A Lifetime on Clouds Read online

  GERALD MURNANE was born in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, in 1939. He spent some of his childhood in country Victoria before returning to Melbourne in 1949 where he lived for the next sixty years. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane.

  In 1957 Murnane began training for the Catholic priesthood but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a primary-school teacher. He also taught at the Apprentice Jockeys’ School run by the Victoria Racing Club. In 1969 he graduated in arts from Melbourne University. He worked in education for a number of years and later became a teacher of creative writing.

  In 1966 Murnane married Catherine Lancaster. They had three sons. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, and was followed by eight other works of fiction. His most recent book is A History of Books. He has also published a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005).

  In 1999 Gerald Murnane won the Patrick White Award. In 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. In the same year, after the death of his wife, Murnane moved to Goroke in the north-west of Victoria.

  ANDY GRIFFITHS is one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors. He has written more than twenty books, including the much-loved ‘Just!’ and ‘Treehouse’ series (with the illustrator Terry Denton) and The Day My Bum Went Psycho, and has sold more than five million copies worldwide.

  andygriffiths.com.au

  ALSO BY GERALD MURNANE

  Fiction

  Tamarisk Row

  The Plains

  Landscape with Landscape

  Inland

  Velvet Waters

  Emerald Blue

  Barley Patch

  A History of Books

  Non-fiction

  Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Gerald Murnane 1976

  Introduction copyright © Andy Griffiths 2013

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by William Heinemann, Australia 1976

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147455

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148506

  Author: Murnane, Gerald, 1939- author.

  Title: A lifetime on clouds / by Gerald Murnane; introduced by Andy Griffiths.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Going to America by Andy Griffiths

  A Lifetime on Clouds

  Going to America

  by Andy Griffiths

  GERALD Murnane is the author of some of the most original books ever written by an Australian. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is an obsessive exploration of the imaginative terrain of childhood. His third novel, The Plains, is a meditation on love, landscape and creativity that has an hallucinatory power. The novel that came between these two extraordinary books, A Lifetime on Clouds, has long been out of print. And yet it is, for my money, the funniest and most accessible of all his works. It is also a moving and fearless account of adolescent angst. Murnane’s frank treatment of sexuality, longing, adult hypocrisy, and the guilt and confusion created by a sexually repressive 1950s Catholic boys’ school is as engaging now as when it was first published, in 1976.

  The protagonist of A Lifetime on Clouds is the fifteen-year-old schoolboy—and self-confessed sex maniac—Adrian Sherd, who lives in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. By coincidence, in 1976 I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy living in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne and, although I don’t think I qualified as a sex maniac (not compared to Adrian Sherd, at least), I did have a strong interest in the subject.

  On my bedroom wall I had a poster of Suzi Quatro wearing a partially unzipped white leather jumpsuit, and I was convinced that if I could find just the right angle I would surely be rewarded with a glimpse of her left breast. I spent a lot of time that year with my cheek pressed against the wall, desperately trying—and failing—to penetrate the mysteries of that jumpsuit.

  Fortunately, other sources of raw material for my burgeoning interest in the female form were provided by the lurid covers of my horror comic collection, which often featured partially clothed damsels in distress. And I participated in Church of England Boys’ Society paper drives that exposed me to such racy publications as the ironically named Truth and its steamy Heart Balm letters page, as well as the Sunday Observer, which could be relied on to contain pictures of streakers running across sporting fields or down busy city streets. And if all else failed there was always the bra section of Kmart catalogues, although these were only to be called on in emergencies.

  But, despite my considerable efforts, I was a rank amateur when measured against Adrian Sherd, who takes a far more systematic approach to his fantasy life. Every afternoon Adrian sets his model train running across a large, crudely drawn map of the United States. Whichever state it stops in will be the setting for one of his vividly imagined nightly escapades with scores of willing and scantily clad starlets, the inspiration for which he gathers from glimpses of the Hollywood movies his mother does not allow him to watch, the pages of the Argus newspaper, and coveted and difficult-to-obtain magazines such as Man Junior and Health and Sunshine.

  Adrian brings an admirable rigour to his trips to America and maintains a strict policy not to allow any of the women he sees in real life into his fantasies. On the one occasion he breaks this self-imposed rule, and issues an imaginary invitation to the ‘piney woods of Georgia’ to a young, ‘carefully groomed’ married woman he sees on the train, he finds he can’t relax.

  Whenever he met her eyes he remembered he would have to face her on the train next morning...It would be hard pretending that nothing had happened between them on the previous night.

  There was another difficulty. Jayne and Marilyn and Susan and their many friends always had the same look about them—a wide-eyed half-smile with lips slightly parted. The new woman had an irritating way of changing her expression. She seemed to be thinking too much.

  One of the many delights of the novel is the contrast between the debauchery of Adrian’s imagined life and the humdrum reality of postwar Melbourne suburbia:

  One very hot Saturday morning Adrian Sherd was staring at a picture of the Pacific coast near Big Sur. He hadn’t been to America for several days, and he was planning a sensational extravaganza for that very night with four or perhaps even five women against a backdrop of mighty cliffs and redwood forests.

  His mother came into the room and said she had been down to the phone box talking to his Aunt Francie and now Adrian and his brothers and mother and Aunt Francie and her four kids were going on the bus to Mordialloc beach for a picnic.

  The pleasures of America pose a dilemma for our insatiable hero who, increasingly terrified and burdened with guilt, attempts to reform himself—Adrian is Catholic, after all, and has been taught that masturbation is a mortal sin. He does this not by abandoning his fantasies but by redoubling his efforts to create an even more elaborate o
ne, in which he courts, marries and raises a family with a good Catholic girl whom he has seen taking communion in church. This fantasy is so gloriously and painstakingly realised that it occupies most of the last half of the novel. Not only does it weaken the starlets’ hold on Adrian’s mind, but it makes the second half of the book possibly even more entertaining—and certainly more earnest and affecting—than the first.

  There is much to love in this novel and many passages that are profoundly funny—laugh-out-loud moments which, at the same time, evoke strongly felt and often deeply painful emotions. Throughout, Murnane masterfully maintains a deadpan tone.

  For instance, Adrian is angry and disappointed that he and his friends have been cheated by Father Dreyfus’s much-anticipated sex-education film, which the brother promised would show them ‘the moment of fertilisation’. Adrian imagines that, at the very least, this means the film will present them with ‘a statue or a painting of a man and woman doing it’, but instead they are shown a picture of the female reproductive system and an animated image of an ‘army of little sperm men invading the diagram’. ‘The commentator got excited. He thought there was nothing so marvellous as the long journey of these tiny creatures. Adrian didn’t care what happened to the little bastards now that the film had turned out to be a fraud.’

  What follows is one of the most shockingly funny images of the entire book and a great example of how Murnane isn’t afraid to go where angels fear to tread. (Okay, it’s on page 130 if you can’t wait.)

  Or consider Father Lacey’s speech to Adrian’s class, urging them to avoid non-Catholic newspapers:

  ‘There’s one Melbourne newspaper in particular that regularly prints suggestive pictures which are quite unnecessary and don’t have anything to do with the news of the day. I won’t name the paper, but some of you have probably noticed what I’m talking about. I hope your parents have, anyway.

  ‘This very morning for example I happened to notice a picture on one of their inside front pages. It was what they call a sweater girl...

  ‘I’ll speak quite frankly now. There are many famous and wonderful pictures of the naked female body with the bosom exposed—some of them are priceless treasures in the Vatican itself. But you’ll never find one of these masterpieces drawing attention to the bosom or making it appear larger than it really is.’

  And then there are Adrian’s delightfully pompous imaginary lectures to his imaginary wife on their imaginary honeymoon in Triabunna, Tasmania.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush, Denise darling. In one sense, what I’m going to do to you tonight may seem no different from what a bull does to his cows or a Hollywood film director does to one of his starlets. (Denise looked startled and puzzled. He would have to explain this point to her later.) It’s not a pretty thing to watch, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way our poor fallen human natures can reproduce themselves. If it seems dirty or even ridiculous to you, I can only ask you to pray that you’ll understand it better as time goes by.’

  So fervid is Adrian’s imagination that in the course of A Lifetime on Clouds he provides nothing less than an alternative history of the world—from the Garden of Eden through to 1950s Melbourne—focusing on the role that masturbation has played in shaping civilisation. We are all familiar with Adam and Eve’s crime of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and Cain’s slaying of his brother, but, according to the gospel of Adrian Sherd, what Cain did after spying on his mother and sisters as they bathed in the Tigris was even worse.

  When he was alone again, he formed his hand into the shape of the thing he had seen between their legs and became the first in human history to commit the solitary sin.

  Although it was not recorded in the Bible, that was a black day for mankind. On that day God thought seriously of wiping out the little tribe of Man. Even in His infinite wisdom He hadn’t foreseen that a human would learn such an unnatural trick—enjoying by himself, when he was hardly more than a child, the pleasure that was intended for married men only...

  Lucifer himself was delighted that Man had invented a new kind of sin—and one that was so easy to commit.

  If you only read one Gerald Murnane novel in your life, make it this one. There is so much pleasure to be had from reading this book that it’s surely a new kind of sin—and one that is so easy to commit.

  A Lifetime on Clouds

  PART ONE

  He was driving a station wagon towards a lonely beach in Florida—an immense arc of untrodden white sand sloping down to the warm, sapphire-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. His name was Adrian Sherd. His friends in the car with him were Jayne and Marilyn and Susan. They were going on a picnic together.

  They were almost at the beach when Jayne said, ‘O damn! I’ve left my bathers behind. Has anyone got a spare pair?’

  No one had. Jayne was very disappointed.

  The sea came into view. The women gasped at the beauty of it under the cloudless sky. Jayne said, ‘I can’t resist that glorious water. I’m going to have my swim anyway.’

  ‘Will you swim in your scanties and brassiere?’ asked Marilyn.

  ‘No. The salt-water would ruin them.’

  Sherd pretended not to be listening. But his stomach was weak with excitement.

  ‘You mean you’ll swim in the—?’ Susan began.

  Jayne tossed back her long dark hair and glanced at Sherd. ‘Why not? Adrian won’t be shocked—will you, Adrian?’

  ‘Of course not. I’ve always believed the human body is nothing to be ashamed of.’

  The grass above the sand was lush and green like a lawn. Sherd and Jayne spread out the picnic lunch. The other two hung back and whispered together.

  Susan came over and spoke. ‘It won’t be fair for Jayne if she goes swimming with nothing on and Adrian is allowed to peer at her all day. Adrian will have to strip off too. That’s a fair exchange.’

  They all looked at Sherd. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be fair either. Susan and Marilyn will see me in the raw without having to take their own bathers off.’

  Jayne agreed with Sherd that the only fair thing would be for all four of them to leave their bathers off. But Susan and Marilyn refused.

  After lunch Susan and Marilyn went into the trees and came back wearing their twopiece bathers. Jayne and Sherd waited until the others were in the water. Then they slipped out of their clothes with their backs turned to each other and ran down the sand staring straight ahead of them.

  In the water Jayne dived and splashed so much that it was some time before Sherd saw even the tops of her breasts. At first he thought she was teasing him. Then he realised he was behaving so calmly and naturally himself that she didn’t know how anxious he was to see her.

  Jayne ran out of the water at last and Sherd followed her back to the car. She stood side-on to him and dried herself, bending and twisting her flawless body to meet the towel.

  Sherd couldn’t pretend any longer that he saw this sort of thing every day. He stood in front of her and admired her. Then, while she sat beside him with only a towel draped round her shoulders, he made a long speech praising every part of her body in turn. And when she still made no effort to cover herself, he was moved to confess the real reason why he had brought them to the lonely beach.

  Jayne was not alarmed. She even smiled a little as though she might have suspected already what was in his mind.

  Susan and Marilyn came out of the water and went behind the trees to change. They both stared hard at Sherd as they passed.

  Jayne said, ‘I still think it’s unfair, those two seeing you in the nude and hiding their own bodies. I’m sure you’d like to look at them, wouldn’t you?’

  She bent her lovely compassionate face close to his and said, ‘Listen, Adrian. I’ve got a plan.’

  After this, events happened so fast that he barely had time to enjoy them properly. Jayne tiptoed up behind the other two women. Sherd followed, trembling. Jayne tore the towels away from their naked bodies, pushed Susan into the car and
locked the door. Marilyn squealed and tried to cover herself with her hands, but Jayne grabbed her arms from behind and held her for Adrian to admire. Then, while Marilyn walked around swearing and looking for her clothes, Jayne dragged Susan out of the car and showed her to Adrian.

  Adrian lost control of himself. He looked just once more at Jayne. Her eyes met his. She seemed to know what he was going to do. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that he preferred another’s charms to her own. But she saw he was overcome by his passions.

  Jayne leaned back resignedly against the car and watched. Even Susan forgot to cover herself, and watched too. And the two of them stood smiling provocatively while he grappled with Marilyn’s naked body and finally subdued her and copulated with her.

  Next morning Adrian Sherd was sitting in the Form Four classroom in St Carthage’s College in Swindon, a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne.

  The day started with forty minutes of Christian Doctrine. The brother in charge was taking them through one of the Gospels. A boy would read a few lines and then the brother would start a discussion. ‘It will pay us to look very closely at this parable, boys. Robert Carmody, what do you think it means?’

  Adrian Sherd had a sheet of paper hidden under his Gospel and a packet of coloured pencils on the seat beside him. He was looking for a way to make the Christian Doctrine period pass more quickly. Instead of drawing his usual map of America showing the main railways and places of interest, he decided to sketch a rough plan of his classroom. He drew twenty-nine rectangles for the desks and marked in each rectangle the initials of the two boys who sat there.

  He thought of several ways of decorating his sketch. Because it was a Christian Doctrine period, he chose a spiritual colour scheme. He took a yellow pencil and drew little spears of light radiating outwards from the boys whose souls were in the state of grace.