A History of Books (15 page)

At the age of eleven, I never doubted that I would live for the rest of my life as a faithful Catholic, but I found it tedious to sit each Sunday in a parish church crowded with parents and their squirming clusters of children; to hear the priest preaching that the parish school needed money for an extra classroom; to read in the Catholic newspaper that the archbishop had made a speech attacking communist-controlled unions after he had blessed and opened a new church school building in a faraway outer suburb where the streets were dust in summer and mud in winter. From here and there in my reading, I had put together a collection of expressions that inspired in me what I supposed were pious feelings:
private oratory; private chaplain; gothic chasuble; jewelled chalice; secluded monastery; strict observance
. I seem to have been dreaming of a private place where I could enjoy my religion with a few like-minded persons. At the centre of the place was, of course, the oratory or chapel, but I was also concerned that the place should be surrounded by an appropriate landscape.

After I had been at the Farm for a few days, I heard for the first time about Outlands. The day was a Sunday, and a visitor
from Outlands had arrived for the midday meal. The visitor was a young man perhaps not yet thirty years of age. He was pale and rather plump, and I was surprised when I learned that he came from a settlement of farmers but very interested when I saw that the newspaper he carried with his luggage was in a foreign language. Before I could learn much about the man or about Outlands, my father arrived to take me for a walk and to tell me news of our family.

While I walked with my father, I tried to learn what he might have known already about the Farm and about Outlands. My father would tell me only that Nunkie and his parents had been very kind to take me in but that I must not let them turn me into a religious maniac. My father, who could well be called for the purposes of this piece of fiction the Unreformed Gambler, was a Catholic in the same way that the Reformed Gambler was a Catholic. My father went to mass every Sunday and to confession and communion once each month and seemed to suspect the motives of any Catholic who did any more than this.

While we walked on the Sunday, my father told me that he knew about Outlands only that it was doomed to fail, just as the Farm had failed. Such places always failed, my father said, because their founders were too fond of giving orders and not prepared to listen to advice. He then told me that the Farm had been intended by its founder, the person called in this fiction the Holy Foundress, to be a place where a few men who had recently completed long terms of imprisonment could live and work and pray while they prepared themselves to find homes and jobs in
the world at large. The Farm, my father reminded me, was only a few tram stops away from the large prison where he himself had been a warder when I was born and where he had learned, as all the other warders, his mates, had learned, that almost every person who had been imprisoned for a long term was by nature the sort of person who would be later imprisoned again.

My father had ceased to be a prison warder in one of the first years after I was born, but he had remained friends with many warders. He told me on our Sunday walk, in the streets of the suburb where the Farm was at the end of the tramline that passed the front gate of the large prison, that all the warders who had heard of the founding of the Farm had predicted that the Farm would fail and that the warders' predictions had been fulfilled. The Farm had failed, my father said, because most of the men who had gone from the prison to the Farm had not been reformed but had gone on planning – and even committing – further crimes while they lived at the Farm.

My father told me the story of the Farm with seeming relish, but I tried while he talked to compose in my mind arguments in defence of the Farm. I had lived at the Farm for only a few days, but each morning I had gone with Nunkie and his son, my cousin, and the Holy Foundress to early mass in the semi-public chapel of a nearby convent; each evening I had prayed with the others at dusk in the room where the big bookcase stood; each day I had walked between the fruit trees for ten minutes, imitating the even paces of one or another priest I had once seen walking on the paths around his presbytery while he read the divine office
for that day. Perhaps I was discovering the power of ordered behaviour, of ritual. Perhaps I was merely devising for myself one more of the imagined worlds I had devised throughout my childhood. Although I was hardly fond of the Holy Foundress, I admired her for having tried to set up what I thought of as a world of her own, a world apart from or concealed within the drab world that most people inhabited, a small farm almost surrounded by suburbs.

My own imagined worlds before then had been located each on an island of the same shape as Tasmania, which was the only suitable island I knew of. The people of those worlds had been devoted to cricket or to Australian Football or to horse-racing. I had drawn elaborate maps showing where the sportsgrounds or racecourses were situated. I filled pages with coloured illustrations of the football jumpers of the many teams or of the coloured caps of the cricket teams or of the racing silks of the racing stables. I had spent so much time in preparing these preliminary details for each of my imagined worlds that I had seldom got as far as to work out results of imagined football or cricket matches or of imagined horse-races.

I had destroyed or lost all the pages showing the details mentioned above, but sometimes during the year before I arrived at the Farm I had felt a peculiar longing and had wanted my adult life to be so uneventful and my future home to be so quiet and so seldom visited that I could spend most of my life recording the details of an imaginary world a hundred times more complicated than any I had so far imagined.

The people at the Farm seemed not to read newspapers, although I feel sure today that Nunkie and the Reformed Gambler must have looked through the results and reports of cricket matches during the summer. Perhaps they kept the newspaper out of sight of the children, or cut out the sporting pages and burned the rest. When I asked Nunkie, on my first day at the Farm, where the newspaper was, he told me that the people of the Farm were not especially curious about events in the secular world. Nunkie's expression, ‘the secular world', gave me even then, on my first day, the pleasant sensation that I was inside a world inside what others considered to be the only world.

After Nunkie had answered my request for a newspaper, he had taken me to the bookshelves in the main room at the Farm. He told me I was welcome to read any book from what he called the library, provided that I first sought his approval of my chosen book. I saw names of authors such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray on some of the nearest books, and I asked Nunkie whether the library contained any modern books. He pointed to a shelf containing many of the works of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

On the day after Nunkie had shown me the library, I looked more closely at the books. When he arrived home that afternoon from the state school where he taught, I asked him whether I could read a book from an upper shelf: a book the spine of which I had looked at often during that day. The title of the book was
Fifty-two Meditations for the Liturgical Year
.

As soon as I had seen the title mentioned above, I had done,
probably for the first time, two things that I have done many times since then: I first imagined the contents of a book of which the title was the only detail known to me; and I then derived from my imagining much more than I later derived from my looking into the text of the book.

I have to remind the reader that this piece of fiction is set in the year 1950. In that year, and for many years afterwards, the word
meditation
denoted only a little of what it has since come to denote. In the year in which I wanted to read the book mentioned above, there were no doubt a few scholars or eccentrics in the city of Melbourne who knew something about meditation as it was practised in so-called eastern religions, but neither Nunkie nor I knew of the existence of those scholars or eccentrics. The only sort of meditation that he or I was aware of was an exercise such as Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, had devised: an attempt by the person meditating to bring to mind as clearly as possible one or another of the events reported in one or another of the four Gospels and then to ponder on the behaviour and the words of Jesus of Nazareth as reported in connection with that event and then to feel certain feelings as a result of the pondering and finally to make certain resolutions for the future as a result of the feelings.

Thirteen years after I had asked to be allowed to read the book mentioned above, I was anxious to have as my girlfriend a certain young woman who worked in a certain second-hand bookshop in the central business district of Melbourne. While I was thus anxious, I used to visit the bookshop every Saturday
morning and to spend an hour and more looking around the shelves before buying one or another book and then trying to begin with the young woman while she sold me the book such a conversation as would persuade her that I was a young man who dressed and behaved unexceptionally but who saw inwardly private sights the descriptions of which would become in the near future the texts of one after another of the works of fiction that would make him famous. Whether or not I can claim that the young woman became my girlfriend, I can state that she and I went out together, as the saying used to go, for a few weeks during which time she sometimes described to me what she had seen inwardly as a result of her having read one or another book while I described often to her what I foresaw as the contents of one after another of the works of fiction of mine that would later be published, one of which works, so I promised the young woman, would include a character inspired by her. At the end of the few weeks mentioned in the previous sentence, the young woman went to live in another city, and she and I have never met up with one another or written to one another since then. However, I have learned from newspapers that the young woman later became a famous author, although not an author of fiction. The young woman later became a much more famous author than I became, and during the year before I began to write this piece of fiction, her autobiography was published. I have been told by a person who has read the autobiography that no passage in it refers to myself. Even so, the publication of the autobiography of the famous woman who had once been the
young woman in the second-hand bookshop reminded me that I had still not kept the above-mentioned promise that I made. I am able to introduce the young woman into this paragraph, and so to keep my promise to her, for the reason that one of the books that I bought in the shop where she worked was a copy of the same book that I had wanted Nunkie's permission to read, as was reported above. I had bought the book, and had given the young woman in the shop to understand that I would look into the book, because she was still a faithful Catholic and I wanted her to suppose that I had not lost all interest in religion and even that she might win me back to a certain degree of belief in the Catholic faith if she became my girlfriend. The paragraph that ends with this sentence is, of course, part of a work of fiction.

After I had asked Nunkie whether I might read the book mentioned earlier, he had smiled and had told me that meditations were not for boys. He had then reminded me that it was time for our daily cricket match. This was played every evening between Nunkie and his son on the one side and the Reformed Gambler and myself on the other. We bowled underarm with a tennis ball on a paved area near the former dairy, and we observed complicated local rules as to how many runs were scored if the ball was hit into this or that area of the long grass in the orchard.

Even though I knew nothing about non-Christian sorts of meditation, I had already, at the age of eleven, heard or read enough about certain great saints of the Church to know that those persons saw more in their minds while they prayed or
meditated than mere illustrations of the gospel story. I had heard or read that certain great saints had sometimes gone into trances or been transported. No priest or religious brother or nun had ever, in my experience, suggested that his or her congregation or pupils should do more while praying than talk to one or another of the Persons of the Holy Trinity or the Blessed Virgin Mary, or one or another of the saints. I sensed as a child that my priests and teachers were uncomfortable when questioned about anything to do with visions or with unusual religious experiences. Those same priests and teachers were never reluctant to talk about hell or purgatory and the punishments meted out to the residents of those places, but they were reluctant to speculate about the joys of heaven. A child who asked for details about the celebrated happiness of the residents of heaven might well be told that the souls in heaven were content for ever to contemplate the Beatific Vision. This was the term used by theologians, so I learned as a child, for the sight that one saw when one saw Almighty God.

For all that I was most curious to know what the souls in heaven enjoyed and what the great saints sometimes saw while they prayed or meditated, I was in no way curious to see God Himself. I write this in all seriousness. I had never wanted to meet God or to have with Him any more dealings than were absolutely necessary. I believed in Him; I was pleased to belong to the organisation that I believed to be His One, True Church; but I had no wish to meet Him and to have to make conversation with Him. I was much more interested in the place where God lived than in the Deity Himself.

For most of my childhood, I could only dare to hope that I might one day see the landscapes of heaven. I was rather more confident that I would one day glimpse some of those landscapes while I prayed with intensity or while I meditated. And, of course, I was able to imagine beforehand something of what I hoped to glimpse in the future. The landscapes of heaven were lit by a light that emanated from God Himself. Near its source, this divine light was of an almost unbearable fierceness, but in the distant zones of heaven where I was most at home, it shone serenely, although by no means unwaveringly, so that the sky above the landscapes seemed sometimes like a sky at early morning in summer in the world where these details were being imagined, and sometimes like a sky at mid-afternoon in late autumn in that same world. The details of the landscapes themselves were by no means elaborate. I was content to compose my heavenly vistas by extending further and further into the background the simple green hills, some of them with a few stylised, tufted trees on top, that I had enjoyed staring at in pictures in the earliest of my picture books; by having a pale-blue stream wind between some of the hills; by situating on this or that hillside a farmhouse or a few cattle or horses, and behind just one of the furthest hills the church steeple or the clock tower of a peaceful village.