A History of Books (13 page)

When the man supposed that he might live as the image-man had lived, he was not so foolish as to have been influenced by any so-called movements said to have arisen as a result of the image-man's writings or opinions. The man understood that the image-man had begun to follow his own way of life and to write his own sort of writing as long ago as the 1940s and many years before words such as
beatnik
and
hippie
would be made popular by certain journalists. The man supposed that the image-man's way of life was too much his own to be summarised or defined. The image-man, who was often supposed to have preached against the conventions of society, so to call them, included in one or another of his books of fiction a passage in which the first-person narrator wanted no more than to be in his middle age a railway worker drinking beer in the late afternoon on his front veranda and talking to his best friend, who lived in the house next door.

The man who had once supposed that he might live as the image-man had lived – that man had lived for many years in a modest house in a suburb that might have been called lower middle class. The man worked in a government department, in what was sometimes called a middle-level position. He had been married for many years to a woman whom he had first met when they worked in the same building. He and the woman had two children. Only on some evenings and at weekends did the man try to follow the example of the image-man by drinking beer and by trying to write fiction.

Soon after the image-man had died, one after another biography was published. The man bought and read most of the
biographies and learned from them, among many other matters, that the image-man had spent much time during his last years drinking beer and trying to write fiction. He was married by then to a wife who had been one of his childhood friends. During his last years, his wife would hide his shoes to prevent him from going to some or another bar and drinking whisky and other drinks.

The man, who had never felt drawn towards any political party and had never signed any petition or any document protesting against any war or any seeming-injustice – the man read with interest in one or another of the biographies mentioned a report of the image-man's having been visited late in his life by two young persons whose shirts were printed with slogans protesting against a certain war being waged by the United State of America. The biographer supposed that the young persons had expected the image-man to welcome them and to sympathise with their political views, but he had stood at his front door with a can of beer in his hand and had told them that he would not utter a word against his country and had then driven the young persons away.

 

This, the twenty-eighth section of this work of fiction, comprises four paragraphs. All except the first paragraph comprise extracts from a work of two volumes: an autobiography written in the Hungarian language and published in Hungary five years before the birth of the man of nearly seventy years who
is the writer of this paragraph. When the autobiography was published, its author was aged in his mid-thirties. He had been born in a region of Hungary that was later declared by the Treaty of Trianon to be a part of Czechoslovakia. He later lived in Hungary but chose to leave in 1948 for political reasons. He died by his own hand in the United States of America when he was aged more than eighty years and after he had refused all offers to have his books of fiction published in Hungary. The following paragraphs have been translated from the Hungarian language by the author of this paragraph.

I never understood those writers who claimed to find in a moment of inspiration their immortal subject matter. The work finds us, not we the work, and the most we can do is not to turn and flee from it. Sometimes, it seemed to me that all the lines I had written were only puttings-off, postponements, thousands of little writings, a series of books all hiding from the subject I had undertaken to write about; but a time came when it was no longer possible to flee from the meeting, no longer possible to write another book as though to beg for a postponement of my payment of my writer's fees – a time came when I was dragged in front of my task, when I had to stand there or else fail to come out with the words that I alone could write…Every bit of writing that I began was a sort of escape, a sort of faithlessness, as though I was pleading with my daemon ‘Let me off just this once; the time has not yet come; let me first talk about other things; this is still my
preparation, my finger exercises; I still don't hear clearly my true voice; I am still full of strange melodies; I have to forget first all that I've heard or felt, to forget the penetrating literary rhythms that reverberate around me…Truly, I'll write this first, and afterwards that, and afterwards, yes afterwards, I'll devote myself to my true task. So, I wrote books, like someone trying to buy off his fate, to appease with small sacrifices his relentless deity. But I was always painfully aware that I could not escape so cheaply…

‘What will you write about?' they asked. Sometimes I was amazed to discover that a writer's fate is to be less able to turn away from certain tasks than from certain people or from certain responsibilities in the area of feelings and emotions. In despair, I saw that I might ask that question for years, perhaps for my whole life: what will I write about? Sometimes in conversation I mentioned ideas for books that I might like to write in the future; then, one day in the future, I would be astonished to find that I was now writing precisely that book which I had speculated about or talked idly about years before.

It might have been good to have run away from these conjectured books; to have ignored the lot of them; to have rested myself and stretched my limbs, gathered my strength, perhaps for other sorts of enterprises. But no; I could not have run away from a single letter. Obviously, every line belonged to that same task: the superfluous, the faulty, the shamefully hurried, the lazy…I know that I was never preparing for that certain ‘great book' in which I would declare everything; the
writer knows that he can never declare ‘everything', and only the amateur or the expert lounging around the boundaries of literature – only such a one can write a great book. Rather, I believed that among all those slight occasional works…there would be one line or one paragraph in which I would say in my own style what no one but me could say. I thought it unlikely that what I had to say would be especially clever, strikingly original, dazzlingly intellectual; it might be that I would explain myself, when the right time and the right situation occurred, in commonplaces, since in life and in literature the decisive statement – the word or the opinion – which wholly explains the person is usually simple indeed. Sometimes I imagined that everything I was writing was a foreword, an excuse or pretence: in truth, there was only one character I would have liked to write about, to describe, and I was surprised to learn that this character was alive, that I knew her name, that I was acquainted with her, that I spoke often to her; I believed she was an older woman who stood at the centre of her social circle, who was not especially clever or good but who simply knew something that was perhaps the secret, so to speak, of life, although she was unable to express this with complete certainty in words; she was a perfectly balanced person; more than this I did not know… This woman's secret, the secret of this unknown woman who was nearer to me than any real woman, I would have loved to discover while I wrote. Could this be called a writerly program? Of course not. And sometimes I was amazed at how wasteful was my search for her, how many memory-islands I had to
wander across in my effort to reach her. Everything that I know about life or would like to know – she is the basis of it all; and yet I don't know who this woman is, whether or not she lived near me once, whether or not I once met up with her. She is perhaps the Mother, the Other, the Eternal and Unknowable whom I yearn to meet up with; I do not know. But I do know that with every line I have written, with every book, and with every sort of literary work, I search for her, hoping she might answer me. Years would pass, filled with work and compromises and experiments, and during those years I would see the face of that female personage less and less clearly; I could not even hear her voice from the shadows. Then, for a moment, in some foreign country, I would catch sight of her. It is as though my work is nothing but a pretence: I write so that I can meet with her, if only once.

 

A man aged almost forty years was reading for the first time the last few pages of the English translation of a long work of fiction that had been first published in the Icelandic language in Reykjavik in the year before the man had been born.

The man and some of his friends often discussed the books of fiction that they had read recently. During their discussions, the man and his friends spoke as though they clearly remembered each book, referring to persons and events as though they were among the contents of the book and forgetting that the book consisted only of words arranged in sentences and that the
persons and events so often discussed were image-persons and image-events from their own minds. The man and his friends liked to seek out and to read little-known books of fiction, especially books translated from foreign languages, and then to announce to one another that he or she had discovered a neglected masterpiece, one of the two or three greatest books of fiction that he or she had read.

While the man mentioned above was reading the book mentioned there, he hoped that he could later declare honestly to his friends that the book was the greatest work of fiction that he had read. He looked forward to reporting, for example, that he still seemed to hear the roaring of the waves in the small bay mentioned in the early pages of the book, the same bay that the chief character of the book would later append to his surname as though he was one of a notable landowning family rather than a foundling whose mother, as he so often complained during his later life, had sent him away, soon after his birth, in a sack. The man looked forward to reporting his feelings of shock and distress while he had read passages describing, so he intended to say, the squalor and the wretchedness of the poorer characters and their brutality towards one another. He looked forward to reporting his feelings of sympathy and his grudging admiration for the chief character of the book, who tried throughout his life to write poetry in the tradition of the sagas but who wrote mostly doggerel.

While he was reading the last few pages of the book, the man hoped that he would be able later to report to his friends not
only the matters mentioned above but also that the ending of the book had been profound or magnificent or sublime. (These three adjectives were used often by the man and his friends when they discussed books of fiction.) The man hoped thus, but he was sometimes afraid that his hope would not be fulfilled.

Whenever he was reading some or another book of fiction, the man was especially alert to what he called, at that period of his life, the setting of the book: the landscapes or the scenery in which the characters lived their lives, as he would have said. A book of fiction would most impress the man if he seemed to see, while he was reading the book, a setting likely to become later a part of his own mind. It was not necessary that the setting should be of the sort called dramatic or picturesque, so long as it was spacious and lacking precise boundaries. The man was more than satisfied if, when he had left off reading a book of fiction, he seemed to see in his mind an expanse of mostly level grassy countryside or a range of forested hills or even street after street of suburban houses. Such scenery, so the man supposed, would provide space enough for any personage who had formerly been a character in a work of fiction to begin his or her existence as a presence in the mind of the man.

While the man was reading the book mentioned above, he sometimes doubted that the author of the book could find among the coastal bays or the meadows above the cliffs or the treeless stony uplands or the glaciers often mentioned in the book scenery fit for the ending of a work of fiction that was profound or magnificent or sublime. The man then read to the end of the book.

Thirty years afterwards, the same man prepared to write a short passage about his experience as a reader of the last pages of the book mentioned or, rather, about his memories of that experience. The man intended to report that the words
ice
and
sky
, together with the words
white
and
blue
, had appeared often on the last pages; that the chief character had been reported as approaching the zone where the white and the blue seemed to meet or even to merge. Much else, of course, had been reported in the last pages, but the man remembered nothing of it.

For thirty years, the man preparing to write the short passage mentioned had wanted to write a work of fiction the ending of which would alert at least one reader to the feel of things in the way that he, the man, had been alerted by the ending of the book mentioned often above. If the man could not have written the work that he had wanted to write, then he would have been satisfied to write a work of fiction for which the only apt ending would have been a report of the effect on the man of his having read, thirty years before, that the chief character in a certain work of fiction had seemed to pass from sight in a place where the white seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the blue; where the land seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the sky, the visible with the invisible, the writer even with the reader, and whatever had been written with whatever had been read.

 

As It Were a Letter

 

O
n the day before I began to write this piece of fiction, I received in the post two items from a man who was born when I was already eleven years of age. That man, whose name is not part of this piece of fiction, has the same urge that Vladimir Nabokov attributed to himself in the early pages of his book
Speak, Memory
: the urge to learn more and more about the years just before his conception and birth. The man often questions me about what I remember from the eleven years when I was alive and he was not. The man claims that what I tell him adds to the sum of what he knows about himself.