A History of Books (8 page)

 

In the mind of a young man of about twenty-five years, an image appeared of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who sat on an image-plank suspended by image-ropes from an image-branch and who moved herself backwards and forwards by pushing a bare foot against the soil beneath her. In the mind of the same young man were also image-sounds, as though the young image-woman sang part of an image-song while she moved backwards and forwards or as though an image-radio, out of sight in the image-background, broadcast the image-words
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
set to an image-tune that he, the young man, would never afterwards succeed in remembering.

The young man mentioned made no attempt to draw nearer in his mind to the young image-woman mentioned but went on watching her from the distance that seemed to have been fixed between them. He suspected that his trying to approach might cause her image to retreat into the image-background, which seemed to consist at first of fold after fold of dark-blue imagemountains in the upper right-hand corner of a topographical image-map of the United States of America and later of the grey-blue image-haze that was the farthest image-sight in all
image-landscapes. Rather than try to approach the young image-woman, the young man tried to fix her in his mind. He had not yet learned that it was not in his power to fix any sort of image in his mind; that he had no need so to fix any image; that every image in his mind was already fixed there and would remain there, even though he might seem at times unable to recall one or another such image. Nor had the young man yet learned that he might have been himself watched from a distance by some or another entity whose image he had once watched from a distance and had tried to fix in his mind but had afterwards lost sight of.

The young man had listened, as a boy of ten years, to part of a certain program broadcast by radio. Not having heard the earlier part of the program, the boy did not know what had caused the two chief personages to become separated from one another as young persons so that they had to spend their later lives searching for one another in one after another landscape or city of the United States of America. Towards the end of the program, the boy's mother had turned off the radio, as a result of which the boy had not learned until nearly fifteen years later, when he read as a young man the long poem from which the radio program had been adapted, that the two separated personages had finally met up with one another when the male personage was on his deathbed. Sometimes during the fifteen years mentioned, he who had been the boy mentioned had heard in his mind the voices of a male and a female personage calling to one another as two such voices had once called during part of the radio program mentioned. Sometimes, during those fifteen years, he who had
been the boy mentioned had supposed that the personages were separated because the female of the two had died and because her spirit had not then gone to heaven or to any such afterworld but had travelled through the United States of America in search of the male personage. On one after another prairie or beside one after another wide river or among one after another range of mountains, the spirit personage was perhaps able to look out for and finally, even, to see the living personage, but the living personage could never look out for or see the spirit personage. If the two were to meet up at last, they could hope for no more than that the spirit personage, the female of the two, might become a presence fixed in the mind of the living personage, the male of the two.

The young male person who was aware of what is reported in the previous paragraph knew about the landscapes of the United States of America only what he had learned from a few films and from a few copies of the
National Geographic Magazine
. Knowing only this, and not knowing that the separated personages mentioned were reported in the text of a poem as having met up at last when the male of the two was dying in a city in the north-east of the country, the young male person, whenever he hoped that the separated personages would meet up at last, chose to suppose that they met up at last in a landscape such as he had studied in a certain illustration in one of the first issues that he had ever seen of the
National Geographic Magazine
, which illustration was of fold after fold of dark-blue mountains near the border of the state of West Virginia.

The first image mentioned in this section of this work of fiction is an image in the mind of a young man of a young woman, hardly more than a girl. That image first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was reading one of the many works of fiction that he read in the hope of learning how to write a work of fiction that he had planned for a long time to write but had not yet begun to write. The young man had read the work mentioned because he had read previously that the work was an outstanding example of a so-called school of so-called realist writing that had flourished in the United States of America between the two World Wars. The young man had begun to read the work of fiction mentioned first in order to learn how he himself ought to write if he should choose to become a realist writer; second to learn how a certain fictional young man had thought and felt in a fictional suburb of a fictional Chicago twenty years before the young man had been born; and third to surmise how some or another actual young man might actually have thought and felt at the time mentioned.

The young man mentioned was an undiscerning reader who believed that any book published in the United States of America must have been at least as meritorious as any book published in his own country. Even so, the young man had begun to be uneasy while he was reading the work of fiction mentioned. He had hoped, when he had begun reading, to see in his mind image after image of young persons living out their lives in an image-Chicago. He had seen, at first, a number of such images, but had then begun to see in his mind an image of an author
with close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed spectacles who sat in front of a typewriter by means of which he put onto paper word after word and sentence after sentence intended to bring to the mind of reader after reader seeming-image after seeming-image of seeming-reality.

 

An image of a room lit by afternoon sunlight appeared in the mind of a man aged about forty years. The man was reading a book in which were published interviews with well-known American or European writers of fiction and of poetry. The image-room was filled with image-furniture such as would have been fashionable thirty years before the birth of the reading man. The most noticeable piece of image-furniture was a glass-fronted image-bookcase from which the man had taken down or had looked into or had read one after another book during several summer holidays in his boyhood. The image-book that he remembered most clearly had been illustrated with reproductions of famous paintings, one of which was a painting of a group of naked young women.

The man aged about forty years was reading the book mentioned in the hope of becoming more skilled at writing fiction. During many of the previous twenty years, the man had written several short works of fiction and had tried to have them published. Two years before he had begun to read the book mentioned, the man had seen first one and then a second of his short works published, each in a different literary magazine.
During the previous two years, however, the man's first novel, which he had worked at intermittently for fifteen years, had been rejected by three publishers. After the third of these rejections, the man had applied for entry as a mature age student to a course in the arts faculty of a so-called college of advanced education in a distant suburb of the city where he lived. The course mentioned included several units in fiction writing taught by a writer whose novels had won prestigious literary awards. One of the writer's novels, the theme of which, so to speak, had been the confrontation between Indigenous people and pastoralists, had been turned into the script for a successful film. While the man was waiting to learn whether or not he had been accepted into the course mentioned, he had bought the book mentioned much earlier and had begun to read it. When the image of the sunlit room had appeared in the man's mind, as was mentioned earlier, he had been reading a report of an interview with a famous author of fiction in the French language.

If a certain man aged more than sixty years had set out to report every appearance in the minds of certain younger men of an image of a certain sunlit room, then the man aged more than sixty years would have reported that the image of the sunlit room had first appeared in the mind of a young man aged about twenty-five years while he was reading a book of fiction given to him by a young woman who had previously been his girlfriend. The young man had persuaded the young woman to be his girlfriend after he had been for several years without a girlfriend and soon after he had decided not to approach any
young woman in the future unless she had been, or was still, a member of the church that he had formerly belonged to. The young woman was a member of the church mentioned and had spent her first seventeen years in a small town in a mountainous district north-east of Melbourne. The young man often saw her image in his mind against a background of fold after fold of dark-blue image-hills reaching back from the suburbs of his native city towards mountainous districts that he had never visited. The young woman had been the girlfriend of the young man for several months before she told him that they should no longer see each other. At their last meeting, the young woman had given the young man as a present an English translation of a book by a famous writer of fiction in the French language. The young man had read the book with care, hoping to learn from it some or another message from the young woman. Fifteen years later, when he was reading the book of interviews mentioned earlier, and when he and the young woman had been married for thirteen years, the man who had been the young man supposed that he had been given the book only because the famous writer had remained throughout his life a member of the church mentioned earlier and that the young woman had admired him for this. When the man was aged about forty years, he recalled from his having read the book mentioned only an image of a man aged perhaps sixty years who was writing at an image-table near an image-bookcase in an image-room filled with image-afternoon-sunlight. The image-man was writing to his image-wife. He and she had lived for many years in separate
image-suites of the same image-house and had communicated only by means of image-pages of image-handwriting.

The man who is the subject of these paragraphs never afterwards considered that he had become a more capable writer of fiction as a result of his having read, at about the age of forty years, the published report of the interview with the famous writer in the French language. Even so, the man still remembered, more than twenty years after he had read the report, an image that had appeared to him while he read. The image was of a room filled with afternoon sunlight. Noticeable in the image-room were a glass-fronted image-bookcase and an image-table where a famous image-man, aged perhaps sixty years and more, sat writing. The remembering man could remember, at the age of sixty and more years, hardly any of the words in the report of the interview mentioned but he remembered still a statement to the effect that all the fiction written by the famous writer was part of his effort to rediscover the faraway world of his Jansenist, provincial childhood.

 

In the mind of a man aged somewhat more than sixty years, an image appeared of an image of rays of sunlight appearing in the mind of a young man of somewhat more than twenty years. When the image had appeared in the mind of the younger man, he was reading a work of fiction by a much-praised author aged somewhat more than thirty years who lived in the United States of America. When the image of rays had appeared in his mind,
the young man was sitting in the lounge room of a spacious flat that he rented in an outer suburb of Melbourne. The time of day was late afternoon, and rays of sunlight shone through the large windows of the spacious flat and onto some of the many illustrations that the young man had cut from magazines or from dust jackets and had fastened to the walls of the lounge room. Each illustration was of a writer of fiction or of poetry, and one of the writers was the much-praised author mentioned above. The author wore a shirt with stripes of many colours and had a cigar in his mouth.

When the young man had fastened to his wall the photographic portrait of the much-praised author, he, the young man, had been trying for several years to write one or another poem or short story worthy of being published in one or another literary magazine. Afterwards, whenever he looked at the image-shirt or the image-cigar in the portrait, the young man envied the much-praised author his being able to wear such a shirt and to hold such a cigar in his mouth as though the colours of the shirt and the bulk of the cigar were signs of the contents of the author's mind – contents so rich and various and distinctive that he had been able first to write nearly a hundred thousand words of fiction, then to have the fiction published in New York City as a hardcover first novel, and then to announce that he was close to having finished his second work of fiction.

Something else that caused the young man to envy the published author was his having been born and spent his childhood and youth in Virginia, which existed for the young
man as a desirable image-landscape in his mind: a landscape of mostly level green countryside with fold after fold of dark-blue hills in the background. The mostly level green countryside was variegated with dark stripes and patches that were plantations or clumps of trees. Somewhere in the level countryside was the image-racecourse that had appeared in the first coloured feature film that the young man had watched. He had been no more than five or six years at the time and had understood nothing of the narrative. The only images that he later recalled were of perhaps twenty racehorses jumping one after another quickset fence during a famous steeplechase. The jockey astride each horse wore a jacket of various colours variously arranged. All of the jockeys appeared to be men, although one jockey was actually a young woman, hardly more than a girl. The young man seemed sometimes to remember a series of images connected with this young woman, although he supposed few of the images would have appeared in the film. The series included images of the disguised young woman's falling from her mount at one of the fences, of the disguised young woman's lying injured or unconscious on the grass, of her lying afterwards on a bed or a stretcher, of a pair of hands unfastening button after button at the front of a richly coloured jacket, thereby exposing a singlet or undergarment faintly rounded at either side by a female breast.