Read Online Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gerald Murnane
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perspiration, although the line-drawing could surely not have been so detailed as to suggest this.) The young woman is married to, or is in love with, a man whose home is in the West Indies, although she sometimes remembers another man: an Englishman who was once in love with her and may still be in love.
I had intended the previous paragraph to be no more than a report of a few details in a line-drawing that I seem to recall, but I see now that I was not able to report those details alone; I was compelled to report also a few details of a narrative the chief characters of which are a young woman and two men. Many times during the fifty and more years since I first looked through the Classics Comics version of Westward Ho! , I have tried to recall more of the details of that narrative. Sometimes I have tried urgently to do so, as if much depended on my learning all that might be learned about the narrative and the characters in it. The narrative in question is not at all the series of events that comprises the work of fiction Westward Ho! If that were so, I could visit tomorrow the nearest public library and could relieve my uncertainties within an hour or two. No, the narrative is a mysterious formation that developed I cannot say when in some or another far part of my mind. Because it developed thus and there, I accord it, rightly or wrongly, more respect than I could ever accord anything that I might have read in a book, and if ever I were able to arrange in order the items of that narrative, I would afterwards review them in my mind much more often than I have reread the pages of any of the books that have influenced me.
Whenever I seem to recall the details from the line-drawing mentioned above, I seem to be looking towards the young woman from the direction of England. I am no more than a ghost-character, perhaps barely visible to the true characters. However keenly I might feel my situation, they, natives of the countries of fiction, know joys and sorrows of a different order. Whatever might weigh on me whenever I seem to see the image-balcony and the image-strand of dark image-hair on the pale image-forehead, I am spared whatever it is that oppressed the personage whose part I have taken. If the young woman is lost to me, how much more remote must she be from the chief character: the young Englishman whose name I long ago forgot along with the few dark strokes on a white ground that once suggested his face. If my unease grows on me, I can leave off looking across a conjectured ocean towards an image of an image; I can look instead into text after fictional text for one after another young image-woman at a far image-distance from me. The young Englishman, for as long as I recall having read about him, will go on looking from the same place in my mind towards the same further place in my mind.
My looking out as a ghost-character from an image-England is other than I should have expected. One of my few vague memories of the comic-strip is that Westward Ho! was concerned with the old rivalry between Spain and England. As a Catholic schoolboy of my time, I had been well warned against the common view of the English as heroes and the Spanish as villains. As a Catholic schoolboy, I should have sided with the Spanish man who was, presumably, the owner of the house where the young woman sat or reclined on the balcony. That I seemed to have sided with the Protestant Englishman causes me to suppose that I was already, as a child, liable to be swayed by images and feelings that owed nothing to my religion; that I was already, as a child, devising a coherent mythology wholly my own.
No matter how often I look at the image in my mind of the young woman on the balcony, I learn no more of her story or of the story of the male characters in Westward Ho! Instead, I find myself often hearing in my mind several stanzas of poetry that my mother used to recite to me during the years when I was barely old enough to read for myself.
I had intended the previous paragraph to be no more than a report of a few details in a line-drawing that I seem to recall, but I see now that I was not able to report those details alone; I was compelled to report also a few details of a narrative the chief characters of which are a young woman and two men. Many times during the fifty and more years since I first looked through the Classics Comics version of Westward Ho! , I have tried to recall more of the details of that narrative. Sometimes I have tried urgently to do so, as if much depended on my learning all that might be learned about the narrative and the characters in it. The narrative in question is not at all the series of events that comprises the work of fiction Westward Ho! If that were so, I could visit tomorrow the nearest public library and could relieve my uncertainties within an hour or two. No, the narrative is a mysterious formation that developed I cannot say when in some or another far part of my mind. Because it developed thus and there, I accord it, rightly or wrongly, more respect than I could ever accord anything that I might have read in a book, and if ever I were able to arrange in order the items of that narrative, I would afterwards review them in my mind much more often than I have reread the pages of any of the books that have influenced me.
Whenever I seem to recall the details from the line-drawing mentioned above, I seem to be looking towards the young woman from the direction of England. I am no more than a ghost-character, perhaps barely visible to the true characters. However keenly I might feel my situation, they, natives of the countries of fiction, know joys and sorrows of a different order. Whatever might weigh on me whenever I seem to see the image-balcony and the image-strand of dark image-hair on the pale image-forehead, I am spared whatever it is that oppressed the personage whose part I have taken. If the young woman is lost to me, how much more remote must she be from the chief character: the young Englishman whose name I long ago forgot along with the few dark strokes on a white ground that once suggested his face. If my unease grows on me, I can leave off looking across a conjectured ocean towards an image of an image; I can look instead into text after fictional text for one after another young image-woman at a far image-distance from me. The young Englishman, for as long as I recall having read about him, will go on looking from the same place in my mind towards the same further place in my mind.
My looking out as a ghost-character from an image-England is other than I should have expected. One of my few vague memories of the comic-strip is that Westward Ho! was concerned with the old rivalry between Spain and England. As a Catholic schoolboy of my time, I had been well warned against the common view of the English as heroes and the Spanish as villains. As a Catholic schoolboy, I should have sided with the Spanish man who was, presumably, the owner of the house where the young woman sat or reclined on the balcony. That I seemed to have sided with the Protestant Englishman causes me to suppose that I was already, as a child, liable to be swayed by images and feelings that owed nothing to my religion; that I was already, as a child, devising a coherent mythology wholly my own.
No matter how often I look at the image in my mind of the young woman on the balcony, I learn no more of her story or of the story of the male characters in Westward Ho! Instead, I find myself often hearing in my mind several stanzas of poetry that my mother used to recite to me during the years when I was barely old enough to read for myself.
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