Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane [Murnane, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781564787019
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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