Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

  What I have written just now about my angel is not at all meant to report that she and I were already on familiar terms during my childhood. According to my teachers, my angel had been appointed as my guardian at the moment of my birth. I was not reassured, however, by the words of the prayer that we recited in class every day: ‘O Angel of God, my guardian dear… / ever this day be at my side… ’ I have heard long since that theologians can justify our having to ask in prayer for benefits that would have come to us by right, but in my childhood my having to plead daily with my angel to stay with me prevented me from feeling that she was permanently mine. In any case, even my child’s sense of the rightness of things would have told me that the precious boon of angelic companionship ought to have been earned; to have come at some cost. (And while I wrote the previous sentence I recalled having heard in class from one or another pious nun that our every sin caused our guardian angels to turn away from us.)

  Sons of the angels… Whatever bond I might sometimes have felt between myself and my angel, when I sang under my breath to the melody of the hymn from the Benediction service all angels, my own included, seemed far away. The sons of the phrase were not at all related filially to the angels. In my mind, an angel was a virginal female impossible to associate even with spiritual motherhood, let alone bodily. The word son in Bendigo in the 1940s was commonly heard in streets and schoolyards. Among schoolboys it served as mate or pal or cobber would have served at other places and times. It was heard even more often as the form of address used by men towards boys other than their sons. The sons of the angels were to me the juniors, the nondescript rag-tag mob of boys milling around far beneath the gaze of the heavenly beings who were their guardians but who still kept their distance. And whether or not each angel had as yet been appointed the guardian of each son, I sensed that the angels in general were disappointed with us sons in general. We played childish games or fought each other in the dusty schoolyard, scarcely aware that we were entitled to live a different life indeed, if only we could have been mindful of angelic ways.

  Sometimes, if I struggled to imagine the angels and their ways, I attributed to angels some of what I seemed to have discerned in the older girls of St Kilian’s School, who would have been thirteen or fourteen years of age. These persons moved gracefully and spoke in quiet voices; they had a love of cleanliness and order; and, so I had learned one morning when I was sent on an errand by my teacher to the eighth-grade classroom, they could recite the Latin and Greek roots of many English words. Thoughts of the older girls often led me to think of their counterparts across the aisle of the church: the older boys of the Brothers’ College.

  From a very early age, I had been interested in what I thought of as romance. I learned what I could of the subject from the same source that had taught me the word itself: the women’s magazines that were the chief reading matter in our house. At the time when I daydreamed about the angels and their sons, I assumed that older boys and girls were even more interested than I was in romance. I was seldom without a girlfriend. My chosen female was sometimes a girl from my own class, who was almost always left unaware of my having chosen her. She was sometimes a girl from a higher class who might not even have known of my existence. And she was occasionally an adult: a woman whose face I had seen in a drawing or a photograph in one of the magazines mentioned already. I needed a girlfriend chiefly so that I could see one or another detail of a female image in my mind or could sense a female presence there. But I had also a vague notion that our relationship, such as it was, was a foreshadowing of the future. At some vague time in some remote place, my wife-of-the-future and I might walk together on the street or sit together in our motor car whereas now we met only at the sides of my mind.

  Sons of the angels… I had met with no boy of my own age who was interested in romance, but I could not believe that the man-sized senior boys of the Brothers’ College had not each chosen for himself a girlfriend after having inspected during many a religious ceremony the rows of older girls across the aisle. And so I was able sometimes to hear the drawn-out Latin as one or another message from the boy-men to their chosen females. We may seem ungainly and roughly spoken, so the message might have run, but we admire your gentleness and your demureness and we wait in hope for some glance or some sign of encouragement from you. We are only the sons as of now, but we are willing to learn the ways of the angels.

  It should be apparent that my various imaginings during the Latin hymn were anything but orderly or consistent. I might have been thinking at one or another time of the yearning of the older boys for the girls across the aisle and yet thinking a moment afterwards of angels and mortals. Whatever might have been the details of my thoughts, the recurrent theme was of the enforced separation of personages who deserved to be united.

  I heard from the radio one evening in Bendigo part of the story of two such personages. My parents used to seem uneasy whenever I became interested in radio plays or serials meant for adults, and they were apt to switch off the radio if the characters talked too much about romantic matters or if they sighed or murmured or otherwise suggested that hugging or kissing may have been going on. If I was eager to listen to something from the radio, I used to make a show of being involved in some game in a corner of the room. Sometimes I even disguised my interest by leaving the room for short periods. I cannot recall that my parents censored the radio adaptation of Henry Longfellow’s narrative poem ‘Evangeline’ on the evening when I heard it, but I took away from it only a jumble of impressions – perhaps because I knew hardly anything about the history or geography of North America. What I remembered afterwards were the cries of the separated lovers during their lifelong search for one another, each calling the other’s name in a landscape that I imagined as a vast prairie. And I would not have failed to notice, and to add to my stock of secret meanings, that the name of the young woman, Evangeline, had at its core the word angel and that the young man, Gabriel, was named after an angel.

  It might have fitted more neatly with the themes of this piece of writing if I could have reported that the various separated personages often in my mind were separated not only by their differing natures or qualities and by their distance from each other in space but also by their speaking each a different language. What I seem mostly to have imagined was that the angelic/female personage was at home not only in the English spoken by the sons, myself included, but also in a language spoken only among her own superior kind. The higher language I thought of mostly as Latin, but I was sometimes able to imagine fragments of other such languages. In my confused response to the radio version of ‘Evangeline’, for example, I heard the occasional French proper nouns as suggesting that the heroine spoke her own private language in addition to the English of the narrative. At such times I was keenly aware that I knew only English, and yet I seemed to myself at other times to have acquired fragments of a language from elsewhere.

  During my childhood, songs or stories faintly heard or vaguely understood would at first annoy and frustrate me but would later encourage me to compose a private music and a private mythology so rich in meaning that I dwell on them nowadays at least as often as I hear in my mind the music of acknowledged masters or as I recall my having read one or another work of literature. According to my best recollections, the first hit parade, as it was called, was broadcast from 3BO Bendigo in 1948. The so-called number-one song when I first listened in was ‘Cruising Down the River’, sung by Arthur Godfrey. The last line of the chorus of the song was ‘Cruising down the river on a Sunday afternoon’.

  In the 1940s, so I recall, crooners such as Bing Crosby caused a certain sort of young woman to shriek as her later counterpart would shriek on hearing rock-and-roll stars. But hit parades and crooners had made few inroads into the staple content of music programmes when I was listening to the wireless-set in the mid-1940s. Whole programmes were given over to bel-canto, arias from operettas or even operas, popular songs from earlier decades (the name Al Bowley comes to m
ind), and especially dance music (Victor Sylvester). I mention these details lest the reader suppose that when I went far down into the backyard on many a Sunday afternoon in the years mentioned already (in a provincial city where the silence was broken as often by the clip-clop of cart-horses as by the noises of motor-cars) and listened deliberately to the faint rhythms and the snatches of melodies from one or another neighbouring house, I heard the brutal thumping or the animal-wailing that would be their equivalent today. The sounds that I heard were teasingly varied.

  At the time, I was not concerned as to where they came from: the sounds that I thought of as Sunday-afternoon music or far-away music. I suspect now that most of them came not from neighbouring houses but from a bungalow in the backyard of one of the houses. It would much better suit my purposes in this piece of writing if such had been so. A backyard bungalow stood behind many a house in the 1940s. The bungalow was hardly more than a shed, often unlined, and its occupant was usually a widower or a bachelor, often a heavy drinker, who took his meals with the family in the house. In later years, I learned that the bungalow was a necessary adjunct to many a lower-middle-class house in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, where I attended secondary school. In a typical house with two bedrooms, the daughters occupied the second bedroom while the sons had for their bedroom a backyard bungalow. How often the widowers and bachelors of Bendigo in the 1940s masturbated in their bungalows I have no way of knowing, but I have spoken with several men of my own generation who were thankful that they occupied backyard bungalows during their adolescence and early manhood and could masturbate in comparative privacy.

  My mood on most Sunday afternoons was somewhat melancholic. Sometimes the hints of music that I heard only deepened my mood; at other times they relieved it. Sometimes the hints seemed only to remind me of how far I was from my land of heart’s content, wherever and whatever it might have been. The inhabitants of that land were close to the source of the music, and their feelings were on that account far richer and more sustaining than my own mere longings. But at other times I believed myself capable of composing from the faint thumpings and the fragments of phrases something fit to be chanted or sung in places far from my dusty backyard. My melancholy was more often deepened than relieved; the dwellers in the far landscape seemed on most Sundays utterly unaware of me; and yet I was sometimes able to imagine myself drawing nearer them. Sometimes I saw them looking towards me as I approached them along one of their splendid avenues or across one of their vast lawns. They made, at first, no move to welcome me, but then they understood that I was calling to them in their own language or singing one of their own songs.

  I am able to recall a number of fragments from the many that I used to chant or sing in what I hoped might have been the language of Elfland or Paradise or Idaho, and I am about to cite one such on this page. I called to mind readily just now the sounds and the melody – I have often heard them in my mind during the fifty and more years since I first heard them – but when I came to write them just now, I found that the non-English syllables had no written equivalents in my mind. I had to choose between several possible written versions of those syllables because for most of my life I had merely heard them; I had never seen them as writing in my mind.

  La boola boola, la boola boola

  Sealie off-oof,

  Kar sealie off-oof,

  And let the rest of the world go by.

  The last of these lines came from a popular song of the mid-twentieth century, and I sang the line exactly as I had heard it in the song. I sang the first three lines to a melody that I had devised myself, probably by varying one or another tune that I heard often from the radio. As for the syllables of those lines, most may have come from my having misheard the words of songs – not only English words but German or Italian also. What interests me much more than the origins of this fragment, however, is the fact that I devised it, sang it often, and got from my singing a certain mood or a state of feeling – all this without once translating the text, so to speak. During most of my life, these lines have had considerable meaning for me, even though most of the words have never had specific meanings. In short I invented, to the best of my child’s ability, a foreign language so that I could feel more intensely or see further than I was enabled to feel and see by the sounds of my native language.

  I think of myself nowadays as a person who reads words rather than hears them. At school or at university, whenever I wanted to memorise a passage I studied it in such a way that I was able afterwards to visualise its appearance on the page. I often notice myself reading in the air, as it were, my own and other persons’ words during a conversation. For some years during my childhood, I felt obliged to write with my finger on the nearest surface every word that came to my mind. Walking to school, for example, I scribbled continually with the point of my index finger on the smooth leather of my schoolbag, trying to record in writing the onrush of my thoughts. For how long, I wonder, has English been for me only a written language?

  The first sentence that I recall having composed in writing is ‘The bull is full’. I wrote this sentence with pencil on paper in either February or March in 1944 and showed it soon afterwards to Eleanor Warde, the part-owner with her husband of the house where my family lived at that time in rented rooms. Mrs Warde was a handsome woman with dark hair and was, according to my best recollection, the first female person that I was drawn to confide in. I can hardly have written my sentence in order to report something I had observed or had had reported to me. The sentence is almost certainly the result of my taking pleasure from the sounds of English before I became accustomed to words as writing.

  During my lifetime I have become competent, to varying extents, in six languages, but I have only once learned a language by hearing its sounds. That language was, of course, my native English, which was for me no more than a spoken language during the few years before I began to read and write. (I am able to recall a few occasions when I heard for the first time one or another English word and when I subsequently spoke it often to myself in order to savour some peculiar state of feeling that the word gave rise to. I recall even such details as the place where I was standing and the fact that I was strangely affected by the word in question, but of the feelings aroused by the word I recall only the faintest hint. I can see in my mind, for example, a white window-curtain being lifted by the wind while I repeat aloud the word serenade. I am no more than three years old, and I have recently heard that word for the first time; I heard it pronounced in a deep voice by a male announcer during a radio programme. The sound of the word has a strange effect on me as I say it aloud, but I recall nothing of that effect today. When I look at the word serenade, even in the context of this paragraph, I am hardly aware of it as having any sound; it appears to me as a written word around which float a few images.)

  Evidently, the one language that I first learned as a system of sounds became for me long ago a system of written words and sentences. I became so used to English as a medium and so much occupied with the subject matter of my reading or writing that I seldom noticed or was affected by the audible qualities of my first language.

  During my twelfth year, I was fluent in the Latin of the mass. I was an altar boy in the suburb of Melbourne where my family then lived. I had been given at first a booklet with the altar boys’ responses printed in it, but I soon learned its contents by heart and thereafter recited either with eyes reverently closed or while staring at the pattern of dark-green fleurs-de-lis on the pale-green sanctuary carpet or at the embroidered imagery and lettering on the priest’s chasuble or the altar-cloth. I had learned the Latin at first by reading it, but the sounds of the prayers had been more or less familiar to me since my early years. And although I knew well the English equivalent of each Latin sentence, I had not much understanding of the syntax of the Latin. In short, I was more likely to hear myself reciting the Latin than to see it unrolling as a text in my mind, and I was easily able to cut myself adrift from the meaning.
Admittedly, there were days when I tried to be devout and to utter the Latin responses as prayers, but I was much more inclined to use my small store of foreign syllables for my own purposes.

  I began to enjoy hearing myself recite, aloud but to myself alone, the longest piece of Latin from my store. This was the confessional prayer, the Confiteor. When I recited it under the fig-tree in my favourite corner of the backyard in 1950, it seemed inordinately long, but when I recited it just now at a leisurely pace, it took no more than thirty seconds. I have forgotten what thoughts were in my mind during my earliest recitations under the fig-tree, but a time came when I began to hear the chanted Latin as someone might have heard faintly from a distant radio the description of a horse-race.

  I have written elsewhere about the importance to me of horse-racing, but there may be some reader of this writing who needs to be told that I have got from horse-racing during my lifetime more meaning than I have got from literature or music or any other branch of what is generally called culture. For whatever reasons, images of horse-racing appear in my mind whenever I have begun to feel intensely about any matter. The most common but by no means the only images are of the last hundred metres of various races. A few of these are races that I have watched in the past. Others are races between horses I cannot even name on racecourses whose very whereabouts are a mystery to me. I am not aware of having any influence on the progress or the results of these races-in-the-mind; I watch them only as a spectator. Even so, I understand as soon as the field of horses comes into my view that I ought to follow the progress of one particular horse, and this I do, having recognised the horse by some imperceptible sign or by a sort of instinct. This horse is only sometimes the eventual winner; at other times it fails by a narrow margin or as a result of misfortune.