ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Yesterday was destined to be an awful day, and I decided to spend it with my head in the sand.  I did not watch the news, I avoided political Tweets and my activist Facebook friends.  I read books instead and lived in a different world.

In the morning I read more of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, (a book I won in BookerTalk‘s Christmas competition, thank you Karen!) Reflecting today on this book’s gut-wrenching descriptions of slavery, I am reminded that America has been appalling before and that good people worked to change it.

Over lunch I started a beautiful new biography called Margaret Flockton: A Fragrant Memory who was Australia’s first professional botanical artist.  I didn’t choose it for any political reasons, just because I like botanical art, but again, reflecting on it today, I am minded to think that women have overcome all kinds of obstacles in the past and will do so again.

We went next door to admire our neighbours’ (finally!) finished renovations, and over nibbles and a glass of wine, sat on their new deck in the glorious late afternoon sunshine and talked of inconsequential things.  Not entirely inconsequential because (of course!) we also talked books, and I put my old teacher-librarian hat on and told their little girl how much I loved reading because it takes you into different worlds.

Before dinner I resumed reading Drusilla Modjeska’s new memoir Second Half First and was back in the world of my young adulthood, when the world was full of promise and with grassroots activism we were seeing real and important changes that made us a progressive nation once more.

And I went to bed with Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape.  There are six short fictions in this collection and I have been reading them one by one.  (See my previous post about the first three).  There is no better world to lose yourself in than Murnane’s.  His landscapes are both vast and intimate all at the same time, and ‘A Quieter Place than Clun’ especially so…

In this fiction, which lures the reader into thinking it is autobiographical because it seems so real, the narrator describes his journey towards writing the landscape.  Not the landscape around him that intrudes into his inner world, but a landscape of his own making.  This journey is both painfully droll and poignant; it is also metaphorical and real as he takes up life as a primary school teacher in the bayside and inner suburbs of Melbourne and then travelling around country Victoria as a statewide relieving teacher, filling absences for head-teachers who had resigned suddenly or had nervous breakdowns.

As a very young man about to sit (and fail) his Matriculation he had struggled with opposing visions of his future: idealised images of life in the gardens of a seminary, or strolling the lawns of the University of Melbourne as a student of psychology or philosophy.  In the event he became a clerk processing sick-leave forms for the Department of Education, telling his parents that he was studying by night for a second try at Matric but actually spending his solitary nights reading, absorbed by what he knew of the landscapes of Kentucky from his reading of Elected Silence by the American poet Thomas Merton.  At the same time he is also obsessed with the problem of finding a soul mate, only partly so that he can avoid the teasing of the boorish males at work and their tales of conquest.

In those days I believed that people were distinguished mostly by the landscapes they thought about. I was sure I had not met a young woman whose landscapes could compare with mine. The public service typists in the office where I worked seemed made up of layers of streets in places like Elsternwick or Moorabbin or crowded beaches on the Mornington Peninsula.  The young women I saw in church on Sunday gave onto the sandy plain south-east of Oakleigh where houses could be built with loans from the YCW Co-operative Housing Society.

Then, one Saturday morning, a young woman brushed past me in Cheshire’s and reached down a small book from a shelf in Standard Authors and took it to the sales counter.  When I saw her face I knew the landscapes behind it would lead me out of Kentucky and North Carolina.  Watching her walk serenely out onto the street, I decided she must have watched over places coloured neither soul-silver nor skin-gold. (p.155)

Most readers, I think, even aficionados of Murnane, will read this fiction half-hoping that each girl will be the one.  ‘A Quieter Place than Clun’ begins, after all, with the poignant image of this young man taking himself off to play basketball each week with the local branch of the Young Catholic Workers in the hope of meeting a female of [his] own age at last, only to find that the girls of The National Catholic Girls’ Movement practised on Tuesdays while the men played on Wednesdays, and the long awaited joint picnic was by convention attended by couples, the man buying the ticket for his girlfriend.

I had watched quietly while every other member of my team ordered two tickets.  Each YCW member, it seemed, had a girlfriend from the NCGM to take to the snow.  I had no girlfriend.  I had never had a girlfriend. That was why I had joined the YCW.  Yet I had still not spoken to a girl in all the months I had been playing basketball. I had never even seen the girls of the NCGM – although I had thought of them often enough. They too played basketball but they practised on Tuesday night.  Every Wednesday night – the young men’s night – I had enjoyed a keen pleasure to think that twenty-four hours earlier a throng of short-skirted young women had pressed the weight of their thighs and buttocks against the same asphalt that jarred my skinny goose-fleshed legs.  (p.148)

(I am so tempted to quote the rest of this passage about his endurance of spending endless freezing nights at practice and hours sitting on the reserve bench being patronised, experiencing it as a preparatory rite which would culminate in an approved opportunity to mingle freely and to inspect an assembly of eligible females without fearing that I might violate some unwritten rule of conduct between the sexes.  But the author and publisher of this very special book deserve that you should buy it, not read some of its best bits here on this blog).

Until he encountered images of landscapes that conflicted with the landscapes he had envisaged for himself the narrator saw his future as a poet and book collector.  The girl in Cheshire’s (a long-gone bookshop in the Melbourne CBD) leads him to the woodland landscapes of Thomas Hardy, although he never sees her again to speak to her.  But Hardy eventually disappoints:

The lives of writers began to interest me as much as their own works, and I soon found fault with Thomas Hardy.  He seemed to have ben too bound up with the people around him, too ready to see his dull neighbours as heroic dreamers. If I was going to follow his example I would have to rejoin the YCW and pretend that the basketball men went to Donna Buang and such places to see the grey-blue heart of Victoria. But what clearly disqualified Hardy was his having been twice married.  I could not accept that the purest green could spring from a man who had spent most of his life as a fond husband.  (p.162)

And there you can see from that excerpt that it would be a mistake to assume that this fiction is a mere coming-of-age story about a solitary young Catholic misfit.  As he ventures from one literary influence to another, he refines his ideas about the landscapes that will guide his life and his writing.  Reading it made me want to re-read Murnane’s History of Books to which I failed to do justice.  I suspect that I could happily spend a year just re-reading my collection of Murnane’s books, and following the trail of his reading…

It things get really bad out there in the real world, I might just do that.

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.