by Luke Carman
In part the pleasure this purity gives to the narrator is the thought that he might himself one day ‘light upon one or another shade or hue that would declare to the world as much I cared to declare of my own invisible attributes.’
It is this principled pleasure in purity and simplicity which divides the Catholic Kerouac from the ‘technical’ Murnane. Kerouac – who drank himself to death at the age of 47, whose final work was perhaps the longest suicide note ever published, who could not live the life he affirmed in his work – believed he found God on his travels. Murnane, by contrast, when asked at the conference by the silver-haired professor how it was that he had poured so much imagery into the plains and yet they remained largely empty, explained his conception of his inner imaginary in terms not unlike these: ‘Within a house on the plains, there is a man downstairs in a large room reading a book that is part of a long series of books. A woman is there too, and she is reading the same series, but she is reading so intently that she has not noticed the man’s arrival.’
‘How’s that for an answer?’ Murnane says to the professor.
At the conference, a young biographer discussed the pleasures of being given access to Murnane’s famous archives, and in a recent essay, this same young biographer wondered how it could be that his subject had garnered so little acknowledgement from the literary establishment in the form of awards and titles. Was there, the young biographer suggested, some conspiracy of refusal behind the neglect Murnane had suffered through his career? I suspect the truth is that there is something essential to the work itself that repels the threat of acknowledgement by any award or honour. When some or another guru called Kerouac ‘The Christ from Duluoz’, the author called it blasphemy, and it was in this moment that the title for the beat writer’s final, fatal novel The Vanity of Duluoz was born.
The conference, with its pilgrims and their words of praise, was the culmination of a writerly life lived in faith. Border Districts, beginning with a resolution to keep faith, ends in strict observance of this tenet. The narrator, explaining a distaste for the poet Shelley as ‘fatuous and affected’, explains that he nonetheless ‘foresaw, soon after I had begun to write this report, that I would be compelled to include in it a certain two lines from some or another poem by Shelley: lines that I had once found merely decorative and without meaning but have remembered for more than fifty years in spite of myself’. Murnane’s narrator supplies the lines, one poet quoting another, as Kerouac insisted Christ became on the cross when he quoted a Psalm of David ‘like a poet remembering it by heart’.
The sun set over the flat sandy greens of the golf course as Murnane’s lower lip quivered and he thanked the speakers for their words, and spoke of the spirit that had kept him writing when he thought nothing on earth could compel him to continue. There was a strange change in the air, and the author admitted to feeling it too: ‘I didn’t expect you to win me over today…and basically you have.’ With that he retreated to the confines of the bar, to a round of applause, and for an hour or so, sold drinks and signed books. I stepped into the queue to buy a Carlton Draught with a copy of A Million Windows, and overheard a critic with a shaved head say, ‘I wonder if we will one day understand what we have here, in this man.’
Acknowledgements
In earlier versions, several essays in this collection, or extracts from them, have been published in the following publications: Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Seizure, The Lifted Brow, Global Media Journal and Sonofabook. Thank you to the editors – especially Catriona Menzies-Pike, Jonathan Green, Alice Grundy and Ellena Savage.
The collection is the result of the superlative work of the indefatigable Ivor Indyk, Evelyn Juers, Nick Tapper, Léa Antigny, Emily Stewart and Aleesha Paz.
Thanks also to those writing friends whose lunacy and bizarre behaviour was a constant source of inspiration – especially Fiona Wright, Felicity Castagna, Lachlan Brown, Hugh Newton, Ian Van Gemert, David Henley, Milissa Deitz, Melinda Jewell and Rachel Morley.
Final thanks to my family for all their love, support and chardonnay.
The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.