Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

  An interesting story convinces me from the first few sentences that the author has written the story in order to discover the meaning of some part of his or her experience. (If any person concludes from this that I prefer to read stories written in the first person or stories that are obviously autobiographical, then that person has not begun to understand what I am saying here.) A boring story usually puts me in mind of an author who is confused or vain or anxious to impress or who thinks that Meanjin stories have to be about the things that some journalists call issues or have to have characters who talk about ideas.

  The most common fault that I found during 1988 in stories by previously published writers was shoddy sentences – sentences that seemed to have been dashed down and never read aloud, let alone revised, sentences seemingly unconnected with human thoughts or feelings. Stories by previously unpublished writers most commonly made me suspect that the writers were nervous – that they had not yet learnt the value of their own memories and dreams and thoughts and feelings as material for fiction.

  The two best means that I’ve found for helping students of fiction-writing are to comment on their stories sentence by sentence and to discuss with them some of the practical accounts that writers of fiction have written about their craft. Of the many of these, I quote to students most often a single sentence by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Often during 1988 when I was trying to explain to an author that his or her story was not interesting enough for Meanjin, but trying at the same time to encourage the author to write a better story, I found myself quoting the same sentence to the rejected author.

  The sentence goes: ‘Before I write a story, I must have a conviction that it is a story that only I can write.’

  (Meanjin, vol. 48, no. 1, 1989)

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  ‌Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

  I first read part of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated into English by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, in January 1961, when I was aged a few weeks less than twenty-two years. What I read at that time was a single paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way. I suspect today that I did not know in 1961 that the volume I was reading was part of a much larger book.

  As I write these words in June 1989, I cannot cite the publication details of the paperback volume of Swann’s Way. I have not seen the volume for at least six years, although it lies only a few metres above my head, in the space between the ceiling and the tiled roof of my house, where I store in black plastic bags the unwanted books of the household.

  I first read the whole of À la recherche du temps perdu, in the Scott Moncrieff translation, during the months from February to May in 1973, when I was thirty-four years old. What I read at that time was the twelve-volume hardcover edition published by Chatto and Windus in 1969. As I write these words, the twelve volumes of that edition rest on one of the bookshelves of my house.

  I read a second time the same twelve-volume edition during the months from October to December 1982, when I was forty-three years old. Since December 1982, I have not read any volume by Marcel Proust.

  Although I cannot remember the publication details of the volume of Swann’s Way that I read in 1961, I seem to remember from the colours of the cover a peculiar brown with a hint of underlying gold.

  Somewhere in the novel, the narrator writes that a book is a jar of precious essences recalling the hour when we first handled its cover. I had better explain that a jar of essences, precious or otherwise, would be of small interest to me. I happen to have been born without a sense of smell. That sense which is said by many persons to be the most strongly linked to memory is a sense that I have never been able to use. However, I do have a rudimentary sense of taste, and when I see in my mind today the cover of the paperback of Swann’s Way that I read in 1961, I taste in my mind tinned sardines, the product of Portugal.

  In January 1961, I lived alone in a rented room in Wheatland Road, Malvern. The room had a gas ring and a sink but no refrigerator. Whenever I shopped, I looked for foods that were sold in tins, needed no preparation, and could be stored at room temperature. When I began to read the first pages of Proust’s fiction, I had just opened the first tin of sardines that I had bought – a product of Portugal – and had emptied the contents over two slices of dry bread. Being hungry and anxious not to waste anything that had cost me money, I ate all of this meal while I read from the book propped open in front of me.

  For an hour after I had eaten my meal, I felt a growing but still bearable discomfort. But as I read on, my stomach became more and more offended by what I had forced into it. At about the time when I was reading of how the narrator had tasted a mouthful of cake mixed with tea and had been overcome by an exquisite sensation, the taste of the dry bread mixed with the sardine oil was so strong in my mouth that I was overcome by nausea.

  During the twenty or so years from 1961 until my paperback Swann’s Way was enclosed in black plastic and stored above my ceiling, I would feel in my mind at least a mild flatulence whenever I handled the book, and I would see again in my mind, whenever I noticed the hint of gold in the brown, the light from the electric globe above me glinting in the film of oil left behind after I had rubbed my crusts around my dinner plate in my rented room in Malvern on a summer evening in 1961.

  While I was writing the previous sentence, I saw in my mind an image of a bed of tall flowers near a stone wall which is the wall of a house on its shaded side.

  I would like to be sure that the image of the tall flowers and the stone wall first appeared in my mind while I was reading Swann’s Way in 1961, but I can be sure of no more than that I see those flowers and that wall in my mind whenever I try to remember myself first reading the prose fiction of Marcel Proust. I am not writing today about a book or even about my reading of a book. I am writing about images that appear in my mind whenever I try to remember my having read that book.

  The image of the flowers is an image of the blooms of the Russell lupins that I saw in an illustration on a packet of seeds in 1948, when I was nine years old. I had asked my mother to buy the seeds because I wanted to make a flower-bed among the patches of dust and gravel and the clumps of spear grass around the rented weatherboard house at 244 Neale Street, Bendigo, which I used to see in my mind continually during the years from 1966 to 1971, while I was writing about the house at 42 Leslie Street, Bassett, in my book of fiction Tamarisk Row.

  I planted the seeds in the spring of 1948. I watered the bed and tended the green plants that grew from the seeds. However, the spring of 1948 was the season when my father decided suddenly to move from Bendigo and when I was taken across the Great Divide and the Western Plains to a rented weatherboard cottage near the Southern Ocean in the district of Allansford before I could compare whatever flowers might have appeared on my plants with the coloured illustration on the packet of seeds.

  While I was writing the previous paragraph, a further detail appeared in the image of the garden beside the wall in my mind. I now see in the garden in my mind an image of a small boy with dark hair. The boy is staring and listening. I understand today that the image of the boy would first have appeared in my mind at some time during the five months before January 1961 and soon after I had looked for the first time at a photograph taken in the year 1910 in the grounds of a State school near the Southern Ocean in the district of Allansford. The district of Allansford is the district where my father was born and where my father’s parents lived for forty years until the death of my father’s father in 1949 and where I spent my holidays as a child.

  The photograph is of the pupils of the school assembled in rows beside a garden bed where the taller plants might be delphiniums or even Russell lupins. Among the smallest children in the front row, a dark-haired boy aged six years stares towards the camera and turns his head slightly as though afraid of missing some word or some signal from his elders and his betters. The staring and listening boy of 1910 became in time the man who became my father twenty-nine years after the photograph had been taken and who died
in August 1960, two weeks before I looked for the first time at the photograph, which my father’s mother had kept for fifty years in her collection of photographs, and five months before I read for the first time the volume Swann’s Way in the paperback edition with the brownish cover.

  During his lifetime my father read a number of books, but even if my father had been alive in January 1961, I would not have talked to him about Swann’s Way. Whenever my father and I had talked about books during the last five years of his life, we had quarrelled. If my father had been alive in January 1961 and if he had seen me reading Swann’s Way, he would have asked me first what sort of man the author was.

  Whenever my father had asked me such a question in the five years before he died in 1960, I had answered him in the way that I thought would be most likely to annoy him. In January 1961, when I was reading Swann’s Way for the first time, I knew hardly anything about the author. Since 1961, however, I have read two biographies of Marcel Proust, one by André Maurois and one by George D. Painter. Today, Monday 3 July 1989, I am able to compose the answer that would have been most likely to annoy my father if he had asked me his question in January 1961.

  My father’s question: What sort of man was the author of that book? My answer: The author of this book was an effeminate, hypochondriac Frenchman who mixed mostly with the upper classes, who spent most of his life indoors, and who was never obliged to work for his living.

  My father is now annoyed, but he has a second question: What do I hope to gain from reading a book by such a man?

  In order to answer this question truthfully, I would have to speak to my father about the thing that has always mattered most to me. I would never have spoken about this thing to my father during his lifetime, partly because I did not understand at that time what the thing is that has always mattered most to me and partly because I preferred not to speak to my father about things that mattered to me. However, I am going to answer my father truthfully today.

  I believe today, Monday 3 July 1989, that the thing that has always mattered most to me is a place. Occasionally during my life I may have seemed to believe that I might arrive at this place by travelling to one or another district of the country in which I was born or even to some other country, but for most of my life I have supposed that the place that matters most to me is a place in my mind and that I ought to think not of myself arriving in the future at the place but of myself in the future seeing the place more clearly than I can see any other image in my mind and seeing also that all the other images that matter to me are arranged around that image of a place like an arrangement of townships on a map.

  My father might be disappointed to learn that the place that matters most to me is a district of my mind rather than a district of the country where he and I were born, but he might be pleased to learn that I have often supposed that the place in my mind is grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance.

  From the time when I first began as a child to read books of fiction, I looked forward to seeing places in my mind as a result of my reading. On a hot afternoon in January 1961, I read in Swann’s Way a certain place-name. I remember today, Tuesday 4 July 1989, my feeling when I read that place-name more than twenty-eight years ago, something of the joy that the narrator of Swann’s Way describes himself as having felt whenever he discovered part of the truth underlying the surface of his life. I will come back to that place-name later and by a different route.

  If my father could tell me what mattered most to him during his lifetime, he would probably tell me about two dreams that he dreamed often during his lifetime. The first was a dream of himself owning a sheep or cattle property; the second was a dream of his winning regularly large sums of money from bookmakers at race meetings. My father might even tell me about a single dream that arose out of the other two dreams. This was a dream of his setting out one morning from his sheep or cattle property with his own racehorse and with a trusted friend and of his travelling a hundred miles and more to a racecourse on the edge of an unfamiliar town and there backing his horse with large sums of money and soon afterwards watching his horse win the race that he had been backed to win.

  If I could ask my father whether the dreams that mattered to him were connected with any images that appeared in his mind as a result of his reading books of fiction, my father might remind me that he had once told me that his favourite book of fiction was a book by a South African writer, Stuart Cloete, about a farmer and his sons who drove their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep out of the settled districts of southern Africa and north-west into what seemed to them endless unclaimed grazing lands.

  One of my feelings while I read certain pages of Swann’s Way in January 1961, was a feeling that my father would have agreed with. I resented the characters’ having so much leisure for talking about such things as painting and the architecture of churches.

  Although January 1961 was part of my summer holidays, I was already preparing to teach a class of forty-eight primary-school children as from February and to study two subjects at university during my evenings. The characters in Swann’s Way mostly seemed to lead idle lives or even to enjoy the earnings of inherited wealth. I would have liked to frogmarch the idle characters out of their salons and to confine them each to a room with only a sink and a gas ring and a few pieces of cheap furniture. I would then have enjoyed hearing the idlers calling in vain for their servants.

  I heard myself jeering at the idlers. What? Not talking about the Dutch Masters, or about little churches in Normandy with something of the Persian about them?

  Sometimes while I read the early pages of Swann’s Way in 1961, and when I still thought the book was partly a fictional memoir, I took a strong dislike to the pampered boy who had been the narrator as a child. I saw myself dragging him out of the arms of his mother and away from his aunts and his grandmother and then thrusting him into the backyard of the tumbledown farm-workers’ cottage where my family lived after we had left Bendigo, putting an axe into his hand, pointing out to him one of the heaps of timber that I had split into kindling wood for the kitchen stove, and then hearing the namby-pamby bleating for his mama.

  In 1961, whenever I heard in my mind the adult characters of Swann’s Way talking about art or literature or architecture I heard them talking in the language used by the gentlemen and lady members of the Metropolitan Golf Club in North Road, Oakleigh, where I had worked as a caddy and an assistant barman from 1954 to 1956.

  In the 1950s, there were still people in Melbourne who seemed to want you to believe that they had been born or educated in England or that they had visited England often or that they thought and behaved as English people did. These people in Melbourne spoke with what I would call a world-weary drawl. I heard that drawl by day from men in plus-four trousers while I trudged behind them down fairways on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. In the evenings of those days, I heard the same drawl in the bar of the golf club where the same men, now dressed in slacks and blazers, drank Scotch whisky or gin-and-tonic.

  One day soon after I had first begun working at the Metropolitan Golf Club, I looked into a telephone directory for the addresses of some of the most outrageous drawlers. I found not only that most of them lived in the suburb of Toorak, but that most of this majority lived in the same neighbourhood, which consisted of St Georges Road, Lansell Road, and a few adjoining streets.

  Six years after I learned this, and only a few months before I first read Swann’s Way, I travelled a little out of my way one afternoon between the city and Malvern. On that fine spring afternoon, I looked from a window of a tram down each of St Georges Road and Lansell Road, Toorak. I got an impression of tall, pale-coloured houses surrounded by walled gardens in which the trees were just coming into flower.

  While I read Swann’s Way in 1961, any reference to Paris caused me to see in my mind the pale-coloured walls and mansions of St Georges Road and Lansell Road. When I first read the word faubourg, which I had never previously read but the meaning of w
hich I guessed, I saw the upper half of a prunus tree appearing from behind a tall wall of cream-coloured stone. The first syllable of the word faubourg was linked with the abundant frothiness of the pink flowers on the tree, while the second syllable suggested the solid, forbidding wall. If I read a reference to some public garden or some woods in Paris, I saw in my mind the landscape that I connected with the world-weary drawlers of Melbourne: the view through the plate-glass windows of the dining room and bar in the clubhouse of the Metropolitan Golf Club – the view of the undulating, velvety eighteenth green and the close-mown fairway of cushiony couch grass reaching back between stands of gum trees and wattle trees to the point where the trees almost converged behind the eighteenth tee, leaving a gap past which the hazy seventeenth fairway formed the further part of the twofold vista.

  My father despised the drawlers of Melbourne, and if ever he had read about such a character as Monsieur Swann, my father would have despised him also as a drawler. I found myself, at the Metropolitan Golf Club in the 1950s, wanting to distinguish between the drawlers that I could readily despise and a sort of drawler that I was ready to respect, if only I could have learned certain things about him.

  The drawlers that I could readily despise were such as the grey-haired man that I heard one day drawling his opinion of an American film or play that he had seen recently. The man lived in one of the two roads that I named earlier and was wealthy as a result of events that had happened before his birth in places far from the two roads. The chief of these events were the man’s great-grandfather’s having brewed and then peddled on the goldfields of Victoria in the 1860s an impressively named but probably ineffective patent medicine.

  The American film or play that the drawler had seen was named The Moon Is Blue. I had learned previously from newspapers that some people in Melbourne had wanted The Moon Is Blue to be banned, as many films and plays and books were banned in Melbourne in the 1950s. The people had wanted it banned because it was said to contain jokes with double meanings.