Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

  The drawler had said to three other men, while the four were walking among the complex arrangement of vistas of green fairways that I would later see in my mind from 1961 onwards whenever I would read in one or another volume of À la recherche du temps perdu the name of one or another wood or park in Paris, ‘I’ve never laughed so much in my whole life. It was absolutely the funniest show I’ve ever seen!’

  On the afternoon nearly forty years ago when I heard the grey-haired drawler drawl those words, I readily despised him because I was disappointed to learn that a man who had inherited a fortune and who might have taken his pleasure from the ownership of a vast library or a stable of racehorses could boast of having sniggered at what my school-friends and I would have called dirty jokes.

  Six or seven years later, when I read for the first time about Swann, the descendant of stockbrokers, and his passion for Odette de Crecy, I saw that the Swann in my mind had the grey hair and wore the plus-four trousers of the great-grandson of the brewer and peddler of patent medicines.

  The Swann in my mind was not usually one of the despised drawlers. Sometimes at the Metropolitan Golf Club, but more often when I looked at the owners of racehorses in the mounting-yard of one or another racecourse, I saw a sort of drawler that I admired. This drawler might have lived for some time during each year behind a walled garden in Melbourne, but at other times he lived surrounded by the land that had been since the years before the discovery of gold in Victoria the source of his family’s wealth and standing – he lived on his sheep or cattle property.

  In my seventh book of fiction, O, Dem Golden Slippers, which I expect to be published during 1993, I will explain something of what has happened in the mind of a person such as myself whenever he has happened to see in the mounting yard of a racecourse in any of the towns or cities of Victoria an owner of a racehorse who is also the owner of a sheep or cattle property far from that town or city. Here I have time only to explain first that for most of my life I have seen most of the sheep or cattle properties in my mind as lying in the district of Victoria in my mind that is sometimes called the Western Plains. When I look towards that district in my mind while I write these words, I look towards the north-west of my mind. However, when I used to stand on the Warrnambool racecourse during my summer holidays in the 1950s, which is to say, when I stood in those days at a point nearly three hundred kilometres south-west of where I sit at this moment, I still saw often in the north-west of my mind sheep or cattle properties far from where I stood, and doubly far from where I sit today writing these words.

  Today, 26 July 1989, I looked at a map of the southern part of Africa. I wanted to verify that the districts where the chief character in my father’s favourite book of fiction arrived with his flocks and herds at what might be called his sheep or cattle property would have been in fact north-west of the settled districts. After having looked at the map, I now believe that the owner of the flocks and herds was more likely to have travelled north-east. That being so, when my father said that the man in southern Africa had travelled north-west in order to discover the site of his sheep or cattle property, my father perhaps had in mind that the whole of Africa was north-west of the suburb of Oakleigh South, where my father and I lived at the time when he told me about his favourite book of fiction, so that anyone travelling in any direction in Africa was travelling towards a place north-west of my father and myself, and any character in a book of fiction who was described as having travelled in any direction in Africa would have seemed to my father to have travelled towards a place in the north-west of my father’s mind. Or, my father, who was born and who lived for much of his life in the south-east of Australia, may have seen all desirable places in his mind as lying in the north-west of his mind.

  Before I mentioned just now the map of the southern part of Africa, I was about to mention the second of two things connected with my seeing on racecourses the owners of distant sheep or cattle properties. I was about to mention the first of those owners that I can recall having seen. The owner and his horse and the trainer of his horse had come to the summer meeting at Warrnambool, in one of the early years of the 1950s, from the district around Apsley. At that time I had seen one photograph of the district around Apsley: a coloured photograph on the cover of the Leader, which was once the chief rival of the Weekly Times for the readership of persons in rural Victoria. The photograph showed grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance. Something in the colours of the photograph had caused me to remember it afterwards as having been taken during the late afternoon.

  The only map that I owned in the 1950s was a road map of Victoria. When I looked at that map, I saw that Apsley was the furthest west of any town in the Western District of Victoria. Past Apsley was only a pale no-man’s-land – the first few miles of South Australia – and then the end of the map.

  The man from the district around Apsley stood out among the owners in the mounting-yard. He wore a pale-grey suit and a pale-grey hat with green and blue feathers in the band. Under the rear brim of his hat, his silvery hair was bunched in a style very different from the cropped style of the men around him. As soon as I had seen the man from the district around Apsley, I had heard him in my mind speaking in a world-weary drawl but I was far from despising him.

  I have always become alert whenever I have read in a book of fiction a reference to a character’s country estates. The ownership of a country estate has always seemed to me to add a further layer to a person: to suggest, as it were, far-reaching vistas within the person. ‘You see me here, among these walls of pale stone topped by pink blossoms,’ I hear the person saying, ‘and you think of the places in my mind as being only the streets of this suburb – or this faubourg. You have not seen yet, at a further place in my mind, the leafy avenue leading to the circular driveway surrounding the vast lawn; the mansion whose upper windows overlook grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance, or a stream that is marked on certain mornings and evenings by strands of mist.’

  I read in Swann’s Way during January 1961 that Swann was the owner of a park and a country house along one of the two ways where the narrator and his parents went walking on Sundays. According to my memory, I learned at first that Swann’s park was bounded on one side at least by a white fence behind which grew numerous lilacs of both the white-flowering and the mauve-flowering varieties. Before I had read about that park and those lilacs, I had seen Swann in my mind as the drawler in plus-four trousers that I described earlier. After I had read about the white fence and the white and lilac-coloured flowers, I saw in my mind a different Swann.

  As anyone who has read my first book of fiction, Tamarisk Row, will know, the chief character of that book builds his first racecourse and first sees in his mind the district of Tamarisk Row while he kneels in the dirt under a lilac tree. As anyone will know who has read the piece ‘First Love’ in my sixth book of fiction, Velvet Waters, the chief character of ‘First Love’ decides, after many years of speculating about the matter, that his racing colours are lilac and brown. After I had first read about the park and the lilacs at Combray, I remembered having read earlier in Swann’s Way that Swann was a good friend of the Prince of Wales and a member of the Jockey Club. After I had remembered this, I saw Swann in my mind as having the suit and the hat and the bunched silver hair beneath the brim of his hat of the man from Apsley, far to the north-west of Warrnambool. I decided that Swann’s racing colours would have been a combination of white and lilac. In 1961 when I decided this, the only set of white and lilac colours that I had seen had been carried by a horse named Parentive, owned and trained by a Mr A.C. Gartner. I noticed today what I believe I had not previously noticed: although the one occasion when I saw the horse Parentive race was a Saturday at Caulfield racecourse at some time during the late 1950s, Mr Gartner and his horse came from Hamilton, which of course, is north-west from where I sit now and on the way to Apsley.

  One detail of my image of Monsieur Swann, the owner of racehorses, changed a
few months later. In July 1961, I became the owner of a small book illustrated with reproductions of some of the works of the French artist Raoul Dufy. After I had seen the gentlemen in the mounting-yards of the racecourses in those illustrations, I saw above the bunched silvery hair of Monsieur Swann in my mind not a grey hat with blue and green feathers but a black top hat.

  I first read the first of the twelve volumes of the 1969 Chatto and Windus edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, as I wrote earlier, in the late summer and the autumn of 1973, when I was thirty-four years of age. On a hot morning while I was still reading the first volume, I was lying with the book beside me on a patch of grass in my backyard in a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne. While my eyes were closed for a moment against the glare of the sun, I heard the buzzing of a large fly in the grass near my ear.

  Somewhere in À la recherche du temps perdu, I seem to remember, is a short passage about the buzzing of flies on warm mornings, but even if that passage is in the part of the text that I had read in 1961, I did not recall my having previously read about the buzzing of flies in Marcel Proust’s texts when the large fly buzzed in the grass near my ear in the late summer of 1973. What I recalled at that moment was one of those parcels of a few moments of seemingly lost time that the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu warns us never deliberately to go in search of. The parcel came to me, of course, not as a quantity of something called time, whatever that may be, but as a knot of feelings and sensations that I had long before experienced and had not since recalled.

  The sensations that had been suddenly restored to me were those that I had experienced as a boy of fifteen years walking alone in the spacious garden of the house belonging to the widowed mother of my father in the city of Warrnambool in the south-west of Victoria on a Saturday morning of my summer holidays. The feelings that had been suddenly restored to me were feelings of expectancy and joy. On the Saturday morning in January 1954, I had heard the buzzing of a large fly while I had been looking at a bush of tiger lilies in bloom.

  As I write this on 28 July 1989, I notice for the first time that the colour of the tiger lilies in my mind resembles the colour of the cover of the biography of Marcel Proust by André Maurois that I quoted from in my fifth book of fiction, Inland. The passage that I quoted from in that book includes the phrase invisible yet enduring lilacs, and I have just now understood that that phrase ought to be the title of this piece of writing… Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs.

  My book Inland includes a passage about tiger-lilies that I wrote while I saw in my mind the blooms on the bush of tiger lilies that I was looking at when I heard the large fly buzzing in January 1954.

  I had felt expectancy and joy on the Saturday morning in January 1954 because I was going to go later on that day to the so-called summer meeting at Warrnambool racecourse. Although I was already in love with horse-racing, I was still a schoolboy and seldom had the money or the time for going to race meetings. On that Saturday morning, I had never previously been to a race meeting at Warrnambool. The buzzing of the fly was connected in my mind with the heat of the afternoon to come and with the dust and the dung in the saddling paddock. I had felt a particular expectancy and joy on that morning while I had pronounced to myself the name tiger lily and while I had stared at the colours of the blooms on the bush. The names of the racehorses of the Western District of Victoria and the racing colours of their owners were mostly unknown to me in 1954. On that Saturday morning, I was trying to see in my mind the colours, unfamiliar and striking, carried by some horse that had been brought to Warrnambool from a hundred miles away in the north-west, and I was trying to hear in my mind the name of that horse.

  During the morning in the late summer of 1973 when I heard the buzzing of the large fly soon after I had begun to read the first of the twelve volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, the feelings that came back to me from the Saturday morning nineteen years before only added to the feelings of expectancy and joy that I had already felt as I had prepared to read the twelve volumes. On that morning in my backyard in 1973, I had been aware for twelve years that one of the important place-names in À la recherche du temps perdu had the power to bring to my mind details of a place such as I had wanted to see in my mind during most of my life. That place was a country estate in my mind. The owner of the estate spent his mornings in his library, where the windows overlooked grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance, and his afternoons exercising his racehorses. Once each week, he travelled a hundred miles and more with one of his horses and with his distinctive silk racing colours south-east to a race meeting.

  At some time during 1949, several years before I had attended any race-meeting or had heard the name of Marcel Proust, my father told me that he had carved his name at two places in the sandstone that underlies the district of Allansford where he was born and where his remains have lain buried since 1960. The first of the two places was a pinnacle of rock standing high out of the water in the bay known as Childers Cove. My father told me in 1949 that he had once swum through the fifty yards of turbulent water between the shore and Steeple Rock with a tomahawk tied to his body and had carved his name and the date on the side of Steeple Rock that faced the Southern Ocean. The second of the two places was the wall of a quarry on a hill overlooking the bays of the Southern Ocean known as Stanhopes’ Bay, Sandy Bay, and Murnane’s Bay, just south-east of Childers Cove.

  During the first twenty-five years after my father had died, I thought about neither of the two places where he had once carved his name. Then, in 1985, twenty-five years after my father had died, and while I was writing a piece of fiction about a man who had read a story about a man who thought often about the bedrock far beneath his feet, an image of a stone quarry came into my mind and I wrote that the father of the narrator of the story had carved his name on the wall of a quarry, and I gave the title ‘Stone Quarry’ to my piece of fiction, which until then had lacked a title.

  At some time during the spring of 1985 and while I was still writing ‘Stone Quarry’, I received through the post a page of the Warrnambool Standard illustrated by two reproductions of photographs. The first of the two photographs was of Childers Cove as it had appeared for as long as European persons had looked at it, with Steeple Rock standing out of the water fifty metres from shore and the Southern Ocean in the background. The second photograph showed Childers Cove as it has appeared since the day or the night in 1985 when waves of the Southern Ocean caused Steeple Rock to topple and the surfaces of sandstone where my father had carved his name to sink beneath the water.

  In the autumn of 1989, while I was making notes for this piece of writing but before I had thought of mentioning my father in the writing, a man who was about to travel with a camera from Melbourne to the district of Allansford offered to bring back to me photographs of any places that I might wish to see in photographs.

  I gave the man directions for finding the quarry on the hill overlooking the Southern Ocean and asked him to look on the walls of the quarry for the inscription that my father had told me forty years before that he had carved.

  Two days ago, on 28 July 1989, while I was writing the earlier passage that has to do with the buzzing of a fly near a bush of tiger lilies at Warrnambool in 1954, I found among the mail that had just arrived at my house a coloured photograph of an area of sandstone in which four letters and four numerals are visible. The four numerals 1-9-2-1 allow me to believe that my father stood in front of the area of sandstone in the year 1921, when he was aged seventeen years and when Marcel Proust was aged fifty years, as I am today, and had one year of his life remaining. The four letters allow me to believe that my father in 1921 carved in the sandstone the first letter of the first of his given names followed by all the letters of his surname but that rainwater running down the wall of the quarry caused part of the sandstone to break off and to fall away at some time during the sixty-eight years between 1921 and 1989, leaving only the letter R for Reginald followed by the first three letter
s of my father’s and my surname.

  I have a number of photographs of myself standing in one or another garden and in front of one or another wall, but the earliest of these photographs shows me standing, in the year 1940, on a patch of grass in front of a wall of sandstone that is part of a house on its sunlit side. The wall that I mentioned earlier – the wall that appears as an image in my mind together with the image of a small boy and the image of a bed of tall flowers whenever I try to imagine myself first reading the first pages of À la recherche du temps perdu – is not the same wall that appears in bright sunlight in the photograph of myself in 1940. The wall in my mind is a wall of the same house that I stood beside on a day of sunshine in 1940, but the wall in my mind is a wall on the shaded side of the house. (I have already explained that the image of the boy in my mind is an image of a boy who was first photographed thirty years before the day of sunshine in 1940.)

  The house with the walls of sandstone was built by my father’s father less than one kilometre from where the Southern Ocean forms the bay known as Sandy Bay, which is next to the bays known as Murnane’s Bay and Childers Cove on the south-west coast of Victoria. All the walls of the house were quarried from the place where the surname of the boy who appears in my mind as listening and staring whenever I remember myself first reading about Combray now appears as no more than the letters MUR… the root in the Latin language, the language of my father’s religion, of the word for wall.

  At the summer race meeting at Warrnambool racecourse in January 1960, which was the last summer meeting before the death of my father and the second-last summer meeting before my first reading the first part of À la recherche du temps perdu, I read in my racebook the name of a racehorse from far to the north-west of Warrnambool. The name was a place-name consisting of two words. The first of the two was a word that I had never previously read but a word that I supposed was from the French language. The second word was the word Bay. The colours to be worn by the rider of the horse were brown and white stripes.