Gerald Murnane - A History of Books

The man aged forty and more years had read the book mentioned late on night after night while he sat in a building with glass walls beside one of the gates of a certain university in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The man was employed as a security guard, and for much of his time he sat in the building with glass walls and ensured that none but so-called authorised motor vehicles passed through the nearby boom gates into the grounds of the university. During the last hours of each evening, before the man locked the boom gates and then set out on a motor scooter to patrol the grounds of the university, few cars approached the boom gates, so that the man was mostly free to read. He would have been free to write also, if he had so wished.

When the man had begun to work in the building with glass walls, he had assured his wife that he would use his free time in the late evenings for writing fiction. More than two years before the man had begun to work in the building with the glass walls, he had agreed with his wife that he would stay at home each day for two years while she went to work. Each day, he would do an agreed amount of housework and would supervise their two children when they were not at school. During the remainder of the day, the man would write the long work of fiction that he had wanted for many years to write. Before the first of the two years had ended, however, the man understood that he would not be able to write the long work of fiction. During each day of his first months alone at home, the man had written several hundred words of the long work. In later months, he had spent much of his time doing crossword puzzles or having his left hand play against his right hand at Scrabble or simply reading one or another of the many works of fiction that he owned. During the last hour before his wife arrived home, the man would type an adaptation of four hundred words from a work of fiction that had been published in London forty-eight years before his birth. The chief character of the work was a man who earned barely enough to support himself and his wife and children by writing four thousand words of fiction on every working day. While he wrote the adaptation mentioned, the man would change all the proper nouns and some of the common nouns in the original work and would sometimes insert a variant word or phrase and would then draw a line through it. On many an afternoon, the man would sip from a flask of vodka while he wrote the adaptation, although he would always hide the flask before his wife arrived home. He sipped so that he would show no sign of agitation if his wife later asked him, as she sometimes asked, how much writing he had done during the day and if he then lifted out of his filing cabinet and held open in front of her the folder where he stored the few pages that he himself had composed on top of the many pages that he had adapted from the work in which the chief character had written four thousand words on every working day. Towards the end of the second year that the man had spent at home, he told his wife that he had finished the first draft of his work of fiction but that he would have to write a further draft before he submitted the work to any publisher. Even if his wife had not insisted that he should become employed again, the man would not have wanted to spend any more time alone in his house doing crossword puzzles or playing Scrabble or adapting passages from the book whose chief character wrote four thousand words each day, just as the author of the book was reported to have done.

During the first weeks after he had begun to work in the building with glass walls, the man mentioned spent the last hours of each evening in reading one or another biography of one or another writer of fiction. The first such book was a biography, published not long before in London, of the author of the book of fiction that the man had adapted during his two years at home. The man learned from the biography that the author, its subject, had lived for much of his life in circumstances very like those of the chief character in the adapted work of fiction, who had written four thousand words of fiction on every working day even though he was often in debt and even though his wife was shrewish and addicted to alcohol. The man learned also from the biography that the author, its subject, had sold for publication during the twenty-six years before he had died during his forty-seventh year twenty-seven books, many of them comprising three volumes. The second book that the man read in the building with glass walls was the book mentioned earlier, which had been awarded a prize for fiction but which the man believed to be mostly autobiography.

Late on some of the first evenings while he sat reading in the building with glass walls, the man had thought of how easily he might complete the writing of a book that would appear to be fiction but would be hardly more than a report. But then he had thought of the lives of the two men he had read about during the evenings mentioned. The subject of the first book had been married first to a woman who had died from the effects of alcohol and then to a woman who was later committed to a so-called infirmary for the insane. The subject of the second book had been later divorced from the woman in whose apartment he had pretended to be writing fiction. He had been taken to hospital at least once as a result of his drinking and had several times been admitted to what he called in his book an insane asylum. The life of the man in the building with glass walls seemed, by comparison, uneventful. Unless the unthinkable should happen — unless he or his wife should lose control of their drinking or become mentally ill, then the chief events of his life and therefore, so he supposed, the only possible subject for any seeming-autobiography that he might succeed in writing, was the books that he had read.

A man of more than sixty years still saw often in his mind a series of images that he had first seen more than thirty years before while he was reading a work of fiction that had originally comprised three volumes, the first of which had been first published twenty-two years before his birth and the third of which had been published ten years before his birth. In the following report of the series mentioned, each noun or pronoun refers to an image-person or an image-place or an image-thing; each verb refers to an image-action; and each modifier refers to an image-quality or an image-condition.

Two women, strangers to one another, were returning home by horse-drawn coach from Melbourne to separate districts in the south-west of Victoria. One woman, who was shabbily dressed, had gone to Melbourne in connection with the recent death there of her husband. The other woman, who was respectably dressed, had gone to Melbourne to arrange for her husband to be returned home, even though he had been certified as insane and confined in a lunatic asylum. The shabbily dressed woman would have been obliged to travel on the outside of the coach if the other woman had not shamed one of the men inside so that he gave up his seat. By way of thanks, the shabbily dressed woman gave her surname and her address to the fashionably dressed woman and promised to help her if asked in the future. The address of the shabbily dressed woman consisted only of two words denoting some or another township or district unknown to the respectably dressed woman.

Later in the series of images, the wife of the insane man waited among a group of strangers on a jetty or pier in the south-west of Victoria for the arrival from a distant anchored ship of a small boat in which a number of male figures were discernible. The group on the jetty or pier was watching one particular male figure who was struggling against several of the others. A man on the jetty or pier announced with evident excitement to the wife that a lunatic was being brought ashore. The struggling man went on struggling while the boat was being moored and then while the other men were trying to get him onto the jetty, but ceased to struggle when his wife approached and put a hand to him.