ABOUT THE BOOK
What he had been searching for was not the perfect religious order but the perfect landscape…From that moment on he was a poet in search of his ideal landscape.
Lost to the world for more than four decades, Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains.
A Season on Earth is Murnane’s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections—the first two of which were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print.
A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character’.
Here, at last, is sixteen-year-old Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscapes.
Adrian Sherd is one of the great comic creations in Australian writing, and A Season on Earth is a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.
CONTENTS
Cover Page
About the Book
Title Page
Foreword
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Introduction to Chapter from The Plains
Chapter from The Plains
Also By
Praise
Copyright page
FOREWORD
According to my records, I sat with Hilary McPhee of Heinemann Australia in her office in Inkerman Street, St Kilda, in July 1973 and handed over to her the typescript of Tamarisk Row, which I had worked at intermittently for the previous nine years. I’ve always counted myself fortunate to have been able to submit my first work of fiction in person and with a recommendation. When I had finished Tamarisk Row nearly a year earlier, I knew no one in publishing and little about the ways of publishers. My only source of advice was the author Barry Oakley, who was a friend of mine at the time. Barry was good enough to look over my typescript and to tell Hilary McPhee, his own editor, that my work was well worth her consideration.
The typescript that I handed to Hilary was overly long, and I had had the typed pages bound by a bookbinder into two volumes, which made the text seem even longer. I took the monstrous item out of my literary archive just now and estimated that it comprises at least 140,000 words. To have written such a thing, let alone to have submitted it to a publisher, seems to me now sheer folly, but I don’t recall myself feeling the least embarrassment when I handed my two thick volumes to Hilary, nor her making any comment on their size.
She was not long in doing so, however. A few weeks later she told me she was prepared to publish Tamarisk Row if I would first remove at least half the original text. This I did willingly. It was by no means a hard task, given that the book consisted of numerous short sections, most of which could be wholly removed without leaving scar tissue.
All of the above is most relevant to the history of A Season on Earth, my second work of fiction, which is now published in its original format forty-three years after it was mutilated at the request of a publisher’s editor. My records tell me that I wrote the first notes for my second work in August 1973, in the very month when I was told by Hilary McPhee that my first work was at least twice too long for publication. Of course, I had no intention, while I was planning my second work, that it should grow to the size of its bulky sibling. (I had likewise never intended, in the beginning, that Tamarisk Row should be much longer than the average first novel.) But can I truly offer the excuse that my second work simply outgrew its original plan while I wrote it? Should I not have had continually in mind while writing A Season on Earth the fate of Tamarisk Row? I cannot recall having any such concern during the two years when I was bringing A Season on Earth to its final length: about 142,000 words.
According to my notes from those days, I took from August 1973 until February 1974 to work out what I called my Final Plan. My slow progress would have been partly the result of my having to work at the very same time on reducing Tamarisk Row to its required length.
In more recent decades, I’ve kept detailed records of my dealings with publishers, but I can find few written records of Heinemann Australia’s turning my four-part work A Season on Earth into the two-part work A Lifetime on Clouds, which is what took place in 1976. According to a brief summary that I made at the time, a first handwritten draft of the four-part work was finished in June 1975. I then hand-wrote a second draft and sent this to a professional typist in September 1975. I collected the finished typescript in December 1975. I then had the typescript bound into two volumes and delivered these to Heinemann Australia in March 1976.
Hilary McPhee was no longer the editor at Heinemann. She had left to found her own publishing company, the successful firm of McPhee Gribble. No full-time editor had been appointed in her place. Instead, the services of a freelance editor, Edward Kynaston, seemed much in use. Even I could see that my publisher was languishing. Kynaston could hardly be said to have replaced Hilary. She had been a dynamic presence around the place and an active commissioning editor. Kynaston worked from his home, assessing some of the unsolicited submissions and marking up typescripts for the printer. The head of the firm, John Burchall, was a likeable man but what I would have called a functioning alcoholic. A few years earlier, when Tamarisk Row had been in the pipeline, my publishers were a lively bunch; now, they seemed adrift, but I was bound by my earlier contract to offer them my latest work.
The best that I can say for Edward Kynaston is that he was prompt and decisive. Only a few weeks after I had delivered my typescript, my new editor told me in John Burchall’s office that he and John were delighted with my work. I’ve forgotten most of what was said at the meeting but I can never forget Kynaston’s calling my latest work a comic masterpiece. I may have been briefly flattered by the word ‘masterpiece’, but I was disappointed that my editor had such a narrow view of a work that was much more than a comic romp. I soon learned that he was softening me up for a proposal that I might not like. The proposal was that my typescript should be neatly bisected. It was really two books, I was told. They would publish the first half as soon as possible and the second half soon afterwards as a sequel.
I straightaway opposed the idea. I tried to appeal to Burchall, but he was firmly with Kynaston. Clearly, they had discussed the matter at length beforehand. All I could do was to ask for time.
I worked frantically at home for a few weeks. (I was supported at the time by a one-year fellowship from the Australia Council.) I shortened my typescript as I had previously shortened Tamarisk Row for Hilary McPhee—by stapling blank sheets over the sequences of pages meant for discarding. My aim was to severely prune the whole and to have Heinemann publish only one book of four much-shortened sections. I would have done better to save my time—Kynaston and Burchall would not budge; my so-called masterpiece was to be neatly halved.
I’ve sometimes wondered what might have happened if I had taken the whole typescript to McPhee Gribble at that point, but I’ve never been any sort of tactician, and the thought seems never to have occurred to me. I was in my thirties, and my two advisers or opponents were in their fifties. I knew they had misread my work, but if I gave way to them I was at least assured of having a second book of mine in print, and so I gave way.
My next task was to rewrite the last few pages of the
second of the four sections of the original work. I seem to have done this skilfully enough, given that no reader or reviewer has ever claimed to find the ending of A Lifetime on Clouds hasty, contrived or unconvincing. A much harder task awaited me if the plan for publishing a sequel to A Lifetime on Clouds was to be effected. I understood that many a reader of the sequel would not previously have read A Lifetime on Clouds. I had to write a new block of fiction for these readers. I had to rewrite completely the beginning of the third of the four sections in order to explain why Adrian Sherd was travelling, early in his final year of secondary school, from his home in Melbourne to a junior seminary in New South Wales.
I wasted perhaps six months trying to perform the impossible. I can still recollect the mood of dejection that overcame me on many of the days while I struggled to summarise in a few pages the peculiar emotional history of the young man who was set on joining the Charleroi Fathers. I suspect I knew from the first that my task was hopeless. Worse, I suspect I knew from the first that the second book—the sequel—would never be published. A Lifetime on Clouds was rather well received but it was far from being the raging success that would have assured the success of its sequel. I don’t even recall any discussion of a possible sequel after the publication of A Lifetime on Clouds. I certainly never raised the matter with Heinemann. Burchall, Kynaston and I seemed, for once, in agreement.
The six years between the publication of A Lifetime on Clouds and of The Plains were the bleakest of my writing career. There were several other causes for this, but I’ve never doubted that my writerly misfortunes during those years were mostly the result of the butchering of A Season on Earth. The third and fourth sections rested in my literary archive for decades, and few of my growing number of readers would have known of their existence. I could seldom bring myself to look at them, and if I sometimes dared to think of their being published in the future, I could only imagine the two lost sections being published as a sort of literary curiosity with a long introduction to explain their context and history. I seem never to have supposed that some enterprising and courageous publisher would one day publish the original four-part work.
When Michael Heyward was visiting me in Goroke in 2012, I showed him the original four-part typescript during a tour of my archives and told him its history. Michael was eager to read the unpublished sections but I denied him the opportunity. Once again, I seemed to suppose that any talk of publication involved only the as-yet-unpublished sections. Finally, in late 2017, Michael gave me to understand that he would consider publishing the original four-part work, and I willingly gave him a copy of the third and fourth sections.
I’m overjoyed to see this book in print, more than forty years after I first submitted it for publication. I’ve sometimes heard or read that A Lifetime on Clouds is markedly different from the rest of my published fiction, or that my second book seems to lack something when compared with the others. These statements are well and truly justified. A Lifetime on Clouds is different; it’s only half a book and Adrian Sherd is only half a character. Now that my original text has been published at last, A Season on Earth, wholly restored, can take its rightful place among my other titles.
I’m truly grateful to Text Publishing for performing a literary miracle.
Gerald Murnane, Goroke, 2018
He was driving a station wagon towards a lonely beach in Florida—an immense arc of untrodden white sand sloping down to the warm, sapphire-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. His name was Adrian Sherd. His friends in the car with him were Jayne and Marilyn and Susan. They were going on a picnic together.
They were almost at the beach when Jayne said, ‘Oh damn! I’ve left my bathers behind. Has anyone got a spare pair?’
No one had. Jayne was very disappointed.
The sea came into view. The women gasped at the beauty of it under the cloudless sky. Jayne said, ‘I can’t resist that glorious water. I’m going to have my swim anyway.’
‘Will you swim in your scanties and brassiere?’ asked Marilyn.
‘No. The saltwater would ruin them.’
Sherd pretended not to be listening. But his stomach was weak with excitement.
‘You mean you’ll swim in the—?’ Susan began.
Jayne tossed back her long dark hair and glanced at Sherd. ‘Why not? Adrian won’t be shocked—will you, Adrian?’
‘Of course not. I’ve always believed the human body is nothing to be ashamed of.’
The grass above the sand was lush and green like a lawn. Sherd and Jayne spread out the picnic lunch. The other two hung back and whispered together.
Susan came over and spoke. ‘It won’t be fair for Jayne if she goes swimming with nothing on and Adrian is allowed to peer at her all day. Adrian will have to strip off too. That’s a fair exchange.’
They all looked at Sherd. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be fair either. Susan and Marilyn will see me in the raw without having to take their own bathers off.’
Jayne agreed with Sherd that the only fair thing would be for all four of them to leave their bathers off. But Susan and Marilyn refused.
After lunch Susan and Marilyn went into the trees and came back wearing their twopiece bathers. Jayne and Sherd waited until the others were in the water. Then they slipped out of their clothes with their backs turned to each other and ran down the sand staring straight ahead of them.
In the water Jayne dived and splashed so much that it was some time before Sherd saw even the tops of her breasts. At first he thought she was teasing him. Then he realised he was behaving so calmly and naturally himself that she didn’t know how anxious he was to see her.
Jayne ran out of the water at last and Sherd followed her back to the car. She stood side-on to him and dried herself, bending and twisting her flawless body to meet the towel.
Sherd couldn’t pretend any longer that he saw this sort of thing every day. He stood in front of her and admired her. Then, while she sat beside him with only a towel draped round her shoulders, he made a long speech praising every part of her body in turn. And when she still made no effort to cover herself, he was moved to confess the real reason why he had brought them to the lonely beach.
Jayne was not alarmed. She even smiled a little as though she might have suspected already what was in his mind.
Susan and Marilyn came out of the water and went behind the trees to change. They both stared hard at Sherd as they passed.
Jayne said, ‘I still think it’s unfair, those two seeing you in the nude and hiding their own bodies. I’m sure you’d like to look at them, wouldn’t you?’
She bent her lovely compassionate face close to his and said, ‘Listen, Adrian. I’ve got a plan.’
After this, events happened so fast that he barely had time to enjoy them properly. Jayne tiptoed up behind the other two women. Sherd followed, trembling. Jayne tore the towels away from their naked bodies, pushed Susan into the car and locked the door. Marilyn squealed and tried to cover herself with her hands, but Jayne grabbed her arms from behind and held her for Adrian to admire. Then, while Marilyn walked around swearing and looking for her clothes, Jayne dragged Susan out of the car and showed her to Adrian.
Adrian lost control of himself. He looked just once more at Jayne. Her eyes met his. She seemed to know what he was going to do. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that he preferred another’s charms to her own. But she saw he was overcome by his passions.
Jayne leaned back resignedly against the car and watched. Even Susan forgot to cover herself, and watched too. And the two of them stood smiling provocatively while he grappled with Marilyn’s naked body and finally subdued her and copulated with her.
Next morning Adrian Sherd was sitting in the Form Four classroom in St Carthage’s College in Swindon, a southeastern suburb of Melbourne.
The day started with forty minutes of Christian Doctrine. The brother in charge was taking them through one of the Gospels. A boy would read a few lines and then the brother would start
a discussion. ‘It will pay us to look very closely at this parable, boys. Robert Carmody, what do you think it means?’
Adrian Sherd had a sheet of paper hidden under his Gospel and a packet of coloured pencils on the seat beside him. He was looking for a way to make the Christian Doctrine period pass more quickly. Instead of drawing his usual map of America showing the main railways and places of interest, he decided to sketch a rough plan of his classroom. He drew twenty-nine rectangles for the desks and marked in each rectangle the initials of the two boys who sat there.
He thought of several ways of decorating his sketch. Because it was a Christian Doctrine period, he chose a spiritual colour scheme. He took a yellow pencil and drew little spears of light radiating outwards from the boys whose souls were in the state of grace.
Adrian awarded his golden rays to about twenty boys. These fellows spent all their lunch hour bowling at the cricket nets or playing handball against the side of the school. Most of them were crazy about some hobby—stamp collecting or chemistry sets or model railways. They talked freely to the brothers out of the classroom. And they made a show of turning their backs and walking away from anyone who started to tell a dirty joke.
Next Adrian edged with black the initials of the boys who were in the state of mortal sin. He started with himself and his three friends, Michael Cornthwaite, Stan Seskis and Terry O’Mullane. The four of them admitted they were sex maniacs. Every day they met beside the handball courts. Someone would tell a new dirty joke or discuss the sex appeal of a film star or interpret an adult conversation he had overheard or simply report that he had done it the night before.
Adrian blackened the initials of other fellows who were not friends of his but had let slip something that betrayed them. Once, for instance, Adrian had overheard a quiet boy named Gourlay telling a joke to his friend.
GOURLAY: Every night after cricket practice I pull a muscle.
FRIEND: After practice? How come?
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