Gerald Murnane

Barley Patch

PART 1

The Turf was so complicated it went on forever.

— Jack Kerouac, Doctor Sax

Must I write?

A few weeks before the conception of the male child who would become partly responsible, thirty-five years later, for my own conception, a young man aged nineteen years and named Franz Xaver Kappus sent some of his unpublished poems and a covering letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, who was by then a much-published writer although he was only twenty-eight years of age.

Kappus, of course, wanted Rilke to comment on the poems and to advise him as to who might publish them. In an answering letter Rilke made some general comments, not especially favourable, and declined to discuss the matter of publication. However, Rilke did not fail to advise the young man:

Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Search for the reason that bids you write. . acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?

I first read the above passage in June 1985, soon after I had bought a second-hand copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M. D. Herter Norton and published in New York by W. W. Norton & Company. When I first read the passage, I was a teacher of fiction-writing in what was then called a college of advanced education. As soon as I had read the passage, I typed it onto a clean page and then put the page into one of the folders of notes that I used for my classes in the unit that was called Advanced Fiction Writing. Once each year thereafter, I read to the students of that unit the advice of Rilke to the young poet. I then urged the students to question themselves from time to time as Rilke would have had them do. I then said it would be no bad thing if several at least of the persons present were to decide at some time in the future, in the stillest hour of their night, that they need no longer write.

I never afterwards heard that any former student of mine had suddenly decided to write no more or that he or she ever put into practice or even remembered Rilke’s stern advice. In the early autumn of 1991, however, four years before I ceased to be a teacher of fiction-writing, and on a bustling afternoon rather than during a still night, and without even putting to myself Rilke’s recommended question, I myself gave up writing fiction.

Why had I written?

When I stopped writing, I could have said that I had been writing fiction for more than thirty years. Some of what I had written had been published, but most of it had been stored as manuscripts or typescripts in my filing cabinets and will be there still when I die.

My pieces of published writing were called by publishers and by almost all readers either novels or short stories, but to have them thus called began in time to make me feel uncomfortable, and I took to using only the word fiction as the name for what I wrote. When I stopped writing at last, I had not for many years used the terms novel or short story in connection with my writing. Several other words I likewise avoided: create, creative, imagine, imaginary, and, above all, imagination. Long before I stopped writing, I had come to understand that I had never created any character or imagined any plot. My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination.

I was seldom embarrassed to have to admit this. The word imagination seemed to me connected with antiquated systems of psychology: with drawings of the human brain in which each swelling was named for the faculty residing there. Even when I looked into some or another novel by a contemporary author much praised for his or her imagination, I was far from being envious; a powerful imagination, it seemed, was no preventative against faulty writing.

For many years I wrote, as I thought, instinctively. I certainly did not write with ease: I laboured over every sentence and sometimes rewrote one or another passage many times. However, what might be called my subject-matter came readily to me and offered itself to be written about. What I called the contents of my mind seemed to me more than enough for a lifetime of writing. Never, while I wrote, did I feel a need for whatever it was that might have been mine if only I had possessed an imagination.

I was never merely a writer, of course. I was a reader of fiction long before I began to write it. Many writers of novels or short stories or poetry have claimed to be, in their own words, voracious and insatiable readers. I would describe myself as an erratic reader, not only because I have failed to read many of the books most admired by readers and writers of my generation but because I soon forgot much of what I did read and yet dwelt often on a certain few texts or even a few pages from those texts.

As a child, I seldom read what were called children’s books, partly because I hardly ever saw such books and partly because I decided at an early age that I was capable of reading adults’ books. My parents owned no books to speak of. They borrowed each week several books from what was called during my childhood a circulating library, but the books were always returned to the library before I could read more than a few pages. I read mostly from magazines. My parents bought each month two magazines filled with short stories. One magazine was Argosy, which came, I think, from England. The other was The Australian Journal, which included not only short stories but part of a serialised novel. The rule in our household was that my mother would first read each of these magazines so that she could tell me which stories, if any, were not suitable for me. I would then be allowed access to the magazine, provided that I undertook not to read the stories deemed unsuitable. These, of course, I always read first, hoping to learn from them some or another secret from the world of adults. I learned from this furtive reading of mine only that my mother did not want me to read descriptions of what might be called prolonged, passionate embraces and that she did not want me to know that young women sometimes became pregnant even though they were not yet married.

A person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read. I can still remember, nearly sixty years later, some of what I read as a child, which is to say that I can still call to mind some of the images that occurred to me while I read as a child. As well, I claim that I can still feel something of what I felt while those images were in the foreground of my mind.

During the years from about 1960 to about 1990, I read more than a thousand books, mostly of a sort that could be called literature. When I last looked through the pages of the ledger where the titles and the authors of all those books are recorded, I learned that twenty or so of the books had left on me some sort of lasting impression. A few moments ago I was able to scribble in quick succession, in the margin of the page where I wrote the early drafts of each sentence on this page, the titles and authors of nine of the twenty or so books mentioned in the previous sentence. And just now, while I was writing the previous sentence, I remembered a tenth title and author. After having written the previous sentence, I waited for more than a minute, at the end of which time an eleventh title and author came to my mind.

Two days have passed since I wrote the previous sentence. During that time, no further titles or authors have occurred to me, although I asked myself several times whether I should add to my list of eleven titles the eight titles of my own published books together with the titles of my unpublished books, given that I often recall my state of mind when I was writing one or another passage from those books and that I sometimes recall also a phrase or a sentence from the passage.

One day, I decided not to go on reading one after another book of a sort that could be called literature — that day was only a few months before the day when I decided to write no more fiction. When I made the earlier decision, I intended to confine my reading in future to the few books that I had never forgotten; I would reread those books — I would dwell on them for the rest of my life. But after my decision to write no more fiction, I foresaw myself reading not even my few unforgotten books. Instead of reading what could be called literature and instead of writing what I called fiction, I would devise a more satisfying enterprise than either reading or writing. During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote but had never afterwards detached themselves from me: I would contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that comprised the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing. During the rest of my life I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.

Before I began to write the first of the three preceding paragraphs, I was about to report that a few images had come to my mind while I was writing the last two sentences of the paragraph preceding that paragraph. The first of the few was an image of two green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees that first appeared in my mind in 1950, while I was reading the first story that I read of the series of short stories published in The Australian Journal about a fictional farm named Drover’s Road, or it may have been Drovers’ Road. The author was, I think, a woman, but I have long since forgotten her name. The same few chief characters took part in each story; they were members of the latest of the several generations of the family that had lived at the farm, whichever name it had. I have forgotten the names of the chief characters, both male and female, but I felt just now something of what I felt towards a certain female character whenever I read about her: I wanted no sadness or anxiety to be visited on her; I wanted the course of her life to be untroubled. The character in question was young and unmarried, and I wanted her to remain so for as long as I went on reading about her.

While I was writing the first few sentences of the previous paragraph, I was unable to recall any details of the images of persons and faces that I had had in mind while I read as a child the series of short stories referred to. At some time while I was writing the last two sentences of the previous paragraph, I found myself assigning to the female character under mention the image of a face that I first saw during the early 1990s when I looked into a book that I had recently bought on the subject of horse-racing in New Zealand. (I recall no reference to horse-racing in any of the short stories in which the young female was a character, but after I had assigned a face to the character, I recalled that the place called Drover’s or Drovers’ Road was described as being in a fictional New Zealand. As soon as I recalled this, I found myself assigning to the image mentioned earlier of the two green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees, a background not of snow-covered mountains such as I had sometimes seen in pictures of New Zealand, where I have never been, but of sombre, forested mountains such as I saw during my one, brief visit to Tasmania in the 1980s.)

Not far away (according to the scale of distances that applies in my mind) — not far away from the two green paddocks and part of a homestead is an image of a two-storey building intended to be an English farmhouse several centuries old. I have always assumed that this house is surrounded by green paddocks or fields, as they might be called, but only one such green expanse has been of interest to me. It reaches from the vicinity of the house to a steep hill in the middle distance. Near the summit of the hill is a grove or a clump of trees. In the book of fiction that first caused me to see this hill in my mind, the original hill is called Tanbitches. Somewhere in the book is the explanation that the name of the hill is a variation of the phrase ten beeches, the trees near the summit being beech trees.

Sometimes I seem to recall that the variation was explained as being merely the sort of change that happens over time to an often-used phrase. At other times, I seem to recall that Tanbitches was said to be a remnant of the dialect formerly widespread in that part of England. Regardless of which explanation I seem to recall, I always feel again a semblance of the unease that I felt whenever I saw in my mind, as a child-reader, an image of the hill with the trees on it and heard in my mind at the same time the quaint-sounding name of the place.

I should have felt not unease but pleasure. I should have been pleased that I could refer to a prominent place in my mind by using what seemed more a code-word than a name. I was already aware as a child that the landscapes or the human faces or the melodies or the panels of coloured glass in doors or windows or the sets of racing colours or the aviaries of birds or the passages of prose in books or magazines — that the origins of the images most firmly lodged in my mind had a certain quality that first took my notice and afterwards compelled me to memorise the item affecting me. I am no more able now than I was as a child to apply a name to that certain quality. Given that I sometimes tried as a child to devise a private word or phrase for the quality, I should have been pleased to be able to hear in my mind the word Tanbitches whenever I saw in my mind a green field sloping upwards towards a hill with a clump of trees near its top, but the word made me uneasy, and I believe today that my unease caused me for the first time as a child-reader to think of a story, as I would have called it, as having been made up, as I would have said, by an author.

I seem to recall that I was disappointed by the similarity between the plain English of the phrase ten beeches and the would-be quaintness of the word Tanbitches, however its origin may have been explained in the text: that I wished the hill — if it could not have a plain English name — might have been known by a word so outlandish that not even the author could explain its occurrence. I may not be exaggerating if I claim to recall that I preferred the hill in my mind to remain nameless rather than to bear the name assigned to it by the author.

The author in question was named Josephine Tey. The book was Brat Farrar, which was published in monthly instalments in The Australian Journal in either 1950 or 1951. At the age when I read every piece of fiction in every issue of the Journal, I was not at all interested in authors, and yet I recall myself speculating sometimes about Josephine Tey or, rather, about the ghostly female presence of the same name that I was sometimes aware of while I read Brat Farrar. I would not have enjoyed speculating thus. I would much rather have read the text of Brat Farrar in the same way that I read other works of fiction: hardly aware of words or sentences; interested only in the unfolding scenery that appeared to me while my eyes moved past line after line on the page. But the word Tanbitches would cause me to stop and sometimes even to suppose that Josephine Tey had erred: she had failed to learn the true name of the hill and so she had given it a name of her own choosing—Tanbitches was only a word that an author had imagined.

I had another cause for thinking sometimes about the personage named Josephine Tey when I would rather have been admiring the image of the two-storey house or the image of the green field rising to the wooded hill, or when I would rather have been feeling towards the images of persons who seemed to live in that scenery as though I lived among them. I seem to remember that Brat Farrar was called a mystery novel and that the plot turned on the return to the family home of a young man claiming to be the long-lost heir to the estate. The claimant, so to call him, was invited to live in the family home although none of the persons already living there was yet sure of the truth of his claim. I recall three of these persons. One was the claimant’s brother, who may have been named Simon and who may have been a twin; another was the claimant’s sister, or perhaps half-sister; the third person was an older woman known always as Aunt Bee. The three siblings, if such they were, had no parents that I can recall. Aunt Bee was the oldest of the chief characters and by far the most powerful of those who lived in the two-storey house. Whether or not she was their aunt, she seemed to have authority over the three purported siblings. The young woman especially confided in Aunt Bee, consulted her often, and almost always followed her advice.

For as long as I had the text of Brat Farrar in front of my eyes, and often at other times, I did as I was compelled to do whenever I was reading much of what I read during the 1950s or whenever I was remembering the experience of having read it. I felt as though I myself moved among the characters.

I was unable to alter the course of the narrative: anything reported in the fiction was a fact that I had to accept. However, I was free to take advantage of the seeming gaps in the narrative. The text of a work of fiction, as I seem to have understood from the first, reports in detail certain events from certain hours in the lives of the characters but leaves unreported whole days, months, years even. A narrative would often include, of course, a summary of a lengthy period of time, but a mere summary hardly restricted my freedom.

I was free, first of all, to observe and to admire. I could watch openly while my favourite female character rode on horseback to the far side of some landscape described in the text and even further, or while she fondled or fed her pet animals or birds, or even while she sat reading some work of fiction and while she felt, perhaps, as though she herself moved among the characters of that work. I was free also to influence the life of my favourite female character, but within strict limits. In 1953, for example, while I was reading Hereward the Wake, by Charles Kingsley, I was distressed by Hereward’s abandoning his wife, Torfrida, for another woman. From my standpoint as a shadowy presence among the characters, I knew I could never reverse Hereward’s decision. And yet, I was able in some mysterious way to add to whatever remorse he might have felt from time to time: I became, perhaps, one more of the lesser characters whose disapproval conveyed itself to Hereward. More to my satisfaction, I seemed able wordlessly to convey my sympathy to the cast-off Torfrida and even to suppose that this was of help to her.

In my life as a ghostly fictional character — as the creation of a reader rather than a writer — I could say and do no more than my creator was able to have me say or do, and my creator was a child. He was a precocious child in some ways: in his reading of adult books, for example, and in his curiosity about adult sexuality, so to call it. In other ways, he was an ignorant child. When he sent a version of himself into the scenery that included the hill with the trees on it and the two-storey house, he wanted no more than to have that version fall in love with one of the female characters and she with him. And although he could have said that he himself had already fallen in love with many female persons in what he would have called the real world, he knew about girls’ or young women’s falling in love only what he had read about it in fiction.

A reader of this work of fiction may be wondering why I had to insinuate a version of myself into the scenery of so many novels or short stories when I might have chosen from the male characters in each work a young man or a boy and might afterwards have felt as though I shared in his fictional life. My answer is that I had never met up with any young male character with whom I could feel the sympathy needed for such a sharing. And the most common reason for my failing to sympathise with young male characters was that I could not comprehend, let alone agree with, the policy of those characters towards young female characters.

Sometimes I tried to live in my mind the life of one or another male character of fiction. I believe I tried, while I read the first of the monthly instalments of Brat Farrar, to take part, as it were, in the fictional life of the young man who had arrived at the two-storey house claiming to be the long-lost son. I recall my having suspected from the first that the claimant was an impostor and, therefore, no kin of the young woman. This would have left me free to fall in love with the young woman, who had attracted me as soon as I had begun to read about her. At the same time, my representing myself as her brother or half-brother would have obliged me to disguise my true feelings for the time being — or, if my claim was accepted, perhaps indefinitely. Far from being a hindrance or a hardship, this would have been much to my liking; for me, the process of falling in love needed much secrecy and concealment and pretence. To fall in love with a young woman who had to allow for the possibility that I was her brother or half-brother — such an event would have prompted me to set going all that I considered necessary and appropriate during a courtship: the young man’s confiding in the young woman day after day for month after month, if necessary, until she had learned every detail of his life-story, of his daydreams, and of what he might have called his ideal female companion, and until she had come to understand that he was different indeed from the many coarse-minded suitors that she would have read about in fiction who could hardly wait before they tried to kiss and embrace their girlfriends; the young woman’s responding to the young man’s confidences by reporting in equal detail her own history, especially those periods of her life when she believed herself to be in love with one or another boy or young man; finally, the young woman’s falling into the habit of asking the young man, whenever he took his leave of her, where he was likely to be and what he was likely to be doing in his absence, thereby allowing the young man to suppose that the young woman daydreamed about him while he and she were apart, so that he did not deceive himself whenever he seemed to feel her presence about him while he was alone.

Before I began to write the first of the six previous paragraphs, I had intended to report more of what I recalled about my feelings towards the character of Aunt Bee, as she existed in my mind, and more about a further reason that I had for thinking sometimes about the personage known to me as Josephine Tey when I would have preferred simply to look at the unfolding scenery that appeared to me while I read. I had intended to report that I was jealous of the influence that Aunt Bee had over the young female character that I looked forward to courting in my mind. If the young female had a fault in my eyes, it was her unquestioning admiration of Aunt Bee.

I sensed that Aunt Bee disapproved of my interest in the young female character and that she contrived to keep me from being alone with her. Even though I conducted myself towards the young woman with unfailing seemliness, as though I truly was her brother or her half-brother, still Aunt Bee seemed to suspect me of wanting to make advances to the young woman if only I could arrange for the two of us to be alone together. Of course I wanted to be alone with the young woman, but for the time being I planned only to have long, serious conversations with her during our meetings.

The publication in serial form of the whole novel surely took at least six months, during which time I would have seen myself often in my mind as a version of the character of the claimant, and even more often as a version of myself inserted into the scenery of the novel. During the two weeks while I was writing the previous two thousand words of this text, I recalled a number of my experiences as a child-reader of the text of Brat Farrar, but not once did I recall any scene in which any version of myself was alone with the young female character. I attribute this to the influence of Aunt Bee. Not only did the young female character consult the older woman at every turn, but I believe that I, whether as reader, seeming character, or intruder-into-the-text, was afraid of Aunt Bee.

If only I had been able, in spite of Aunt Bee, to spend some time alone with the young woman, I had prepared beforehand not just the substance of what I was going to tell her about myself but also the scenery in which I was going to tell it. I have little doubt that Josephine Tey would have described in detail more than one view of the countryside visible from the two-storey house, but all I recall today is the distant hill with the clump of trees and the name that I could not accept. The scenery mentioned two sentences ago was of my own making. As soon as I had understood that the two-storey house stood among green English countryside, I would have felt free to arrange throughout that countryside my own preferred distant views or hidden nooks. I recall more than fifty years later that I hoped often to sit with the young woman in an upper-storey room that had been fitted out as a parlour and the windows of which overlooked a distant moor or fen. I cared nothing for what might be called geographical veracity: I wanted to have the young woman see in the distance the sort of place where she and I might have strolled together as innocent friends if only we had known one another during childhood. Five or six years before I first read Wuthering Heights, I had decided that a moor was a most suitable place for a male and a female child to be alone together and to talk together until the image of each became in the other’s mind the trustworthy companion that he and she had always longed for. As for the fen, I thought of it as no more than a shallow swamp that two children might have walked around in complete safety. I believe I might even have decreed — I, the wilful reader — that the inexpertly named hill with the coppice near its summit was the source of a tiny stream that trickled downwards in rainy weather until it became, if the rain kept up, what English persons called a brook, which I understood to be a watercourse shallow enough and narrow enough for a child to be able to wade across or even to jump across. Since my early childhood, I had been afraid of large bodies of water or of fast-flowing, murky rivers and drains but much interested in shallow ponds or swamps or small creeks that filled or flowed only during seasons of rain. Walking with one of my uncles across his dairy farm during many of my summer school-holidays, I would have liked to inspect certain green places among clumps of rushes where the soil might have been still spongy and damp, but my uncle always reminded me that such places were infested by snakes. The equivalent indoors of my interest in shallow or trickling water was my longing to have access to an upper-storey window. At the time when I was reading Brat Farrar, I had never been inside a house of more than one storey, although I had often daydreamed of watching unobserved from an upper window not only persons close by but also distant landscapes. At least five years before I read Brat Farrar, I had been taken for the first time to a house where one of my mother’s older sisters lived with her husband and her four daughters in a clearing in the Heytesbury Forest, in south-western Victoria. My mother and my aunt, and even the four girls, my cousins, often amused themselves afterwards by recalling in my hearing that I had walked into one after another room during my first minutes in their house and had looked behind the door in each room. In reply to their questions at the time, I had said that I was looking for stairs. Their house was hardly more than a cottage, but something about the angle of the roof must have suggested to me as I approached that a few upper rooms or even a single attic might have looked out over much more of the forest than I could have seen if I had stood among its nearer trees. I found no stairs, of course, but I found later on the back verandah something that caused me to forget my disappointment. My two oldest girl-cousins, one of them of my age and the other a year older, were the owners of the first doll’s house that I had seen anywhere but behind shop-windows. The house was of two storeys, and seemed to be fitted out with items of tiny furniture. I could not inspect the house; its owners would not allow me or my younger brother to approach it. I tried to explain that I wanted only to look into the house and not to touch it, but the girl-owners were unmoved. My brother and my mother and I were to stay overnight. One of the girl’s beds was moved from their tiny bedroom onto the back verandah so that my brother and I could sleep head-to-toe in it. I can only suppose that my mother slept in one of the girl’s beds in their room and that two at least of the girls had to sleep head-to-toe, which might have explained in part why the older girls seemed to dislike their visiting cousins, especially me who begged to see into their doll’s house or, failing that, to join in their games or their conversations. During the early evening, I felt sure that the owners of the doll’s house would take it to their own room at any moment, but the house was still on the back verandah when my brother and I were preparing for bed. I could not believe that the owners had forgotten it. I supposed either that their mother had forbidden them to take the thing into their crowded bedroom or, more likely, that they, the girl-owners, had left it on the verandah in order to entrap me: they knew I was anxious to inspect the house and, probably, to handle some of the items in it; they knew also the rightful position of every bed and pillow and chair; in the morning they would find proof that I had handled certain things; they would convey this proof to their mother and, even perhaps, to my own mother; I would have to defend myself against the collective anger of my aunt and my mother and my girl-cousins. Having foreseen these possibilities, I became cautious. I forced myself to stay awake until half an hour after I had heard the owners of the doll’s house going to their room for the night. Then I slipped out of bed and knelt beside the doll’s house and tried to look in through an upper window. A certain amount of moonlight already lit up the back verandah, but while I knelt my head and shoulders kept the upper storey in darkness. I hesitated but then dared to slide the whole doll’s house far out onto the verandah, hoping that nothing inside had been moved. Then, while the moonlight shone through the windows on one side of the upper storey, I stared in through the windows of the other side. Moments before I applied my eye to the first of those windows, which were mere apertures and not glazed, I had intended to insert soon afterwards through another window one or more finger and then to touch one after another of the objects in the upper rooms. But in the event, I merely looked, although this was only partly because I was afraid I might leave some trace of my intrusion: some chair overturned or some bed-quilt turned down.

From an early age, I had read each week a comic-strip that filled the inside back cover of the Australian Women’s Weekly. The title of the strip was “Mandrake the Magician.” To this day, I do not know whether the creator of Mandrake and his companions was a resident of Australia or of the United States of America. As a child, I was content to locate Mandrake’s adventures in a daydream-country where towering cities were set far apart on rolling grasslands: a country deriving in part from the few films that I had seen but also from the glimpses of far-reaching landscapes that came to me whenever I heard from a distant radio on a quiet afternoon the faint sounds of some or another hit-parade song.

Mandrake had two constant companions: Lothar, his giant Nubian servant, and Princess Narda, a young brunette woman who might have attracted me if I could have learned something about her character. In one of their adventures, Mandrake, Lothar, and Princess Narda went for a holiday to a dude ranch in a desert landscape. (This is no proof that the comic-strip itself came from the USA. I learned many years later that some of the comics I had once assumed to be American were devised by men who toiled all their lives in Sydney or Melbourne.) Late on their first evening at the ranch, when all three were preparing for bed in their separate rooms, Princess Narda, who had not drawn the curtains across her window, saw outside the window a giant human hand poised as though about to thrust through the glass and to grope towards her. Princess Narda screamed and then fainted away. Mandrake and Lothar hurried into her room, but by then the hand was no longer in view, and when Princess Narda had been revived and had told her story, the men were inclined to believe that she had imagined the giant hand. (Later, Mandrake himself found a giant footprint and had glimpses of parts of a threatening giant. Some villains had made the parts out of papier-mâché in order to frighten visitors away from the ranch. The villains wanted to buy the property cheaply and then to profit from the oil that they believed was under the property.) Even as a young child, I saw through, as it were, most of the adventures of Mandrake the Magician; I was almost always aware of the presence behind the line-drawings and the speech-balloons of a person who lived in some or another part of what I called the real world and who struggled continually to imagine. And yet, I got from certain images in comic-strips what I got from certain pieces of fiction in publications such as The Australian Journal: details worthy to be included in the scenery that I needed to have always at the back of my mind and outlines of persons worthy to live among that scenery. For example, I watched unfolding in my mind often as a child the following events. A huge, awkward male person, quite unlike myself to look at but of a disposition not unlike my own, finds himself one evening outside a lighted room in which a good-looking dark-haired young woman is undressing for bed. He had first caught sight of the young woman from some distance away, but when he stands beside the window he is so tall and so clumsy that he can only stoop and fumble with a hand at the lighted panes. His only means of getting past the window is to smash the glass with his knuckles. This he does so easily that the shards of glass bring hardly a trace of blood to his pudgy fingers. He is unable to see into the room, but he trusts his fingertips to be able to distinguish between furniture and fabrics and human flesh. Shortly, his fingers close around the limp female body on the floor of the room. But then he pauses. He had been going to lift the woman out; to hold her up to his face; to admire her miniscule features; to look beneath her clothing. But now, he pauses, perhaps out of pity for the doll-sized creature who lies at his mercy but more, perhaps, because the unfolding of my mind has come to an end. I have lost sight of events. I am in need of a faculty such as I have never possessed.

On the verandah of my aunt’s house, I looked into each of the two upper rooms of the doll’s house and then eased the house back to its former position. Then I climbed back into my bed, feeling foolish. I had expected that my looking into the house might reveal to me some sort of secret that my girl-cousins had been keeping from me — perhaps on some bed in an upper room lay a tiny doll with only a thin nightdress covering her female parts. In the event, I had seen in the upper rooms only neat furniture. No doll that my cousins owned was small enough or dainty enough to belong in the house. It was not only I who had no right to poke my fingers through the windows; I began to think of my cousins as hardly worthy to own the house, which I had stopped thinking of as a mere residence for dolls.

Three or four years after my visit to the house in the clearing in the Heytesbury Forest, I read a comic-book about a character named Doll-man. Some or another unremarkable citizen of a vaguely American city was able, when the need arose, to compress the molecules of his body and to become a doll-sized man. On the night when I had looked into the doll’s house, I fell asleep as though my own molecules had been somehow compressed so that I was able to lie comfortably in my chosen bed in an upper-storey room overlooking a clearing in the Heytesbury Forest and to hear already in my mind the shrieks of the giant female personages who would look in on me next morning through the windows.

I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee in the work of fiction Brat Farrar. I reported even earlier that I sometimes resented the influence that Aunt Bee was allowed to exert over one at least of the other characters in the work. While I was reporting those matters, I seemed to recall from more than fifty years ago my having once or twice doubted whether the one character in a work of fiction should be allowed to possess so many qualities deemed admirable by the narrator as Aunt Bee was allowed to possess in Brat Farrar. Of course, terms such as narrator and even character were unknown to me at the time. I simply observed what happened in my mind while I read. And although I was afraid of Aunt Bee, I must sometimes have been aware that the cause of her appearing as she did in my mind was no more than that a personage known to me only as Josephine Tey had chosen that she, Aunt Bee, should appear thus.

I would like to be able to report here that I supposed at least once during my reading that Josephine Tey, whoever she might have been, ought to have written differently about Aunt Bee. I suspect that I had already accepted, more than fifty years ago, that no writer could be required to deal fairly with his or her characters, let alone readers.

When Aunt Bee was first mentioned in the text of Brat Farrar, she was probably the subject of a long passage of description. Any such passage would have been wasted on me, as all so-called descriptions of so-called characters in works of fiction have been wasted on me since I first began to read such works. For how many years did I read dutifully what I thought of as descriptive passages? How often did I try to feel grateful to the authors who included such passages in their works, thereby enabling me to see vividly while I read what they, the authors, had imagined while they wrote? I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were wholly different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them. I was too young at the time to know that this was not the result of my being an unskilled reader. Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it; that even while I write this present piece of fiction I am trying to read a certain text. (With writing, the matter seems to have been otherwise. Already, as a very young man, I understood that I might be capable of writing fiction without having first observed numerous interesting places and persons and events and even without being able to imagine settings and characters and plots, but not until the day when I stopped writing did I understand what I had been doing all the while when I had thought I was merely writing.)

I would have read attentively whatever Josephine Tey had written in the early pages of Brat Farrar in order to suggest to the reader the appearance of Aunt Bee. Perhaps some or another sentence might have caused me to see in my mind the image of Aunt Bee that has stayed there ever since, but I suspect not. Josephine Tey may have written at length about her character’s distinctive clothes or her admirable personality, but I suspect that some connotation that I have long since forgotten caused me first to see Aunt Bee in my mind as I have seen her ever since. My image of Aunt Bee has comprised never more than two details. She, so to call her, consists of a florid face and a hairstyle that might be called upswept. I am vaguely aware of a clothed body somewhere beneath the hairstyle and the face, but I have never seen that body in my mind. The florid face is hardly different from the florid face that I recall whenever I recall the woman known to me only as Sister Mary Gonzaga, who was the principal of the first primary school that I attended. I was not afraid of Sister Gonzaga as some persons claim to have been afraid during their childhood of nuns wearing long black robes. Sister Gonzaga’s robes and her florid face seemed to me appropriate distinctions for a person who taught forty and more eighth-grade girls.

At my first primary school, boys were taught only in the lowest three grades. After the third grade, boys went to an all-boys school across the road to be taught by religious brothers. At the primary school, all upper grades consisted of girls only. In the eighth grade, almost every girl was in her fourteenth year. In my first year at primary school, I knew nothing of secondary schools, let alone teachers’ colleges or universities. The girls in Sister Gonzaga’s room were the most senior students of any sort that I had ever seen. I was mostly the pet, or favourite, of my nun-teacher in the first grade, and so I was often sent by her on some or another errand to Sister Gonzaga’s classroom. No university or cathedral or library that I have since stepped into has awed me so much as that hushed classroom would awe me whenever I visited it on some or another hot afternoon. The room seemed cooler than any other in the school, if only because its windows looked between pepper-trees towards the banks of the trickling drain that I knew as Bendigo Creek or because each windowsill had on it a plant-pot from which sparse green foliage hung down. The coolness may have been an illusion, but the quietness of the room always startled me. I seemed to have entered a place where arcane knowledge lay just beyond my reach. The eighth-grade girls, whenever I burst in upon them, seemed either to be absorbing or to be recording such knowledge. Either they were reading from thick books with homemade brown-paper covers that hid the titles and the names of the authors, or they were writing with steel-nibbed pens or even with fountain pens one after another long sentence across line after line in immaculate exercise books. More than that, the girls made gentle fun of me — why, I never understood.

The girls’ teacher seemed to know me as a clever child who was not afraid to speak out. Whenever I visited her room, she would ask me, in the hearing of the whole class, what I took to be a straightforward question. I would give her a straightforward reply, but almost always my reply would cause the eighth-grade girls to laugh. They laughed not raucously and overlong, as my own classmates laughed, but briefly and discreetly. A sort of whinnying sound rose from the girls and then ceased abruptly at a look from Sister Gonzaga. I would always leave the room not only baffled by my having amused the girls but hurt by their having rejected me, because my speaking frankly in front of them had been, in its own way, a declaration of love.

Whenever I stood in front of the rows of eighth-grade girls, I was not bold enough to look at any one face. I was therefore spared the sight of some or another girl that I saw every day in the playground and disliked for her features or her manners. I looked always above the heads of the girls and towards the rear wall of their classroom, so that any one of the throng of pale blurs in the lower field of my vision might have been the face of the girl that I never saw in the playground because she stayed in a quiet corner with her few softly-spoken girlfriends or because she spent most of her lunch-hour reading in her classroom: the girl who was far too old for me to have as my girlfriend but who might have seen far into me while her teacher made fun of me, so that I could rely in future on her image in my mind. This image would have been of a tall girl, almost a woman in my estimation, who wore the same intimidating navy-blue tunic and white blouse that her classmates wore but whose face told me she did not resent my interest in her — my seeing her in my mind whenever I needed to look to a female presence for inspiration.

I understood that the connection between the older girl and myself existed only in my daydreams, but I sometimes supposed that something might have developed between us if only her florid-faced teacher had not urged her girl-pupils often to look away from their shabby houses and their dusty streets and to dwell on the images that came to their minds whenever they read their books or said their prayers. When some of my classmates told me that children from the nearest State school used the nickname “Beetroot” for our Sister Gonzaga, I pretended to be shocked but I was secretly pleased.

Several years after I had last seen the red-faced nun, and a hundred miles away from the provincial city where she had made fun of me in front of her decorous pupils, I would have been reading, in the first of the serialised excerpts of Brat Farrar, some or another paragraph in which the narrator hinted yet again at the virtues of the character Aunt Bee when I first gave to that character the nickname that I have used for her ever since: Aunt Beetroot.

A bowl of beetroot stood on the table every Sunday afternoon in the kitchen of the comfortable house in the eastern suburb of Melbourne where an older sister of my mother lived with her husband and their children, my cousins, who were mostly girls or young women. Many other plates and bowls stood on the same table. My aunt and her family had a so-called roast dinner every Sunday at midday. The plentiful remains of the roast lamb or beef were left to cool on the table. In the early afternoon, the first of the regular Sunday-visitors would arrive at the house. My mother and my brother and I were occasional visitors. By mid-afternoon, all the women present would have begun to prepare in the kitchen the evening meal for the dozen or more persons present: the Sunday tea, as everyone called it. The women at the kitchen table talked continually, but if any of them saw me at the door trying to overhear them, the kitchen would become silent. My mother would tell me sternly to go outside and play.

Many times during my childhood I was told to go outside and to play in some or another garden while my mother and her women-friends talked indoors. To play in such places was impossible. The sort of game that I played in my own backyard needed weeks of preparation: I had to set up a farming property under each shrub and then to mark out the roads that crossed my rural district and finally to choose the names for the husbands and wives who lived at each property. (I chose the surnames either from among the names of trainers and jockeys in the Sporting Globe or from the names of film stars in advertisements in the Bendigo Advertiser for films currently showing. The given names I chose from a private store that I kept always in mind; none of these names belonged to any scabby or poorly dressed classmate of mine, and each of them when I pronounced it aloud gave rise to a sort of imagery that I might have struggled to explain on this page if I had not read by now the work of fiction by Marcel Proust the English title of which is Remembrance of Things Past and an early section of which, titled “Place-Names: The Place,” contains a long passage in which the narrator reports that certain words gave rise in his mind to certain images far more elaborate and consistent but in essence similar to the images that arise even now in my mind when I recall myself crouching beneath a tamarisk tree or a lilac tree or a lion’s-paw shrub and assigning to persons who were hardly yet visible in my mind the names that would make them more so because the vowels or the consonants of those names connoted pale or freckled or sun-browned skin or eyes of a certain colour or even a distinctive voice or bearing.)

Whenever I was sent out of the comfortable house mentioned in the previous paragraph, I went first to the small front garden and then to the fernery on the shaded side of the house and finally to the small back garden. On my way from the kitchen to the front garden, I passed the closed door of the room that was my uncle’s office. He was the only man I knew who had a room of his own in his own house, and for this I envied him, especially on Sunday afternoons when the crowd of women was in the kitchen. Once, on a weekday, I had looked into the office when the door was ajar and my uncle was working in his garden. The room was surprisingly small and bare. I had hoped to see shelves of books, but the only furniture was a desk, a cupboard and a chair. (My father had once said to me scornfully that none of the family in that house had ever read a book.) On the desk were several magazines with coloured covers. The topmost was called Glamour and had on its cover a picture of a young woman in a two-piece bathing-costume. My uncle was a bookmaker and well-off, as my mother often told me. He earned most of his money on Saturdays and was often at leisure on other days. He cultivated standard roses in perfectly rectangular beds, masses of flowering annuals in perfectly circular beds, and a dozen sorts of fern and palm in his dim fernery. At the end of his back garden he kept canaries in aviaries: one large enclosure each for the males and the females, and several smaller cages for breeding pairs. I never saw him indulging his other main interest, but it was well known among his friends and relatives that he left his wife and six children at home on three evenings of every week of the year while he sat alone and watched films in one or another of the many picture theatres in his own or a neighbouring suburb.

Whenever I was told to play in my well-off uncle’s garden, I went first to the flowerbeds at the front. I plucked petals furtively until I had a collection of many colours. Then I hid myself in the fernery and arranged my petals in groups on the concrete stepping-stones so that each group suggested a set of racing-colours that had been described on one or another page in the collection of racebooks belonging to another uncle of mine: my father’s youngest brother, who lived far away in the south-west of Victoria. On winter Sundays, when the garden was bare, I would collect a leaf from every shrub or tree in both the front and the back garden. Afterwards in the fernery, I would chew on leaf after leaf, comparing the flavours. (I did this not only in my well-off uncle’s garden but in most gardens that I visited as a child. A few years ago, I saw in a newspaper article a list of garden plants reputed to be poisonous to human beings. Several on the list were plants that I had chewed and savoured often as a child.)

The fernery, on the less-frequented side of the house, always attracted me. Perhaps some of the trailing leaves reminded me of the potted palms meant to suggest opulence in the line drawings of hotel-foyers or hotel dining-rooms where so-called romantic episodes took place in comic-strips that I had read. Or, perhaps, I responded to the comparative seclusion of the fernery in the same way that I responded whenever I found myself alone in a secluded place or an empty landscape or even whenever I read about such a place or such a landscape — by seeing myself and a young female person alone together in that place or that landscape.

The person I most often saw alone with myself in the fernery would have been one or another of my three girl-cousins, the daughters of the well-off owner of the fernery. The youngest of the three was four years older than myself. None of the three, as I recall, took the least notice of me during my childhood. Two of the three are long dead, and the third I have not met up with for nearly twenty years. Even so, I am able to recall precisely the peculiar attraction that I felt towards each of my three cousins. I never felt towards any of them the sort of yearning that I often felt towards one or another girl of my own age whom I thought of as my girlfriend. That is to say, I never yearned to have a cousin follow me around or spy on me or interrogate me in order to learn my every thought and daydream. Nor did I lie in bed at night trying to see myself with one or another cousin in the far future as husband and wife in a house of two storeys on an extensive rural property. Perhaps my feelings towards my cousins arose partly from my having had no sister and no female friend of my own age during my childhood. My only sibling was a brother five years younger than myself. Moreover, my father’s losses from his betting on racehorses caused us to move from one rented house to another almost every year, so that I always felt myself to be a transient and likely to be soon snatched away from any friend I might make. What I most yearned for my cousins to do was to advise me. I never stood alone in the fernery without the vague hope that one or another cousin would join me there among the trailing greenery and would give me what my mother and my aunt would have called a good talking-to.

My cousin might have told me in the fernery no more than how she spent some of the many hours when I was unable to observe her: what she discussed with her girlfriends at school or with her sisters late at night in the bedroom that they shared. Even this would have been of value to me, who had to put into my girlfriends’ mouths predictable words of my own choosing whenever I tried to foresee our future dealings with each other. I knew there was much more that my cousin might have told me if I could have earned her sympathy, and although I could never formulate any detail of this precious information, I could cause myself to feel sometimes, alone in the fernery, a pleasant dizziness merely by supposing that I might one day hear such stuff from a young female person while she stood so close beside me that I could see the faint hairs on her forearms or the pale freckles just below her neck.

I daydreamed in the fernery only about the three female cousins of mine who lived thereabouts, but in other secluded places images of other female cousins appeared to me and advised me or revealed things to me. My Catholic father and my Protestant mother had each eight siblings. Of my eight paternal uncles and aunts, only three married, and these three together produced eleven children. All eight of my maternal uncles and aunts married and together produced more than forty children. My father was older than most of his siblings, whereas my mother was younger than most of hers. I had hardly any dealings with my cousins on my father’s side, who were mostly much younger than myself. As a boy, I visited many of my cousins on my mother’s side and even stayed sometimes overnight in their homes. Not once during all my childhood did a girl-cousin of mine approach me as though she had in mind any sort of serious discussion between the two of us. A few girl-cousins even gave me to understand that they disliked my company. And yet, for year after year, I remained hopeful. On some or another sweltering afternoon in the coming summer holidays, I would surely find myself alone with a girl-cousin in some or another shed on her parents’ farm. There would be between us such an understanding as had never yet existed between myself and a female person. We would neither of us feel urged to prove ourselves worthy of the other. Nor would we live in fear of losing the other’s regard. Our mood would be relaxed, light-hearted even. Our business together would begin with questions and answers. We would ask at first trivial or even flippant questions, as though nothing was at stake. Later, our questions would be such as had for long bothered us or even tormented us. We would answer each other with frankness, each marvelling at how easily we dispelled doubt after doubt or mystery after mystery. It was always possible that our honesty would oblige us to undress or even to make free with one another’s body, but I never supposed that anything we might do together would be done for any less serious purpose than to learn what it was that our parents and aunts and uncles seemed anxious that we should not learn.

In my well-off uncle’s backyard, I spent most of my time in front of his aviaries, especially the breeding cages. Each of these contained a male-bird and a female-bird and a nest, which was an empty Fisher’s Wax tin that the birds lined with straw and feathers. The nesting-tin was always nailed to the wall of the cage but too high up for me to see into. I often saw part of an adult bird that was sitting in the nest. Sometimes I heard the cries of baby-birds from inside the nest. Sometimes I saw a parent-bird reaching down to feed its young from its own mouth. I never actually saw into a nest. Each breeding-cage had a small door through which a person might have looked into the nest-tin, but the door was always fastened with a padlock. I once asked my uncle if I could look through one of the doors, but he told me that even my looking in on them might cause the birds to abandon their eggs or their young.

My glimpses into my aunt’s kitchen on those Sunday afternoons in the 1950s may have been among the first causes of my aversion during all my later life to meals prepared by persons other than myself. My aunt and her woman-helpers prepared two dishes: a salad and a trifle. The ingredients of the salad seemed to require much handling. Leaves of lettuce had to be folded over and sliced — and then folded and sliced again until they made up a bowl of what was called shredded lettuce. Stray bits of lettuce that clung to the slicers’ palms or got stuck under their fingernails were scraped or plucked free and then dropped into the bowl. Likewise, when a cluster of tomato-seeds fell away from a newly severed slice, the woman-slicer picked up the blob between the knife-blade and two or three fingertips and then dropped the seeds and the adjoining jelly into a bowl where pieces of tomato and discs and hoops of onion were submerged in vinegar. I cannot claim that I was revolted by the preparation of the beetroot, but the sight of the purplish stain from its juice on the tablecloth at mealtime would always remind me of the offensive sights that I had seen from the kitchen doorway during the afternoon. The worst of those sights were of women putting fingers into mouths. Most of the women removed sticky and greasy substances from their fingers by sucking the affected finger and then going on with their work. If even one of the women had wiped her finger afterwards in token fashion on her apron, I might have been able to tell myself later that that particular woman had happened to prepare the portion of salad that I was struggling to swallow, but I never saw any of the women wiping her finger thus.

At least once during the Sunday afternoon, the women made a pot of tea and then sat around the table to drink it. My aunt would put on the table a plate of cakes for the women to eat with their tea. In those years, a woman such as my aunt would have been ashamed to serve to guests any cakes or biscuits bought from shops. Such a woman devoted at least one half-day each week to baking, as she called it. My aunt would put in front of the other women patty-cakes: simple iced cakes in patty-pans of pleated paper. If she had had more time than usual for baking, she might serve lamingtons or butterfly-cakes: patty-cakes with two semicircular slices cut from the top of each cake, with whipped cream spread over the newly exposed surface, and with the two semicircles pressed into the cream so as to suggest the raised wings of a butterfly.

I saw it only once during the many Sunday afternoons when I would walk often slowly through my aunt’s kitchen, hoping to overhear the deliberations of some of the most powerful persons I knew. I saw it only once, but I assumed that it happened often. I assumed that my aunt, soon after having taken a large bite from one or another cake, would often remove one or another mass of pulped food from behind her inmost teeth by poking an index-finger far into her mouth and then, seemingly, by first scraping the finger along the teeth, then wiping the finger against the tongue, and finally swallowing the food.

At every Sunday tea, after the main course of cold meat and salad, we were served a sweet called a trifle. I never saw a trifle being prepared — the ingredients would always have been placed in a large bowl early in the day and put aside to soak. Children such as myself were served only small portions of trifle, because one of the ingredients was sherry. I might have identified the other ingredients merely by looking at what was on my spoon while I ate, but I always ate my trifle by gulping at it and I always kept my eyes averted from the stuff in my plate or on my spoon. The main ingredient was some kind of cake, but after it had been soaked all day its texture often suggested to me that I had in my mouth such a pulp or mush as my aunt would have removed from her rear teeth whenever she scraped them with a finger.

The aunt mentioned hereabouts could well have afforded to visit a hairdresser whenever she so wished and to have come away with a different hairstyle after each visit. I cannot recall that I ever took note of her hairstyle, but whenever an image of my aunt has appeared in my mind for many years past, that image has been of a certain face beneath what I call an upswept hairstyle: exactly the sort of hairstyle worn by the image of Aunt Bee in my mind whenever I recall my having read Brat Farrar.

In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seem to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the early 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew spying on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.

Not long before I read Brat Farrar, or it may have been not long afterwards, I read in The Australian Journal one after another instalment of the novel The Glass Spear, by Sidney Hobson Courtier. I knew about the author only that he was an Australian whose previous published works had been short stories set in New Guinea during the Second World War. (During the late 1950s, when I had decided on a career as a teacher in a State secondary school who would write poetry and perhaps short stories in secret at weekends or during the long summer holidays, I learned that Sidney Hobson Courtier was a senior teacher in a State primary school about five kilometres from the south-eastern suburb of Melbourne where I then lived. I was prepared to write always in secret and to use a pen-name because I knew that teachers employed by the State were forbidden to undertake paid employment outside their working hours. Sidney Hobson Courtier made no secret of his being a writer. He had got special permission from the Education Department to write in his free time after he had presented the Department with a medical certificate stating that he needed to write in order to preserve his health. During the early 1960s, when I was teaching in a primary school and writing poetry and short stories in secret in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, my head-teacher had been a colleague of the man he referred to as Sid Courtier. I never questioned my head-teacher about the author of The Glass Spear, partly because I was afraid of revealing that I was a secret writer and partly because I preferred not to learn that the author was other than I had surmised during my reading of his book.) While I read the early instalments of The Glass Spear, I surmised that the author was a person I might have confided in: a person who might have listened with interest while I explained that I read books of fiction in order to see landscapes in my mind and to meet up with young female personages in my mind. While I read the later instalments, I read also in order to learn how the plot, so to call it, would unfold and what would happen to the characters, so to call them. But my interest in these matters was only a passing interest: I was anxious to have done with them so that I could turn my attention again to what I considered the true subject-matter of the book.

If I could have met up with the author of The Glass Spear in the house where I saw him as living — in the sprawling house with the long return verandahs looking across park-like countryside towards a distant road somewhere in the western half of Victoria — I would have complained politely to him that his sort of book always came to an end too soon after the chief events, so to call them, had taken place: after the murders had been solved and the lovers had become engaged to be married. I might even have dared to tell Sidney Hobson Courtier, while we sat in a shaded corner of his verandah, that the chief fault of books such as The Glass Spear was that they came to an end when they might have gone on for as long, or longer, than I could have read them. I could not reasonably have asked of any author that he or she should write a book so long that I could never read to the end of it, but I might have dared to suggest to Sidney Hobson Courtier that he might have written as the ending of his book at least one more chapter like the early chapters so that my last experiences as a reader of The Glass Spear could have been sights-in-my-mind of room after room in a sprawling mansion surrounded by grassy countryside, or feelings such as I might have felt if I had been one of the persons who was to go on living in that mansion for long after the book had come to an end.

At least one murder was reported to have taken place in The Glass Spear. I forgot long ago who the victim or victims was or were and, likewise, who was the murderer. The murder-weapon, I seem to recall, was a spear such as an Australian Aborigine might have made. The tip of the spear was a piece of sharpened glass from a beer-bottle. When I first learned this while I was reading one or another serialised episode, I was disappointed. Until then, I had supposed that the words of the title of the book I was reading referred to a spear made all of glass and perhaps even lying on dark-coloured velvet in a glass display-case in the hall of the large house described in the early pages of The Glass Spear. Or I had supposed, against all odds, that I might read in due course that one or another room in the large house was a chapel or an oratory, or even a library, and that the windows of that room were of stained glass and that one of those windows, late on every cloudless afternoon glowed with a many-coloured design at the centre of which appeared a spear of a rare shade or tint.

I had only a passing interest in the murder or murders and hardly more interest in the chief male character or even the chief female character. These were two young unmarried persons and distant cousins, so I seem to recall. The man seemed dull and predictable; I had no wish to share in his life as I sometimes seemed to share in the life of a young male character. I gave to the image in my mind of the young woman a face that I would have called attractive, but I found her much less interesting than another female character who will be mentioned shortly.

My not having to take part in the life of the chief male character left me free to have a version of myself wander through the setting of The Glass Spear, which setting was a huge sheep or cattle property in the west of New South Wales. The name of the property was Kinie Ger. I spent hardly any time in the paddocks, partly because they were too arid for my liking and partly because I preferred not to meet up with any of the many Aborigines who lived on the property. Some of these worked as stockmen or labourers or kitchen-hands and lived in quarters not far from the homestead; others seemed to have no other homes than a row of humpies beside the creek. The white persons in the homestead referred to these humpies as the blacks’ camp and to the tall woman who seemed the leading person there as Mary, preceded by an epithet that I cannot recall.

The homestead known as Kinie Ger has stayed in my mind more clearly than any other building I have read about in fiction for the reason that the author of The Glass Spear took pains to include in his text details sufficient for the reader to be able to draw an accurate plan of the building. During my conjectured meeting with Sidney Hobson Courtier on his return verandah, the question I most wanted to ask him was whether or not he considered himself such a person as I considered myself: that rare sort of person who cannot be content in any district or any building unless he or she can refer to a map or a plan, even a map or a plan that the person has devised in haste in his or her mind. I was mostly content while I was a ghost-character of The Glass Spear because I mostly wandered through the homestead known as Kinie Ger seeing in my mind my whereabouts on the plan in my mind.

The homestead, as I see it now, nearly sixty years since I last read any reference to it, was shaped like an upper-case letter E. A person approaching the homestead saw the three arms of the letter pointing towards him or her. The central arm comprised the dining-room and the living-room. The outer arms each comprised mostly bedrooms. The long arm from which the three shorter arms projected comprised kitchen, pantries, storerooms, and the manager’s quarters. I seem to recall that Mary and some of her tribe spent much time in the yard behind this arm of the house.

The persons living in the homestead numbered perhaps ten, many of them being members of what would be called nowadays an extended family. I forgot long ago whatever I might have read about most of them. I remember today that one of them was named Ambrose Mahon. I remember also a great deal about Huldah.

As I approach yet again in my mind the three-pronged building that I first read about in the early 1950s, I keep my eyes fixed on the windows of the nearest room in the prong or wing at my left. Behind those windows, the blinds are always drawn. The nearest to me of the rooms in the wing on my left is the furthest room along the corridor for someone standing inside that wing and also the most remote room in the house from the main living areas. The door to that room is always locked, just as the blinds are always drawn in the windows. In the dim, locked room lives Huldah, one of the several siblings of the older generation of the family who live at Kinie Ger. Huldah has lived in her room since she was a child. Her siblings, presumably, know why she hides from the world and perhaps even visit her in secret late at night. The younger persons at Kinie Ger have never seen Huldah and can only guess at her story. They mostly guess that Huldah has some hideous disfigurement that she wants to keep hidden from the world or else that she has an illness of the mind that causes her to live her life in secret.

From the moment when I first read about Huldah, she was for me the chief character of The Glass Spear. I often disregarded the facts of the novel, so to call them, and thought of her as a young woman of marriageable age rather than the middle-aged person she surely was. Given that the version of myself who stepped easily into the scenery of books of fiction was a young man of marriageable age, it was inevitable that I would spend much of my time as a hanger-on at Kinie Ger in trying to attract the attention of the unseen Huldah. I did what little I could think of doing. I walked past her windows several times each day, always with a book in my hands as a sign that the world in which Kinie Ger stood among vistas of arid grasslands with trees in the distance — that world was not for me the only possible world. When I had tired of so walking, I would sit with an opened book in front of me in the living-room, in the central wing of the house. I was far from Huldah’s room, but one of her trusted siblings might have reported to the hidden young woman that the newcomer who had found his way across pages of text into the dim rooms of a remote homestead was a reader; that even in a place I had only read about, I still read about other places.

If it had been possible, the trusted sibling might have reported also that I was a writer. The sibling could not have told Huldah that he or she had seen me writing for hour after hour during some or another hot afternoon at the table of the living-room. As a child, I supposed that my sort of writing could be done only in secret. However, I am able to report that my having read about Huldah and her locked room in a fictional homestead drove me to begin to write the first piece of prose fiction that I can remember having written. As I recall, I wrote during 1950 or 1951 the first few hundred words of a story set on a large rural property in inland Tasmania. Most of what I wrote described the homestead on the property and some of the persons who lived there. I wrote in secret and I hid the finished pages each morning before I left for school. I hid the pages under a loose corner of the frayed linoleum in my bedroom, but after I had written the first few hundred words my mother found them. She quoted several of my sentences to me one afternoon as soon as I had arrived home from school. She took out my pages from the pocket at the front of her apron and she questioned me in the way that many a person would question me at writers’ festivals and such gatherings thirty and more years later. My mother wanted to know how much of my fiction was autobiographical, so to speak, and how much was imaginary, so to speak. She was especially interested in the origins of the two chief characters, a young man and a young woman each of marriageable age whose rooms were at diagonally opposite ends of a huge homestead, which was shaped like an upper-case letter H. The young man’s given name was the same as my own, and my mother seemed to have divined that the young woman’s given name was that of a girl at my school, although she, my mother, could surely not have supposed that the name belonged to a girl in an upper grade who would have been three years older than myself. I spent much time in observing this girl, although she had never caught me at it and may well have been unaware of my existence.

My mother handed back to me the pages of my fiction. I destroyed them soon afterwards, but without having given my mother the satisfaction of knowing that I had done so.

When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I supposed that her hiding herself was not the result of some deformity but of the opposite. I supposed that Huldah might have been like the princess in many a so-called fairytale who was so beautiful and so talented that her father would give her in marriage only to some young man who could perform three impossible-seeming tasks. I also connected Huldah with a female character I had read about a few years earlier in a comic-strip named Rod Craig, in one or another Melbourne newspaper. I had little sympathy for the hero of the strip, Rod Craig himself, who was a muscular adventurer and yachtsman. But I was much interested in a certain female character in one of the episodes of the comic-strip.

Rod Craig was occupied with some or another important task on some or another island in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean. While he went about his task, he came to hear about a mysterious pale goddess who was venerated by a tribe of dark-skinned persons in some remote valley or on some remote outer islet. Rod, of course, resolved to meet up with the goddess. Her dark-skinned worshippers, of course, denied him access to her. I have long since forgotten the struggles that took place between Rod Craig and the dark-skinned persons, but I can still recall the line-drawing that appeared sometimes in the comic-strip during the fictional time when Rod Craig was trying to gain access to the pale goddess. The drawing was of a large, ornate building of grass or leaves or coconut fibre or some such material. On the side of the building facing the viewer was a doorway. Nothing was visible in the darkness on the other side of the doorway, but I understood that the space beyond the doorway was an antechamber, the first of many such vestibules or foyers that led through a maze of inner chambers towards the abode of the goddess. Again, I forget the details of the plot, so to call it, but I recall the line-drawing of the scene in one of the outer chambers of the elaborate building when Rod and the goddess met at last. Her costume was studded with hundreds of pearls that her followers had gathered for her over the years, and the few pen-strokes suggesting her features allowed me to believe that she was beautiful. She was, of course, the sole survivor of a shipwreck and had been rescued as a child by the dark-skinned ones, who had never seen a pale-skinned person. She readily agreed to return with Rod to the civilised world, so to call it, and the very last panel illustrating her story showed her dressed in a blouse and slacks and waving from the deck of Rod’s yacht to her former worshippers, who had seemingly accepted her departure from them. (The ghost of a story in which I was the ghost of a character had a different ending. Rod Craig was set upon and killed by the dark-skinned persons after he had committed the sacrilege of stepping across the outermost threshold of the goddess’s apartments. I was allowed to stay on among the goddess-worshippers after I had given them to understand that I wanted no more than to be able to learn at some future time the ground-plan of the goddess’s building and, perhaps, to erect a modest but not uncomplicated dwelling of my own within walking-distance of her abode.)

When I thought of Huldah as being of marriageable age, I had no way of knowing how much she might have learned about myself-the-ghostly-minor-character who loitered sometimes around the grounds or along the corridors of Kinie Ger. And even when I was able to suppose that she had learned something at least about me, how was I to know whether she felt towards me contempt or indifference or even such a warm interest that I ought to expect before too long some sort of message from her locked room?

When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, which is to say when I thought as a child that Huldah might be forty or older, she was of no less interest to me than the young, marriageable Huldah.

In 1955, only a few years after I had first read about Huldah, I read in one of my secondary-school textbooks the poem “The Scholar Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. When I state that I have never since forgotten the poem, I mean, of course, not that I can recall whole lines or stanzas, much less the entire poem, but that I can see in my mind clearly today much of what I saw in my mind when I used to read the poem as a schoolboy and that I can feel today much of what I felt then. The scholar who had to give up his studies at Oxford on account of his poverty and who lived thereafter with gipsies on lonely back-roads or in remote woodlands — or, I should rather write, the imprecise images in my mind of a nameless, faceless figure skulking in the background of a few other images in my mind of a few landscapes of England, a country I have never seen, affect me still today somewhat as the original account of the lad from Oxford seemingly affected Matthew Arnold so that he came to write the poem. Even during the years when I was driven to give every free hour to the latest of my writing projects, I would sometimes be overtaken by a strong intimation that the true work of my life still awaited me: that I had still not discovered the precious enterprise that would occupy me wholly for the remainder of my life in some or another quiet room behind drawn blinds. During my teenage years, however, and during the many later years before any of my writing was published, the equivalent for me of the scholar’s research among the gipsies was always the latest of the poems or the pieces of fiction that I was trying to write. Even as a child in the years when I read such fiction as The Glass Spear, I mostly saw myself-the-adult as a reader or a writer in a house of two storeys overlooking rural landscapes, although I recall a period when I had a rather different vision of my future.

I had been interested in horse-racing from my early childhood, although I had learned early to conceal much of my interest, given that my father’s gambling had caused much hardship in our family. I read each week the copy of the Sporting Globe that my father had discarded but I read it out of sight of my parents. I began to notice in the Globe, as it was commonly called, advertisements for racing systems, as they were called. Each advertiser published the names and the odds of the winning horses selected on the previous Saturday by his system, which was for sale at no small price. In time, I began to envisage the advantages that I might enjoy if I myself were able to select every week several winners at generous odds. I was not interested in buying the sort of goods that many a person might have bought with sums of money won from betting. I wanted no more than to be free from having to work for my living; I wanted to go to the races each Saturday and then to spend the rest of the week in my room, working at my writerly or readerly tasks. And this was still several years before I had first read “The Scholar Gipsy.”

There arose, however, whenever I daydreamed of a literary life supported by the proceeds of betting, the interesting complication that I might have to devote many years to the search for a lucrative way of betting before I could fulfil my daydream. I might have to spend year after year comparing the information and the predictions in each Saturday newspaper with the results in each subsequent Monday newspaper. (No newspapers were published on Sunday in those days.) For the time being, I might have to devote all my free time to the task of finding the means that would enable me to devote all my free time to the task that ought to occupy all my free time. In the meanwhile, I would work at some humble clerical job in the State Public Service or the Gas and Fuel Corporation or some such body, taking care each day to conserve my nervous energy for my all-important after-hours tasks.

In mid-1957, six months after I had passed the matriculation examination for the University of Melbourne and had been expected to go on to study arts or law, I was working as junior clerk in the offices of the State Electricity Commission. I was by no means discontented. I spent most of my free time in writing poetry. During most of my lunch-hours, I walked to the State Library of Victoria and read biographies of twentieth-century poets. Whenever I walked through the area reserved for newspapers and periodicals on my way to the central reading room, I used to notice a certain sort of reader. This person was always a male in early middle-age. He was dressed as the older males were dressed in the building where I worked. He read continually from newspaper after newspaper fetched for him by the sour-faced men in dust-coats who fetched and carried for the public. Always he read a Saturday newspaper followed by a Monday newspaper, making notes the while on a cheap note-pad. He was, of course, trying to unlock the secret of horse-racing; trying to discover the betting-method that would free him from daily employment and would allow him to follow his true task, whatever it might have been. As it happened, I was not then myself driven by the urge to find the perfect betting-method, the philosopher’s stone of the gambler. I was able to look calmly on those driven men, one or another of whom might have been the nearest I have ever seen during my lifetime to an embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy.

When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, I supposed that she had discovered at an early age a project or an enterprise so manifold and so demanding and yet so inviting that she had given herself to it wholly. While her siblings and her contemporaries concerned themselves with courtships and careers, Huldah pulled down the blinds in her room and locked the door and then began the writing or the reading or the drawing of diagrams or maps that made up the outer, visible part of her life’s work. (I was never able to conceive of Huldah’s or the Scholar Gipsy’s tasks as not being concerned with texts or diagrams or maps.) Of course, if Huldah was busy in her room with her lifelong task, I was not likely to attract her interest by wandering around the grounds of Kinie Ger as though the visible world was all that I knew. My only hope of learning about her all-absorbing task was, perhaps, to lock myself in my own room in the sprawling homestead for months or even years until Huldah got to hear of my unusual ways and sent for me.

Huldah did sometimes receive people in her room. After the first of the murders that were the main items in the plot, so to call it, of The Glass Spear, two detectives from some or another far-away town interviewed her. I have long since forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction. I am therefore unable to explain how I learned the fictional fact that Huldah underwent her interview while sitting in an armchair in her room with a black (or was it a white?) veil covering her completely. Perhaps a crude illustration appeared on one of the pages of The Australian Journal. Certainly, the interview went well for Huldah. During the remainder of the story she was under no suspicion.

After I had read about Huldah’s having been interviewed, I surely hoped that I myself, ghost-character, might somehow be granted an audience. If I could have thought of myself as a cousin or a distant relative of Huldah, I might have dared to ask her some of the questions that I had for long wanted to ask her, but whenever I thought of myself as hearing only a female voice from behind a thick veil, I could only suppose that Huldah was a stern aunt of mine.

Huldah may not have been a murder-suspect, but The Glass Spear was one of those so-called mystery novels the narrator of which conceals essential information from the reader in order to surprise him or her at last, and so, for all that I can recall, Huldah herself might have stood revealed at last as the murderer or, at least, an accessory to the murders. The only details I remember from the day when my mother brought home the latest copy of The Australian Journal and read for herself the last episode of The Glass Spear, after having promised me that she would not let slip a word about the ending before I had been able to read it for myself — the only details relate to the unveiling of Huldah. Far from being a recluse in a locked room, Huldah spent most of her time in the open air. She was the Aboriginal woman who appeared as a minor character in the novel, the Mary whose epithet I have forgotten. The story of Huldah’s seeming dual identity was explained to the younger characters almost at the end of the book in a long passage purporting to come from the mouth of Huldah’s brother, who had known her secret all along. I seem to recall that I found this passage strained even as a child; that it brought to my mind an image of the author himself, he who had made up, as it were, Kinie Ger and all the characters who lived there. I was listening to the author while he tried to persuade me to believe that his characters could well have existed in the place commonly called the real world. (I long ago gave up trying to justify the reading or the writing of fiction on the grounds that either of those enterprises relates in some way to the so-called real world in which some persons write fictional texts. For the past fifty and more years, I have been more convinced of the fictional reality, so to call it, of Huldah, the recluse in the locked room, she who never existed, than I have been convinced of the existence of Huldah/Mary, she who can be said to have existed in The Glass Spear and who may well have been the fictional counterpart of someone who once existed in the world where I sit writing this sentence.)

Mercifully, the word gene was not yet in common usage in the early 1950s. Sidney Hobson Courtier was therefore unable to concoct the mock-scientific explanation that a novelist nowadays would use to explain the existence of Huldah/Mary. He could only claim that one of Huldah’s male forebears had fathered a child with an Aboriginal mother; that Huldah was a descendant of that child; that Huldah happened almost wholly to resemble her one Aboriginal forebear rather than her many Anglo-Celt ancestors; that Huldah’s appearance as a child had caused her parents and her siblings to be so ashamed of her that they and she had devised the way of life that she later led.

In the rear pages of every issue of The Australian Journal was the section called Journal Juniors. It comprised a cheerful letter from the person-in-charge together with letters from children in every state of Australia. The person-in-charge was known only by a female given name, but each child-contributor had his or her full name and address published. I joined the Journal Juniors in 1950, intending to write often to the person-in-charge. I wanted my writing to be read in particular by a certain girl of about my own age who lived in an inland town in Queensland. This girl was published in almost every issue of the magazine, and whereas most children wrote about their pets or holiday outings, the girl from Queensland wrote letters that an adult might have praised as highly imaginative. I recall a long letter in which she told how she made bearable her nightly task of drying the dishes for her mother. The girl imagined that each teacup was a young female personage while each mug or jug was a young male personage. She gave a name to each personage and imagined certain of them as being in love with certain others. When she, the girl, had a fancy to promote one or another courtship, she would store the two crockery-personages overnight in the same part of the cabinet. In another sort of mood, she would keep a certain pair apart for night after night while she imagined them as yearning to meet or even trying to send messages to one another. There was much more to the game, all of it reported in faultless, confident-sounding sentences.

I had always been praised by my teachers for my English compositions, as they were called, and after I had joined the Journal Juniors I resolved to write and to have published something that would earn the admiration of the girl from inland Queensland. I tried for a few weeks, but none of the few paragraphs that I produced seemed anything but dull and childish, and I had to accept that the girl from inland Queensland was a far better writer than I. Not until more than thirty years later, when I was a teacher of fiction-writing and I had to deal with certain students who submitted assignments that were clearly not their own work — not until then did I have the least suspicion that the girl-writer from inland Queensland might have had more than a little help from her mother or her aunt.

I long ago became used to telling persons who had enjoyed settled childhoods in houses with bookshelves that I had never read this or that so-called classic children’s book. Sometimes, however, I was able to affect to know something of a book merely because I had read a much-condensed version of it in the Classics Comics series. Neither my brother nor I could ever afford to buy a comic, but we often read other boys’ comics. A boy-cousin of ours, the youngest child of our bookmaker-uncle, had boxes stuffed with comics under his bed, and I was sitting on the edge of that bed one Sunday afternoon in the early 1950s ready, if the opportunity arose, to spy on one or another of my girl-cousins, or ready, if my mother told me to stop burying my head in trashy comics, to step into the tiny front garden and to pretend to play, while I read in haste the adaptation for Classics Comics of the novel Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley.

Perhaps only a few years later, I had forgotten almost all that I had looked at in the pages of the comic-book and all that had passed through my mind while I looked. Still today, however, I seem to recall several details from the line-drawings in one of the last panels of the comic-book. A young woman sits or reclines on a balcony in some or another town in the West Indies. The balcony overlooks the sea, and the young woman is looking across the sea in the direction of England, where she was born and grew up. A strand of dark hair lies diagonally across the young woman’s forehead. (I have always supposed that the hair clings to the young woman’s skin because her forehead is covered with perspiration, although the line-drawing could surely not have been so detailed as to suggest this.) The young woman is married to, or is in love with, a man whose home is in the West Indies, although she sometimes remembers another man: an Englishman who was once in love with her and may still be in love.

I had intended the previous paragraph to be no more than a report of a few details in a line-drawing that I seem to recall, but I see now that I was not able to report those details alone; I was compelled to report also a few details of a narrative the chief characters of which are a young woman and two men. Many times during the fifty and more years since I first looked through the Classics Comics version of Westward Ho!, I have tried to recall more of the details of that narrative. Sometimes I have tried urgently to do so, as if much depended on my learning all that might be learned about the narrative and the characters in it. The narrative in question is not at all the series of events that comprises the work of fiction Westward Ho! If that were so, I could visit tomorrow the nearest public library and could relieve my uncertainties within an hour or two. No, the narrative is a mysterious formation that developed I cannot say when in some or another far part of my mind. Because it developed thus and there, I accord it, rightly or wrongly, more respect than I could ever accord anything that I might have read in a book, and if ever I were able to arrange in order the items of that narrative, I would afterwards review them in my mind much more often than I have reread the pages of any of the books that have influenced me.

Whenever I seem to recall the details from the line-drawing mentioned above, I seem to be looking towards the young woman from the direction of England. I am no more than a ghost-character, perhaps barely visible to the true characters. However keenly I might feel my situation, they, natives of the countries of fiction, know joys and sorrows of a different order. Whatever might weigh on me whenever I seem to see the image-balcony and the image-strand of dark image-hair on the pale image-forehead, I am spared whatever it is that oppressed the personage whose part I have taken. If the young woman is lost to me, how much more remote must she be from the chief character: the young Englishman whose name I long ago forgot along with the few dark strokes on a white ground that once suggested his face. If my unease grows on me, I can leave off looking across a conjectured ocean towards an image of an image; I can look instead into text after fictional text for one after another young image-woman at a far image-distance from me. The young Englishman, for as long as I recall having read about him, will go on looking from the same place in my mind towards the same further place in my mind.

My looking out as a ghost-character from an image-England is other than I should have expected. One of my few vague memories of the comic-strip is that Westward Ho! was concerned with the old rivalry between Spain and England. As a Catholic schoolboy of my time, I had been well warned against the common view of the English as heroes and the Spanish as villains. As a Catholic schoolboy, I should have sided with the Spanish man who was, presumably, the owner of the house where the young woman sat or reclined on the balcony. That I seemed to have sided with the Protestant Englishman causes me to suppose that I was already, as a child, liable to be swayed by images and feelings that owed nothing to my religion; that I was already, as a child, devising a coherent mythology wholly my own.

No matter how often I look at the image in my mind of the young woman on the balcony, I learn no more of her story or of the story of the male characters in Westward Ho! Instead, I find myself often hearing in my mind several stanzas of poetry that my mother used to recite to me during the years when I was barely old enough to read for myself. During those years, my mother would often tell me what she called ghost stories in order to make me afraid or what she called sad stories in order to make me weep. Her favourite ghost story had as its chief character a ghost named Old Eric. My mother had first heard the story dramatised on radio late at night, and she told the story to me one evening when I was lying in bed before sleep.

A newly married couple arrive on the first evening of their honeymoon at an unoccupied castle that someone has made available to them in a remote district of England. The husband mentions light-heartedly the legend of Old Eric, the first owner of the castle, who had a withered leg and who preyed on young women. According to the legend, Eric could be brought back to life if his remains were moistened with female blood. While exploring the cellars, the couple find some old bones but think nothing of their discovery, not even when the wife cuts her finger on a suit of armour and blood drips to the floor. They choose for their bedroom the topmost attic-room. Then the wife prepares for bed while her husband explores some or another distant wing of the building. Soon afterwards, the wife hears the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The footsteps have an irregular rhythm, as though the person climbing the stairs has a faulty leg.

When she first told me the story, my mother had switched off the light at this point and had then left the room. Soon afterwards, I heard the sound of footsteps approaching my room. The footsteps had a distinctive, irregular rhythm, as though the person approaching had a faulty leg. I obliged my mother by screaming as though terrified. I obliged her in the same way on later occasions when I was in bed and she would imitate in the hallway the sound of Old Eric climbing the stairs in the castle. Although I was not terrified, I was concerned for the safety of the young woman. Even so, I believed she could have saved herself from Eric by the same means that I myself relied on when I woke sometimes in the early hours and supposed an intruder was in the house. She might have saved herself if she had had the wit to undress and put on her nightdress and then to lie in bed utterly still and taking only shallow breaths so that Old Eric would suppose she had already died and would then go in search of some other victim. Being ignorant of the ways of female persons, I was unable to see in my mind the young woman undressing or putting on her nightdress, but before my mother’s footsteps had reached my door I had always composed in my mind the last scene of the story of Old Eric in my mind. The young woman lay on the bed with only a sheet covering her. (The young couple had chosen high summer for their wedding and honeymoon.) She had been cunning enough to lie sprawled in the way that corpses were often sprawled in illustrations. The window of the attic room was high above the trees, so that the moonlight entered unchecked. The young woman was so clearly visible, so I supposed, that Old Eric would have taken her for a corpse as soon as he had looked in at the door. He would have done no more than look for a few moments beneath the sheet and the nightdress before he went on searching the other rooms on the upper floor.

My mother’s sad stories, as she called them, were mostly about children who became lost in uninhabited places or became orphans at an early age. As with her ghost stories, I feigned sadness so as to oblige my mother. One of her sad stories worked on me differently. When I first heard it from my mother, I thought of it as the story in verse of a child named Bridget. A few years later, I learned that the words my mother had often recited to me by heart were three stanzas of a poem with the title “The Fairies,” by William Allingham. I learned this in 1947, when I was in the third grade of primary school. The poem was part of the contents of the Third Book in the series of readers published by the Education Department of Victoria. (My mother, who was not yet eighteen years of age when she conceived me, would have read “The Fairies” for the first time only eleven years before my birth, in the same edition of the Third Book that was still in use during my own schooldays. My mother had been compelled to leave school at the age of thirteen, but throughout her life she was able to recite by heart a number of poems from the Education Department readers. I never learned whether her teachers had required her to learn these poems or whether she had learned them of her own accord or, even, whether she had learned the poems unintentionally as a result of her having often read and enjoyed them.) I learned long after I had left school that “The Fairies,” which the compilers of school readers in the Education Department of Victoria had deemed suitable to be appreciated by children of about eight years, had been intended by William Allingham to be a poem for adults.

During the years before I was able to read for myself the stanzas about Little Bridget, I learned from my mother’s mournful-sounding recitations that Bridget had been stolen for seven years. (Until I actually read the poem, I was unaware that Bridget’s abductors were fairies; they were referred to only as “they” in the three stanzas. I thought of them as men in flowing robes.) When Bridget had returned home, none remained of her former friends. (Sometimes my mother would alter the text, using the phrase “mother and father” instead of the word “friends.” She must have supposed that I would be more affected by the thought of a child without parents than the thought of a child without friends. So far as I can recall, I thought of all characters in stories or poems as being without parents; even if their parents were mentioned in the text, I abolished the parents from my mind while I read. I knew what my mother was about, but when I grieved for Bridget I was grieving for a girl-woman who would have resembled the most fetching of the older schoolgirls that I was already observing even before I myself had begun at school.) I thought of Bridget as not only friendless but lacking all human company. She lived alone among the same tumbledown cottages and wild-growing garden flowers and English-seeming countryside that came to my mind whenever my mother recited the few lines she recalled from “The Deserted Village,” by Oliver Goldsmith. I could not suppose Bridget to be unhappy in this setting. I thought of her as going through one after another of the cupboards and drawers in the empty houses, inspecting keepsakes and reading letters left behind by her former friends. After an interval that I supposed was a few days, her abductors returned and made off with her a second time.

They took her lightly back,

Between the night and morrow,

They thought that she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

Whenever my mother recited these lines, I assumed that Bridget had died, even though her abductors had thought otherwise. In my eighth year, however, as reported above, I came upon the text of the whole poem. Staring at the printed words was far more satisfying than listening to my mother’s recitation. With the text safely in front of me, I had time for speculating; for calling into question the seemingly obvious. I was anxious, of course, that Bridget should not have died. Surely I had no choice but to accept the word of the narrator? My one hope lay with the abductors. How could they have mistaken a dead girl-woman for one who merely slept, especially when they must have lifted her in their arms from her bed and later set her down again? (I saw them as carrying her away on a litter.) I seem to recall that I mostly wavered in my understanding of the text, although a few years later I might well have resolved the matter by composing my own version of events: by writing in the rear of a disused exercise-book a few lines of doggerel that would keep alive a fictional personage whose original narrator had declared her dead. Even during my wavering, however, I must sometimes have acted boldly. It would very much suit the pattern of meaning in this work of fiction if I could report here that I decided once at least, when I was a mere child-reader, that a certain narrator was mistaken: that the truth about a fictional personage need not be available to the very personage who was supposed to convey that truth to the reader. It would very much suit my purpose in writing this work of fiction if I could report that I learned in my childhood that a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory.

The story of Bridget, so to call it, is told in twelve lines of a poem made up of fifty-six lines. The last lines relating to Bridget are these:

They have kept her ever since,

Deep beneath the lake,

On a bed of flag-leaves,

Watching till she wake.

The verbs in this passage are no longer in the past tense. Often, as a child, I strove to prolong a narrative: to keep it from ending in my mind. I had no need so to strive with the story of Bridget. Nor were the last words of the text of the sort that sometimes sounded cheerfully at the end of a so-called fairy-tale. (“And for all I know, she may be living there still…”) The last words relating to Bridget were calm and assured; the narrator spoke with authority. The story of Bridget had still not come to an end when the last word had been written about her. But what could remain of a story when the chief character already lay dead? Again, I could wish to report that I once, as a child-reader, found reason to doubt a narrator of fiction. I could wish to report that I decided that the personages within the text knew more than the personage hovering over the text, as it were; the abductors of Bridget, watching by her bed, knew more about her than the man who had written about her. Or, I could wish to report that I stared at the last four words of the story of Bridget until they seemed to change in meaning; until a hoped-for event became an unexpected event, and, finally, an actual event. If I could report such as this, I could hardly report that Bridget, the fictional personage, finally awoke. The eventual awakening would have taken place outside the boundaries of the text composed by William Allingham. Bridget, by now subtly other than a fictional personage, would have been restored to her new existence in a place where neither reader nor narrator could lay claim to her; in a place on some or another far side of fiction. What sort of life was hers in that place neither William Allingham nor I could know, even if we tried to go on writing or reading about her.

As for Bridget’s being said to lie beneath a lake, I always resisted the notion that she was beneath the surface of the lake; that she was underwater. If she were underwater, so I reasoned, then those watching her would have had to be underwater also, and all of them would have long since drowned. (I was never able to learn the rudiments of swimming. Whenever I was told as a child to put my face into water, I closed my eyes and held my breath and supposed that I was drowning. I felt sympathy, years afterwards, for the men that I read about who put to sea off the west coast of Ireland in frail, handmade boats. Those men disdained to learn anything of swimming, believing that to do so would only prolong their death-agony if their boat were to capsize. From my point of view, anyone who ventured beneath the surface of an ocean or a river or a lake was doomed.) I was able to devise a safe place for Bridget because I had followed not long before certain episodes, so to call them, of the comic-strip “Mandrake the Magician.” In those episodes, Princess Narda had been captured by a man who seemed to live with his followers underwater. Whenever they retreated to their hide out, they seemed to disappear among willow-trees at the edge of a certain river, so that they were reputed to be amphibious beings. The author of the comic-strip encouraged this belief in his or her readers by depicting the leader of the abductors of Princess Narda as a man possessing no hair and no eyes and only the rudiments of nostrils and mouth. When the abductors had first brought Princess Narda into the presence of their leader, he, being without eyes, had put his hands on the face and neck and shoulders of his prisoner in order to satisfy himself that she was a good-looking young woman. When I studied the line-drawings of the man whose head and face was a fleshy dome, I was prepared to believe that he could remain for long periods underwater. I learned, however, from later episodes that the hide out of the abductors and their leader was not unlike the burrow of the platypus, which creature I first read about in the School Reader a year after I had first read about Bridget. The lair of the platypus was an underground hollow close to a watercourse. The hollow could be approached through either of two tunnels, one of them leading downwards from among scrub and the other leading upwards from below water-level. The abductor of Princess Narda wanted it thought of him that he lived underwater, but only one of the entrances to his hide-out was beneath the river, and Princess Narda was safe from drowning throughout her captivity. So, too, was Bridget after I had learned to see her as lying on her flag-leaves in a dry, airy cavern like that in which Princess Narda had been held captive. (I mentioned the platypus just above for no other reason than that I admired as a child the layout of its burrows. I read only recently that the eyes of the platypus remain closed during the many hours of each day while the animal is underwater, even while it feeds or copulates.)

It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that one or another detail should be incongruous, if not inexplicable. At some time after I had begun to see in my mind an image of Bridget lying in her cavern, I began to notice an image of a strand of dark hair lying diagonally across her forehead. What seemed incongruous was that the strand of hair seemed to be lifted from the forehead and then to be carried away and then to drift back towards the forehead. Even though I had found for Bridget a safe, dry cavern in my mind, still she seemed to lie in the path of some or another current underwater. It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that some details of the images seem fixed in the mind while other details can be altered by the effort of the person in whose mind they appear. In my image of Bridget, the strand of hair seems still to move. However, I learned long ago to see the seeming movement as a trick of light. Long ago, I caused to appear in an upper wall of the cavern a large window. On the other side of the thick glass of the window is part of the lake that Bridget is reported to lie beneath. The currents in the lake, or the drifting from side to side of underwater plants, check the passage through the water of the sunlight from far away, causing a play of light and shade across Bridget’s face. I could wish to change further the detail of the window. I could wish to see instead of a view of water a window of coloured glass showing an image of a trickling stream or of a shallow swamp bordered with clumps of rushes.

I have often wanted to bring forward the story of Bridget. The time when I seemed most likely to do so was a certain year in the late 1980s, when I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing and when I approached my place of employment on four mornings of every week on foot, having walked from the nearest railway-station through certain back-streets of a suburb of Melbourne where the value of the meanest cottage would have been twice that of the house that my wife and I had been paying off for twenty and more years in a suburb on the opposite side of the city. In a certain back-street, I used to walk for some distance beside a high wall of bluestone that was one of the boundaries of a large allotment. I sometimes heard the sound of trickling water from the far side of the wall. I supposed the sound might have come from an arrangement of fish-ponds with a tiny waterfall between them or, what was less probable but more to my liking, from a streamlet issuing out of a grotto wherein stood a statue of a female personage. I was never able to learn what caused the sound of trickling water, but I was one day able to assume that a fernery of some sort was on the other side of the wall. On that day I noticed, as I walked beside the wall, a pale-green button-shape protruding from the grey mortar between two blocks of bluestone. I found that the seeming-button was the uncurled frond of a fern. On the other side of the wall, so I understood, was a fernery so well-watered and so lush that one of the fern-plants there could find no other way of reproducing than by forcing a child-frond into a crevice within the strip of mortar between two blocks of bluestone in a massive wall, as though somewhere, on the far side of the wall, was a place where a new and more spacious fernery might come into being.

On day after day, I observed that the button-shape was developing into a frond and that the pale green was changing to green. My first catching sight from a distance of the single shred of greenery protruding from the dark-blue wall became for me the chief event of each day. I soon understood that the sight of the fern-frond growing out of the wall would become in time the sort of image that would go on troubling me until I had discovered more of the network of images and feelings of which the frond-image was only the most noticeable part.

For as long as I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing, I used to tell my students that my own way of writing fiction was only one of many ways. Even so, I made sure that my students were well aware of how I went about my writing. I told my students of Advanced Fiction Writing during a discussion about the origins of fiction in the year when the fern had appeared that I believed I would write at some future time a work of fiction the central image of which was an image of a fern-frond protruding through a bluestone wall. I told my students further that an image connected with the central image would be an image of a strand of hair lying diagonally across the forehead of a young female person who looked out across an ocean or who lay with closed eyes beneath a lake.

Only a year or two after I had told my students what is reported above, I gave up writing fiction. The work of fiction that I talked about in front of my students will never be written. And yet, the simple network of images that would have given rise to that work remains in my mind and has become more complex in recent years.

Nowadays, the south-west coast of Victoria is often described as a popular tourist destination. At a certain point on that coast, the local government authority, hoping perhaps to reassure the persons known as tourists that the place whereat they have arrived is of historical importance, has erected a sign on which appear two words. The second word is Bay. The first word is the surname of my paternal great-grandfather followed by the possessive apostrophe. The surname on the sign is, of course, the surname of the author of this sentence and of all the other sentences in this work of fiction. I have been told that many tourists, so to call them, visit the place where the sign has been erected and admire the high cliffs thereabouts and even descend the steep stairway to the small bay named on the sign. I myself have not visited that part of the coast for twenty-nine years and will not visit it again. When I last visited the place, long before anyone would have wanted to erect a sign on it, I did so for the purpose of showing to my wife and my three young children a district that stayed in my mind even though I had turned away from it. I showed them the red-roofed sandstone farmhouse built by my father’s father on the site of the earlier wooden house built by that man’s father, who was the first owner of the nearest farm to the coast and the man for whom the steep bay was named. I photographed my children standing on the edge of a cliff with the bay visible below them and beyond the bay the Southern Ocean. I told my children of how my parents had taken me often to the farm beside the coast while my father’s father was still alive during the 1940s. During those years, the steep bay was so seldom visited that the sand would be littered with driftwood during winter and spring. Only in the hottest weeks of summer did visitors arrive, and they were mostly local farming families bringing picnic-lunches. I told the children that my parents and my brother and I sometimes picnicked in the steep bay. I told the children of how I had hated and feared the sea since the time when my mother had taken me onto the beach at Port Campbell before my first birthday and when I, a quiet and docile baby, had screamed until she took me away from all sight and sound of the waves. I told the children of how I used to plead with my parents not to take me down the path from the cliff-top into the steep bay; of how I used to stand on the cliff-top and to turn my back on the sea and to look northwards across the first few of the hundred and more miles of the so-called Western District and to yearn to belong to one of the families who lived there and who looked out all day from their windows and verandahs onto views of seemingly endless grassy countryside with intervening lines of trees marking the courses of creeks that trickled towards some far-away river that flowed sluggishly towards some farther-away ocean. I told the children of how I was always compelled to go down with my brother and my parents into the steep bay but of how I often avoided having to paddle and to splash among the incoming waves and to pretend that I was enjoying myself or even learning to swim. I often avoided these hateful rituals by creeping, with my parents’ reluctant permission, in among the piles of boulders at either side of the bay. The boulders were pieces of cliff that had fallen during past centuries. The waves from the ocean had so eroded the boulders as to create a complicated system of tunnels and sluices and pools. If I crept far out among the boulders, I was able to hear the crash of each ocean-wave against the outermost boulders and afterwards the long succession of hissing- and gurgling- and sucking-noises that marked the flowing of the water from the wave inwards among the boulders. I could sit in safety by some or another rock-pool while the force of the ocean-swell shook the boulders all around me but barely troubled the water of the pool. The sides of the pool would have been overgrown with bunches of the plant that I called sea-lettuce and with fronds and ribbons of plants that I had no name for. Currents in the pool caused the plants to sway continually. The currents were surely caused by the waves that struck the outer boulders, and yet the swaying of the plants seemed unconnected with any inrush of water from the ocean. The water from each wave took so long to travel through the heaps of boulders to the furthest pools (the nearest to the beach) that a second wave would sometimes arrive before the water in those pools had begun to recede. The plants attached to the sides of the rock-pools moved unpredictably, although always gracefully. Many years after my last visit to the heaps of boulders beside the bay named after my father’s grandfather, at a time when I supposed that I might soon begin to write a piece of fiction in which one of the central images was of a fern protruding through a wall of bluestone and another central image was of a strand of hair lying across the forehead of a female person, I began to understand that a further central image was of green bunches or fronds moving under water at unpredictable intervals, which further central image might require me to report in my piece of fiction that a certain young female personage on a balcony, or a certain young female personage presumed by other personages to have died, seemed sometimes to move her head from side to side as though she wondered at, or as though she disbelieved, or as though she could wish not to have seen some or another image that appeared in her mind.

I did not tell my children of how I had often daydreamed during my childhood about a certain series of events that might take place on one or another Sunday afternoon in the near future: a Sunday afternoon when one or another of my mother’s sisters and her husband and children would join my parents and my brother and myself for a picnic at the steep bay with the rock-pools at its side. The series of events would have begun with one or another of the daughters of the sister of my mother, that is to say, one or another girl-cousin of mine agreeing to go with me among the boulders in order to watch the swaying of the green leaves and fronds in the rock-pools. The series would have continued with the girl-cousin and myself, soon after we had found ourselves alone together beside the most secluded of the rock-pools, agreeing that a girl-cousin and a boy-cousin were uniquely placed one to another, being neither sister and brother nor girlfriend and boyfriend but something in-between, as we might have expressed the matter, and further agreeing that we two cousins, during our few minutes together beside the secluded pool, were provided with an opportunity to treat with one another as surely no sister and brother, nor any girlfriend and boyfriend, ever treated.

The series of events reported in the previous paragraph never took place beside the fictitious rock-pool or any other sort of rock-pool or in any other sort of secluded setting. And yet, there came into my mind while I was writing the previous paragraph an event that happened during the week after the horse named Rimfire won the Melbourne Cup in the world where I sit writing these paragraphs, and there came into my mind soon afterwards a fictitious version of that event: a version well-suited for including in this piece of fiction.

During the week mentioned in the previous sentence, my brother and I and my parents lived in a farming district about five miles inland from the steep bay mentioned previously. The district, so far as I could see, comprised mostly level grassy countryside with lines or clumps of trees short of the horizon, some of which comprised the nearest tracts of the Heytesbury Forest. My family had arrived in the farming district only a few weeks before. We had previously lived in a provincial city several hundred miles away. I did not know it at the time, but we had left the provincial city in haste so that my father could avoid paying the large sums that he owed to bookmakers who had allowed him to bet with them on credit. In the farming district, my family paid a token rent for a house that had no bathroom, no laundry, and no sink or running water in the kitchen. We were one of only two families in the district that had no motor-car; my father rode a push-bike for three miles each day to and from the farm where he milked the cows and did labouring jobs. I marvel today that I never shrank with shame during my first days at the school in the farming district when one after another boy or girl asked me where I lived and what my father did. Perhaps I thought that my family’s humble circumstances counted for nothing beside the fact that my surname was attached to the steep bay on the coast not far away: the bay where many of my schoolfellows picnicked with their families on Sundays in summer.

My family’s circumstances were seemingly no hindrance to my proposing to the daughter of our nearest farmer-neighbour that she and I should look at one another’s naked bodies from near at hand. The daughter was a year younger than I. She had yellow hair and a pert nose, and I considered her pretty. On several afternoons each week I would visit her parents’ farm on the pretext of wanting to play with her brother, who was in my class at school. The parents were always in the milking-shed when I visited. The mother, like the daughter, had yellow hair and a pert nose. The father I hardly ever saw; he seemed always to be finishing some or another job of work. I learned some years later that the farm was owned by his father-in-law, the father of the pert-nosed wife. The father-in-law owned several other farms and was the largest land-owner in the district.

I would like to be able to remember what arguments or inducements I used in order to persuade the yellow-haired girl to show herself to me. I can only remember the sight of her standing in the dimly lit shed with her pants around her knees and her dress bunched beneath her chin. During the minute or so while she stood thus and while I inspected her, she neither moved nor spoke, so that I remembered her body afterwards as being hardly different from the many images of marble torsos that I looked at in books about sculpture, except for one or two significant details. And even those details I had struggled to appreciate in the dim shed, not because the yellow-haired girl was less than generous in showing them to me but because I had been for so long outside in the bright sunlight. I had been playing cricket or football with the brother of the yellow-haired girl in the so-called house paddock and looking often across the mostly level grassy countryside with lines or clumps of trees short of the horizon, and my eyes had been dazzled.

Some years before I began to write this piece of fiction, a man who has read all of my published writing told me by telephone that he had been travelling recently along the coast in the southwest of Victoria and had come across a certain steep bay above which stood a sign proclaiming that the bay was named after a person bearing my surname. I told the man that the bay in question had been named after my father’s grandfather. I told him that I had not visited the steep bay for nearly thirty years and would not visit it again. I told the man also that I hoped he knew me better than to suppose that I got satisfaction from having my surname displayed on a sign above the Southern Ocean. I told the man finally that I had already arranged for my surname and my given name to be displayed at some or another time in the future in the only sort of landscape that I cared to be connected with. I explained to the man that I had bought some years ago a burial plot in a cemetery at the edge of a small town in the far west of Victoria after having satisfied myself first that the view in every direction around the cemetery was of mostly level grassy countryside with scattered trees in the middle distance and with a line of trees in the far distance and then that many a person standing in the Western District of Victoria and looking towards the furthest line of trees to the west of him or her would be looking in the direction of the small town.

Have I answered yet the question why had I written?

I would be willing to admit that I have not yet answered the impending question, but only if my hypothetical questioner would admit that a question can hardly be worth asking if its answer can be delivered in fewer than ten thousand words.

A certain sort of reader may have learned already why I wrote what I wrote during the years before I gave up writing. Another sort of reader may need to read one or more of the following three paragraphs, even though no sentence in any of those paragraphs is in the indicative mood of traditional grammar. Another sort of reader may agree with me that a question can hardly be worth asking if it admits of only one answer. Still another sort of reader may be able to interpret the following paragraphs as variants of the one definitive statement.

I may well have written in order to prepare myself to write at last the stories of such as Little Bridget or of Huldah (not the true Huldah, so to call her, but the veiled female personage that I had envisaged when I read the early parts of The Glass Spear) or of Rod Craig’s hidden goddess or of other such female personages. It would be no argument against the foregoing proposition for anyone to point out that none of my published works of fiction includes any reference to any of the female personages mentioned in the previous sentence. I may have written those works only so as to render visible for ever to some or another reader the many images that had appeared in the foreground of my mind during the many years while I was still preparing to write about Little Bridget or about Huldah or about such personages. In short, I may have written those works only so that I could write at last about the images that had persisted for fifty years and more in the background of my mind no matter whom I fell in love with or who became my wife or what children were born to us or what befell us during the onrush of events that might be called my seeming life.

Another answer suggests itself. My published books may have been written not in order to remove images from my mind but to arrange them more appropriately and to give certain images their rightful prominence. I may have written during the past thirty years and more not one after another separate book but one after another chapter of the one book, the final chapter of which I am trying to write at present: a chapter devoted to Little Bridget, Huldah, and others of their kind.

Each of the two previous paragraphs would have been misleading if it had seemed to suggest that the purpose of my writing about Little Bridget and the others was to bring their stories to an end. On the contrary, my hope would always have been that those stories would never come to an end. As a ten-years-old child, reacting simple-mindedly to fiction meant to entertain adults, I had seemed to meet up with images of personages and of landscapes the origins of which were utterly outside my awareness; but even as a man past middle-age who has read perhaps two thousand books, I could never wish for those images to be reported even as likely to come to an end, even such an end as a passage in a work of fiction might seem to have brought about. If ever it occurred to me that even the little I have written in these pages about Little Bridget and her kind might bring nearer the end of their fictional existence or of whatever other sort of existence they enjoy, I would never again refer to Little Bridget or to any other such personage in any sentence that I might write. Instead, I would try to devise some means other than the writing of sentences in order to prolong the existence of my favourites.

I have taken hardly any interest in the so-called visual arts, but it seems apt to mention here a game that I used to play or an exercise that I used to perform three and more years before I first read about any of the personages mentioned above. One of my father’s unmarried sisters used to send to my parents every year as a Christmas present a calendar published by a religious order of Catholic priests. My mother used to hang each calendar on a nail behind the kitchen door. The calendar had a separate page for each month. On the lower half of each page was a pattern of numbered squares denoting the days of the month. On the upper half of the page was a coloured reproduction of one or another painting with a subject-matter that might be called biblical or religious. The pictures on the calendar were the only illustrations of any kind displayed in our rented house. I stared often at picture after picture during several years of the mid-1940s but I recall today only two pictures together with the words of a title. I recall the image of a group of persons on the top of a hill surrounded in every direction by water. In all the expanse of water, the only solid object is a large boat in the middle distance. The persons on top of the hill are gesturing as though to implore the persons in the boat to rescue them. During the year when I looked often at this picture I had not yet heard the story of Noah, but I did not doubt that the persons on top of the hill would soon be drowned. I recall also the image of a clump of dark-coloured trees in the right foreground of an extensive landscape. Opposite the trees, in the left foreground, is a tall building with what would have seemed to me a lofty and spacious verandah. The roof of the verandah rests on columns. I was hardly interested in the building, but I looked sometimes at the columns. The building as a whole was outlandish, but I recognised the columns as being no different from the columns at the front of the Capitol Theatre in the provincial city where I then lived. In December of each year, in the evening of the last schoolday, my school took part in a concert. While I stood with my classmates on the stage of the theatre, I was never unaware of the painted backdrop behind us: a landscape of green meadows and dark-green copses and the blue water of a winding stream. On the following day, our long summer holiday would begin, and my feeling of pleasant expectation seemed sometimes to spread beyond me and to add a certain glamour to my surroundings. At such times, I might have been about to begin not a long holiday in a well-known city but a new mode of living in landscapes of exaggerated colour. A dozen and more persons busied themselves on the verandah or in front of the building, but I seldom looked at the persons. During the year when I looked often at this picture, I looked mostly at the scenery on the farther side of the tall building and of the dark trees. The words that I still recall comprise the title of the picture: Landscape with Samuel Anointing David. I surely read at least once the name of the person who executed the painting, but I have long since forgotten the name.

I would surely have looked with interest at many an illustration before I looked for the first time at the images of the dark-coloured trees and of the lofty verandah. I would surely have felt many times before as though a ghostly version of myself moved among the images of persons in one or another illustration. Whenever I stared at the illustration on the calendar, however, I was interested not in the images of some or other persons but in images of scenery alone. I looked always past the dark-coloured clump of trees and the outlandish building and the people assembled among the lofty columns. I looked first into the middle distance of the illustration. If a version of myself could have travelled across a long bridge of stone over a shallow-seeming river, then he could have learned what lay beyond the first of the low, wooded hills in the middle distance. Soon afterwards, he could have set out not directly rearwards towards the mountains on the horizon but diagonally, as it were, towards mostly level grassy countryside in the right-hand background. My image-self, when he travelled thus, would have been driven by more than childish curiosity. What would have led him more deeply in among certain images in an image of a certain landscape was a strangeness in the seeming sky and even in the seeming air. The whole of the painted scene was strangely lit. If ever I had considered the matter previously, I would have supposed that the foreground of an illustration ought to have been more brightly lit than the background and that any seeming personage who seemed to travel towards the background should have seen more dimly as he or she travelled further away from the district that was lit by the true source of light in the true world. In the scene with the lofty verandah and the dark trees in its foreground, not only was the background the most brightly lit of the visible zones but the play of light overall allowed me to suppose that the scenery behind the furthest discernible blurs and smudges would have been more richly illumined still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would later have paused during my reading of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in order to dwell on the strange circumstance that the fictional character Angel Clare had, at a certain point in the narrative, turned away from the character Tess Durbeyfield in somewhat the way that I had turned away several times from Nancy during the months before I began to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

I first met Nancy in the late summer of 1959, when she and I became classmates in the training-college for primary-school teachers. When I met her, I had been without a girlfriend for nearly three years. My only previous girlfriend had been Christine, who was mentioned earlier in this piece of fiction, but who had turned away from me. During my three solitary years, so to call them, I followed the policy of approaching only those young women who seemed likely to be readers of books of fiction or of poetry and who might therefore be supposed to take kindly to hearing me talk about the fiction and the poetry that I intended to write. During my three solitary years I approached, in fact, no young women.

Books of fiction or of poetry were seldom discussed during classes at the training college where I met Nancy. Even so, I formed the impression during one of the first classes in the subject called English in 1959 that Nancy might sometimes have read such books in private and might have been influenced by them. If I had followed the policy mentioned in the previous paragraph, I should have approached Nancy early in 1959. For nearly six months, however, I found excuses for not approaching her. Before coming to the training college, Nancy had spent a year at university, where one of her chosen subjects had been English. I had avoided going to university partly from a fear of being compelled there to study books of poetry or of fiction that might distract me from writing the sort of poetry and fiction that I hoped to write and partly because I had once seen in a Melbourne newspaper a photograph of a lawn at the university during lunch-hour on a warm day in summer and had noted among the crowd of students sprawled or seated on the lawn many groups in which males and females were intermingled and some of the females wore dresses with low necklines. I had not wanted to be one of such a crowd. Moreover, Nancy was a champion swimmer and served as a life-saver during summer at the beach near her home.

Six months after I first met Nancy, I began to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles, although it was not part of the required reading for the teacher-training course. Long before I had finished the book, I understood that it would be out of character for me if I were to approach Nancy during the foreseeable future.

In answer to the question posed at the head of this section: I admit that I have sometimes paused while reading about one or another fictional personage. I have sometimes paused as though I had met up at last with an imagined character. I have sometimes paused but then I have gone on reading; the seeming character has become one more of the many personages in the background of my mind; Catherine Earnshaw is indistinguishable from a young woman, hardly more than a girl, whose name in my mind is Christine; Angel Clare and I are of one accord.

The reader should not suppose that I fail to recognise the workings of the imagination in other writers of fiction because I search out too eagerly and read too hastily passages referring to young female persons. I tried to recall just now the occasion when I read for the first time the passage of fiction that has affected me more than any other passage that I have read during sixty years of reading fiction. I seemed to recall that I was walking across a courtyard on my way towards the front door of a mansion. I had been invited to an afternoon party that was then taking place in the mansion. A motor-car just then arriving in the courtyard passed close by me, causing me to step suddenly backwards. My stepping thus caused me to find myself standing with one foot on each of two uneven paving-stones. What happened afterwards is reported in the relevant passage in the last volume of the work of fiction the English title of which is Remembrance of Things Past.

Leaving aside for the moment much of what has been written so far in these pages, have I never wished to be able to report, as it were, events that might have happened, as it were, at such a time and in such a place that I could never be supposed to have witnessed them?

I admit to having wished from time to time that my exerting some faculty previously unknown to me might enable me to recreate in vivid detail, as some or another reviewer might later put it, a certain series of events that took place not a great distance from where I sit writing these words and much more recently than the great days of the Australian bushrangers or of the ancient Egyptians. That series would consist of the most decisive of the many events that could be said to have resulted in my being conceived.

What would have been some of those seemingly imagined events?

On a certain afternoon in the early 1930s with a hot sun in a clear sky but with a cool breeze blowing from the nearby sea, a man aged about thirty years was riding on horseback towards a swampy area overgrown with tea-tree and with other sorts of dense scrub. The swampy area was near the centre of a low-lying island within sight of the mainland of south-eastern Victoria. Perhaps two hundred persons lived on the island, which could be reached from the mainland only by boat. Most of the persons were from farming families, few of them prosperous. The rest of the persons were either convicted criminals serving their sentences on a so-called prison-farm on part of the island or the prison officers who lived on the same farm and who guarded and supervised the convicted men. The man on horseback was a prison officer. He had grown up on a dairy farm in south-western Victoria but had left home early and had then wandered over much of Australia. More recently, he had worked as a prison officer in Melbourne, but he had then applied to be transferred to the island prison-farm because he liked to be out of doors in sparsely settled districts. He had come to the island also in order to be far away from racecourses and bookmakers. For most of his adult life he had bet recklessly on racehorses and had several times won in a single bet more money than he could have earned from six months of work, but when he had set out for the island he was without reserves of money.

These paragraphs, of course, are only a summary of what I might have written if I had been otherwise gifted. The persons mentioned in these paragraphs hardly deserve to be called fictional characters. Even so, I intend from here onwards to call the young man on horseback the chief character, if only to remind myself continually of how short he falls of being an imagined character and of how far is this report of him from being a product of imagination.

The chief character was a skilled horseman, but he was mounted somewhat awkwardly as he rode towards the swamp. He was carrying about him in several sacks at least six adult birds of one or another variety of the species phasianus colchicus, the common pheasant. During some of his ample leisure time as a prison officer on the island, the chief character had tried to breed pheasants in roughly-made aviaries. He had learned in time that his captive pheasants were what he chose to call shy breeders. He had hoped that his pheasants might supply table-birds for the kitchen of the prison-farm. He had also hoped to enjoy the pleasures available to a breeder of livestock: he would select pairs suitable for mating; he would observe the persistence of qualities and traits from one generation to the next. But his caged birds produced few chicks, and he had decided not long before the afternoon mentioned above that he would release many of his birds into the wild.

The chief character was not unhappy while he carried his sacks of pheasants towards the swamp that lay near the centre of the island. Certainly, he got pleasure from his breeding of birds or animals, but he enjoyed equally seeing, or even thinking about, certain creatures that were free to wander and to reproduce out of the reach of humankind. In anxious or restless moods, he was sometimes able to calm himself by recalling the distant sights he had had of the pair of peregrine falcons that had nested during several years of his boyhood on Steeple Rock, the island-pinnacle that stood far out in one of the bays of the Southern Ocean near his father’s farm. In his room at the prison-farm, he often composed himself to sleep of an evening by imagining (his word) the comings and goings of the herd of wild deer that lived in the least-frequented part of the island. He had not yet seen any of the deer, but he had several times seen the small herd of wild cattle that survived on the island although one or another cattle-farmer would sometimes ride out with his dogs and would try to round them up. The chief character looked forward to a time when the scrub-covered districts of the island would be densely populated with pheasants; when he could dismount in any isolated place and could creep into the scrub and could see his birds foraging or courting or raising their young.

The chief character observed and reflected on the breeding behaviour of animals and birds. He could not admire the males that kept harems and drove off or fought and defeated rivals: the bull with his cows or the cock with his hens. The chief character sympathised with the bachelor-males that were obliged to watch the breeding-flock from a safe distance for season after season. The chief character thought of the world as too closely settled; there should have been more scope for each bachelor-male to lead away a young female or two into an empty landscape.

The swampy area where the chief character set free his pheasants was one of several areas where he found himself forgetting for the time being that he was on an island, so low-lying was the land and so dense was the line of trees that he saw not far off in whichever direction he looked. After he had watched the last of the birds fluttering in among the tea-tree, he turned his horse away from the swamp and towards the farming district. He had planned his outing so that he would arrive at a certain farm at mid-morning. At that time, the farmer and his two sons would be working in one or another shed or paddock while the farmer’s daughter would be alone in the house. The chief character was no furtive visitor. He intended to chat briefly with the farmer, who would then invite him to call at the house and to ask his (the farmer’s) daughter for a cup of tea.

The chief character had visited the farm often during the few months since he had arrived on the island. During almost every visit, he had talked with the daughter, who was the only female in the house. (Her mother had died three years before, and she, the daughter, now kept house, as the saying was, for her father and her two older brothers.) The daughter was seventeen years of age. Except for three brief holidays spent with an aunt and an uncle in a suburb of Melbourne, she had lived all of her life on the farm on the island. Whenever the chief character visited the farm, she mostly listened while he talked about interesting persons that he had met during his travels through New South Wales and Queensland.

Both the chief character and the daughter, as I intend to call her, were Catholics, to use the language of their time and place. There was no Catholic church or school on the island, and only a few Catholic families. Once each month, a priest came from the mainland and celebrated Mass either in the lounge-room of the farm where the daughter lived or in the mess-hall at the prison-farm. The chief character had never doubted his Catholic faith, as he himself would have put the matter, but he disliked any show of religious zeal or piety. Even so, he had looked with approval at the daughter whenever she had bowed her head and had closed her eyes during each of the Masses that he and she had attended. The occasion when he had looked with the most approval had been that of her returning to her place after she had received Holy Communion, to use the language of those days. As soon as she had returned to her place, the daughter would close her eyes and would then bow her head and cover her face with her hands. Most Catholics of that time made a similar show of reverence after having received Holy Communion, as they would have called it, but the daughter, so the chief character had observed, was always the last person in the congregation to lift her head again and to open her eyes. While he was walking to the back door of the farmhouse soon after he had let loose the pheasants at the edge of the swamp, the chief character kept in mind an image of the daughter with her head bowed and with her face covered by her hands.

Words came easily to the chief character. On some of his many visits, he had talked for an hour and more to the daughter, who had seemed content to listen. On the morning after he had freed the pheasants, the chief character was rather less talkative than usual with the daughter. He tried to work his way by several different routes towards a speech that he had been preparing for a week and more. The chief character was about thirty years of age but he had had few dealings with young women. On the morning in question, he might have been afraid to deliver his prepared speech to the daughter if he had not been able to keep in his mind the image mentioned in the previous paragraph. For as long as he had that image in his mind, the chief character felt confident that the daughter had not yet been courted by any young man.

The chief character delivered the short speech mentioned above, but not until after he had talked to the daughter for perhaps half an hour about matters that he had not intended to talk about during that visit. One of these matters was horse-racing. He had never told the daughter about his betting on horses, but while he was trying to work his way towards his prepared speech, he heard himself telling her that he intended to enjoy in the future only what he called the innocent pleasures of horse-racing: watching each race as a spectacle only; learning the patterns of the jockeys’ silk jackets; trying to imagine the feelings of the owner whose horse, a moment before, had won a so-called classic race, or of the owner who had backed his horse at long odds to win a large sum but had seen the horse, a moment before, beaten by a narrow margin. At another time during his visit, the chief character heard himself calculating aloud for the benefit of the daughter the amount that a man might have saved by the end of a year if he had set aside from his wages during every week of that year a certain number of shillings and if he had lived throughout the year in accommodation provided cheaply by his employer. At still another time during his visit, the chief character heard himself asking the daughter for a pencil and a scrap of paper so that he could set down for her inspection the calculations that he had been making aloud. (Throughout his life, the chief character had a habit of reaching for pencil and paper whenever he was alone and of making detailed calculations. During periods when he was trying to stay away from racecourses, the calculations were of the sort that he made for the benefit of the daughter in the kitchen of the farmhouse on the morning after the release of the pheasants. During periods when he was going often to the races, the calculations were attempts by the chief character to predict the betting markets of races not yet run or even his likely winnings from this or that bet at these or those odds. During the last year of his life, the calculations ought to have had to do with the chief character’s many unpaid debts to bookmakers and unpaid loans from generous relatives, so his elder son thought at the time, although the calculations were mostly part of one or another scheme for selling the only house that he had ever owned, for moving with his wife and their younger son to some or another house owned by the Housing Commission of Victoria in some or another country town in Victoria, and for buying with the meagre proceeds from the sale of the house the first motor-car that he would ever have owned.)

The reader will have surmised that the short speech mentioned previously was a proposal of marriage from the chief character to the daughter. During the weeks before he delivered the short speech, the chief character had imagined, to the best of his ability, some of the ways in which the daughter might respond to the speech. What the daughter actually said to him, however, after he had delivered his short speech, he had been far from imagining.

While the daughter went on with her reply to his speech, the chief character seemed to be hearing that he had been too late with his speech; that this hardly-more-than-girl who had lived almost every day of her life on the lonely island and who dealt with hardly any male persons apart from her father and her brothers — that this shy-seeming and softly spoken person had already come to an understanding with some unseen rival of the chief character. While the daughter went on further with her reply, the chief character learned that his supposed rival was no man but was the being that went by the name of God with both himself and the daughter, although he and she might well have imagined that being rather differently. In short, the daughter had decided at some time before she had first met the chief character that she wanted to spend her life in one or another religious order of women; that she wanted to be a nun.

However eloquently the chief character tried to persuade the daughter to give up her ambition, she was immovable. And yet, she was vague about her chosen future. Having lived all her life on the island and having attended only a state school, the daughter had met hardly any nuns and knew about the so-called religious life only from reading pamphlets posted to her by various orders of nuns at the request of a helpful aunt on the mainland. When the chief character visited the daughter a week after the visit reported above, she told him about the contents of these pamphlets although she preferred not to show him the pamphlets themselves. She told him further that she had chosen from nearly a dozen different orders of nuns a certain enclosed order, as it was called. The chief character was not sure of the expression “enclosed order” although, as he said to the daughter, he had his suspicions. The daughter then explained, using a number of words and phrases that she had obviously learned from one or another of her pamphlets, that the members of an enclosed order served God not by teaching or by nursing but rather by keeping to their convent and by leading a strictly regulated life. Much of their day was given over to prayer, both in choir and in private. An enclosed nun prayed not only for her own spiritual good but also for the good of the world outside her convent: the world that she had turned away from. The daughter finally told the chief character that she had looked often at certain photographs in one of her pamphlets. One photograph showed part of a room containing a bed and a chair and a table with a crucifix on it. Behind the table was part of a window overlooking part of a treetop. The other photograph showed part of a fish-pond on part of a lawn that would have been surrounded on all sides by a cloister that would have been surrounded on all sides by a two-storey building that would have been surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall. The daughter said that she was able to imagine herself living for the rest of her life in the places shown in the photographs.

More than a year passed before the daughter was able to become a postulant of an order of sisters at a convent in a suburb of Melbourne. The order that she joined was not an enclosed order. While the daughter had been still keeping house on the farm on the island but preparing to join one or another religious order, the chief character had visited her no less often than when he had been courting her in his mind. He went on trying to persuade her not to lock herself away from the world in a convent of an enclosed order but to join the order of nuns that he himself admired most, which was an order founded by an Australian woman who had grown up in a remote district that was the furthest south-east district of South Australia and was just short of the border between that state and Victoria. The chief character’s motives in this matter were unselfish; he believed that the enclosed life was pointless and cruel for both women and men. His arguments won over the daughter. She joined the order that he had recommended, and she made her final vows in the year when his eldest son was conceived.

What would have been others of those imagined events?

On a certain afternoon in the early 1930s with a hot sun in a clear sky but with a cool breeze blowing from the nearby sea, a boy aged about thirteen years was walking towards a swampy area overgrown by clumps of rushes. The swampy area was in the furthest paddock from the house on a dairy farm in south-western Victoria. The tops of the tallest rushes were as high as the boy’s head when he walked amongst them, but the boy was afraid that he might still be seen from any of the paddocks around and so he walked further in towards the centre of the swampy area. The boy trod carefully between the green tussocks. He was looking out for snakes, which were often seen in the swampy area. He was also trying not to spill a jam-jar of water that he was carrying in one hand.

At certain times of the year, the swampy area was under water, but the season was now summer and the boy was able to walk far in among the rushes before he felt soggy ground underfoot. He stepped back from the dampness and then sat down in the shade of a clump of rushes. He looked around and made sure that he was surrounded by clumps of rushes. Then he sipped from the jar of water and afterwards placed it on a level piece of ground. He sipped because he knew that the water in the jar was the only drinking-water that he would have during the rest of the day. The boy had gone into hiding and intended not to show himself again until evening.

The boy had chosen the swampy area for his hiding-place not only because it was far from his house but also because the clumps of rushes were the tallest growing things in all the paddocks of the farm. Fifty years before, the boy’s grandfather had cleared from the farm the many trees and patches of scrub that had formerly grown there. The farm was the very last expanse of fertile land short of the coast. Beyond the southern boundary of the farm, the land sloped upwards and became scrub-covered cliff-tops before coming to an end. Where the land came to an end, sheer cliffs stood above the Southern Ocean.

While the boy sat in the swampy area, he heard the sounds of wave after wave bumping against the bases of the nearer cliffs. The boy and all of his family heard almost continually the sounds of waves of the ocean bumping against cliffs or breaking on beaches. The exceptional times were certain days and evenings in late spring and in summer when the wind blew from the north. The north wind not only quietened the ocean; the north wind brought to the coastal district the feel and the smells and the sounds of the mostly level grassy countryside that reached for hundreds of miles inland.

The north wind had blown hard on a certain day only a few days before the day when the boy had gone into hiding in the swamp. On that certain day, a certain image had come into the mind of the boy while he was standing in a paddock at some distance from the swampy area. The boy was not looking for a hiding-place on that day; he had been sent on an errand by his father, the owner of the farm. Just before the certain image had come into his mind, the boy had been watching, as he often watched, the waves made by the north wind in the grass of the paddocks around him and had been thinking, as he often thought, of how quiet were the waves of grass compared to the least noisy of the waves of the ocean. Then he noticed in his mind an image of a building of two storeys. The boy supposed at first that he was looking at an image of the bluestone presbytery that stood beside the Catholic church in the coastal city that he sometimes visited with his parents. But then he understood that he was looking at an image of one or another house of two storeys that might have stood far back from the road on one or another large grazing property far away to the north-west of his father’s farm and on the way to the South Australian border. The boy had never seen an actual house on any such property, but he had travelled several years before with one of his father’s brothers to a town north-west of his father’s farm and had glimpsed at a certain moment during his journey a distant point of fiery light that his uncle had explained away as the reflection of the late-afternoon sunlight in a window of some or another grazier’s mansion.

After the boy had seen in his mind the image of the house, he felt as though he was standing in his mind in the garden of the house and was looking up at a certain window of the upper storey. A young woman was looking down from the window and was letting fall from the window towards the garden where the boy was standing in his mind length after length of the hair from her head. The boy had read some years before a story purporting to be a story for children in which a young woman imprisoned in a tower had let fall her hair in the form of a ladder so that a certain young man would be able to climb from the ground upwards and in through her window. While he had read that story, the boy had seen in his mind an image of abundant red-gold hair arranged in the form of a ladder. The hair let down by the young woman in the house of two storeys was black and was in the form of a veil or a curtain.

When the black hair in the image in the mind of the boy had been let down and was trailing on the lawn beside the house of two storeys, the boy felt as though he had stepped towards the hair and had reached both hands above his head and had clutched at the hair and had tried to drag himself upwards towards the window through which the young woman was looking down from the upper storey. The boy then felt as though he had lifted himself a short distance upwards so that his feet were no longer on the lawn beside the house of two storeys. But then the boy had felt as though he had fallen and as though he was lying on the lawn beside the house of two storeys and was struggling to free himself from the folds of black hair in which he was entangled. And then the boy had understood that his efforts to drag himself upwards had torn the black hair from the head of the young woman of the upper storey. He had not dared to look upwards, but he had supposed that the young woman was still looking down from her upper window although the dome of her skull was now white and bald.

The north wind had blown all day but had ceased to blow during the early evening of a certain day several years after the day when the boy had fled with his jar of water into the swampy area. The boy sitting in the swampy area had, of course, no knowledge of what he was going to see during the evening of a certain day several years afterwards. The boy sitting in the swampy area and trying not to see in his mind the image of the bald, white skull of the young woman at the upper window of the house of two storeys far out on the mostly level grassy countryside that lay to the north of where he sat in hiding — that boy might well have turned his back on the waving grass that seemed to lead back to the house of two storeys and might have tried to call to mind the waves of the ocean that he could hear bumping and breaking not far away. The boy was not afraid of the ocean. His older brothers had taught him to swim, and he and they sometimes swam together on hot afternoons in the sheltered cove near their father’s farm. While he was swimming, the boy often thought of the ocean liners that travelled past the sheltered cove and the cliffs but always far out to sea. The boy had lived always beside the ocean but he knew about ocean liners only from books and magazines.

In the early evening mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph, the boy had grown almost into a young man. He was so tall and so broad that he fitted comfortably into many items of clothing that his older brothers and his father passed down to him in the way that thrifty families passed clothing down during the time when these fictional events would have taken place if ever I had been able to report them. In the early evening mentioned previously, the boy-man, as I intend to call him, had been walking towards his parents’ house from a distant paddock of his father’s farm when he felt urged to look at the ocean from the cliff-tops near the sheltered cove mentioned previously. He felt so urged because the north wind had been blowing all day, and he wanted to admire the calmness that the north wind always caused on the nearer parts of the ocean.

As soon as the boy-man had looked down at the nearer parts of the ocean, he had noticed far out towards the horizon what seemed an oblong glow. He soon understood that he was looking at an ocean liner travelling from Melbourne towards Britain and Europe. He had never previously seen and would never afterwards see such a sight. While he watched, he tried to climb to a higher point on the cliff so that he could keep the ocean-liner in his view for as long as possible. While the boy-man was thus climbing, he noticed in his mind an image of himself approaching the ocean-liner as though he had swum towards the liner from the sheltered cove and as though the liner had altered its course so as to pass close by the cove. In the image, and in the images that followed, the boy-man was in the water beside the liner, holding a rope-ladder that had been thrown down to him, while numerous passengers leaned over the railings on the various decks of the liner and urged the boy-man to climb the rope-ladder and to join them on board the liner. The men-passengers wore stiff white shirts, black jackets and trousers, and black bow-ties. The hair on each man’s head was black and was so sleek that the boy-man saw reflected in it rays and beams from the lights all around the man. (The boy-man was sometimes reminded of those sleek black heads of hair ten or even twenty years later, when he had long since become a man and when he sometimes picked up a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly that one or another of his sisters had been reading and when he looked at the line-drawings of Mandrake the Magician in the comic-strip of the same name on the inside of the rear cover of the magazine.) The women passengers wore dresses that exposed their shoulders and their upper arms and much of their chests. The lips of the women had been painted. Some lips were scarlet and reminded the boy-man of tomatoes. Other lips were almost purple and reminded the boy-man of beetroot.

For as long as the men-passengers and the women-passengers leaned downwards from the decks of the liner and urged him to climb aboard, all the passengers seemed to stand in the same relationship to the boy-man as stood the characters in a work of fiction for as long as he was reading the work and, sometimes, for long afterwards. The boy-man had never seen in the place that he called the real world any men or women dressed as the passengers were dressed; only while he was reading did such personages appear to him. He supposed that the passengers on the liner were travelling to Britain or even to other countries of Europe so that they could return to their native scenery: so that they could pose once more against backgrounds of beech forests or of moors overgrown with heather. If the boy-man had possessed an imagination, as he surely did, then he would have seen in his mind images of himself strolling with his new-found companions against backgrounds of beeches or of heather. He might even have seen images of himself sometimes slipping away from his companions and stepping further back among the beech-trees or across the moors so that he could see what might have lain behind the places that were the settings of works of fiction.

The boy-man mentioned in the previous paragraph, the boy-man seemingly invited to join up with a band of fictional characters, is, of course, no more than a character in the mind of a boy-man standing on a cliff-top: a boy-man who was several years previously a boy who went into hiding among clumps of rushes and who, as I wrote earlier in these pages, might himself have become a character in a recognisable work of fiction if only I had been able to imagine such a work.

The imagined boy-man, so to call him, could not bring himself to climb the rope-ladder and to join up with the sleek-haired men and the bare-shouldered women. He might, perhaps, have dared to climb the ladder and to step aboard the liner if the only persons waiting for him had been the sleek-haired men, but for as long as the crowd on the deck included numbers of women, the boy-man clung to the lower rungs of the ladder and would not lift himself out of the water. The boy-man was not afraid of leaving behind for the time being his parents and his brothers and sisters and the farm beside the ocean, but he was afraid of standing in the view of a group of women while he was wearing the bathing costume that had been passed down to him by his father. Each of the brothers of the boy-man owned a bathing costume of the modern sort. This sort of costume covered less of the body than had earlier costumes but it was designed so as not to embarrass the wearer or any female person in his presence. The modern costume reached only from the shoulders of the wearer to his upper thighs, but part of that costume was a skirt-like covering that hung in front of the wearer’s groin. The earlier sort of costume, the so-called neck-to-knee costume, covered most of the wearer’s body but clung when wet to every part of the body. From the time when his father had passed his bathing-costume down, the boy-man had worn the costume only in the presence of his brothers. Even with his brothers he had not wanted to stand so that his wet costume revealed to them the contours of his private parts. Perhaps if the sleek-haired men on the ocean-liner had produced from somewhere a dressing-gown that the boy-man could have wrapped around himself — or perhaps if they had offered no more than that they should stand around the boy-man so as to shield his body from the view of the bare-shouldered women — then the boy-man might have climbed up to the deck and might have joined up with the sort of persons that he had previously never met but had only read about in books of fiction. But the series of events in the boy-man’s mind always came to an end with his letting go of the rope-ladder and then drifting back towards the sheltered cove and the high cliffs beside his father’s farm while the ocean-liner went on its way towards the countries that were the settings for books of fiction. After he had let go of the ladder, the boy-man had often regretted that he had forgone an opportunity to consort with men who might have been characters in works of fiction, but he had always then reminded himself that he had been saved from causing embarrassment to a number of women who might have been characters in works of fiction. He had been saved from having to pass in full view of the women while he was wearing only an old-fashioned bathing-costume. He had been saved from causing the women the embarrassment of their seeing him in a close-clinging fabric that revealed the exact outlines of the parts of him that he had learned from his schoolfellows to call his tool and his stones.

If the boy hiding among the clumps of rushes had had time to prepare, he would have brought a book with him to his hiding-place; but he had had to flee from his house with only the jar of water, and so he passed the time by listening to the sounds of birds. He would have preferred to watch the birds as well, but he dared not move from his hiding-place; if any of his sisters had been sent to fetch him back, she might have seen him through some or another gap between the clumps of rushes.

Although the farm was without trees or scrub, it did not lack for birds, and the boy often observed them. While he was hiding in the swampy area, the boy heard from time to time the sounds of two sorts of bird that he thought of as his favourites. Twelve years later, when he had bought his first bird-book, he learned the scientific names of the two birds: anthus novaeseelandiae and alauda arvensis, but as a boy he knew the birds only as groundlark and skylark, although he did know that the groundlark was a native of Australia whereas the skylark had been introduced from England. The boy found it strange that these birds spent much time on the wing but made their nests on the ground. Even if tall trees had been growing on the farm, the groundlark and the skylark would still have made their nests on the ground, hidden among tussocks.

The boy in hiding looked out for the nests of groundlarks and skylarks whenever he was walking across a paddock on his father’s farm. He had found only one nest. It was a disused nest, but the boy had admired its snugness beneath the overhanging grass. He had left the nest in place, meaning to go back and to inspect it on later occasions, but he had never afterwards been able to find the nest. Later in the afternoon while the boy was in hiding, he began to pass the time by looking around the swampy area as though he had been one of his favourite birds in search of a site for a nest. Whenever he found such a site, he tried to make with his fist a snug hollow and then tried to imagine the nest and the eggs and the naked young.

The day when the boy went into hiding among the rushes was a Sunday. At the midday meal, which the family called dinner, the boy had sat quietly, as usual, among his parents and his older brothers and sisters. During the meal, the boy had heard much talk about a party of visitors that was going to arrive in the early afternoon. The head of the party was a brother of the boy’s mother and was well known to the boy, who was, of course, the man’s nephew. The uncle, as I intend to call him, had remained unmarried until almost his fortieth year and had worked at many different jobs in several states of Australia but had lately married. The uncle had married a widow, who was the mother of nine children. He had then taken up, as the saying went, a soldier-settlement block in a forested district inland from his brother-in-law’s coastal farm. During the meal mentioned above, the boy at the table had learned that his uncle was then on his way to visit the coastal farm and was bringing with him his wife and the four of her children who had still not left home. The boy had learned finally that all four children were daughters.

Early in the afternoon, one of the boy’s sisters had called out that she could see the visitors arriving at the front gate. The boy had then stood with his sisters on the front verandah and had watched the visitors approaching in their horse-and-buggy across the home paddock. The boy had made out the four persons with pale-coloured dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats who had recently become his step-cousins but had still not made out their faces when one of this sisters thrust an elbow against his ribs and told him that the youngest of the four was exactly the same age as himself. The boy had then gone into the kitchen and had filled a clean jam-jar with water and had set out for the swampy area at the far end of the farm. He had remained in hiding in that area during the rest of that afternoon and had not returned home until sunset, long after the visitors had gone.

The reader is surely waiting still to learn how the seemingly imagined events reported in the foregoing thirty-four paragraphs might be considered part of some seemingly imagined version of the narrator’s having been conceived.

I have read and forgotten, during the past forty and more years, countless statements by writers about the writing or the reading of fiction. A few statements I still remember, even if I cannot recall who first made the statements. Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.

The man who released the pheasants on the island became, a few years later, my father. A few years later again, when I was a small boy, he took my mother and me and my younger brother one Sunday afternoon from our rented weatherboard cottage in a south-eastern suburb of the largest city in northern Victoria to a building of two storeys in a north-western suburb of that city. We walked from our home to the centre of the city and then we travelled by electric tramway to the north-western suburb. We left the tram at the terminus and then we approached and entered the building of two storeys. Except for a few churches, this was the largest building that I could recall having entered.

I was impressed not so much by the size of the building as by the view that might have been available on clear days to a person occupying one or another of the rooms behind the north-facing windows that I had stared at while I walked through the front garden towards the building. I had never been further north than the city where I lived at that time, but I thought often of the districts that lay in that direction. I hoped that they consisted of mostly level grasslands and not the red sand or gravel that I saw sometimes in pictures of inland Australia.

My father had told me in the tram that the building of two storeys was a convent of an order of nuns founded especially to serve the country districts of Australia. (The teachers at my school were nuns but of an order founded in Ireland; nor had I ever seen the house where they lived.) The nun that we were going to meet would almost certainly have occupied a room on the upper storey. However, it would have been unthinkable for any male person, even a child as young as myself, to go beyond the front parlour of the convent.

In that front parlour, during our visit to the convent, which visit took place on some or another hot afternoon in the mid-1940s, my parents and my brother and I were received by a woman whose appearance I can hardly recall. Her brown robes covered all but her face, which appears to me now as no more than a pink blur. I understood that my father and the nun had known one another at some time before I had been born, and it came to me just now that my father had introduced her to me as someone who had been in her younger days a fearless rider of horses across paddocks and through swamps.

I remember no other visit to the convent, but for several years after our meeting with the nun my brother and I each received from her through the post at Christmas one of the cards called by Catholics of those days holy-cards. My family moved house twelve times between the mid-1940s and the last year of the 1950s, when I left home, and most of my keepsakes from those years were lost long ago. Just beyond the reach of my right arm, however, in the topmost drawer of my nearest filing cabinet, is an envelope containing the handful of holy-cards that I still possess. I have not looked at the cards for at least two years. When next I look at the cards they will all seem familiar, but as I write these words I am able to see in my mind only one of the cards. On the rear of that card is a greeting to me from my father’s nun-friend, written more than sixty years ago. On the front is a picture only. The card, so to call it, is unusual in that it has no pious message or prayer and not even a caption beneath the picture displayed on it. The picture shows a male child, perhaps five years of age, sitting with his chubby legs outstretched on the altar of a Catholic church. The child is leaning expectantly, so it seems, towards the tabernacle. (This was the domed container, about the size of a small milk-can, where was kept by day and by night in a gilt-lined ciborium the so-called Real Presence. The contents of the ciborium would have seemed to a non-believer a collection of small, circular white wafers. The nun and I and all believing Catholics considered each wafer to be the body of the personage that we usually named as Christ or Our Lord or, sometimes, Jesus. The domed container was made of bronze or of some such metal and was always draped on its outside with satin hangings the colour of which was determined by the liturgical season. The container had at its front a door that was always kept locked except during the few minutes when the priest celebrating Mass either took out the consecrated wafers — the Real Presence — for distribution to the faithful as Holy Communion, so called, or afterwards stored the remainder for the next Mass. As for the interior of the tabernacle, the average lay-person saw no more of it than he or she might have glimpsed if he or she had been kneeling in a front seat of a church and had happened to look towards the altar just when the priest was genuflecting out of respect for the Blessed Sacrament, so called, before he closed and locked the tabernacle door. Even I, during the two years when I served as an altar-boy at a parish church in an outer suburb of Melbourne in the early 1950s — even I, although I strained from only a few paces away, saw no more than the white curtain — was it of satin? silk? mere linen? — that hung in the doorway of the tabernacle. The priest reached through the pleated white cloth in order to take out or to put away the sacred vessel, so called, but the cloth seemed always to fall back into place a moment afterwards. I could only try to imagine the interior of the tabernacle, and whenever I thus tried I liked to suppose that the white curtain I often saw was only the outermost of a series of such hangings, so that the priest, whenever he pushed his fingers inwards towards the ciborium, felt his way through layer after layer of gently resisting plushness.) Even I, who was only a few years older than the pictured child, understood the message of the uncaptioned holy picture. At the same time, I understood the folly of the message.

I had no doubt that any Catholic child of the age of the altar-climber would have learned to be in awe of sanctuaries and altars and, above all, tabernacles. In the city where I lived when I received the card, any Catholic child found even so much as trespassing in the sanctuary, let alone clambering onto the altar and fiddling with the tabernacle — any such child would have been thrashed by parents and teachers. If the child had already made his or her first confession, he or she would have been advised to confess at the first opportunity the mortal sin of sacrilege. The child’s escapade might later have been made public, but only as an example of the sort of gross offence that no right-minded child would even contemplate. It would have been unthinkable for someone to record the offence for posterity, as it were, by painting on the front of a holy-card the scene of the crime, so to call it. And yet, the fact remained: there I was, a resident of the city mentioned earlier in this paragraph and also the owner of a holy-card that seemed to advertise the unthinkable. Admittedly, the little altar-sitter in the picture seemed more like a cherub in a church-mural than the sort of child that I mixed with. But whenever I stared at the portrait of the curly-haired, pink-cheeked boy, I felt the beginnings of a peculiar hopefulness. Somewhere, in some layer of the world far beyond my own drab layer, it might have been possible sometimes to follow one’s own desires without incurring punishment. The curly-haired child might have explained away his escapade by telling the adults that he felt sorry for Jesus, locked up all day on the altar with nobody to visit him; or perhaps the child’s excuse was that he had something to tell Jesus: something so private that it had to be whispered to Jesus through the keyhole of his house. And the lisping trickster might have got away unscathed. The adults judging his case might have exchanged smiles of mock-exasperation before deciding that he had meant no harm. I inferred all this from the mere facts that the holy-card had been designed and printed by adults and had been sent to me by an adult — and a nun, moreover.

My pondering over the holy-card led me to no new course of action, although it would surely have made my daydreams somewhat bolder. I may well have daydreamed sometimes about an afternoon when the sender of the card, won over by my innocent-seeming ways and by the long words that I had used on her, showed me up the stairs of her two-storey building and allowed me to look out from the upper verandah at the view, which I hoped would be of far-reaching grasslands in northern Victoria, where I had never been. I may even have daydreamed that the sender of the card, again impressed by my feigned innocence and precocious words, persuaded some priest-friend of hers to hold open in my sight the door of a tabernacle and even to part the inner hangings with his hand in such a way that I would be able always afterwards to see the exact arrangement of folds of cloth and dark interstices in a tabernacle in my mind.

The reader should not suppose that I was interested in tabernacles or in the upper storeys of convents or of presbyteries because I was attracted to the invisible personages in whose cause such places had been built. I was in awe of Almighty God; of his son Our Lord, Jesus Christ; of Mary, the Mother of Our Lord; of all the angels and saints. Rather, I was in awe of the images of those personages that had lodged in my mind as a result of my having looked from an early age at certain statues, coloured windows, and holy-cards. I was anxious not to offend the personages by any misdeeds of mine. Several times daily, I uttered aloud or in my mind prayers addressed to one or another of the personages. Sometimes I felt that one or another of the personages was scrutinising me from behind the cover of his or her invisibility. I did not doubt what I had been taught from early childhood: that my chief task in life was to become on close terms with as many as possible of the personages. And yet, I was not at all attracted to any of the personages; and although I would never have dared admit it to anyone, I felt as though none of the personages had any special fondness for me.

I was not devoted to the personages, but I was interested in the places where they were venerated or where they were depicted as dwelling. I peered not only at upper-storey windows but into the dim, furthest reaches of grottoes in churchyards. I tried to imagine the garden behind the high wall in front of the Marist Brothers’ monastery. I seem to have envied priests and members of religious orders not only the views to be had from their imposing buildings but also whatever they saw when there was nothing of note to be seen around them: what they saw when they paced up and down the same path in the same walled garden, and even, perhaps, what they saw when they closed their eyes or covered their faces after they had received Holy Communion in some secluded chapel at first light.

My interest in these matters found its simplest outlet of a Sunday morning when I knelt beside one or another of my parents in our not-unpretentious parish church. During much of the service I would fix my attention on one after another of the stained-glass windows. The foreground of each window-picture was the preserve of one or another of the personages mentioned above. The background, however, seemed available for me to fill with landscapes or with glimpses of distant townships. And yet, whenever I gave up trying to imagine scenery fit to be discerned in some or another background of transparent pale-green or translucent orange and asked myself, in a mood of literal-mindedness, what in fact was just out of sight behind those converging pastel-toned plains and skies, I had to acknowledge the obvious. However many other-worldly personages might have loomed in the view of the worshippers inside the church, they existed against an ultimate background hardly different from what lay around me whenever I walked to school or to my local shops. The farthest imaginable background might have been a suburb of a provincial city overlaid by a pale wash of colour.

But I have not yet finished my report of the holy-card showing the curly-haired child getting away, so it seemed, with sacrilege. What I am about to report would have happened gradually and subtly and would have made scant difference to my everyday life; would have been hardly apparent to me except at odd, illuminating moments. What I am about to report is not at all an account of my drawing closer in my mind to the nun who had sent me the holy-card mentioned often above. If anything, I preferred not even to recall the pink-faced, brown-robed figure who had made much of me in the parlour of the convent on account of my bearing, according to her, an uncanny resemblance to my father.

In order to complete my report of the effects of a certain holy-card on the child that I seem to have been, I have to introduce into this work of fiction a personage whose title will be from here onwards the Patroness. I have used just now the word personage for want of a more accurate word. The reader must not suppose that my patroness occupied the same level of existence that was occupied by the personages mentioned in detail in the fourth-most recent paragraph and mentioned briefly in two subsequent paragraphs. This is necessarily a complicated piece of fiction, and if the English language had provided them, I would have used a variety of terms so as to distinguish such as the Patroness mentioned just above and what might be called the chief characters of the religion of my childhood, not to mention certain beings that I reported in earlier pages as having come into existence while I read works of fiction.

The Patroness was the least predictable of any of the beings that I choose to call personages. On rare occasions, she seemed closer to me and more aware of me than any other denizen of my mind. Mostly, though, she led a wavering existence, sometimes seeming as though anxious to break through whatever barriers lay between us but at other times seeming as though the very purpose of her existence was to remain aloof from me and so to provide me with a task worthy of a lifetime of effort: the simple but baffling task of gaining admission to her presence.

The Patroness almost certainly made her first appearance in my mind at some time after I had received the holy-card mentioned often in the preceding paragraphs, but for as long as I went on trying to see her clearly in my mind, I understood that she was a personage or an entity in her own right and definitely not a memory in my mind of the pink face and the brown robes and the ingratiating presence of the nun that my father had taken me to visit in the north-facing building of two storeys. The Patroness, so I learned after much struggling to apprehend her image, was changeable in her attitudes towards me. Sometimes she seemed to assume the most forbidding of poses: she was the merest outline of a female; the transparent representation in ice or glass of the virgin-goddess of my religion or of my own mother as she might have been when my father had first courted her. Paradoxically, my patroness could seem closer to me during those periods when I was quite unable to visualise her than when I was repeatedly glimpsing her in my mind. I would give up for a few days all my straining after her image and would experience a period of calm and reassurance, as though what separated us was not distance but her prankish hiding behind this or that image in the foreground of my mind. Such tantalising periods would often end with my catching sight of a picture of a young woman in a magazine or even of an actual young woman in a street and then feeling for a few hours afterwards as though my patroness had thus arranged for me to be shown her approximate likeness.

My patroness would have first appeared in my mind, or would have first signalled her presence there, when I was puzzling over the picture of the boy who was leaning against the tabernacle. I am no more concerned nowadays, as I write this report, than was the boy who received the holy-card long ago with any such abstraction as character. I am only concerned to report that the boy felt from the beginning as though his patroness had come to him with the message that she herself, in certain moods, would not despise him and would not report him to his teachers or to the parish priest if it came to her knowledge that he had thought of touching the satin coverings of a tabernacle or even of trying its door. He even felt as though his patroness understood that his being interested in tabernacles was not an expression of his interest in the personages who presided over his religion. And at some unrecorded hour on an unrecorded but fateful day, the boy, in his daydreaming, felt as though he had succeeded in reporting to his patroness that he would have been no less eager to clamber up to a tabernacle and to prise open its door and to learn at last the details of its inner arrangements even if he had known beforehand that the place contained no sacred vessels, so called, and no Blessed Sacrament, so called.

After the boy had felt as reported in the previous paragraph, he felt for a few hours, or perhaps only for a few minutes, that his patroness understood him in such a way that he need hardly explain himself to her in words. He felt as though she understood that his wanting to see into tabernacles and such places had only ever arisen because he had lacked for a patroness and had been driven to look for such places as might console him for his lack. This feeling, of course, could not last, and in the daydreams that followed, he found in some or another church or convent a tabernacle that was no longer used for religious ceremonies but was still decorated and was still even locked. By some preposterous means, he found the key to the tabernacle. He opened the door, and if he had had more courage, he might have explored all of what lay behind it. But he did not so dare. All he dared to do was to leave in the dark space behind the outer curtains a written message to the patroness — or for some or another personage who might be disposed to read the message and to understand it.

It was never to be expected that any decisive event would take place: any event that might convince the boy of his patroness’s interest in him, let alone her indisputable existence in his mind or elsewhere. If he went back in his daydreams to the tabernacle where he had left the written message and if he found that the place behind the curtains was empty, could he be sure that she had understood the message? Had she even read the message? Had she merely removed it as a formality in the same way that priests of certain religions, so the boy would learn long afterwards, would consume in private the sacrificial food offered by the faithful to their non-existent gods?

While I was writing the previous paragraph, which is, of course, part of a work of fiction, I remembered for perhaps the first time in sixty years an event in the seventh or eighth year of the life of a person who can never be any more than a personage in the mind of any reader of this writing. I remembered my having found one afternoon on the way home from school in the largest city in northern Victoria a short tunnel of about the circumference of my index finger in the trunk of the tall grey-box tree that grew in the gravelly margin of the street outside the house where I lived with my brother and my parents. What was probably no more than a deep knothole seemed to me a phenomenon not to be ignored.

In the shabby rented house next to my parents’ hardly less shabby rented house was what my mother called a tribe of kids. The nearest to me in age of the tribe was a girl a year older than myself. If the reader of this paragraph could accept that certain fictional events may closely resemble remembered events, then I would be willing to report that the girl mentioned in the second sentence of this paragraph had the name Sylvia; that I sometimes felt urged to confide to Sylvia matters such as I would have confided to few other persons, and not just because I seemed to read from her face that she would have been a trustworthy confidant but also because the sound of her name when I pronounced it brought to my mind vague images of pleasant scenery; that I addressed to Sylvia, soon after I had discovered the short tunnel mentioned in the previous paragraph, a brief note telling her that I wanted to talk to her soon about certain matters; that I rolled the note into a cylindrical shape and pushed it as far as I could push it into the short tunnel in the grey-box tree but that I never afterwards informed the person addressed in the note of what I had done, although I often paused on my way past the tree and reached a finger into the tunnel, hoping to find that my message had been retrieved but always having my finger come up against a wad of unread paper. A day came, of course, when I walked past the tree without remembering my message; and when I learned, five years later, that silvus was the Latin for woodland, I had forgotten, so I thought, the name that had been at the head of my note and had forgotten even the grey-box tree.

I got hints sometimes of personages much more remote from me than my patroness but perhaps not wholly inaccessible if only I could have discovered the means of access. In a certain corner of a garden behind a spacious house that my father sometimes visited, I found a fish-pond full of shaggy water-plants and overhung by ferns. In another part of the same garden, an ornamental grapevine grew over the frosted-glass panels of a wall of the garage. Whenever I stood alone in these places, I felt nothing more subtle than a child’s anger and helplessness, and yet the cause of those feelings was too subtle almost for me to explain nowadays. I wanted to see or to hear or to touch some or another being who was able to comprehend and to enjoy and perhaps even to express in words what I was only vaguely aware of in those places. It seemed to me impossible that what I was caught up in consisted of no more than myself and a pool of water or panes of glass and a few garden-plants; I was one small part of a mystery that I myself could never hope to explicate. If only I had been granted as little as a glimpse in my mind of one of this remoter sort of personage, I would have devoted myself to her (she was much more likely to have been female than otherwise) as I never devoted myself during childhood or afterwards to the personages recommended to me by my teachers and priests.

There were personages even less accessible to me than those mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Those impossibly remote beings probably seemed as they did because the scenery they lurked beyond was itself distant from me. In a coloured booklet advertising the scenery of Tasmania, I found, when I was ten years old, an aerial view of Elwick racecourse in Hobart. Each curve of far-off white-railed fencing was perfectly graduated, and yet the whole racecourse had a tantalising asymmetry that brought into being a goddess of racecourses, even though I had scant hope ever of catching sight of her. And when, as a young man in my twenties, I finally travelled through the landscape that reached northwards from the view that I had never seen from the upper floor of the convent mentioned much earlier, far from being disillusioned, I often became aware that some or another barely perceptible being might have presided over the view ahead of me of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. I was unable to envisage even the merest outline of the being, but I was able to ascertain that she was at least as well-disposed towards me as the remembered image in my mind of the brown-robed nun who had once made a pet of me in her parlour and had later sent me a certain holy-card.

I met with the nun, my father’s friend, only once after my visit to her convent of two storeys in northern Victoria. My father died suddenly when I was only twenty. After his funeral service, I was standing among a throng of relatives in the grounds of the church when the persons around me stepped aside in order to open a passage for two nuns who were striding towards me. The two were my father’s friend and a travelling companion. I stood awkwardly while the friend reminded me of what a fine man my father had been. As she left me, she expressed the hope that I would one day do something to make my father proud of me.

I have never since seen the nun, who is surely no longer alive. However, I have in my archives several short letters from her and a copy each of my equally short replies. She wrote chiefly to tell me that she had recently come across one or another of my books of fiction and had read it but had been, on balance, disappointed by it. Only once was she more specific.

My published books of fiction comprise many more than half a million words. Of all those words, no more than 150 could be said to report an act of sexual intercourse between two characters. Of those 150 words, only two refer to any part of the human body: the words are hands and knees. Most of the remaining 148 words report the impressions of a male character who seems to imagine himself as a jockey during the latter part of a horse-race. The act in question results in the conception of the chief character of the book in question, which character is a boy who devises elaborate games to do with imaginary horse-races. In one of her short letters to me, the nun wrote that the passage mentioned was unworthy of me.

The boy who hid all afternoon among clumps of rushes in a swampy area was the youngest of nine siblings: five females and four males. Four of the females died unmarried. Three of the males married, but none before his thirtieth year. One of these three, six years after his youngest brother had hidden all afternoon from a buggy-load of visitors, became my father. The male who died unmarried was he who had hidden in the swampy area one Sunday afternoon in the early 1930s. The man who became my father had become at some time previously the husband of a young woman who had been one of the far-off females in pale-coloured dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats whose approach in a horse-and-buggy had caused their youngest step-cousin to flee to a swampy area. I am unable to imagine any details of the courtship of the persons who became my parents. I was never told when or where they were married. And yet, my mother liked to tell the story of the Sunday afternoon when she and three of her sisters visited for the first time their new step-cousins and when the youngest of them disappeared into the paddocks. My mother and her husband’s youngest brother always seemed friendly towards one another, although I never heard my mother mention in his hearing the day when she and he would have met for the first time if only he had not run away.

My father’s youngest brother courted at least three eligible young women, as his sisters might have described them. One of the three was a nurse, one was a teacher, and one was a private secretary. All three were church-going Catholics. Each courtship, so to call it, lasted an unusually long time during the 1950s, when my youngest uncle, as I intend to call him henceforth, was aged in his thirties. My youngest uncle, being the owner of a dairy farm, would have been a good catch for any young woman, so I heard my mother say more than once. But none of the courtships came to anything. My youngest uncle’s friends, my own parents, and certainly my uncle’s unmarried sisters would all have been hoping for a different outcome, but each courtship ended with my uncle’s announcing that he and the young woman had parted good friends.

Each of the three young women came from a country district and each married a farmer no more than two years after she and my youngest uncle had parted. This only went to show, so my mother said, that each of the three had been on the lookout for a husband when she and my uncle had been seeing one another. As for my uncle’s claim that he had parted good friends with each young woman, I can only report something that he told me at a time when we confided somewhat in each other — when I was nearly twenty years of age and he nearly forty. He told me that he still wrote once each year to one of his three former girlfriends and that she wrote in return a long letter telling him things that she could never have told her husband. As for the sort of courtship that my youngest uncle undertook with each of the young women, I can only report something that he once said to me as an aside when we were discussing what we considered the undue influence of American films and television programs on our society in the late 1950s. He told me as though it was a matter to be deplored that even young Catholic women of those days seemed to want no more than to be mauled as soon as they were alone with a man in a parked car after an evening together.

During my boyhood and my teenage years, I shared much more with my youngest uncle than with his oldest brother, my father. During my father’s last years, I hardly saw him. He was working at two jobs in an effort to pay back a large loan from five cousins of his: three bachelors and their two spinster sisters who owned a large grazing property on the edge of the western plains of Victoria. Whatever story my father might have told his cousins, the loan was needed in order to pay his debts to bookmakers. My father would have been called nowadays a compulsive gambler.

But even in earlier years, when my father was at home on most evenings, I seldom approached him. In his free time, he pored over form-guides or made telephone calls to his racing friends or pencilled rows of figures on scraps of paper. I seldom approached him, and yet I was probably more interested in horse-racing than even he was. Like my father, I daydreamed about successful bets; but betting was only one of many aspects of horse-racing that was endlessly interesting to me. And all through my boyhood and youth, I knew only one person who understood not only my father’s craze for betting but my own love of everything to do with horse-racing. That person was my youngest uncle.

My uncle liked to bet, but he rarely backed winners. He was influenced by too many whimsical factors when he made his selections. He told me often about the only big win that he had had. The horse was at odds of fifty to one. My uncle had not been interested in the horse until he had seen it parading in the mounting-yard. He had for long been interested in racing colours: the many-coloured silk jackets registered in the names of owners or, sometimes, trainers. He thought that too many people designed complicated sets of colours in the mistaken belief that such colours would stand out from all others and would suggest the unique qualities or claims of the owners of the colours. My uncle thought that the reverse was true: that the most noticeable colours and those that reflected best the discernment of their designers were the simplest combinations. Although he had never owned even a share in a racehorse and never would, my uncle had designed his own colours: white, yellow braces and cap. The design was simple; the colours came from the flag of the Vatican City. (Even when I was still an unquestioning Catholic, I was disappointed that my uncle could draw on no more peculiar source of inspiration than the religion that he had been born into. My own colours, which existed only in my mind against one or another view of one or another image of a racecourse in the background of my mind, were at that time a complicated arrangement of lime-green and royal-blue. These two colours were seldom used by owners of racehorses in the 1950s. I had chosen the colours as my own on a certain Sunday morning when I was sitting in the largest Catholic church in the coastal city mentioned several times in this piece of fiction. Instead of following the service or trying to pray, I had been searching for likely combinations among the colours in the large window of stained glass above the altar. I had taken the royal-blue from certain parts of the cloak worn by the image in the window of the personage who would have been addressed in their prayers by most of the congregation as Our Lady. The lime-green I took from the robe of a minor angelic attendant of the blue-robed personage. I chose the two colours not because of their setting in the stained-glass illustration but because of what I thought of as the background of the illustration. The wall behind the altar was at the northern or inland end of the building. If, by some preposterous means, I had been able to look outwards through the coloured glass, I might have seen, as though it comprised part of the background behind the personage known as Our Lady and her angelic attendants, a view of the southern-most district of the western plains of Victoria, which view would have comprised mostly level countryside with lines of trees in the distance. Even without any means of looking outwards through the glass, I was still able to see in my mind a semblance of that view. Whenever I looked at an image of my racing colours in my mind, I looked through the lime-green at mostly level grassy countryside and through the royal-blue at lines of trees in the distance.) When my uncle had looked at the parade of horses in the mounting-yard, he had seen, among the many-coloured spots and diamonds and Maltese crosses and crossed sashes, a simple livery: yellow, black sleeves, and cap. Not only were the colours strikingly simple, so my uncle used to tell me, but the jacket and cap were obviously new; both the yellow and the black were resplendent; and when the jockey flexed his arms or bent or straightened his torso, the silk arranged itself in creases or folds or bosses, so my uncle said, exactly like those that had so often taken his eye whenever he had studied one or another famous religious painting in the foreground of which were divine or saintly personages draped in hills and valleys and shimmering expanses of rich fabric. My uncle was always a cautious punter, but on that memorable day he put three times his usual stake on the horse carrying the yellow and black and being quoted at fifty to one. He watched with no great surprise while the horse won, and afterwards he collected as winnings the equivalent of two monthly milk-cheques from the butter-factory that he supplied from his dairy farm.

My uncle was interested in the naming of horses and would send me often through the post pieces torn from newspapers showing details of cleverly chosen names. The nearest he ever came to telling me a dirty joke was his telling me that he planned to buy one day a filly and a colt, to name the one On Fire and the other Fundament, to mate the two eventually, and to name the first foal Scratch Below.

My uncle often told me that his best friend during his teenage years had been a man he had never seen. Jim Carroll is said to have been the first person in Australia, and probably in the world, to describe the progress of horse-races for the benefit of listeners to radio, or listeners-in, as they were called in Jim Carroll’s time. Nowadays, Jim Carroll would be called a race-caller, but in the mid-1930s there was no name for his occupation, so new was it. Jim was employed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to comment on Melbourne races for the benefit of listeners in many parts of Victoria. He did not chant or intone as his successors learned to do; Jim talked to his listeners about what he could see and what they could not. He talked as though he was sitting in their lounge-rooms and able to see, far beyond the range of their vision, a field of horses on a far-away racecourse.

During the mid-1930s in Victoria, the price paid to farmers for butterfat fell to sixpence per pound. And yet, my father’s father and his family survived the so-called Great Depression.

In the mid-1940s, when I first visited the stone house near the upwards-sloping cliffs, I saw there things that I had seen in few other houses: a cabinet radio; a gramophone; a tall, glass-fronted bookcase full of books; binoculars for bird-watching; massive cedar wardrobes and bedsteads; a dining-room suite including a large sideboard full of English china and a glass-fronted cabinet full of water-jugs and wine-glasses and glass fruit-bowls; a piano with a cupboard full of sheet-music. The family survived and later prospered largely because my youngest uncle and several of his siblings, during most of the 1930s, milked cows and did farm-work and housework for no wages.

My youngest uncle had left school to become, in effect, an unpaid farm-labourer. He milked cows by hand, morning and evening, on every day of the week and did other farm-work between milkings, except on Sunday. Much of his free time on Sundays, however, was taken up by the long, slow trip to church, the hour and more of the service and the sermon, and the trip home again. Perhaps once each month, he went with his parents on their weekly trip to the nearest city, which trip took all of an hour on roads that were mostly gravel. His older siblings sometimes went to a Saturday-evening dance in the district, but he preferred to stay home and read.

He did extra tasks on weekdays so that he could spend most of each Saturday afternoon by the battery-powered radio, listening to Jim Carroll commenting on races at Flemington, Mentone, Caulfield, Williamstown. The boy listening-in was hardly aware that these places were suburbs of Melbourne, which he had not yet visited; each place-name brought to his mind the same far-reaching racecourse of a vaguely elliptical shape, although the different vowel-sounds in each gave rise to differing sights of level grassy countryside in the background and to differing arrangements of trees and low hills on the horizon. The boy tried to commit to memory choice passages from the racing-commentaries so that he could repeat them aloud during the following week; could shout them in the direction of the ocean or whisper them while he sat among grass or rushes.

“I can tell you now: Peter Pan’ll win it. Peter Pan’ll win it!” So said Jim Carroll during his commentary on a certain Melbourne Cup when the field had only just turned into the straight. And Peter Pan won.

“I told you all. I told you weeks ago he wasn’t a stayer.” So said Jim Carroll to his listeners one afternoon when a field of horses was in the straight and when a race-caller of today would not dare to do other than report the positions of the leading few but when Jim Carroll chose to report that the favourite was dropping back through the field, just as Jim himself had predicted.

Jim Carroll’s best comment so impressed the solitary boy who later became my favourite uncle, and afterwards so impressed the solitary boy who later became his favourite nephew, that he and I would often look for excuses to come out with the comment. On many a Saturday morning in the late 1950s, when I lived with my parents in a suburb of Melbourne, after my uncle had driven during the Friday afternoon from the western district to my parents’ house and had gone out, as the expression was, with his girlfriend on the Friday evening and had arranged with her to go out on the Saturday evening, he and I would set out for the races together, discussing the chances of horse after horse. It had for long been a game with us for one to say that a certain horse should run well, given that it was closely related to some or another outstanding horse. The other would then counter this prediction with the words that my uncle had remembered for nearly thirty years from the afternoon when Jim Carroll, while discussing the entrants in a forthcoming race, had said to his listeners, “We all know this horse is closely related to a champion, but Boy Charlton had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself!”

My youngest uncle throughout his life observed birds. Whenever I remember him nowadays, thirty years after his death, I tend not to see any image of him but to hear his voice in my mind while he tells me about some or another bird, the image of which appears in my mind where the image of my uncle might have been expected to appear. The bird in question is sometimes one or another of the striped quail-chicks that my uncle hunted down one day in a paddock not far inland from the farm where he had spent his earliest years and still in sight of the cliffs that stood above the ocean. We did not see the mother-bird, but she had seen us and had sounded a warning call to her chicks. My uncle had recognised the call. He told me to stand still. He whispered to me that seven or eight quail-chicks were likely to be hiding near us. The grass was only ankle-high, but I could see no birds. After perhaps two minutes the mother-bird, still hidden, sounded a different call. From place after place around my feet a tiny, striped quail-chick began to run towards the place whence the mother-bird had called. I understood that the chicks were running, but seen from above their movement was so fluent that each bird might have been a tiny, striped toy propelled by clockwork.

My uncle surprised me by chasing after the chicks. He caught two by flinging his hat over them. Then he imprisoned the chicks in a billy-can beneath a ball of crumpled newspaper. He told me he would give the chicks to a family he knew in the city further along the coast. The family had aviaries in their backyard. He mentioned a surname. I understood that the wife was a cousin of my uncle, or it may have been a second cousin.

Or, the image in my mind connected with my uncle is an image of the white-fronted chat, epthianura albifrons. My uncle had led me to a nest of a pair of chats in the summer of my last year at school. The nest was in a clump of rushes no higher than my hips. For most of my childhood, I had thought of the nests of birds as being among the many things that I was not at liberty to inspect, most of them being in treetops or dense foliage or on cliff-tops. I got a keen satisfaction from my looking down at the four speckled eggs in the tiny cup of woven grass in the clump of rushes. The chats’ nest was at the edge of a swampy area, five kilometres from the swampy area mentioned earlier in connection with my uncle but still within sound of the Southern Ocean.

My uncle explained to me on that day of clear sky, when the sun was hot but when a cool breeze blew from the nearby sea, that the chat was a bird of the inland; he had seen white-fronted chats on saltbush plains in the far north of South Australia. The few chats in his own paddocks lived on the uttermost boundary of the species’ habitable territory, although the birds nesting in the rushes did not know this, of course. Those birds would live and die as though their own small territory was surrounded on every side by boundless grasslands. The female hatching her eggs in the rushes, if she could have had knowledge of such things, would have looked from her nest at any hour of the day towards the sandstone cliffs where none of her kind could have survived; she would have heard on most days and nights the sounds of the waves of the Southern Ocean, which was more vast than any continent of land and which sustained many kinds of bird but would have been death to her own kind. And yet, nothing that the bird or her mate saw or heard would have altered in the least their way of life. Nearly every day, their feathers were ruffled by winds from the ocean, but the birds went on living as though no ocean had ever existed.

My uncle told me that a common name for the white-fronted chat was nun, which name had been prompted by the bird’s white face and throat and by the contrasting black of the head and shoulders and breast. And yet, the bird that most resembled a nun was the male; the female was mostly grey-brown.

When my uncle was past forty years of age, and when the last of the young women that he had courted during the previous ten years had become married to some or another farmer or grazier, he sold the farm where he had lived alone for ten years with a distant view of cliffs along the coast. He gave as his reason for selling the farm that he was obliged to care for his widowed mother and for his three surviving unmarried sisters. These four female persons lived in a spacious sandstone house in the coastal city mentioned often in this piece of fiction. My uncle found work with a firm of stock and station agents and moved with his few belongings into a one-roomed, cream-painted weatherboard bungalow set among fruit-trees in the large backyard of the house where his mother and his sisters lived. My uncle would never draw the curtains across the large window that opened from his bungalow onto the garden. On most evenings, while he lay on his single bed and read the Weekly Times or the Bulletin or the Catholic Advocate, the window was crowded with moths and other insects and with the spiders that preyed on them. During the warm months of the year, when my uncle left the window always ajar, the insects passed freely through it, and two or three large huntsman spiders prowled the ceiling at all hours.

My uncle had kept the racebook from every one of the many race-meetings that he had attended. He read often from his collection, which he liked to call his Books of Wisdom or, sometimes, his Books of Lamentations, but he was an untidy man and had never arranged his collection in order. Some of the books were in shoeboxes in his wardrobe; others were in cardboard cartons under his bed. One day, a few months after he had moved to the bungalow, his youngest sister decided to tidy her brother’s bungalow while he was at work and took away and burned most of the cartons and their contents.

The woman mentioned in the previous sentence will be mentioned again several times in this piece of fiction under the title of my youngest aunt. She was four years older than my youngest uncle and was the youngest of his sisters. She was in her twenty-third year when I was conceived. Four months before my conception, she had become a postulant of an order of nuns that had been founded in Ireland.

During the year before my conception, my parents were presumably courting and, in due course, marrying, honeymooning, and setting up house together, although I have never learned precisely where or when they carried out these enterprises. During the same year, a so-called mission took place in the remote Catholic parish beside the Southern Ocean where my youngest aunt and her siblings attended church every Sunday. A so-called mission took place every third or fourth year in many a parish of the Catholic Church from long before my birth until at least my twentieth year, when I ceased to be interested in such matters. A so-called mission was usually conducted for two weeks by two priests from one or another of three or four religious orders of priests whose special work was the conducting of missions. The two priests would have prepared for the mission for several weeks beforehand, praying and looking into their hearts for guidance and writing notes for the many sermons that they would preach during the two weeks of the mission, the purpose of which was to revive the faith and the religious ardour of the parishioners, who were presumed to have become lukewarm and complacent during the previous few years. During the two weeks of a mission, a sermon and a prayer-service took place every evening in the parish-church. Each day, the two mission-priests visited homes throughout the parish and urged people to attend the prayer-services and so to rekindle their faith.

My youngest aunt would never have been lukewarm or complacent in the matter of her religion. What seemingly happened to her during the year before I was conceived was that her usual religious ardour developed apace. At some time after the mission had been conducted in her parish, she decided, so it seems, that she had a so-called religious vocation. She then applied to become a postulant of an order of teaching nuns. She could have had no hope of training as a teacher, given that she had left school at fourteen and had worked thereafter at housekeeping at her father’s dairy farm. However, the order that my youngest aunt applied to join included not only teaching nuns but so-called lay-nuns. The lay-nuns underwent the same spiritual training, so called, that the teaching nuns underwent and took the same vows that the teaching nuns took, but whereas the teaching nuns worked by day in schools as teachers, the lay-nuns were mostly confined to their respective convents, where they cooked and washed up and laundered and generally kept house for their teaching sisters.

If I were to get up now from the desk where I sit writing these words, and if I were to walk out of this house and up the driveway to the street in front of the house, and if I were to look to the south, I would see in the middle distance, on the highest hill in this district, the largest building in this district of unremarkable suburbs. The building now serves as a so-called centre for so-called aged persons, but when my wife and I first arrived in this district forty years ago, and for some years afterwards, the building was a convent occupied by numerous teaching nuns and postulants and, probably, by a few lay-nuns. The building is of three storeys, and persons looking out from certain windows on the uppermost storey would see, beyond the furthest suburbs, the mostly level grassy countryside north-west of Melbourne with the forested slopes of Mount Macedon in the distance. If my youngest aunt had looked out from one or another third-storey window during the year and more while she lived in the building as a postulant, she would have seen far more than I had hoped to see if only I could have looked out from an upper window of the convent of two storeys mentioned previously in this work of fiction.

I have for long hoped that my youngest aunt looked out from one or another second- or third-storey window on the day when she left the convent in order to return to her father’s house beside the Southern Ocean, there to take up again her work as a housekeeper. If my aunt had so looked out on that day, she might have been better able to comprehend and afterwards to speak about or even to write about a certain spectacle than many a newspaper-reporter who afterwards used stock-phrases to report what had come to him as hearsay.

“On that day it appeared that the whole state was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Seventy-one lives were lost.” The previous sentences are from a report of a royal commission that followed the bushfires of January, 1939, in the state of Victoria. The day when the fires were at their worst was known afterwards as Black Friday. By chance, it was the day when my youngest aunt left the convent that would have overlooked, among much else, the paddock whereon would be laid down fifteen years later a certain street beside which would be built twelve years later again the house in which my aunt’s oldest nephew would live for at least forty years and would write books of fiction, one of the last of which would include a passage in which the narrator, who was wholly lacking in imagination, would report mere details in the hope that fiction truly was, as someone had once claimed, the art of suggestion and that some at least of his readers might intuit or divine or suppose, if not imagine, some little of what his aunt had seen or felt on the day when she left the convent where she had hoped to live for the rest of her life.

My youngest aunt may well have had a so-called vocation to the religious life. She left the convent not because she lacked the will to stay there but because she was beginning, even in her twenties, to be afflicted by the muscular or nervous ailment that afflicted three of my father’s five sisters and obliged each of the three to spend her last years in a wheel-chair or a bed. My youngest aunt outlived all her sisters by many years, but I have never been able to make out the handwriting in either of the two letters that she sent me during the 1980s, each of which letter was a reply to a short letter that I had sent in order to resume negotiations, as it were, with my father’s surviving siblings after the publication of my early books of fiction had caused an estrangement between myself and them.

Even if my youngest aunt had looked out from an upper window on the day when she left the convent, she surely had more on her mind than would have allowed her to look directly westwards through the smoke and the wind-blown cinders and to hope that her only sister-in-law was safe and well. The sister-in-law, who was also a step-cousin of my aunt, was the wife of my aunt’s oldest brother. The husband and the wife lived in a room in a boarding-house in a northern suburb of Melbourne, and the wife, who was only eighteen years of age, was expecting to give birth within a few weeks to their first child, who would be the first niece or nephew of the young woman who was leaving the convent.

During the fifty-six years from the time when my mother and I were first able to talk to one another until the year when she died, my mother reported to me only two incidents from the five years between the time when she first met the man who later became her husband and my father and the time when she and I were first able to talk to one another. One of the two incidents was my bawling when I first saw the ocean. The other incident was my mother’s fearing during most of Black Friday that the widespread fires would reach the northern suburbs of Melbourne, that the weatherboard boarding-house where she lived with her husband would be burned to the ground, and that she would die before she could give birth to her first child.

I seldom saw my youngest uncle during the first years after I had left school. I had come to believe that his being still a devout Catholic and my no longer being so would have caused trouble between us. But later, in the early 1960s, I began to think of my youngest uncle as a person who might be able to get me out of the trouble that I had fallen into.

I could not have brought myself to confide in my uncle. I wanted only to see him again — to watch from close at hand his bachelor’s way of life. He was still working as a stock and station agent, but he had leased a paddock in the coastal district where he had grown up, and he grazed young cattle there and inspected them every few days. I wanted, during the early 1960s, to draw strength from watching my uncle tramp alone across his paddock of a late afternoon when the wind blew from the sea. I wanted to draw strength from my uncle because I seemed to myself weak.

In the early 1960s, when I was in my early twenties and my youngest uncle was in his early forties, we were both of us bachelors. He was what was called in those years a confirmed bachelor. I had had hardly any dealings with young female persons and I seemed to lack the skills that enabled most other young men of my age to acquire steady girlfriends or even fiancées and wives. Sometimes I would spend every evening for week after week alone, more or less reconciled to my bachelorhood, while I read or tried to write poetry or prose fiction. At other times, I would resolve to change my way of life. I would prepare a detailed plan for approaching some or another young woman at my place of work, even preparing in advance the topics that I would raise in order to promote conversation between her and me. Then, either I would fear to speak to the young woman or I would overhear her talking to a workmate and would decide that she and I surely had no common interests. After each such event, I would suppose that I was by nature intended to live as my youngest uncle lived. I would then try to console myself for having been born to bachelorhood as I supposed my bachelor-uncle must sometimes have consoled himself.

I most commonly consoled myself by foreseeing (not imagining) a sequence of events from twenty years into the future. Never having married, I could afford to own a racehorse. On a certain cold and cloudy day, my horse, which usually raced in country districts, contested a race in Melbourne. My horse was at long odds in the betting, but its trainer had advised me to back it. Something urged me to bet several times my usual amount on the horse. If the horse had won, I would have collected the equivalent of a major prize in a lottery. In fact, the horse was narrowly beaten. After the race, and while I stood alone with the horse’s trainer at the second placegetter’s stall, I happened to glance towards the adjoining stall, where the numerous part-owners of the winner were hugging and kissing and crying out. One of the part-owners, a married woman, had been, many years before, one of the young women mentioned in the previous paragraph. As soon as I had learned this, I took care to avoid meeting the gaze of the married woman, although I did not turn my face away from her. I looked at my horse and then talked with my jockey and my trainer, keeping on my face an expression such as would tell the married woman, if only she had recognised me and had surmised that I was a bachelor, that I had for long been reconciled to my bachelorhood and that my having become thus reconciled enabled me the more easily to endure such misfortunes as that which her own racehorse had inflicted on me a little while before.

On a certain cold and cloudy Saturday evening in the early 1960s, I stood with my youngest uncle in the paddock that he leased in the coastal district where he had spent all of his life. I had made a hurried trip from Melbourne to see my uncle at what seemed to me a turning-point in my life. I had left my place of work on the Friday evening and had travelled for more than four hours by railway-train to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I was due to travel back to Melbourne again on the Sunday afternoon. I had only a few hours on the cold and cloudy Saturday evening for learning from my uncle what I hoped to learn from him.

I hoped to learn from my uncle that his bachelorhood was not the result of some fear or weakness; that his having no wife or girlfriend was merely a sign of some or another higher calling. I would have been satisfied to hear from him, for example, that his being a bachelor would allow him, if he so wished, to experience the peculiar joys and disappointments of an owner of racehorses. I had no reason for supposing that my uncle had ever wanted to write poetry or prose fiction, but I would have been satisfied to hear from him, for example, that his being a bachelor allowed him to read much more poetry or prose fiction than he would otherwise have read or to listen for hours each evening to so-called classical music on his radio or to study his books about Australian birds. Sometimes I even hoped he might tell me about a project that he had previously kept secret from me: some or another unending task that would allow me to think of him as a sort of scholar-gipsy of the back-roads of south-western Victoria. I had hurried to visit my uncle because a group of men that I had lately joined up with had seemed to assert that my uncle’s bachelorhood and my own solitariness were each a variety of illness.

Six months before my hurried visit to my uncle, I had begun to spend Friday and Saturday evenings with a young man and a young woman in their rented flat on the first floor of a building of four storeys within walking distance of the central business district of Melbourne. On other nights of each week, I went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction in my rented bungalow in the backyard of a house at a distance of several suburbs from the building of four storeys, but I no longer had the strength to go on trying to write on every evening of the week. On most Friday and Saturday evenings, several other young men visited the first-storey flat. Sometimes, one or another young man would have a young woman with him, but most of the young men came alone, bringing several bottles of beer. The young men stayed in the flat until about midnight, talking together with the two persons who lived in the flat or, sometimes, watching television. On some evenings, all the persons in the flat would set out just before midnight to walk across the park at the rear of the building of four storeys to a cinema that was one of the first cinemas in Melbourne to show a so-called midnight movie. I went with the other young persons to the cinema, even though I would always fall asleep soon after the program had begun.

The young man and the young woman who lived in the first-floor flat were not married. Neither I nor any of the young men who visited the flat knew of any other young persons who lived together without having married. Even the young persons who lived in the flat knew of no other young unmarried persons who lived together. (The reader has been told already that these fictional events are reported as having taken place in the early 1960s.) The young men who visited the flat envied the young man who lived there, but the young man himself often seemed discontented. Several months before I had begun to visit the flat, the young woman who lived there had left the flat and had lived elsewhere. She had left the flat after the young man who lived there had punched and beaten her. One of the conditions of her returning to the flat had been that the young man who lived there must consult a psychiatrist for the time being.

Often, while I was visiting the flat, the young man talked to me and the other visitors about his group, as he called it. This was a group of five or six men of various ages who met on alternate Sunday mornings in the home of a general practitioner who was studying psychiatry. The young man talked as though each of us listening ought to join his group or a similar group in order to deal with his many problems.

At some time during the fourth month after I had begun to visit the first-storey flat, I consulted the general practitioner mentioned in the previous paragraph. I told him that I visited the first-storey flat on Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but that I spent every other evening alone, trying to write poetry and prose fiction. I told him further that I had seemed lately to be losing the strength that I needed for trying to write poetry and prose fiction; that I had nowadays to drink several bottles of beer before I could begin to feel the strength that I need for trying to write. The doctor, so to call him, prescribed certain tablets that he said would be more helpful to me than beer. The tablets caused me to sleep during the hours when I would otherwise have been drinking beer and trying to write poetry and prose fiction, but I went on taking the tablets and consulting the doctor, so to call him. During the third consultation, he told me I was ready to join his Sunday-morning group.

Most of the young men in the group seemed to be reformed alcoholics, but the young man who lived in the flat told me privately that several of them had what he called serious sexual problems. I had expected that the members of the group would be continually questioning and challenging one another, but for much of their time together they did little more than gossip. The doctor, so to call him, sat with the group but seemed to follow a policy of keeping silent unless asked a direct question. Only one man in the group used technical terms, so to call them. This man claimed to have read many books by the author that he referred to familiarly as Freud.

I was asked few questions during my first session with the group, but early in my second session the man who used technical terms asked me whether or not I had a girlfriend. Having learned that I had no girlfriend, he asked me what efforts I was presently making to acquire a girlfriend. I answered that I was making no such efforts at present; that I spent all my free time at present trying to write poetry and prose fiction; that the few young women I met up with were none of them interested in poetry or prose fiction; that my leading a solitary life might better help me as a writer than if I were to acquire a girlfriend or a wife. The man then used many technical terms. I understood him to be telling me that my trying to write poetry and prose fiction was no more than my trying to find an imaginary girlfriend or wife. I understood from the demeanour of the other men in the group that they agreed with the man who used technical terms, even though most of them were unskilled in the use of such terms.

I did not try to defend myself against the man who used technical terms, but when I left the group that morning I had already decided that I would attend only one more session. At that session, I would refute the claims of the man who used technical terms, so I had decided. I would defend solitary males and bachelors against the wordy arguments of European theorists. In the meanwhile, I would make a hurried trip to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I would walk with my uncle across mostly level grassy countryside and would draw strength from the company of a man who had kept up no fewer than three long-lasting courtships with good-looking young women but was still a bachelor.

I had expected to feel much more comfortable walking with my uncle across his bleak paddocks than I had felt with the group of men in the doctor’s meeting-room, but I could not readily explain the reason for my visit. I had never told him that I no longer believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church, although he probably suspected as much. I could not even tell my uncle that I had joined a group of men who were patients of a doctor with an interest in psychiatry. I told him that I had been for a long time without a girlfriend but that I was amply consoled by the various dreams that I had of my future. One of those dreams, so I told my uncle, was my dream of owning racehorses in the future, which dream my uncle readily understood. Another of my dreams, so I told my uncle, was my dream of being published as a poet or as a writer of prose-fiction. This dream he claimed also to understand, although the only twentieth-century Australian authors that he seemed to have read were A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, and Ion L. Idriess.

I told my uncle the merest summary of what I called my beer-drinking dream, and not only because he was not a drinker. After drinking large amounts of beer, I would usually feel reconciled to my present solitariness and to a life of bachelorhood. I would even count myself lucky not to have to endure the nervous strain and the financial costs of courtship and marriage. Some or another comfortable saloon bar would become for me in later life what his lounge-room was for the average married man, or so I often supposed while I was drinking. But sometimes when I was awake in the early hours and feeling gloomy after an evening of beer-drinking, then what I called my hangover-dream would appear to me. The dream began at some vague time in my future as a beer-drinking bachelor. One or another of my drinking-companions would decide that my bachelor’s way of life was only a posturing: a means of advertising my need for a girlfriend or a wife. This drinking-companion would be a married man with what is called nowadays a large extended family. A certain member of that family would be a young female person of presentable appearance or better who had led a sheltered life and had had few suitors. (I would always spare myself the task of trying to imagine the details of the history of the young female person.) My drinking-companion would have spoken favourably about me to the presentable young person for some time before he had even told me of her existence. Then he would tell me during a few drinking-sessions more about the young person than I might have learned if she and I had gone together for six months. I would then express my admiration for the young person, knowing that she would learn of it through our intermediary. Hints, intimations, even guarded messages would be relayed in each direction. I would be spared many of the anxieties of a conventional courtship. The day when the young female person and I would finally meet would be some sort of family celebration at the home of our go-between. The tub in the bathroom would be three quarters full of bottles and cans of beer and packs of crushed ice. No more would be required of me than to say something witty from time to time to the young person and not to fall over or to be caught urinating or vomiting in the backyard before I went home.

I could never even have hinted to my uncle that I had also what I might have called my dream of last resort, although the men from the group that I had lately joined might have considered my dream little more than a masturbation fantasy. When none of my other dreams seemed of any worth, I sometimes saw in my mind one or another image of one or another of my female cousins as though she was of a mood to relent towards me and as though the image of her mother was far elsewhere in my mind.

When the sun was setting below the cliffs in the distance, my uncle had still not told me anything in return for my confidences. Then a plover flew past, crying its mournful-sounding cry. My uncle told me that none of his farmer-neighbours seemed to know that two distinct species of plover inhabited the coastal district. I myself had not known this, even though plovers were among the birds that especially interested me because they laid and hatched their eggs in mere hollows scratched from the soil. I told my uncle that he was fortunate to be a bachelor who could study his bird books of an evening while his neighbours were dealing with their wives and children. My uncle then told me that he had for long feared he had been made sexually impotent by a kick that he had taken as a schoolboy. When he was ten years of age, so my uncle told me, he had been kicked viciously in the stones by a boy named Stanley Chambers.

Surely some readers of these pages are able to think of the writer of the pages as being no more than the narrator of a work of fiction: a personage supposed by those readers to exist on the far side of their own minds for as long as they go on reading these pages. For the sake of those readers, whose prowess as readers of fiction I admire unreservedly, I report the following.

I travelled back to Melbourne on the day after my youngest uncle and I had talked about plovers and other matters, but I never afterwards attended any Sunday morning group. I was no longer willing to listen to the opinions of the would-be psychiatrist and his ignorant patients. I was no longer willing to hear them talk as though a scribbling theorist in some or another gloomy city in central Europe had long before explained away the existence of a far-reaching network of images of swamps below tall cliffs and of racecourses among level grassy landscapes and of paddocks where quails and plovers lay low and of female personages seen from a distance, which far-reaching network was, in fact, no more than an image in my own mind. In short, I behaved as a fictional personage is obliged to behave; I remained true to my belief that no so-called real world could exist among the scene after fictional scene where I was believed to live and to write.

Other readers of these pages may well think of the writer of the pages not as a conjectured personage but as a mere human person hardly different from themselves. For the sake of those readers, whose prowess as readers of fiction I could never admire, I report the following.

I travelled back to Melbourne on the day after my youngest uncle and I had talked about plovers and other matters. Before a week had passed, I reported to the Sunday morning group what my uncle had told me about his having been kicked as a boy. I did not expect that the doctor and the members of the group would then advise me as to how my uncle, a man approaching middle-age, might overcome his fear, but I hoped that the doctor and the members of the group might repay my trust in them by suggesting how I might overcome some of my own fears. I listened while they talked at length. Afterwards, I went away disappointed and never returned. At the time, I could not have expressed the matter coherently, but I understood later that the speculations of the group were a sort of inferior fiction. I might even have said that each member of the group exercised a sort of rudimentary imagination. He struggled to explain his imagined world to me, who would later go home to my bachelor’s flat, there to struggle to write my own sort of fiction without even imagination to help me.

Eleven years after my youngest uncle and I had last talked seriously together, my first book of fiction was published. During those eleven years, I had become a husband and later a father while he had remained a bachelor. During those years, I had met with him only occasionally. Soon after I had become a husband, I had taken my wife to meet him. Later, I had paraded my children in front of him. He and I had had little to say to one another during those eleven years. I had expected that my first book might disappoint my uncle, but I could not have predicted that he would react towards it as he did. He sent no message of any sort to me but he wrote to my brother that he, my youngest uncle, had disowned me for ever.

While I was writing my second book of fiction, I thought hardly at all about my uncle who had disowned me. While I was writing that book, my uncle’s mother and two of his sisters died. When the book was published, only a few survived of my father’s eight siblings. Two of these were my bachelor-uncle and his youngest sister, my unmarried aunt: she who might have looked out from a second- or third-storey window in a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne on many a day during the year when I was born. Again, my uncle sent no message of any sort to me, but again he wrote to my brother. My uncle wrote that he had been far more disgusted by my second book than by my first. But his own disgust, so my uncle wrote, was a small matter by comparison with his most urgent concern. His youngest sister, the only one still alive of my four unmarried aunts, she who often referred to me as her first and favourite nephew, was eager to read my second book. He had persuaded her with some trouble that my first book could not possibly be of interest to her, and she had still not read it. Now, however, she could hardly be put off; she was pressing him to allow her to read my second book of fiction, which he considered not so much a book of fiction as an accumulation of filth. I have never heard from my brother what he wrote in reply to these complaints from my uncle.

I know, even today, no more about the ailments liable to affect the human body than I knew, more than forty years ago, when I ceased to attend the Sunday morning group, about the ailments affecting the mind. What little time I have had for learning during my adult life has been given to the study of what I call for convenience patterns of images in a place that I call for convenience my mind, wherever it may lie or whatever else it may be a part of. Even so, I read or hear sometimes about theories that I myself would never have had the wit to devise. One such theory, which I heard for the first time a few years after the early death of my youngest uncle, asserts that a person subjected to prolonged emotional stress, so to call it, is more likely than the average person to be afflicted by the disease of cancer.

Seven months after the publication of my second book of fiction, I heard that my youngest uncle had been found to have cancer of the liver. He was aged fifty-five and had been in good health throughout his life. He had never smoked and had never drunk alcohol. According to his older brothers, no member of their parents’ families had been known to have any sort of cancer. (When I mentioned these matters to my mother at the time, she told me without smiling that my uncle’s cancer would have been caused by his sister’s cooking. This was the sister who had lived for a time in the convent of three storeys and who kept house for my uncle for some years before his illness became known. According to my mother, my youngest aunt had learned in the convent to be mean with food: to reheat leftovers and to bake cheap, doughy puddings.)

My uncle had been told that he would live for no more than six months. During the first four of those months, I told myself that my uncle was obliged to make the first move towards reconciliation, given that I had not written my books of fiction with the intention of offending him. At some time during the fifth of those months, when I had still received no message from my uncle, I telephoned him and asked if he would care to have me visit him. He told me that he would be pleased to see me.

I drove my motor-car from Melbourne to the coastal city that has been mentioned several times already in these pages. The time of year was late winter, and I remembered that the time of year had been late winter also when I had travelled by railway-train to visit my uncle fourteen years before and had talked with him about plovers and other matters. The hospital where I met with him was on the northern side of the coastal city, far from any view of the Southern Ocean; the view from his room was of mostly level grassy paddocks with lines of trees in the distance.

I spoke with my youngest uncle for nearly an hour. He was weak and haggard, and his skin was yellow, but he seemed no less cheerful than of old. We spoke about his father’s farm, of the tall cliffs visible from every paddock of the farm, and of the sounds of the ocean that were heard from every paddock except on the few days of the year when the north wind blew from the plains inland. We spoke about the birds that he and I had observed, and I reminded him about the white-fronted chat, the bird that lived the life of a species from the inland plains even though gales from the Southern Ocean would sometimes bend sideways the clumps of rushes where its nest was hung. We spoke mostly, however, about horse-racing: about successful or unlucky bets we had made; about champion horses we had seen; about racing colours we had admired or about racehorse-names we had thought witty or inspired. As I prepared to leave him, I suggested to my youngest uncle that he should not have been surprised if my interests, in later years, had been different from his own, given that Boy Charlton had had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself. In all the time while we were together, that was the nearest we came to referring to my books of fiction.

We were still outwardly cheerful as I prepared to leave, although we both surely knew that we would never meet again in the place that is sometimes called this world, as though to suggest that at least one other world may exist. When we came to shake hands, my youngest uncle thanked me for what he called my wonderful companionship during our earlier years together. I was so surprised that I was able to grasp his hand and to look him in the eye and then to stride to the door of his room and for some little distance along the corridor of the hospital before I began to weep.

While I drove back to Melbourne, I came to understand that the hour while my uncle and I had talked together in the hospital might have been the first time for as long as I could remember when I had kept out of my mind all thoughts of books of fiction that I had written or of books of fiction that I hoped to write in future and perhaps, too, of books of fiction that other persons had written and that I had read. While I had talked with my uncle, he and I had behaved as though I had never written any book of fiction and as though I had no intention of writing any book of fiction in the future. We had restricted ourselves to talking about views of ocean and of mostly level grassy countryside, about birds, and about horse-racing, as though none of those topics had ever found its way into a book of fiction. I might have said afterwards that I had survived for an hour without fiction or that I had experienced for a little the life I would have led if I had never had recourse to fiction. I might have said that that life would not have been impossible to lead if only I could have accepted its chief hardship: if only I could have accepted that I would never be able to suggest to another person what I truly felt towards him or her.

I have reported in the previous seventy-eight paragraphs numerous events, few of them seeming to be connected with my conception. Admittedly, my father and my mother have been referred to, but surely I could conjecture, postulate, speculate more boldly as to how those two came together?

No, I could not. Whatever I might have hoped to achieve when I began this piece of fiction, I am not going to be able to explain how I came to be conceived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The chief character had moved out of his parents’ house during his twenty-first year. He took with him two cardboard grocery cartons full of books, several manila folders of drafts of poems waiting to be revised, his binoculars, and his clothes. During the four years between his moving out and his arrival with his binoculars at the upstairs flat, the chief character had lived in six different rented rooms in various suburbs of Melbourne but had kept safe his cartons of books and his folders of poems and his binoculars, which were still in their original case of imitation leather. In the case also was a parcel of white cloth, about half the size of the chief character’s thumb. The parcel was stuffed with some or another sort of crystal or granule, the purpose of which, so the chief character had heard from someone, was to draw off the moisture in the air inside the case of imitation leather.

Whenever he opened the case in order to take out the binoculars or to put them away, the chief character would touch the parcel several times with a fingertip. Afterwards, he would roll the parcel between several fingertips, pressing and squeezing the cloth until he could feel some of the many crystals that were packed into the parcel. Whenever he merely touched the parcel, he seemed to be plumping a pillow that belonged on a bed in a bedroom on the upper storey of a doll’s house. After he had plumped the pillow, it would have been ready for placing on the single bed in the upper room in his mind so that the young female personage whose room it was could have lain to rest in the bed whenever it had pleased her to leave off looking out from her upper-storey window and to step across the room to her bed. If it had occurred to him that the usual occupants of a doll’s house were lifeless figurines, then he would have seen the female personage in his mind either as a character in a comic-strip in his mind or as the handiwork of a craftsman of genius who had equipped the personage and, perhaps, each of the other personages in the same house, with tiny clockwork or electric motors that enabled the personages to walk and to perform certain rudimentary movements. Whenever he fingered the granules inside the parcel, he seemed to be fingering beads of a substance that he knew as Irish horn.

Like many another earnest Catholic schoolboy during the 1940s, the chief character had carried in his pocket a set of rosary beads. Sometimes he passed the beads between his fingers while he murmured the collection of prayers known as the rosary. He understood that the beads themselves were no more than counters or markers and had no intrinsic spiritual value. However, he had once received as a present from his father’s youngest sister a set of beads somewhat different from any that he had previously owned or seen. A small cloth label attached to the beads stated that they were made from genuine Irish horn. The chief character did not know at the time, and never afterwards learned, what were the origins of Irish horn, whether genuine or imitation. But his not knowing as a boy what the beads were made from only added to their value in his estimation. He would have prized them for their appearance alone. Every bead differed, however slightly, from the next, if not in shape then in colour. If a bead was not distinguished by some bulge or concavity, then it was more richly tinted or less so than its neighbours. The fifty and more beads, when viewed from a distance, seemed predominantly blue-green, but hardly any bead, when he looked closely at it, could have been called either blue or green. In many a bead was a tint that he could not name, but this only pleased him the more. He would sometimes hold bead after bead between an eye and the light, hoping to see what he saw whenever he peered into certain of his glass marbles or into certain panels of coloured glass in the front doors of houses: a luminous other-world waiting to be populated by personages of his own devising; or, perhaps, a limpid medium, much less dangerous than water, through which he might have found his way towards places beneath rivers and lakes where characters from comic-strips or from poems watched over their female captives who might have been, after all, not dead but merely fast asleep.

The chief character took his binoculars to the upstairs flat on a few Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but got no benefit from them. He and his companions soon tired of keeping watch in the dark bathroom until the light might have been turned on in the young woman’s bedroom. Sometimes, when one or another young man had seemed to stay overlong in the bathroom, the others would suspect him of having sighted the young woman and kept her for himself alone, as it were. Once, when the chief character had stepped into the bathroom in order to urinate, the light had just then appeared in the young woman’s room. The chief character had picked up the binoculars from where they lay in readiness on the bathroom floor, but before he had brought them into focus the light had been turned off again.

On a certain Friday or Saturday evening, the chief character’s binoculars were lying in readiness on the floor of the bathroom of the upstairs flat but all of the young men gathered in the flat were drinking beer in the lounge-room and watching some or another television program. At a certain point in the evening, according to the narrator of the abandoned work of fiction, the young men found themselves watching images of bishops or cardinals or high-ranking personages of the Catholic Church while some or another religious ceremony was taking place. Several times, while the young men watched, the image of one or another personage was seen to close its eyes and to bow its head for a few moments. After the second or third occasion when an image had appeared thus, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat began to jeer at the images of the personages.

The young man who jeered was one of two persons in the room who had attended a Catholic secondary school but had later ceased to call themselves Catholics. The other such person was the chief character. The young man who jeered looked while he jeered in the direction of the chief character. The young man then left off jeering and asked a question of the chief character as though he might have been the only person in the room who could answer the question. The young man asked what it was that Catholic bishops and priests and members of religious orders saw or affected to see whenever they closed their eyes during religious ceremonies.

The chief character of the work of fiction that would never be completed gave some or another flippant answer to the young man who had jeered at the images, but he, the chief character, was not comfortable. This was not because he was in any way sympathetic to the personages whose images had appeared just then on the television screen but because he himself, a few years before, had often closed his eyes and bowed his head during religious ceremonies. The chief character and the young man who jeered had sat in the same classroom during their final year of secondary education. The jeerer had failed his matriculation examination and had then gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to find a young woman who would live with him without first having married him. The chief character had passed his matriculation examination and had then gone to live in a building of two storeys among mostly grassy countryside, which building was the novitiate of a religious order of priests. The chief character had lived for only twelve weeks in the building of two storeys and had then returned to his parents’ home in a suburb of Melbourne. Soon afterwards, he had gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to write poetry or prose fiction. On the evening when his former classmate had jeered at the images on the television screen, the chief character had suspected that his former classmate was jeering at him — not as though the chief character still prayed or still attended religious ceremonies but as though his staying alone in his room during most evenings and his trying to write poetry or prose fiction was his way of closing his eyes against the real world for the sake of something illusory. The chief character could not have defended himself if he had been thus jeered at. Moreover, he suspected already that he was far from being the sort of writer who could include, years later, in one of his works a scene, so to call it, in which a fictional writer avenged himself against a fictional jeerer.

Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another report of one or another person’s having been paid a sum of money by one or another diocese or religious order of the Catholic Church for the reason that the person had been sexually assaulted by some or another Catholic pastor or teacher. On one or another of the evenings mentioned above, the young man who was reported above as having jeered at images of Catholic clergymen announced to the other persons gathered in the young man’s upstairs flat that he intended to take legal action against the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne and against the orders of religious brothers and nuns that had taught him. The grounds for his legal action were going to be that his various parish priests and teachers had set back his intellectual development by ten years and more; they had filled his mind with legends and superstitions instead of useful knowledge. (Even if the persons in the upstairs flat had not been drinking beer for several hours, none of them would have supposed the young man to be talking seriously. Any sort of legal action against the Catholic Church would have seemed preposterous folly in the early 1960s, even though certain priests and religious teachers were perpetrating during those years some of the sexual assaults that gave rise to criminal charges and out-of-court settlements in later years.)

The sum of money that the young man was going to demand from the Catholic Church was the equivalent in today’s currency of about twenty million dollars. When his listeners asked how he would spend such a sum, the young man answered them in detail.

Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another advertisement offering for sale one or another building of two or even three storeys that had formerly been a convent for an order of nuns or a monastery for an order of Catholic priests in some or another town in the countryside of Victoria. At the time when the young man in the upstairs flat began to explain how he would spend the equivalent of twenty million dollars, it would have seemed preposterous to suppose that any convent or monastery in any town in the countryside of Victoria would ever be offered for sale, and yet the young man predicted that the Catholic Church, which was then a flourishing organisation, would soon begin to be less than flourishing and that convents and monasteries would soon be offered for sale. The young man explained to the other persons in the upstairs flat that he would use part of the proceeds of his legal action as the purchase-price of a building of two or even three storeys in the countryside of Victoria, which building had been formerly a monastery or a convent.

When the young man who lived in the upstairs flat first mentioned a monastery or a convent, and whenever he afterwards talked about such a building, the chief character saw in his mind one or another detail of an image of a two-storey building of bluestone that he had seen twice only, on a certain Saturday when he had attended a race-meeting for the first time. The chief character had been taken to and from the race-meeting by a paternal uncle who lived in a coastal city in the south-west of Victoria. The race-meeting had been held some twenty miles inland from the coastal city, at a racecourse that was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside with trees in the distance. Between some of the trees were the roofs of buildings in a small town. The tallest of these buildings was a convent belonging to an order of teaching nuns. The chief character had only twice glimpsed the convent through the windows of his uncle’s motor-car but he, the chief character, had noted several dormer windows above the level of the upper-storey windows. He had asked his uncle whether the windows were mere ornaments or whether each window had behind it a cell-like room where one or another nun read or prayed or slept of an evening. The uncle first told the chief character that any male person who went beyond the hallway and the front parlour of the convent earned the penalty of immediate excommunication. The uncle then said that the nuns in the convent in the small town took in as boarders a few older girls from districts further inland. Perhaps each of these older girls, so the uncle said, was allotted a comfortable attic room with a window overlooking grassy countryside and part of a distant racecourse.

One of the conditions of his buying the convent or monastery, so the young man told his listeners in the upstairs flat, was that all the furnishings and fittings should be sold to him. He would be especially concerned to have the chapel handed over to him with its altar and tabernacle intact and the sacristy with its cupboards full of vestments and so-called sacred vessels. If possible, he would buy also the robes or the habits worn by the priests or the nuns who had formerly lived in the building. After having acquired the building, he would arrange for part of the first floor to be turned into a luxuriously appointed apartment for himself and the woman who lived with him. The rest of the first floor would be turned into many smaller apartments, each of which would be occupied, so the young man said, by a high-class call-girl. The upper floors would be converted into spacious apartments to be occupied permanently, or at weekends, by each of the young men who had visited him on the many Friday and Saturday evenings when he had been no more than a clerk who worked in a building of many storeys and who lived in an upstairs flat. One of these young men, of course, would have been the chief character.

When the young man had fitted out to his satisfaction the former convent or former monastery, so he told his visitors not only on the evening when he first talked of taking legal action against the Catholic Church but on many an evening afterwards, and when each of the smaller apartments on the first floor had been occupied by a high-class call-girl, then would begin the series of events for the sake of which the building had been bought and fitted out. On every Friday and every Saturday evening, the owner of the building of several storeys would arrange for the celebration in the chapel of the building of a Black Mass, that is to say, an obscene travesty of the Catholic Mass. Whenever he discussed this matter, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat would state that the chief character was the best qualified of all the young men in the flat to be the celebrant of the Black Mass. As the celebrant, he would wear only a chasuble of the style known as Roman, which would scarcely hide his nakedness. The young man from the upstairs flat would be the altar-server or acolyte and would wear only a lace-edged surplice reaching to his waist. The congregation would consist of all the other residents of the building of several storeys, each of them naked beneath the habit of a nun or of a priest. At a certain point during the Black Mass, the celebrant would reach into the tabernacle and would take out a croissant and a bottle of expensive wine. The so-called priest’s communion would consist of the celebrant’s buttering and eating the croissant and swigging often from the bottle. Soon afterwards, the congregation would be invited into the sanctuary not to receive communion but to take part in a banquet. (Food and drink would have been waiting on tables near by.) Towards the end of the banquet, a plentiful supply of comfortable cushions would be spread around the sanctuary, on the steps of the altar, and on the altar itself, in front of the tabernacle. Then would follow what the young man from the upstairs flat called a sex-orgy.

After the young man of the upstairs flat had first disclosed his plans for the Black Mass in the building of several storeys, it became the custom on every Friday and Saturday evening for all of the young persons gathered in the upstairs flat, including the young woman who lived there, to spend some or another part of each evening in discussing how they might spend one or another Friday or Saturday evening in the building of several storeys after the young man of the upstairs flat had bought the building and had fitted it out to his liking. The discussions at first were simple. The young man of the upstairs flat owned a copy each of several issues of the American magazine Playboy, which had recently been allowed into Australia after having been previously a prohibited import. All of the persons gathered in the upstairs flat would look at one after another illustration of a bare-breasted young woman from the magazines and would cast votes in order to decide whether or not the young woman should spend some time as a guest in the building of several storeys. The young woman of the upstairs flat was interested in dance and music and would describe some of the items that she would later choreograph, as she put it, for performance by herself and other naked young women during banquets. The chief character tried to amuse the others by reading to them parodies he had composed of prayers from the Mass. In each parody words such as God, angels, and sacrifice were replaced by words such as Lucifer, devils, and farce. However, few of the persons in the flat knew anything about Catholic doctrine and liturgy, and the parodies aroused little interest. The only means that the chief character found for amusing the others in the upstairs flat was his performing a brief mime in which he took the role of a priest first turning from the altar towards his congregation with his head bowed and his eyes closed, then seeming to notice that something was amiss, and finally looking aghast. (The chief character never held back from discussing with the other persons in the upstairs flat the details of the banquets and the orgies in the building of several storeys, but he was never able to imagine himself as taking part in an orgy. Whenever the chapel of the building of several storeys appeared as an image in his mind, it was always fitted with a so-called side-chapel, a sort of alcove with a few pews to one side of the altar. If an orgy seemed about to begin, he would slip unnoticed into the front pew of the side-chapel and would there masturbate quietly while he watched the goings-on in the sanctuary.)

In time, discussions about the building of several storeys became more detailed. Someone proposed that banquets and orgies should be filmed. This proposal led to plans for a library of films to be set up in the building together with a cinema where the residents could gather on quiet evenings to watch memorable scenes from past orgies. Someone then suggested the setting up of a film-unit which would not only record notable events in the building of several storeys but would produce short feature-films with contents grossly obscene: what would be called, twenty and more years later, porn movies. Mention of a library led also to discussion of books — obscene books, of course — and a plan for sending one of the residents of the building of several storeys by ship to Europe for the purpose of buying and smuggling back into Australia some of the most outrageous of the books reputed to be available in France or Sweden. Failing that, the chief character could be allotted a quiet suite in a remote part of an upper storey, could be provided with a baize-topped desk, a shaded lamp, and the latest electric typewriter, and could be urged to write short stories or novels with contents so foul that the works could never be published but would be circulated as bound typescripts among the persons who lived in or visited the house of several storeys.

After a few weeks of the sort of discussion mentioned in the previous paragraph, the persons in the upstairs flat began to talk less about sexual gratification and more about the indulgence of some of their less urgent passions. Perhaps they had begun to ask themselves how they might spend the uneventful mornings and afternoons between the riotous evenings in the chapel. Perhaps the young men, knowing that they would never again want for sexual relief, were pleased to discover in themselves yearnings for more subtle and lasting pleasures. For whatever reason, the young men in the upstairs flat came around to discussing such projects as the setting up of a large room given over to the display of football memorabilia. After the young man of the upstairs flat had reassured the other young men that money would be no object in the fitting-out of the building of several storeys, he who cherished old football-cards and autographed pictures of premiership teams had taken to setting out in an imagined upstairs hall row after row of glass display-cases, each containing part of a valuable collection inherited from his grandfather. One young man loved to play poker. He was to be provided with a luxuriously appointed gaming room where he could spend whole days with like-minded persons, betting on the fall of costly, hand-painted cards. It was expected that many of the high-class call-girls would find their way to the gaming-room and that their presence, fashionably dressed, would give a stimulating piquancy to the atmosphere among the card-tables. A young man with simpler interests wanted to be provided with numerous large glass tanks, properly heated and aerated, so that he could stock them with rare tropical fish. This man assured the others in the upstairs flat that nothing would be more likely to rest them and restore them after a strenuous night of banqueting and sensuality than to wander through an indoor aquarium, admiring the changeable colours of gliding or darting fish or the swaying of green water-plants in limpid water behind sturdy glass.

Of the various young men in the upstairs flat, the chief character was the last to report to the others how he hoped to amuse himself on uneventful mornings and afternoons in the building of several storeys. He supposed that the other young men were expecting to hear that he would furnish an upper-storey room with bookshelves and a writing-desk, that he would fill the shelves with classic works of literature, and that he would spend most of each day in his room, reading in a comfortable armchair or writing prose fiction or poetry at his desk, and when he was finally asked about his plans he tried to fulfil these supposed expectations. He would keep mostly to his room, he said, and the walls of the room would be covered with books and the desk in the room with pages of typing and handwriting. He knew from experience that the others would not be curious about the subject-matter of the pages on the table. However, for the sake of the few young men who seemed to be occasional readers of books he offered the information that his library would be missing many of the so-called classics of literature, given that he often struggled to read more than a few pages of one or another so-called classic. His library, he said, would contain many of the sort of book called by literary historians or critics a minor classic or a neglected masterpiece or a work that defied classification.

The chief character hoped that his brief account of his way of life in his upstairs quarters would dissuade the other young men from seeking him out if ever they became bored with the goings-on in the more frequented parts of the building of several storeys. Perhaps after he and the other young men had been together in the building for a year and more, so the chief character supposed, and after they had been present together at many a Black Mass and after he had watched them taking part in many a sex-orgy and after they had looked up many a time from their cushions in the sanctuary and had seen him masturbating quietly in the side-chapel — perhaps then he would be more comfortable with them and would not object to their opening the doors of the further rooms of his remote upstairs suite and learning how he spent most of the time while he was assumed to be reading or writing. Perhaps then also, so the chief character supposed, he would not shrink from having one or another of the more friendly high-class call-girls look into his further rooms. During his first months in the building, however, the chief character would prefer to be taken for a reclusive reader of books and a writer of poetry and prose fiction.

During those first months, the chief character would hope that the craftsmen climbing the stairs each day towards his suite would be supposed by the other residents to be building bookshelves and that the boxes delivered to his suite would be supposed to contain books. The craftsmen, however, would be skilled model-makers, and the boxes would contain the many thousands of components of the models to be installed in one or more of the chief character’s rooms in the building of several storeys.

Once having got from the owner of the building a sum of money equal to the cost of several thousand books, including many rare first editions, the chief character would have employed a team of highly skilled model-makers to work under his direction in an upper room with a dormer window. The team would have begun by covering most of the floor with a taut, green-coloured fabric. The team would then have driven through this fabric and into the floor hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny white pegs. These pegs would then have served as supports for hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny white railings. The whole structure would have formed the inside running-rail, so called, of a miniature racecourse with long straights and gradual turnings. Beside the racecourse would have been numerous miniature buildings and car-parks set among miniature trees and flower-beds. In the area enclosed by the course proper, so called, would have been at least one miniature lake.

Sometimes, when the chief character had got thus far in his plans and when he had foreseen himself lying for the first time on the floor beside the newly completed racecourse and looking along an expanse of green fabric bordered with tiny white pegs, he would be tempted to abandon his project. At such times, he would seem to have made only a toy-landscape, a place more suitable for recalling certain days in his childhood than for enabling him to see further across his mind than he had yet seen. But then he would foresee himself fitting a brownish Holland blind to the dormer window and then drawing the blind against the sunlight and then, perhaps, stepping back into a corner of the room and looking at the lines of pegs through half-closed eyes and even through a pair of binoculars held back-to-front to his eyes; and then some or another glimpse in his mind of something not previously seen in his mind would persuade him to go on.

The other persons in the upstairs flat, if ever they cared to imagine the chief character in his suite of rooms in the building of several storeys, could have seen him only as writing at a desk with shelves of books around him. Soon after he had talked to the others about his way of life in the non-existent building, they had begun to lose interest in the orgy-house, as it came to be called. The poker games and the other diversions and even the Black Masses were seldom mentioned again, although sometimes an image on the television screen of some or another young woman would prompt one or more of the young men to reminisce as it were, about the good looks of the high-class call girls. It began to seem to the chief character as though he had been left in charge of the house; the less the others talked about it, the more clearly and substantially it began to appear in his own mind. Sometimes, when the house had first been talked about, he had given much thought to protecting his privacy; and he had seen himself often in his mind as being alone in his rooms in the late afternoon or the early evening and trying not to be distracted by some or another drunken shout or playful squeal from far below. As the others in the upstairs flat talked less about the building of several storeys, it seemed in his mind sometimes so quiet that he might have felt urged to go downstairs and to stroll around the deserted chapel until he had recalled a few hectic moments from some or another orgy that he had watched long before.

The chief character had often sustained himself with daydreams about his future, but his wandering around a disused convent in his mind seemed unconnected with any life that he had previously wanted for himself. The empty upstairs rooms seemed more solid than any scenery from daydreams; the rooms seemed to be on the same level of existence as things that he would have called his faculties or his qualities; the rooms even caused him to feel a more ample person and a more worthy.

He was no mere observer of mental scenery. He was not long in learning that he could alter certain details and have them stay as he preferred them to be. He had wanted for some time to extend the part of the building that he thought of as his own. His particular wish was for more dormer windows, each with an attic-like room behind it. Then, after no effort that he could recall, he seemed to be strolling past doorway after doorway in a corridor that he did not recognise. When next he looked upwards towards his quarters from the grounds around the building, an entire wing seemed to have been added. His desk and his bookshelves, not to mention his rooms filled with models, were now even further away from the main living area. Even if the other young men and the high-class call-girls were to settle in the building after all, he would hear scarcely a sound from them.

He was in no hurry to call in the model-makers. He was now of a mind to have a number of attic-rooms filled each with a racecourse but he supposed that this would disturb the quietness of his suite for many weeks or even for months. For the time being, he was content to experience the subtle differences between room and room: in one room a red-gold hair still lay in the crack between two floorboards from the last days before the last girl-boarder there had gone home to her parents’ property far inland; in another room the hair, if he could have lighted on it, would have been black; the window of yet another room was the only window in all the building from which a person looking out might have seen on a day of sunshine the occasional distant flash of light from the windscreen of a motor-car and might have understood how far away was the nearest main road. (Seemingly, the chief character had shifted the building by the power of his imagination or by a supreme effort of his will; the reader will recall that the original of the building of several storeys was in one or another street of a small town.) Some rooms were distinguished one from another only by the mood that came over the chief character after he had stepped inside and had closed the door behind him. Perhaps the glimpse of the distant countryside that came to him through the sides of his eyes put him in mind of Tasmania or New Zealand, although he had never been to either of those places. Perhaps he felt weak and foolish to be an adult and yet to be devising elaborate games with painted toys. Perhaps, on the other hand, he felt that his life was all of a piece: the imagery that had sustained him as a child could yield still more meaning in his later life. This last-mentioned feeling came to him sometimes accompanied by an image of an old man staring at the shore of a lake or a swamp where a gentle wave was breaking against a clump of rushes. The original of the image was a photograph of the psychiatrist C. G. Jung that had once appeared on the cover of the news-magazine Time. The chief character had read the long article that accompanied the photograph. He had not been able to understand the theories of the famous psychiatrist but he, the chief character, never afterwards forgot his having read that the psychiatrist as an old man had set out to play again his favourite childhood games in the hope of learning about himself something of much value.

The chief character was most likely to bring to mind the building of several storeys during the many weekday evenings when he was alone in his rented room and was trying to write poetry or prose fiction. Instead of writing what he had intended to write, he would draw a plan of the upper floor of his wing of the building and would try to decide which of the rooms there would be the room where he would sit at his desk deciding such matters as the shape of each of the model racecourses, the sort of landscape that ought to be painted as a mural behind each racecourse, and whether or not each dormer window ought to be of stained glass and, if so, what should be the colours and the design of the glass.

I looked back just now at the previous few pages of this work of fiction and found that I have begun to write about the chief character as though he were the chief character of this present work. I have even begun to write as though I were still writing the work that I left off writing more than fifteen years ago on the bustling afternoon mentioned earlier. I have fallen into somewhat the same confusion that the chief character himself fell into when he sat down to write one or another piece of writing but began instead to write about a building that had already been abandoned by the persons who had first imagined it.

I ought to report one last detail from the chief character’s speculating about the upper rooms in the building of several storeys. As a small child, he had heard from the radio on Saturday afternoons many names of racehorses before he had seen even a photograph of a racecourse and long before he had seen any sort of representation of a set of racing colours. While he listened to the radio he knew, of course, that a number of horses far away were contesting a race, but there appeared in his mind a sequence of images derived only from the sounds of the names. He was listening to broadcasts of horse-races when he was still barely able to read simple words, so that names such as Hiatus, Latani, Icene, and Aggressor had for him no meaning. He learned in due course what most such words denoted, but he never forgot how the words had affected him. The name Hiatus, for example, brought to his mind an image of a grey-black bird struggling against winds high in the sky. The name Latani caused him to see a mole like a small black bead on the chin of an olive-skinned young woman. The name Icene gave rise in his mind both to a sight and to a sound: the sight of a long gown of silvery material and the sound of the gown’s trailing across a floor of white marble. When he heard the name Aggressor, he saw the grey-brown side of a steep railway-cutting wet with rain. Later, as a young man who went often to the races, he maintained his interest in the names of horses and took pleasure in the success of horses with names that sounded well or connoted rich imagery. Later again, he could never see in his mind an expanse of green cloth on a floor beneath a dormer window without hearing in his mind one or more name suitable for a racehorse. His hearing the names thus would often persuade him against having the model-makers build their white fences and set in motion their gliding horses and doll-jockeys. The sound in his mind of one or another name would often seem to denote not a mere painted toy and not even an actual straining, staring racehorse but a knot of what he might have called compressed mental imagery or, using the word in a sense particularly his own, meaning. And when he sensed the presence in his mind of this sort of meaning he wanted not to watch model horses gliding across green cloth but to go in what seemed the opposite direction: to search, if possible, behind the scenery in his mind for the further scenery that must have lain there: for the further racecourses and the horses that raced there with names that he had heard already in his mind. But for this sort of searching he would need paper, pens, the means for writing. In his thoughts, he went back to his desk among the bookshelves. The attic rooms, for the time being, were empty. If, for the time being, a young man or a high-class call-girl were to visit him, he might feel again the embarrassment that he sometimes felt when he had to confess that he spent most of his free time sitting at a desk and writing about the lives of invisible personages in invisible places, but he would be spared the task of explaining why he had lately turned to writing about contests between invisible horses and jockeys on invisible racecourses.

If the chief character had had his favourites among the invisible racehorses, one such would have been named King-in-the-Lake. The name would have brought to mind an image of a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water. The man might have been dead or merely asleep.

Ten years before the image-man in the image-lake had first appeared to the chief character, he had read often the poem “The Forsaken Merman,” by Matthew Arnold. Afterwards, whenever he recalled his having read the poem, he recalled the seeming sound of bells travelling downwards through water and the seeming sight of a certain building in the neighbourhood of the lake. The building was of white weatherboards with a tower where orange-gold bells swung. While he seemed to hear under water the sound of the seeming bells, the chief character saw an image of the view that might have appeared to a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water. At the centre of the view was a zone of pale-blue sky. On either side of this zone was a narrow band of dark green. Each band was a part of the bank of the lake, where grass and clumps of rushes grew. If ever the chief character had wanted to design a set of invisible racing colours for the horse named King-in-the-Lake, then the colours pale blue and dark green would surely have occurred to him.

An invisible racecourse, no less than a visible, could be no more than a detail in the foreground of a far-reaching invisible landscape. The chief character might have supposed himself unable to comprehend the true extent of such a landscape or the intricacy of its details if he had not understood from the first that the landscape existed only in potential; was encoded in what he had yet to read or to write in his upstairs suite in the building of several storeys.

The chief character, then, had no need of any special faculty for bringing to mind such a detail as the name of the personage who was the owner of the racehorse that would carry the colours pale blue and dark green in one or more races that would be run in due course in a building of several storeys in his, the chief character’s mind. The chief character simply came by the information that the surname of the personage mentioned was Glass and that the initials preceding his name in racebooks and form-guides should be G. G. for the given names Gervase Graham or, perhaps, Gary Grenfell. If I could think of the chief character as having deliberately chosen the surname for his own chief character, then I might admire the chief character for his perceptiveness; for his seeming to be aware of the pattern of imagery, so to call it, in the work of fiction in which he himself is no more than a personage. But the personage with the surname Glass has the same sort of existence in the mind of the chief character as that personage has in my own mind. Like the hundreds of owners and trainers and jockeys who frequent one or another invisible racecourse, the personage named G. G. Glass has always existed in potentiality awaiting the appearance of his name in a text such as this.

In the place where I sit writing these words, a racecourse is often described as a place where persons of every rank compete as equals: where the magnate may have to watch his costly horse overtaken in the straight by an animal of unfashionable breeding owned by a syndicate of bar-attendants. While I was writing the previous paragraph, I was led to postulate a contest at one or another invisible racecourse between an invisible racehorse carrying the pale blue and dark green colours of G. G. Glass and an invisible racehorse carrying my own colours, as though a writer of a work of fiction might sometimes exist in potentiality awaiting the appearance of his or her name in a text such as might be written by an invisible personage mentioned in an invisible text. The appearance of my own racehorse on the other seeming side of my own fictional text might have shown me something of what I had hoped for as a child when I had wanted to see outwards from the coloured glass that I often looked into.

A certain brief section of my unfinished book was set, as it were, in an old timber building at the rear of a house of grey sandstone surrounded on three sides by mostly level and treeless grassy countryside. On the other side of the house were a few bare paddocks. Beyond these paddocks were cliff-tops overgrown by scrub. Beyond the cliff-tops was the Southern Ocean. The old timber building was all that remained of the timber house that had been replaced by the house of grey sandstone more than twenty years before the birth of the chief character. The persons who lived in the house of grey sandstone were the parents and the four unmarried siblings of the father of the chief character. When the chief character first visited the house, in the summer of his seventh year, the persons who lived in the house had for long been using the old timber building as a storage-place or dumping-place for unused or unwanted furniture and belongings.

The chief character visited the house of grey sandstone several times during the summer of each year until his tenth year, when his father’s father died and the house and the surrounding paddocks were sold. At some time during each of his visits to the house, his mother would tell the chief character to go outside and play. The chief character would then go in search of his father’s youngest sister, who was almost always at work in the kitchen or the laundry. He would ask his father’s sister, who was his youngest aunt, for permission to go into the old timber building and to play the gramophone that was kept there. His youngest aunt would always give her permission but would remind him to be careful of the gramophone and the records, which had belonged to her when she was a young thing, as she expressed the matter. (The chief character thought of his aunt as middle-aged or old, although she was in her mid-thirties.)

The gramophone, as it was called, was little more than a turntable and an amplifier in a portable case. In a box near by were twenty and more records made from some or another glossy black material. The records were brittle and some of them had been cracked or chipped before the chief character had first handled them. At one side of the gramophone was a handle that had to be turned many times before each record was played. Seemingly, the turntable was set in motion by a concealed spring, although the chief character was never curious about such matters.

The chief character took care when handling the gramophone and the records although he could not believe that his aunt valued them or would ever use them again. He supposed that she had lost interest in them as she had grown older. In later years, when he had learned more about his youngest aunt, the chief character supposed that she had discarded the gramophone and the records during the year before he had been conceived, which was the year when his aunt had been preparing to become a postulant in an order of nuns; that she had stowed away in the old timber building not only the gramophone and the records but perhaps other items that seemed to her frivolous and distracting after she had decided to lead a simple regulated life in a building of two or more storeys.

All of the records were of songs popular in the USA in the late 1920s. Only a few appealed to the chief character, and these he played repeatedly. The sound was what he called scratchy and many of the words were inaudible, but he heard enough to be able to feel what he hoped to feel whenever he listened to a piece of music: to feel as though a person unknown to him in a desirable place far away from him desired to be in a place still further away. The song that he played most often had the title “O, Dem Golden Slippers” and was sung by three or four male persons.

The chief character was never able to make out the words of the song. The only words that he recognised were the words of the title, which words were sung often as part of a refrain. He supposed the singers to be unhappy men and their song to be a lament of some kind. Even in bright sunshine, the old timber building was only dimly lit, with much discarded furniture having been stored in front of the two small windows. The record that the chief character played most often had a bright yellow label at its centre. The words on the label were printed in black. Even when the mostly level grassy countryside all around was in bright sunshine, the chief character was able to think of himself as sitting in darkness while he listened to the gramophone. He liked to stare first at the spinning black record and then at the yellow central circle and then at the dark blur of words on the inner yellow.

Among the images that appeared to the chief character while he stared at the dark blur that had formerly been printed words — among those images were some that arranged themselves as though to illustrate for his benefit the meaning of the incomprehensible words of the song that sounded from the spinning record. The most notable of these images was of a pair of slippers made from translucent glass of a colour between orange and gold. The slippers, so he came to understand, belonged to a young female personage whose home was a building of two or more storeys. The unhappy men might have been former servants of the father of the young female personage. The men had been sent away from the house of two or more storeys after the father of the young female personage had suspected that they had fallen in love with his daughter.

On days when the sunlight was especially bright outside the old timber building, the chief character would sometimes look away from the black and the yellow blurs while he listened to the incomprehensible words of the song the title of which was intended at one time to be the title of a long and complicated book of fiction. At such times on such days, the chief character would look in the direction of one of the two small windows of the old timber building. He would look in the hope of seeing there the crowd of dust-motes that he sometimes saw swirling or drifting in a shaft of sunlight. Sometimes while the record was spinning on the turntable of the gramophone and while the wavering music and voices were sounding in the old timber building, the crowd of dust-motes seemed to portend something. The song sounded always as a lament. Nothing in the words or in the music gave rise to hope. Whatever was lost or far away would always be so. The young woman, the owner of the slippers of orange-gold glass, would keep to her room in the building of two or more storeys. But the specks of yellow went on swirling or drifting in the shaft of light for long after the song had ended. The movement of the specks caused the chief character to think of energy held in check or of meaning waiting to be expressed. At any moment, the yellow motes might break out of their aimless-seeming formation and might arrange themselves far otherwise; might even comprise a set of signs requiring to be read.

The parents of the chief character would not allow him as a child to attend race-meetings with his father. The parents hoped to keep the boy from following the ways of his father, who had lost large sums of money to bookmakers during year after year. When, finally, the chief character attended a race-meeting for the first time, he was in his sixteenth year and in the company of his father’s youngest brother. While the horses were circling behind the barrier before being called forward by the starter for the first race at the first meeting that the chief character had attended, the movement of the horses recalled to him the swirling and drifting of the dust motes in the old timber building where he had listened as a child to the gramophone belonging to his youngest aunt.

One or another section of the book that I failed to complete would have included a report of certain details that appeared to the chief character after he had been injected with a measured amount of a substance that he knew by the name of psilocybin. The section would have begun with a report of the chief character’s consulting a medical specialist in the hope of learning why he, the chief character, seemed unable to write poetry or prose fiction or to persuade some or another young woman to be his girlfriend. The following is a summary of the other matters that would have been reported in the section.

The chief character consulted the medical specialist for several months, after which the specialist proposed that the chief character should stay overnight in a certain private hospital while the psilocybin affected him. It so happened that the chief character, during one of the months mentioned, first met up with a young woman who later became his girlfriend, who later still lived in a room in the same house of two storeys in which the chief character and two other persons lived, and who later again became the wife of the chief character. It so happened also during another of the months mentioned that the chief character wrote the first notes for a poem that became, several years later, his first published poem. Despite what had happened during the months mentioned, the chief character went on consulting the medical specialist so that he, the chief character, could experience the effects of a substance that was said to alter a person’s perception.

The private hospital mentioned in the previous paragraph was a building of two storeys in an eastern suburb of Melbourne. The chief character was shown into a small room on the upper storey. The room contained only a single bed and a bedside table and a wardrobe and a chair. The window-blind had been drawn against the late-afternoon sunlight. On the blind were shadows from the upper branches of a tree in the walled garden beside the building. The chief character had to change into pyjamas and to lie in the bed before the medical specialist injected into his, the chief character’s, bloodstream a measured dose of the substance mentioned previously. Soon after the injection of the substance, the chief character saw in his mind the first of a series of richly coloured images that appeared to him during several hours.

The first of the images mentioned above were of zones of red and of blue and of yellow and of green forming intricate patterns or designs. If the chief character had recognised outlines of persons or of objects among the patterns or designs, he might have supposed that he was looking at window after window of stained glass in some or another gigantic cathedral. Instead, he supposed that the images were of unfamiliar details of the entity that he was accustomed to think of as his self, as though he had stood in front of a source of light so powerful that it caused to be projected on to some or another surface near by much-enlarged images of his brain or of his nerves. (Some days later, he recalled certain patches of colour that had appeared on the dark surface of the rug where he had played as a child with his collection of glass marbles. He had often placed one after another translucent marble so that the sunlight would cause a patch of faint colour to appear in the shade of the marble. After he had learned from his reading the word essence, he thought of the patch of colour as revealing the essence of the marble.)

Later, the chief character seemed to himself to be standing in a corner of a walled garden beside the hospital of two storeys, except that the plants and the pathways were those that he had seen whenever he had visited as a child the stone house where his father’s unmarried siblings lived with their parents. From beneath a certain bush in an opposite corner of the garden, some or another small creature seemed to be signalling to him. What he saw was a series of tiny flashes, and yet afterwards he used the word winking to describe the sight. He understood, in the way that he seemed to understand certain matters in his dreams, that the creature under the bush was one of a sort of beetle that had infested the garden around the stone house mentioned above. He had learned from his father’s sisters to call the beetles soldier beetles. He admired the beetles’ wing-cases, which were dark-brown with orange-yellow markings, but after he had heard from his aunts that the beetles damaged many of the plants in their garden he killed any beetle that he saw and afterwards earned praise from his aunts when he told them how many he had killed. The beetles were easy to kill, especially the many pairs that moved less nimbly because they were joined rear-to-rear. These he sought out so as to boost his tally. He did not learn until some years later that the joined pairs had been copulating. For as long as he saw the signals that he later described as winking, the chief character understood that the sender of the signals shared with him certain secret knowledge although he, the chief character, could not have said what this knowledge consisted of; for as long as he saw the signals mentioned, the chief character understood also that the sender of the signals was well disposed towards him; and soon after he had first observed the signals, the chief character understood further that the sender of the signals was God — not a symbol of God or a manifestation of God but the almighty being that he, the chief character, had addressed in his prayers during earlier years and had tried often to see in his mind. God was no more and no less than an image of a beetle with orange-yellow markings on a dark-brown wing-case in an image-corner of an image-garden in his, the chief character’s, mind.

For as long as he lay in the upper room, the chief character was in a light-hearted mood. Having found himself in the presence of God, the chief character directed towards God the sort of wordless message that he seemed able to send in his dreams. The content of the message was that there should be no hard feelings between God and the chief character. The flashing or winking from the wing-case of the Beetle-god then ceased. The chief character could no longer make out the orange-yellow markings or any other details in the shade beneath the bush. He understood that he had been politely dismissed; that nothing needed to be discussed between God and himself; that he ought to leave God to attend to his own affairs while he, the chief character, went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction.

While the chief character lay in the upper room of the hospital, the images that appeared to him were in no apparent order. He had always thought of the images in his mind as being arranged somewhat in the way that the names of townships were arranged on maps of mostly level countryside and that the images were connected by feelings in the way that the names of townships were connected by lines denoting roads. Whenever an image first appeared to him in the upper room, the image seemed to have appeared from behind one or another detail in the previous image, as though he was moving continually towards the seeming background of an illustration with no visible horizon. Sometimes, he felt for a moment before the appearance of an image as though the power of the image preceded it. And sometimes an image would be a mere detail, although his everyday mind, so to call it, was always aware of the undisclosed whole. He was aware, for example, that a certain blurred image of yellow-green fabric seen from close-up was a detail of an image of his father’s youngest sister as she would have appeared to him when he was hardly more than an infant. For a moment before the appearance in the upper room of the image of the yellow-green fabric, he had felt as though he was the object of strong affection. He understood from this and from the image of the yellow-green fabric that he had been embraced as a child, perhaps warmly and often, by his youngest aunt, she who had once tried to live as a nun in a building of several storeys. Strangely, so it seemed to him later, he was visited in the upper room by no image of either of his parents. He had never had reason for supposing that his parents were lacking in affection for him, and yet he had met up with no image of either parent among the images that had come into his view when he had seen into his essence, as he might have called it.

A brief section of the unfinished work of fiction would have reported the matters that are summarised in the following three paragraphs.

Very early in his life, the chief character became accustomed to thinking of his mind as a place. It was, of course, not a single place but a place containing other places: a far-reaching and varied landscape. He was sometimes aware that mountain-ranges and fast-flowing rivers and even, perhaps, an ocean might have existed on the farther side of his mental country, but he was not curious about such matters. He could never foresee himself tiring of the districts that most appealed to him. Those districts seemed to comprise long views of mostly level grassy countryside with lines of trees seemingly always in the distance. The countryside was watered by a few shallow creeks and by swamps that were mostly dry in summer. The houses were set far back from the road, and some were of two storeys. The interiors of the houses were little-known to him, even though he sometimes speculated as to the contents of the books in some of the libraries or the subject-matter of the paintings in some of the hallways or drawing-rooms as though he could have learned from one or another page or from the background of one or another painting some secret of much importance to him.

The father of the chief character had among his cousins seven siblings who had begun life as the children of a poor share-farmer and his wife in the south-west of Victoria. The children, both boys and girls, had worked beside their parents before and after school in the milking-shed. During their teenage years, the siblings worked full-time for their parents or on other farms. Only two of the seven married. The others, two females and three males, lived throughout their lives under the one roof. By means of hard work and thrift, the unmarried siblings became wealthy. When the chief character was still a small child, the siblings owned a large grazing property far inland from the coastal district where they had spent their childhood. On some or another day in the early 1940s, the chief character had been taken by his parents on a visit to the large grazing property. He was not yet four years of age, and he afterwards recalled only a few details from the visit.

The large grazing property was in a district of mostly grassy countryside that had been occupied for more than a century by a small number of families well known for their wealth. The siblings’ property had been formerly owned by one such family. The house on the property had been copied from some or another house in England. The house comprised two storeys and a tower that reached upwards beyond the second storey. At some time during his visit to the grazing property, the chief character was led to the top of the tower by the younger of the female cousins of his father. (He supposed, long afterwards, that he had begged his parents for some time beforehand to be taken to the top of the tower.) His female guide had led him by the hand up the spiral staircase in the tower. At the top of the staircase was a sort of balcony, so the chief character recalled later, but around the balcony was a wall of stones or bricks too high for the chief character to see above. His guide had knelt or had crouched and had lifted him by the armpits so that he could see the view. At some time afterwards, presumably, he had forgotten whatever details he may have noted in the view from the tower, which view would have been of mostly level grassy countryside with lines of trees in the middle and the far distance. However, he had never afterwards forgotten that he had rested himself, while he looked into the distance, against the changeable shapes of the first female breasts that he afterwards recalled himself resting against.

In the hallway of the house on the large grazing property was a wooden pedestal on which was a dome of clear glass under which was a parrot perched on a branch. The chief character had known from the first that the parrot was the preserved body of a dead bird, but he had longed to inspect the coloured feathers from close-up. He had studied illustrations of parrots in a book owned by his father’s youngest brother but he had never seen an actual bird. As soon as the young woman had led him down from the tower on the large grazing property, he had asked her in a pleading voice to lead him to the parrot so that he could study it through the glass. The young woman then led the chief character into the hallway of the house of two storeys where she would later live unmarried for forty years with her four unmarried siblings; she lifted the glass dome away from the stuffed remains of the living parrot; then she watched with seeming approval while he ran his fingers through one after another zone of feathers on the stuffed likeness — through the light green and the dark blue and the pale yellow.

One or another section of my never-completed work of fiction would have begun by reporting that the chief character decided during the last few months of his secondary schooling that he was called by God to be a Catholic priest.

The chief character liked to watch from the inside of some or another windowpane while rainwater fell against or trickled down the outside. He was watching thus in his classroom on the first floor of a building of two storeys on a day of rain four months before his final examinations, the so-called matriculation examinations. He was confident of passing the examinations and of obtaining a so-called Commonwealth scholarship that would enable him to study arts at university. Afterwards, so he supposed, he would train for a year as a teacher in secondary schools. He was indifferent towards so-called careers. He wanted only to be tolerably well paid and to be free during his evenings and his weekends to write poetry and, perhaps, prose fiction. He watched the rain on the window of his classroom as though the window overlooked a street parallel to the main street in some or another large town in the countryside of Victoria during one of the many years when he would teach English and history at the high school in the large town and would live as a bachelor in a self-contained flat on the upper floor of so-called business premises near the centre of the town. Even when the window was not blurred by rain, the man who lived behind the window could see through it no further than the nearest buildings. He understood that the large town was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside and scattered trees but he believed that he was more likely to write poetry or prose fiction of worth if he was prevented from seeing the horizon in any direction. During the four years before he would be able to watch the rain trickling down the window of the upstairs room near the centre of the large town, so the chief character understood, he would be obliged to mix with young persons, both male and female, in a university. At some time during those years, he might decide to approach one or another young female person in the hope that he and she might later go out together, as the saying was, and later still might even become boyfriend and girlfriend.

I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain trickling on the window of his classroom, would have preferred to be already an older man remembering certain events or even regretting that certain events had never taken place rather than to be still a young man preparing to experience those events.

At some time during the day of rain, the chief character would have looked through a certain booklet from among a collection of booklets displayed at the rear of his classroom, so I would have reported if I had gone on with my abandoned work. The chief character had noticed the booklets often before but had never looked into them. For some months afterwards, he would suspect that he had been led to look into the booklets by what he called the intervention of Divine Providence. Each of the booklets in the collection was intended to persuade young men to apply to train as priests or lay-brothers in one or another religious order. The booklet that the chief character looked through contained both text and illustrations. A number of the illustrations were of a building of two storeys. From one of these illustrations the chief character learned that the building was surrounded on three sides at least by mostly level grassy countryside that was not without trees. From captions beneath the illustrations, the chief character learned that the building housed the novitiate of a certain religious order; the place where young men trained as novices of the order during the first year after they had joined the order. In short, as I reported in an earlier section of this present work of fiction, the chief character of my abandoned work of fiction had decided to apply to join the religious order in question before he had read the text of the booklet published by the order. The illustration that the chief character was looking at when he made his decision was an illustration of the interior of a room of the sort that was occupied by each of the novices of the order. The room was furnished with a bed and a table and a chair and a cupboard. The table was so placed that a person sitting at it would face the window of the room. Given that the view through the illustrated window was a view wholly of sky, the chief character supposed that the room was on the upper storey of the building of two storeys. Soon after he had supposed this, the chief character saw in his mind an image of rain trickling down a window that overlooked some or another view of the Riverina district of New South Wales in his mind. While he watched the image of the trickling rain in his mind, the chief character of my partly completed work of fiction was pleased to suppose that he had found a means of going to live in an upper room of a building of two storeys without first having to go to university, where he might have had to spend his time studying books of small interest to him or preparing to approach one or another young woman.

Six months before the day of rain mentioned above, during two days of his summer holidays, the chief character had read all of the three hundred and more pages of Elected Silence, by Thomas Merton, published in London by Hollis and Carter in 1954 but first published several years before in the USA. The chief character had never heard of the book or its author before he received it as a prize at the end of his second-last year of school, and several times while he read it he supposed that the book had come into his hands through the intervention of Divine Providence. Elected Silence was the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who had been a teacher and a poet before becoming a monk in a Cistercian monastery in the USA. Merton had been prepared to give up his writing when he entered the monastery, but his superiors had allowed him to write poetry and had later encouraged him to write essays and to have them collected and published. (The chief character did not know it, but I learned some years ago from a biography of Thomas Merton that the royalties from his books became the chief source of income for the monastery and that their author was often exempted from following the rule of the monastery and was allowed, when he so wished, to live alone and to go on with his writing in the so-called hermitage, which was a weatherboard cottage in a grove of trees in the grounds of the monastery.) After he had read the book, the chief character had made inquiries and had learned that the Cistercian Order had a monastery in Australia but he had been disappointed when he found that the monastery was in hilly countryside only thirty miles from Melbourne.

The religious order with its novitiate in the Riverina district had been founded in Italy during the eighteenth century by a pious Italian priest, so the chief character learned from the booklet that had persuaded him to join the order. Both priests and lay-brothers of the order wore a black soutane and a black cloak. Both soutane and cloak had an insignia of scarlet embroidered over the wearer’s left breast. The special work of the order in Australia was to visit one after another parish and to conduct there a mission, something that has been described elsewhere in this work of fiction. When the priests were not conducting missions they lived a strictly regulated life in one or another monastery of the order. This was much to the liking of the chief character. He had no wish to live as a parish priest in some or another suburban or rural presbytery under the notice of his parishioners. Even when he worked on the mission, he would be looking forward to returning to his monastery and working on his latest poem.

The chief character was not easily able to persuade his parents to allow him to go to the Riverina district instead of to university. Whenever his parents reminded him of the benefits to be got from an education at university, the chief character would recite in his mind certain phrases from the poem “The Scholar-Gipsy,” by Matthew Arnold. He recited the phrases in order to see more clearly the connections between himself and the chief character of the poem. For the chief character of my unfinished fiction, the Riverina district would be the retired ground preferred by the scholar-gipsy: the lone wheat-fields and the river bank o’ergrown. The cloak that the scholar-gipsy wrapped around himself was a likeness of the black cloak that the chief character would wear as a novice shut away from the world. The most striking connection, however, was reported in the note that preceded the poem. The young man who had inspired the poem, he who had left university and had taken up with the gipsies, claimed to have discovered that the gipsies could do wonders by the power of the imagination and had resolved to learn their arts.

When the parents of the chief character gave their permission for him to join a religious order of priests, they were won over by his seeming sincerity and piety, or so the reader of my unfinished fiction might have supposed. Certainly, he had developed during the weeks after the rainy afternoon mentioned previously a keen longing to join the religious order of his choice. What he most longed for, however, was not to preach or to minister to other persons but to attend to his own salvation, as he would have expressed the matter. And whenever he thought of himself as attending thus, he saw himself in the future as reading or writing at a table in an upstairs room or as kneeling in a chapel or standing before an altar with his eyes closed and his head bowed.

Even during the last weeks before he travelled to the Riverina district in order to study for the priesthood, the chief character felt no strong affection for the personages that he knew as God or Jesus or Our Lady or the angels and saints. Even when he told his parents that he was called by God to the priesthood, he did not feel as though the above-named personages felt any strong affection for him. He felt as though the personages were remote from him and perhaps indifferent towards him for the time being but prepared to look on him favourably if he could prove himself worthy of them. This would require from him much more than mere virtuous living or the recitation of prayers. His becoming worthy required him to see further than most persons saw; to see into the places, wherever they were, where the personages most clearly manifested themselves; to dare even to see the personages themselves as they saw one another.

The chief character was hardly more than a boy when he set out for the Riverina district but he intended to become a writer of poetry or, perhaps, prose fiction, and also a mystic. He had come across the word mystic in his reading and had interpreted the word in his own way. He did not understand until a few years afterwards that his notion of prayer and meditation was hardly different from his notion of writing. The writer struggled to discover, in some far part of his mind, subject-matter fit for poetry; the mystic struggled to glimpse God or heaven. (The chief character would not have conceded, when he set out for the Riverina district, that what the mystic saw, or hoped to see, was an image or images in his mind.)

The daily doings of the chief character while he lived in the building of two storeys in the Riverina district would have been no part of my abandoned work of fiction. He lived in the building for twelve weeks before returning to Melbourne and becoming employed as a clerical officer, so called, in a building of many storeys. While he lived in the building of two storeys, he had seemed to be accepted by the seven young men who were his fellow-novices and by the priests who were his instructors and his spiritual director. This last-mentioned man had even seemed disappointed when the chief character had announced that he wanted to leave the building of two storeys, although the man had not pressed him to stay.

The chief character wrote only a few notes for a poem while he lived in the building of two storeys. The novices followed strictly the Rule of the religious order; the daily time-table allowed him no time for poetry. Several times during his stay, the chief character wondered whether it would have been better for him as a writer of poetry if he had applied to join the Cistercian order, even though their monastery was in hilly country not far from Melbourne. As for his striving to be a mystic, he had only to close his eyes in the choir stalls in the chapel and numerous images would appear to him, but he was disappointed by their simplicity and by their seeming to be derived from the illustrations on the holy-cards that he had owned as a child or from the subject-matter of the stained-glass windows that he had stared at as a child. Once only, towards the end of his stay in the building of two storeys, he seemed to see certain images the origins of which he could not readily have explained. He had undertaken an ambitious task. He had understood from an early age that the ceremony of the Mass was a sacrifice which pleased God and made that Being better disposed towards the persons who had taken part in the ceremony. But he had never understood the technical details, so to call them, of the sacrifice: who or what was offered and by what means; why the offering was likely to appease God. During the periods set aside for so-called spiritual reading, the chief character searched through books of theology for answers but found only vagueness. Even Thomas Aquinas, reputedly the greatest of theologians, had had to concede that the exact workings of the sacrifice of the Mass were a mystery.

One morning during his last week in the building of two storeys, the chief character was straining to see in his mind some or another visual equivalent of the mystery mentioned in the previous paragraph when he lost sight of the usual images of crucifixes and chalices and wafers of unleavened bread and bearded deities looking down from on high. In place of these predictable images, he saw in his mind while he knelt with his colleagues in the chapel certain details of the image of a mounting-yard at a crowded and well-appointed racecourse. Perhaps twenty handsome horses were being led around the perimeter of the yard by their strappers. On the rectangular lawn at the centre of the yard, the owners and trainers conferred in small groups. At any moment, the glass doors of the nearest building would be flung open and the jockeys would step out and would stride onto the rectangular lawn where each jockey would join one or another of the conferring groups.

At this point in the work of fiction that had never been finished, the narrator would have reported that the chief character had attended several race-meetings before he had arrived in the Riverina district and that he had been much affected at those meetings by the sight of the horses parading in the mounting yard. While the horses paraded and while the owners and the trainers and the jockeys conferred, the chief character had been able to foresee many possible outcomes of the race about to be run. Almost every conferring group might have had grounds for hoping to win. Almost every owner might have looked with pride at the jacket worn by his jockey. The colours of the jacket would have been chosen to suggest the achievements or the distinctive qualities or tastes of the owner. Perhaps a few sets of colours hinted also at the distinctive landscapes of the region from which the horse and its owner and trainer had arrived. For as long as the horses merely paraded, it was possible to foresee almost any one of the coloured jackets returning ahead of all the others; almost any owner and trainer having their hopes fulfilled. The race was still to be run. Each contestant still deserved admiration.

On the morning during his last week in the building of two storeys when the image-horses paraded in the mounting-yard in his mind, the chief character understood, in the way that he understood certain matters in his dreams, that one of the horses was owned by no less a personage than God. From this, of course, the chief character understood further that one of the many men standing on the rectangular lawn, each wearing a suit and a tie and a grey felt hat and each listening impassively or speaking guardedly or glancing about anxiously, must have been God incarnate, the second Person of the Holy Trinity.

For weeks past, the chief character had been straining often to see in his mind images explaining some of the so-called mysteries of his religion. None of what he had seen had been half so clear and so eloquent as the image of the mounting-yard. The image was no more stable than any other image in his mind, but whenever he was able afterwards to see it wholly or even partly, he tried in all seriousness to interpret it. He decided that a thoughtful racegoer could probably give a clearer account of such matters as the mystery of the incarnation and the sacrifice inherent in the Mass than could a theologian. If God were to take his chance as an owner of racehorses, He would experience the gamut of human emotions. And what sacrifice could bring a person closer to God than that a person should risk a large sum of his or her hard-earned money by betting on God’s horse at its every start?

In one respect, the chief character was left dissatisfied by his mounting-yard imagery. He had no way of knowing which of the owners was the Son of God. He, the chief character, supposed his best means of identifying God was through His racing colours. Not all the jockeys were clearly visible among the knots of conferring owners and trainers and the parading horses, but the chief character was somewhat persuaded that Almighty God was represented by a purplish blur of jacket and sleeves on the far side of the rectangular lawn.

The building of two storeys in the Riverina district was to have been the setting, as it were, of at least two sections of my unfinished book. One of those two, if ever I had written it, would have differed little from the following seven paragraphs.

On every day except Sunday, each of the novices in the building of two storeys dusted the parlour or the library or polished the parquetry in one or another corridor or otherwise helped with the upkeep of the building. On a certain Saturday afternoon in April, when the chief character was already thinking of leaving the building and returning home, and when he was at the handle of an electric floor-polisher in the upper-storey corridor where the priests had their rooms, he heard a familiar sound. The sound came from behind the closed door of one of the old, retired priests of the order.

The chief character had been pleased to learn, soon after his arrival in the building of two storeys, that the building where he and his fellow-novices were to study and to perfect themselves for a year was also the building where the priests of the order spent their retirement. The chief character thought it fitting that men who had worn themselves out with preaching and with praying and meditating should be able to spend their last years looking out over mostly level grassy countryside while they brought to mind some of the images that had sustained them during their lives as priests. On the Saturday afternoon mentioned in the previous paragraph, the familiar sound heard by the chief character was the sound of a radio broadcast of a racing-commentator describing a horse-race in Sydney.

The chief character had not heard any sort of radio broadcast since he had arrived at the building of two storeys ten weeks before. Nor had he seen any sort of newspaper during that time. During their year in the novitiate, the novices were meant to be free from the so-called distractions of the everyday world while they were formed into exemplary religious, and so they were denied access to radios and newspapers. Strictly speaking, the chief character should have turned away and ceased to listen to the race-broadcast, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was unable to make out any words; all he could hear was the muffled voice of the commentator and the steady rise in pitch as the race neared its climax.

Later on the same day, the chief character found a pretence for passing again by the old priest’s door. Again, the chief character heard the sound of a race-broadcast. This time, so the chief character thought, the race being described was being run in Melbourne. On the following Saturday afternoon, when he was again polishing the floor of the corridor, the chief character heard again the same sounds that he had previously heard. He had never yet seen the old priest. He saw in his mind a frail, white-haired man sitting at the table in his room and looking through the window and across the mostly level grassy countryside while he saw sometimes in his mind an image of one or another divine or canonised personage and at other times an image of one or another horse-race being run far beyond the farthest line of trees in the distance.

On the Monday afternoon after the second of the Saturday afternoons mentioned above, the chief character had to pass along the priests’ corridor on his way to perform his latest rostered task, which was to clean the priests’ bathroom and toilets. Outside the door of the retired priest who listened to race-broadcasts was a newspaper. (The chief character understood that newspapers were delivered to the building every day and were then set out in the priests’ recreation room. Only the novices, trying to live by the strict rule of the order, were shut away from the world.) The chief character looked up and down the priests’ corridor and saw that it was deserted. Then he picked up the newspaper, which was some or another tabloid published in Sydney. Then he put the newspaper on the floor again but with its rear page facing upwards. Then he leaned over the page and tried to read it, watching at the same time for any priest who might step into the corridor.

Much of the rear page was occupied by an image of a racehorse winning a race by a wide margin. The chief character learned that the horse was the two-years-old colt Todman and that the race was the inaugural Golden Slipper Stakes at Rosehill racecourse in the suburbs of Sydney. The chief character might have learned more if he had not seemed to hear from around a corner of the corridor the clattering sound of a pair of sandals such as every priest and novice wore as part of his habit.

The chief character had heard already about the colt Todman, which had won several races in Sydney during the last months before he, the chief character, had left home for the building of two storeys, but he could not recall having previously heard about the inauguration of the Golden Slipper Stakes. At some time after he had left the building of two storeys and had returned to his parents’ house in a suburb of Melbourne and had begun to work by day as a clerk in a building of many storeys near the centre of Melbourne and to try to write poetry and prose fiction of an evening and to attend one or another race-meeting every Saturday, the chief character learned that the Golden Slipper Stakes was the richest race for two-years-olds in the world. He learned further that the phrase golden slipper was meant to denote a horseshoe. The winner of the race came back to the scales area through a horseshoe-shaped wreath of yellow flowers, and the trophy presented to the winning owner or owners included in its design a golden horseshoe. And yet, during his last two weeks in the building of two storeys and for some weeks after he had arrived home from the building, whenever he heard the phrase golden slipper in his mind the chief character saw a moment afterwards an image of a slipper such as might have been worn by one or another young female personage in one or another story purporting to be a story for children. The image-slipper was of translucent yellow glass and rested on an image-cushion of black image-velvet until the young female personage, the owner of the image-slipper should appear.

During the first year after I had given up writing fiction, as was reported in the first paragraph of this work of fiction, I read for the first time the book Bestseller, by Claud Cockburn, which had first been published in London by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1972. I have since forgotten all but five of the many thousands of words that I read in that book. The five words were reported as having been spoken by a so-called progressive Protestant clergyman who had been asked, during the first decade of the twentieth century, how he thought about God. The clergyman had replied that he had for long supposed that God was a sort of oblong blur.

Later during the first year after I had given up writing fiction, I received a letter from a lay-brother of the Cistercian Order, whose monastery stood among mostly hilly country no more than thirty kilometres from the suburb where I had lived with my wife and our children for more than twenty years. I intend to refer to the lay-brother from here on as the monk.

I was pleased to have been addressed in writing by a member of a religious order that I had mentioned in my latest work of fiction, even if that work had since been abandoned. And yet, I was puzzled by the letter. The monk had written that he would like to meet me and, perhaps, to discuss some of my published books of fiction, which he admired, so he wrote, for their skilful depictions of relationships between men and women. I was puzzled because I could recall from my six published books of fiction hardly any passage reporting a relationship, as that word was commonly used. The monk invited me to visit him at his monastery. If I was not eager to discuss my fiction with him, so he wrote, then I might like to talk with him about horse-racing. As a young man, he had been much interested in horse-racing, and one of his brothers was a race-caller who could be heard every day on radio describing races in country districts of New South Wales.

I visited the monk in his monastery a few weeks later. I was surprised that I, a stranger, could visit him so easily. From my reading, I had learned that the Cistercians observed strict silence and received only occasional visits from close relatives. The traditional Cistercian monastery had a guest-house, but the only monk who spoke with the guests was the guest-master, who had been released from his vow of silence by the abbot. The monk, however, spoke freely with me when we met. He explained later that many of the rules of the Order had been relaxed in recent years. A monk was free to receive guests, even female guests, in the parlour of the guest-house whenever he wished.

Later, while we were talking, a bell sounded, and I understood that the monk was required to go to the chapel and to chant there with the rest of the Cistercian community part of the so-called Divine Office for that day. I expected the monk to leave me in the parlour for the time being, but he invited me to go with him to the chapel. Here was another rule that had been relaxed. As a guest of the monk, I was welcome to stand beside him in the choir stalls and to join in the chanting of the Office. I was thus able, as a married man in his fifties and a non-believer, to walk unchallenged into a place that had been during my youth utterly remote from me: a place where devout and ascetic men closed their eyes in prayer and glimpsed inwardly, perhaps, images of personages or of places or of processes such as I myself might have glimpsed only if I had undertaken several years of study and of prayer. Even the Divine Office was no longer in sonorous and difficult Latin but in English. Much of what I read from the monk’s book and tried to chant was in praise of a god who put to flight his people’s enemies and scattered their encampments.

Afterwards, in the parlour, I asked the monk what sort of mental images the average Cistercian might have seen while he was reciting part of the Office that we had come from reciting. I expected to hear from him that the average monk would see in his mind a series of images seeming to illustrate the passages from Scripture that made up the Office and that a more disciplined or more devout monk might also feel himself closer than usual to one or another divine or canonised personage. The monk replied, however, that the average Cistercian was unlikely to have paid any attention to the words that he chanted and was likely to have used the time in the chapel as an opportunity to meditate in the way that a Buddhist monk might have meditated. The monk then said that he himself had learned a different way of meditating, although he neglected to tell me whence he had learned it. He said that he used his time in the chapel as an opportunity for calling to mind images of what he most desired; of what was most needed to round-out or to complete his mind or his soul; of the missing part of himself. He even said that he had heard or had read somewhere that God might be defined as the object of a person’s most intense longings. And then he described for me the images that most occupied his mind in the chapel. They were images of young female personages. Each personage had blonde hair and wore a tight-fitting evening gown of scarlet or orange or yellow satin that rested low on her breasts. The monk insisted that the images were neither of persons that he had seen in the past nor of persons that he hoped to meet in future; rather, they were images from what he called his spiritual homeland. The monk insisted also that he did not feel towards the personages any sort of sexual desire; instead, he felt towards the personages as though they were his soul-mates.

Some weeks after I had visited the monk, I received from him a letter together with a photograph. He explained in the letter that he had sent the photograph to me because I seemed rather interested in the practice of meditation. The photograph was of a small weatherboard house or cottage with a row of fruit-trees behind it. The monk explained in his letter that the building had been the home of the farm-manager and his family during the many years when the monastery and its farm had been the country retreat of a family whose wealth derived from their owning the largest firm of stationery suppliers in Melbourne. The monk explained further that the building had been used for some years by the monastery as a hermitage; from time to time, one or another monk would retire to the building and would live there alone for one or more weeks while he devoted all of his free time to prayer and to meditation. The monk himself, so he wrote, had recently spent some time in the building.

I had looked for some time at the photograph before I had read the letter. Before I had learned that the image in the photograph was of a hermitage, I had been sure that the image was of a so-called rural-school residence: a cottage such as had been built beside many a school in the countryside of Victoria in the first half of the twentieth century for the teacher and his family. While I stared at the image of the cottage, I recalled certain passages in the work of fiction that I had recently abandoned. In those passages, the chief character was reported as foreseeing that he would one day turn aside from his vocation; that he would give up living as a bachelor and a writer of poetry and prose fiction and would become a primary teacher and would marry and would listen to radio broadcasts of horse-races on Saturday afternoons while he looked at the mostly level grassy countryside around the school as though images of what he most desired might be visible behind the lines of trees in the distance.

I wrote to the monk, thanking him for the photograph and explaining that I was too busy to visit him again for the time being, which was true. Then, perhaps two months later, when I had stepped, as I often did, into the totalisator agency in a suburb adjoining my own suburb, I saw the monk in a far corner, reading one of the form-guides on the wall. He was dressed in casual clothes, and I guessed at once that he had left the monastery for good although he had never given me any hint that he might do so. I felt a certain disappointment that I might never visit the Cistercian monastery again, but I greeted the monk cheerfully and learned that he had indeed left the monastery for good; that he had found board and lodging with a middle-aged widow only a few streets away from where we then stood; and that he would like to go with me to the Saturday races at the first opportunity.

When I called for the monk on the following Saturday, he was outside the widow’s house, dressed appropriately for the races and with a pair of binoculars hanging from his shoulder. I happen to be rather knowledgeable about binoculars and I saw that the monk was carrying a pair that would have been imported from Japan nearly forty years before. I asked him where he had bought the binoculars. He told me without smiling that he had stolen them from the monastery on the day before he had left the place for good.

Before I had left home for the races, my wife, who had never met the monk, told me to invite him to our house for lunch on the Sunday of the following weekend. She said that she felt sorry for the monk, who would surely be struggling to make friends in the outside world, as she called it. When I let the monk out of my car on the way home from the races, I invited him as my wife had instructed me. He said that he would be pleased to accept. Then he asked me if he could bring his girlfriend. I was surprised that he had acquired a girlfriend already, but I told him that she would be welcome.

The lunch was a dull occasion. My wife and I struggled to keep conversation going. She told me afterwards that she had sensed a certain tension between our two guests. I recall today very little about the monk’s girlfriend except that she was blonde and somewhat plump and dressed in pink.

I never saw the monk again. Three weeks after the Sunday lunch mentioned above, on a Saturday when I was at the races, the girlfriend of the monk called on my wife at our home and begged to be allowed to confide in her. She, the girlfriend, lived, so she said, in a nearby suburb and was anxious to confide in somebody. What she confided to my wife might be summarised as follows. She, the girlfriend, had first met the monk about six months before when she had visited the monastery for what she called counselling after what she called the sudden break-up of a relationship. She had stayed for a week in the guest-house at the monastery. (She explained to my wife that the strict rules of the Cistercian Order had been relaxed somewhat in recent years so that women could stay as guests of the monastery and could meet with some of the priests and lay-brothers during their recreation-hour of an evening. She had talked often with the monk, and they had seemed to be drawn to one another. She had given the monk her telephone number, and after she had returned home he had spoken to her often for long periods late at night. He had telephoned her in secret, and against the rules of the monastery, from a little-used telephone extension on the upper storey of the building.) During her second visit to the monastery, the monk had promised to leave his order and to marry her soon afterwards. He had left the monastery in due course, after which she and he had had what she called an intense sexual relationship, but then he had told her that he suspected his true vocation was to the celibate life. Two weeks ago, he had left Melbourne for the inland city in New South Wales where he had spent his childhood. She had not heard from him since, and she was thinking of setting out after him.

Something that ought to be explained is my having begun again to write fiction only a few years after I had stopped, so I thought, for good.

Four years after I had stopped writing fiction, my seventh book of fiction was published. Some of the book consisted of pieces of fiction that had been published previously in so-called literary magazines, but each of the other three pieces I had written in order to explain one or another of three matters that I could have explained by no other means than by writing a piece of fiction. One of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had become tired of reading book after book of supposedly memorable fiction and then being unable to remember, a year or more afterwards, any sentence of the text or any detail of my experience as a reader. Another of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had not been misguided whenever I had struggled from time to time during the previous forty years to devise a set of racing colours in which one or another arrangement of one or another shade of blue or of green explained about me something that could have been explained by no other means than by the appearance of a set of racing colours. The third of the pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had stopped writing fiction several years before (and had presumably stopped again after having written the text that explained this) and to offer to readers of good will a hint as to what sort of project I now preferred to fiction-writing.

The few reviews of my seventh book of fiction that came to my notice were, on balance, favourable reviews. The most favourable was written by a person who had previously praised other books of mine and found much meaning in them. Towards the end of the review, the reviewer began to comment on the third of the pieces mentioned above. I expected to read that the reviewer had understood my explanation and had taken my hint. I read instead that the reviewer admired the trick of perspective and other items that I had not known were in the piece.

I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.

My piece of fiction of ten years ago had the title “The Interior of Gaaldine.” When I chose that title, I supposed that most readers of good will would have recognised the provenance of the word Gaaldine. Perhaps most of those readers did so recognise the provenance of the word, but no reviewer seemed to have done so. I had supposed it was common knowledge among readers of my sort of fiction that the sisters who were the authors of some of the best-known works of English fiction in the nineteenth century had written extensively during their youth, and even during their adult life, about so-called imaginary countries, one of which was named Gondal. I had supposed further that many of those readers must have read at some or another time a certain entry written in her diary by one of the sisters mentioned when she was in her seventeenth year, which entry was often quoted as evidence that the writer was as much concerned with the so-called imaginary countries as with her everyday life, so to call it, and which entry reported, among other things, that the inhabitants of Gondal were just then discovering the interior of Gaaldine. For the diversion of my readers, I had the narrator of my piece of fiction report at one point in his narration that he had heard the name of a certain female character as Alice, when the readers would have known, or so I supposed, that the name of the character was Ellis, which had once been the pen-name of the writer of the diary-entry mentioned above, she in whose mind lay the country of Gondal. I even put at the very end of my piece of fiction the names of the three personages from Gondal or, rather, the names of the three characters from one or another of the texts set, so to speak, in Gondal, so that the very last words of the piece of fiction would be the name of the female personage whose presence in the mind of the young woman Emily Brontë caused her later to write about the character named Catherine Earnshaw in a work of fiction set, as it were, far away from Gondal.

I included in my piece of fiction of ten years ago what I supposed was a broad hint that the narrator of the piece had been persuaded during the writing of the text that no more fiction need be written, whether by himself or by any other writer of fiction. The narrator had become aware that the fictional texts already in existence gave way or led back to a series of fictional settings or mental landscapes that could not be thought of as coming to an end. The narrator might have become thus aware either by his reflecting on the series that began with the fictional scenery around the fictional place named Wuthering Heights, the fictional place named Gondal, and the fictional place named Gaaldine, or by his reflecting on the processes called in my piece of fiction decoding or gutting, by means of which the narrator of the typescript mentioned in the text caused fictional horse-races to take place in the fictional country named New Arcadia.

According to the diary-entry mentioned previously, the fictional inhabitants of Gondal had been prompted some time before to learn what lay beyond the boundaries of their fictional country. In my first published book of fiction, which appeared in print thirty-three years ago, the narrator reported, among other matters, that the chief character saw in his mind from time to time certain fictional personages whose district was bounded on one side by tamarisk trees. The narrator reported also certain details of what those personages might have seen from time to time in their own minds, but he reported mostly what they might thus have seen while they were concerned with such events as seemed to take place in their own district. If ever the narrator had reported that one or another of the fictional personages was prompted to learn what lay beyond the boundaries of his or her fictional country, then he, the narrator, would have reported that the personage saw in his or her mind a certain green-gold blur that occupied most of the horizon along one side of his or her district.

For much of the time while I was writing what later became my first published book of fiction, I had in mind a certain dusty backyard in an inland city of Victoria. At the rear end of that yard stood a fence of wire netting. On the far side of the wire netting was the yard behind the house where lived a man who was sometimes described by his neighbours as the mad old bachelor. This man bred a rare variety of poultry known as brown leghorns. The birds were kept in pens and cages while the backyard was used for growing grasses and grains for feeding to the birds. Along the wire netting mentioned earlier was what the owner of the birds called his patch of barley. If ever I myself had written a diary-entry comparable to the diary-entry mentioned above, I might have written that the people of the tamarisks were of a mind to discover the interior of the barley patch.

During the sixteen years when I was a teacher of fiction-writing, I read many books and articles by writers or about writers, and I collected many hundreds of statements that I thought might be of use to my students. Some of the statements I could hardly understand; others I disagreed with; but I put most of the statements in front of my students so that they might learn more than my own views. One statement that I kept for year after year among my notes but seldom read to the students reported how the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev claimed to have discovered many of the characters that he wrote about. According to the statement, Turgenev first met up with many of the characters while he slept. Certain personages seemed to appear to the writer in his dreams. The personages seemed to importune him; they seemed to beg him to write about them; they seemed to yearn to become characters in his writing.

During most of the years before I stopped writing fiction, I would have afforded little cheer to any personage who had begged me in a dream to allow him or her into my fiction. I would have tried to explain to the personage that he or she would still be no more than a personage, even if I were to report his or her existence in my fiction. I would have tried to explain that no sort of character could be said to exist in my fiction; that anyone mentioned in my fiction could be never more than a fictional personage, even if he or she might have seemed to resemble some or another person who lived in the place often called the real world or some or another character mentioned in some or another work of fiction. In fairness to myself, however, I might have tried to explain that the state of existence of the personages in my fiction was by no means wretched; that many such personages appeared against a background of mostly level grassy countryside; and that many a personage was the object of my continual curiosity, so that I longed to be on familiar terms with the personage, even if my only means of achieving this might have been the preposterous project of my becoming myself a personage in my own fiction.

On a certain day while I was trying to write the work of fiction that I would never complete, and while I was thinking confused thoughts about fictional characters and fictional personages and about the scenery where fictional events were reported as taking place and the scenery that might have lain out of sight beyond that scenery — one day, the thought occurred to me that the writer Ivan Turgenev had wrongly interpreted what he had seemed to see while he slept. He was reported as having seen personages pleading to be allowed into his works of fiction, but I wondered whether the writer had mistakenly interpreted the sighs, the groans, and the gestures of the personages. I supposed that Ivan Turgenev had been no less conceited than most writers of fiction. I supposed that he believed the characters in his fiction enjoyed a more satisfying existence than was enjoyed by the lost-seeming wayfarers who had come from he knew not whence in order to trouble his sleep. I then supposed further that the lost-seeming ones were not at all lost; that they stood on the outermost border of their native territory and pleaded with the writer of fiction not to try to write about them but to put away his writing and to join up with them: to become an inhabitant of their far-reaching countries or continents.

Whether or not I had correctly interpreted Ivan Turgenev’s experience, I was myself much encouraged by my speculations. Now, at last, I might answer with conviction many a question that had for long bothered me. During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction — during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about — not only in sleep but during those waking moments the strangeness of which can hardly be described by the dreamer, much less suggested by a writer of fiction. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about. Such a character looked often from the region of the text towards that further region or dreamed about it. Such a character, perhaps, remembered often some or another personage who had never left that further region but remained safely there, never mentioned or referred to in any passage of fiction. Now, I might try to glimpse in my own mind some of what might be glimpsed in the mind or remembered or dreamed of but never written about. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction.

It was never my intention to give a name to the country mentioned in the previous sentence, but a certain name later attached itself to that country. The name seems to me sometimes such a name as a child might devise for an imaginary country. At other times, the name seems connected with certain passages in my own fiction, as though I had sometimes alluded to the country even before I had become convinced of its existence. The name attached itself while I was reading soon after its publication The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, first published in London in 1994 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In that book are many detailed accounts of the so-called imaginary countries written about by the Brontë siblings during their childhood and afterwards. A recurring name in those accounts is Glasstown. The name, of course, denotes a town or a city, but I soon found myself thinking of the name Glassland as though it denoted a country where fictional personages lived in the state of potentiality.

My discovery, so to call it, of a country on the far side of fiction need not have affected me as a writer of fiction. If anything, I ought to have devoted myself more earnestly to writing the book of fiction that I was not to finish. I should have written with more respect for the personages in my fiction now that I knew them to have histories unknown to me; to be connected with places I could only speculate about. I might well have written thus if a certain complication had not developed in my writing about a certain personage in the book of fiction that I was never to finish.

The reader of this work of fiction should recall that certain early sections of the unfinished work of fiction were set, as it were, in what might be called an imaginary building of two or more storeys. Several fictional personages first imagined the building and then set about imagining certain events that might one day take place in the building, but all except one of the personages later began to lose interest in the building. That personage was a young man who was called in earlier sections of this present work of fiction the chief character. If ever I had finished the work that I later abandoned, and if the finished work had later been published, then the reader would have learned that the chief character continued to be interested in the imaginary building, so to call it, throughout his fictional life, so to call it. Long after he had married and had become a father, and even after three of his poems and two pieces of his short fiction had been published in so-called literary magazines — even then, the chief character would often have imagined a young man not unlike himself at a desk in the imaginary building. (Although unable myself to imagine, I am able, of course, to write about fictional personages as though they have this ability.) The chief character sometimes tried to imagine the contents of the many thousands of pages that the imagined man would have filled with writing while he, the chief character, had had three poems and two pieces of short fiction published. If ever the unfinished work had been finished and published, then the reader would have learned also that the chief character made notes from time to time for a long work of fiction the whole of which would have been set in a building of two or more storeys and the chief character of which lived as a recluse in an upper-storey room where he filled many thousands of pages with writing that he showed to no one.

The complication mentioned in the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph arose as a result of my having decided one day to inspect some of the many thousands of pages mentioned in the previous sentence. The easiest way for me to report this matter is to write here that I visited the building mentioned often in this work of fiction; that I walked past the seemingly unoccupied suites of rooms on the ground floor and past the empty chapel, where the altar and the tabernacle were bare although the sanctuary was still carpeted; that I climbed several sets of stairs and walked along several corridors past many empty rooms, some of them with dormer windows, until I found the room in which a certain male personage sat at a desk between a set of bookshelves and a room of steel filing cabinets; and that I stepped up behind the male personage and looked over his shoulder.

The personage happened just then to be recording the progress, furlong by furlong, of a classic race for three-years-old colts and geldings in a place that no one but himself had any knowledge of. He was doing this in much the same way that a male personage was reported to have done similar tasks in my piece of fiction “The Interior of Gaaldine,” which is to say that he had beside him an opened double-page of some or another volume of nineteenth-century fiction and in front of him a handwritten page showing the names of ten or more racehorses and many other details. I looked for only a moment at the handwritten page. This was partly because I might otherwise have violated certain conventions affecting writers and their subject-matter and partly because I have long believed that a glance is the best means for discovering essential details. I saw the names Campanology, Nubian Servant, Rushy Glen, and Wildfell Hall. I saw the words emerald green, lilac, and yellow. I saw also several surnames, none of them belonging to any person that I could recall having met or having read about.

While I walked away from the room and back along the first of the several corridors, I understood for the first time that a personage mentioned in a work of fiction is capable of devising a seeming territory more extensive and more detailed by far than the work itself. On my way to visit the male personage in his upper room, I had looked through each of the open doorways that I passed and had admired the glimpse after glimpse that I had got through window after window of detail after detail of mostly level grassy countryside with trees in the distance. I had been pleased by the spaciousness of my fictional landscape and by the illusion of variety that I got from my sequence of views. On my way back from the upper room, I took no note of the portions of landscapes that flashed at me through the various windows. I could only marvel at the vast and variegated country where lived the owners and the trainers and the jockeys of the throng after throng of horses in the race after race recorded on the page after page in all the steel filing cabinets along the wall of the room that I had come from.

The personage who sat among the filing cabinets had written not a word about the country mentioned in the previous sentence. I had not needed to look into the cabinets in order to learn this. I had understood it in the way that a person understands certain matters in dreams or in the way that an author of fiction understands certain matters relating to the characters in his or her fiction. The personage recorded only names of racehorses, their positions at various points during races, the names of their owners and trainers and jockeys, and the colours worn by those jockeys. The filing cabinets around the personage contained only these details, and yet for every page in those crowded cabinets a suburban street, a country township, an inland plain with mountains in the distance rose to view in a territory as yet unknown to me. I felt the sort of giddiness that I might have felt as a child if I had crept towards the brink of a tall cliff overhanging an ocean or if I had climbed to the topmost vantage-point in a building of several storeys and had seen still no end to the level grassy countryside all around. I had for long supposed that a writer of fiction saw first in his or her mind or even, perhaps, imagined a fictional place inhabited by fictional personages or, as some would say, by characters, and afterwards wrote about that place and those personages. The man among the filing cabinets would have made no claim to be any sort of writer, least of all a writer of fiction. He sat at his desk with his pen in his hand and his page in front of him. The opened book at his left was for him not a fictional text but merely an accumulation in a certain order of the letters of the English alphabet from the varying occurrences of which he was able to calculate the fluctuating fortunes of the racehorses named on the page in front of him. And yet, for every detail that the man recorded I seemed to be made aware of the existence of one more of a barely discernible population who lived out their lives far from the scrutiny of any writer, let alone reader, in some or another Glassland or Gondal or farther-off Gaaldine.

One matter I could not at first account for. Each of the four names that I had seen from among the list of names of three-years-old colts and geldings — each of those names surely alluded to one or another passage in this present work of fiction. But then I supposed that many of the population mentioned in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, whenever they strove to give distinctive names to their racehorses, would have sought out words and phrases relating to the most recondite of matters in the remotest of imaginable regions.

Several years after the bustling afternoon mentioned in the first section of this work of fiction, I read for the first time a later edition of The Art of Memory, by Frances A. Yates, which had been first published in London in 1966 by Routledge and Kegan Paul. I learned from this book for the first time the detailed history of a set of beliefs and practices that I had previously known about only from references in other books. I learned from the book by Frances A. Yates that many a scholar from so-called classical times almost until so-called modern times discussed in theory or used in practice a system that was intended to store for ready retrieval every fact or concept or notion or item of doctrine from any branch of the so-called arts and sciences that the scholar might ever have need of. (During much of the time while the system was in use, printed books did not exist.) A person using the system had first to establish in his or her mind an image of a building, preferably of several storeys each with several rooms. Such a building was often called in the book a memory palace. The person then placed in one after another position in one after another room on one after another storey of the image of the building one after another image of one after another object that would serve afterwards as the perceptible reminder of some or another item requiring to be remembered.

In a later chapter of the book mentioned above, the author tries to explain the contents of a book the unwieldy title of which she replaces by the word Seals (Latin sigilli). The author of the book is Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic in 1600. Frances A. Yates explains that Giordano Bruno was a follower of the so-called Hermetic philosophy, one item of which seems to have been that each human entity is a replica of the divine organisation of the universe. The same author explains further that the so-called Trinity Seals described, and sometimes depicted, by Giordano Bruno in his book are the simplest visible representation of a memory-system designed to occupy not a palace of several storeys but the universe itself as it was understood by the Hermetics.

I believe I may have learned less from reading books than I have learned from writing books, even those books that I later left off writing. While I was reading about the book mentioned in the previous paragraph, I seemed not to understand what I was reading. I seemed to be trying but failing to see in my mind images of a universe arranged around a vertical axis whereas every image that I had been aware of had been arranged around a horizontal axis. Soon after I had read about the book, however, I understood that I myself had written a book in which was mentioned, if not depicted, the simplest visible representation of a memory-system; a book in which were mentioned, if not depicted, sets of racing colours, racecourses, and even a few racehorses. My memory-system might have seemed to occupy no more than an upper room in a building of two or three storeys, but its figurative extent would have seemed to me no less than old Bruno’s hermetical labyrinth would have seemed to him. Tract after tract of mostly level grassy countryside, each with trees on its farther side — this would have been universe enough for me.

During the months before the bustling afternoon mentioned in the very first section of this work of fiction, I used often to glance at a certain young woman while she and I and many other persons waited on a certain suburban railway station. I took note of the yellowish hair of the young woman and of the tilt of her nose. I hoped I would be able to keep an image of the young woman in my mind while I was writing a later section of the book of fiction that I was then writing. After I had abandoned that book of fiction, I sometimes regretted that no passage of my own fiction would ever bring to mind any image of the young woman. However, I remained hopeful that some or another image of her might appear in the future to some or another reader or writer of some or another page not of my making. Now, having brought to an end this present work of fiction, I am even more hopeful.

In some or another room in a certain memory palace, some or another compiler of pages may already have had sight of her image. She is a trainer and also, perhaps, an owner of racehorses on a property in countryside resembling some or another district of New Zealand or of Tasmania. Near the centre of the property is a training track enclosing a swampy area that might be called today, in the place where I sit writing these words, wetlands. I could wish that the sighting mentioned above might have occurred on one or another morning when the young woman would have been loading one or another of her racehorses into a horse-float to be taken to one or another distant racecourse not yet mentioned in any work of fiction and, by definition, never able to be so mentioned. I could hardly doubt that the young woman’s helper would be a stern-faced older woman. Nor could I suppose that the building partly visible between trees in the middle distance would be other than a house with attic windows or an upper storey. As for the item dangling from the lapel of each woman — the shield-shaped card that will later admit her to the mounting-yard beside the distant racecourse — the badge on the breast of each female personage would be of black and of gold.

About the Author

GERALD MURNANE was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including Inland, The Plains, and Tamarisk Row, as well as a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane has been a recipient of the Patrick White Award and the Melbourne Prize. Barley Patch won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation.

Content

Gerald Murnane
Barley Patch

PART 1

PART 2

About the Author