Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs Read online

  First UK edition published in 2020 by And Other Stories

  Sheffield – London – New York

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © 2005 Gerald Murnane

  First published in 2005 by Giramondo, Australia

  All rights reserved. The right of Gerald Murnane to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.

  ISBN: 978-1-911508-66-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-911508-67-0

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London.

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

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  Contents

  Meetings with Adam Lindsay Gordon

  On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life

  Why I Write What I Write

  Some Books Are to Be Dropped into Wells, Others into Fish Ponds

  The Cursing of Ivan Veliki

  Birds of the Puszta

  Pure Ice

  The Typescript Stops Here: Or, Who Does the Consultant Consult?

  Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

  Stream System

  Secret Writing

  The Breathing Author

  The Angel’s Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life

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  One of the least useful tasks that a person of my years might undertake is to ask how differently he or she should have done this or that in the past.

  Even so, the author of the second-last piece in this book, when he was hardly younger than I am now, chose to ask himself just that question. He answered it by declaring that he should never have tried to write novels or novellas or short stories but should have allowed each piece of his fiction to find its own way to its natural end.

  The author’s conjecturing is futile, of course, but it has inspired me to make an even bolder declaration. I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or even anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.

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  ‌Meetings with Adam Lindsay Gordon

  I remember an unseasonal cold in the air, an almost wintry sky, and mutterings around me from people I thought must have known the truth about the place. I knew little myself; and my father beside me was anxious, as usual, to be away.

  I remember looking briefly through more than one window, but what was on the other side of the glass I do not remember. Yet I recall my childish sadness that day for things lost or detained far from their rightful surroundings. I imagined that the house itself had been shipped many years before from Britain. Hearing that a man had composed poetry behind the locked doors, I thought of the poet as a sort of prisoner there, writing to pass the months or years of his sentence or exile. And a strange chain of confusions made me think that the poet was Robert Burns, whose verses I had already chanced on – and found, of course, unreadable.

  I saw Adam Lindsay Gordon’s house in Ballarat only that once, on an afternoon in 1946 while I waited with my parents for the bus that would take us across the Western Plains on the second leg of our holiday journey from Bendigo to the coast. Twenty years later I looked at a photograph of the house and saw not a poet’s cell or a transplanted bit of the Old World but the house where I had spent the Bendigo years of my childhood. Distracted on that grey summer day by mutterings about the poet and his unhappiness, I had not recognised the two front windows, the central front door, and the hooded iron verandah roof – the same pattern that was repeated over and over among the gravel footpaths and picket fences and pepper trees of Bendigo and every other goldfields town.

  I had failed to notice that the glass I peered through for signs of my first poet was part of the same symmetry that always appeared to me in the streets of Bendigo as a pair of eyes and a nose under a frowning forehead. Those were the eyes of all the people detained where nothing could ever be a subject for poetry or fiction. I would have seen myself as one of those blankly staring people except that my father talked often of taking us for good where we went every Christmas – south-west to his native district on the coast. Indoors on hot afternoons I never peeped around the drawn blinds of my own twin windows because I was thinking of our journey through the hills to Ballarat and then out over the plains.

  I could never handle any of the Victorian Readers, published by the Education Department, without imagining a single personage as their compiler. It was a male, the son of a Methodist minister, with two grandparents from Birmingham, one from Aberdeen, and one from Belfast. In his youth he had worked briefly as a jackaroo. Later he had been wounded at Gallipoli. In his mature years, apart from compiling the readers, he was a bushwalker, a lay preacher, and a student of British and Imperial History and Greek and Roman mythology.

  In 1949, at a two-roomed school in a forested district a little east of Warrnambool, my teacher actually looked and talked like the Compiler of Readers. And on a certain February afternoon, with his back to a window where deciduous shrubbery framed a sky hazy with bushfire smoke, he took us (his words) for poetry.

  Hark! the bells on distant cattle

  Waft across the range,

  Through the golden-tufted wattle,

  Music low and strange;

  Like the marriage peal of fairies

  Comes the tinkling sound,

  Or like chimes of sweet St Mary’s

  On far English ground.

  These and forty other lines from ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’ were printed in our Reader (with a new title and their stanzas altered to make them seem like a message of simple optimism). Girls who could be relied on to put feeling into their voices read aloud a stanza each. Then the composite overseer of my childhood explained that although the poet’s love of beauty was apparent, still Gordon was not quite a poet to be proud of. He had not quite become an Australian. Just when the cattle-bells and the wattle should have made him appreciate the true beauty of Australia, Gordon had felt homesick for England.

  I did not think it odd that Gordon should be blamed for Englishness by the same authority who taught loyalty to Empire. There were appropriate times for an Australian to think of England: during (Protestant) church services; on Shakespeare’s birthday; at the funeral of a civic or military leader. In general an Australian thought English thoughts indoors and when solemnity was called for. Out of doors one could be Australian, and more light-hearted. Yet I felt a certain sympathy for Gordon. I suspected in those days that a secret meaning was hidden in the landscapes of Australia; and I thought Gordon with his simple homesickness might have been closer to that meaning than the Compiler of Readers with his breadth of outlook.

  The page headed ‘January’ on the calendar always made me think of a yellowish plain of the Western District awash with heat haze. At the beginning of every January I foresaw myself reaching the heart of an actual plain and learning the secret that would keep me for ever afterwards contented in Australia. In January of a year when I seemed more than halfway from childhood to manhood, I found the empty paddock I had been expecting and stood there waiting to think and feel as an Australian. I was aware of nothing I could call an original thought. But if such a thought had come to me, I was sure it would have announced itself in metrical verse. I could almost hear the predictable pattern of stresses, although it had no words with it. Then, when I tried to think of myself as a poet of the Australian landscape, I had to imagine as the place where my words came to me the library of a large homestead with windows overhung by English trees. As my readers I imagined a people who strode in from the white, scorched paddocks and read leather-bound volumes in the half-light of indoors.

  In a summer when I was trying not to think of poetry, because I belie
ved I had read too much and lived too little, one of my drinking mates told me about ‘Dingley Dell’. This man seemed to think of Gordon as a poet of the bush, the horseman who had once, for sheer daring, urged his mount over a fence on the edge of the steepest cliff above the lakes at Mount Gambier. And yet this active bushman, so I was told, had shut himself away for two years at ‘Dingley Dell’: a lonely house on a lonely coast where convivial fellows such as ourselves would have gone mad. My drinking mate offered to take me from Melbourne to see the poet’s shrine.

  But we detoured too widely on the way; and somewhere near the South Australian border we were too tired and too ill to go any farther. Gordon had not been much of a drinker, but in our crazed banter we chose to confuse him with his Sick Stockrider and with a figure from Australian folk memories: the lonely, misplaced new-chum, already in the horrors from drink and maddened further by the harsh, foreign sunshine and cries of unrecognised birds.

  My father, whose forebears arrived in Victoria in the 1830s, scorned all more recent migrants. But he liked to recite by heart from ‘How We Beat the Favourite’. My father could forgive a good horseman much. Remembering the rhythms of racing ballads, and the internal rhymes falling like whip-blows, I looked at Gordon’s poems in the first week of November this year.

  Before I turned to the racing verses I looked for evidence that Gordon had looked at the Australian landscape, or felt about it, in some way peculiarly his own. I found that the poet sees his surroundings mostly as a place where he is called on to think in what he assumes to be a poet’s idiom. This stanza is from the dedication to Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.

  In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles

  ’Twixt shadow and shine,

  When each dew-laden air draught resembles

  A long draught of wine;

  When the skyline’s blue burnish’d resistance

  Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,

  Some song in all hearts hath existence, –

  Such songs have been mine.

  Substitute an appropriate botanical term for ‘wattle gold’ and the poet might be in the pampas of Argentina, preparing to sing to us.

  It is hardly worth raising the trite accusation that Gordon did not see Australia clearly. No doubt he saw it clearly enough for his own purposes, which did not include the writing of poems about the landscape itself. Wattles, distant mountains and horizons were boundaries of the place where poems of reflection occurred to Gordon. He was a poet in the landscape and not a poet of the landscape.

  But a racecourse is a landscape – and a landscape that is no mere backdrop but an arena where many doubtful issues can be resolved. The English bookmaker and world-traveller, J. Snowy, writing not long after Gordon’s death, called Melbourne the greatest horse-racing city in the world, where the entire population seemed to exist on racing. Australian writers on popular culture have made many shallow pronouncements on horse-racing. Novels and films set around racecourses seem the work of simpletons. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s racing verses may be not much more than thumping doggerel, but I find it peculiarly appropriate that an early Australian poet should have put on racing silks and ridden at Flemington and Coleraine.

  The racecourse must have seemed sometimes to Gordon his landscape of last resort. A man who had been born in Ballarat in the 1890s once told me that he had heard from a former jockey who rode with Gordon. At the barrier before a steeplechase one day at Dowling Forest, Gordon announced that this would be his last race. When he urged his horse like a madman at the first jump, the other riders knew what he had meant. That was the last they saw of him – in racing parlance. He won that day by a great space.

  (Age Monthly Review, December 1984)

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  ‌On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life

  Like other children of my time and place, I watched films from Hollywood in the first years after World War II, although I believe I watched fewer than most children. I watched perhaps twenty double-feature programmes from 1946 to 1948. The films were mostly cowboy films, in black and white, and I watched them on Saturday afternoons in the Lyric Theatre, Bendigo, of which I remember only that the floor was quite level, so that the screen always seemed high above me and remote.

  The films I watched made me discontented. Scene after scene disappeared from the screen before I had properly appreciated it; the characters moved and spoke much too fast. I hardly ever got the hang of a film, as my brother would say afterwards when I asked him to explain what I had missed.

  What I looked for in films was what I called pure scenery. I thought of pure scenery as the places safely behind the action: the places where nothing seemed to happen. Occasionally I glimpsed the kind of scenery I wanted. Behind the men on horses or the encampment of wagons was a broad tract of tall grass leading back to a line of hills. When I saw any such banal arrangement of grassy middle distance and hilly background, I tried to do to it something for which the simplest word I could have found was swallow. I wanted to feel that waving grass and that line of hills somewhere inside me. I wanted grass and hills fixed inside the space that began, as I thought, behind my eyes.

  I was not so literal-minded that I was troubled by cartoon images of a greedy boy with his cheeks swollen by a segment of landscape-pie. Yet the word swallow was not inapt. Getting the scenery from outside to inside seemed to engage me in some kind of bodily effort. And if I did not actually think of mouth or stomach, I could still see myself crouching over scenery made somehow conveniently tiny; the scenery brought so close to my face that the familiar became blurred, and strange details filled my eyes; some crucial moment arriving for which I had no words; and finally the scenery safely mine, a piece of plain with a rim of hills floating inside my private space, and rather higher than lower, as though my space was a sort of walking Lyric Theatre and the watching part of me was on the level floor far below the screen.

  But I was hardly less discontented after I had absorbed a slab of pure scenery than beforehand. Even in my private space, that scenery was still merely visible. Yet I had hoped to experience my scenery more completely. I had hoped to feel, or even to taste, the qualities that had made a plain of grass and a line of hills seem from the distance peculiarly mine. If I had been subtle enough, I might have understood that the watching part of me could do no more than watch. Even if the watching homunculus (or puerculus) had performed a further swallowing ritual, a further watcher would still have been no more than watching.

  I had first been attracted to my scenery because nothing seemed to happen there; my grasses and hills were never the site of the frantic action that took place in the foreground of films. But when I was tired of waiting to understand my empty places, I allowed certain things to happen there. My scenery became the setting for most of my imagined adult life.

  I spent much of my childhood assembling elaborate daydream worlds that I thought were foreshadowings of my later life. Even at thirteen I was filling an exercise book with the pedigrees to the third generation of an imagined herd of Guernsey cattle that I intended to own one day, and with maps of my dream-farm showing how each paddock was differently stocked in each season of the year. At the same age I built from wet clay a Trappist monastery – half a span high and two metres square – and wrote down the names of all the monks, together with their roster for celebrating mass in the main chapel and the private oratories.

  In my pure scenery at Bendigo I was not yet a dairy farmer or a monk. I was not even wholly I. The man of the silvery grasslands and grey-black hills was more American than Australian. His face and body were those of a cartoon-strip hero, Devil Doone. Only his thoughts were mine – or what I imagined at eight or nine would be mine twenty years from then.

  That man – dark-haired, broad-chested, and quietly confident – lived in a place named Idaho. As soon as I had learned to read an atlas I had discovered that in America, quite unlike Australia, a man could travel inland without confronting deserts. In a popular song broadcast fro
m 3BO Bendigo, a chorus of sweet female voices sang of the hills of Idaho. The actual Idaho was near enough to Texas and the Santa Fe Trail to have caught the eye sometimes of a film-maker from Hollywood. And so my pure scenery led always back from the crudely imagined America of films towards the hills of my Idaho.

  Far back in the seemingly empty land that was all but overlooked by the makers of American films, the Man of Idaho owned an enormous ranch. Yet the ranch, for all its size, was hardly visible from the few roads in the neighbourhood. It lay in a shallow part of the landscape, between two gentle slopes that looked from a distance like the one gradual hill. Any fool, I thought, could have located his ranch in some steep valley behind mountain peaks, like some lost world in a comic-strip adventure. But then the very mountains that were meant to hide the secret place would actually tempt and challenge intruders. The Man of Idaho laid out his ranch, his gardens, his house and the rooms inside it with cunning and pretence. Everything looked ordinary and uninviting at first glance. Bands of cowboy-actors could perform their absurd routines almost at the edge of my hero’s property but quite unaware of the riches hidden from their view – just as the people around me in Bendigo could not guess what was doubly hidden inside me.

  Although he was a considerable landowner, the Man of Idaho was an indoors man. I had not heard that phrase in those days; I first read it years later in an account by Hugh Hefner of his way of life. But the Man of Idaho was an unusual sort of playboy. The only pleasures he indulged in were the pleasures that I had decided were the most lasting and satisfying.

  Two events in my childhood impressed me so deeply that I have still not traced the whole pattern of their influence in my thinking and feeling.

  I was one of a line of schoolchildren shuffling through the dust under the elms in Rosalind Park and up the hill towards the Capitol Theatre to practise for our end-of-year concert. High on the hill, we climbed a wooden staircase towards the rear door of the theatre. On the last landing of the staircase, and just before I stepped into the dark theatre, I turned and looked back. Half the city of Bendigo lay below me. The shimmering iron roofs and drooping treetops, the glimpses of orange-gold gravel – everything I saw begged me to stare and interpret. I was looking at a map of the richest pleasures I knew. The long summer holidays were only days away. Anything I could fancy myself doing on blazing afternoons or in the long hot evenings – the site of it was hidden in that intricate pattern of roofs and trees.