Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  The pupils read by turns, and A. fidgeted while some farmer’s son from Sedgewick North stumbled down the long rolling sentences that led to vistas of plains. Then it was Nola Pomeroy’s turn. She was given the passage that A. had been hoping to read himself. But she was a good reader and, being a girl, she delivered her words with an earnestness that would have seemed ridiculous coming from a boy.

  We had at length discovered a country for the immediate reception of civilised man, and fit to become the abode of one of the great nations of the earth. Unencumbered with too much wood, yet possessing enough for all purposes, with an exuberant soil under a temperate climate, bounded by the seacoast and mighty rivers, and watered abundantly by streams from mighty mountains, this highly interesting region lay before me with all its features new and untouched as they fell from the hands of the Creator. Of this Eden it seemed that I was the only Adam; and indeed, it was a sort of paradise to me.

  A. kept himself from looking across at Nola. He watched instead the plains of Australia Felix projected onto the map of Victoria like an image from some memorable film strip. He watched himself reach a hand towards the waving grasses and scattered trees. But then a shadow fell on the map, and meaningless patches of light and darkness mottled his own skin. His outstretched arm had come between the source of light and the image he was after. And Nola herself might have been still behind him in the darkness.

  In the last week of the school year even the rowdiest pupils were quieter and more decorous. Each morning before classes, the room was locked and the blinds were pulled down while Mr Farrant wrote up their final tests on the board. In the afternoon, while their teacher marked their test-books at his table, the upper grades filed into the infant school on the other side of the folding doors and practised for their Christmas Tree. Mrs Farrant played the piano, the upper grades sang the carols, and a select few of the younger children went through the actions of their nativity scene. Lolling against the infant-room walls under loops of coloured paper chains, A. and his friends sensed that the year was approaching some sort of climax.

  They knew, of course, that the Christmas Tree was nothing much. It took place on the evening of the very last schoolday. The folding doors were pushed back and the desks stacked in corners. The parents and children faced each other across an empty space with the man-sized pine branch in its painted oil drum at the centre. The presents, one for each child, were heaped under the tree. The men of the School Committee, who had paid for the presents, sat on chairs beside Mr Farrant and referred to him as the Master of Ceremonies.

  A. and his friends endured the carols, the nativity scene, the speeches, and finally the handing out of presents, all for the sake of the quarter-hour at the end. Then, while the parents had their tea and cakes around the tree, the older boys slipped outside into the dark and scattered. They ran and blundered and stumbled through the school garden, swinging their fists at anyone blocking their way, and made for mysterious hiding places. And even while the slower ones were still running, the howling began.

  A. had first heard it years before, when he was much too small to join in. The big fellows had howled at every Christmas Tree since, and A. had tried it with them as soon as he entered the upper grades. He had known better than to ask what the rules were – he would have been told brusquely by the howlers that there were no rules. But he had learned, over the years, what a howler had to do.

  You had to hide as far from the others as possible so that no one saw you when you let out your howls. You need not actually howl, but you must not make human sounds – and certainly not words. You tried to howl (or yelp or roar or crow) in turn with the others. This was hard to manage in the darkness, but if you were patient and listened carefully you heard a remarkable effect – a long, almost rhythmic sequence of strange cries from near and far, with a place reserved for your own special call-sign.

  A. was always glad just to find a corner for himself and to take part in the howling, but there were some who achieved much more. Some boys moved between one howl and another. They rather spoilt things if they stumbled noisily or showed themselves. But if they shifted their places unnoticed, you had a pleasant shock when their turn came. A howl that you had last heard from the end of the schoolground might ring out from behind a bush only a few paces away. Or a howl that you expected to come from nearby would reach you faintly from as far away as the pine plantation and leave you wondering how the bastard, whoever he was, had travelled such a distance between his howls.

  Even the best howling sessions lasted only a few minutes. Then the school doors would open. The light from inside would spill out over the square of asphalt by the flagpole. Parents would come out to claim their younger children from the group of loiterers listening to the howling. The nearest of the howlers would creep in from the darkness and mingle with the family groups. Down past the pony paddock the farthest howlers soon noticed the gaps in the sequence and gave one last wild cry each and came quietly back. But A., whose parents were always the first to leave any gathering, had always climbed into the back of his father’s utility still hearing one or two faint calls from the most daring of the howlers.

  During each howling session A. tried to fix in his mind the strangest of the cries and the whereabouts, so far as he could judge, of the furthest howlers. He enjoyed the howling itself, but he looked forward to a far greater pleasure. He planned to question the others afterwards and to establish the exact routes followed by certain howlers across the dark schoolgrounds. If he could have learned enough, he would have drawn a detailed map showing the territory that each boy had seemed to claim when he stood in some unlikely spot and uttered his peculiar cry.

  But A. had never been able to learn much more after howling than the little he knew from having been a howler himself. In bright daylight, with the same old paddocks around them, boys seemed reluctant to talk about the howling. They even seemed to dislike A.’s using glibly the word howling as though they and he had taken part in some annual ceremony. They seemed to want to pretend that a few tough bastards had run out into the dark to show off and a few others had followed them – and that was all.

  A. invited Nola Pomeroy to the howling. He knew she could take no part in it. Not even the toughest eighth-grader would have led a girl away into the dark while her parents were just inside the school building. And no girl would have wanted to behave like a mad dog while she was dressed up for the Christmas Tree. What A. had in mind was for Nola to stand quietly outside on the asphalt and keep her eyes open.

  Afterwards she might tell him the directions that the other boys had taken when they rushed off into the darkness. Days after the howling she might sit with him over his map of the schoolgrounds and the pine plantation and the nearest paddocks, marking with dotted lines the beginnings of the routes of all the howlers she had spied on. He would add some of his own observations from the hectic few minutes when he had blundered among the shapes and shadows she could not have seen. She might correct him occasionally, because she had been better placed to appreciate the whole event. But when they could not agree on a certain point they might well have to draw alternative diagrams.

  On the night itself Nola walked a few paces away from the schoolroom porch and stood with her back to the windows. The first of the howlers were already leaping the lavender bushes and dodging between the dahlia beds on their way to claim their stations in the darkness. But A. moved slowly and deliberately away from the brightness of the schoolroom. He wanted to be sure that Nola observed him setting off into the obscure landscape of the howlers. If she had wondered sometimes why he had never got around to taking her into a pocket of roadside bush after school, she might now realise that he had much stranger places in mind.

  He turned for a moment, and the sight of her alone against the brightness of the school windows made him pause. All year she had stood with him in the cloakroom and watched journeys of explorers in the patterns of shadows from film strips. Now there was darkness over Sedgewick North and as much
as they could imagine of the rest of Australia, and Nola had placed herself in front of the brightest light for miles. The shadow she made reached far across the schoolgrounds. It merged into the unlit territory where the howlers were already following mysterious routes to their separate bases.

  A. was less anxious to run out among the howlers. He moved further away from the school building, but not to search for any hiding-place among the unfamiliar shapes of shrubs and fences. He paused at what seemed the boundary of the aura from the lighted windowpanes. He wanted the girl behind him to make some movement or some sign that would suddenly alter the pattern of shadows around him. He wondered how much she might do to the scenery with just a gesture.

  He looked back again. She was walking away; she was no longer between him and the light. And then the first howls were sounding, and he realised he had stood and wavered when he should have been running out into the dark to find his howling place.

  It was too late for exploring. He dropped to the ground where he was. He wriggled and squirmed a little against the dry grass, thinking he might mark out with his body a place like a hare’s that someone would stumble on and wonder about in the long, dreary days of the summer holidays.

  The most notable of the howls that year could have come from anywhere. Once, it sounded so close that A. himself could have been held responsible. At other times it seemed to come from a place too far away for any boy to have reached. Someone was making the frantic bellow of a bull trying to get through a fence to a cow on heat. It was only the simple noise of an animal wanting no other landscape than the place where his female waited to be sniffed at and mounted. Yet out in the darkness it seemed to A., occasionally, something more.

  Stone Quarry

  I have just finished reading a piece of fiction about a man who insists on finding out how deep the bedrock is wherever he happens to be standing.

  I would like to know the name of the woman who wrote the fiction. She has light-brown hair and interesting eyes, but her skin is rather weatherbeaten and her forehead is oddly wrinkled. I can never judge a person’s age. This woman might be thirty-five or forty-five.

  The woman’s fiction is all in the first person, and the narrator identifies himself as a man. The author – the woman with the creased forehead – claims that the man in the story is based on her own brother, who suffers from what she calls an illness of the mind.

  I will explain where I am and why I have to write this.

  I am sitting at a battered garden-table on the back veranda of a ten-room stone house on a hilltop thirty-four kilometres north-east of the centre of Melbourne. A forest of rather skinny eucalypts grows all around the house and all down the steep gullies for as far as I can see. About once an hour I hear a motor car on the gravel road deep down among the trees. Mostly I hear the cheeps and tweets and ting-tangs of birds and the swishings of leaves and twigs in the wind. If I walk along the veranda I can just hear, through the thick stones of the wall, the tapping of a typewriter. At two other places along the stone wall I can hear the same faint sound. Far inside the house, and quite inaudible to me, two people are using electronic keyboards and screens. A writers’ workshop is in progress.

  The stone house belongs to a painter (a painter of quite ordinary views of desert and savannah, to judge from what can be seen on the insides of these walls). At this moment the painter is somewhere on the road to Hattah Lakes. But these details are not important…the artist’s house is ours for the present.

  We are six writers – three men and three women – who have undertaken to write and to show our writing to one another for seven days and six nights up here among the sounds of birds and the wind in the treetops. Five of us, so I believe, have had fiction published in magazines or anthologies. Myself, I am a poet (sparingly published) who is trying to break into prose. Our workshop is not meant to produce immediately a body of publishable writing. Our meeting here on this hill is meant to put us in touch with the deep sources of fiction.

  Last night – Friday night – each of us had to write our first piece and then hand it to the person in charge of the session. This morning at breakfast each of us was given a copy of each of the five pieces written by our fellow writers.

  In most writers’ workshops the members sit around discussing their work; they talk about themes and symbols and meaning and such matters. The six of us do none of this. Ours is a Waldo workshop. The rules were devised by Frances Da Pavia and Patrick McLear, a husband-and-wife team of writers in the USA. In 1949 these two began a series of workshops at their summer house in Waldo County, Maine. Frances Da Pavia and Patrick McLear have both since died but they bequeathed their estates, including the house in Maine, to the Waldo Fiction Foundation, which continues to arrange annual workshops and to keep alive the Waldo theory of fiction in the USA and in other countries.

  The rules for the Waldo workshops have hardly been changed since the first summer when the co-founders and four disciples shut themselves away for a week on a rocky peninsula looking across the water to Islesboro Island. As far as possible the writers have to be strangers to one another. (The co-founders were far from being husband and wife in the days of their first workshops, and after their marriage they were never again together as writers in the stone house.) Everyone is compelled to take a pen-name at the first session and to change that pen-name each day. But the most important rule is the absolute ban on speech.

  In this matter a Waldo workshop is more strict than a Trappist monastery. Trappist monks are at least allowed to use sign language, but writers at a Waldo workshop are not allowed to communicate by any means other than the writing of prose fiction. Waldo writers may exchange any number of messages during their week together, but every message must be encoded in prose fiction. No other sort of message is permitted. Writers may not even allow such a message to reach them inadvertently: if one writer happens to intercept another’s glance, the two must go at once to their separate writing-tables and write for each other a piece of fiction many times more elaborate and subtle than whatever lay behind either glance or was read from it.

  Waldo writers are not even permitted to make the sorts of comment that writers in conventional workshops make about each other’s work. Each morning in this house each one of us will pore over the latest batch of fiction, looking for scattered traces of our own stories in the manifold pattern of Waldo.

  To preserve the ideal of unbroken silence, the Waldo manual recommends a certain gait for strolling around the house and grounds and a certain posture for sitting at the dining-table or on the veranda. The eyes are kept lowered; each stride is somewhat hesitant; arms and hands are guarded in their movements for fear a hand might brush a foreign sleeve or, worse still, a naked wrist or finger. House and grounds, naturally, are required to be remote and secluded. The co-founders’ house, in the one photograph that I happen to have seen, seems to belong in an Andrew Wyeth painting.

  The theory behind the vow of silence is that talk – even serious, thoughtful talk or talk about writing itself – drains away the writer’s most precious resource, which is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which might be read all the wisdom of the world. At the beginning of each workshop, every writer has to copy in handwriting and to display above his or her writing-table the famous passage from the diaries of Franz Kafka:

  I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

  Every breach of the vow of silence must be reported to the writer-in-charge. Even so seemingly slight a thing as sighing within earshot of another person is a reportable offence, and the writer who catches a hint of meaning in the sound of someone’s breath escaping is therefore expected not only to write before long about a fictional sigher and sigh but to draft a brief informer’
s report. Likewise, the sight of a mouth being drawn deliberately down at the corners or even a distant view of a head shaking slowly from side to side or of a pair of hands being pressed against a face – any of these can oblige a writer to amend the work-in-progress so that it includes a version of the latest offence against Waldo and of the report of the offence and any other documents to do with it.

  A first offender against the Great Silence is punished by being sent to his or her room to transcribe passages from writers whose way of life was more or less solitary: Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Giacomo Leopardi, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Michel de Ghelderode, A.E. Housman, Thomas Merton, Gerald Basil Edwards, C.W. Killeaton…The Waldo Fiction Foundation keeps a register of all those who for at least five years of their lives wrote or took notes but talked to no friend or lover.

  A second offence brings immediate expulsion from the workshop. The expulsion is never announced to the group, but suddenly among the buzzings and clickings of insects and the chirrups of birds on a drowsy afternoon a motor-car engine starts up, and perhaps you notice an hour later that a certain pair of creaking shoes are no longer heard in the corridors; or perhaps, standing at a certain point on the veranda, you see the same trail of ants flowing up and down the yellowish stone and the same tiny spider unmoving in its cave of crumbled mortar but you no longer hear the faint rattling of a typewriter through the wall; or later at the dinner table a bread roll lies unbroken by a pair of hands that you formerly watched from under your eyebrows.

  Does anyone reading this want to ask why the workshop should expel a person whose presence had made the fiction of at least one writer daily more bulky and more complex? Anyone who could ask this question has not even begun to understand what I have written so far. But Waldo can answer for me. What might have seemed to the objector a grave objection earns a sentence in the manual. Just the one room becoming empty will make the echo of the fiction of the house more lingering still.