Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  The man looking at the page of the atlas is a mature-age student in an institution known as a college of advanced education in an inner suburb of Melbourne. The man, who was formerly the young man whose shirt and tie were mentioned in the first paragraph of this piece of fiction, has worked for more than twenty years in the same office building. For more than ten years, he has travelled on weekday evenings in a suburban train from the city to the outer south-eastern suburb where he lives with his wife and their two children, but during the past three years he has broken his journey homewards on two evenings of many weeks in order to attend classes at the institution mentioned above. The evening when he consults an atlas in the library of the institution, as reported above, is an evening in a certain year in the late 1970s.

  The institution mentioned above was founded in a certain year in the early 1970s. Twenty years afterwards, the man most often mentioned in this piece of fiction would still describe the two years just mentioned and the few years between as the most exciting years of his life. In the year before the first of the years just mentioned, a certain political party was elected to form the federal government of the country where the man had lived throughout his life. This political party had been in opposition for more than twenty years, and the man and most of his friends found the result of the election in itself exciting. The man would recall twenty years afterwards that the policies of the new government had been exciting, especially their policies in education which, as he understood them, offered to adults such as himself a free tertiary education with an emphasis on retraining. He had left school in the second-last year of his secondary education and had never expected to study at a university of any similar institution. In fact, the college where he enrolled in the mid-1970s in no way resembled any of his images of a university. The buildings stood along a side street with no lawns or grounds around them. When he went into the student union building on the day of his enrolment, the person who handed him booklets of information was a woman of about thirty who was breast-feeding a baby, and when he was taken on a guided tour of the college the person who guided him and his party was a man of about thirty who told the new students that he had worked at twelve different jobs, the most recent being as a labourer in a piggery, and that he intended to work as a scriptwriter for a television production company as soon as he had finished his diploma in humanities with a major in creative writing.

  The chief character of this piece of fiction, when he enrolled in a course for a diploma in humanities with a major in creative writing, had written no fiction since the year in the late 1960s when his wife had had to give up her job and stay at home to look after the first of his and her two children. Before then, he had taken out one or another of his folders of notes and early drafts on one or another evening each week and had added or emended one or two paragraphs, but after his wife had stopped working he had had to find a second job. He began to work in the early mornings for the newsagency in his suburb, counting out the bundles of newspapers for the delivery boys and then driving parcels of papers to depots on street corners for the boys to pick up on their rounds. He excused himself from writing during the years when he worked at the two jobs, since he had to go to bed early on six evenings of each week. He could not have enrolled as an evening college student while he was working at two jobs, but his children had started at school by the mid-1970s, and his wife had begun to work part-time. Even so, she would not have agreed to his giving up his second job and studying in the evenings if he had not persuaded her that a diploma in humanities would qualify him for more senior positions in the office building mentioned previously.

  In his first year as a student of creative writing, the chief character of this piece of fiction had to enrol in units that included short assignments in technical writing, verse writing, scriptwriting, and fiction writing. He completed these units without distinction under a teacher who told his students in the first week that he was not himself a published writer but would prepare them to meet the distinguished writers who would teach them in subsequent years.

  The chief character of this piece of fiction enrolled in the second year of his studies in only the two units An Introduction to Fiction Writing A and B. Even before his first classes, he began to make notes for the pieces of short fiction that he would have to write during the year. He believed he might be about to learn at last some technique the lack of which had hindered him as a writer for nearly twenty years. When he opened one of his folders of a morning in the train on his way to work, he had only to add a sentence to one or another paragraph of notes in order to feel somewhat as he had felt as a young man wearing a shirt and tie of provocative colours and reading Ulysses. As a young man, however, he had thought of his becoming a writer as leading him to places far from the suburbs of Melbourne: he had seen himself being stared at in cafés in Europe or even in hotels in the hills north-east of Melbourne. As a mature-age student aged nearly forty, he foresaw that he would spend the rest of his working life in an office building in Melbourne and he expected from writing only that it should make him feel somewhat distinguished from other persons in the office building or in the suburb where he lived, as though he had once seen something that the others only wondered about.

  The teacher of the units mentioned above was a shabbily dressed man in his fifties. Most of his students were puzzled by him or disliked him and looked forward to taking the third-year units An Advanced Course in Fiction Writing A and B. The teacher of these units was a woman in her thirties whose two books of short stories had each won a literary award and who was often interviewed by the literary editors of newspapers and other journalists. The second-year students had heard from more senior students that the woman began her first class each year with the statement that all writing was a political act and that she continually urged her students to submit their work for publication or to arrange public readings of their work. The shabbily dressed man spoke to his students at their first class as follows. The best service he could perform for them was to persuade them to give up writing fiction as soon as they had finished his course – or even before then. The writing of fiction was something that a certain sort of person had to do in order to explain himself or herself to an imagined parent or an imagined loved one or an imagined god. He himself had had two novels published more than ten years before but had had nothing published since then and had no intention of writing so much as a sentence of fiction during the remainder of his life. He had stopped writing fiction after having been shown a sign. He had had to write or to prepare to write fiction in order to be shown the sign, but having been shown the sign he no longer wished to write fiction. The shabbily dressed man then said to his class that he had probably said too much to them already and had probably confused them thoroughly. He then said that their first class was over, that their classes for the next month were cancelled, and that they should go away and write their first piece of fiction and deliver it to him three weeks later so that he could prepare photocopies for the workshop classes that would occupy him and them for the rest of the year.

  The chief character of this piece of fiction wrote as his first assignment for the shabbily dressed man a piece of fiction whose chief character was a man who lived alone in a hut in a patch of bush in a corner of a dairy farm and had never married or kept company with women or girls. The assignment was returned to the man who had written it with no editorial marks and with no critical annotations but with the outsized inscription 66% in red ink at the foot of the last page.

  Talking with classmates in the cafeteria before the first of the workshop classes, the chief character of this piece of fiction learned that the shabbily dressed man was well known for refusing to write comments on his students’ assignments. Some students said he was an alcoholic whose hand shook so badly that he could not use it for writing. Others said that he was merely lazy. Still others said that he was afraid of teachers of creative writing in other institutions reading anything that he might have written by way of comment on h
is students’ work.

  During the first of the workshop classes, the shabbily dressed man explained to his students that he calculated the mark for each of their assignments by observing what percentage of the text he was able to read before deciding that he wanted to read no more. Yet the man did not actually say that he had not read all the assignments to the end, and when he commented on each assignment in class – after each of the students had taken his or her turn to speak – he said nothing harsh. When the chief character of this piece of fiction heard the shabbily dressed man speaking to the class, he, the chief character, thought the man sounded sorry for his students, as though they were suffering from something that he himself had once suffered from but had long since recovered from.

  Before the chief character of this piece of fiction had begun to write his second piece of fiction for the course he had enrolled in, he understood that he had fallen in love with a woman who was one of his classmates. When he decided this, the chief character had never spoken in private to the woman, although he had sat near her sometimes in a small group of students in the cafeteria before class. He knew about her only that she worked in an office building by day and that she spoke with a slight English accent. He guessed that she was five to ten years younger than himself.

  What seemed to the chief character the chief cause of his having fallen in love with the woman mentioned above was the piece of short fiction that the woman had written as her first assignment. Most of the class seemed to find the piece better than the average standard of the pieces read in class, but the chief character of this piece of fiction wrote on his copy as a final comment before passing the copy to the author that he was deeply impressed. The person in the class who seemed most in agreement with this opinion was the shabbily dressed man, who said in class that he looked forward to reading the next piece by the same author – something he had never previously said to the class.

  The woman mentioned above wore a ring that the chief character of this piece of fiction supposed was a wedding ring, although she had never mentioned a husband or children when she talked in the cafeteria. Yet, even the chief character had lately noticed changes among the people in the office building where he worked and the suburb where he lived; even he had heard of marriage break-ups and open marriages and of couples moving in together without marrying. A number of the men and women in his class were separated or divorced, and at least one affair seemed to have begun among his classmates. But during the time when the action of this story takes place, the chief character seldom wondered whether or not he would have with the woman he was in love with what would be called by other persons an affair or whether or not he would become estranged from his wife or the woman from her husband, if she had a husband.

  During the time mentioned in the previous sentence, whenever the chief character thought of the woman he had fallen in love with he thought often of certain details in the piece of fiction the author of which was the woman and the chief details of which are as follows.

  The chief character is a young woman working at her first job in an office building in a certain provincial city in England. The time is the mid-1960s. The young woman spends much of her time foreseeing herself as a painter of pictures. The young woman spent her childhood in a small house in a suburb of the city mentioned above but spent much of her time as a child foreseeing herself as living in a mansion among certain hills that she saw far away whenever she looked from a certain hill in the suburb where she lived towards the countryside beyond the suburb. The chief character meets in the office building where she works a man who has, so he says, several painters of pictures among his friends. The chief character, who has had few dealings with men, soon believes that she has fallen in love with the man just mentioned. After the chief character and the man have kept company for several weeks, the man invites the chief character to a party where, so he says, the guests will include some of the painters mentioned above. The last paragraph of the story reports the man as driving the chief character towards the party which, so the man has told her, will take place in a mansion in the countryside beyond the suburbs of the city where he and she live. The chief character, who has been looking out through the windows of the man’s car, understands that she is being taken into the hills mentioned earlier. By now, darkness has fallen. The chief character notices that the lights of houses are farther apart than she had expected. She supposes that the countryside is less settled than she had expected. Even the large house or mansion that she and the man approach at last has fewer lights showing than she might have expected in a mansion where a party was taking place with many painters of pictures among the guests.

  The piece of fiction summarised above caused the chief character of this piece of fiction, so he believed, to fall in love, but the piece of fiction caused him also to prepare to write as his second piece of fiction for the course that he had enrolled in a piece that would explain certain matters to the woman-author. While he was so preparing, the chief character arrived early one evening at the institution where he was a student and went to the library in order to consult the atlas mentioned earlier. He found on a certain page of the atlas a hatched area denoting a city with the same name as the city mentioned in the previous paragraph. He then looked in widening circles around the hatched area. While he looked, he tried to see in his mind more clearly than he had previously seen them certain details of countryside and of a certain mansion in the countryside. While he looked, he noticed that the areas that he was looking at on the map were marked by fewer names of towns and villages than he might have expected. Then, in an area the colour of which denoted that the area was hilly, he saw a name that is part of the title of this piece of fiction.

  Trees can be seen in the foreground. Hills can be seen in the background. Sounds of insects can be heard. A man and a woman sit together. The man talks to the woman.

  Sometimes the man who foresees the details above as appearing in his mind foresees himself as leaving the course quietly in the way that several of his classmates have already left. Sometimes he foresees himself as explaining to the shabbily dressed man that his, the chief character’s, next piece of fiction will be submitted late because its author is experiencing difficulties of a personal nature. Sometimes he seems about to foresee himself as disregarding all considerations other than that he must write a certain piece of fiction and after that piece many other pieces of fiction. Sometimes he seems about to foresee himself as understanding that he has already written all the fiction that could have been required of him.

  In Far Fields

  During the years when I earned my living as a teacher of fiction-writing in a university, one or another of my students would sometimes call on me in my office and would claim that she could not write the pieces of fiction that I required her to write and would give as the reason for this that she did not understand what I meant by the word fiction. I used the words her and she in the previous sentence only because three-quarters of my students of fiction-writing were females.

  While I was writing the previous sentence, I saw in my mind an image of the view from the chair that I used as my chair in one of the rooms that I used as my office during the years when I was a teacher in a university. The view was of part of the room as it would have appeared to me if ever I had been visited in my office by a certain young woman who was one of my students for two years but never visited me during those years. The young woman never visited me or asked me to explain what I meant by the word fiction, but she wrote as the last of her assignments while she was my student a piece of fiction that earned from me the highest numerical mark on a scale of 1 to 100 that I gave to any piece of fiction during the years mentioned above.

  While I was writing the previous paragraph, I understood that the young woman mentioned there was listening to the words of a man who was talking about the writing of fiction. I could not see any image of the man, and I could not hear in my mind any words that the man was speaking, but I understood that the man was in the room
and that the young woman was listening to the words of the man.

  I understood these things in the same way that I understand many of the matters that I seem afterwards to have seen and to have heard while dreaming.

  While I was writing the previous paragraph, I understood that the young woman mentioned there could not hear any words from the man mentioned there but that she was aware of what the man could well have spoken to her in the same way that I am aware of what could well have been spoken to me by images of persons that I seem afterwards to have been aware of while dreaming.

  During the years mentioned in the first paragraph of this piece of fiction, I would sometimes say to one or another of my students in my office that any person who was paid to teach other persons how to write pieces of fiction should be able, in the presence of any number of those other persons, to write the whole of a previously unwritten piece of fiction and to explain at the same time what had seemingly caused each sentence of the piece to be written as it had been written. I would then write a sentence on a sheet of paper. I would then read the sentence aloud to my student. I would then explain to my student that the sentence was a report of a detail of an image in my mind. I would explain further that the image was not an image that I had seen in my mind recently for the first time or an image that I saw in my mind only at long intervals but an image that I saw often in my mind. I would explain that the image I had begun to write about was connected by strong feelings to other images in my mind.

  I would then go on to tell my student that my mind consisted only of images and feelings; that I had studied my mind for many years and had found in it nothing but images and feelings; that a diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns. Whenever I had seen in my mind the image that I had begun to write about just then, so I would say to my student, I had felt the strong feelings leading from that image far out into the grassy countryside of my mind towards other images, even though I might not yet have seen any of those other images. I did not doubt, so I would tell my student, that one after another detail of one after another of those other images would appear in my mind while I went on writing about the image that I had begun to write about on the sheet of paper that was before me.