I know, even today, no more about the ailments liable to affect the human body than I knew, more than forty years ago, when I ceased to attend the Sunday morning group, about the ailments affecting the mind. What little time I have had for learning during my adult life has been given to the study of what I call for convenience patterns of images in a place that I call for convenience my mind, wherever it may lie or whatever else it may be a part of. Even so, I read or hear sometimes about theories that I myself would never have had the wit to devise. One such theory, which I heard for the first time a few years after the early death of my youngest uncle, asserts that a person subjected to prolonged emotional stress, so to call it, is more likely than the average person to be afflicted by the disease of cancer.
Seven months after the publication of my second book of fiction, I heard that my youngest uncle had been found to have cancer of the liver. He was aged fifty-five and had been in good health throughout his life. He had never smoked and had never drunk alcohol. According to his older brothers, no member of their parents’ families had been known to have any sort of cancer. (When I mentioned these matters to my mother at the time, she told me without smiling that my uncle’s cancer would have been caused by his sister’s cooking. This was the sister who had lived for a time in the convent of three storeys and who kept house for my uncle for some years before his illness became known. According to my mother, my youngest aunt had learned in the convent to be mean with food: to reheat leftovers and to bake cheap, doughy puddings.)
My uncle had been told that he would live for no more than six months. During the first four of those months, I told myself that my uncle was obliged to make the first move towards reconciliation, given that I had not written my books of fiction with the intention of offending him. At some time during the fifth of those months, when I had still received no message from my uncle, I telephoned him and asked if he would care to have me visit him. He told me that he would be pleased to see me.
I drove my motor-car from Melbourne to the coastal city that has been mentioned several times already in these pages. The time of year was late winter, and I remembered that the time of year had been late winter also when I had travelled by railway-train to visit my uncle fourteen years before and had talked with him about plovers and other matters. The hospital where I met with him was on the northern side of the coastal city, far from any view of the Southern Ocean; the view from his room was of mostly level grassy paddocks with lines of trees in the distance.
I spoke with my youngest uncle for nearly an hour. He was weak and haggard, and his skin was yellow, but he seemed no less cheerful than of old. We spoke about his father’s farm, of the tall cliffs visible from every paddock of the farm, and of the sounds of the ocean that were heard from every paddock except on the few days of the year when the north wind blew from the plains inland. We spoke about the birds that he and I had observed, and I reminded him about the white-fronted chat, the bird that lived the life of a species from the inland plains even though gales from the Southern Ocean would sometimes bend sideways the clumps of rushes where its nest was hung. We spoke mostly, however, about horse-racing: about successful or unlucky bets we had made; about champion horses we had seen; about racing colours we had admired or about racehorse-names we had thought witty or inspired. As I prepared to leave him, I suggested to my youngest uncle that he should not have been surprised if my interests, in later years, had been different from his own, given that Boy Charlton had had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself. In all the time while we were together, that was the nearest we came to referring to my books of fiction.
We were still outwardly cheerful as I prepared to leave, although we both surely knew that we would never meet again in the place that is sometimes called this world, as though to suggest that at least one other world may exist. When we came to shake hands, my youngest uncle thanked me for what he called my wonderful companionship during our earlier years together. I was so surprised that I was able to grasp his hand and to look him in the eye and then to stride to the door of his room and for some little distance along the corridor of the hospital before I began to weep.
While I drove back to Melbourne, I came to understand that the hour while my uncle and I had talked together in the hospital might have been the first time for as long as I could remember when I had kept out of my mind all thoughts of books of fiction that I had written or of books of fiction that I hoped to write in future and perhaps, too, of books of fiction that other persons had written and that I had read. While I had talked with my uncle, he and I had behaved as though I had never written any book of fiction and as though I had no intention of writing any book of fiction in the future. We had restricted ourselves to talking about views of ocean and of mostly level grassy countryside, about birds, and about horse-racing, as though none of those topics had ever found its way into a book of fiction. I might have said afterwards that I had survived for an hour without fiction or that I had experienced for a little the life I would have led if I had never had recourse to fiction. I might have said that that life would not have been impossible to lead if only I could have accepted its chief hardship: if only I could have accepted that I would never be able to suggest to another person what I truly felt towards him or her.
I have reported in the previous seventy-eight paragraphs numerous events, few of them seeming to be connected with my conception. Admittedly, my father and my mother have been referred to, but surely I could conjecture, postulate, speculate more boldly as to how those two came together?
No, I could not. Whatever I might have hoped to achieve when I began this piece of fiction, I am not going to be able to explain how I came to be conceived.
During my lifetime, I have seen many writers of fiction praised for something called psychological insight. This faculty is said to enable the writers to explain why their characters behave as they are reported to behave in the writers’ works of fiction. I would be surprised if any reader or critic claimed to have found anywhere in my fiction an entity deserving to be called a character. And even supposing that some far-seeing reader or critic has glimpsed, among the mazes of my sentences, some shape or phantom of a man or a woman, I would defy such a reader or critic to endow such an illusion with anything that might be called a trait of anything that might be called a character. Any personage referred to in my fiction has its existence only in my mind and finds its way into my fiction only so that I might learn why it occupies in my mind the position that it occupies there.
Yes, I have referred to the man who released the pheasants as my father. Likewise, I have referred to a girl seen from a distance on a certain afternoon as my mother, but I am unable to compose sentences that might even begin to explain how the breeder of pheasants and the wearer of the pale-coloured frock even came to meet, let alone to be drawn to one another and finally to copulate.
If I have not stated it previously, then I state it here. This work of fiction is a report of scenes and events occurring in my mind. While writing this work of fiction, I have observed no other rules or conventions than those that seem to operate in that part of my mind wherein I seem to witness scenes and events demanding to be reported in a work of fiction.