Before I had left home for the races, my wife, who had never met the monk, told me to invite him to our house for lunch on the Sunday of the following weekend. She said that she felt sorry for the monk, who would surely be struggling to make friends in the outside world, as she called it. When I let the monk out of my car on the way home from the races, I invited him as my wife had instructed me. He said that he would be pleased to accept. Then he asked me if he could bring his girlfriend. I was surprised that he had acquired a girlfriend already, but I told him that she would be welcome.
The lunch was a dull occasion. My wife and I struggled to keep conversation going. She told me afterwards that she had sensed a certain tension between our two guests. I recall today very little about the monk’s girlfriend except that she was blonde and somewhat plump and dressed in pink.
I never saw the monk again. Three weeks after the Sunday lunch mentioned above, on a Saturday when I was at the races, the girlfriend of the monk called on my wife at our home and begged to be allowed to confide in her. She, the girlfriend, lived, so she said, in a nearby suburb and was anxious to confide in somebody. What she confided to my wife might be summarised as follows. She, the girlfriend, had first met the monk about six months before when she had visited the monastery for what she called counselling after what she called the sudden break-up of a relationship. She had stayed for a week in the guest-house at the monastery. (She explained to my wife that the strict rules of the Cistercian Order had been relaxed somewhat in recent years so that women could stay as guests of the monastery and could meet with some of the priests and lay-brothers during their recreation-hour of an evening. She had talked often with the monk, and they had seemed to be drawn to one another. She had given the monk her telephone number, and after she had returned home he had spoken to her often for long periods late at night. He had telephoned her in secret, and against the rules of the monastery, from a little-used telephone extension on the upper storey of the building.) During her second visit to the monastery, the monk had promised to leave his order and to marry her soon afterwards. He had left the monastery in due course, after which she and he had had what she called an intense sexual relationship, but then he had told her that he suspected his true vocation was to the celibate life. Two weeks ago, he had left Melbourne for the inland city in New South Wales where he had spent his childhood. She had not heard from him since, and she was thinking of setting out after him.
Something that ought to be explained is my having begun again to write fiction only a few years after I had stopped, so I thought, for good.
Four years after I had stopped writing fiction, my seventh book of fiction was published. Some of the book consisted of pieces of fiction that had been published previously in so-called literary magazines, but each of the other three pieces I had written in order to explain one or another of three matters that I could have explained by no other means than by writing a piece of fiction. One of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had become tired of reading book after book of supposedly memorable fiction and then being unable to remember, a year or more afterwards, any sentence of the text or any detail of my experience as a reader. Another of the three pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had not been misguided whenever I had struggled from time to time during the previous forty years to devise a set of racing colours in which one or another arrangement of one or another shade of blue or of green explained about me something that could have been explained by no other means than by the appearance of a set of racing colours. The third of the pieces was intended to explain to myself and to readers of good will why I had stopped writing fiction several years before (and had presumably stopped again after having written the text that explained this) and to offer to readers of good will a hint as to what sort of project I now preferred to fiction-writing.
The few reviews of my seventh book of fiction that came to my notice were, on balance, favourable reviews. The most favourable was written by a person who had previously praised other books of mine and found much meaning in them. Towards the end of the review, the reviewer began to comment on the third of the pieces mentioned above. I expected to read that the reviewer had understood my explanation and had taken my hint. I read instead that the reviewer admired the trick of perspective and other items that I had not known were in the piece.
I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.
My piece of fiction of ten years ago had the title “The Interior of Gaaldine.” When I chose that title, I supposed that most readers of good will would have recognised the provenance of the word Gaaldine. Perhaps most of those readers did so recognise the provenance of the word, but no reviewer seemed to have done so. I had supposed it was common knowledge among readers of my sort of fiction that the sisters who were the authors of some of the best-known works of English fiction in the nineteenth century had written extensively during their youth, and even during their adult life, about so-called imaginary countries, one of which was named Gondal. I had supposed further that many of those readers must have read at some or another time a certain entry written in her diary by one of the sisters mentioned when she was in her seventeenth year, which entry was often quoted as evidence that the writer was as much concerned with the so-called imaginary countries as with her everyday life, so to call it, and which entry reported, among other things, that the inhabitants of Gondal were just then discovering the interior of Gaaldine. For the diversion of my readers, I had the narrator of my piece of fiction report at one point in his narration that he had heard the name of a certain female character as Alice, when the readers would have known, or so I supposed, that the name of the character was Ellis, which had once been the pen-name of the writer of the diary-entry mentioned above, she in whose mind lay the country of Gondal. I even put at the very end of my piece of fiction the names of the three personages from Gondal or, rather, the names of the three characters from one or another of the texts set, so to speak, in Gondal, so that the very last words of the piece of fiction would be the name of the female personage whose presence in the mind of the young woman Emily Brontë caused her later to write about the character named Catherine Earnshaw in a work of fiction set, as it were, far away from Gondal.
I included in my piece of fiction of ten years ago what I supposed was a broad hint that the narrator of the piece had been persuaded during the writing of the text that no more fiction need be written, whether by himself or by any other writer of fiction. The narrator had become aware that the fictional texts already in existence gave way or led back to a series of fictional settings or mental landscapes that could not be thought of as coming to an end. The narrator might have become thus aware either by his reflecting on the series that began with the fictional scenery around the fictional place named Wuthering Heights, the fictional place named Gondal, and the fictional place named Gaaldine, or by his reflecting on the processes called in my piece of fiction decoding or gutting, by means of which the narrator of the typescript mentioned in the text caused fictional horse-races to take place in the fictional country named New Arcadia.