A History of Books (2 page)

The man lying on the couch had dreamed a clear and memorable dream before he had woken on the hot afternoon. The events of the dream resembled some of the events that had taken place on a certain hot afternoon ten years before. On that afternoon, the man and his wife had attended a wedding in a certain provincial city far from Melbourne. The man's wife
wore to the wedding an expensive dress and hat that she had bought for the occasion. In mid-afternoon, when the guests were arriving at the wedding reception, the man's wife had asked him to take a photograph of her in her new outfit, as she called it. The man had then gone to fetch his and his wife's camera from their motor car. When the man met up again with his wife, she was standing alone in a small paved courtyard. She then stood in front of two ornamental columns while the man took several photographs. While his wife posed for the photographs, the man became aware that he and his wife had not been alone together during the previous three days and two evenings. He and she had spent most of that time in a house belonging to relatives of his wife and had had to sleep in separate bedrooms. After the wedding reception, the man and his wife would have to return once more to the house mentioned and to sleep once more in the bedrooms mentioned. On the following morning, they would set out for Melbourne. They would set out early in order to avoid the heat of the day.

While the man was taking photographs of his wife, he foresaw the two of them arriving in the early afternoon at their upstairs flat in a certain inner suburb of Melbourne and soon afterwards lying on their bed wearing only their underclothes and without having debated any matters beforehand.

 

An image of a marble statue of a naked man appeared in the mind of a boy of ten years. The details of the image, so the boy
supposed, were such as might have appeared just then in the mind of a girl of about ten years who was sitting in sight of the boy and was looking into a certain volume of an encyclopedia. The most noticeable of those details were an image-sac and an image-tube that dangled between the image-legs of the image-statue.

The boy and the girl sat at separate desks in the single classroom of a primary school with no more than a dozen pupils. The large window at one side of the classroom overlooked mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the far distance. The trees were the nearest trees of a forest extending on its far side further than the boy had ever travelled in that direction. The boy had once travelled with his parents and his brother on a road of red gravel that led for a few miles in among the overarching trees of the forest. After that day, the boy had sometimes seen in his mind an image of some or another clearing in some or another forest and had wished that he could have gone alone into such a clearing whenever he had feared that some or another person or persons might infer from his, the boy's, demeanour what sort of images he saw for the time being in his mind or what sort of feelings those images caused in him.

Each of the children in the classroom mentioned had a book in front of him or her, although some children whispered or fidgeted rather than read. The teacher's desk was in a corner behind the children. The teacher was a man considered by the children to be old but was perhaps no older than forty years. His chair was tilted backwards, and he sat with his head against
the wall behind him and with his eyes closed. Some of the children supposed that the teacher had fallen asleep because the afternoon was hot. The oldest girl often asserted that the teacher fell asleep on most afternoons because he drank during every lunch hour from a flask of brandy that he kept inside his jacket. The girl asserted also that her parents were going to report the teacher soon to the district inspector of schools.

At some time during the last hour of every school day, the teacher allowed the children to put away their schoolbooks and to do what he called free reading. Each child then chose a book from the cupboard that was called the library. The boy in whose mind the image-statue had appeared had read every book in the so-called library. Some books he had read several times. On the day when the image-statue was in his mind, he was reading for the third or the fourth time a book that would never be mentioned in any text that he would read during the sixty-one years before he read the page proofs of this present work of fiction. The boy had never taken note of the name of the author of the book. The title of the book comprised two words: a surname in the possessive case and the word
Fag
. The two words of the title were the only words from the book that the boy would remember, even a few years afterwards, but he would still remember, sixty and more years afterwards, some of what he had seen in his mind while he read and some of what he had felt. He would remember, for example, an image of a boy-man seated at a desk in an upstairs room that he called his study. The image-boy-man sometimes read from an image-book in which the image-words were in the
Greek or the Latin language and sometimes wrote on an image-page with an image-pen image-lines of poetry or image-sentences of prose that he himself had composed just then in the one or the other language. The image-boy-man sometimes looked out through the image-window above his image-desk at an image-view of low green image-hills with a line of image-trees in the image-distance. The image-trees were the nearest image-trees of an image-woodland that extended a little way in among the image-hills. The image-boy-man admired the image-trees but had never wished to go alone into the image-woodland.

The surname of the image-boy-man was part of the title of the book mentioned earlier, and the boy who had read the book several times always considered the image-boy-man the chief character of the book. Sixty and more years after he had last read the book, and when he better understood the workings of books of fiction, the man who had been the boy-reader understood that the chief character of the book was he who was denoted by the second word of the title. This character was an image-boy no older than the boy-reader himself had been while he was reading. The narrator of the book reported many of the images that appeared in the mind of this image-boy and many of his image-feelings but nothing of what took place in the mind of the image-boy-man who employed the chief character as his fag.

The chief character was reported as first disliking and fearing his employer but later admiring him – disliking him because the boy-men, his employer's classmates, all disliked him and shunned him; fearing him because he spoke always
sternly to the chief character; admiring him because he seemed not to care that his classmates disliked him and shunned him and because he went on reading or writing in his study every evening in such a way that he, the chief character, could never suppose what his employer might have seen in his mind, much less what he might have felt; admiring him also because he trained during many an afternoon for a certain long-distance race conducted by the school and later came from far back in the field and won the race.

The boy in the classroom mentioned earlier seldom recalled any character from any book. In the books that he read were too many so-called adventures. The characters in those books took part in one after another so-called adventure whereas the boy wanted to read about male and female characters falling in love with one another. The boy himself often fell in love – mostly with girls of his own age but often with young women and sometimes with young men. A few months before he had begun to read for the third or the fourth time about the image-boy-man whose surname was part of the title of a book of fiction, the boy had fallen in love with the girl in whose mind, so he supposed a few months later, was an image of a marble statue. Sometimes the boy wished that he could write books instead of merely reading them. The girl-characters or the young-women-characters in his books would understand why the boy-characters had fallen in love with them, but the boy could never have found the words for writing about such a matter. Nor could he have found the words for writing about boy-characters or young-men-characters who were
able to prevent other persons from knowing what images they, the characters, saw in their minds or what feelings those images gave rise to, although he sometimes wished to write about those matters also.

The boy reading in the classroom wanted to conceal his thoughts and feelings from the girl who was looking into the volume mentioned earlier. A few days before, the boy had given the girl to understand that he had fallen in love with her, but he was still waiting to learn what this had caused the girl to think or to feel.

When the boy had taken from one of the shelves in the classroom the book about the fictional character whose fictional feelings remained unknown, the girl had taken from another shelf a certain volume of an encyclopedia. The older children knew that the volume contained illustrations of statues of naked men and women. The boy himself sometimes looked at the image-breasts of the image-women and at the smooth image-places between their image-thighs. The boy could not recall the girl's having previously looked into the volume, but while he was reading that a fictional boy-man sat reading or writing in his fictional study he suspected that the girl was looking at the image-details between the image-thighs of the naked image-men.

 

Two patches of dried gum lay on a mostly white page. The patches had formerly held in place a coloured reproduction of a painting. The title of the painting and several other details were
still printed at the foot of the page. The man remembering these details could not recall the title of the painting but he recalled that its subject was a group of naked women beside a pool in a large room with a tiled floor and marble columns. The man could not recall any detail of any of the images of the women, but he recalled that he had stared at detail after detail on many an afternoon from his eleventh to his fifteenth year.

On each of the afternoons mentioned, the boy had found the reproduction mentioned in a book containing numerous reproductions of paintings but only one in which were images of naked women. He had then looked at the images of the women for as long as he had dared before he replaced the book and then reached for the book of fiction that he was presently reading during each afternoon. This book was one or another work by a famous author of fiction who had been born in England one hundred and twenty-seven years before the boy had been born. The boy had first been recommended to read these works of fiction by an aunt who was one of his father's unmarried sisters and after he had boasted to her that he, the boy, was capable of reading the books that adults read. His aunt had told him that the famous author had not belonged to their church but that his books of fiction would be safe to read. She had then given the boy permission to take down one or another of those books from the tall glass-fronted bookcase in the parlour of the house where she lived with her two unmarried sisters and their unmarried brother.

The house mentioned was a farmhouse surrounded by mostly
level grassy countryside. The view of countryside ended in one direction in a distant line of trees and in another direction in a line of cliffs overlooking an ocean. During each of the years mentioned earlier, the boy had spent several weeks of his summer holidays in the house. During each of those weeks, he had read often from one or another book of fiction by the famous author mentioned and had looked often at the reproduction of the painting mentioned earlier until the day during the summer holidays of his fifteenth year when he had found, on the page where the reproduction had previously lain, only the two patches of dried gum mentioned earlier.

Thirty and more years after he had found the two patches mentioned, the man who had been the boy mentioned was standing on one of the cliffs mentioned and was trying to remember what he had read about in the many books of fiction by the famous author mentioned, none of which books he had read since the summer holidays of his fifteenth year. The man had brought his wife and their two children to the cliffs during their summer holidays. While the man was standing on the cliff, his wife and their children were scrambling down a steep path into a bay or cove where waves broke against a strip of sand at the foot of the cliff. Before the man had turned to look across the grassy countryside towards the nearest farmhouse and to try to remember what he had read about in the parlour of that house more than thirty years before, he had been pleased to hear his wife and their children calling to one another and laughing on the steep path. During the previous year, his wife had been often
ill and had spent several periods in one or another hospital.

While the man looked towards the nearest farmhouse, there appeared in his mind an image of a sailing ship lying on a reef within sight of cliffs. Tall waves were breaking against the ship, and the wind had torn the sails from the masts. Groups of people were huddled on the deck of the ship. Other people were trying to launch lifeboats. Noticeable among these people was a man who was taller and more enterprising than his fellows and who helped to launch several lifeboats and to guide people into the boats.

The man standing on the cliff took an interest in the few details that he seemed to remember from books that he had read. He had been trying for some years to complete the final draft of a long work of fiction, although he had excused himself from writing during the previous year on account of his wife's illness. While he stood on the cliff, he seemed about to learn something that would be of much use to him as a writer of fiction but he was not observant enough to notice such a detail in his mind as that the image of the wrecked sailing ship in his mind was not an image of any sort of nineteenth-century vessel. Not until twenty years later would the man notice that the details of the imageship were those of a line drawing of a Portuguese caravel from the fifteenth century. The man knew hardly anything about any sort of ocean-going vessel, but in his twelfth year he had copied into a school exercise book as part of a so-called project a line drawing of a caravel. As part of the same so-called project, he had searched several pages in his atlas for places bearing names
that seemed to be Portuguese. One such place that he found was the island named Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean, which island his teacher had not previously known about and which she supposed at first to be a fictional island in some or another book of fiction that the boy had read.