Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  None of the poems I have singled out as among Murray’s best dates from later than 1992. Since that date he has – aside from the Collected Poems of 2002 – published several collections of – in my view – lesser poems. Under the title Killing the Black Dog (1997) he has also published a memoir of his long struggle with depression. The memoir comes with a combative afterword, dated 2009, in which he rehashes old but evidently not forgotten quarrels with ‘official’ Australian culture, condemned for orchestrating media campaigns against him and more generally for being out of touch with public sentiment.23

  The time has perhaps come for Les Murray to let go of old grudges. He has received many public honours and is widely acknowledged to be the leading Australian poet of his generation. His poems are ‘taught’ in schools and universities; scholars write learned articles about them. He claims that he is read more abroad than at home. This may or may not be so. But even if it were true, he would not be the first writer to suffer such a fate. It is a better fate than not being read at all.

  22. Reading Gerald Murnane

  Between 1840 and 1914 Ireland emptied itself of half of its population. As many as a million died of starvation, but most who departed their native land departed in hope of a better life elsewhere. Though North America was the favoured destination, over 300,000 went in search of that better life in Australia. By 1914 Australia had a stronger ethnic Irish presence than any country in the world bar Ireland itself.1

  The community life of Irish Australians centred, not unnaturally, on the Catholic Church. Until the mid-twentieth century the church in Australia was an extension of the Irish Church; only with the arrival after the Second World War of waves of immigrants from Catholic southern Europe, bringing with them their own rituals and folk-ways, did it begin to lose its predominantly Irish complexion.

  Strict on obedience to doctrine and on outward forms of observance, suspicious of the modern world and its allures, the church in Australia concentrated its energies on keeping its flock from straying, doing its best to make sure that every child of a Catholic family received a Catholic schooling. Gerald Murnane, born in 1939, was one of the beneficiaries of this policy. From Tamarisk Row (1974) onward, in a solid body of fiction and non-fiction, Murnane has recorded the impact of an Irish-Australian Catholic education on a male child whose character and family background are so close to his own that only a Murnanian spirit of scrupulousness prevents one from calling this child his younger self. Among the residues of that education have been, on the one hand, an unquenched belief that there is another world beyond this one, and, on the other, ingrained feelings of personal sinfulness.

  Murnane’s belief in another world needs to be qualified at once. Although, after high school, he took the first steps toward entering the priesthood, he soon abandoned the idea and indeed gave up religious observance for good. The belief he has retained is therefore philosophical rather than religious in nature, though no less strong for that. As for access to that other world – a world distinct from our own and in many ways better than it – this is gained neither by good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction.

  When it comes to sinfulness, the boy we meet in Murnane’s books – the boy I will eschew calling the young Murnane – has all the frustrated curiosity about sex that one might expect in a child brought up in a community where impure deeds are inveighed against from the pulpit, yet in such clouded terms that what such deeds may actually consist in remains a puzzle. In a revealing episode related in Barley Patch (2009), the boy waits up until the household is asleep, then steals out of bed to explore a dolls’ house belonging to his girl cousins that he has been forbidden to touch, linked in his subconscious mind (I use the term ‘subconscious mind’ provisionally – see Murnane’s strictures below) not only with the girls’ private parts but with the tabernacle where the ceremonial vessels of the Mass are kept. By moonlight he peers through the tiny window, longing to reach in a finger and touch the mysteries inside yet fearful of leaving some guilty trace behind.2

  How the male gets into the female is only one of the many mysteries that this child faces. In his naive cosmology, God the Father is at best a remote presence. Presiding over his destiny instead is a figure he calls the Patroness, a composite of the Virgin Mary and his own mother in her youth. ‘The very purpose of her existence,’ he records, ‘was to remain aloof from me and so to provide me with a task worthy of a lifetime of effort: the simple but baffling task of gaining admission to her presence.’3 A need to offer up to the female principle some strenuous act of penance becomes one of the deeper motives in Murnane’s writing, animating his novel Inland (1988) in particular.

  As a writer, Murnane is anything but a naive, straightforward realist. Putting down on paper what an Irish Catholic upbringing was like in Australia circa 1950 is only a fraction of his ambition. As he makes abundantly clear, his boy hero, who while venerating his Patroness also tries to get his cousins to take off their knickers in the toolshed, has a twofold existence, both the everyday world he shares with us and in a quite other world that is nonetheless in a not easily explained way part of our own.

  In this connection Murnane likes to quote a gnomic observation attributed to Paul Eluard: ‘There is another world but it is in this one’.4 For the reader of Murnane’s fiction, grasping just how the other world relates to this one is the main obstacle to understanding what Murnane is up to, or believes himself to be up to.

  Thus: Is the boy about whom Murnane writes to be understood as a figure in his imagination? Is there a site, loosely to be called an imaginary world, where all the personages in Murnane’s fictions have their existence; and when Murnane (or the fictional being ‘Murnane’) writes of another world that is in this one, does he have nothing more unusual in mind than the world held in the imagination of his authorial self?

  Of himself, his mind, and the power of that mind to conjure beings who do not ‘really’ exist, Murnane has the following to say:

  He had never been able to believe in something called his unconscious mind. The term unconscious mind seemed to him self-contradictory. Words such as imagination and memory and person and self and even real and unreal he found vague and misleading, and all the theories of psychology that he had read about as a young man begged the question of where the mind was. For him, the first of all premises was that his mind was a place or, rather, a vast arrangement of places.5

  He fills out his scheme of the mind – or rather, of his own mind, since he is not interested in generalities – as follows:

  In his fifties, he … had come to believe that he was made up mostly of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings connected him to the images and connected the images to one another. The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called the network, for convenience, his mind.6

  The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections between them, and setting these connections out in grammatical sentences (‘There is nothing in the world so complex that it cannot be expressed in grammatical sentences,’ writes Murnane or ‘Murnane’, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic).7 Whether connections between images lie implicit in the images themselves or are created by an active, shaping intelligence; what the source is of the energy (the ‘feelings’) that discerns such connections; whether that energy is always to be trusted – these are questions that do not interest him, or at least are not addressed in a body of writing that is rarely averse to reflecting on itself.

  In other words, while there is a Murnanian topography of the mind, there is no Murnanian theory of the mind worth speaking of. If there is some guiding, shaping force behind the fictions of the mind, it can barely be called a force: its essence seems to be a watchful passivity.

  As a writer, Murnane is thus a radical idealist. His fictional per
sonages or ‘image-persons’ (character is a term he does not use) have their existence in a world much like the world of myth, purer, simpler, and more real than the world in which their mundane avatars are born, live, and die.8

  For readers who, despite Murnane’s best efforts, cannot tell the difference between image-persons and figments of the human imagination, it may be best to treat Murnane’s theorizing – which extends into the very texture of his fiction – as no more than an elaborate way of warning us not to identify the storytelling I with the man Gerald Murnane, and therefore not to read his books as autobiographical records, accountable to the same standard of truth as history is. The I who tells the story will be no less a constructed figure than the actors in it.

  With David Malouf (born 1934) and Thomas Keneally (born 1935), Gerald Murnane belongs to the last generation of writers to come to maturity in an Australia that was still a cultural colony of England, repressed, puritanical, and suspicious of foreigners. Of that generation, Murnane has been the least obedient to received norms of realism and the most open to outside influence, whether from Europe or from the Americas.

  Between 1974 and 1990 Murnane published six books. Among these, The Plains (1982) and Inland (1988) are usually read as novels, though they lack many of the standard features of the novel: they have no plot worth speaking of, and only the most desultory narrative line; their personages have no names and few individuating characteristics. Landscape with Landscape (1985) and Velvet Waters (1990) are, more recognizably, collections of short fictions, some showing the imprint of Jorge Luis Borges. Murnane is conspicuously absent from the list of Australian writers who have answered the call to celebrate or interrogate Australianness: one of the pieces in Landscape with Landscape is a satirical commentary, not entirely successful, on this call.

  After 1990, according to his own account, Murnane gave up writing fiction. In a preliminary note to Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005) he writes: ‘I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.’ Both Lilacs and the book that followed it, Barley Patch, are, loosely speaking, collections of essays. Barley Patch, the more substantial of the two, comprises recollections of Murnane’s family, childhood, and early manhood; reflections on his career as a writer, including his decision to give up fiction; explorations of his own practice as a writer; an outline of his philosophy of fiction; and synopses of abandoned projects – synopses so detailed and well developed that they threaten to become works of fiction themselves.

  As a child, Murnane recalls, he loved to read because reading allowed him to wander freely among fictional personages and stare openly at (fictional) women. In real life staring was proscribed; surreptitious spying became his secret sin. He longed to meet a girl who would be curious enough about him to spy on him. To spark the curiosity of girls he would ostentatiously ignore them and occupy himself in writing. All the time he yearned for ‘some layer of the world far beyond my own drab layer [where] it might have been possible sometimes to follow one’s own desires without incurring punishment’.9

  He entered his twenties (he continues in straight autobiographical vein) ‘lack[ing]the skills that enabled most other young men of my age to acquire steady girlfriends or even fiancées and wives’. At weekends he met with other lonely, sex-starved young Catholic men to drink beer and talk about girls. For the rest he holed up in his room, writing.10

  His decision to devote himself to writing instead of furthering his education was greeted with disapproval from his family; after his first book came out he was disowned by a favourite uncle. To fortify his resolve he recited to himself, like a mantra, Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, which celebrates a life of solitary intellectual endeavour. For an income, he told himself, he would bet on the horses.

  Looking back, he wonders how he could have wasted three decades of his life making up fictions. He entertains several hypotheses, none entirely serious. One is that, fearful of travel, he needed to invent a world beyond his small corner of Victoria.

  When he gave up fiction-writing, Murnane informs us, he also gave up reading new books, devoting himself instead to the writers who meant the most to him, chiefly Marcel Proust, Emily Brontë, and Thomas Hardy. During the years left to him, he resolves, he will occupy himself with the ‘mental entities’ who have visited him in the course of a lifetime; he will ‘contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that [comprise] the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing’. These images will be tirelessly rearranged and remapped, so that his works of fiction can eventually be viewed as a set of variations, chapters in a single lifelong task. The example of Proust is clear.11

  Fascination with the image clusters in his mind leads Murnane to explore how memory works. He reads books on mnemonics, including Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory; he even invents a system of his own based on horse racing and jockeys’ colours. What interests him most are what (if he did not abhor the notion of the unconscious) he might call unconscious associations: the way the word hiatus, for example, brings to his mind ‘a grey-black bird struggling against winds high in the sky’.12

  Images in his memory trouble his waking hours, will not go away, until he can slot them into an image network. The qualities of these images – their associations, their emotional coloration – engage him more deeply than their overt content. His fictions are, fundamentally, explorations of the qualities of images. He has little interest in where in his life experience these images originate, that is to say, no wish to subordinate them to the seeming real.

  The most difficult pages of Barley Patch concern the status of the ‘other’ world where fictional beings live. Although such beings may depend on one or other author to write them into existence, they ultimately escape or exceed authorial control. Their interior lives are all their own; in some cases their author fails to grasp who they truly are.

  An important stage in a life of writing is attained, Murnane continues, when the writing self is able to graduate from merely observing and reporting on inner images to sharing an image life with image persons in the other world. Readers of the right kind may be brought or swept along too, into a realm where they or their image selves rub shoulders with fictional beings.

  Too sketchy and eccentric to constitute a proper metaphysics of fiction, these pages are better read as the poetic credo of a writer who at one point goes so far as to posit that the ‘real’ (mundane) world and the real (ideal) world maintain themselves in a tension of erotic reciprocity, each holding the other in existence:

  Being no more than the conjectured author of this work of fiction, I can have come into existence only at the moment when a certain female personage who was reading these pages formed in her mind an image of the male personage who had written the pages with her in mind.13

  There will be readers who will dismiss Murnane’s dual-world system as idle or fanciful theory-spinning, and perhaps go on to say that it shows he is all intellect and no heart. Murnane indirectly addresses this criticism when, in Barley Patch, he tells the story of his last visit to a beloved uncle dying of cancer – the same uncle who had cut ties with him when he decided to become a writer. The two spend their last hour together in a typically male Australian way: warding off any display of sentiment, discussing horse racing. After which Murnane leaves the hospital room, finds a private place, and weeps.

  His uncle was right, Murnane reflects afterwards: there was no need for him to waste his life writing. Why then did he do it? The answer: without writing he ‘would never be able to suggest to another person what I truly felt towards him or her’.14 That is to say, only by telling a story of a man who appears to have no feelings but privately weeps, addressing the story, elegiacally, to one who can no longer hear it, is he able to reveal his love.

  Murnane’s writing, from Inland onward, reflects continually on this difficult personal fate. On the one hand, being a writer has
set him further and further apart from human society; on the other hand, it is only through writing that he can hope to become human. The elegiac tone that marks his later work comes from the realization that he is what he is, that in this life there will be no second chance, that only in the ‘other’ world can he make up for what he has lost.

  Barley Patch concludes with a summary of one of the fiction projects Murnane abandoned in the 1970s. Its hero is a young man who is awkward with girls, thinks of entering the priesthood, and so forth – a young man much like his historical self. Then abruptly he abandons the summary, realizing he has resumed writing, albeit in précis form, the work he had resolved to give up.

  In Inland, which can loosely be labelled fiction as Barley Patch can loosely be labelled essays, we are back in the schooldays of the young Murnane (the young Murnane self). At the age of eleven he is joined in his class by a girl whom he names simply ‘the girl from Bendigo Street’.15 The two become close companions, even soulmates, until they are sundered by a family move and never meet again.

  No word of love passes between them. However, through an intermediary the boy inquires whether the girl likes him, and is told that she likes him ‘very much’.16

  This unrealized love from thirty years ago is revisited by the older Murnane (the older Murnane self). Inland is a letter to the girl from Bendigo Street: a declaration of love; a lament over a lost opportunity; but also – and here we touch on a motive force that is harder to pin down – an act of atonement.

  The transgression for which Inland is meant to atone is not visible in the story of the youthful pair, but seems part of the constitution of the Murnane self who figures as writer of the book. Inland tries to give substance to this obscure originary sin by situating it in an overt work of fiction, and thus – in Murnane’s metaphysical system – making it real.