Have I answered yet the question why had I written?
I would be willing to admit that I have not yet answered the impending question, but only if my hypothetical questioner would admit that a question can hardly be worth asking if its answer can be delivered in fewer than ten thousand words.
A certain sort of reader may have learned already why I wrote what I wrote during the years before I gave up writing. Another sort of reader may need to read one or more of the following three paragraphs, even though no sentence in any of those paragraphs is in the indicative mood of traditional grammar. Another sort of reader may agree with me that a question can hardly be worth asking if it admits of only one answer. Still another sort of reader may be able to interpret the following paragraphs as variants of the one definitive statement.
I may well have written in order to prepare myself to write at last the stories of such as Little Bridget or of Huldah (not the true Huldah, so to call her, but the veiled female personage that I had envisaged when I read the early parts of The Glass Spear) or of Rod Craig’s hidden goddess or of other such female personages. It would be no argument against the foregoing proposition for anyone to point out that none of my published works of fiction includes any reference to any of the female personages mentioned in the previous sentence. I may have written those works only so as to render visible for ever to some or another reader the many images that had appeared in the foreground of my mind during the many years while I was still preparing to write about Little Bridget or about Huldah or about such personages. In short, I may have written those works only so that I could write at last about the images that had persisted for fifty years and more in the background of my mind no matter whom I fell in love with or who became my wife or what children were born to us or what befell us during the onrush of events that might be called my seeming life.
Another answer suggests itself. My published books may have been written not in order to remove images from my mind but to arrange them more appropriately and to give certain images their rightful prominence. I may have written during the past thirty years and more not one after another separate book but one after another chapter of the one book, the final chapter of which I am trying to write at present: a chapter devoted to Little Bridget, Huldah, and others of their kind.
Each of the two previous paragraphs would have been misleading if it had seemed to suggest that the purpose of my writing about Little Bridget and the others was to bring their stories to an end. On the contrary, my hope would always have been that those stories would never come to an end. As a ten-years-old child, reacting simple-mindedly to fiction meant to entertain adults, I had seemed to meet up with images of personages and of landscapes the origins of which were utterly outside my awareness; but even as a man past middle-age who has read perhaps two thousand books, I could never wish for those images to be reported even as likely to come to an end, even such an end as a passage in a work of fiction might seem to have brought about. If ever it occurred to me that even the little I have written in these pages about Little Bridget and her kind might bring nearer the end of their fictional existence or of whatever other sort of existence they enjoy, I would never again refer to Little Bridget or to any other such personage in any sentence that I might write. Instead, I would try to devise some means other than the writing of sentences in order to prolong the existence of my favourites.
I have taken hardly any interest in the so-called visual arts, but it seems apt to mention here a game that I used to play or an exercise that I used to perform three and more years before I first read about any of the personages mentioned above. One of my father’s unmarried sisters used to send to my parents every year as a Christmas present a calendar published by a religious order of Catholic priests. My mother used to hang each calendar on a nail behind the kitchen door. The calendar had a separate page for each month. On the lower half of each page was a pattern of numbered squares denoting the days of the month. On the upper half of the page was a coloured reproduction of one or another painting with a subject-matter that might be called biblical or religious. The pictures on the calendar were the only illustrations of any kind displayed in our rented house. I stared often at picture after picture during several years of the mid-1940s but I recall today only two pictures together with the words of a title. I recall the image of a group of persons on the top of a hill surrounded in every direction by water. In all the expanse of water, the only solid object is a large boat in the middle distance. The persons on top of the hill are gesturing as though to implore the persons in the boat to rescue them. During the year when I looked often at this picture I had not yet heard the story of Noah, but I did not doubt that the persons on top of the hill would soon be drowned. I recall also the image of a clump of dark-coloured trees in the right foreground of an extensive landscape. Opposite the trees, in the left foreground, is a tall building with what would have seemed to me a lofty and spacious verandah. The roof of the verandah rests on columns. I was hardly interested in the building, but I looked sometimes at the columns. The building as a whole was outlandish, but I recognised the columns as being no different from the columns at the front of the Capitol Theatre in the provincial city where I then lived. In December of each year, in the evening of the last schoolday, my school took part in a concert. While I stood with my classmates on the stage of the theatre, I was never unaware of the painted backdrop behind us: a landscape of green meadows and dark-green copses and the blue water of a winding stream. On the following day, our long summer holiday would begin, and my feeling of pleasant expectation seemed sometimes to spread beyond me and to add a certain glamour to my surroundings. At such times, I might have been about to begin not a long holiday in a well-known city but a new mode of living in landscapes of exaggerated colour. A dozen and more persons busied themselves on the verandah or in front of the building, but I seldom looked at the persons. During the year when I looked often at this picture, I looked mostly at the scenery on the farther side of the tall building and of the dark trees. The words that I still recall comprise the title of the picture: Landscape with Samuel Anointing David. I surely read at least once the name of the person who executed the painting, but I have long since forgotten the name.
I would surely have looked with interest at many an illustration before I looked for the first time at the images of the dark-coloured trees and of the lofty verandah. I would surely have felt many times before as though a ghostly version of myself moved among the images of persons in one or another illustration. Whenever I stared at the illustration on the calendar, however, I was interested not in the images of some or other persons but in images of scenery alone. I looked always past the dark-coloured clump of trees and the outlandish building and the people assembled among the lofty columns. I looked first into the middle distance of the illustration. If a version of myself could have travelled across a long bridge of stone over a shallow-seeming river, then he could have learned what lay beyond the first of the low, wooded hills in the middle distance. Soon afterwards, he could have set out not directly rearwards towards the mountains on the horizon but diagonally, as it were, towards mostly level grassy countryside in the right-hand background. My image-self, when he travelled thus, would have been driven by more than childish curiosity. What would have led him more deeply in among certain images in an image of a certain landscape was a strangeness in the seeming sky and even in the seeming air. The whole of the painted scene was strangely lit. If ever I had considered the matter previously, I would have supposed that the foreground of an illustration ought to have been more brightly lit than the background and that any seeming personage who seemed to travel towards the background should have seen more dimly as he or she travelled further away from the district that was lit by the true source of light in the true world. In the scene with the lofty verandah and the dark trees in its foreground, not only was the background the most brightly lit of the visible zones but the play of light overall allowed me to suppose that the scenery behind the furthest discernible blurs and smudges would have been more richly illumined still.