In the impossible circumstance that I possessed an imagination, I might, perhaps, be able to bring the breeder of pheasants and the pale-clad girl in the distance, his step-cousin, into the one bed, but I prefer to report a series of unlikely events that composed itself I know not when in some or another far paddock of my mind. The events comprise no more than an exchange of several letters between two persons who had never met and were never to meet, along with the speculations and, perhaps, the imaginings of each of the two persons. One of the persons was a young unmarried man living in a district of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of cliffs and an ocean in one direction and in the other direction the beginnings of a district of plains. The other person was a young unmarried woman living in a building of more than one storey. I cannot explain how the exchange of letters began, unless to suggest that the two young persons may have been distant relatives. Early letters would have included reports of books that each of the writers had read or hoped soon to read. Later letters would have reported details from the childhood of each writer. Such a sympathy and such an understanding would have developed between the writers — and readers, as they ought also to be called — that each might sometimes have speculated as to how differently the two might have lived if they had learned from one another early in life what they had later learned from their letters. And if even one of the two had been able to do so, then he or she would have called into being an imagined courtship and marriage and even an imaginary child of the marriage.
Much of what has been written in the preceding few pages might be said to have been misleading. The true account of my conception is simply told. Being no more than the conjectured author of this work of fiction, I can have come into existence only at the moment when a certain female personage who was reading these pages formed in her mind an image of the male personage who had written the pages with her in mind.
Some or another conception has been reported at last. This text is surely at an end.
A personage, or even a person, who reports the events preceding his or her conception should surely not end the report at the moment of conception. Although the existence of the personage or person might be said to have begun at conception, his or her lasting awareness of things was then far from having begun.
My own report should end with the following account of a few moments during the summer when I became two years of age. The sunlight is strangely bright, as though the previous two years of my life have been lived in darkness. My father has taken me into a strange house. As for the whereabouts of the house, I will seem to recall long afterwards that my father and I arrived at the house after we had travelled for some distance along the road that led towards a place called Kinglake from our own house in the mostly level grassy countryside of Bundoora, north of Melbourne.
While my father talks with the man of the house, a woman picks me up and carries me towards a doorway within the house. The smooth skin of the woman and her pleasant voice appeal to me. Beyond the doorway is darkness. The woman steps through the doorway, still carrying me in her arms. From somewhere in the darkness, the woman takes up a small object and then puts it into my hands. Outside again, in the bright sunlight, I see that the object is some sort of home-cooked biscuit or cake. The woman urges me to eat the object, but I want only to admire the colour of the object, which is a golden yellow. As soon as the woman has set me down, I take the object back through the doorway. I am eager to watch again while the eloquent yellow stands out from the blackness.
PART 2
Seemingly, this text is still far from the end. What remains to be reported about my having decided to write no more fiction?
A hasty reader of the previous pages may still be waiting to learn why I gave up writing fiction more than fifteen years ago. A more careful reader may already be on the way to learning why I gave up. The hasty reader and the careful reader alike are perhaps curious to know what I happened to be writing on the bustling afternoon when I stopped writing fiction without even having questioned myself as the poet Rilke had recommended. Each sort of reader is welcome to the information that I was writing, on the bustling afternoon, the latest of the hundreds of pages that I had written during the previous four years in an effort to put together a longer and more dense piece of fiction than I had previously put together. The title of the abandoned piece of fiction had occurred to me at some time before I had written the first words of the piece, just as every other title of every other work of fiction of mine had occurred to me. The title in question was O, Dem Golden Slippers.
The hundreds of pages mentioned in the previous paragraph have lain for more than fifteen years in one of the filing cabinets that stand against the walls of the room where I sit writing these words. In the same filing cabinet are scores of other pages comprising notes and early drafts that I wrote before I began to write the first of the hundreds of pages. All of the pages mentioned are in hanging files each of which is accurately labelled, but I prefer not to look into those files today. I prefer to report the few details that have stayed in my mind for more than fifteen years rather than to look again at the pages that I struggled to write for four years until I suddenly gave up the struggle on the bustling afternoon mentioned earlier.
The first section of my abandoned work of fiction was a report of something that I had heard from a mature-age student of my fiction-writing course some years before I began to write the work. I reported that a certain young man who had spent all his life in a small town in north-eastern Tasmania daydreamed often of going to live in Hobart, which he saw in his mind as a city of many-storeyed office-buildings surrounded by suburbs where not a few of the houses were of two storeys. On a certain day during his last year of secondary school, the young man saw in a newspaper a portion of the text of an advertisement directed to young persons about to leave school. The young man learned from the portion of text that board and lodging would be found in Hobart for successful applicants. The young man had then begun to draft an application in his mind even before he had learned what sort of training course or occupation was being advertised. I reported finally that the young man had escaped from his small town to Hobart and thence to Melbourne whereas the chief character of the work of fiction of which my report was the beginning — that character had escaped in a different direction. He had spent most of his early life in one or another suburb of Melbourne. During his last year of secondary school he saw, in a booklet published by a religious order of priests, a black and white reproduction of a photograph of a large building of two storeys overlooking a view of mostly level grassy countryside in the Riverina district of New South Wales. He had decided to apply to join the order of priests even before he had learned what his life’s work would be if his application was successful.
An early section of the unfinished work of fiction was set, as it were, in what used to be called a flat on the second storey of a block of flats in an inner suburb of Melbourne. Some of the windows of the flat overlooked a park where open grassy expanses were crossed by lines of trees. The tenants of the flat were a young man and a young woman who lived together although they had not yet been married. The time when the fictional passage was set in the flat was the early 1960s.
During the many years since the 1960s, many persons have written inaccurate accounts of that decade. Many of those persons have written, for example, that the decade was a period of liberation or of sexual freedom. I was a young man in my twenties during the 1960s. I was well aware of a mood of expectation among younger persons. We sensed that things would change for the better in the near future. In the meanwhile, however, no great changes seemed to have taken place. In the late 1960s, for example, one of my girl-cousins, a daughter of one of my father’s younger brothers, travelled in secret from Melbourne to Sydney and there gave birth to a so-called illegitimate child. The child was taken at once to a so-called babies’ home, there to await adoption. In the late 1960s, for example, a young woman of my acquaintance who spent the 1970s and every decade thereafter as a follower of the latest trends and fashions — that young woman lived for a week of her annual holidays with her boyfriend in a holiday-flat on the Mornington Peninsula but posed throughout the week as his wife and wore a mock wedding-ring and a mock engagement-ring.