He had never thought of himself as having any profession or following any career. From about his twentieth to about his sixtieth year he had written some poetry and much prose fiction, and some of the fiction had been afterwards published. During those same years, he had earned a living by several means. In his forty-first year, he had found a position as a part-time tutor in fiction writing in an insignificant so-called college of advanced education in an inner suburb of Melbourne. His first students were all adults, some older than himself. So far as he could tell, they were not impressed by his credentials or his teaching methods, and he responded by being wary with them and giving away little of himself.
He had been given to understand that he was only a stopgap; that he would keep his tutor’s position only until the college was able to appoint permanently as a lecturer one or another writer of note: someone whose reputation would lend prestige to the writing course. In the event he, whatever his name was, stayed on for sixteen years. By then, the place where he was employed had become a university and most of his students were not long out of school. How these things came about is no part of this piece of fiction.
This piece of fiction begins a few years after its chief character had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, and at a time when he sometimes lived through several days without remembering that he had formerly been such a teacher.
The man of this fiction had no interest in mathematics, but throughout his life he had loved arithmetic. He was fond of calculating such numbers as the approximate total of the breaths that he had drawn since the moment of his birth or of the bottles of beer that he had drunk since the well-remembered day when he had drunk the first of them. He had once arrived at a close estimate of the total length of time during which he had experienced the extremes of sexual pleasure. He daydreamed of quantifying things that had never before been measured. Whenever he was in a railway carriage or a theatre, he wished he could have been free to discover which person from among those present had the keenest sense of smell; which one had been most often frightened of another person; which one had the strongest belief in an afterlife…
Most of the man’s arithmetical enterprises resulted in estimates only, but in some matters he was able to arrive at exact totals, for he was a diligent keeper of records. Calendars, bank statements, receipts, and such things he stored in his filing cabinets at the end of every year. And in keeping with his love of recording and measuring, he kept precise and detailed accounts of his work as a teacher of fiction writing.
He was obliged to keep certain records, of course, so that he could award grades to his students at the end of each semester, but he went far beyond this. Not only for his own satisfaction, but also to avoid disputes with students over their grades, he devised and perfected during his first years as a teacher what he supposed must have been a unique means of arriving at a mark (on a scale from 1 to 100) for each piece of fiction that he assessed. His method was to record in the margins of every page of every piece of fiction every instance of his having had to pause in his reading. Whenever he was stopped by a spelling mistake or a fault of grammar; whenever he was confused by a badly shaped sentence; whenever he lost the thread of the narrative; whenever he became bored by what he was reading; at every such time, he put in the margin what he called a negative mark and, if time allowed, he wrote a note to explain why he had stopped and had made the mark. At the foot of each page he put a running tally of the number of lines of fiction that he had so far read and of the number of negative marks that he had made in the margin. At the foot of the last page he set out in full his calculation of the percentage of the fiction that had been free of fault. This percentage figure became the numerical mark for the piece of fiction.
Of course, it was not only faults in the fiction that might have caused him to stop reading. He paused often from sheer enjoyment of a shapely sentence or from admiration of a thoughtful passage or from a wish to postpone the pleasure of reading further into a passage that promised much. Whenever he paused for reasons such as these he wrote a warm message to the author of the piece, but his method of assessment would have become too complicated even for him if he had tried somehow to have the outstanding passages cancel out some of the negative marks.
He was always ready and waiting to defend his method of assessment if some querulous student had challenged him over it but no student ever did so, although not a few disputed his comments on particular passages that he had assessed as faulty. For year after year, he went on assigning to hundreds of pieces of fiction percentage marks that claimed to rank the pieces precisely.
He was not required to keep any details of his assessment after he had sent the final results for all students to the administrative officers of the place where he worked. But being the person he was, he could never think of throwing away even a single page that recorded some of the workings of his mind. At the end of each year, he put into one of his filing cabinets the folders of ruled pages on which were recorded, among other details, the title of every piece of fiction submitted to him during the year, the number of words in each piece, and the percentage mark that he had allotted to the piece. The total of the pieces of fiction was never less than two hundred and fifty, and the total words in all the pieces was never less than half a million. Before he put his records away he would turn the pages, letting his eyes take in the columns of figures showing the percentage mark for piece after piece of fiction.
As a boy, he had kept pages filled with batting and bowling averages for cricketers; he had pasted into scrapbooks pictures showing the finishing order of field after field of horses in famous races. Always during these months-long tasks, his hope had been that some surprising discovery would be his final reward; that the first columns of figures might prove to have been misleading, or that the horse that seemed likely to be beaten in a close finish had won after all. Fifty years afterwards, he was much more adept at devising games to satisfy his lifelong love of protracted contests and delayed but decisive results. He would have taken care throughout the year not to compare any of the several hundred marks that he had awarded. He knew, of course, which were the dozen or so most memorable pieces that he had read, but he had been at pains never to think of one as better than another. Now, at the end of the year, and six weeks and more after the last student had been seen on campus, he placed a crisp sheet of white paper over each page of his folder of results while he looked at the page. The paper was so placed that he saw only the first of the two numerals of the percentage mark for each piece of fiction. When he looked down any page, he knew only which pieces of fiction had earned ninety per cent or more but not which piece had earned the highest mark.
Of the half-formed images that came into the man’s mind while he scanned the titles of the pieces of fiction with ninety or more marks apiece, he was taken most by a glimpse of the highestscoring pieces of fiction as the leading horses in an impossible race. On some vast prairie or pampa, hundreds of horses were approaching a crowded grandstand and a winning post. He was fond of dwelling on this image, with its promise of something about to be decided after having been for long in doubt.
There was more to the exercise described just above than the comparatively simple experience of awaiting the outcome of a decisive event; more even than the more subtle pleasure of admiring the strong claims of each contender and marvelling or regretting that even such claims might be surpassed by the even stronger claims of another and yet another contender. There was also the question — simple for him to pose to himself but perplexing, if not impossible, to answer — what exactly was he thinking of whenever he claimed to remember each of these pieces of fiction? He saw on the page of his folder of pages a title, and sometimes he saw beyond this no more than an image that the title had given rise to. (He had always encouraged his students to choose as the title for a story a word or words connected with a central image or a recurring theme in the fiction. He discouraged them from choosing abstract nouns or phrases that related only in a general way to the fiction. Among the titles of the leading pieces, therefore, he was much more likely to see such as ‘Killing Ants’, ‘A Long Line of Trees’ or ‘Six Blind Mice’ than ‘The Request’, ‘Secrets’ or ‘The Tourist’.) Sometimes, other images would appear in his mind following on from the image connected with the title. Sometimes the succession of images was long enough for him to be able to say that he recalled the plot of the piece of fiction or the story. Sometimes he saw, in what he thought of as the background of his mind, an image of the author of the piece of fiction while one or another of the previously mentioned images remained in the foreground. Sometimes, whether or not he had seen in his mind any of the previously mentioned sorts of images, he saw an image of the classroom where he and a group of students had read the piece of fiction and had afterwards discussed it on one or another morning or afternoon of the past year. At such times, he sometimes heard in his mind particular comments from one or another reader or even the distinctive hush that always settled over a class soon after they had begun to read a piece of fiction that was far beyond the ordinary.