Last Letter to a Reader E-Book

Gerald Murnane

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 199

Beschreibung

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane – perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane's own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane's last work, as death approaches. 'Help me, dear one,' he writes, 'to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.'

Leseprobe

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And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © 2021 Gerald Murnane and Giramondo, Australia

All rights reserved.

The rights of Gerald Murnane to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted.

Originally published in 2021 by Giramondo, Australia

ISBN: 9781913505424 eBook ISBN: 9781913505431

Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London. Cover Design:Sarahmay Wilkinson.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

Tamarisk RowA Season on EarthThe PlainsLandscape with LandscapeInlandVelvet WatersEmerald BlueInvisible Yet Enduring LilacsBarley PatchA History of BooksA Million WindowsSomething for the PainBorder DistrictsGreen Shadows and Other PoemsLast Letter to a Reader

Nearly six years ago, when I had written the last of my poems for the collection Green Shadows and Other Poems, I felt sure that I could write nothing more for publication. I went on writing, of course, but only for my archives.

In mid-2020, during a so-called lockdown in the state of Victoria, I wrote the first few of the pieces in this book – but only for myself and for future readers of my archives. Not until I had mentioned my project to Ivor Indyk of Giramondo, did I think of my pieces as the first of a published collection. Thus encouraged, I went on writing long after the lockdown had ended, pleased to be able yet again to explain myself.

Gerald MurnaneAugust 2021

‌Tamarisk Row

A few weeks ago, on one of the first days of spring in my eighty-second year, I began a project that seemed likely to provide a neat rounding-off to my career as a published writer. I began to read Tamarisk Row (1974), my first book of fiction. I intended to read the book at my leisure and afterwards, in order of their publication, every book of mine, ending with Green Shadows and Other Poems (2019). I intended also to write a brief report of my experience as a re-reader of each book. A copy of each report would be lodged in each of my Chronological Archive, which I think of as a documentation of my life as a whole, and my Literary Archive, which is concerned with everything that I’ve written for publication.

The whole project, before I began it, seemed likely to be reassuring and far from demanding. I looked forward especially to learning about the earlier writer things that he may not have known at the time or things that had since been forgotten. I feel nowadays as though I know immensely more about the writing of fiction than I knew in earlier decades. How would the man I am now judge the earlier man? These and other matters brought on a pleasant sense of anticipation in the days before I began my project.

I had previously read none of my books in its published form. I had looked into each book many times, often for the purpose of finding and then reading – sometimes aloud – one or another passage that I was proud of. I had read aloud more than a few of my favourite passages in public – the last words I had uttered in public comprised the sonorous last paragraph of A History of Books. But I had never sat down and tried to confront any book of mine as though for the first time. The word tried is the operative word in the previous sentence. I surely knew, when I opened Tamarisk Row the other day, that to try was as much as I could do.

I discovered early in life that the act of reading is much more complicated than most people seem to acknowledge. My project, as I called it, was never going to be any sort of simple confrontation. And so, while I scanned in their printed form a hundred thousand of the million and more words that I had scrawled in ballpoint pen half a century ago, I did what I’ve always preferred to do in the presence of a certain sort of text: I followed the workings of my mind.

If I chose to use a common expression, I could report that my mind wandered often from the time when I re-read the first page of Tamarisk Row. The word mind denotes for me, however, other than it seems to denote for most people, and while I can readily report that some or another conscious part of me was wandering, I would reserve the word mind to denote the place where the wandering occurred. I can be much more specific. I can report that for as long as I attended to the text of Tamarisk Row, I was distracted by, and sometimes even lost in, the true subject-matter, as I would call it, of that text.

Certain matters mentioned or hinted at in the previous paragraph will be raised again in later sections of this book. I report here only that I had in mind while I read the first, brief section of Tamarisk Row far more than the words of that section could have been intended to denote. This should not have surprised me. I had said several times in public that I was for ever prevented from reading any of my published books because I saw their published texts always as surrounded, so to speak, by so much else that had gone into the making of those texts. From among the teeming, infinite-seeming profusion of what I saw, I might mention an image of part of the city of Bendigo as it appeared on a hot afternoon in 1946 to a small boy climbing with his classmates the flights of wooden stairs at the rear of the Capitol Theatre at the upper end of View Street. I might mention a host of persons and places that I recall from the four years that I spent in Bendigo or a host of events that I took part in, although none of those persons or places or events had any bearing on what I wrote about in Tamarisk Row. Or I might mention some of the thirty or forty thousand words that I removed from the original text of the work to reduce it to a publishable length, and some of what I saw in mind or felt while I first wrote those words. But the author of a text is not alone in seeing far beyond the simplest denotations and connotations of that text. Surely any self-aware reader knows what a multitude of imagery appears during the reading of a text, often distracting but sometimes enhancing.

In short, I will always have to struggle indeed to decide how any book of mine might affect a reader. But no such struggle need hinder me from assessing the soundness of the sentences that make up the text or the skill and consistency of the narrative. I’ve learned a great deal about sentences and about narration since I began to write what turned at last into Tamarisk Row, and although I could never think of disowning the man who spent his late twenties and early thirties writing his first work of fiction, I expected my re-reading to tell me that my first book was flawed. I knew the sentences would not disappoint me – I’ve been concerned since boyhood with the structure of sentences – but I expected to find faults in the narration. I had never forgotten the stinging comment by an Irish reviewer that I had grafted an adult’s perceptions onto the sensibility of a child.

Needless to say, I found passages that I could wish today to have written differently, but I was more often pleasantly surprised. The author of fifty years ago had thought far less about theories of narration than I have today, but some sort of feeling for the rightness of the narrative was already with him. Throughout my reading, I had in mind the accusation by the Irish reviewer. Had the boy Clement Killeaton been credited with insights beyond his grasp? I had the accusation especially in mind while I read such sections as those reporting Clement’s peering of an afternoon into the orange-gold glass panel of the west-facing front door at 42 Leslie Street, Bassett, and I felt wholly exonerated from the Irishman’s charge. Twenty and more years before I succeeded in defining for my own satisfaction what I now call ‘true fiction’ or ‘considered narration’, I had written page after unerring page of the stuff.

I’ve spent countless hours during the past sixty years trying to write fiction, but I’ve also spent a great many hours trying to explain for my own satisfaction what I’m actually doing when I’m writing fiction and why I find certain sorts of fiction more satisfying than other sorts. I had been busy at both of those tasks for nearly twenty years before I found the words that I had sought for so long. In fact, I found two neatly complementary sets of words. One set I devised myself. In 1979, I was writing part of the script for a documentary film about myself and my books and my interest in horse-racing. The words I was writing were to come from my own mouth while I was standing alone before the camera. I had come to dislike and distrust cameras by then, and I was perhaps provoked to declare to the darkness behind the lens what I had previously been unable to write on a blank page. Or, perhaps I supposed my situation was that of the narrator of the last passage of The Plains, and the camera in front of me was aimed only at the darkness behind my eyes. Whatever, as they say, in the film Words and Silk I declare at length what I can state simply here: true fiction is an account of certain of the contents of the mind of the narrator.

The second of the two sets of words I found in the introduction to a paperback collection of the short works of Herman Melville. Given the importance of those words to me and the number of times I’ve quoted or paraphrased them, it might be expected that I could name the author of the words, but I can’t. His name would be somewhere among my lecture notes in my Chronological Archive, but the notes amount to several hundred pages, and the book where I first read the words is in storage in Melbourne, four hundred kilometres away. So, the author, who was a male and a lesser-known academic, if dead by now never knew or if still alive will never know that a few of his words had a life-changing impact on one of his fellows. Those words are to the effect that a story well told informs us not only that certain things may have happened but what it is to know that such things may have happened.

It would not be inapt for me to mention here my having described myself sometimes as a technical writer: one whose fiction is no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of his mind. For this sort of writer – my sort of writer – a passage of fiction is not an account of something that might once have happened in the visible world; it is not even an account of something that could conceivably have happened in that world. For this sort of writer, such issues are irrelevant; a passage of fiction reports his or her contemplation of what did happen or what did not happen or what might have happened or what can never happen.

While I read recently many a passage from Tamarisk Row, I enjoyed many a seeming-memory, as I would call it, of myself in my early thirties in what my wife and I called the book-room (before it became our eldest son’s bedroom) during the several hundreds of evenings and weekends when I wrote the last drafts of what is called, on the rear cover of the 2008 edition, my masterpiece. I enjoyed, for example, the seeming-memory of myself writing not what I myself saw when I looked sometimes of an afternoon through the translucent yellowish glass in the front door of a weatherboard cottage at 244 Neale Street, Bendigo, thirty and more years before, and not what some readily visible character saw in some readily visible film-in-the-mind, but what came to light, to use that impressive figure of speech, when, in a certain north-facing room in a certain north-eastern suburb of Melbourne, I wrote that a certain fictional personage stood before a pane of sunlit glass and when I got ready to report the patterns of imagery already rising to sight in the endless, inexhaustible place-of-places that I demean when I call it my mind.

While I was writing the previous sentence, I was reassured yet again of the truth of the claim by the narrator of my ‘First Love’ (first published in the collection Velvet Waters, 1990), that no such thing as ‘Time’ exists; that we experience only place after place; that remembering, as we call it, is no sort of rediscovery or recollection but an act performed for the very first time somewhere in the endless place known as the present.

By way of illustrating my preferred form of narration, I could cite the section of Tamarisk Row titled ‘The field lines up for the Gold Cup race’. That section is one of a number of passages in the book that can surely not be taken to represent the thoughts or the imaginings of any character. Nor am I willing to agree that the passage is any sort of commentary or intervention by a narrator such as Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope employed. I prefer to leave unnamed the source of the passage and not to connect it closely to any one character. Of course I wrote the passage, and of course, by a crude process of elimination, it must be attributed to the narrator, but during the complex process of the reading of true fiction, such exactitude is not called for. If, during that mysterious process, a reader can mistake a character for himself or herself, then the same reader can likewise err with the narrator or the narrator err with either of the other two.

I seem to recall several critics pointing out that my first published work contained many, if not most, of the themes or strands to be found in my later works. I found plenty of evidence for this during my re-reading. I should have been annoyed, perhaps, by my wastefulness – using in an overly long first work what should have been husbanded for the future. Or, I should have been a bit ashamed of my nervousness as an unpublished writer – putting on display far more than was needed to impress a likely publisher. Instead, I learned that I myself, in the person of the narrator of my first work of fiction, had foreseen the inevitable. To quote the course broadcaster towards the end of his call of the Gold Cup race: ‘… he knows at last that he will never leave Tamarisk Row…’

‌A Season on Earth

I have my own way of assessing the worth of a book – not just a so-called work of literature but any sort of book or, for that matter, any piece of music or any so-called work of art. I could say in simple terms that I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to explain how the reading of a book or the remembering of a book are not for me what they seem to be for many others.

James Joyce, so I once read, was often irritated by someone’s reporting that he or she had just read a most impressive book. The person so impressed would begin to explain the impressive subject-matter of the book, but Joyce could not tolerate this. He wanted to learn what the book truly comprised; he wanted the enthused reader to quote from the text of the book some of the more impressive sentences or paragraphs. This, of course, few enthused readers are able to do. I myself am seldom able to do it, but at least I learned long ago not to claim that I was talking about a book when what I was talking about were my memories or my impressions or my fantasies.

Sometimes an impressive sentence or two will stay with me for long afterwards. I have not looked into Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, for fifty-three years, but I can recall a sentence that still comes to me sometimes and works its strange effect on me: a simple sentence spoken by Captain Ahab not long before the final pursuit of the white whale. ‘They are making hay in the meadows of the Andes, Mr Starbuck.’ And if someone should ever inform me that those are not the exact words of the text, I’ll be pleased rather than abashed – pleased that I’ve adapted a fictional text for the best of all purposes: to enrich an actual life.

My own books, those that I wrote, have always seemed, of course, far more than mere texts. The actual published words seem to me sometimes mere traces of long-lasting moods, oppressed states of mind, or whole phases of my life, but some of those published words sometimes appear in written form or sound aloud in my mind, or sometimes I call on them for encouragement or consolation. The examples that I’m about to quote occurred to me while I was writing just now about the sentence from Moby-Dick, and I may well have composed my often remembered sentence under the influence of the strange mood brought on by Melville’s sentence. My sentence is part of a passage towards the end of Inland in which passage the narrator ponders on the frequent occurrence in works of literature or music of a calm or serene passage before the major themes engage in their final, climactic conflict: The solemn themes turn to face the storm.

Given that I recall nothing from so many of the books that I’ve read, Moby-Dick rates highly with me, and if I were to learn from one reader alone that one sentence alone from the text of Inland still recurred to him or her, then I would hope that my book would rate equally highly with that reader.

My preferred words for my most esteemed books are memorable and influential, and those words certainly describe Hunger, by Knut Hamsun. Nothing of the text remains with me from my having read it about forty years ago. What remain are either memories of mental scenery brought into being while I read or, more likely, re-creations of such scenery prompted by powerful feelings liable to be aroused by the mere calling to mind of the title of the book and the name of its author. Under the influence of those feelings several years ago, and at a time when I often claimed I had nothing further to write, I spent several days making notes for a book-length work of fiction titled Thirst that might affect at least one reader as Knut Hamsun’s book had affected me. I was tired of writing for publication, but the desire to emulate Hamsun might have kept me going if I had not come to understand, while I made my notes, that I had already written during my fourth decade, and before I had read Hunger, a book such as I felt driven to write in my ninth.

Readers never tire of asking me how closely the lives of my fictional characters and narrators resemble my own life, and I persist in giving evasive answers. The two most common are hardly dishonest. I declare that separating accurate memories from their various counterparts is a hard task. Or, I declare that my own life in Bendigo during the 1940s or in Oakleigh South in the 1950s was much stranger than Clement Killeaton’s life in Bassett or Adrian Sherd’s in Accrington. Here, however, is a freely given morsel for my persistent questioners to seize on.

In the third section of A Season on Earth, Adrian is a student of a seminary conducted by a religious order of Catholic priests. The year is 1955. Many of my readers will know that I was a seminarian for a time. (Some accounts seem to suggest that I studied for the priesthood for several years. In fact, I spent fourteen weeks in the seminary in early 1957.) Adrian’s motives may be interpreted from the text of A Season on Earth and also from the variant passages in the last pages of the first section of A Lifetime on Clouds. My own motives for applying to join the Congregation of the Passion (Passionist Fathers) were different indeed from Adrian’s.

Regardless of what I may have said to myself or to others at the time, I surely knew that I turned to the priesthood in order to avoid going to university. And if I didn’t admit my true motive then for fear that it proved me a social and emotional retard, I proudly admit it now and declare that my decision was in my own best interests. I was dux of my class all through secondary school and winner each year of the prize for English Literature. Reading was hugely important to me, and I was already trying to write poetry. Even so, I found the study of English distasteful, hateful even, and wholly confusing. And although I knew hardly anything of what went on in universities, I sensed that the study of English there would be even less to my liking. Perhaps I sensed that I would one day define for my own satisfaction why the reading of a certain sort of book seemed necessary for my peace of mind, if not for my very survival. Certainly I knew that what I wrote in essays had little connection with the all-important question why certain texts had a profound and lasting effect on me while others had none.

I claimed earlier that A Season on Earth is somehow similar to Hunger. I would have been more precise if I had written that I consider Adrian Sherd and the first-person narrator of Hunger to be similar personages and their predicaments somewhat similar. Each personage strides by day or broods and scribbles by night in his native city, but as though an invisible pane separates him from its other inhabitants and an invisible grip prevents him from living as they live. Adrian, for example, feels especially deprived in his never having seen a naked female or even an illustration of one such. He decides that his most practical means for remedying this is to save his money and eventually to travel to Yemen where, so he has read, young women may be bought as slaves and inspected by the buyers beforehand. In the last of the four sections of the book, Adrian moves rapidly through one after another of the four dream-roles that he had earlier played out for a year and more each: satyr, loving husband, priest, and poet. But his moving thus is no sort of resolution. The invisible pane still bars his way; the invisible grip still holds him back. The women he lusts after or falls in love with are depictions in newspapers or magazines. The monastery that he wants to join is in England. His literary projects are mere daydreams. I cannot agree with those readers who believe that Adrian, as he appears in the last pages of the book, is ready to become any sort of competent writer.