Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  I could write an entire short novel on this subject, but I am only a minor poet taking his first stumbling steps as a writer of fiction; and in any case my first task is to finish this account of the most wonderful week in the history of Waldo.

  After the bonfire of that week the writers meditated on the two versions of Campobello: the writer as finder of blank spaces on actual maps, and the writer as finder of quite new double-pages of maps. And what those writers never forgot was that the fiction from each of their two groups had been indistinguishable. The so-called Campobello Migration that followed meant simply that all Waldo writers were free from then onwards to locate the ideal source of their fiction in places even further east than New Brunswick or in places whose names or parts of whose names might have appeared on a map of Maine if certain pages of atlases were rubbed together, figuratively speaking, before their colours had finally dried.

  The shadows of the nearest trees have now reached the yellow flagstones under my writing-table. The time is late in the afternoon. And just a moment ago I heard the sudden starting-up of a motor car.

  The artist who owns this house left a badly written note explaining how to operate the pumps that bring water up the hill from the underground storage tanks, and for some reason he scrawled at the bottom: Late in day find spot on back veranda with terrific view of Melb skyline so long no smog.

  As I write these words, a motor car is following the winding road downwards between these hard hills where off-blue hardenbergia sprouts wild between outcrops of dull-gold talc. In the motor car is a writer who believes wholeheartedly, as I believe, in the claims of Waldo fiction. The writer has submitted to being expelled from this house as the penalty for sending a message to a fellow writer by means other than the inserting of an allusion into a passage of fiction. If I am the person who was meant to receive the message, I can write truthfully that I have never received it.

  I do not know the name of the person in the motor car. I will probably never know that name. If I could give all my time to reading all the fiction published in this country, I might read some day a passage recalling a piece of fiction I once read about a man who thought continually about the bedrock far under his feet, who studied the surfaces of all the stones he saw, who wanted to live only in stone houses, who would not have complained if he had been made to read fiction day after day, or even poetry…

  The rules of Waldo allow me only until sunset to finish what I am writing. If this were only a piece of fiction devised to amuse a few writers with tastes and interests like my own – if not only Waldo and the man who wondered about bedrock but even the woman with the light-brown hair was invented for the benefit of a group of writers who have not yet been mentioned in these pages, surely now would be the time for me to explain myself.

  Until I was nearly twenty years old I thought I was meant to be a poet. Then, in December 1958, I saw in the window of Alice Bird’s secondhand bookshop in Bourke Street, Melbourne, a copy of Ulysses, by James Joyce. After reading that book I wanted to be a writer of prose fiction.

  In those days I knew only two people who might have been interested in my change of heart. I told the two people what I had decided while the three of us happened to be standing under an enormous oak tree in the grounds of the mansion known as Stonnington, in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern. Stonnington at that time was used by the Education Department of Victoria as part of a teachers’ college. I was a student of the teachers’ college, working to qualify at the end of 1959 for the Trained Primary Teacher’s Certificate, after which I would teach in schools of the Education Department by day and write prose fiction during evenings and at weekends.

  After I had announced my decision to write prose fiction I wanted to do more. I searched in libraries for information about Joyce. Somewhere I found a sentence that I still remember today: He dressed quietly, even conservatively, beringed fingers being his only exoticism.

  I went to one of the pawnbrokers in Russell Street, Melbourne, and bought two cheap rings. Each was low-carat gold with a slab of black onyx. I wore the rings on my fingers but I did not otherwise change my threadbare style of dressing.

  The first picture I found of Joyce was a reproduction of a photograph that I have rarely seen since. I believed the man I considered the greatest of prose writers had had a forehead sharply scored by lines of the same pattern – three parallel horizontals intersected by a single diagonal – as the lines I had drawn in my fourth year of secondary school in my general science notebook to represent a layer of bedrock.

  I hid my rings from my father. In my father’s eyes, rings and tiepins and cufflinks were of the style he called Cockney Jew. I hid Ulysses also. My father could not bear to hear such words as shit or fuck uttered in any context, and I assumed he would not want to read them either.

  My father has been dead now for twenty-five years. He left behind him no prose fiction and no poetry, and not even a written message for any of his family. But on the wall of a sandstone quarry on the hill called Quarry Hill near the mouth of Buckley’s Creek in the district of Mepunga East on the south-west coast of Victoria, my father’s surname and his two initials are still deeply inscribed above the date 1924. When my father carved his name he was as old as I was when I made my announcement under the oak tree in the grounds of the building called Stonnington.

  In 1924 James Joyce was forty-two and Ulysses had been published for two years. The young man carving his name in the stone-quarry had thirty-six years still to live; the man writing Finnegans Wake in Paris had a little less than half that time ahead of him. The man in the quarry knew nothing then of Joyce or his writing and still nothing of them when he died.

  I have enclosed with my last will and testament five sheets of paper inscribed with what I consider useful information for my sons. One sheet tells them how to find the inscription made by their grandfather who died ten years before the eldest of them was born. One or more of my sons may care to inspect my father’s writing twenty-five years after my own death, and then to note how much or how little of my own writing can still be read.

  Out of the quarry on Quarry Hill came the blocks of sandstone that went into the building of a house known as The Cove about one kilometre from the quarry and within earshot of the Southern Ocean. My father’s father built the house and lived in it until he died in 1949. The house stands solidly today, but it is owned and lived in by people whose name I do not know. I have not seen the house for nearly ten years. I hardly ever think of it. I did not even think of it while I was writing about the stone house of Waldo by Penobscot Bay. This is not a story about a house but about the space where a house could have been. I only mention my grandfather’s house in this story because the digging of the stone for that house gave my father a page for his writing that has lasted for sixty years.

  All my life I have looked around me for outcrops of rocks or pebbles or for any jagged place where the true colour of the earth is exposed. Even the crumbs around an ants’ nest will make me stop and look. I watch the cuttings beside railway-lines, the bare patches at the bases of roadside trees, and the dirt thrown up from trenches; I like to be able to think clearly about the colours underneath me as I walk.

  The man I read about today is not interested in the colours of soil. He wants to be sure the bedrock is deep and true for as far downwards as he can imagine it. He believes in a world of countless layers, most of them invisible, and he believes that a fault in any one of the layers has an influence on every other layer. He believes that what some people call his mental illness is a fault in one of the subtle, invisible layers of the world at about the level of his own head. He believes that the ultimate cause of this fault is a terrible creasing of the bedrock far below.

  The man I am writing about is a character in a piece of fiction, but the woman who wrote the piece of fiction is a living woman whose forehead creases when she writes or reads. Until a short while ago that woman was with me in this house, but now she has gone and I do not expect to see her
again.

  The woman with the furrows in her forehead has left the house because she has already read what I am writing. The woman came up to my table this morning while I was crouched on the hillside staring at the mauve hardenbergia and fingering the brownish, powdery rocks. The woman read my pages and understood more clearly than I understand why I am writing them. Then she left a message for me – a clear, unambiguous message not encoded in prose fiction and therefore in serious breach of the rules of Waldo. And then the woman handed all her paper and drafts to the writer-in-charge and left this house.

  To finish this piece of fiction I would only have to write that after the woman had gone I went in search of her message and found it in the most obvious place – in the nearest thing to a library in this house. I would only have to write that one volume on the artist’s miserable shelf of books was oddly stacked, as though drawing attention to itself…

  The book is: Berenice Abbott: Sixty Years of Photography, by Hank O’Neal with an introduction by John Canaday, published by Thames and Hudson in 1982. On the front of the dust-jacket is a brilliantly clear picture of James Joyce at the age of forty-six. Two rings are clearly visible on his fingers. Inside the cover of the book the name Nora Lee has been written in ballpoint. My mother’s mother had exactly that name but she owned no books. Towards the end of the book I found a photograph of a place called Stonington, which is on an island off the coast of Maine.

  Or I might finish this piece of fiction by mentioning that I have always been drawn to writers who have felt their minds threatened. When I read Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce in 1960 I studied carefully the account of his daughter’s madness. I wondered whether Joyce could follow, as he claimed he could, the swift leaps in her thought.

  One night in October 1960 I was drinking in the house of a man who boasted that he was welcome in the houses of famous artists in the hills north-east of Melbourne. Late in the evening, when the man and I were both very drunk, he drove me in his station wagon (it was the company car that he drove as a sales representative) first to Eltham and then along hilly back roads to the strangest building I had ever seen. I learned afterwards that the place was Montsalvat, but on that dark night in 1960 the man who took me there would only tell me it was an artists’ colony. I learned afterwards too that the man I met in the stone castle was Justus Jorgensen, but I was introduced to him only as the Artist.

  The Artist would have been justified in sending us away from his front door, but he let us in and dealt with us most politely. We must have talked for an hour, but all I remember is my learning that the Artist had been in Paris in the 1920s; my asking had he ever seen James Joyce; his telling me that he had; my asking had he ever seen Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, and had she seemed in any way strange; his telling me that Lucia Joyce had been a beautiful young woman with no imperfection that he had noticed.

  I might have ended this piece of fiction in either of the two ways outlined above, but of course I did not. I have thrown in my lot with Waldo. If I am any sort of writer I am a Waldo writer. If what I write rests on any coherent theory it rests on those doctrines devised by starers into fogs and mutterers of names of islands on the wrong side of their country.

  And so, trusting utterly in the wisdom of Waldo, and noting that the sun is at the point of sinking below the faint purple-brown blur which is the northern suburbs of Melbourne as seen from an artist’s stone house far to the east of my own home, I end, or I prepare to end, this piece of fiction.

  All the fiction I have written in the stone house has been an encoded message for a certain woman. In order to send this message I have had to imagine a world in which the woman does not exist and neither do I. I have had to imagine a world in which the pronoun I stands for the sort of man who could imagine a world in which he does not exist and only a man steeped in the theories of Waldo could imagine him.

  Precious Bane

  I first thought of this story on a day of drizzling rain in a secondhand bookshop in Prahran. I was the only customer in the shop. The owner sat near the door and stared out at the rain and the endless traffic. This was all he seemed to do all day. I had passed the shop often and walked through the man’s gaze; and during the moment when I intersected that gaze I felt what it might be like to be invisible.

  On the day of drizzle I was inside the man’s shop for the first time. (I buy many secondhand books, but I buy them from catalogues. Secondhand bookshops make me unhappy. Even reading the catalogues is bad enough. But the secondhand books that I buy do not sadden me. Taking them out of their parcels and putting them on my shelves, I tell them they have found a good home at last. And I warn my children often that they must not sell my books after I have died. My children need not read the books, but they must keep them on shelves in rooms where people might glance at them sometimes or even handle them a little and wonder about them.) The man had glanced at me when I came into his shop, but then he had looked away and gone on gazing. And all the while I poked among his books he never looked back at me.

  The books were badly arranged, dusty, neglected. Some were heaped on tables, or even on the floor, when they could easily have been shelved if the man had cared to put his shop in order. I looked over the section marked LITERATURE. I had in my hand one of what I called my book-buying notebooks. It was the notebook labelled 1900–1940… Unjustly Neglected. The forty years covered by the notebook were not only the first forty of the century. Written ‘1940–1900’, they were the first forty years from the year of my birth to a time that I thought of as the Age of Books. If my life had been pointed in that direction I would have been, just then, not sheltering from rain in a graveyard of books but inspecting wall after wall of leather-bound volumes in my mansion in a city of books. Or I would have been at my desk, a writer in the fullness of his powers, looking through tall windows at a park-like scene in the countryside of books while I waited for my next sentence to come to me.

  I put together four or five titles and took them to the gazing man. While he checked the prices pencilled in the front leaves I looked at him from under my eyebrows. He was not so old as I had thought. But his skin had a greyness that made me think of alcohol. The bookseller’s liver is almost rotted away, I told myself. The poor bastard is an alcoholic.

  I believed, in those days, that I was on the way myself to becoming an alcoholic, and I was always noticing signs of what I might look like in twenty or ten years or even sooner. If the bookseller had pickled his liver, then I understood why he sat and gazed so often. He suffered all day from the mood that came over me every Sunday afternoon when I had been sipping for forty-eight hours and had finally stopped and tried to sober up and to begin the four pages of fiction I was supposed to finish each weekend.

  In my Sunday afternoon mood I usually gave up trying to write and looked over my bookshelves. Before nightfall I had usually decided there was no point in writing my sort of fiction in 1980. Even if my work was published at last, and a few people read it for a few years, what would be the end of it all? Where would my book be in, say, forty years’ time? Its author by then would be no longer around to investigate the matter. He would have poisoned the last of his brain-cells and died long before. Of the few copies that had actually been bought, fewer still would be stacked on shelves. Of these few even fewer would be opened, or even glanced at, as weeks and months passed. And of the few people still alive who had actually read the book, how many would remember any part of it?

  At this point in my wondering I used to devise a scene from around the year 2020. It was Sunday afternoon (or, if the working week had shrunk as forecast, a Monday or even a Tuesday afternoon). Someone vaguely like myself, a man who had failed at what he most wanted to do, was standing in gloomy twilight before a wall of bookshelves. The man did not know it, but he happened to be the last person on the planet who still owned a copy of a certain book that had been composed on grey Sunday afternoons forty years before. The same man had once actually read the book, many years before the afternoon
when he searched for it on his shelves. And more than this, he still remembered vaguely a certain something about the book.

  There is no word for what this man remembers – it is so faint, so hardly perceptible among his other thoughts. But I stop (in my own thinking, on many a Sunday afternoon) to ask myself what it is exactly that the man still possesses of my book. I reassure myself that the something he half-remembers must be just a little different from all the other vague somethings in his memory. And then I think about the man’s brain.

  I know very little about the human brain. In all my three thousand books there is probably no description of a brain. If someone counted in my books the occurrence of nouns referring to parts of the body, ‘brain’ would probably have a very low score. And yet I have bought all those books and read nearly half of them and defended my reading of them because I believe my books can teach me all I need to know about how people think and feel.

  I think freely about the brain of the man standing in front of his bookshelves and trying to remember: trying (although he does not know it) to rescue the last trace of my own writing – to save my thought from extinction. I know that this thinking of mine is, in a way, false. But I trust my thinking just the same, because I am sure my own brain is helping me to think; and I cannot believe that one brain could be quite mistaken about another of its kind.