A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  ‘You got any sort of firearm on you, son?’

  The man sounded nasty. It was probably better to answer him, Adrian thought, but there was no reason to give him the satisfaction of looking at him.

  ‘No! Of course not!’ Adrian thought his voice sounded timid and childish.

  Adrian became suddenly aware of a strange incongruity. In himself, he felt like a middle-aged, formally dressed classical scholar, but in the eyes of the angry farmer he was a mere boy in shorts and shirt and sandshoes.

  The man came nearer. ‘You’re still going to tell me what you’re doing here near my property. I saw you doing something funny in the grass just now.’

  The only way to be free of this fool was to tell him the truth. Adrian looked briefly at the man and then stared into the distance across the uncongenial Australian landscape. ‘If you must know, I was composing poetry.’

  Would the man believe him? Adrian could have shown him the pencil and the notebook in his haversack except that nothing was written on any of the pages. He dragged his bike to the road and mounted it. The man was still silent.

  Adrian was pedalling away before the man called out, ‘Poetry…’

  It might have been a question or an exclamation or even a cry of derision. Adrian rode on. The man called out again, ‘Poetry…’ By now the wind had blown away any malice or contempt that might have been intended. The word sounded almost like a cry for help. Someone was lost among the paddocks and cypresses of Australia and and was calling on poetry to save him.

  Adrian was fifty yards away from the man. Once more he shouted, ‘Poetry…’ This time, the word was hardly distinguishable. The man might have been calling Adrian by name. He was poetry personified, and from far away a frail human voice was trying vainly to call him back to the world of commonplace men.

  Adrian had a hard ride home from Stepney. The wind that had been behind him in the morning was blowing into his face. His stomach ached. He wished he had packed a more substantial lunch instead of what he had thought was a snack suitable for a poet. Every few miles, he had to rest beside the road. He took no notice of the farmland around him. He saw how wise Housman had been to compose his nature poetry in London or Cambridge. When Adrian reached home he let the air out of his tyres and hung his bike in the shed. He would never visit the Australian countryside again.

  He ate his tea with the Literary Supplement of the Age spread out beside him. (The Argus had ceased publication a few months before. Adrian supposed the Catholic men of Melbourne had succeeded in their campaign. But he was indifferent now to the passing of the Argus, which had never given much space to literature.) On the last page of the Supplement was a headline: ‘A. E. Housman—New Light on a Secretive Poet’. Underneath were long columns of print—more than Adrian had ever read about his exemplar. A scholarly American had written the first complete biography of the poet. The author could never have dreamed that news of the book would reach a certain young Australian poet on the very day when he was most in need of something to confirm the standing of poetry and to sustain him in his dedication to it.

  Adrian read the review several times. Most of the facts in it he already knew from his reading in the State Library, but the new biography offered an intriguing explanation for the poet’s lifelong reticence and secretiveness. What was this explanation? The review did not disclose it.

  On the following Monday, Adrian asked for the book in Cheshire’s. No, it was not yet available, but it could be ordered from the local distributors if he wished. Adrian ordered two copies in case one of them was defective in some small way or was damaged while being sent from England. He called at the bookshop every week to ask whether the books had arrived. In the meanwhile he excused himself from trying to write poetry until he knew the truth about the poet he was modelling himself on.

  One night, the salesman in Cheshire’s came out from a back room with the two books in his hand. Adrian waited until he was alone in his room after tea before he even opened the parcel. One of the books was in mint condition. Adrian wrapped this copy in the brown paper supplied by Cheshire’s and stored it safely in his wardrobe. The other book had a corner of its dust-jacket folded over. Adrian propped himself up in bed and opened the volume that would be his working copy.

  At the front was a photograph of A. E. Housman at the age of fifty-two. It was the first picture that Adrian had seen of the great man. He was posed formally, with his chin resting on a hand. He seemed at first sight stern and forbidding, but Adrian could not believe he was unapproachable. If their lifetimes had coincided and if Adrian had written to Housman explaining how he, Adrian, venerated the poet’s works and was trying to imitate his way of life, the proud severe face would surely have relaxed into a look of approval at their first meeting. The rigid mouth might even have twisted itself into a faint smile. Perhaps at their second or third meeting the carefully posed right hand might have been thrust forward in a gesture of unmistakable friendship.

  Unfortunately, Housman had not looked directly at the camera. No matter how he positioned his own face, Adrian could not feel as though the eyes were directed at him. It was almost impossible to imagine the look of bluff affection from Housman that Adrian would dearly liked to have visualised.

  At three o’clock next morning Adrian finished the book. He left the light on and sat thinking. Housman had proved to be a fraud. None of his poems would be of any more use to Adrian, who had wasted his money buying two copies of a book he would never read again. He would keep the books, but only to remind himself of how foolish he had been to make a hero of a poet without knowing the full story of his life.

  According to the biography, the outline of Housman’s life was as Adrian had supposed—a troubled but undocumented childhood in the west of England, years of solitude in London and later in Cambridge. Housman had no close friends and discouraged anyone who seemed likely to violate his privacy. However, his reason for living as he did was not as Adrian had imagined it.

  The review in the Age had mentioned an intriguing explanation for Housman’s eremitic way of life. Adrian had hoped for a love story set among the blossoming hawthorn hedgerows of Shropshire in early spring—Housman at twenty with his acutely sensitive heart broken and the girl he loved walking off among the masses of blossom with an uncouth farm lad. There was a love story, but not of the kind that Adrian had expected. As an undergraduate in the clammy corridors and shadowy quadrangles of Oxford University, Housman had fallen in love with a young man.

  It made no difference to Adrian that the affair had come to nothing. (Housman had hesitated to declare himself; the other young man had affected not to notice anything unusual and had later married and gone to India.) Adrian felt badly deceived. Before he turned out the light, he looked for the last time at Housman’s photograph. When he remembered that he had wanted, only a few hours before, to win an approving glance from those averted eyes and a grip of friendship from that plump, pale hand, Adrian shook his head.

  Adrian had already found in the State Library a book titled Twentieth Century Authors. It was filled with brief biographies and tiny photographs of hundreds of novelists and poets and playwrights, most of them unknown to Adrian. Having finished with Housman, Adrian resolved to search through the collection of authors page by page until he found a man who had lived a solitary, misanthropic life while his powerful emotions drove him to write moving poems or novels.

  Twentieth Century Authors was arranged in alphabetical order. Adrian found his first two candidates among the As. They were both Russian nihilists—Leonid Andreyev and Mikhail Artsybashev. Andreyev’s forehead was deeply creased. In his short stories and articles he had proclaimed the worthlessness of all human effort. He had died in despair. He was not exactly the man Adrian was looking for, but he ruled over Adrian for two days until he reached Artsybashev. On each of those two days Adrian chose not to make his bed or brush his teeth because such activities went against the principles of nihilism. On the train and during his walks in the Trea
sury Gardens, he kept his eyebrows raised in order to deepen the faint lines on his forehead. And each morning, under his usual sports jacket, he wore a black tie from the old clothes box in the back shed.

  Artsybashev seemed a more cheerful nihilist than Andreyev. He had worn brightly coloured silk blouses as a means of self-expression and he had preached total disregard for all moral restraints. His novel Sanine, named for its robust, amoral hero, had been banned in Russia but had been popular among a generation of European youth before the Great War.

  As a Catholic, Adrian could not subscribe to Artsybashev’s doctrines. In fact, Adrian had no wish to believe in them, let alone practise them. He was not even sure that Artsybashev himself had practised them. If the famous Russian had been a true nihilist, he would not have advocated free love and worn coloured blouses but would have sat alone at his desk consumed by poetic sadness while he thought of all the young people of Europe reading Sanine and afterwards enjoying themselves as they followed his doctrines. The only clue to Artsybashev’s private life was the tiny photograph in Twentieth Century Authors. Mostly, when Adrian looked at the face behind the dark beard he saw an expression of gloom and believed that the Russian was one of his own kind. It was only occasionally that he saw the coarse features of a man who actually enjoyed the sensual pleasures that he proclaimed as the greatest good.

  Adrian adopted Artsybashev as his provisional patron until he could find a more suitable entry under the letters B to Z in Twentieth Century Authors. He borrowed a sleeveless pullover with a Fair Isle pattern from his father and wore it under his sports jacket. He spent a week’s wages on a second-hand signet ring with a square of black onyx set in nine-carat gold and wore it in the cause of self-expression.

  In the State Library each evening he read about hundreds of writers from B to L but all were disqualified for one reason or another. They had married or had taken part in public life or they belonged to some cosy little group of writers who praised each other’s works or issued manifestos.

  A few had nearly qualified. A Norwegian novelist had lived all his life as a bachelor in the village of his birth. His novels were described as gloomy and pessimistic, which was very much in his favour, but Adrian rejected the man on the grounds that his work as a postmaster would have provided him with a rich social life and would have obliged him to exchange gossip with everyone in his village.

  A certain Dutchman had written several gloomy, despairing novels. He had not married until he was past fifty years, which impressed Adrian. But the novelist was eventually rejected because he had spent much of his life in the East Indies. This cast doubt on his celibacy. Even a pessimistic bachelor might have been tempted beyond his endurance in a tropical climate, surrounded by brown-skinned women in flimsy clothing.

  Nearly three weeks after his search had begun, Adrian had reached the letter M. Walking up to the State Library after work, he had a premonition that he was close to discovering a man after his own heart. The evening was warm. The month was still only October, but the young women going home from their work in city offices wore summer dresses. Adrian saw himself in the summer months ahead, walking to the station after work with the sun still high in the west. The windows and doors would be left open on the trains. Dry heads of spear grass would fly in from beside the railway tracks. Near Caulfield the elm plantation would remind him of the summer afternoons when he would look up from behind his book at Denise McNamara. (Where was she now? The relentless flow of time must always be a major theme in his poetry!) His keenest pleasure would be experienced on hot Friday evenings when groups of young women, with the satiny skin of their bare arms in his full view, would chatter about their trips to the beach on the coming weekend. He would sit for mile after mile with his eyes on the book he was reading. Whenever a young woman mentioned her boyfriend or her new bathers or gave a faint squeal of joy, he would derive his pleasure from the thought of himself sitting all Saturday and Sunday in his shed with the blind pulled down against the sun and his notebooks in front of him.

  On the lawn in front of the State Library three women students from the university sat together over their textbooks. Adrian paused a few paces from them. It was an opportunity for him to experience already the sort of pleasure he had just now been looking forward to. He reminded himself that he could have enrolled at the university if he had not given up his studies for a literary career. The bare legs on the grass, the one naked foot with the sandal dangling from it—sights such as these might have confronted him every day on the university lawns, but his was the vocation of the poet who turned his feelings of deprivation into literature.

  Adrian sat at his usual seat in the reading room and began at the letter M. Five minutes later, he read the half-page entry for the Flemish playwright Adhémar Martens, who wrote under several other names but mainly Michel de Ghelderode. Adrian read the entry twice through and then took out pencil and paper and made a complete copy. Then he closed the book. He might still read from N to Z, but he could not believe he would find in the rest of the book any male writer who better suited his needs.

  Adrian read his pencilled notes on the train homewards. Martens had spent his life in his native Belgium. There was no mention of his having had a wife or children. At the age of thirty, he had retired to a few rooms of his family home, where he wrote numerous plays with mediaeval themes and surrounded himself with an odd assortment of artefacts that were all he cared to know of the outside world. In later years he had confined himself to one room and mostly communicated with outsiders by means of written messages.

  Adrian read again and again the sentences reporting Martens’ withdrawal from the world and wondered if he himself could dare to follow the brave Belgian. Adrian had no interest in plays or the theatre, much less anything mediaeval, but he did not doubt that Martens’ way of life was appropriate for a young poet wanting to avoid the distractions of the world and to distil his emotions into poetry.

  That evening Adrian hinted to his parents that he might move his bed into the back shed so that he could have more privacy. His parents disapproved. They said he was too moody and stuck-up as it was without locking himself in the shed and away from everyone. Besides, the shed was only of fibrocement with unlined walls and no electricity.

  Adrian made his own plans. He was eighteen years old. In little more than three years he would be legally entitled to withdraw from the world with or without his parents’ consent. One of his father’s friends was a carpenter. Adrian asked the man what would be the cost of lining the shed. (The man was not to tell Mr Sherd about it. Adrian said he was preparing a surprise for his father.)

  When the carpenter had quoted him a figure, Adrian calculated that he could pay for the job if he saved most of his salary for the next nine months. In the meanwhile, he planned the furnishings. He was justified in fitting out the place comfortably—Martens had surrounded himself with an assortment of artefacts. Adrian would buy his own radio. He would have to listen to Top Forty programs in order to capture the atmosphere of the parties and picnics where people of his own age were enjoying themselves. Just to sit in his isolated room, hearing a mournful pop song playing and knowing that Denise McNamara or Clare Keating might be dancing to the tune somewhere—this would be enough to put him in the mood for hours of poetry writing.

  He would have a special shelf stacked with recent copies of the Australian Women’s Weekly. The pictures of young socialites sipping cocktails and the advertisements for girdles and acne lotions would provide authentic details for the descriptions in his writings of the world he had turned away from. And he would take out a subscription to St Gerard’s Monthly. He could stare at the photos of young couples with their six or seven children when he wanted to remind himself of the joys of family life that he had forsworn.

  He would eventually have to resign from the public service. The strain of leading a double life—an administrative clerk by day and a recluse after hours—would one day prove too much for him. Until he had published his po
ems he could earn a modest living by writing short stories for magazines. He consulted an advertisement that appeared in the Age Literary Supplement every Saturday and then sent a postal note for five shillings to a post office box in Melbourne. He received by return post a booklet titled A Marketing Guide for Australian Writers, from which he learned that the Women’s Weekly paid as much for a single story as he could earn in six weeks as a public servant.

  On the following Saturday Adrian locked himself in the back shed. He pinned to an upright in the wall a map of Belgium from his brother’s school atlas. Over the city of Brussels (Martens’ birthplace) he fixed with sticky tape a tiny picture of the Great Man. (Adrian had recently removed the picture from Twentieth Century Authors by means of a razor blade.) Pinned to another wall was a coloured picture from a recent edition of the Women’s Weekly. It was part of an advertisement for a biscuit with a low calorie content. A vivacious young woman was waving goodbye to someone as she stepped into a sports car. A young man held the car door open for her. He wore casual clothes and his expression was confident, bordering on arrogant. He used women for his pleasure—he had never experienced a poetic emotion in all his life. (The pictures were attached to the wall only temporarily. When Adrian moved into the shed for good, they would be part of a permanent collection like Martens’ assortment of artefacts.)

  By mid-afternoon, Adrian had several pages of notes for a short story. A young woman has left Australia on an overseas tour. She wanted time to think over a marriage proposal from the brash young man who had courted her for months past in his sports car. She felt that life must have had more to offer her than an endless round of social outings and Sunday drives. Her travels took her to the Continent. In the suburb of Ixelles, in the city of Brussels, she took a job as a domestic servant. The house where she worked was large and rambling and gloomy. She was warned never to pass a certain doorway on an upper landing. She learned in time that an austere genius, a literary recluse, lived and worked beyond the forbidden door. A whole new world opened up for her. All day at her work she thought of the great man in his dim room high above her and wondered what could have sustained him in his exile and whence came his creative energy.