One day, I decided not to go on reading one after another book of a sort that could be called literature — that day was only a few months before the day when I decided to write no more fiction. When I made the earlier decision, I intended to confine my reading in future to the few books that I had never forgotten; I would reread those books — I would dwell on them for the rest of my life. But after my decision to write no more fiction, I foresaw myself reading not even my few unforgotten books. Instead of reading what could be called literature and instead of writing what I called fiction, I would devise a more satisfying enterprise than either reading or writing. During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote but had never afterwards detached themselves from me: I would contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that comprised the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing. During the rest of my life I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.
Before I began to write the first of the three preceding paragraphs, I was about to report that a few images had come to my mind while I was writing the last two sentences of the paragraph preceding that paragraph. The first of the few was an image of two green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees that first appeared in my mind in 1950, while I was reading the first story that I read of the series of short stories published in The Australian Journal about a fictional farm named Drover’s Road, or it may have been Drovers’ Road. The author was, I think, a woman, but I have long since forgotten her name. The same few chief characters took part in each story; they were members of the latest of the several generations of the family that had lived at the farm, whichever name it had. I have forgotten the names of the chief characters, both male and female, but I felt just now something of what I felt towards a certain female character whenever I read about her: I wanted no sadness or anxiety to be visited on her; I wanted the course of her life to be untroubled. The character in question was young and unmarried, and I wanted her to remain so for as long as I went on reading about her.
While I was writing the first few sentences of the previous paragraph, I was unable to recall any details of the images of persons and faces that I had had in mind while I read as a child the series of short stories referred to. At some time while I was writing the last two sentences of the previous paragraph, I found myself assigning to the female character under mention the image of a face that I first saw during the early 1990s when I looked into a book that I had recently bought on the subject of horse-racing in New Zealand. (I recall no reference to horse-racing in any of the short stories in which the young female was a character, but after I had assigned a face to the character, I recalled that the place called Drover’s or Drovers’ Road was described as being in a fictional New Zealand. As soon as I recalled this, I found myself assigning to the image mentioned earlier of the two green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees, a background not of snow-covered mountains such as I had sometimes seen in pictures of New Zealand, where I have never been, but of sombre, forested mountains such as I saw during my one, brief visit to Tasmania in the 1980s.)
Not far away (according to the scale of distances that applies in my mind) — not far away from the two green paddocks and part of a homestead is an image of a two-storey building intended to be an English farmhouse several centuries old. I have always assumed that this house is surrounded by green paddocks or fields, as they might be called, but only one such green expanse has been of interest to me. It reaches from the vicinity of the house to a steep hill in the middle distance. Near the summit of the hill is a grove or a clump of trees. In the book of fiction that first caused me to see this hill in my mind, the original hill is called Tanbitches. Somewhere in the book is the explanation that the name of the hill is a variation of the phrase ten beeches, the trees near the summit being beech trees.
Sometimes I seem to recall that the variation was explained as being merely the sort of change that happens over time to an often-used phrase. At other times, I seem to recall that Tanbitches was said to be a remnant of the dialect formerly widespread in that part of England. Regardless of which explanation I seem to recall, I always feel again a semblance of the unease that I felt whenever I saw in my mind, as a child-reader, an image of the hill with the trees on it and heard in my mind at the same time the quaint-sounding name of the place.
I should have felt not unease but pleasure. I should have been pleased that I could refer to a prominent place in my mind by using what seemed more a code-word than a name. I was already aware as a child that the landscapes or the human faces or the melodies or the panels of coloured glass in doors or windows or the sets of racing colours or the aviaries of birds or the passages of prose in books or magazines — that the origins of the images most firmly lodged in my mind had a certain quality that first took my notice and afterwards compelled me to memorise the item affecting me. I am no more able now than I was as a child to apply a name to that certain quality. Given that I sometimes tried as a child to devise a private word or phrase for the quality, I should have been pleased to be able to hear in my mind the word Tanbitches whenever I saw in my mind a green field sloping upwards towards a hill with a clump of trees near its top, but the word made me uneasy, and I believe today that my unease caused me for the first time as a child-reader to think of a story, as I would have called it, as having been made up, as I would have said, by an author.
I seem to recall that I was disappointed by the similarity between the plain English of the phrase ten beeches and the would-be quaintness of the word Tanbitches, however its origin may have been explained in the text: that I wished the hill — if it could not have a plain English name — might have been known by a word so outlandish that not even the author could explain its occurrence. I may not be exaggerating if I claim to recall that I preferred the hill in my mind to remain nameless rather than to bear the name assigned to it by the author.
The author in question was named Josephine Tey. The book was Brat Farrar, which was published in monthly instalments in The Australian Journal in either 1950 or 1951. At the age when I read every piece of fiction in every issue of the Journal, I was not at all interested in authors, and yet I recall myself speculating sometimes about Josephine Tey or, rather, about the ghostly female presence of the same name that I was sometimes aware of while I read Brat Farrar. I would not have enjoyed speculating thus. I would much rather have read the text of Brat Farrar in the same way that I read other works of fiction: hardly aware of words or sentences; interested only in the unfolding scenery that appeared to me while my eyes moved past line after line on the page. But the word Tanbitches would cause me to stop and sometimes even to suppose that Josephine Tey had erred: she had failed to learn the true name of the hill and so she had given it a name of her own choosing—Tanbitches was only a word that an author had imagined.