Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  The narrator of Monsieur Nicolas had been strongly attracted to girls and young women from about his tenth year, but they were persons from his neighbourhood, some of whom actually kissed and petted him, and he felt towards them a sexual desire that seemed to the chief character of this story undistinguished, especially after he had read of how the narrator of the book had been taught by a young woman how to satisfy that desire. This lesson had taken place when the narrator was still not twelve years of age and was reported on page 27 of the book. The remaining four hundred and more pages of the book contained mostly reports of the narrator’s first desiring and soon afterwards enjoying one after another girl or young woman or woman. The chief character of this story, from the age of four, would often find in his mind when he was alone, and especially when he was in sight of paddocks of grass or stands of trees or even a corner of a garden, an image of the face of a woman or a girl. Some of the faces were of images of persons in photographs or other illustrations; a few of the faces were of images of persons from films he had seen; and sometimes a face appeared to him, so far as he could surmise, from the same source that had given rise to the images of Helvetia.

  The faces of this last sort interested him more than the others whenever during his later life he studied his memories of what he had come to call the female presences. Each face was never less than beautiful, according to his notion of beauty, but a presence would often appear at first with an expression of sternness or aloofness. He got much pleasure from knowing that this expression was only to keep secret from outsiders the warmth of the feelings that he felt continually from the presence. He understood that each presence was eager for him to confide in her, even though he suspected at the same time that she knew already what he most wanted to confide. He understood also that if he were to report to any presence some of the worst and most shameful things that he had done or said or thought – things that he knew to be sins according to his religion – she would be no more than curious to learn what his motives had been or what queerer things he could get up to.

  Usually, the female presence seemed to be his wife or the person who would become his wife in the future. The man who remembered these matters up to fifty years afterwards did not find it strange that the boy from the age of four had talked to a wife-in-his-mind rather than to a friend-in-his-mind of either sex. Until he was nine years old and able to read passages from the books of popular fiction that his parents read, the boy believed that the only persons who took part in sexual behaviour were husbands with their wives, and for many years after that he believed that he himself could never so much as speak about sexual matters with any female person who was not his wife or his betrothed. He spoke about such matters often with the female presences in his mind and he did with them in his mind certain things, but only after having warned the presences of what to expect. No matter how perceptive and knowledgeable a female presence might be and how much about him she knew without his having to tell her, she would always be quite innocent in sexual matters and would wait to learn from him.

  Whenever he saw himself with his wife-in-his-mind, he and she were in a particular place. Husband and wife lived together without children in a house set far back from the road on a farm of several hundred acres. The details of the farmhouse changed as often as he saw in one of the women’s magazines that his mother read an illustration of one or another house described as ultra-modern or luxurious, but the farm always appeared in his mind as a rectangle of green paddocks with a road of red gravel at its front and with thick forest at its sides and its rear. The boy who saw this farm in his mind did not learn until he was a man aged more than fifty years which farm in the place that is called for convenience the real world most nearly resembled the farm with forest on three sides. For most of his life, he had taken pleasure from seeing in his mind images of grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. These images resembled, as he well knew, landscapes that he had seen when he had looked from the windows of country trains between the western suburbs of Melbourne and the district in the south-west of Victoria where the parents of his parents lived. This district was mostly grassy countryside, but in certain parts of the district a line of trees was visible in the distance, and for most of his life the chief character of this story would have said that a broad expanse of grass and a distant line of trees was his ideal landscape except that he sometimes remembered that he and his wife-in-his-mind had always lived in a place where the grassy paddocks seemed no more than a large clearing in a far-reaching forest.

  Late in his life, the man discovered that certain details of certain images in his mind would begin to flicker or waver while he looked at them and that this flickering or wavering was often a sign that a surprising image or cluster of images would soon appear from behind the wavering or flickering detail or details. One of the first details that had wavered or flickered in this way was the line in his mind where the green paddocks of the farm mentioned in the previous paragraph came to an end and the thick forest surrounding the farm began. The man remembered many years afterwards that the boy would sometimes want to see himself and his wife-in-his-mind as talking together or being naked together in their modern and luxurious house but would find himself instead looking at the wavering or flickering boundaries of his and her farm.

  After his eighth year, the female that he considered his wife-in-his-mind was sometimes a version of a girl of his own age from his own school or neighbourhood. Each of these girls had what he considered a beautiful face and kept herself aloof from himself and other boys. He never deliberately chose one or another of these girls. One day when he found himself growing tired of the face of his wife-in-his-mind, he would notice that her face had become in a moment a version of the face of a girl that he knew. At first he might protest to himself (knowing that the female presence was listening, even though she was faceless for the time being) that he had never considered the girl’s face beautiful. But he would be gradually won over. Against the background of the farm with the forest around its boundaries, the face would become the face of his wife. He would become impatient to be in his schoolroom again or on a certain street in his neighbourhood, so that he could see the face-in-his-mind as it had now been revealed to him.

  When the appearance of a girl from his school had settled in his mind in this way, he was not at first eager to have the girl know that he and she were now connected. He preferred to watch the girl when he thought she was unaware of him. His watching was meant only to make more vivid in his mind afterwards the face of the female presence. When the details of a face were quite clear in his mind, so he had learned long before, the female presence was more likely to surprise him by what she said and did and so to reassure him that she existed apart from himself. At such times, the husband of the female presence seemed not the boy as he might have become in the future but the boy as he might have been at that moment if only he could have been living in the world where one of the countries was Helvetia. Soon, however, the man and the woman in his mind would become almost wholly himself and the girl in the future, and soon after that, the face-in-his-mind would have become the face of the schoolgirl that he saw each day, and he would have begun to be unhappy.

  The man read the book of fiction Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from the French of Marcel Proust and published in London in 1969 by Chatto and Windus, when he was a few more than thirty years old. The passages reporting the unhappiness of Swann over Odette and of the Narrator over Gilberte and Albertine were the first accounts he had read of a state of mind similar to his own whenever during the years from his ninth year to his twenty-ninth year he felt towards a female person what is most conveniently denoted by the word love. (Until he had read those passages, the most nearly accurate accounts that he had read of his state of mind when in love had been accounts of the states of mind of female characters in fiction.) During much of the period of twenty years just mentioned, he would be continually unhappy while he was out of sight
of the girl whose face was in his mind, but no less unhappy when he was in sight of her. Away from her, he was unhappy to think of her talking or laughing among people he had never met and doing a thousand small things that he would never know about. But at such times, he could at least talk with her image in his mind. When he was in sight of her, he was made aware that she was not thinking continually and anxiously about him. He was able to remember forty years afterwards what he had seen and felt one Monday morning in his tenth year when he had turned in his seat in a classroom and had looked for the first time in three days at a girl whose image had been in his mind for much of that time and had been almost certain that she was aware of him looking at her but had seen her looking deliberately past him at the blackboard and copying one after another of the details there into her exercise book.

  Sometimes his looking so often at a particular girl led some female friend of the girl to challenge him to deny that the girl he looked at so often was his girlfriend. He would have liked to make this denial and so to save himself from being teased in the schoolground, but he was always aware that the girl he so often looked at might herself have caused him to be questioned and might be hurt if he denied that he was interested in her, and so he would admit that he considered the girl in question his girlfriend. The end of the matter would follow after a few days. Now that he had confessed, he was no longer free to look at the girl. Whatever the girl might have felt towards him, she and he had to make a show of disliking the mere sight of one another for a few days before the other children would leave off tormenting them. Sometimes, his few days of having to avoid the girl would cure him of thinking about her. At other times, he would go on loving her in secret for months, and her face would continue to be the face of his wife-in-his-mind.

  At some time during his ninth year, when he was trying to remove from his mind the image of the face of one or another schoolgirl and so to be free from his latest mood of unhappiness, he found a way of breaking out of the cycle of feelings reported in the previous paragraphs. Two of his father’s brothers and four of his father’s sisters had never married. One of the unmarried sisters had died, and one of the unmarried brothers had gone to live in Queensland, but the other four unmarried persons had gone on living in their parents’ house in a large town in the south-west of Victoria. Each of the three women had a room or a sleepout in the house, but the man – called from now on the bachelor-uncle of the chief character – lived mostly in the garden behind the house, in what was always called the bungalow: a small room with a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, a bookshelf, a chair for sitting at the desk, and a chair for a visitor. The bachelor-uncle ate most of his meals in the house and sat for a half-hour each evening with his parents and sisters (and with his sisters alone after their parents had died), but he spent most evenings and many afternoons in the bungalow, sitting at his desk or lying on his back on his bed while he read from books or listened to radio programmes on the ABC or to broadcasts of horse-races. He earned his living by breeding and fattening cattle in a few paddocks of grazing land that he leased in the countryside that surrounded the town where he lived. He spent only three or four mornings each week with his cattle. Every Saturday he drove his car to the nearest race meeting. Every Sunday he went to Mass in his Catholic parish church. The chief character of this story had heard as a boy that his bachelor-uncle had had as a young man several girlfriends who would have made excellent wives, but he, the chief character, hoped as a boy that his parents and others were predicting rightly when they said that his uncle would always be a bachelor. And at some time during his ninth year, the boy decided that he himself would be a bachelor and not a husband when he became a man.

  He could not remember, years afterwards, the first occasion when he turned away from the wife-in-his-mind and became a bachelor in his mind, but he remembered later occasions when he had felt suddenly relieved that he would never again be preoccupied with girls or young women whose faces had become fixed in his mind: that he would never have to find a wife in the future. As soon as he had become a bachelor in his mind, he would see himself in the future not on the farm with the forest at three sides but in a bachelor’s bungalow or looking out across grazing land or arriving alone at a race meeting. Years later, when he came across the word heartwhole in his reading, that word seemed especially apt for describing the feeling of strength and soundness that he had got from thinking of himself as a boy-bachelor. And yet, he had never thoroughly rid his mind of female presences in his bachelor-days; nor did he try to do so. He would sometimes feel as a bachelor that he was being watched from a distance by one or another female presence: someone who resembled no girl he had ever seen; someone who was almost a stranger to him. She was, perhaps, the wife he would never know: the woman he might have married if he had not been a lifelong bachelor. He would never have behaved cruelly towards her, but her quiet sadness did not move him.

  During each of his bachelor-moods, he would become interested again in things he had ignored while he was preoccupied with women- or girls-in-his-mind. As a boy-bachelor, he took pains with his schoolwork and with his prayers in church, and he helped his mother with housework and his father with gardening. After a few weeks, however, he would find himself again thinking often of a female person watching him, and then the cycle would begin again.

  Quite apart from all the female persons mentioned so far in this story is another group that the chief character sometimes called in his mind the women of the scrub.

  During the first few years when the chief character lived with his parents and his younger brother in the south-eastern suburb, he, the chief character, knew of no other young person of his own age who lived within walking distance of his house in any direction. Every house that he knew of among the sandy tracks and the clumps of scrub contained a young married couple and as many as three or four small children. A few of the wives-in-his-mind in earlier years had had the faces of young married women that he had seen outside his mind, but as from this thirteenth year the young married women of his neighbourhood in the south-eastern suburb did in his mind what no wife had ever done or would ever do there.

  On a very hot day in January in his thirteenth year, he decided to endure for no longer a sensation that he had endured at intervals on every hot day of that summer. He walked in among the grey-green scrub that had not yet been cleared from behind his house. Because the land around the house had not yet been fenced, he was able to continue walking in an easterly or south-easterly direction through the scrub until he was out of sight of his house. In a thick part of the scrub, he knelt and set about relieving himself of the sensation that had been troubling him. The scrub grew so closely around him that his forearms and his thighs were prickled continually. When he had still not yet fully relieved himself but had almost done so, he began to imagine that a certain few young women of his neighbourhood had followed him into the scrub and were watching him. While they watched, they jeered at him or rebuked him or commanded him to stop what he was doing.

  In his eighteenth year, when he first noticed in his mind an image of the young woman in school uniform mentioned earlier, the scrub had for long been cleared away from his neighbourhood, and the land was covered over by houses and fences and backyards. One day, soon after the scrub had been cleared, he had supposed that if tracts of scrub had still been growing in all the outlying parts of all the suburbs between his suburb and Dandenong during the year when he had first come to live in his suburb, then he could think of himself and his family as having lived for a short while at the westernmost edge of an outlying district of Gippsland. After the very hot day mentioned in the previous paragraph, he had gone into the scrub once in about every week and had relieved himself in the same way until the hot weather had ended in late March and he was no longer wearing summer clothes and able to feel the scrub prickling his bare skin. From that time onwards, he relieved himself from time to time in his bed. Before the following summer had begun his house had been fenced and much of the scrub cleared.
He relieved himself less often during the following years, and sometimes not for a month or more while he was in love with an image of a face in his mind. But his way of relieving himself was almost always the same. He would have gone alone into scrub or forest in his mind in order to relieve himself but he would have been followed in his mind by young married women. As he grew older, the behaviour of the young married women in the scrub in his mind became more subtly provoking, but the sting of their taunting and teasing always felt in his mind like the prickling on his bare skin of the scrub that had grown in the past almost to the walls of his parents’ house.

  His school uniform was mostly grey, with trimmings of royal blue and gold. Her uniform had white and pale-blue trimmings on a colour that seemed to him at first black but proved to be a dark navy-blue. He had been in love for some weeks with the image of her face in his mind and had looked often at her face of an afternoon when they were travelling in the same compartment of a train in the direction of Dandenong and had satisfied himself that she was aware of his looking at her before he first spoke to her. Her voice when he first heard it seemed to have a faint English accent, and he learned during the many afternoons when they talked to each other in the train that she had been born and had spent her first five years in a south-western county of England before her parents had moved with her and her two older sisters from England to Australia and had settled in a newly built house in an outlying street of Dandenong.