Barley Patch
Authors: Gerald Murnane
OTHER WORKS BY GERALD MURNANE
Tamarisk Row
A Lifetime on Clouds
The Plains
Landscape with Landscape
Inland
Velvet Waters
Emerald Blue
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
BARLEY PATCH
GERALD MURNANE
DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS
CHAMPAIGN / DUBLIN / LONDON
Originally published in Australia and New Zealand by the Giramondo Publishing Company, 2009
Copyright © 2011 by Gerald Murnane
First Edition, 2011
All rights reserved
Ebook conversion by Kelly Teagle,
TIPS Technical Publishing, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murnane, Gerald, 1939-
Barley patch / Gerald Murnane. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Australia and New Zealand by the Giramondo Publishing.”
ISBN 978-1-56478-676-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Australia--Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.3.M76B37 2011
823’.914--dc22
2011019089
Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency,
and by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body
Cover: design and composition by Danielle Dutton, illustration by Lachlan Plain
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America
PART 1
The Turf was so complicated it went on forever.
—
Jack Kerouac,
Doctor Sax
Must I write?
A few weeks before the conception of the male child who would become partly responsible, thirty-five years later, for my own conception, a young man aged nineteen years and named Franz Xaver Kappus sent some of his unpublished poems and a covering letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, who was by then a much-published writer although he was only twenty-eight years of age.
Kappus, of course, wanted Rilke to comment on the poems and to advise him as to who might publish them. In an answering letter Rilke made some general comments, not especially favourable, and declined to discuss the matter of publication. However, Rilke did not fail to advise the young man:
Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Search for the reason that bids you write . . . acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?
I first read the above passage in June 1985, soon after I had bought a second-hand copy of
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
, translated by M. D. Herter Norton and published in New York by W. W. Norton & Company. When I first read the passage, I was a teacher of fiction-writing in what was then called a college of advanced education. As soon as I had read the passage, I typed it onto a clean page and then put the page into one of the folders of notes
that I used for my classes in the unit that was called Advanced Fiction Writing. Once each year thereafter, I read to the students of that unit the advice of Rilke to the young poet. I then urged the students to question themselves from time to time as Rilke would have had them do. I then said it would be no bad thing if several at least of the persons present were to decide at some time in the future, in the stillest hour of their night, that they need no longer write.
I never afterwards heard that any former student of mine had suddenly decided to write no more or that he or she ever put into practice or even remembered Rilke’s stern advice. In the early autumn of 1991, however, four years before I ceased to be a teacher of fiction-writing, and on a bustling afternoon rather than during a still night, and without even putting to myself Rilke’s recommended question, I myself gave up writing fiction.
Why had I written?
When I stopped writing, I could have said that I had been writing fiction for more than thirty years. Some of what I had written had been published, but most of it had been stored as manuscripts or typescripts in my filing cabinets and will be there still when I die.
My pieces of published writing were called by publishers and by almost all readers either
novels
or
short stories
, but to have them thus called began in time to make me feel uncomfortable, and I took to using only the word
fiction
as the name for what I wrote. When I stopped writing at last, I had not for many years used the terms
novel
or
short story
in connection with my writing. Several other words I likewise avoided:
create
,
creative
,
imagine
,
imaginary
, and, above all,
imagination
. Long before I stopped writing, I had come to understand that I had never created any character or imagined any plot. My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination.
I was seldom embarrassed to have to admit this. The word
imagination
seemed to me connected with antiquated systems of psychology: with drawings of the human brain in which each swelling was named for the faculty residing there. Even when I looked into some or another novel by a contemporary author much praised for his or her imagination, I was far from being envious; a powerful imagination, it seemed, was no preventative against faulty writing.
For many years I wrote, as I thought, instinctively. I certainly did not write with ease: I laboured over every sentence and sometimes rewrote one or another passage many times. However, what might be called my subject-matter came readily to me and offered itself to be written about. What I called the contents of my mind seemed to me more than enough for a lifetime of writing. Never, while I wrote, did I feel a need for whatever it was that might have been mine if only I had possessed an imagination.
I was never merely a writer, of course. I was a reader of fiction long before I began to write it. Many writers of novels or short stories or poetry have claimed to be, in their own words, voracious and insatiable readers. I would describe myself as an erratic reader, not only because I have failed to read many of the books most admired by readers and writers of my generation but because I soon forgot much of what I did read and yet dwelt often on a certain few texts or even a few pages from those texts.
As a child, I seldom read what were called children’s books, partly because I hardly ever saw such books and partly because I decided at an early age that I was capable of reading adults’ books. My parents owned no books to speak of. They borrowed each week several books from what was called during my childhood a circulating library, but the books were always returned to the library before I could read more than a few pages. I read mostly from magazines. My parents bought each month two magazines filled with short stories. One magazine was
Argosy
, which came, I think, from England. The other was
The Australian Journal
, which included not only short stories but part of a serialised novel. The rule in our household was that my mother would first read each of these magazines so that she could tell me which stories, if any, were not suitable for me. I would then be allowed access to the magazine, provided that I undertook not to read the stories deemed unsuitable. These, of course, I always read first, hoping to learn from them some or another secret from the world of adults. I learned from this furtive reading of mine only that my mother did not want me to read descriptions of what might be called prolonged, passionate embraces and that she did not want me to know that young women sometimes became pregnant even though they were not yet married.
A person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read. I can still remember, nearly sixty years later, some of what I read as a child, which is to say that I can still call to mind some of the images that occurred to me while I read as a child. As well, I claim that I can still feel something of what I felt while those images were in the foreground of my mind.
During the years from about 1960 to about 1990, I read more than a thousand books, mostly of a sort that could be called literature. When I last looked through the pages of the ledger where the titles and the authors of all those books are recorded, I learned that twenty or so of the books had left on me some sort of lasting impression. A few moments ago I was able to scribble in quick succession, in the margin of the page where I wrote the early drafts of each sentence on
this
page, the titles and authors of nine of the twenty or so books mentioned in the previous sentence. And just now, while I was writing the previous sentence, I remembered a tenth title and author. After having written the previous sentence, I waited for more than a minute, at the end of which time an eleventh title and author came to my mind.
Two days have passed since I wrote the previous sentence. During that time, no further titles or authors have occurred to me, although I asked myself several times whether I should add to my list of eleven titles the eight titles of my own published books together with the titles of my unpublished books, given that I often recall my state of mind when I was writing one or another passage from those books and that I sometimes recall also a phrase or a sentence from the passage.
One day, I decided not to go on reading one after another book of a sort that could be called literature—that day was only a few months before the day when I decided to write no more fiction. When I made the earlier decision, I intended to confine my reading in future to the few books that I had never forgotten; I would reread those books—I would dwell on them for the rest of my life. But after my decision to write no more fiction, I foresaw myself reading not even my few unforgotten books. Instead of reading what could be called literature and instead of writing what I called fiction, I would devise a more satisfying enterprise than either reading or writing. During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote but had never afterwards detached themselves from me: I would contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that comprised the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing. During the rest of my life I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.
Before I began to write the first of the three preceding paragraphs, I was about to report that a few images had come to my mind while I was writing the last two sentences of the paragraph preceding that paragraph. The first of the few was an image of two green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees that first appeared in my mind in 1950, while I was reading the first story that I read of the series of short stories published in
The Australian Journal
about a fictional farm named Drover’s Road, or it may have been Drovers’ Road. The author was, I think, a woman, but I have long since forgotten her name. The same few chief characters took part in each story; they were members of the latest of the several generations of the family that had lived at the farm, whichever name it had. I have forgotten the names of the chief characters, both male and female, but I felt just now something of what I felt towards a certain female character whenever I read about her: I wanted no sadness or anxiety to be visited on her; I wanted the course of her life to be untroubled. The character in question was young and unmarried, and I wanted her to remain so for as long as I went on reading about her.
While I was writing the first few sentences of the previous paragraph, I was unable to recall any details of the images of persons and faces that I had had in mind while I read as a child the series of short stories referred to. At some time while I was writing the last two sentences of the previous paragraph, I found myself assigning to the female character under mention the image of a face that I first saw during the early 1990s when I looked into a book that I had recently bought on the subject of horse-racing in New Zealand. (I recall no reference to horse-racing in any of the short stories in which the young female was a character, but after I had assigned a face to the character, I recalled that the place called Drover’s or Drovers’ Road was described as being in a fictional New Zealand. As soon as I recalled this, I found myself assigning to the image mentioned earlier of the two green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees, a background not of snow-covered mountains such as I had sometimes seen in pictures of New Zealand, where I have never been, but of sombre, forested mountains such as I saw during my one, brief visit to Tasmania in the 1980s.)
Not far away (according to the scale of distances that applies in my mind)—not far away from the two green paddocks and part of a homestead is an image of a two-storey building intended to be an English farmhouse several centuries old. I have always assumed that this house is surrounded by green paddocks or fields, as they might be called, but only one such green expanse has been of interest to me. It reaches from the vicinity of the house to a steep hill in the middle distance. Near the summit of the hill is a grove or a clump of trees. In the book of fiction that first caused me to see this hill in my mind, the original hill is called
Tanbitches
. Somewhere in the book is the explanation that the name of the hill is a variation of the phrase
ten beeches
, the trees near the summit being beech trees.
Sometimes I seem to recall that the variation was explained as being merely the sort of change that happens over time to an often-used phrase. At other times, I seem to recall that
Tanbitches
was said to be a remnant of the dialect formerly widespread in that part of England. Regardless of which explanation I seem to recall, I always feel again a semblance of the unease that I felt whenever I saw in my mind, as a child-reader, an image of the hill with the trees on it and heard in my mind at the same time the quaint-sounding name of the place.
I should have felt not unease but pleasure. I should have been pleased that I could refer to a prominent place in my mind by using what seemed more a code-word than a name. I was already aware as a child that the landscapes or the human faces or the melodies or the panels of coloured glass in doors or windows or the sets of racing colours or the aviaries of birds or the passages of prose in books or magazines—that the origins of the images most firmly lodged in my mind had a certain quality that first took my notice and afterwards compelled me to memorise the item affecting me. I am no more able now than I was as a child to apply a name to that certain quality. Given that I sometimes tried as a child to devise a private word or phrase for the quality, I should have been pleased to be able to hear in my mind the word
Tanbitches
whenever I saw in my mind a green field sloping upwards towards a hill with a clump of trees near its top, but the word made me uneasy, and I believe today that my unease caused me for the first time as a child-reader to think of a story, as I would have called it, as having been made up, as I would have said, by an author.