me news of this sort, but he began to tell me each night about the people at his place of work.
According to my son, the owner of the engineering works, who had inherited the business from his father, was too often absent and too easygoing with his staff. Too many people were employed in the place, but no one had been dismissed while my son had been there. My son said he could name several men who ought to have been sacked.
Whenever my son named one of his fellow workers as an idler or simply as the teller of a good joke or the perpetrator of a prank, I struggled to picture the man or to recall anything that my son might have said previously about the man. As my son talked more of an evening, two of his workmates became more distinct in my mind. One was a man of about my own age who was sometimes an adviser and protector to my son. This man will be called from here on the kindly man. The other workmate seemed from my son’s descriptions to be a few years younger than myself. This man seemed from my son’s first descriptions an idle and malicious man. My son first described the man as small and thin and dark-haired and as spending much of his time on cold days sitting near one of the gas-heaters in a corner of the building and teasing and insulting the apprentices and the youngest of the process workers. When my son first mentioned this man to me, he, my son, told me he could not understand why the owner of the place had not sacked the man long before. My son told me that the owner had seen the man sitting in front of the heater one day but had not seemed to notice anything amiss. The man had been sitting in front of the heater with his chin in his hands, and the owner had walked past the man and had even seemed to greet the man. But a few nights after my son had reported these details to me he told me that the man had cancer. My son then corrected himself. The man had previously had cancer and had been away from work for many months being treated for the cancer, which was in his jaw. A few weeks before my son had begun to work at the place, the man had returned to work, and word had passed around that the man had been cured of his cancer. But on cold days, the man sat in front of the heater with his chin in his hands and teased or insulted my son and other young workers, and my son had heard some of his workmates saying that the man had not been cured of his cancer. This man will be called from here on the man with his chin in his hands.
During the days after my son had first told me about the man with his chin in his hands, I saw from time to time in my mind one or another image of a small, thin man with dark hair. Sometimes the image was of the man sitting hunched over a heater in a corner of an engineering works. At other times the image was of the man running with long strides through grass that reached to his hips in countryside consisting of grass for as far as I could see.
After I had seen in my mind the images mentioned above, I began to look for opportunities to ask my son about the man with his chin in his hands. By this time, my son was no longer riding his bicycle to and from his place of work. The kindly man, who lived in a suburb adjoining my suburb, would stop in his car each morning to pick up my son from a street corner about a kilometre from my son’s and my home. Each afternoon, the kindly man would drive my son to the same corner. On wet mornings or afternoons, the kindly man would often call at my house. My son was less tired and irritable after work, and spoke more willingly about his workmates. I asked him during a succession of evenings such questions about the man with his chin in his hands as whether or not he was married and a father; where he lived; whether or not he owned a car; what interests and hobbies he had; and what details or anecdotes he sometimes reported from his past. I learned from my son that the man with his chin in his hands seemed to be only a few years short of my own age but had never been married; that the man lived with his mother in a rented flat in the suburb of Fairfield; that the man had a sister who lived with her children elsewhere in Fairfield; that the man did not own a car, and travelled by bus between his home and his place of work; that the man seemed to spend his evenings and his weekends watching television programmes on his and his mother’s television set or watching films by means of their video cassette recorder and that he sometimes boasted to his workmates that his and his mother’s television and video recorder were the best available; and that the man never spoke about his past, although my son understood that the man had been employed for many years in the engineering works. When my son first told me that the man lived with his mother, he, my son, went on to say that I should not suppose the man was gay. My son told me that the man was too ugly and too ill-natured to have had a wife or a girlfriend.
In the last week of August, when the hailstorms that always fall at that time on the suburbs of Melbourne had stripped the pink blossoms from the prunus trees on the nature strips in the suburb where I live, my son told me one evening that the man with his chin in his hands had not been seen at work for several days and that his workmates were saying that the man’s cancer had flared up again. On the same evening, my son explained to me why he had arrived home much later than usual on that afternoon, even though he had been driven to his front gate by the kindly man. My son explained the matter as follows. When the kindly man had driven away from their place of work on that afternoon, he had not driven in the usual direction. He had explained to my son that he, the kindly man, was going to call at the home in Fairfield of the man with his chin in his hands. The kindly man used the word mate when he spoke of the man with his chin in his hands. The kindly man, so he said, was going to drop in on his mate and lend him a few books to cheer him up and pass the time away while he was laid up at home. The kindly man had pointed his thumb over his left shoulder when he mentioned the books. My son looked over his own shoulder and saw on the back seat of the kindly man’s car a cardboard carton almost full of books. In time, the kindly man had stopped his car outside a shabby block of flats between decaying weatherboard houses. The whole of the area surrounding the block of flats was paved with cement and was marked into parking areas for cars. Several cars were parked on the cement and seemed to have been parked there for many hours. This and the shabbiness of the cars suggested to my son that the owners of the cars were unemployed. My son stayed in the kindly man’s car while he carried the carton of books to the front door of one of the flats. My son could not see who opened the door of the flats and let the kindly man in. He was inside the flat for about five minutes. He came back to his car without the books. He told my son that the sick man had been pleased to receive a visitor but that he was not at all well.
When I had heard my son’s report, I asked him what sort of books had been in the carton. While I asked this question, I kept my face turned away from my son.
My son told me that the books in the carton had been old-looking paperbacks. In my son’s words, the books had been westerns and thrillers and a lot of rubbish.
Books are a load of crap
At the time when my son was born, I worked in an office building at the edge of the city of Melbourne. Before my son was born, I used to spend my lunch-hour on each day from Monday to Thursday at my desk, reading the book that I was currently reading. During my lunch-hour on each Friday, I used to look through the books in one or another of several bookshops in the city. In the week after my son was born, I began to spend my lunch-hour reading a book published by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. The book contained the publication details and a short description of hundreds of books considered most worthy to be read by children in each of several age groups. As I read the book, I put a mark from time to time beside the title of one or another book. After I had done this for three weeks, I had read every page of the book and had marked the titles of more than a hundred books. These books, many of which were described in the book I had just read as children’s classics, I intended to buy at the rate of one each fortnight so that my son would have the beginnings of an impressive library by the time when he began school.
I did not succeed in buying all the books that I had marked in the book mentioned above, but I bought many of them, and I bought as well other books that I saw in bookshops or read about in book reviews (some in the TLS). After my daughter was born, I bought books for her also, although I preferred to let my wife choose what would appeal to a girl. I went on buying books each few months for both children, but especially my son, for more than fifteen years. I bought paperback books and hard-covered books in equal numbers, except that each child received several expensive hard-covered books at Christmas and on birthdays. I bought fiction and non-fiction books in about equal numbers, even after both children had told me, when they were aged twelve or thirteen that they were less interested in fiction. When the children were in the upper years of secondary school, each had a part-time job and each received a weekly allowance from me. By then, I had to pay for music lessons and sports coaching and for most of the children’s clothes, and I could hardly afford to go on buying books as I had bought them previously. I told the children one day that I would still buy them books at Christmas and birthdays but that they should use part of their allowance or of their wages to buy any other books that they wished to buy. So far as I was able to observe from that time onwards, neither of my children bought any book.
When the children were in the lower years of secondary school, they and their mother overruled me in the matter of whether or not we should have a television set in the house. Before then, as I used to say, I had kept the house free from spurious imagery. After the day when I was overruled, my wife and children watched dead images from cameras instead of living images from their own minds, as I often told them. To their credit, they seldom watched for more than an hour or two each day, and occasionally the set was left turned off all evening, but from the day when the television set was installed, I never referred to our house as I had often referred to it in the past; I never again told my children that they lived in a house of books.
For many of the years when the house was a house of books, I used to read to my children every night. I began to read to them before they themselves could read. I sat between them on the couch in the lounge-room and read from large picture books and from books in the series that we knew as Ladybird books. I believed from the first that the words and the pictures that came from books would produce in the minds of my children images of such richness and such power that the children would never afterwards be impressed by the contrived images that might come to them from cameras by way of cinema screens or television sets. I expected that the clearest images in my children’s minds throughout their lives would be the images produced by the words of the books that I had read to them as children. The images produced in their minds by the illustrations in the books I had read to them would be of lesser power, since those images had come to them by way of the minds of the persons who had made the illustrations. The images that came to my children’s minds by way of the screens of cinemas or the tubes of television sets, having come to their minds by way of machinery, would be of hardly any power. So I thought in the house of books.
During the years when I lived in the house of books, reading book after book myself and reading from books each night to my children, I saw an occasional film. Sometimes a friend of my wife would recommend one or another film to us, and if the film was being shown not at a cinema in the city but at one or another cinema in a suburb not more than a half-hour’s drive by car from my house, I would sometimes go with my wife to see the film. Because I have seen so few films during my lifetime – fewer in the past fifty years than most persons in the suburbs of Melbourne would have seen during the past year – and because the images on the screen of the cinema are always so large and so brightly lit, I would see often in my mind during the first few days after I had watched one or another film one or another image from the film. I always expected that most of these images would have disappeared from my mind before a few days or weeks had passed. I thought of my mind as passing these images through itself as my body would have passed through its digestive system some pebbles or buttons that I might have swallowed. I was prepared to accept, however, that a few of the images of the film would remain in my mind. I believed that I might not see these images in my mind for so long that I would hardly remember the origins of the images when next I saw them. I believed that some of the images just mentioned might have been so changed during the many years while they stayed out of sight in my mind that I would suppose the images had first come to me while I was reading one or another book.
Soon after I had first seen in my mind, as was reported in the previous section of this story, the image of the man running with long strides through grass, which image I had first seen soon after my son had first told me about the man with his chin in his hands, I understood that the man running with long strides had the face and the body of an actor whose name I had never learned who played the part of a small, thin man with dark hair in a film with the title Midnight Cowboy or The Midnight Cowboy, which was one of the few films that I had watched during the years when I lived in the house of books. Soon after I had first seen the man running with long strides in the grass in my mind, I remembered that the man in the film had run with long strides along a seashore in his mind, having been cured in his mind of all the ailments that he suffered from. Even after I had remembered this, however, I believed that the man I saw was the soul or shade or spirit of the man running through grass in his mind, the body of the man having already died.
When I had understood that a number of the details of the image in my mind of the man running through the grass had come from my mind rather than from a camera by way of a screen in a cinema, I watched the image whenever it appeared, hoping to learn something of meaning. I learned in time that the grass in the image was connected with another area of grass in my mind, which area of grass was an image of a paddock of grass that I had sometimes walked through during a certain year in the late 1950s. I learned in time also that the grass in the image of the man running was connected with certain feelings that I felt while I watched the film named in the previous paragraph during one or another year in the early 1970s.
During the early 1970s, I earned my living as an editor of technical publications in what was called in those years a semi-government authority. I had been promoted a number of times in a few years, and my salary was a good deal more than that of the average man of my age. My wife was not employed during the early 1970s but cared full-time for our two children, and yet we lived comfortably from the one income and continued to reduce the mortgage on our house. While I sat in the cinema with my wife beside me and our car in the car park nearby and our two children in the care of a baby-sitter in our neat home, and while I watched certain images of the thin, dark man who lived in an abandoned building and earned no income, I remembered the place where I had lived during certain weekends of a certain year in the late 1950s.
During the year just mentioned, I was in the second year of a course for a bachelor of arts degree and was enjoying free tuition and a living allowance as a bonded student of the Education Department of Victoria. I had only to finish my degree and a year-long diploma of education afterwards in order to become a secondary teacher with a secure career and a comfortable income. At some time during the year just mentioned, I decided that I wanted to be not a secondary teacher but an author of books of fiction. For some time during that year, I had been reading instead of the texts set for my course books of fiction by writers I admired and biographies of writers of fiction who had not earned regular incomes but had lived as bohemians or had worked occasionally at menial jobs. After I had decided to be an author of books of fiction, I no longer attended lectures but wrote fiction each day in the reading room of the State Library. At that time also I began to drink beer, my chief reason being that I wanted to spend each Friday evening in a hotel in Melbourne where, so I had heard, a group of bohemians gathered in a certain bar. One of the men I met in this bar worked in a bookshop by day but wanted to become the owner of a small press and to publish what he called avant-garde writings. This man had bought with a legacy from his dead father a small property north-east of Melbourne in a district that was also, so I had heard, inhabited by groups of bohemians. The property had been at one time a farm and orchard, but when its owner first took me there, the fruit trees were overgrown and the paddocks were full of long grass. The house was dirty and decayed, but the owner slept and ate in the back rooms at weekends and had begun to clean and restore the house and to set up his press in one or another room. On my first visit to the property, I decided to flee from my contract with the Education Department at the end of that year, when my failure as a student would have become known, and to live for the rest of my life in a certain shed that I had noticed a short distance from the house. The shed was full of junk and dirt and cobwebs, but in one wall was a window overlooking several paddocks of grass. I intended to clean and restore the shed and to spend my days there, writing fiction. Until such time as my fiction has been published and was earning money for me, I would support myself by working from time to time as a casual labourer.
During many of the weekends in the later months of the year when I first decided to be a writer of fiction, I worked at cleaning and restoring the shed mentioned above. For some time, I would not tell the owner of the property that I intended to live for the rest of my life in his shed. I believe I was afraid that even he, who often said he wanted the output of his press to shock bourgeois society, would have tried to stop me. Perhaps my not telling the owner of the property was in some way the result of my supposing him to be a homosexual, although he had never seemed interested in me as a sexual partner. I have never been able to remember certain events from the last weeks of that year. Sometimes, when I have to explain to someone the reason for my having been first a university student and then a primary teacher and later a part-time university student and later again a graduate and an editor, I say that I had some kind of crack-up when I first went to university. I speak as though I had merely become exhausted by hard work, but from what I remember, I had decided to give up everything for the sake of being a writer of fiction. During the evening when I watched on a screen in a cinema images of the thin, dark man shivering from cold in an abandoned building, I saw an image of myself in the shed beside the paddocks of long grass. The image of myself was sitting at a crude desk and was writing. I could see nothing else in the image of my surroundings except for shelves of books.
During the years when I worked first as a primary teacher and later as an editor, I went on writing fiction in the evenings and at weekends. On a certain day in a certain year in the early 1970s, which year would have been only one or two years after I had seen in a cinema the image of myself reported in the previous paragraph, I sent for the first time to a publisher a body of fiction that I had finished writing. A few weeks afterwards, an editor telephoned me from the offices of the publisher just mentioned. The editor told me that the body of fiction I had sent to her employers would be published as a book of fiction during the following year. One of a number of things that I did as a result of hearing this message from the editor of fiction was to persuade my wife to become again what she had formerly been: a full-time teacher in a private secondary school. Another thing that I did was to resign from my position with the semi-government authority and to become a full-time writer of fiction. I assured my wife at that time that if I failed to earn enough money in the future from my writing, I could always work as a freelance editor for my former employer and for other similar employers. Soon after I had resigned, the money that I had paid for some years past into a superannuation scheme was refunded to me. I used much of the money to buy a new desk and nearly a hundred books – most for myself but some for my children.
At some time during the late 1980s, after I had begun the practice of dumping at Fairfield books that I considered unfit to be read but when I could still not find a place on my shelves for every book that I wanted to keep, I decided that I owned a number of books not so unfit for reading that I ought to dump them at Fairfield but not of such interest to me that I would read them during my lifetime. I thought of these books as being suitable for me to pass on to someone who might find them more interesting than I found them. When I tried to decide which person or persons I might pass the books on to, I saw an image in my mind of a small, thin boy with a book in his hands. I understood that this was an image of one or another of my grandchildren, although my children were at that time still in the last years of secondary school. From that time on, I thought of a certain sort of book that I owned as deserving to be kept for my grandchildren.
Soon after I had decided that some of my books ought to be set aside for my grandchildren, I decided that I would store those books in the space between the ceiling and the roof of my house. I bought a few cheap planks from a timber yard and placed the planks across the timbers that ran above the ceiling of my house. I understood that the space where I was going to store the books for my grandchildren contained much dust, and so I wrapped each book in a plastic bag. I stacked the wrapped books in a cardboard carton and climbed with the carton up through the manhole in the ceiling of my house. During a period of several weeks, I stored three cartons of books in this way. My son and my daughter noticed me storing the first of the cartons, and I told them that the space above the ceiling was a convenient storage place for the things that they no longer used but did not wish to discard altogether. While I was storing the third of the cartons of books for my grandchildren, I saw three cartons that I had not previously seen in that place. I looked into the cartons and saw in each some of the books that I had bought for my son since the year when he had been born.
The title of this section of this story is the last line of a poem by Philip Larkin with the title ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. As each year of my life has passed, I have become more interested in the workings of my mind. In recent years, I have come to believe that I might learn all of meaning that I could ever need to learn if only I could learn why I remember certain images and forget other images. At some time in the past, I would have read a certain poem by Philip Larkin. At some time while I was writing the notes and the early drafts of this story, I would have heard in my mind the words quoted at the head of this section of this story and would then have decided to use those words as the title of this section of this story. Several days ago, while I was preparing to write the final draft of this story, I found in my copy of The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite and published in 1988 by The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber Limited, the complete text of the poem that contains the words that appear at the head of this section of this story. I read the poem slowly and got a certain amount of meaning from it, but a few hours after I had read the poem I could remember nothing of this meaning and none of the words of the poem except for the words at the head of this section of this story.
Welcome to Florida
During a certain year in the early 1980s, when my children were in their earlier years at secondary school, I came to understand that I could no longer go on staying at home by day and writing fiction and working occasionally as a freelance editor. If my children were to complete their secondary education and to go on to tertiary education, so I came to understand, then I would have to go back to working at a full-time job.
I did not want to go back to work as a teacher or an editor and to find myself being supervised by persons who were my juniors when I had last worked full-time. I applied for a position as a security officer at a large private hospital in a nearby suburb. My application had to be accompanied by character references, and one of the persons I asked to write on my behalf was a man who had been my assistant ten years before when I had worked as an editor but who was now himself the chief publications officer in the administration of a college of advanced education. This man told me to tear up my application for the position of security officer and to apply for the position of lecturer in creative writing that had recently been advertised in the institution where he worked.
I had learned from books of fiction and from certain references in articles in the TLS that creative writing was taught in universities in the USA, but I had not supposed that a person might earn a living as a teacher of creative writing in Australia. And yet, I earned my living for more than ten years by writing detailed comments in the margins of pages of fiction written by my students, by conferring with one student after another in my office, and by acting as chairperson during sessions when a class would read and then discuss a piece of fiction by someone from that class. In time, the institution where I worked became part of a university. As a member of a faculty of a university, I was asked each year to report on the number of conferences I had attended and the number of keynote addresses I had delivered and the number of research projects I had obtained funding for and the number of articles I had published in refereed journals and the number of consultancies I had engaged in. I answered each such question by writing NIL in letters of a modest size and I returned each list of questions promptly to its sender and hoped I might be allowed to go on for a few more years teaching from February to November the eighty students who enrolled each year in my course and writing fiction from November to February. I hoped I would be able to resign from my position soon after my children had finished their tertiary education and had found secure positions. After the year in the early 1980s when I began to dump certain books at Fairfield, I looked forward to undertaking during my retirement the tasks described in the following paragraph. As a younger man, I had supposed that I would spend my retirement buying and reading new books and adding them to my collection and erecting new shelves and dusting the rows of books on the many shelves in the several rooms that I had filled with shelves of books and sometimes, of course, reading again a book I had read previously; but after I had taken my first load of books to Fairfield, I foresaw differently my reading and writing in the future.
After I had retired from full-time work, so I supposed, I would examine continually the power of each of the books on my shelves. I would do this by the means described earlier in this story, but during my retirement I would have time to be more thorough and more stringent.
During my retirement, I would test each book once each year. Once each year, I would stand in front of the spine of each book and wait to see in my mind some of the images that had first appeared there when I had read the book. No other sort of image would save a book as some books had been saved when I had first tested them in the early 1980s. On the other hand, I was not going to dump at Fairfield every book that failed my test. I would simply banish the failed books from my shelves. Many of the banished books would be worth considerable sums of money and, to be fair, some of the books that I had read only once in the early 1960s, when I had first begun to read books continually, were at a disadvantage, having been closed for many years longer than books read in more recent years. (Or, the opposite might have been true if my mind had been more impressionable in early years.) I would keep the failed books wrapped in plastic in cartons in the space above the ceiling or, if that space became crowded, in a spare room of the house.
I looked forward to my retirement whenever I thought of the work I was going to do with my books. If, as I believed, those persons lived longest who had large or never-ending tasks to occupy them, then I was assured of a very long life. I could foresee no end to my task. For as long as I was alive, I would remember something at least from each of a small number of books. My life would have been one continuous experiment as to the worth of books. Of course, I would record in writing the results of the experiment. Readers of what I wrote might learn even before my death the comparative value to me of my best-remembered books or the comparative value of particular passages within one or more book. Or, a reader of my writing might study not the books but the man who partly remembered them. What sort of man, such a reader might ask, would remember this rather than that passage from this or that book? (If I had remembered wrongly, which is to say if I had believed one or more images in my mind to be connected with a book whose text seemed to another reader incapable of giving rise to such an image or images, then a reader of my writing would have a rich subject for study.) I need not write mere reports. I should be able to find connections between some of the images that I connected with separate books. I should be able, perhaps, to write one last book by connecting what I had retained from a lifetime of remembering images connected with my books. My last book would be a book of books: a distillation of precious imagery, and if I was able to arrange that the last page or the last paragraph was written on the last day of my life, then I would have advanced an argument that would remain forever indisputable; I would have pointed to my own life as evidence of the supremacy of one or another book.
In certain moods, I foresaw the end of my life as being the opposite of what is reported above. As a result of one decisive event in my life, or, perhaps, as the end of a long and gradual process, I would turn away from books, never to be reconciled. I might leave the shelves standing in my house and the first editions and other valuable titles in place as part of my legacy for my children, but I would never again open the covers of a book. I would find other tasks to keep from my mind all thought of books or the images they had formerly given rise to. But even if I spent my retirement thus, I would still learn, even against my will, much about the books I had spurned. I could not help but notice, year after year, as I tried to forget whatever I had thought as a result of my reading, that some images remained with me long after other images had gone: that some books were harder to forget than other books. And when I thought of this sort of future for myself, I observed something that always surprised me. The act of writing was not so closely linked to the reading of books as I had for long supposed. Even as an aged book-hater, I would still be capable of writing. I might write a book about my efforts to remove all traces of books from my mind. I might even write a book containing no evidence that I had ever remembered having read a single book.
During the first two weeks after my son had told me about the carton of books that had been delivered to the man with the chin in his hands, I waited each afternoon to hear that the man had returned to work and seemed much recovered or that he had been admitted to hospital after having become much more ill or that the kindly man and my son had called again at the flat in Fairfield and had found the man with his chin in his hands no better and no worse than before. If I had heard from my son on any afternoon during the two weeks just mentioned the third of the reports mentioned in the previous sentence, I would have hoped to hear as part of the report that the man with his chin in his hands had returned the carton of books to the kindly man, saying as he returned them that he very much appreciated the loan of the books but that he preferred to watch films and other programmes on his mother’s and his television set and video recorder rather than read books.
During the two weeks mentioned in the previous paragraph, I often saw in my mind sequences of images more vivid and more detailed and more apt to recur than any sequence of images that I could remember having seen as a result of any book that I had read recently. Each sequence of images appeared as though on a screen in a cinema in my mind, but while I watched the images I felt as though I was writing certain passages of a book in my mind and as though each passage in the book would drive out of my mind each image from the film in my mind.
On the screen in my mind, the mother of the man with his chin in his hands held her son in her arms on the day when he had been born. The mother admired the body of her son and saw in her mind an image of her son as a tall, strong man.
In the book in my mind, the mother of the man with his chin in his hands held her son as in the film but foresaw that he would be small and thin throughout his life and that he would die while she was still alive.
On the screen in my mind, the mother led her son by the hand towards the school gate on his first day as a schoolboy and foresaw that he would make many friends at school and would learn much and would afterwards earn his living in an office where his fellow workers smiled at him, especially the young women.
In the book in my mind, the mother read one or another school report on her son and foresaw that he would spend his working life as an unskilled labourer and would be disliked by many of his workmates and would never marry.
On the screen in my mind, the man opened one or another book from a carton of books lent to him by one of the few of his workmates who was not unfriendly towards him. The man read a number of pages of the book but then fell asleep or began to watch his television set and afterwards could not remember anything of what he had read about.
In the book in my mind, the man did as reported in the previous paragraph but remembered having seen in his mind while he read one or another of the pages in the book an image of plains of grass reaching to the horizon in his mind.
At the end of the two weeks mentioned above, my son told me when he had returned home from work late that the kindly man had called with him at the home of the man with his chin in his hands. On this occasion, so my son told me, he had gone with the kindly man to the front door of the flat where the man with his chin in his hands lived with his mother. The mother had answered the door. She had been, in my son’s words, a fat, hopeless woman. According to my son’s report, the kindly man had told the mother that he and my son had called to see how her son was feeling and to collect some books that he, the kindly man, had lent to the son on a previous occasion. According to my son’s report, the mother had answered that her son was at that moment asleep, that he had not been at all well, and that she would prefer not to wake him in order to meet his visitors. According to my son’s report, he and the kindly man had told the mother to pass on their best regards to her son and had then left.
On a certain afternoon during the second week after the events reported in the previous paragraph, my son told me that he and his workmates had been told during that morning by the owner of the engineering works that the man with his chin in his hands had died. On the following morning, I was about to look through the notices under the heading DEATHS in the Sun News-Pictorial, but then I recalled that I knew only the first of the given names of the man who had died, which name was the only name that my son had used of the man. I asked my son as he was leaving for work that morning, but he said he did not know the surname of the man. I then looked through the text of each of the notices in three of the columns headed DEATHSuntil I had found the notice of the death of the man with his chin in his hands. One notice only had been inserted, the mourners being the man’s mother and his sister. I did not look in the columns headed FUNERAL NOTICES.
When my son returned home on the afternoon of the day when I had read the notice mentioned in the previous paragraph, he said in connection with the death of the man with his chin in his hands only that an apprentice at the engineering works had said that he was pleased to have heard that the man had died and would no longer tease or insult him.
On the day following the afternoon mentioned in the previous paragraph, I read among the notices under the heading DEATHS in the Sun News-Pictorial only one notice referring to the man with his chin in his hands. In that notice, the dead man was described as a good mate of a man whose first given name was included in the notice. That man has been called in this story the kindly man.
On each of the first few afternoons after I had heard of the death of the man with his chin in his hands, I expected my son to tell me that a party of his workmates, himself perhaps included, had attended during that day the funeral service for the man with his chin in his hands, but my son did not tell me what I had expected him to tell me.
From time to time during the years since the afternoons mentioned in the previous paragraph, I have seen as though on a screen in a cinema in my mind a sequence of images of a fat woman nearly twenty years older than myself looking around a bedroom in a flat in the suburb of Fairfield and preparing to empty the bedroom of most of the belongings of the person who had formerly slept in the bedroom. One of the images in the sequence is of the woman finding under the bed in the bedroom a carton of books.
Sometimes, when I have seen in my mind the image mentioned in the previous paragraph, I have felt as though I was writing in a book in my mind a passage in which the fat woman mentioned above picked up one or another of the books in the carton and opened one or another page of the book and read one or another paragraph on the page and saw in her mind an image of a man surrounded by long grass reaching to the horizon in her mind.
At other times, when I have seen in my mind the image mentioned in the previous paragraph, I have felt as though I was writing a passage in a book in my mind in which the fat woman picked up the carton of books and carried it out through the front door of her flat and left it beside the footpath at the front of the block of flats, knowing that a truck would drive past the block of flats later on that day and that labourers employed by the city in which she lived would collect the carton of books from the footpath and would throw the carton and its contents into the back of the truck, after which the truck would continue on its way towards the wastepaper collection depot only a few hundred metres from the block of flats.
Sometimes, when I have seen in my mind an image of the man with his chin in his hands during the years since I learned that he had died, I see in my mind an image of a line drawing of a famous statue of a man sitting with his chin resting on a fist. The line drawing appeared as a logo on each of the many titles in a series of books with the general title of the Thinker’s Library. The series of books was published perhaps as long ago as the 1920s by one or another English publisher whose name I have forgotten. I saw copies of books from the Thinker’s Library in second-hand bookshops in the 1950s and the 1960s, and I bought only one title in the series. Whenever I looked at the list of titles in the series, I imagined the books as having been bought by young men in cloth caps. The young men worked by day in factories in the English midlands and read books by night in order to educate themselves. The title that I bought was The Existence of God. I remember the surname of the author as McCabe. He was an American and a former priest. His book contained a number of arguments against the existence of God. I have not seen the book for more than thirty years. I bought the book during the year in the late 1950s when I was planning to live as a writer of fiction in a shed at the edge of a grassy paddock. I read the book often during that year. I wanted the arguments in the book to strengthen me whenever I was tempted to believe again in God as I had believed during most of my life until that year. Sometimes, and especially when I was drunk, I would take the book down from my shelves and would read a passage to one or another person and would urge the person to borrow the book from me. Someone who borrowed the book failed to return it, and all I remember of the book today is the drawing of the man with his chin resting on his hand and the claim made by the author somewhere in the book that his children had grown up happily without having been taught about God.
One of the few sequences of images that still remains in my mind from the evening about twenty years ago when I watched in a cinema the film named earlier in this story is a sequence of images showing part of the interior of a bus in which the small, thin man with dark hair sits beside the man who seems to be his only friend. The two men are travelling to the state of Florida, but for some time the small, thin man has been lying back in his seat with his eyes closed. The time is late at night, and the windows of the bus show darkness and the lights of motor traffic. At some time during the night, the bus stops at the border of Florida. While the bus is stopped, a young woman with fair hair who works as an assistant in a shop of some kind just inside the state of Florida or who works as an employee of some kind of the government of Florida says to the passengers in the bus the words at the head of this section of this story. The sequence of images is such that I understand the thin man with dark hair to have already died when the bus reaches the border and when the young woman speaks.
Whenever I have seen in my mind the sequence of images mentioned above, I have then felt urged to begin to write a certain book of fiction which would be a report of a search among the images in my mind for the image or images that suggest most clearly the place where I expect to have arrived when one or another person first observes of me that I have already died.
The Homer of the Insects
Of all the books that I bought for my son as a result of my having read the list of books in the book published by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, the book that I most looked forward to his reading was a book of fiction of many pages recommended for children aged from eleven to fourteen years. I cannot remember the title of the book or the name of the author or of the publisher. I remember that the edition I bought for my son was a hardcover edition of more than two hundred closely printed pages. Of all the details on the dust-jacket, I remember only parts of the outline of a line drawing of a boy of about twelve years of age and the outlines of line drawings of tussocks of grass at the feet of the boy.
I cannot remember having read any word of the book mentioned in the previous paragraph. I know that my son has never read the book and that it lies nowadays wrapped in plastic in a carton above the ceiling of my house. And yet, I often see in my mind images of the images that I might have seen if I had read the book.
During the years when I bought many books and when some of those books would stay on my shelves unread for many years while I read the many other books waiting to be read, I would sometimes stand in front of my shelves and would look at the spine of a book that I had owned for many years but had not yet read and would see in my mind a sequence of images of the images that I might have seen in my mind if I had read the book and had later remembered having done so. Sometimes, when I stood in front of an unread book, I understood that the images in my mind had arisen as a result of my having previously looked at the dust-jacket of the book and read the words there. At other times, I understood that the images had arisen as a result of my having previously read one or more reviews of the book or essays mentioning the book. At other times again, I would see images in my mind as though I remembered having read a book that I had never read, but I would be unable to understand why those images had arisen in my mind. During the years after I had begun to dump books at Fairfield, one of the plans that I devised for my retirement was as follows. I would go on buying books and keeping them on my shelves but I would read no more books. I would allow myself to read the dust-jackets of books and to read reviews of books and essays about books, but I would never again look between the covers of any book. After I had retired, I would stare at the spine of one after another of the books that I had never read and while I stared I would study the images that appeared in my mind. I would afterwards describe these images in writing. The written descriptions of all the images would deserve to be considered a book in itself. I might read this book often, observing what images arose in my mind while I read. Or, I might leave the book forever unread but might stand sometimes in front of the book long after I had written it and might observe whatever images might be in my mind.
The most prominent of the images that appear in my mind whenever I remember the hardcover book mentioned in the first paragraph of this section of this story is an image of a man sitting among long grass with his chin in his hands. The man is sitting on a small wooden stool and is staring at something in the long grass just in front of him. I first saw this image in my mind many years before my son told me one afternoon about the man who sat in the engineering works with his chin in his hands. For as long as I have seen this image, I have understood that the man is a famous naturalist who lived for most of his life in the south of France and studied the insects of his native district. For as long as I have understood this, I have supposed that my seeing the image of the famous naturalist is partly the result of my having learned from the dust-jacket of the hardcover book of fiction bought for my son that the book is set in the south of France and that the book is a boy who spends much of his time out of doors. On the first occasions when I saw the image of the famous French naturalist, who is always at a distance among the long grass when I first see the image of him, I supposed I was seeing an image of the naturalist as a young man or even as a boy of the age of the chief character of the hardcover book of fiction, but on each of those occasions the image of the person in the long grass subsequently appeared in the foreground of my mind, enabling me to see that he was a man older than myself.
When I was preparing to write this section of this story, I intended to include in the section the name of the famous naturalist. I had read the name several times in the past but had not remembered exactly the spelling of the name. I looked just now into several reference books on my shelves but was unable to find the name of the naturalist. I then looked among my shelves for some time but was unable to see there any book that might have contained the name of the naturalist in a place where I could readily find it.
If I was another sort of man, I would have visited or telephoned one or another library in order to learn the name of the naturalist, but I am a man who has not gone into a library during the past ten years and who intends not to go into any library in the future. If I were to go into a library, I would seem to be acknowledging that I had failed to acquire all the books necessary for my satisfaction and contentment. If I were to go into a library, I would seem to be admitting that my own library had failed me. Worse, if I were to go into a library I would have to talk to one of the persons in charge of the books in the library. I have gone so seldom into libraries during my lifetime that I have never learned the system or systems according to which the books are arranged on the shelves of libraries. On my few visits to libraries many years ago, I was satisfied to walk between the shelves and to wait for the spine of one or another book to take my eye, but I understand that I could not hope to find in this way the name of the famous naturalist. I could only find that name after having spoken to one or another person in charge of part of a library.
More than thirty years ago, before I became a writer of books, I used to seek out persons who might talk with me about books. Whenever I was reading a book in those days, I would hear in my mind the sound of myself talking in the future to someone about the book. I was careful not to talk about books to persons who did not value books, but I expected that I would always have in the future a large number of friends and acquaintances who would talk about books. After I had become a writer of books, I was more wary of talking about books. I understood by then that each book I had written was not the book I had read in my mind before I had begun to write. I began to suspect that a book, and especially a book of fiction, is too complicated a thing to be talked about, except by a person talking to himself or herself. I began to suspect that a book, and especially a book of fiction, ought to be read in private and then put on the reader’s shelves for five or ten or twenty years, after which time the reader ought to stare at the spine of the book. After I had begun to suspect these things, I seldom talked about books. Sometimes I would point out a book to a person or would place a book in the hands of a person or would leave a book lying where a person might come across it, but I would seldom talk about any of these books. Nowadays, I am more likely to hide books rather than to put them in the way of people. For some years now, I have not tried to persuade any person to read any book. In future, I will not admit to any person that I have read any book. In future, I will not even reveal to any person the existence of any book that the person has not read unless the person has first persuaded me that he or she has already seen in his or her mind some of the contents of the book. Being nowadays this sort of man, I could hardly bring myself to speak to one or another person in charge of part of a library containing a book I know nothing about.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, I began to understand the place in this story of the image the connections of which I did not understand when I first included details of that image in this story. I have now begun to understand why the young woman whose image in my mind caused me to write the second and third and fourth paragraphs of this story chose never to speak to me about any piece of fiction that she had written or intended to write.
The name of the naturalist who spent most of his life in fields of grass in the south of France studying details of the ways of insects is almost the same word as the name of a famous publishing house in London. The famous publishing house publishes much poetry and fiction, and a number of the books on my shelves at this moment were first published by the famous publishing house. At least one of the books that I dumped at Fairfield in the years when I used to dump books had been first published by the famous publishing house. I can remember of that book only that it was a hardcover edition of a book of prose fiction by a famous writer from the West Indies. One of the books on my shelves from the famous publishing house is a paperback edition of one of my own books of fiction. The design on the cover of this book and the advertisement for the book suggest to me that the persons who prepared these things had not read the contents of the book. Another of the books on my shelves is the hardcover edition of the book mentioned most recently in this paragraph. Whenever I look at the illustration on the front of the dust-jacket of the book just mentioned, I suppose that the illustrator first read every word of the book and then was able to see in his mind every detail of each of the images that he would see in his mind twenty or more years afterwards if he stood at that time in front of the unjacketed spine of the book. The hardcover edition just mentioned was the first of my books of fiction to have been reviewed in the TLS. Soon after I had read the review of the book in the TLS, I chose not to renew my subscription to the TLS when it was next due for renewal, and I did not subscribe to the TLS for three years.
From the time when my son was first able to walk around the backyard of our house, I encouraged him to be interested in birds and insects and spiders and plants. I did this partly to safeguard myself from the possible accusation that I was forcing too many books on him, but I genuinely wanted him to take an interest in the natural world. I wanted him to turn to the outdoors whenever he had grown tired for the time being of books. On many fine days when my son was old enough to walk and talk but not yet old enough to read, I would lead him around our backyard, looking for some bird or spider or insect that we could watch.
Whenever I try to remember the days mentioned in the previous sentence, I remember first the image that I have seen often in my mind since I bought for my son the book mentioned earlier in this section of this story. I see in my mind the image of the man sitting with his chin in his hands in the fields of grass. While I watch the man in my mind, he lifts his chin from his hands and picks up from beside him in the grass a pencil and a notebook. In one or another article or essay that I read in one or another publication many years ago, the words at the head of this section of this story were applied to the famous naturalist, who was the author of many books reporting what he saw during his long lifetime in the fields surrounding his home. I watch the man in my mind writing with his pencil in his notebook while he sits in the fields of grass.