M Sarki

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/57377360585/landscape-with-landscape-by-gerald-murnane

Thank goodness for me I am courageous enough to break the rules. Even in the face of a serious suggestion to read the works of Gerald Murnane in the order in which they were written, still I refused and read them as the books came to me in the U.S. mail. First I read The Plains and that pleased me to no small degree and enough so that I could not wait to get my hands on another one. The next one available to me for reading was Barley Patch and that one was different, and a review of previous works, a sequel so to speak, but still I got the feel for Murnane and what he was up to in his so-called true fiction. This title Landscape with Landscape is so unlike either of the first two novels I read that initially I was spooked over what I had gotten myself into. But Murnane doesn't change too much in between the times it takes to write his books. He may, or may not, get better. This collection is a group of loosely connected short fictions which in some cases are basically novellas and rich as can be with all the themes of a full-length Murnane offering. I am flat-out amazed at this Aussie's talent.

It is one thing to write a review about a novel and quite another to remark on a collection of loosely connected stories. Given they are all fictions, this is the one thread they all have in common with each other. That and their impressive genius in their composition. Not to mention the complete engagement, even going into them highly doubtful of this development, but exceedingly pleased with the fabulous results. Of course, Gerald Murnane is not for everybody. And I am not here to shame anyone for not liking nor respecting him for being the great writer that he certainly is. His work is no different than songs by certain bands we like, or symphonies composed by artists the like we shall never see or ever hear from again. It is a matter of taste, and mine goes to something as my friend Gordon Lish describes as being "unexampled in its feeling".

The first story in this collection is titled Landscape with Freckled Woman. Stating from the very beginning that the speaker is the only man in a neighborhood committee that numbers nine women and himself, I was a bit skeptical that there would be much of interest for me here as I generally like to hide from these types of organizations, as does Murnane obviously as well. But almost immediately Murnane had me interested in his secret memory and how it affected his relationship with all these women at the table. His evolving ideas of who he once was and now is vastly alters the changing landscape that Murnane is always focused on. The one woman the speaker chooses to reveal to us besides a brief countenance regarding the president, is flawed in her appearance and has freckles, or marks on her skin, that makes her more real to him and worthy of conversation with as he is a writer and interested in these types of landscapes. But of course, he cannot reveal too much of himself to her as he is not gifted in the gab necessary to converse with members of the opposite sex so instead he tells us, the reader, everything he wishes he could intimately disclose to the freckled woman. It is an amazing story and I felt it to be a great beginning to this collection, but doubtful he could continue this thread of excellence in the remaining five entrees to come.

The second story in this collection is titled Sipping the Essence. In this story Murnane actually has names for his characters which is unusual based on the previous two books I have read thus far. But these characters are delicious and so are their names. Kelvin Durkin plays the lead character's best friend and really isn't much of a friend but somebody it seems the lead needs to talk to and bounce his ideas off or perhaps compare himself to. They are unlike each other in numerous ways except for their inexperience with women and that is the driving force in the story as they both are interested in the same girl. This story is so rich in its telling and one of the very best stories I have ever read. Kelvin Durkin ends up being a richly formed character of the first rank. The lead an awkward drunk who makes his own concoctions of liquors and juice or whatever he gets into his head as worth drinking. But his thinking is superb. He digresses enough to challenge the best of Sebald's adventures on the page. And Murnane is supremely clever and sadly funny about the true facts of life and we need to hear them coming from him and in the way in which he informs us. Unrequited love is the basis for the unfinished business between the three main characters. And the tale is rich and full of dreams and woe.

The third story is titled The Battle of Acosta Nu. Before reading this I did a bit of research as Murnane has admitted to only leaving his hometown of Melbourne once in all his life and this story takes place in Paraguay. His main character is a descendant of a small settlement of Australians. Though his story is fiction it is based on truth, as is all his fiction. In 1893 two thousand men and women led by William Lane left Australia for Paraguay where they established a utopian socialist colony called "New Australia". Paraguay offered the Australian settlers free land in order to help restore the population as just a few years earlier many of their youngest population was lost in a war on their country by serious invaders. The Battle of Acosta Ñu (or Campo Grande) was a battle where on August 16, 1869, 20,000 men of the Triple Alliance fought Paraguayan forces made up of 6,000 soldiers, many of them nine and ten year-old children. There is a national holiday to commemorate the memory of the children who lost their lives in the battle. In October 1957 the town changed its name to Nueva Londres, Spanish for New London. The colony was not a success, but over 2000 descendants can still be found today somewhat scattered into the surrounding area. Of these descendants, the main character in the Murnane story lives with his wife and two children. The manner in which Murnane weaves his tale is remarkable and is believable in very sense of the word. I cannot help but be reminded of Thomas Bernhard or W.G. Sebald in his writing although there isn't the blatant hatred and disgust present in the Murnane text that the above two gents so adroitly use to their advantage. But make no mistake, Murnane is definitely an Australian and proud of it, and wanting always to know more about his continent, country, and its land. Here, in Paraguay, he is again focused on the landscapes he lives in, the land that in his dreams he most loves, and his family which produces the tension needed for his truth to be told. A critically sick son provides the grist for thoughts on religion and spirituality, heaven and hell, nationality and a sense of home, racism, love, bravery, and honorable behavior among other digressions Murnane is so skilled at delivering. Murnane connects the story of The Battle of Acosta Ñu to the war his son is fighting in his hospital room. This, a poignant piece of literature, and of a quality I had no idea I was once again devouring. Will the Murnane brilliance never cease?

The fourth story is titled A Quieter Place than Clun. When I first started reading this after already being quite impressed with the first three works found inside this book, my mind was loosely wandering on its own instead of focusing on the words I was reading. It was immediately obvious to me that Murnane had always felt himself a bit different from others, as definitely not measuring up to the typical norms of the day regarding sports, and girls, and other activities such as the attendance of movies, games, and dancing. The Catholic religion was troubling to him but he was not yet ready to reject its teachings, just as most kids who never question, who are also afraid of rebelling too much against the powers that be. He was always more interested in his own mind, his learning and dreaming of wide expanses that the typical kid was not interested in. His idea of a girlfriend was somebody like himself who was more interested in talking than doing anything in a group or being socially vibrant and engaged. His fantasy held that this girl would find him one day, or he her, but his chances seemed to be slipping away as he observed the other happy couples busily moving through this life in Melbourne. I found it rather interesting how he then wove Thomas Merton and Kentucky into his dream expanse and a fantasy-girl at a North Carolina summer camp reading a book much as he did on an Outer Banks hillside surrounded by Spanish moss. I think in all his subtleties that Gerald Murnane is so very incredible, if you can please excuse me for repeating myself.

"…I decided that falling in love was nothing else than wanting urgently to see a woman's landscape."

The digressions run rampant in this tale of poetry he finds in books on the shelves of bookshops and exterior landscapes. Women, and the homosexuality of A.E. Housman, divide the latter half of this text and add a bit of confusion to the ensuing adventure. A character in the story by the great name of Warwick Whitbread, his wife and his friends, their women's breasts, thighs, and group picnics digressing into a Dylan Thomas idea of writing drunken poetry enough that a potentially-mounting sexual drive should save him from his own writing of it. After seeing enough of breast feedings and bare thighs he moseys down to an overgrown river bank to take care of his two-minute business in order to see if the women's breasts and thighs on his return to the group would still interest him enough to indeed possibly save him from this life of writing and make him be more inclined then to make his own children and raise a family. The problem, in a sense, was solved by his friend Warwick Whitbread by his not inviting our chief character to any more picnic excursions involving the Whitbread family and friends.

The continuing thread of the piece centers on his career as a teacher and his ongoing flight from the women in his building even though he was obviously obsessed with all of them. He moves into a spare room of another friend named the Danziger so he can write his novel that is to take the place of his writing poetry, which was not going much of anywhere of count. But still, our character spends a great deal of time alone holed up in his room or drinking heavily with the Danziger and his wife.

"Every Saturday night the Danziger and his wife went to a party somewhere in the suburbs. They urged me to go with them and bring back a woman to their house. Sometimes I did go, and sat drinking in a corner, hoping some preceptive young woman would notice about me the faint aureole from my fiery pattern of nerves. But always, in the early hours of Sunday, I would go home in a taxi with just the Danziger and his wife."

The story comes full circle to end up back in a solitary room with his book on A.E. Housman, looking onto another landscape in a place more quiet than any he had known. Though revisiting some of his themes of previous sentences I have read by him, he elaborates in ways not yet achieved and offers a different perspective of the same landscapes and self-imposed barriers he has already constructed. I believe this is what he sets out to do. Less dramatic than the previous three in this collection, this story nonetheless is completely satisfying and urges me on to the next installment.

In the beginning I was a bit concerned that I might be subjecting myself, and learning more about Murnane's sexual foibles, than I needed to. Charlie Alcock's Cock is the fifth story and it deals right from the beginning with his own young age, his older female cousins, his curiosity for secrets and sexuality, and all issues he has examined in prior fictions I have previously read. But there is nothing that feels old and worn or repetitive in an irritating manner. There is little doubt while reading the first few pages of this story that Murnane will be taking the reader again on another journey though he never leaves his writing table or his house. Murnane's perpetual dreams of landscapes are his only interest, and the intense focus of his gaze is his great drive resulting from his incessantly strong desire to be always somewhere else it seems. Perhaps it has been the unseasonably cool summer in northern Michigan this year and my own set of lifelong issues that has me a bit frustrated in the reading of this particular story. But I find myself equally ajar with the viewpoints of the world-at-large of the other young men in the story who are too worldly for their own good and the narrator's male cousin who is so comfortable in his skin and vocation for the priesthood. Meanwhile, our narrator struggles with finding a way into the heart and mind of a woman like himself as well as his constant need for sexual gratification which is handled exclusively by his own deft right hand. Nothing earth-shattering in this repetitive revealing of his ongoing neurosis for coming-to-age albeit his retarded time-table for doing so. But the title is making more sense the further on I go. And I am confident in the mastery of Murnane to get me where I need to be before he drops me off into another hidden suburb of the only town he knows. And he does, and it is a sadness that somehow comforts me. His honesty is refreshing, and though he has good reasons for his distaste for things Catholic, he loves their presbyteries and the solace they provide, their hidden arbors and vast lawns, private, and very good places to hide. Murnane is definitely an introspective and he almost kills me in this story of its proof. But he didn't and I am glad I forged on through the most difficult story so far in this collection.

Landscape with Artist completes this book. Australia's version of The Beats are called scrags and the narrator is interested in being one of them as he finally, after twenty years, leaves everything in the city and moves to Harp Gully. He will give up his job as a teacher, his wife and young family, and live the life of a writer living in a shack on a hill. But he believes all artists are pretentious and remembers thinking years ago he was Jack Kerouac ready for his own trip across the Great Divide. But all he can seem to muster most days is another drunken stupor, the entire day's drink spewing from his mouth as he regularly vomits behind another back veranda away from the house, staggering in misery before collapsing again as perhaps did Sal Paradise before him.

"I began one draft after another of the same story because I was too timid to leave Melbourne and to look for the place I belonged or the woman who would listen to the story of my travels."

Most everything in this story is imagined, as is his life, and even what he thinks of it as he looks back. Each memory another fiction he may have developed in his search for this elusive dream for the right woman and the place he might do his work. This, a constant theme in all Murnane's writing and one I never tire of as strange as it might seem. Gerald Murnane is a writer's author, somebody who is willing to go the distance to find what it is that makes himself tick. But in the process he is self-destructive to degrees apparently unhealthy and perhaps even unnecessary. The words keep coming and finding their place in sentences so well-developed they seem to fool. For as honest as they seem there is a lack of credulity in them. The frustrations are certainly real and believable, and in their process of becoming his writing flourishes under the weight of them. For some, I imagine there is no way out and their reading of this becomes unbearable. For me it is a supersaturation of all things good and true, and the journey through them not only inebriated, but invigorating, as if a shot glass could make the bigger difference in my shuddering.

"I have reached the degree of drunkenness at which things even a little odd or unfamiliar can seem strange and remarkable."

Lord knows the man drinks too much. And for somebody like me who hasn't had a drop of alcohol in over twenty-seven years it could begin to get a bit boring to continually read about his almost constant intoxication. But that is what my own reading and writing has become; a replacement for my addictions that caused my own undue suffering. It is important I think for Murnane to keep the pressure on and he does it with his drink. What strikes me most about his almost-constant inebriation is his mounting frustration in which the abuse of hard drink does nothing to curb it except for temporarily putting him out of his misery. And that is what the writing does as well. It is only good for in the doing, and the results matter little to abate the frustration a true artist must embrace. The brilliance in this story is in its obvious rancor for what is at stake.