bought with sums of money won from betting. I wanted no more than to be free from having to work for my living; I wanted to go to the races each Saturday and then to spend the rest of the week in my room, working at my writerly or readerly tasks. And this was still several years before I had first read “The Scholar Gipsy.”
There arose, however, whenever I daydreamed of a literary life supported by the proceeds of betting, the interesting complication that I might have to devote many years to the search for a lucrative way of betting before I could fulfil my daydream. I might have to spend year after year comparing the information and the predictions in each Saturday newspaper with the results in each subsequent Monday newspaper. (No newspapers were published on Sunday in those days.) For the time being, I might have to devote all my free time to the task of finding the means that would enable me to devote all my free time to the task that ought to occupy all my free time. In the meanwhile, I would work at some humble clerical job in the State Public Service or the Gas and Fuel Corporation or some such body, taking care each day to conserve my nervous energy for my all-important after-hours tasks.
In mid-1957, six months after I had passed the matriculation examination for the University of Melbourne and had been expected to go on to study arts or law, I was working as junior clerk in the offices of the State Electricity Commission. I was by no means discontented. I spent most of my free time in writing poetry. During most of my lunch-hours, I walked to the State Library of Victoria and read biographies of twentieth-century poets. Whenever I walked through the area reserved for newspapers and periodicals on my way to the central reading room, I used to notice a certain sort of reader. This person was always a male in early middle-age. He was dressed as the older males were dressed in the building where I worked. He read continually from newspaper after newspaper fetched for him by the sour-faced men in dust-coats who fetched and carried for the public. Always he read a Saturday newspaper followed by a Monday newspaper, making notes the while on a cheap note-pad. He was, of course, trying to unlock the secret of horse-racing; trying to discover the betting-method that would free him from daily employment and would allow him to follow his true task, whatever it might have been. As it happened, I was not then myself driven by the urge to find the perfect betting-method, the philosopher’s stone of the gambler. I was able to look calmly on those driven men, one or another of whom might have been the nearest I have ever seen during my lifetime to an embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy.
When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, I supposed that she had discovered at an early age a project or an enterprise so manifold and so demanding and yet so inviting that she had given herself to it wholly. While her siblings and her contemporaries concerned themselves with courtships and careers, Huldah pulled down the blinds in her room and locked the door and then began the writing or the reading or the drawing of diagrams or maps that made up the outer, visible part of her life’s work. (I was never able to conceive of Huldah’s or the Scholar Gipsy’s tasks as not being concerned with texts or diagrams or maps.) Of course, if Huldah was busy in her room with her lifelong task, I was not likely to attract her interest by wandering around the grounds of Kinie Ger as though the visible world was all that I knew. My only hope of learning about her all-absorbing task was, perhaps, to lock myself in my own room in the sprawling homestead for months or even years until Huldah got to hear of my unusual ways and sent for me.
Huldah did sometimes receive people in her room. After the first of the murders that were the main items in the plot, so to call it, of The Glass Spear , two detectives from some or another
There arose, however, whenever I daydreamed of a literary life supported by the proceeds of betting, the interesting complication that I might have to devote many years to the search for a lucrative way of betting before I could fulfil my daydream. I might have to spend year after year comparing the information and the predictions in each Saturday newspaper with the results in each subsequent Monday newspaper. (No newspapers were published on Sunday in those days.) For the time being, I might have to devote all my free time to the task of finding the means that would enable me to devote all my free time to the task that ought to occupy all my free time. In the meanwhile, I would work at some humble clerical job in the State Public Service or the Gas and Fuel Corporation or some such body, taking care each day to conserve my nervous energy for my all-important after-hours tasks.
In mid-1957, six months after I had passed the matriculation examination for the University of Melbourne and had been expected to go on to study arts or law, I was working as junior clerk in the offices of the State Electricity Commission. I was by no means discontented. I spent most of my free time in writing poetry. During most of my lunch-hours, I walked to the State Library of Victoria and read biographies of twentieth-century poets. Whenever I walked through the area reserved for newspapers and periodicals on my way to the central reading room, I used to notice a certain sort of reader. This person was always a male in early middle-age. He was dressed as the older males were dressed in the building where I worked. He read continually from newspaper after newspaper fetched for him by the sour-faced men in dust-coats who fetched and carried for the public. Always he read a Saturday newspaper followed by a Monday newspaper, making notes the while on a cheap note-pad. He was, of course, trying to unlock the secret of horse-racing; trying to discover the betting-method that would free him from daily employment and would allow him to follow his true task, whatever it might have been. As it happened, I was not then myself driven by the urge to find the perfect betting-method, the philosopher’s stone of the gambler. I was able to look calmly on those driven men, one or another of whom might have been the nearest I have ever seen during my lifetime to an embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy.
When I thought of Huldah as being past marriageable age, I supposed that she had discovered at an early age a project or an enterprise so manifold and so demanding and yet so inviting that she had given herself to it wholly. While her siblings and her contemporaries concerned themselves with courtships and careers, Huldah pulled down the blinds in her room and locked the door and then began the writing or the reading or the drawing of diagrams or maps that made up the outer, visible part of her life’s work. (I was never able to conceive of Huldah’s or the Scholar Gipsy’s tasks as not being concerned with texts or diagrams or maps.) Of course, if Huldah was busy in her room with her lifelong task, I was not likely to attract her interest by wandering around the grounds of Kinie Ger as though the visible world was all that I knew. My only hope of learning about her all-absorbing task was, perhaps, to lock myself in my own room in the sprawling homestead for months or even years until Huldah got to hear of my unusual ways and sent for me.
Huldah did sometimes receive people in her room. After the first of the murders that were the main items in the plot, so to call it, of The Glass Spear , two detectives from some or another
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