A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  That evening, Adrian read every poem in the green-covered book and then began a new section in his notes under the heading ‘Thoughts on First Reading a Poet of Genius’. The new section began thus.

  Surely a special Providence guides A. S.: For some time now he has been preparing to make the acquaintance of a young woman of similar interests among the poetry shelves of Cheshire’s. If such a person had come his way, he would now be writing her a long, heartfelt letter or talking to her by telephone or even accompanying her on some social outing. Thanks to his Blessed Providence he is still unattached and free to spend all his evenings in the company of a true soulmate.

  Before one can write great poetry, one must have experienced powerful emotions. Of all the emotions, grief and a sense of loss are the most powerful. And grief and loss are what A. S. has experienced since a certain day on Mount Donna Buang. All that remains is for him to express these emotions in metre and rhyme.

  Farewell to the shallow emotions of Arnold and Thompson and Patmore! Henceforth A. S. will seek to experience, and to express in his poetry, the profound sadness of Housman.

  Now Adrian went from work each afternoon not to Cheshire’s but to the State Library. He wanted to learn what calamitous loss Housman had suffered: what were the events from which had sprung his exquisite poems. After a long search, Adrian found a book about Housman by a man who had published an early edition of A Shropshire Lad. The book was a revelation. Housman was not a young farmer from near Ludlow whose heart had been broken by some Shropshire Clare Keating. He was a professor of Latin at Cambridge, a stern bachelor and almost a recluse. Unfortunately he had died nearly two years before Adrian’s birth.

  After learning these facts, Adrian wondered whether he was equal to the challenge that Housman’s life presented. The great poet seemed to have lived only for his studies and his poetry. He was a worthy but a daunting model. Adrian spent most evenings now in the State Library. His parents seemed to be hoping that he was preparing to enrol as a part-time student at university, but he was busy compiling a list of Housman’s mannerisms and eccentricities. Afterwards, at home, he filed his list among the pages of one of his poetry notebooks. He meditated often on Housman’s way of life in an effort to understand the source of his poetry, which was just the sort of poetry that he, Adrian, had been trying for years to write.

  Housman had revealed little about his early life, but it was clear to Adrian that the poet, in his youth, had loved a young woman who had not returned his affection. The poet had then resolved, so Adrian believed, to prolong his melancholy indefinitely for the sake of the poetic inspiration that it gave rise to. He turned away forever from the petty consolations of marriage and family and even disdained to seek for friends, although he sometimes mixed with solitary males like himself at university dinners.

  After he had absorbed all the known details of Housman’s way of life, Adrian drew up a list of resolutions for turning himself into an aloof, unapproachable bachelor who wrote poems charged with emotion in his solitary room. One of these resolutions was to travel to England as soon as he had saved his fare. He would visit Shropshire and make pilgrimages to all the places named in Housman’s poems. He would take lodgings in Cambridge as near as possible to the university where Housman had spent his later life. He would search libraries and bookshops for printed references to Housman and would call on people who had known the great poet during his lifetime.

  At last, when he had learned even the least details of Housman’s life, he, Adrian Sherd, the promising young lyric poet, would dedicate himself to following that life exactly. There would be adjustments and compromises, of course. Housman had worn, till the end of his life, Edwardian-style clothing. Adrian was not going to make himself an object of ridicule by strolling around Cambridge in the fashions of his grandparents’ time. Housman had dressed as he had because he remained attached to the fashions of his youth. Adrian would follow the spirit of Housman’s way of life by wearing always what a young man of the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne had worn during the 1950s. He would take with him overseas a stock of Stamina brand sports trousers and some sports jackets sold by Hattams menswear stores.

  Living in austere lodgings, taking solitary strolls in the semi-rural surroundings of Cambridge and rebuffing anyone, male or female, who intruded on his privacy, Adrian could preserve for years in their original intensity the emotions of his youth—not just the pain inflicted on him by Clare Keating but his regret for all his lost landscapes in America, near Hepburn Springs, around the Cistercian monastery at Yarra Glen and on the steppes of Buryat Mongolia.

  Before Adrian had finished his plans and resolutions, it occurred to him that he would be following Housman more faithfully by staying away from England. Housman had left the West Country as a young man. For the rest of his life he lived in London or Cambridge, far from the green landscapes that inspired his best poems. In fact, one of the themes of his poetry was the contrast between his hard and lonely life in the city and the rural satisfactions that he had left behind. Adrian was moving to England in order to achieve fulfilment and his own peculiar sort of happiness. Instead, he should have been planning to move to a place where he would have to endure solitude and the pain of being separated from the places where he might have found some vestige of consolation. When his annual salary had increased sufficiently to permit it, he would move to a respectable boarding house in one of the older suburbs of Melbourne. In the meanwhile he would model himself on Housman as far as was possible.

  Adrian quietly dropped out of the YCW. One of his basketball teammates met him on Accrington station one morning and asked why Adrian had gone missing. Adrian said he had to study every evening, and his teammate said no more. Adrian was not only unwilling to mix any further with the young men of the YCW—as long as he stayed in their organisation there was the danger that he might meet a girl from the NCGM and fall in love with her. There was no evidence that Adrian was aware of for Housman’s having belonged to any sort of organisation, even in his youth. He had dined occasionally with groups of his colleagues in later life, but no women had been present.

  Every morning on the train to the city, Adrian found at least one typist or female shop assistant in his crowded compartment. He hoped his drab clothes told these young women that he scorned the trivialities of their generation and was not in the least interested in impressing the opposite sex. On his train journeys, Adrian read either a volume of Housman’s poetry (he had bought several by now—both new and second-hand) or a novel by Thomas Hardy. (Adrian had learned that Housman once commented favourably on Hardy.) He tried to keep a faintly troubled expression on his face. If a young woman looked at him, as sometimes happened, he trusted that she wondered about him. When he felt her eyes on him, his first impulse was to exchange glances with her as though he was just another young public servant anxious to find a girlfriend. He almost always checked himself in time. Sometimes he had to recite under his breath some powerful couplet from A Shropshire Lad to keep himself from looking up. If the temptation was strong he often saved himself by repeating in his mind ‘Housman, strengthen me!’ or ‘Great poet, preserve me!’

  Adrian would go on reading until the young woman seemed to have understood that he had dedicated himself to something higher than romantic love and went back to her knitting or stared out of the window. He did not despise her. He wished her well in her small world of dances and films and picnics to the hills. He even hoped she had a steady boyfriend whose attentions gratified her. Sometimes he recited mentally some lines by Housman in which the poet expressed envy for those who could take love lightly and not see the terrible sadness of it all.

  When the train reached Flinders Street, Adrian would try to catch the young woman’s eye with a last look full of meaning. It was meant to tell her he was not unappreciative of her interest in him, but he was not free to respond to her as an ordinary young man would have been. She could not be expected to know that she was dealing with a poet, and not even an
ordinary sort of poet but one who had to guard and foster his unhappiness and his sense of grief and deprivation. But at least she must have suspected that he was prevented from responding to her by some grave responsibility.

  At lunchtimes he began to walk in the Treasury Gardens again. He was no longer afraid of meeting O’Mullane again. He had read how Housman had once rebuffed an American man who admired his poetry. The American had waylaid Housman on his regular afternoon walk through Cambridge. Housman fixed him with a stern gaze and dismissed him with a few monosyllables. If O’Mullane were to approach him, babbling about dances and NCGM girls, Adrian would use Housman’s technique to get rid of him.

  The season was early spring. The English trees in the Treasury Gardens were putting out leaves. It was the season in which Housman had composed some of his best poetry. After months of work on his Latin texts he would notice a tree in flower or a pair of young lovers strolling under a blue sky. His usual low-grade misery would intensify. Once more he would feel keenly his separation from the joys of common people. He would open his poetic notebooks again and would jot down the beginnings of some exquisite lament.

  On his lunchtime walks, Adrian deliberately looked for couples strolling hand in hand or sitting on secluded benches or, in fine weather, lounging on the grass with heads close together. Whenever he saw such a couple he turned aside and walked towards them. He always coughed or scraped his feet to warn them. He was not interested in spying on them. As he passed, he glanced just once at their faces and then strode on with the measured gait of a man who knew that life was to be endured rather than enjoyed, and he waited for some memory of Denise or Clare to trouble him and to bring to his mind the first lines of a poem.

  Not many public servants used their lunchtimes for courting, so Adrian discovered in time. After a week of striding past lovers, Adrian understood that he was looking at the same two couples every day. The young men had begun to look at him suspiciously.

  On Sunday afternoons Adrian took long strolls around Accrington. He wore the jacket and tie that he had worn to mass that morning. His mother tried to tell him that young people nowadays preferred casual clothes at weekends and that he looked odd in a tie, but he could not even begin to imagine Housman in a shirt open at the collar. He walked beside main roads, where the traffic was heaviest. He stared resolutely ahead of him and stopped only to look at some shrub or tree that might have been found in an English garden.

  He was sometimes aware of people looking at him through car windows. Driving on Sundays seemed increasingly popular. (Several families in Riviera Grove were now car owners, and the street had recently been turned from a sandy track into a bitumen thoroughfare.) The older persons who looked out at him he assumed to be married couples; the younger couples he assumed were going steady. They were of no interest to him as individuals, but flitting past him continually they provided a backdrop of romantic and domestic contentment for the springtime walks of a solitary poet.

  The third school term had begun. The clerks in the Teachers’ Branch were moving their temporaries again. Adrian discarded his earlier plans for bringing young teachers together with a view to marriage. His new scheme was much easier to arrange. He was no longer interested in the young women. They would have to form their romantic attachments with no help from him. He was going to give some of the young men a taste of the solitude and hardship that Housman had endured.

  Some young male temporaries had spent all of their time since graduation in suburban schools. They would have been able to telephone their girlfriends every evening and take them to the pictures on Saturdays and drive them to the hills on Sundays. It would do them good to have to spend their weekends brooding alone in some remote landscape. At best, one or two might discover, as Housman and Sherd had discovered, the peculiar satisfaction of forgoing the beguilements of romance; they might even decide on a life of bachelorhood. In any case, their months of isolation would strengthen their characters.

  Adrian sent a few complacent young men to one-teacher schools with names that seemed the Australian equivalents of the remote places mentioned in A Shropshire Lad: Peppers Plain, Big Hill, Clear Lake, The Cove, Mosquito Flat. On fine spring days when he crossed the crowded lawns of the Treasury Gardens, he envied the young temporaries in their distant schools, surrounded by the raw material for whole volumes of poignant lyric poetry.

  One Friday in late September, the first north wind of the spring blew over Melbourne. Adrian’s office was so warm after lunch that the public servants worked in their shirtsleeves. Adrian paused in the middle of moving a young temporary man from Kensington to Icy Creek. He watched the passage of the warm wind through the treetops outside and felt a strange urge. It was almost certainly the same urge that had made Housman look up from his Latin texts each year and wonder how the spring was progressing in his lost Shropshire. Adrian would have liked to observe the signs of spring at Icy Creek or Peppers Plain.

  Housman, after a moment of musing, would have gone on resolutely with the task in front of him, but Adrian was not yet as strong-willed as his master. On his way through the city after work he bought a map titled ‘Fifty Miles Around Melbourne’. Before tea that night he oiled his old bike and pumped up the tyres. He studied the map. Fifteen miles past the last of the south-eastern suburbs was an isolated township or hamlet where he could sit undisturbed with his poetry notebook on his knees and a pencil in hand. The place was called Stepney.

  Next morning Adrian packed his lunch in a haversack. He wondered what Housman would have eaten and drunk on a trip through the countryside. He knew from his reading that the poet had been something of a gourmet. He used to meet his publisher at a place called the Café Royal and would always read carefully through menus and wine lists. On his holidays in France he liked to eat a dish called bouillabaise. Adrian had cut the crusts from both ends of a high-tin loaf and had folded them in a lunch wrap with half a packet of Kraft Cheddar Cheese. At the first milk bar that he passed on his trip, he bought a bottle of sarsaparilla because it was the colour of wine.

  He reached Stepney at about noon. He had hoped for a quiet village with a few shady seats or even a small park. He found only a school and a shabby hall and a store with a petrol bowser at the front. The countryside around was flat and mostly treeless and given over to vegetable-growing. Adrian turned into a side road and made for a few cypress trees. When he reached the trees, he found they were ranged around the driveway to a distant farmhouse.

  Adrian got off his bike. A cool wind was blowing across the bare paddocks. He needed a sheltered spot to eat his lunch and jot down some notes for a poem. The most suitable place was among the cypresses, but they were on someone’s farm.

  Adrian felt cheated and out of place in the Australian countryside. In Shropshire he would have had acres of common land to roam across, or he could have had access to farm after farm according to some ancient charter of rights. He sat against a fencepost, as near as he could get to the shelter of the tree. He finished his bread and cheese and opened his sarsaparilla. The drink spurted all over his hands and legs. He supposed he had shaken it while it rested against his back on the long ride to Stepney. He wiped himself with his handkerchief, but his skin remained sticky and uncomfortable.

  He could not bring himself to take his pencil and notebook out of his haversack. He was in no mood for poetry. He leaned back against the fencepost and closed his eyes. The sound of the wind among the trees gave him an idea. The wind in Australia could hardly have sounded very differently from the wind in Shropshire. If he kept his eyes closed and recited vivid lines from Housman, he could convince himself that the wind passing his ears had come towards him from beyond the Welsh Marches. Better still, the feel of the grass at Stepney was surely not all that different from the feel of English grasses. He could touch the grass around him while his eyes were closed and persuade himself that he was in sight of Wenlock Edge.

  Adrian got up and measured with his eyes a walk of twenty yards through the grass
between the fence and the road. He closed his eyes and held his hand well away from his sides—partly so as to feel the tall grass but also to warn him if he strayed too near the barbed-wire fence. He waited until he heard a particularly strong gust of wind straining the cypress branches and then he stepped forward.

  He had never seen an English landscape so clearly or felt so close to the countryside that was now his spiritual home. He was within sight of Bredon Hill when he lost his footing and fell. Even then, he still kept his eyes closed. The feel of the earth close to his face made the whole experience more lifelike. He got to his feet and stepped forward again. Now, however, he was unsure of his bearings. He veered deliberately to left and right, feeling with his hands for the fence and with his feet for the gravel at the edge of the roadside.

  Adrian heard the noise of a car far away in the Australian countryside. He opened his eyes. He was pleased to see that he was still heading in the right direction despite his fall and his subsequent zigzags. He looked for the car. It was not in sight on the road. He listened carefully. The car was coming down the driveway of the farm behind him. The driver might even have seen Adrian performing his Shropshire-in-Australia exercise. That was all he had been doing—trying to transport himself in mind—but the driver of the car may have misinterpreted the matter.

  Adrian walked back to his bike. The car was almost at the gate. Adrian refused to look in that direction. By rights, he should have been in an overgrown lane so narrow and leafy that no car could have approached him. The car stopped at the gate. Adrian stood beside his bike and began to strap his haversack onto his back.