I have not read widely during my lifetime. You might be shocked if I were to name for you some of the so-called great works of literature that I have never read. I have tended to read several times those books that appealed to me rather than to read widely.
At my age, I need not ask myself which books I would take to a desert island. All I need do is to ask myself which books I would like to read yet again during the years left to me. I list them in alphabetical order according to authors’ names: the various collections of short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges; Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë; several collections of short fiction by Italo Calvino, together with The Castle of Crossed Destinies by the same author; Independent People and World Light, by Halldor Laxness; Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust.
I offer two supplementary lists. The first is for Australian literature: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by Henry Handel Richardson; the Langton novels, by Martin Boyd.
The second supplementary list is for Hungarian literature; Puszták Népe and Konok Kikelet, both by Gyula Illyés.
I encourage you to think of each of my seven published books as a report of some or another part of the contents of what I call my mind. And yet it seems to me, at the age of sixty-two, that the half-million words and more of my published books together reveal not a great deal about the interests and concerns of the person I believe myself to be.
About ten years ago, while I was trying to write what would have become a huge book of fiction with the title O, Dem Golden Slippers, I found myself unwilling to go on with my writing. I have still not fully understood what it was that stopped me from going on with that book and caused me to write little fiction for the next few years. I will try, however, to explain what I can explain.
My drawing back from O, Dem Golden Slippers had something to do with my being a husband and a father of adult children. If I had been, as Marcel Proust was, neither a husband nor a father, or if I had been, as D.H. Lawrence was, a husband but not a father, I might not have drawn back. For thirty years past, I had written fiction without caring how many readers might be so careless or so foolish as to suppose that the narrator or the chief character of any piece of my fiction closely resembled the breathing author; but in 1991, in the fifty-third year of my life, I drew back. I drew back partly because what I was about to write might have seemed to certain readers to have revealed more than was seemly for a man of my years, a husband and a father, to have revealed. But I drew back for another reason: quite a different reason. In writing certain passages of O, Dem Golden Slippers, I had discovered certain images and certain connections between images such as seemed to reveal to me that my thirty years of writing fiction had been nothing less than a search for just that sort of discovery. I have tried to describe this discovery to several persons by writing that I seemed to have crossed, at last, the country of fiction and to have discovered on its farther side a country no less inviting. I will be hardly less evasive today, but will assert something that should provoke you to think about the purpose of fiction.
I always took seriously the writing of fiction. I told my students that no one should write fiction unless he or she absolutely had to write it; unless he or she could not contemplate a life without the writing of fiction. During all the years while I wrote fiction, I assumed that I would always write fiction, but I believe now that I was driven to write fiction only so that I could make the discovery mentioned in the previous paragraph. My first thoughts after I had made the discovery were to the effect that I had somehow failed as a writer of fiction; that I had stopped short of writing the sort of fiction that might have enlarged my reputation enormously or made of my collected works a magnificent edifice. My later thoughts were to the effect that what had happened ought to have been expected. I had undertaken the writing of my books of fiction exactly as another sort of person may have undertaken a serious study of some difficult matter. My writing was not an attempt to produce something called ‘literature’ but an attempt to discover meaning. Why should I feel surprise or disappointment if the result of my writing seven books of fiction was my discovery of something of much meaning to myself and my deciding that the writing of fiction was no longer of much importance to me?
I have been somewhat evasive as to details in the previous paragraphs. However, I have written detailed reports for scholars of the future, if there be any such. I have stored these reports in what I like to call my archives. In those archives are copies of all my letters of the past thirty years; a journal that I kept on and off from 1958 until about 1980; numerous drafts of all my published works of fiction and of several unpublished works; notes for many works of fiction that I have not yet tried to write; and many notes from myself to an imagined scholar of the future, explaining candidly some or another matter of possible interest.
All of my archives, which at present fill about nineteen drawers of steel filing cabinets, will become the property of my sons after my death and will, I hope, end up in a library in, I hope, Australia. For several years now, I have been annotating my papers so as to make clear any passages that might not be clear to a reader of the future. When my annotating is completed, my collected papers will comprise a remarkably detailed documentation of my life and my thinking. However, so candid is this documentation that my papers will not be available to the curious or the scholarly reader until several persons apart from myself have died.
I have been an eager reader of writers’ biographies for many years and have noted often the problems faced by biographers when letters or other papers are lost or scattered or censored by one less than honest. I believe my collection of papers will one day supply anyone interested with a body of material as bulky, as detailed, and as candid as any that I have read about.
It occurred to me this afternoon, Sunday 8 July 2001, that I have not changed much during the last fifty years. I was at my desk when this thought occurred to me. I was not obliged to be at my desk. I had actually found myself with a free hour, something that seldom happens with me. But I had chosen, almost unthinkingly, to go to my desk and to find something that I could do with pen and paper: annotating some page from my archives, perhaps, or translating a stanza from my collection of Hungarian poetry, or checking the records that I keep of the two hundred racehorses that I bet on.
Before I began any of these tasks, I sat back and turned my attention loose, so to speak.
My desk is a small student’s desk. It stands in a corner of my room, facing a blank wall. (I prefer to leave a wall blank rather than to decorate it in any way.) Just to my left are thick curtains concealing a window. (I prefer to keep the curtains and blinds closed whenever I am indoors.) Just to my right is the nearest of the six grey or white filing cabinets that stand around my room. While I was looking at one or another of the blank walls or the grey or white filing cabinets, I thought of myself nearly fifty years ago, in the early 1950s.
If I had found myself with a free hour of a Sunday afternoon in those days, I would have chosen to spend it alone, with a pen and paper handy. I seem always to have hoped to learn more by waiting behind drawn blinds, by daydreaming, by jotting things down on paper than by going about the world or even by reading.
Because today is Sunday, I soon thought of one large difference between myself in the 1950s and myself today.
It would be hard to overemphasise the influence on me of my upbringing as a Roman Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s. I was one month short of my twentieth birthday when I chose not to believe any longer, but before then I had been an unquestioning and sometimes a devout Catholic. This means that from the earliest days that I can recall until my young adulthood, I saw the visible world as being surrounded by an invisible world consisting of four distinct zones, namely heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo, and peopled by countless angels, demons, souls of dead human beings, and a God consisting of three subjoined divine persons. More than this, I lived during all those years never doubting that a goodly number of the invisible beings just mentioned were watching my
every movement and aware of my every thought. Some of the beings were very much concerned for my welfare, by which I understood that they wanted me to join them in their eternal happiness after I had died. Others of the beings were reproachful on account of my seldom remembering to pray for their souls; these were my dead relatives and forebears. Still others of the beings were malevolent towards me and would have felt a perverse satisfaction if they could have ensured that I would spend eternity in hell with them after I had died. These, of course, were the devils who arranged, among their many other machinations, that I should often find in newspapers or magazines pictures of young women in tight bathing costumes or low-cut evening dresses.
More than forty years ago I ceased to be a believing Catholic, but I have never been able to think of the visible world, the so-called real world, the place where I sit writing these notes – I have never been able to think that this is the only world. I might go further and say that the notion of this being the only world seems to me hardly less preposterous than the notions imparted to me as a child by my Catholic parents and teachers and ministers of religion. I might go further still and report that I feel confident that a part of me will survive the death of my body and will find itself after that event in a world presently invisible to these eyes (points yet again to eyes). I might go even further yet and say that I have lighted on what I consider sound evidence for these beliefs of mine. But to go further would probably embarrass all of us. It seems to me that a writer of fiction might disturb a group of scholars less by confessing to some unsavoury sexual proclivity than by announcing his belief in an afterlife and claiming to have seen evidence for his belief.
Anyone reading through my archives after my death will find detailed notes on the matters alluded to somewhat coyly just now, but no one should expect to receive after my death any message from the Other Side. One life as a writer will have been enough.
Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.
Only two forms of art have ever affected me deeply: literature and music. Whenever a passage of literature or of music has affected me deeply, I have been compelled to pause in my reading or in my listening and to try to observe the details of the last hundred metres or so of one or another race contested by one or another field of horses that has suddenly appeared on the home straight of one or another racecourse in my mind.
I have sometimes glimpsed details of the many-coloured jackets of the riders of the horses, and there has sometimes come into my mind the name of one or another of the horses, but more than these few items I have never learned. I have thought more than a few times during the past few years that a task at least as worthy as the writing of a further work or works of fiction would be for me to try to draw the outlines of some of the racecourses just mentioned or the details of the many-coloured jackets; to try to list the names of the horses and of their trainers, jockeys, owners; to record details of the races as Clement Killeaton was reported to have recorded details of races in Tamarisk Row, my first published work of fiction, or as the nameless Tasmanian was reported to have done in ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’, which is the last piece in the last book of mine to have been published as of now.
(Edited version of a paper given to the Gerald Murnane Research Seminar, University of Newcastle, 20–21 September 2001; published in I Have Never Worn Sunglasses, HEAT 3, new series, 2002)
The Angel’s Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life
Nem a való hát: annak égi mássa
Lesz, amitól függ az ének varázsa…
The song itself is not what matters most; it has a heavenly other
from which the magic descends.
Janos Arany (1817–82)
Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.
Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.
The first such persons that I was aware of were the Catholic priests who celebrated the mass and other services in the churches that I attended in the 1940s. As a child, I considered the Latin spoken by the priest to be the verbal equivalent of the vestments that he wore. I have always been much taken by rich fabrics and by colours, emblems, and motifs. Long before I understood a word of Latin, I responded to the sounds of its syllables as to so many arrangements of white lambs or red blood-drops or gold sunbursts on silk chasubles of the so-called liturgical colours. I had the usual child’s image of the deity as an old man of stern appearance, and I could never imagine either of us as feeling warmly towards, let alone loving, the other, but I was moved by the ceremonies that I supposed he himself had prescribed for his worshippers, and I was not at all surprised that he had to be addressed on solemn occasions in a language known only to his priests.
I was only seven when I resolved to learn the sonorous Latin language. I found in my father’s missal pages with parallel Latin and English texts. I imagined I could learn the language simply by finding which word in the Latin text was the equivalent of one or another word in the English text and so accumulating a Latin vocabulary to be drawn on as required. I was brought up short when I found that the Latin for God might be Deum, Deus, Dei, or Deo. This and other problems made Latin seem to me perverse and arbitrary by comparison with my native English but only increased my desire eventually to master Latin. In the meanwhile, I derived unexpected pleasures from hearing or, more often, mishearing the language.
During the last half-hour of the school day on the first Friday of each month in the mid-1940s, the pupils of St Kilian’s School and of the Marist Brothers’ College, after having walked in separate formations for a short distance along McCrae Street, Bendigo, from their respective classrooms to the parish church of St Kilian’s, there formed almost the whole of the congregation during the ceremony of the Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament, or Benediction for short. The pupils of the College were all boys. The pupils of the School were mostly girls, although the three most junior classes had equal numbers of boys and girls. Most of the College sat on one side of the central aisle. Most of the School sat on the other side. I was one of the junior boys of St Kilian’s, whose view of the sanctuary was mostly blocked by the heads and shoulders of the older girls.
One of the hymns sung during Benediction was known by its first word, Adoremus (Let us adore… ). On the afternoons that I am writing about, I knew none of this. The words of the ceremony would have been printed somewhere in the back of my father’s missal, but I had never read them. I understood much later that the words of Adoremus were intended to sound as praise for the Eucharist, but to me as a child in Bendigo nearly sixty years ago they brought quite other meanings.
No one in the seats around me could have tried to sing any of the hymns, but from the seats towards the front of the church came a slow, drawn-out version of the sacred words. Evidently, the nuns and the brothers had taught the words to their older pupils, but the singers, self-conscious and unsure, produced what sounded to me mainly of sadness and struggle.
On some afternoon that I will never recall, I first heard the four syllables of the word Adoremus as the English phrase sons of the angels. Afterwards, on many an afternoon that I well recall, I heard that phrase not only while the singers droned out the Latin Aaa… dor… e-e… mus, but whenever else the vague sounds of the Latin allowed me. Years later, when I had learned by heart both the English and the Latin words, I still preferred to dwell on my own mental imagery while I sang under my breath my private words.
Sons of the angels… On the afternoon mentioned in the previous paragraph, I had already seen numerous pictures of ang
els. I had been assured by teachers and by priests that I enjoyed the exclusive attention of my own angel: my guardian angel, as she was called.
I did not hesitate before using the pronoun she in the previous sentence, but I had to struggle somewhat as a child before I could feel sure of the gender of my invisible guardian and companion. I had wanted from the first a female angel, but the same people who assured me of the existence of angels insisted that they were neither male nor female. In fact, the appearance of angels in devotional pictures tended towards the masculine, and the only angels with names – the archangels Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael – were always spoken of as males. Still, the beardless faces, the long hair, and the flowing robes of pictured angels did not much hinder my imaginings. In time, my female guardian began to appear to me, although never as an image of a whole female form. (I have long since come to accept that when I do what is usually denoted by the verb to imagine, I am able to call to mind only details and never wholes.) Her shining hair and flawless complexion I would have derived mostly from advertisements in the Australian Women’s Weekly. Her voice would have come from one or another radio play or serial. I could hardly have been knowledgeable enough to imagine a character or personality to go with her angelic appearance, but if I know anything of the person I was fifty and more years ago, I can be sure that her distinguishing quality was trustworthiness. I could have confided anything to her.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs Page 14