A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Not only was his garden unnecessary—he could do without his chair and table and bed. He shoved his few pieces of furniture back to their old places in the shed. He would never again be confined by the material world. His monastery was wherever he willed it to be.

  Adrian felt a sense of boundless freedom. All he needed was a reasonably quiet spot where he could close his eyes and meditate on his new life. In a corner of the shed was an old wardrobe that he had shared with his brothers years before. The door hung slightly open because the lock was broken. He hammered a nail into the inner side of the wardrobe door and then attached a length of string to the nail. He made a cluster of nail holes in the roof of the wardrobe for ventilation. Then he stepped inside and sat down with the string around his wrist and pulled the door shut.

  Adrian Sherd meditated on the life of a hermit. His cell was remote from the world. He could have followed his rule unhindered through all the seasons of the year, climatic and liturgical. But it occurred to him that most of the daily activities of a hermit—his manual work, his penances, even his mass and his formal prayers—were only a preparation for the climax of his day, which was his wordless meditation.

  Adrian abolished his hermit’s rule and gave himself entirely to meditation. He resolved not to engage in any other activity unless it was absolutely necessary for his survival.

  The aim of his meditation was nothing less than the union of his soul with God. It was called by the church the Mystical Union. Only a few saints had been known to achieve it. One of them, St John of the Cross, had written exquisite lyric poetry to describe it. Adrian would allow himself to jot down a few stanzas if inspiration came to him.

  He closed his eyes and saw a landscape. He was impressed by its sunlit grasslands and broad watercourses. But it reminded him a little of America and he dismissed it from his mind.

  He meditated again and saw scenery vaguely like the places in Australia where he had once hoped to live as a Catholic husband and father.

  He tried several times more. He whispered the most awesome words he knew—‘Godhead, Deity, Eternity, Apocalypse’—and closed his eyes. The landscapes he saw were from literature—green English settings from Arnold and Housman, Francis Thompson’s forbidding country, even a place that could have been the mediaeval world of Martens’ plays. They were more vivid and radiant than he had ever imagined them, but there was nothing spiritual about them.

  Adrian opened his eyes in the darkness of the wardrobe and saw he was as far away as ever from the Mystical Union. He remembered that some of the great mystics had described a state of misery and near-despair that often afflicted the soul in search of God. He too was experiencing it. His vision of shining landscapes was his Dark Night of the Soul.

  He interrupted his meditation to eat his evening meal and sleep in his bed under his parents’ roof and spend a day in the Teachers’ Branch. Before resuming his spiritual tasks he visited Cheshire’s Bookshop to look in the RELIGION shelves for a book on mental prayer. He caught sight of a title that seemed to refer to the plight of mystics like himself—A Season in Hell. He picked up the book before he realised it came from POETRY and not RELIGION.

  Out of habit he searched for information about the poet’s life before looking at the poems. He read about a Frenchman named Arthur Rimbaud who was described as a visionary. Rimbaud had given up poetry at the age of nineteen and set out on a mysterious journey that took him at last to Abyssinia.

  Adrian looked wildly round him, but no one had witnessed his fateful discovery. He took the book to the counter. While the young man was wrapping it, Adrian tried to compose a sentence to let the fellow know what the book meant to him. He wanted to say, ‘Funny, isn’t it, but I’m nearly the same age as Rimbaud was when he gave up poetry for good and went on his travels.’

  But it was the same fellow who had wrapped up An Anthology of Catholic Poets, and he might have said, ‘But you only took up poetry a few months ago.’

  Adrian did not meditate that night. He thought about Rimbaud abandoning poetry and ending his visionary’s quest in a remote part of Africa. Adrian himself was ready at last to give up searching for something remarkable in poetry or religion.

  He knew it would not be easy to forsake his old life and set out for a place like Abyssinia. At work in the Education Department, Coldbeck and grey-haired Mr Armitage, the officer in charge of the Teachers’ Branch, seemed to have got wind of his plan. He heard them talking quietly at Coldbeck’s desk.

  Armitage said, ‘He probably did it for some kind of joke. But I agree with you it’s not all that funny. Where is the place, anyway? Addis Ababa—it’s not on our list of state schools, is it? Africa? Christ Almighty, it’s hard enough to get our temps to the Mallee without sending them to Africa. And what was that business about the shoe in your wastepaper basket? Full of what? Shell grit? Well, it’s no worse than the practical jokes the young clerks used to get up to when I was head of the Papers Branch. I’ll have a talk to him just the same. We’re shorthanded, as you know, Stewart. I wouldn’t want to lose him unless we can get a replacement straightaway.’

  Adrian pretended to be surprised when Mr Armitage called him to his room. The officer in charge of the Teachers’ Branch looked very tired after a lifetime in the public service. Adrian felt sorry for him. He had probably never travelled beyond the garden suburbs of Melbourne. He asked Adrian polite questions about his future. Adrian thought that if he told Armitage about his true destination the poor old fellow would have a nervous breakdown.

  In the end they agreed that the public service was expanding rapidly and prospects had never been brighter for young fellows like Adrian so long as they took life seriously. When Adrian left, Mr Armitage looked quite reassured.

  Adrian hinted to his parents that he felt like going on a long journey. They were not as surprised as he had expected, but they didn’t fully understand him. They said they wouldn’t be too upset if he failed his exams even though he had put so much effort into his studies lately. They suggested he ought to take a week’s leave just before Christmas and visit his uncle’s farm in the Western District and get out in the fresh air.

  As soon as they mentioned the Western District he stopped listening. Anyone who thought a few miles of closely settled dairying country could satisfy a man like Rimbaud was mad.

  Adrian went outside to the shed and looked round carefully. After he had gone there must be no clues to tell anyone where he was. It was most important to hide any sign that he had used the shed for meditation. If his parents called in the parish priest he might know just enough about the soul to guess where Adrian was heading for.

  He took his father’s axe and quietly smashed the chair he had sat on so often. He climbed up on a box and gathered cobwebs from the rafters. Then he smeared the dusty strands across the front of the old wardrobe to make it look as though no one had ever meditated inside.

  He gathered the notes of plays and poems and short stories he had once planned to write. They made a smaller stack than he had expected but they blazed up high in the incinerator.

  Last of all he looked over his collection of books. Most of them could stay where they were—there was nothing in them to suggest where he was going. Some would even mislead anyone looking for clues. If his parents picked up Housman’s poems, for instance, they might think he was somewhere in the west of England. He smiled when he noticed Views of the USSR. He saw his parents praying for their son who had fallen into the hands of the Communists.

  The only book he could not leave was A Season in Hell. Anyone who read the Introduction would know at once where he was going and who had inspired him to go there. He would carry the slender volume hidden about his person. No one would see it while he travelled, but if he was injured or killed they would find it on him. His name in the front would identify him and the book itself would explain the meaning of his last years.

  He took a roll of strong adhesive tape from among his father’s tools. He unbuttoned his shirt and lifted hi
s singlet and bound the book to his chest with long strips of tape. When his clothes were in position again he lay on his back on the cement floor of the shed and visualised the discovery of the book on his body.

  The only words visible among the intersecting bands of black tape were those of the title, A Season in Hell. Adrian realised at once that this did not look well. If the doctor or priest who saw it looked no further than the cover, Adrian might be supposed to have spent his last years in misery or even in mortal sin. He had to ensure that people knew the truth about him—that he had discovered at last a land after his own heart.

  He got up and fetched a ballpoint pen and neatly crossed out the last word of the title without loosening the book from its tapes. There was space on the orange paper of the cover to write in a more suitable word, but Adrian hesitated.

  He asked himself bluntly where he was going after all. He knew it was not to Abyssinia. Apart from minor practical difficulties, Africa was no longer the Dark Continent of sixty years earlier when Rimbaud had hidden himself there. By now Addis Ababa might have as many miles of dreary outer suburbs as Melbourne had.

  He had never intended to follow Rimbaud literally. He was going, like Rimbaud, to a place where poetry was no longer necessary, to the most satisfying of all landscapes, a region that lay on the far side of literature.

  But he had to name his destination for the sake of posterity. The nearer he came to it, the more it resembled a place that theologians had speculated about—the earth itself, transformed into an abode of perfect natural happiness whose inhabitants enjoyed as their right what Adrian Sherd had failed to find in dreams of America, of married life near Hepburn Springs, of the priesthood, of a poet’s calling.

  He lay down again on the floor and bared his chest with the book still taped to it. With his right hand he drew another line through HELL and wrote beneath it LIMBO.

  But he knew that he was still deceiving himself. He was a baptised Catholic, and Limbo was only for those who had never heard of the true Church and had never been baptised.

  He lay for some time with the pen in his hand. Even with his eyes open, he could see the place that he was hoping to reach. But he knew no name for it.

  He felt close to exhaustion. If he could not name his hoped-for place, he might at least name the district or region that encompassed it. Yes, he had still enough strength and perceptiveness to do that. Weary as he was, he recognised that his longed-for destination had been called into being solely by his own wants and yearnings. He crossed out LIMBO and amended his last words for anyone interested.

  He tossed the pen away. His skin was still bare with the book still securely in place and on its cover the amended inscription A SEASON ON EARTH.

  If you’ve enjoyed Gerald Murnane’s A Season on Earth, we think you’ll also like his Patrick White Literary Award-winning novel, The Plains.

  Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

  There is no book in Australian literature like The Plains. In the two decades since its first publication, this haunting novel has earned its status as a classic. A nameless young man arrives on the plains and begins to document the strange and rich culture of the plains families. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself’.

  Read on for a preview of The Plains…

  Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

  My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.

  The plains that I crossed in those days were not endlessly alike. Sometimes I looked over a great shallow valley with scattered trees and idle cattle and perhaps a meagre stream at its centre. Sometimes, at the end of a tract of utterly unpromising country, the road rose towards what was unquestionably a hill before I saw ahead only another plain, level and bare and daunting.

  In the large town that I reached on a certain afternoon, I noticed a way of speech and a style of dress that persuaded me I had come far enough. The people there were not quite the distinctive plainsmen I hoped to find in the remote central districts, but it suited me to know that ahead of me were more plains than I had yet crossed.

  Late that night I stood at a third-storey window of the largest hotel in the town. I looked past the regular pattern of streetlights towards the dark country beyond. A breeze came in warm gusts from the north. I leaned into the surges of air that rose up from the nearest miles of grassland. I composed my face to register a variety of powerful emotions. And I whispered words that might have served a character in a film at the moment when he realised he had found where he belonged. Then I stepped back into the room and sat at the desk that had been specially installed for me.

  I had unpacked my suitcases some hours earlier. Now my desk was stacked high with folders of notepaper and boxes of cards and an assortment of books with numbered tickets between their pages. On top of the stack was a medium-sized ledger labelled:

  THE INTERIOR

  (FILMSCRIPT)

  MASTER KEY TO CATALOGUE OF

  BACKGROUND NOTES

  AND INSPIRATIONAL MATERIAL

  I pulled out a bulky folder labelled Occasional Thoughts—Not Yet in Catalogue and wrote in it:

  Not a soul in this district knows who I am or what I mean to do here. Odd to think that of all the plainsfolk lying asleep (in sprawling houses of white weatherboard with red iron roofs and great arid gardens dominated by pepper-trees and kurrajongs and rows of tamarisks) not one has seen the view of the plains that I am soon to disclose.

  I spent the next day among the labyrinths of saloon bars and lounges on the ground floor of the hotel. All morning I sat alone in a deep leather armchair and stared at the strips of intolerable sunlight bordering the sealed venetian blinds in windows overlooking the main street. It was a cloudless day in early summer and the fierce morning sun reached even into the cavernous verandah of the hotel.

  Sometimes I tilted my face slightly to catch the draught of cooler air from a fan overhead and watched the dew forming on my glass and thought with approval of the extremes of weather that afflicted the plains. Unchecked by hills or mountains, the sunlight in summer occupied the whole extent of the land from dawn till sunset. And in winter the winds and showers sweeping across the great open spaces barely faltered at the few stands of timber meant as shelter for men or animals. I knew there were great plains of the world that lay for months under snow, but I was pleased that my own district was not one of them. I much preferred to see all year the true configuration of the earth itself and not the false hillocks and hollows of some other element. In any case, I thought of snow (which I had never seen) as too much a part of European and American culture to be appropriate to my own region.

  In the afternoon I joined one of the groups of plainsmen who strolled in from the main street and sat at their customary points along the enormous bars. I chose a group that seemed to include intellectuals and custodians of the history and lore of the district. I judged from their dress and bearing that they were not sheep-men or cattlemen, although they might have spent much of their time out of doors. A few had perhaps started life as the younger sons of the great landed families. (Everyone on the plains owed his prosperity to the land. Every town, large or small, was buoyed up by the bottomless wealth of the latifundia around it.) They all wore the dress of the cultivated, leisured class on the plains—plain grey trousers, rigidly creased, and spotless white shirt with matching tie-clip and armbands.

  I was anxious to be accepted by these men and prepared for any test they might make of me. Yet I hard
ly expected to call on anything I had read in my shelves of books on the plains. To quote from works of literature would go against the spirit of the gathering, although every man there would have read any book that I named. Perhaps because they still felt themselves encircled by Australia, the plainsmen preferred to think of their reading as a private exercise that sustained them in their public dealings but could not excuse them from their obligation of cultivating an agreed tradition.

  And yet, what was this tradition? Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker’s peculiar usage of it.

  On that first afternoon I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves and others. This was the very opposite (as the plainsmen themselves well knew) of the common urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other cultures. A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.