A History of Books (11 page)

 

In the mind of a man aged nearly seventy years, a few details appeared of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion. The man waited, but no further image-details appeared to him. He then went on packing the travelling bag that he was going to take with him on a journey that he was obliged to make by railway train to a distant city.

The image of the young woman had appeared to the man while he was putting into his travelling bag a certain book that he had first read more than twenty years before but had not since read. In earlier years, the man had bought some thousands of books and had read many of them. In more recent years, the man had bought hardly any books and had mostly read books that he had first read many years before. Most of the books that the man had bought and had read were books of fiction.

The book that the man put into his travelling bag was not a book of fiction but a report by a man who had spent a year and more during the Second World War in a telegraph station recently built by the Royal Navy on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. The book contained perhaps twenty illustrations: small reproductions of black-and-white photographs. Some of the illustrations were of persons who lived permanently on Tristan da Cunha at the time when the author was stationed there, but no illustration was of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion.

The man about to travel had wanted, many years before, to write a long work of fiction with the title
Masthead of the World
, which phrase he had found in a long poem the title of which was ‘Tristan da Cunha'. The long poem had been written by a man who had been born nearly forty years before the birth of the man who was about to travel. The poet had spent his early years in South Africa but had almost certainly never seen the island that was the subject of his long poem, according to his most recent biographer. According to this biographer, the poet
knew the island of Tristan da Cunha only from photographs or from reproductions of photographs. The man about to travel supposed that one at least of those photographs must have shown the island as it had appeared in the first illustration that he himself had seen of Tristan da Cunha: as a distant conical mountain with its upper parts concealed by clouds. The man about to travel supposed also that the poet must have heard or must have read an account of the roaring noise made almost continually by the ocean against the cliffs beneath the meadows where the houses of the inhabitants were clustered.

The long work of fiction mentioned above had never been written. The work had been intended to comprise entries from the diary of a man who had lived during all of his life in one or another suburb of Melbourne but who reported the events of his life as though he had lived always on Tristan da Cunha. The man who intended to write the work had made notes for only one section before he abandoned the work. That section would have reported the experiences of the chief character after he had begun to court a certain young woman in the way that the young women were courted by the young men on Tristan da Cunha. Every Friday evening, the young man visited his best friend, a young man who lived with an older brother, a younger sister, and their parents in a house of many rooms in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne. During his first hours in the house, the visiting young man would take part with the father of the family and his two sons in tournaments of ping-pong, darts and carpet bowls. Later, the visiting young man would excuse himself and
would sit for an hour and more in the darkened living room, where his friend's younger sister and their mother sat from seven every evening until midnight watching television programs. The men of the house seldom watched television programs, and so the young visitor was almost always alone with the mother and her daughter during his hour and more in the darkened room. The daughter mostly ignored the young visitor, but he was encouraged by the mother's sometimes talking to him while some or another advertisement was showing. On Tristan da Cunha, the mother's engaging him in conversation would have told him that she acknowledged him to be courting her daughter.

The man about to travel might have said that he remembered a few scenes from the book that he was packing among his luggage. The book, of course, contained no scenes; it consisted of nothing but words arranged in sentences. The few scenes that the man might have mentioned had appeared in his mind while he read and were all set, as it were, in an image-space intended to represent the interior of a certain house on Tristan da Cunha, which interior was not represented by any of the illustrations mentioned earlier.

Every item mentioned in the following three paragraphs is to be understood as being an image-item.

A young man who worked by day in a telegraph station on a remote island visited on many an evening a certain house on the island. During most of his time in the house, the young man sat beside a certain young woman on one of the beds in the house, which comprised a large living area and a smaller sleeping area
with a curtain between. While the young man and the young woman sat together, the curtain mentioned was drawn back, so that he and she remained in full view of the persons in the living area, who were the parents and the siblings of the young woman along with one other person. This other person was a young man who had spent all his life on the remote island and who visited on many an evening the certain house mentioned, there to sit silently a little way in from the door in order to signal to the people of the house that he was courting the young woman who lived there.

During much of his time in the house, the man from the telegraph station helped the young woman to read more fluently. For some years past, the remote island had been without a school, and many of the young persons on the island were hardly able to read or to write. Recently, the chaplain attached to the telegraph station had set up a school and had distributed reading books to young adults wishing to read more fluently. The young woman mentioned above was of all the young adults on the remote island the most eager to read more fluently. On every night when the young man from the telegraph station visited her house, he brought for the young woman one or more reading books and sat beside her while she read them. During most of the time while the young woman read, she and the young man leaned against one another, and their nearer hands were clasped out of sight beneath the bed coverings.

Sometimes the young woman mentioned, having read to the end of one or another reading book, turned to the wall beside
her and tried to read from one or another of the pages fastened there. (On the remote island, the inner walls of many houses were decorated with pages from illustrated magazines or even from newspapers. The remote island had no regular mail service, but ships called from time to time and the men from the island went aboard in order to exchange goods or foodstuffs from the island for anything of use to the islanders – even illustrated magazines for lining the walls of their houses.) The young woman tried to read the captions under the illustrations around her and the subheadings in the columns of text around her but she seldom succeeded. Sometimes the young woman became angry after she had failed to read one or another caption or subheading. Sometimes, in her anger, she rebuked or insulted the young man who had been sitting silently a little way in from the door for as long as he had been in the house.

The man filling his travelling bag would not have claimed to remember anything that was reported to have happened between the young woman who was eager to read and the young man her teacher while he was preparing to leave Tristan da Cunha at the end of his term of duty. The man seemed to remember, however, that he had read, in the last pages of the book that he had packed in his travelling bag, a report by the author, who had never returned to Tristan da Cunha after his term of duty there, of his having seen certain images of some or other islanders in some or another illustrated magazine published after the Second World War in England, or it may have been South Africa. The author had been sorry to learn from an article in the magazine that a
commercial company had set up a plant on Tristan da Cunha for processing fish caught by the islanders and that currency was by then in use among the islanders, many of whom bought clothing and foods from abroad. However, before the man had learned these things from the text of the article he had searched among the images of female persons in the nearby illustrations for an image of dark hair and of a face with a faintly olive complexion. After he had found these images, he had learned from a nearby caption that the young woman whom he had taught to read had since become the wife of a young man other than the young man who had sat silently during evening after evening a little way in from the door of her parents' house.

 

After his thirty-seventh year, a certain man would sometimes catch sight of a certain few volumes on one of his bookshelves or would see in some or another book review or literary essay the name of a certain writer in the German language and would then remember one or another moment from the many hours that he had spent in reading one or another volume of a certain unfinished work of fiction by the writer.

Of the several hundreds of thousands of words in the English translation of the work of fiction mentioned, the man had forgotten, soon after he had read them, all but nine. The man remembered, however, his state of mind on many an occasion while he had been reading the work or while he had paused in his reading.

The man mentioned could have said that the long work mentioned was the most difficult work of fiction that he had tried to read. The man could have said that he had had to read many a passage and even many a sentence twice and more before he seemed to understand it. During the few moments after he had seemed to understand such a passage or such a sentence, the man felt entitled to consider himself an intellectual. And yet, whenever he had tried afterwards to report in his own words what he had understood he had been unable to do so.

Of the nine that were the only words remembered by the man soon after he had read the long work mentioned, four comprised the title of a chapter or a section far into the work while the other five were part of a sentence in that chapter or section. Often, while the man struggled to understand the earlier parts of the work, he looked at the words
The lunatics hail Clarisse
and felt relieved. He expected that he would readily understand the chapter or the section that bore this title. He even looked forward to finding one or more humorous passages in that chapter or section. The man found the character of Clarisse impossible to comprehend, let alone to like or to admire. The passages reporting her fictional thoughts and feelings were among the densest in the long work of fiction. It seemed to the man that the fictional character Clarisse was concerned mostly with abstractions or with states of mind impossible to describe or even to suggest in plain words, and he hoped that her being hailed by an assembly of fictional lunatics would give rise to a passage of less exacting prose.

How Clarisse came to meet up with the lunatics the man
mentioned never afterwards remembered, although he seemed to recall that she had sometimes expressed a desire to study the extremes of human experience and that she had sometimes discussed certain lunatics with a doctor who worked in a certain asylum. Surely Clarisse would have been reported in the long work of fiction as having met up with a number of lunatics during what would surely have been a conducted tour of some or another asylum, and surely the word
hail
would have denoted a variety of behaviour. Nevertheless, the man who had once read the fictional report of the visit by the character Clarisse to some or another fictional asylum could remember soon afterwards only that one of the male fictional lunatics, when Clarisse had approached him, had set about
masturbating like a caged monkey
.

 

A certain man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write. The man had made notes for many works of fiction during many of the previous fifty years. Some of those works he had gone on to write, and some of the works that he had written had later been published. During the previous ten years, however, on the few occasions when the man had felt urged to write fiction he had relieved his urge by making notes for one or another work that he expected never to write.

In one of the published works of fiction by the man mentioned was a report of a fictional man's having read a certain book: a translation into the English language of a book written in the
Hungarian language and first published in Hungary three years before the birth of the man mentioned. Even though the man's published book was fiction, any reader might have learned that the existence of the book mentioned in the fictional narrative was a fact and that the book itself purported to be a book of non-fiction. (Why did I write just then the expression
a book of non-fiction
? Why is the expression
a factual book
so seldom used? Is this our way of acknowledging that most seeming-facts are, in fact, fiction? And, if books of fiction are not called
non-factual books
, is this because we understand that most matters reported in books of fiction have a factual existence?)

Although it was never reported in the published work of fiction mentioned in the previous paragraph, the chief character of the work mentioned wished often that some of the purported facts in the translated book mentioned had not been facts: that certain events reported as having happened in the world where he had sat while he read the translated book had not in fact happened. In particular, the chief character wished that a certain young woman, the daughter of farm servants on a large estate in Tolna County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, had not been compelled, on a certain frosty evening in the first decade of the twentieth century, to visit the quarters of the assistant bailiff of the estate; or, if the young woman had been thus compelled, that she had not decided, at some time during her visit, to run from the bedroom of the assistant bailiff without even pulling on her boots; or, if the young woman had decided so to run, that she had run towards the long thatched building where she lived with her
parents and her siblings in one of the many cramped apartments and not towards the well that stood among the out-buildings of the estate; or, if the young woman had run towards the well, that she had not vaulted over the low wall and had not fallen into the freezing water, afterwards to have her corpse hauled out at first light by cowherds and laid on the nearby grass, there to be observed later in the morning by a party of children on their way to school, one of which children, thirty years later, would include his report of what he had seen in a book that would be translated, during his lifetime, into twenty languages, one of them English, but had stared into the water, in which reflection of stars had appeared as pale rays on a dark background that included, perhaps, an image of the face and the upper body of a young woman.