Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

  Style is a very simple matter, it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words… This is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it, and in writing one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit in.

  Something else I listen for when I read aloud… I listen to make sure that the voice I’m hearing is my own voice and not someone else’s voice. I don’t always succeed in this, of course. Sometimes when I read my writing of a few years ago I recognise that I’ve imitated in a few places the voices of others.

  I listen for the sound of my own voice because I remember something the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh once said: ‘This is genius – a man being simply and sincerely himself.’

  And still another thing I hope to hear in my sentences is the note of authority. John Gardner said authority is the sound of a writer who knows what he’s doing. He cited as his favourite example of prose ringing with authority this opening passage from a famous novel.

  Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

  I’ve said I write sentences, but you probably expect me to say what the sentences are about.

  My sentences arise out of images and feelings that haunt me – not always painfully; sometimes quite pleasantly. These images and feelings haunt me until I find the sentences to bring them into this world.

  Note that I didn’t say ‘to bring them to life’. The person who reads my sentences may think that he or she is looking at something newly alive. But the images and feelings behind my words have been alive for a long time beforehand.

  This has been a very simple account of something that begins to make me dizzy if I think about it for too long. The only detail I can add is to say that as I write, the images and feelings haunting me become linked in ways that surprise and amaze me. Often if I write one sentence to put into a form of words a certain image or feeling, I find as soon as I’ve written the sentence that a new throng of images and feelings have gathered to form a pattern where I had not known a pattern existed.

  Writing never explains anything for me – it only shows me how stupendously complicated everything is.

  But why do I write what I write?

  Why do I write sentences? Why does anyone write sentences? What are sentences? What are subjects and predicates, verbs and nouns? What are words themselves?

  I ask myself these questions often. I think about these matters every day in one way or another. For me these questions are as profound as the questions: why do we get ourselves born, why do we fall in love, why do we die?

  If I pretended I could answer any of these questions, I’d be a fool.

  (Meanjin, vol. 45, no. 4, December 1986)

  ‌

  ‌Some Books Are to Be Dropped into Wells, Others into Fish Ponds

  The other day I stood in front of my bookshelves and stared at the spine of Don Quixote. According to my meticulously kept records I read that book in 1970, but when I stood staring at its spine I could remember nothing of the book itself or of the experience of reading it. I could remember no phrase, no sentence; I could not remember one moment from all the hours when I had sat with that bulky book open in front of me.

  After I had waited in vain for some words from the book to come back to me, I kept a lookout for images. I waited to see some flickering scenes in black and white on the invisible screen that hangs about a metre in front of my eyes wherever I go. But not even the ghost of a scene appeared from the book. For a moment I thought I saw a silhouette of a man on horseback, but then I recognised it as a memory of the print of Daumier’s painting of Don Quixote that had hung on the wall in front of where I stood until I had had extra bookshelves built there.

  I gave up waiting for Don Quixote and performed the same test on other books. From a sample of twelve – all of them read before 1976 and never opened since – I found seven that brought nothing to mind. If this was a fair sample, then of all the books that I had read once and had not read again, more than half had been wholly forgotten within a few years. I wondered whether I was entitled to conclude that the forgotten books had been of no use to me. I wondered whether I might have better promoted my health and happiness by going for walks or doing push-ups or taking naps instead of reading those books that were going to fly away so soon from my mind. I wondered whether I might as conveniently have dropped those books down a well as read them. (Yet how could I have known at the time which books I ought to read and which books make a splash with?)

  I could still not believe that so many books had left so little trace behind them. I decided that my memories of them must be buried deep. I decided to poke around in the dark places – the back rooms of my mind. I closed my eyes and said aloud over and over: ‘Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, is one of the greatest works of fiction of any age.’

  While repeating these solemn words I remembered an evening in 1967 when I was a part-time student at the University of Melbourne. A lecturer in English, during a lecture on Tom Jones, read out in class a passage from Don Quixote. No doubt the lecturer was making a very important point, but I have forgotten the point today. All I remember is that the passage quoted from Cervantes was concerned with a person or persons (I think they may have been aboard a ship) being struck in the face by a quantity of wind-borne human vomit.

  This seemed an odd memory to have been connected with a great work of fiction, but it was the only result of my reciting the mantra about the book. If anyone reading this has a detailed knowledge of Don Quixote and has never read in the great book a passage about wind-borne vomit, that person need not trouble to correct me on the point. I am not writing about Don Quixote but about my memory of the books on my shelves.

  And now I remember one more result of my repeating aloud the words in praise of Don Quixote. As I said the words aloud, I became convinced that I had said them on at least one previous occasion – and not to myself, as I happened to be saying the words then, but in company. In short, I became aware that I was a person who sometimes delivered ponderous judgements on books without being able to remember any more than the name of the book, the author’s name, and some judgement borrowed from someone else. This awareness made me embarrassed. I remembered people who had agreed with me when I had uttered my judgements – and people who had disagreed. I might have felt urged to seek out those people and to apologise to them. But what saved me from doing this was a suspicion that some at least of the people who had discussed the great books with me might have remembered no more about the books than I did.

  Within a few days I had learned to accept myself as a man who could remember absolutely nothing about Don Quixote except the name of the author. I even dared to suppose the abyss in my memory might be a sort of distinction. Even the most forgetful among my friends would surely remember one passage at least from Don Quixote, but there I was with my memory a perfect blank. I remembered that Jorge Luis Borges had written a story with the title: ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Even Borges, with his fertile imagination, could imagine nothing stranger than that a man of our time could write the whole of Don Quixote; even Borges could never have supposed that a seemingly literate and civilised man could read and then forget the whole of the immortal work.

  I became interested in the question why I remembered certain books and forgot others. I must emphasise, however, that the books I am writing about are books I have not looked into for at least fifteen years. On my shelves are many books that I read or look into every few years, and some books that I have to pick up and look into whenever I catch sight of them. My memory of these books too is strangely uneven, but for the moment I am writing about the long-forgotten and the long-r
emembered.

  Some books that I have not read for more than thirty years have left me with images that I see nearly every day. The images are by no means comforting. I can never quite believe those people who write as adults about the joys and pleasures of their childhood reading. As a child I was made restless and unhappy by most of the books that I read. Whether the book was meant to have a happy or unhappy ending, I was always distressed by the mere fact that the book had an ending. After reading a book I would go into the backyard and try to build a model of the landscape where the characters in the book had lived, and where they could go on living under my supervision and encouragement. Or I tried to draw maps of their houses or farms or districts, or to write in secret in the backs of old exercise books an endless continuation of the book that I had wanted not to end. Often I included myself among the characters in these prolongations.

  The first book that I remember as affecting me in this way is Man-Shy, by Frank Dalby Davison. I first read Man-Shy when I was eight. I read it again soon afterwards, but I cannot remember having read it since and I could not say when I last looked between the covers of the book. What I am writing today about Man-Shy comes from memory; I am writing about images that have stayed with me for most of my life.

  I remember the red cow. As I remember her now, the red cow stands on a hilltop in Queensland in a year not long before I was born. (My father had told me that the book was set in Queensland in the 1930s.) Probably no week of my life has passed without my seeing for a moment the red cow as she appeared in the little line drawing beneath the last lines of the text of my father’s red-covered Angus and Robertson edition. I have never been to Queensland; I have never ridden a horse or seen a sheep being shorn; yet I have remembered all my life an image of a red cow on a hill in outback Queensland.

  The red cow is dying of thirst. I am not going to check the text after all these years. I will quote what I have always remembered as the last words of the text. ‘… She was about to join the shadowy herd that had gone from the ranges forever.’

  Even while I typed these words just now, I felt the same painful uncertainty that I used to feel as a child. Was the red cow actual or imaginary? If the cow was actual I could at least be sure that her suffering was over. But in that case I could no longer hope that the cow I had read about would miraculously survive.

  If the cow was imagined, then I wanted to ask the author what would happen to her in his imagination. Would she finally die like an actual cow? Or had the author found a way of thinking of her as alive in spite of everything?

  The red cow and her calf were dying because their last waterhole had been fenced around. They were the last survivors in the wild of a herd that had been driven in from the bush to a cattle station. The owners of the station had fenced the waterholes, and the red cow and her calf were about to die from thirst.

  By the age of eight I had been thoroughly taught in the eschatology of the Catholic Church. Yet nothing I had been taught could help me decide what would happen to the red cow if she died – or what had happened to the cow if she had already died. I knew without asking that animals lacked souls. For an animal there was no heaven or hell, only the earth. But I could not bear to think of the red cow as living on earth and then dying forever. I clung to the words on the last page… the red cow was going to join the shadowy herd.

  I laid out in my backyard a vast savannah for that shadowy herd. I studded the savannah with waterholes. I reduced myself in size like Dollman in the comic strip. (‘By a supreme effort of the will he compresses the molecules of his body and becomes… Dollman!’) I led my shadowy herd to the waterholes and watched them drink. I stood beside the red cow while she drank unafraid from the pool at my feet.

  Sometimes I left my shadowy herd in a valley while I climbed a hill to look around me. If I saw far away towards the east the cleared land and the ocean, I could still turn towards the west and see my savannah reaching far inland.

  If the red cow had not been dying of thirst, she would have seen from the hill where she stood at the end of the book the edge of the blue Pacific Ocean. In that scene the blue smudge of the ocean has no other purpose than to mark the far edge of the land where the red cow has been driven to her death. For most of my life the ocean has been no more to me than a boundary marker.

  Today while I think of the ocean to the east of the red cow, I am reminded of Moby Dick.

  I have not looked between the covers of Moby Dick for nineteen years but I remember rather more of the book than I remember of Don Quixote. This need not tell against Don Quixote, which I read only for pleasure whereas Moby Dick was one of my set texts for English at university – in the same year, as it happens, when I heard about the flying vomit in Cervantes. In 1967 I read the whole of Moby Dick twice through with care and some chapters more than twice.

  Yet even so, Moby Dick has lasted well in my mind by comparison with other set texts from the same years. I can recall without effort today two sentences (one of them is the first sentence, of course), a phrase of three words, and some of the images that occurred to me while I read the text twenty years ago. I can recall also the conviction that I had while I read. I was convinced that the narrator of Moby Dick was the wisest and most engaging narrator I had met in fiction.

  The image that comes to me from Moby Dick today is of a toy-like ship on a smooth, green expanse of water. The ship is not a whaling vessel but the sixteenth-century Portuguese caravel that I copied in grade seven into my history notebook from a line drawing in a textbook. On the tiny deck of the toy boat two men stand talking. A few vague figures of other men hang like monkeys in the rigging, but they are there only for decoration – none of them actually does anything. The reason for this is that all my life I have skipped over the technical terms and descriptions in all the books I have read about ships and boats; I have never understood the difference between a bosun and a capstan.

  I have only just noticed that the deck of the toy ship is dotted with pots of the same shape and proportions as the pots in which cartoon cannibals cook cartoon missionaries and pith-helmeted explorers. And now, when I look again at the smooth, green water around the toy boat, I am looking not at the Pacific Ocean but at the surface of what might be a kiddies’ wading pool. I can see from New Zealand to South America in one glance.

  The pots are simmering on the deck because I remember having read in Moby Dick that the oil from the catch of the whales was boiled and purified on deck when the sea was especially calm and the weather fine. I could hardly have read that the crew kept a supply of cartoon cooking pots for this purpose, and now that I have begun this sentence I remember that the fires for heating the boiling-vessels burned in ovens made of brick. The bricks for the ovens, I have just remembered, were laid with mortar on the deck and were afterwards broken apart when they had served their purpose.

  Why have I remembered just now the brick ovens on the toy ship, when for the past twenty years I thought of them as cartoon cooking pots?

  In January 1987 I was halfway through writing what will be my fifth book of fiction. At the time I was not writing well. When I recognise that I am not writing well, I suppose I am staring too hard at what lies in front of my face. I try to stop staring and to notice what lies at the edges of my view. In January 1987 I had been staring for too long at soil. I was writing about a character who was staring at the soil of his native district in order to understand why he always felt drawn to that district. But then I sat back a little and noticed what was at the edge of my view. I noticed a fish pond.

  The pond was not one of those bean-shaped ornamental pools overhung with ferns and pampas grass. It was a plain-looking square of bricks rising abruptly from the back lawn behind a house where I had lived for two years as a boy. As soon as I had noticed this pond at the edge of my view I knew I had found the image that would keep me writing until my book was finished. I felt as though I only had to stare at the brick walls rising out of the grass, or at the little grub-shaped bits of dried mort
ar still sticking between the bricks, or at the dark-green water with the raft of floating water plants whose leaves were like shamrocks – I only had to stare at these things and all the rest of the story I had been trying for three years to tell would appear to me.

  It was a strange experience to discover, halfway through writing what I thought was a story about X, that I had really been writing the story of Y. I had thought for three years that I was writing a book whose central image was a patch of soil and grass, but one day in January 1987 I learned that the central image of my book was a fish pond.

  It was also a strange experience just now to discover that I remembered after twenty years the brick ovens on the deck, and to see the ovens as having the shape and size of the fish pond that yielded half a book of fiction six months ago. The American poet Robert Bly once wrote that he learned to be a poet when he learned to trust his obsessions. I trusted my image of the fish pond last January and found in the image of the pond what I needed for finishing my story. I thought when I had finished the story that I had finished with the pond. I had even written into the last part of the story a description of the pond as empty of water and of the red fish that had lived in the pond as drowning in air. But now an image of the same fish pond has appeared on the deck of the Pequod – or, rather, many images of fish ponds have appeared on deck; and all the fish ponds are bubbling like stew pots.

  Before I look into the bubbling ponds, I ask myself how I could have lived for more than thirty years without realising how full of meaning my fish pond was. I had never forgotten the pond; I would have thought of my own pond whenever I saw a pond in someone’s lawn. But I had not understood how much of meaning was contained in the pond. I was given a hint sometimes, but I failed to follow it up. During most of the thirty-five years after I had left the house with the fish pond on the back lawn, I would become oddly alert whenever I noticed in a front garden a certain small variety of begonia with glossy red and green leaves. I always supposed the leaves themselves would one day remind me of something important; but I was staring at what was in front of me when I should have been watching out for things at the edge of my vision. In the house where I had lived in 1950 and 1951, a row of begonias had grown along the side fence. If I had stood and stared at those begonias I would have seen the pond from the corner of my eye.