ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I finished the first of these short fictions in Landscape with Landscape last night, and I’ll read another one tonight.  This collection of  Gerald Murnane’s fictions is irresistible.

First published in 1985 to reviews labelled ‘cruel’ by the collection’s new publisher Giramondo, these six fictions consist of

• Landscape with Freckled Woman;
• Sipping the Essence;
• The Battle of Acosta Nu;
• A Quieter Place than Clun;
• Charlie Alcock’s Cock; and
• Landscape with Artist.

None of them are very long, and five of them, the blurb tells me, trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and writing.  ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’ imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.

At the risk of simplifying a complex and intellectually sophisticated piece of writing, ‘Landscape with Freckled Woman’ tells a story of a writer trying to explain the conceptual basis of his writing.  The narrator is the only man on a committee of ten, being introduced to the rest of the committee as its new treasurer.  He tells us that he has never given up hope of being recognised as the aspiring writer of his youth.  Avoiding direct eye contact with the women:

… I wanted each woman to wonder, when the president introduced me and they learned I was a writer, whether I might have been quietly observing her for some time before she caught me at it.

The women were all a few years younger than me – in their early or middle thirties.  But they were not too young to have been, fifteen or twenty years before, the young women I had tried to impress by telling them I was going to become a writer.  These young women had always stopped listening – sometimes politely, sometimes not – when I reached a certain stage of drunkenness and began long, elaborate sentences and then could not finish them.  Yet I had never been wholly discouraged when some young woman turned away and left me talking to myself; she added one more to the number of women who might meet me years later and learn I had become a published writer after all and regret she had not listened more closely to me. (p.4)

(And here I think, what if the Nobel Committee comes to its senses after its absurd choice in 2016, and gives the Nobel Prize for Literature to our Gerald Murnane?  Would the cruel reviewer of 1985 cringe in shame?  Would there be a young woman who remembers Gerald Murnane talking about his landscape?)

Murnane can’t resist a little irony: the president tells the committee that they can contact their new treasurer any time because he’s a writer, who works from home.  I won’t be the only reader-writer who hisses a sharp intake of breath at this.  But the narrator moves on, only to tell us some pages later about his resolute quest to find a writing space where he will not be distracted, and not by crass committee members, but by vistas that would interfere with his imagined landscapes.

As he talks (or maybe he dreams he talks) to the freckled woman (to whom he is attracted because freckles and moles make skin unique) he recalls with embarrassment how his concept of landscape has changed.  As a young man he boasted that he was privileged to see what no one else could see:

that all I had to do as a writer was to describe the far-reaching vistas and the intricate topography continually before my eyes: that I need not be curious about what were called real people because I had already made out certain dim figures in my landscape. (p.5)

But now, he had taken to dreaming not because the world I saw by daylight was not enough for me but because it was too much.  He moves from one bleak vista to another, he wants a suburb ot Melbourne that offered nothing to the eye: a suburb from which a writer could see only what he himself devised.

And sometimes the tale of this writer’s quest is droll indeed.  Of his room in inner city Fitzroy he tells us:

He had not been able to pass in and out of the kitchen downstairs without speaking to the woman who seemed the chief tenant of the house.  (He was never sure which of the several men who drank with her every evening actually lived in the house.)  He drank in his own room every night, but having no refrigerator he was forced to keep flagons of cheap wine instead of the beer he preferred.  On Melbourne Cup eve the woman climbed the stairs and called out to him to come down and be sociable.  The young man sat in the kitchen with the woman and her men-friends and accepted their beer.  When they asked him what he did for a living he said he was a teacher by day and a writer in the evening.  They became uneasy, and he wondered which part of his answer had not convinced them.  He said he had moved to their suburb to be among real people.  They sat and looked at him.  He thought they might have resented his coming empty-handed to drink with them, so he climbed up to his room to bring back what he called his grog.  When the woman saw his flagon of hock she ordered him to get it out of her house that minute.  Paint was what she called it. No one, she said, had ever insulted her by bringing paint like that into her house before.  He explained that he only drank wine because he had no fridge for beer.  She wanted to know why he hadn’t asked to keep his beer in her own perfectly good fridge in the kitchen.

He took the wine outside and poured it down the gully-trap.  One of the men told the woman to take it easy and offered the young man more beer, and he stayed drinking with them until after midnight.  But from that day he could no longer write in Fitzroy.  For two weeks he went on drinking wine – taking his flagon to work each morning in his bag in case the woman broke into his room and searched it while he was out.  But each night instead of working on his landscape he lay with his ear to the floor trying to hear what was being said in the kitchen.  He no longer walked through the kitchen to the toilet in the backyard but urinated into a bottle and poured it out of the window onto a patch of weeds.  But he began to believe that the woman in the kitchen could hear his water splashing on the ground in the lulls of the television. (p.18)

There is both dry amusement and poignancy in this image of a young primary school teacher carting his flagon to and from school each day.  Only those who have had their capacity to think and to imagine destroyed by the unwitting interference of others can really understand how awful it is.  It’s not momentary; it persists for as long as the fear of its repetition.  It’s not writer’s block, it’s worse than that because the desire to write is overwhelming, but one just can’t do it knowing that the interruption will come.

In the introduction to this edition, Murnane tells us that he began writing short fiction or novellas because in 1980 he had become a teacher of fiction writing, and he saw the incongruity of exhorting his students to write short fiction when he had written hardly any himself.  This story began as a piece he then wrote called ‘The president was freckled’ but ultimately it took fourteen drafts and was the last to be written and almost defied me to find its final shape.  For those of us who’ve read Inland and The Plains, it makes perfect sense, from beginning to end.

The next story is ‘Sipping the Essence’….

Update (the next day)

‘Sipping the Essence’ is a story of courtship.  An awkward, inhibited young man, a writer, has his first painful experience of courting, and losing, a girl (an experience which he thinks might be an auspicious start to [his] career as a poet of the lonely spaces of Australia).  For his brief time as her boyfriend he maps out how to fill the intervals between meeting and the first kiss:

Each week I would talk about the life and work of a writer I admired.  The four writers were Raymond Roussel, Mikhail Artsybasheff, Leonid Andreev, and Jack Kerouac.  (p.53)

He has a drinking partner called Kelvin Durkin, whose wisecracking style seems utterly unlike a friend an aspiring poet of the lonely spaces of Australia might have, but like the landlady of the Fitzroy house in ‘Landscape with Freckled Woman’ Durkin shows Murnane at his economical best with characterisation.  (And yes, I know he would disapprove of my use of the term because elsewhere in his writing he has been at pains to explain that he doesn’t do characters!)

Update (the day after that)

I’ve just finished ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’.  Ostensibly, it’s a story about a Paraguayan man who believes he is Australian, who struggles to preserve this identity while his son is gravely ill.  Like the other stories it is written in first person, revealing innermost thoughts that are not shared with anyone else because no one else understands and it causes discord if he tries to explain.  It is terribly, terribly poignant and made me realise that there can be moments of crisis in some lives that don’t just involve enormous loss but also a struggle to defend a reality that isn’t shared by anyone else.

Update, long afterwards in 2021, see this superb review of the collection as a whole by Matt Jakubowski at Truce.

Author: Gerald Murnane
Title: Landscape with Landscape
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing, 2016, first published 1985
ISBN: 9781925336115
Review copy courtesy Giramondo Publishing

Available from Fishpond: Landscape with Landscape

Or direct from Giramondo.