Barley Patch E-Book

Gerald Murnane

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 390

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Essential reading for anyone interested in the art of fiction and on how images shape our thoughts, reading, and loves, Barley Patch lays bare the acts of writing and imagining.

Leseprobe

iii

Barley Patch

Gerald Murnane

SHEFFIELD – LONDON – NEW YORK

v

The Turf was so complicated it went on forever.

Jack Kerouac, Doctor Saxvi

Contents

Title PageEpigraphPart 1Part 2Copyright

12

Part 1

3

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years later, for my own conception, a young man aged nineteen years and named Franz Xaver Kappus sent some of his unpublished poems and a covering letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, who was by then a much-published writer although he was only twenty-eight years of age.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?

4I first read the above passage in June 1985, soon after I had bought a second-hand copy of Rilke’sLetterstoaYoungPoet, 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 5written 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 novelsor shortstories, but to have them thus called began in time to make me feel uncomfortable, and I took to using only the word fictionas the name for what I wrote. When I stopped writing at last, I had not for many years used the terms novelor shortstoryin 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 imaginationseemed 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 6mind 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 TheAustralianJournal, 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 7read 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 thispage, 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 8previous 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 re-read 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 9with 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 TheAustralianJournalabout 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 10of 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 tenbeeches, the trees near the summit being beech trees.

Sometimes I seem to recall that the variation was explained 11as being merely the sort of change that happens over time to an often-used phrase. At other times, I seem to recall that Tanbitcheswas 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 Tanbitcheswhenever 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.

12I seem to recall that I was disappointed by the similarity between the plain English of the phrase tenbeechesand 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 BratFarrar, which was published in monthly instalments in TheAustralianJournalin 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 Tanbitcheswould 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 13personage 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 BratFarrarwas 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 14reported 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 HerewardtheWake, 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 15a 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 BratFarrar, to take part, as it were, in the fictional life of the young man who had arrived at the 16two-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 girl-friends; 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 17likely 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 18at 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 BratFarrar, 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 19overlooked 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 WutheringHeights, 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 20trickling water was my longing to have access to an upper-storey window. At the time when I was reading BratFarrar, 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 BratFarrar, 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 21touch 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 22house 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 AustralianWomen’sWeekly. 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.

23Mandrake 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 24real 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 TheAustralianJournal: 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 minuscule 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 25two 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 night-dress 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 upperstorey 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 26I 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 BratFarrar. Of course, terms such as narratorand even characterwere 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 Teyhad 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 BratFarrar, 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 27see 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 LittleWomen, 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. 28My 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 nunteacher 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 29cooler 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 window-sill 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.

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