Interview with Gerald Murnane: Nobel Prize Nominee and Australia's Greatest Living Writer
Interviewing one of the world's greatest living writers, a great cartographer of the mind and the soul
Interview with Gerald Murnane: Nobel Prize Nominee and Australia's Greatest Living Writer. Watch now on YouTube!
The New York Times has described Gerald Murnane as ‘‘the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.’’ A long-time favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the New Yorker describes him as the ‘‘reclusive giant of Australian letters.’’ He’s a fascinating, eccentric person, a man who notes with pride that he has never flown in an airplane or gone swimming or ever worn sunglasses over the course of his entire life. He lives in a dusty town of just two hundred people in Western Victoria and regards the ocean as an ‘‘enemy.’’ He writes of ‘‘dreams within dreams’’ and ‘‘the invisible landscape and geography of the soul’’ and he taught himself Hungarian because he felt a shared affinity with the plains of Hungary. He maintains: ‘‘There is another world but it is in this one.” Needless to say, he is a singularly brilliant and unique individual and writer.
I was honoured to interview Gerald while travelling through country Victoria in 2021. As a literature student at the University of Queensland, I have always loved the written word and Gerald Murnane’s dreams resonated with me. He’s a very humble bloke - I really wanted to talk to him so I simply called up the pub in his small town and asked them to put me through to him and he called me back later the same day. He was very generous with his time and I was touched to discover upon meeting him that he was actually familiar with my story and supported me from afar when the University of Queensland attempted to expel me as a student for protesting against the Chinese government. We talked about dreams, angels, God and everything in between and Gerald told me he thought we were similar people which made me smile. I only hope to be able to write a fraction of a percentage as well as him one day.
Below is a full transcript of our conversation. And while you’re here, please consider subscribing to my Patreon to help me keep this kind of work going. I’ve begun a podcast series with great minds who inspire me and I will be writing and releasing new videos regularly: www.patreon.com/drewpavlou.
This interview is also available on on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Drew: This is Drew Pavlou, with Bolt Cutter, and I’m very honoured today to be meeting one of my favourite Australian writers, one of my favourite writers full stop, Gerald Murnane. Gerald, thank you so much for meeting with me.
Gerald: Thanks Drew.
Drew: We’re in the Horsham Botanical Gardens, in country Victoria. I was doing a road trip to Adelaide for some protests, and I thought why not stop over to try meet with Gerald on the way back, because I’ve been a big fan of his work for a long time. And Gerald was very generous with his time, I rung up the Goroke Bowls Club, and they passed on a message and now we’re meeting today. And I’m very honoured, thank you Gerald for agreeing to sit down and talk to me.
Gerald: That’s alright, mate – your first mistake was to ring up the Bowls Club – I don’t like playing bowls, I never have, I never will. Golf is my sport, though if you had phoned them, they were closed that day. The good thing is we’re here together anyway.
Drew: Now I realize it should have been the Goroke Golf Club! Now Gerald, I find it very difficult to characterize your work, and I think many people have commented on this point. Your work is really at the junction of fiction and essay. You say in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, your great book of essays, that your writing unfolds like ‘‘Dreams within dreams.’’ Your work is investigating and probing the outer limits of the human mind.
Gerald: That’s a good expression – I have a peculiarity almost, well, a lot of people might have it – I think very much in terms of space. And to me, the mind is a space. And it has a near side and a far side. And I’m sitting here today, just thinking about ordinary things. But when I get in front of the typewriter, my 50 something year old typewriter, I tend to be further away, on the far side of my mind. And I wonder what’s even further away. So maybe that’s why I write.
Drew: I was going to say this about it; I think your work is almost like you’ve conquered an Everest of the human mind in a way. Sorry, I’m not trying to piss in your pocket, but I think you’ve actually reached limits of the human mind that few have reached. For that reason, I would say you’re not just a great Australian writer, but a great world writer. You’ve contributed so much to the record of the human experience, the human story. And you’ve done that from countryside Victoria.
Gerald: Well I lived most of my life in the suburbs of Melbourne. My parents were born in this part of Victoria, or not far from here, and I always dreamed of coming back. But to get back for a moment, It’s not just the far sides of my mind but the far sides of fiction. Fiction can be very simple, like what I call film script fiction, where people are saying things to each other; fighting, loving, arguing, and disagreeing, or fiction can be something like a kind of silence. A far away location, and scenes or possible things happening that are only possible in the imagination. That may partly describe some of my fiction. But I do like to repeat again that idea that I’m going further somewhere, away from the places that most writers confine themselves to.
Drew: You’ve famously never travelled on a plane, right? But you have still gone further than most Australians ever have, in your own mind really. I remember a quote by J.M. Coetzee who wrote about you. He said you described a time where you were writing and you felt that you were dead and your characters were alive, image persons who were alive. Could you explain that to me?
Gerald: Well you’re talking about a book that even I don’t understand. Look, you’ve only known me for ten minutes, but you can see I’m a pretty fairly ordinary person that doesn’t put on airs or graces or pretend to be someone else. But when I start writing, I change. I go into a – I don’t know, you might think this is crazy, but I have written quite a few passages and even one whole book that I don’t even quite understand myself. We better keep to this one subject. The book is Inland (1988). And I wrote it because I was very much moved by a passage in another book. The book was about growing up in Hungary about a hundred and twenty or more years ago. It was a book of memory. An autobiography and sociology. Nothing to do with fiction. It was called The People of the Puszta. A puszta in Hungary was a kind of great estate owned by the aristocrats and wealthy merchants who owned these huge farms. There were workers who were like slaves on the farms, and one of these young workers, a woman, drowned herself in a well. After I read about that and when I learnt about her story, why she drowned herself, I wanted to write a book. And the way I wrote the book, it sounds strange. I still think I may be wrong, but the way I think of it now is that I made myself a little tiny black and white piece of writing and I inserted myself into the book. That’s talking as if it’s a fairy story. I almost imagined a character like myself, being part of the book. Things began to change, I was writing and thinking as if I was in Hungary 100 years ago. And then I was wondering if I was alive or dead, because all the people I was writing about were dead. It gets more and more complicated, and one day I tried to explain this book to somebody in a long letter, and I stopped trying to explain it and said, ‘I will never understand this book, it’s a mystery to me.’ And that’s the book Coetzee was talking about.
Drew: That’s fascinating to me, that mystery. Do you think of it as a gift, that thing inside you, that mystery you can reach?
Gerald: I never ever use the expression ‘unconscious mind.’ Something prevents me from believing in an unconscious mind. When I think of my mind, I think that as far as I can go in that mind, there is still somewhere else to go. The thoughts that I write down when writing, quite often come from a place past where I am. You might say, ‘well what’s the difference, isn’t that the unconscious?’ Well no I don’t think that way, when I go there, it’s clear, the sky above me is the same as the same sky over the rest of my mind. See now I’m talking of my mind as if it was a country!
Drew: I know that’s a great theme of your work.
Gerald: Well yeah, the mind is a country a little bit like this country. But there’s mysteries in it that I haven’t yet quite discovered and solved.
Drew: What do you think are the greatest mysteries to you about the mind?
Gerald: How far it reaches. Where does it go? How far can it go? The other mystery was this - this is bringing up a totally different subject - when I was a very small boy and had learnt about horse racing from my father, and listened to their broadcasts on the radio, I began to see horses in the far parts of my mind. Racehorses and jockeys with coloured clothes. These weren’t the horses my father knew in Melbourne or Sydney, they were horses that nobody knew except me. And where were they coming from? What races were they running it? What were their names? That was a little mystery that I had to solve one day. If you Google the three archives of Gerald Murnane, one of the archives is a horse racing archive. And in it there are some of the horses I’ve been seeing all my life, at the far side of my mind.
Drew: That’s quite remarkable, I’ve read about the horse races in your archives. It’s quite fascinating, I almost felt like a bit of a kindred spirit when I read that, because when I was younger, my horse racing was football. Association football, European football. And I would also think of imaginary teams, and the perfect goal in my mind.
Gerald: Well I invented a cricket game once, where the results came about from the currents of vowels and consonants in pages of newspaper writing. It was in Tasmania actually. It only lasted for about six months and then I went back to horse racing. But I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ll put it another way - It sounds like a horrible thing to say that the world isn’t interesting enough, it’s pretty interesting as we both know, but there must be some small children, for whom the world, even though is interesting, is not interesting enough. Two of them might be sitting on this seat! You felt as if that football team was somewhere and you had to go and see it. I feel as if those races are being run right now, and I want to know what’s going on! I didn’t feel as if I created it, but that it was created for me.
Drew: And you were exploring or discovering it?
Gerald: Yeah!
Drew: Yeah, that’s so interesting. For me it's almost the same. These days for me, it's not so much football, but politics and political philosophy. I often sit and think for many hours about what a perfect society would be like, what would be the most moral society, things in that nature. It's almost as if it does exist, but it's out there somewhere else. It’s an ideal.
Gerald: I found philosophy very difficult, I managed to pass one unit in university because it was a compulsory unit. But I also studied some Middle Eastern philosophy in university many years ago, and they got a lot of their philosophy from the Greeks. There was one notion that I found very interesting. It was the notion of possibility. Sometimes it seems to be that anything is possible, if it can be thought about or conceived of, and I use the expression once in a piece of short fiction called Land Deal, which could be about, or probably is about, the Indigenous Australians. I dared to write about them back when it was possible to do that. In it, I used the expression that “anything was possible, except the actual”. Because this, the actual now, is not possible.
Drew: I think I understand you. The real world we inhabit is a lot more limited.
Gerald: Yeah, yeah.
Drew: When did you first discover you had this ability to discover new worlds. Did you think of it as a gift?
Gerald: I thought everybody had it. Look, I can bring this in. When I was young, my mother would take us to see the pictures in Bendigo in the 1940s. If I saw a film that interested me, I wanted immediately to go home to my backyard, which was not a garden, but just leaves and dirt and hens my father kept. But because it was such a rough and untidy backyard it was full of possibilities. There’s that word again. With the stones, twigs, dead leaves and branches I could break off. I could make pretend farms, pretend countries. I would come from watching a movie and I would put the characters from the movie that interested me into my pretend country and I would have adventures with them. I didn’t think like this then, but I think like this now - maybe I thought, ‘I can do better than that.’ It was very interesting but I think it could be more interesting. And the other notion I was entertaining, though I didn’t know it at the time, was that it was such a pity that movies and stories had to come to an end. So in some of my later books I examined the possibility that the characters in fiction, who we only see for a few hundred pages, are actually still there even after we stop reading about them, living their lives and continuing in their country of fiction.
Drew: That’s very interesting. When I read something that really sticks with me, I really feel that.
Gerald: You don’t want it to end. Why should it end? Let it keep going in the land of possibility.
Drew: So you think it can actually exist in another world?
Gerald: I can’t say that the way a philosopher would say it. If I say it – yes, I do in a way. I call the creatures that inhabit that world ‘‘personages.’’ Because if I think they’re no different from the people in this park where we are sitting, then maybe I’m losing my sense of reality a bit. So, I distinguish them. We are ‘‘persons’’ living in this world. If I go home and write about you, you become a ‘‘personage.’’ And there are other personages that maybe never lived in this world. But yes, I tend to believe they have an existence of their own, but I hope I don’t fall guilty to mixing them up with persons. I love the word ‘‘personage.’’ It allows for a lot of freedom.
Drew: So what defines a personage? What makes a personage?
Gerald: A personage is any thing, person, entity that can conceived of.
Drew: So a personage could extend outside of humans?
Gerald: I suppose so, yeah. I don’t go into the realms of science fiction, I think there’s enough wonders in just contemplating humanity. But look, there’s a piece of fiction in a book of mine called A History of Books. I hope you get to read it one day. In that book, because the original piece was hardly enough to fill between two covers, the publisher and I agreed to put three other pieces of short fiction inside. They were not really connected, though they were not unlike. One of those three was called Last Letter to a Niece. It’s about a single man who’s never been married, he’s lived alone for most of his life, in a lonely part of Victoria on the southern coast. He’s writing a letter to his niece, and at the end, it’s revealed that he has no niece, she never existed. But for a lot of his life he wrote letters to her, to explain himself to a young woman who he was not romantically involved with. She was a young woman and he needed to talk to a female. One of the things he thinks he’s explaining to her is that the purpose of fiction – now this might get a little complicated – ‘I begin to believe, dear niece, that the purpose of fiction is to bring together invisible personages through the means of actuality.’ That means that when you read one of my books, you’re reading about personages that were in my mind. Personages you couldn’t have met except through a book. You had to meet them through a book. And here is another thing about me! What I did with my hands just then *mimics ocean waves or radio frequency bandwidth* proves that I do think about space. When I’m thinking about mental things, I don’t just sit unmoving, as if it's all in the mind - I see it as happening somewhere!
Drew: I had this thought once while reading your work. I was thinking, do you think in another lifetime, you could have become a physicist or a mathematician?
Gerald: If I had been properly taught I would have understand maths a lot more.
Drew: Haha, my problem too!
Gerald: Taught by dunces! You’ve asked some very smart questions. My big archive, called the chronological archive, which is letters, and journals, and essays and thoughts and stuff, to remind me where important things are, I’ve put labels. When you Google the three archives of Gerland Murnane, you’ll see pictures of these labels. One of the labels - I haven’t been able to find it lately because there are 24 fully packed drawers - one of the labels reads ‘Fiction and Quantum Physics.’ Now heaven forgive me if a quantum physicist is listening to this, he might spit his tea out for anger or annoyance, but this is something along the lines of what I wrote. All the absurd propositions that I read about, when people say quantum physics comes up with absurd notions, like one thing can be in two places at once, one thing can be two things at once. I said, I’ve already wrote about these things in my fiction! One thing can be more than another. Two things can be in one place.
Drew: I feel like you’re a metaphysician in a way, I feel your work is almost like exploring physics and mathematics from a different angle. Now, Gerald, let me get onto how I got to know your fiction and work. I learned about you after reading the New York Times profile of you that came out some years ago. And it asked: ‘’Is the next Nobel Laureate in Literature tending the bar in a dusty Australian town?’’ I found it very interesting because I had never been taught your work, never discovered it, even though I was always someone who loved Australian writing. Yet the first time I discovered your writing, it was reading the New York Times, an international publication! I’m surprised that I never happened upon your work in any of my high school classes or English literature classes at university. Why do you think that might be? Why do you think that almost at times in Australia, it feels like your work has not been appreciated?
Gerald: As they say, don’t get me started, but you have. The phrase I’ve used lately in the last few years is ‘marginal.’ People ask exactly what you ask and I say because my first book was published in 1975, that’s 45 years ago now. For the first 30 years of my writing career, I was a marginal writer, which is a nice way of saying unpopular, ignored or outsider. I didn’t fit the expectations of so many reviewers. I never felt rejected by readers - I always thought that if ever a large body of readers got the opportunity to read my work without being put off by some of the fairly cool reviews, they would appreciate it. The other word I often use is ‘fashion.’ It’s a sad thing to say this, but just as motorcars, clothes and habits of speech and every other thing is governed by fashion, so too are books and literature and my sort of writing.
Gerald: I’m lucky to be in the position I am in now, because there were times when people almost turned against it completely. I felt it was going to happen in the 1990s if I kept at it, but I stopped writing for ten years for various reasons. But at that time, I could have given a reason: ‘’No one is interested in me much.’’ The book I wrote in 1995, Emerald Blue, I doubt if it sold maybe 700 or 800 copies. People say to me now, “I can’t get hold of Emerald Blue, how do I get hold of it?” Well they can now, because all the contents of Emerald Blue are in the Collected Short Fiction, but the book itself is almost impossible to find because only about six or seven hundred copies were sold. And that was the bottom point of my career, and my wife who died about twelve years ago, in her last years, she said to me, ‘’One day, people will discover you and what they’ve been missing.’’ And she was right, but it unfortunately happened after her death.
Gerald: So look, put it down to fashion. It only takes one bad review. With Landscape With Landscape, one bad and nasty review made a personal attack on me and it put off innocent readers. Now as for the American and Australian thing. One day, my book Inland fell onto the desk of an American editor called Jeremy Davies, about ten years ago. He was working for a small publisher and he told me that it was the most impressive, moving book of fiction that he had ever read. He asked who wrote it, and the Australians he asked were unenthusiastic - ‘‘oh yeah, that’s Gerald Murnane.’’ But he made sure I got published in New York, and the publishers and admirers in New York didn’t know that in Australia I had a low place in the pecking order. They just looked at the book, for the first time, they just looked at the book. And then they said - ‘‘we don’t know anything about this bloke.’’ So Mark Binelli got to read me, and he came out here to Australia to do the article and look what happened! A lot of Australians, who perhaps possessed a little less courage than they should have, said: ‘’Oh, Gerald Murnane must be a bit better than we thought, he’s being praised in America!’’
Drew: Gosh, in many ways I think we still haven’t gotten over the cultural cringe. It used to be towards Britain, and now it's America.
Gerald: Yes, I was hoping you’d use that expression. It was invented by a man called A. A Phillips, who was a senior teacher at Wesley College in Melbourne. He invented that phrase and it’s still true. I myself, for many years as a young writer, I felt the same feeling.
Drew: And me too.
Gerald: I was reading a book one day when I came to my senses. I was in my early 40s, I’m ashamed to say. I was reading a book published by Jonathan Cape, who supposedly published the cream of English literature, and I decided it was just crap! And it wasn’t worth reading, and I took it off my shelf and put it in the collection to be given to an Op Shop. And I thought, just because Jonathan Cape published it, I’m supposed to think it’s better than anything I can do, or any other Australian can do? It takes a long time to get over that.
Drew: It does take a long time, doesn't it? Even as a young person, you always have this sense I think – and it’s ingrained in you from such a young age - that the world is happening elsewhere, and what we have to say as Australians or what we experience is not important.
Gerald: It almost comes naturally to us. In the 1960s, when I was in my 20s, pretty well all of my friends went overseas, and for many of them, that was the reason. To go see the ‘’real’’ world, to see what’s happening over there, in the ‘’important’’ parts of the world.
Drew: What you’re saying is right. When you really sit down and think about it or contemplate it, what anyone here has to say in Australia is just as valuable as anywhere else.
Gerald: About anything, yeah. I’m proud of the fact I stuck it out and kept going. One thing I must say, most of the books I’ve shown you and talked about are published nowadays by Giramondo. It’s small publisher in Sydney. After I’d given up writing for 10 years, I was approached by Iver Indik, who’s the head of Giramondo, and he wanted to get something of mine to publish. His encouragement and support has allowed me to write – I mean I didn’t feel I was being censored in the early years but I didn’t feel as free as I do now, to write what I want to write. It’s a wonderful thing to know that, provided you fulfil their expectations, you’ve got a publisher that’s willing to publish you. Which I didn’t know for many years, in the early years.
Drew: Do you think of yourself as an Australian writer? Do you even think of yourself as an Australian or just a human being?
Gerald: No I’d actually tend to go the other way. I think of myself as a citizen of a little corner of – when I see globes, which I prefer to maps. When I look at a globe and see this little corner of Australia, in Victoria, I think this is enough for me. If I lived for another 300 years, I could travel a bit further, but this is enough for one lifetime.
Drew: Would you like to live another 300 years?
Gerald: If it was all like today and yesterday, yeah. But not if I were like the Strulbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels, and it was no fun, because they don’t die but continue aging, their teeth fall out and all sorts of things. But a serious answer is that if I live that long I think I’ll write too much. Five years ago, I said no more writing, but now I’m putting together a collection of essays, which I wasn’t telling many people before because I wasn’t sure if I’d go ahead with it. (Note: Murnane subsequently published this collection as Last Letter to a Reader). But I’m more than halfway through it. It won’t be a big book, a collection of essays published by Giramondo. And I only felt I wrote it because I wanted to write it. I’ve never had to write for money, just as well because I didn’t make much. Never had to write for a living, I can’t imagine anything worse because then you must please large amounts of people. Although I might sound miserable or complaining about being a marginal writer, one good thing about being a marginal writer is that he or she is free to write what they want to write.
Drew: So how did you support yourself for some of those years?
Gerald: I always had a day job. I didn’t want a career in writing, it would have taken too much time and effort. I started out as a primary teacher; I didn’t want to go to university for long. It’s too hard to explain in a short time, but I did very well in school and got honours in my last year, I could have easily waltzed through university, and I later did a part time degree in my twenties. I started as a primary teacher and it was good enough and gave me free time to write, later on a worked as an editor in a government department. I had a couple years support from government grants, everyone was enjoying those in the Seventies and I got my share. After that I was lucky enough, I got a job teaching at University. Started as temporary and ended up permanent. That lasted for 16 years and then I took early retirement. The difference is I wanted a job but not a career. Not having to write – times when my job was busy, I didn’t have to write. No deadlines or nothing. It suited me very well. And the other thing I’m proud to say, my children and wife didn’t go without attention, money, care, or time because of my writing. I didn’t say ‘‘sorry I’m busy writing today.’’ One of my kids was sick for three or four months, he nearly died. I didn’t write a word during those months and helped to look after him. I’m not boasting because I know people’s families who were ruined or wrecked because of their writing, art or whatever their career was.
Drew: So do you see yourself as primarily a writer?
Gerald: Yes, I’ve stopped thinking about anything else. I used to say ‘part time writer’ or whatever, but now, it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything else. I retired in the Nineties, that’s 25 years ago. I can’t believe I’ve lived all those years!
Drew: So you’ve moved out now to Goroke?
Gerald: Well that was because of my son. I wanted to be with one of my sons, he lived here on his own. He wasn’t unhappy but I thought it would be a nice thing to do after my wife died. We were going to stay in Melbourne only as long as she was alive. And I thought we could be comfy, we could be companions, as he’s a single man. He only chose Goroke by accident, but it suits me very well.
Drew: Do you think it might link to your work? You’ve talked about an ideal, somebody who treks inland and spends their time within these grand manor homes out on the plains, sitting within this big library, and they sit within this big library and write.
Gerald: Well I am where I am. Where I am now is almost literally and geographically, where The Plains (if they ever existed) would be. The Plains first occurred to me when I was a small boy, I didn’t like the ocean, I stood with my back to the ocean. There’s a place down on the coast called Murnane’s Bay, it was where my grandfather Murnane’s farm was. I’m pointing now - that’s another thing, I always point, because it’s about space. There’s a place down there called Murnane’s Bay, it’s on the maps, on good maps. It was where his father was and they had a rocky little beach, we used to go there, and I didn’t like the sea, I was frightened by it and never learned how to swim. They teased me because I couldn’t put my head in the water. I used to stand on the cliff docks, and think: instead of being down there in the sea, wouldn’t it be nice to be way over there? And over there was the Plains and grassland and country. That country was on the way between Warnibal and Hamilton, and when you get to Hamilton you see Stillwall, and then when you look North you are then looking toward Horsham. If you turn around at Horsham and look over toward South Australia you are looking toward Goroke. So, in a way I was looking, as a child, at the place where I now live. But I was only dreaming about it then, and when I was writing The Plains, it doesn’t exist anywhere, the land of The Plains, but if it had a proper existence, if it was based somewhere, I should say, it would be based on this area.
Drew: Coetzee writes that the problem of “Whether the connections between images lie implicit in the images themselves or are created by an active, shaping intelligence” is left unsaid in your work. What do you think of that? I know you were raised as a Catholic, and I know you thought about the seminary at one point. I did too, I went to Catholic schools all my life, and I’ve sometimes thought of that type of life.
Gerald: Well I now live that kind of life, just without the poverty and chastity and all that. To go back to the images. Images have a power. Now I’m starting to pontificate - not exactly pontificate, but talking off the top of my head. I’m saying things which seem absolutely true to me, but the moment I start to put them into words, I know they sound to some people like nonsense.
Drew: Do you find that’s a difficulty for you? There’s a famous quote along the lines of ‘‘all writing is almost a desperate attempt to take out the contents of your own mind and give it to another.’’ Do you feel you’ve been able to do that?
Gerald: You’re asking profound questions, and in this new collection of essays, some of those questions your asking take me three pages, and I don’t even really answer them in three pages, so we don’t have much of a chance answering them in these couple of minutes. But to quickly say, images have a power that never ceases to amaze me. They generate others, that one image will just unfold like a flower, and there will be one more inside. One image will move sideways and lock itself in with another. Endless possibilities. I have an ideal reader, and I can’t talk about that personage in public. But that ideal reader is the one I try to explain myself to. Doesn’t exist in the real world, may not exist anywhere, but it sits in my mind while I’m writing. So that answers your question about that. I’m not trying to reach you, I wasn’t trying to reach the person I was most in love with which was my wife, or my children, I’m trying to reach an ideal reader. Someone who may be the only personage who will ever understand all my writing. About the spiritual question, I wasn’t really going to be very good at helping people or giving them advice or praying for them. I thought I was quite selfish, I wanted a nice quiet room with a desk, and I liked the idea of the colours of the church and the ceremony and things. The other reason, which I put in one of my essays, was a way of escaping university. Everyone was saying ‘‘next year is university!’’ and I’m thinking I didn’t want to go there.
Drew: Yeah, I had a bad experience at University myself!
Gerald: Well that’s the strange thing - I didn’t want people to tell me how to read books. I didn’t know, I don’t know how I got First Honours in English Literature at matriculation, I just wrote what I thought they wanted me to write. It wasn’t what I really believed. Even when I studied as a part-time student, I nearly failed some of the English subjects. Here’s me, the man who’s written 15 books, and I nearly failed academic English because I just didn’t share their views about writing. So, it was no use to me as a writer.
Drew: I felt the same way studying English Literature. It’s almost like there’s a big cut off between literary criticism and the practice of fiction, and they’re almost completely different worlds.
Gerald: Yes, well I was going home in my holidays in my late twenties, I was writing the first drafts of Tamarisk Row, and it was the difference between say working in a butcher shop and being a painter or something. There was no connection at all. What I wrote as an academic student and what I wrote in my Christmas holidays writing Tamarisk Row, there was no connection!
Drew: Why do you think that might be? Why are they so cut off from one another?
Gerald: I never really thought about it. I suppose if you confine yourself to being a reader and have never tried to write (although some of them had tried to write). There was a famous American critic called Lionel Trilling, who I liked, he did make sense on occasions. He wrote a book set in the New England part of America. When I read it, I realised it was made, it seemed to me as if it was written as an example of a book that could be studied in a class. It was the perfect example - it had all the ingredients necessary for students of English to write essays about, but that doesn’t really answer you question.
Drew: I think I read that when you were a fiction assessor for Meanjin or in charge of publishing the creative writing for that journal, you found it difficult because you didn’t like pieces of fiction that seemed contrived or seem to be made with that moral template in mind. You wanted something that was true. So you think it shouldn’t even be written with the critics in mind? Maybe that’s why they always didn’t like you.
Gerald: We’re getting into deep water. One critic said about me ‘‘the trouble with Murnane’s writing is that the world gets left out.’’ I mean that’s nonsense. Everything’s the world!
Drew: And your books are worldy of course.
Gerald: Yeah. Look I’d almost prefer not to go there. I might say something hurtful!
Drew: That’s very good of you! So, when you talk about the furthest spaces of your mind, do you think there’s almost a spiritual dimension to that? Do you think that at the furthest edge there could be something like God?
Gerald: If you read the essay, The Breathing Author, and I’ve said it since - if I were to tell you that I was a sexual deviant or was some kind of sexual pervert, the people listening would be less offended by that then by what I’m about to tell you. Which is that I believe in the survival of the soul.
Drew: No, I agree with you.
Gerald: I can’t think of God. I gave away thinking of God when I stopped going to Catholic Church, because he was too much like an old man. I can just about think of angels or something like that, I know the invisible parts of my wife are still in existence. I know that. If you read a certain chapter in Something for the Pain, I explain that we agreed between us that the first of us to die would send a message, and the message came. It was about horse racing and the message came.
Drew: What was the message?
Gerald: No, you’ve got to read the book. It’s too complicated. The book is about horse racing and betting. But to get back to your other question - it was a bit foolish of me to talk about sexual deviancy, but people are forgiven for all kinds of things, but there are some people who would never forgive me for what seems to them the utter foolishness of saying “I don’t think materialism is enough.”
Drew: I look at it the other way, that materialism is the foolish answer, there’s clearly so much more to the world than what we can see and touch.
Gerald: I call this the visible world we are in now. The invisible parts of you and me, I’m sure will survive. And we will learn lots of things about our present existence that we didn’t.
Drew: Do you think your writing is trying to get to those invisible parts, like a spiritual practice?
Gerald: It didn’t set out to be like that, all I wanted was to just see what was there. The further I want the more that was there. I have speculated that the last thing you get to see at the end of your mind is the beginnings of another mind. That might be the ‘big’ mind. We don’t know.
Drew: Could the universe just be one great mind?
Gerald: I’m happy to be a part of it if it is. Fancy sitting in the Botanic Gardens at Horsham and discovering matters like this. Wouldn’t it be nice if a whole lot of people came out from behind these trees and clapped us!
Drew: I understand now why you were so resistant to talk about matters of the day in the news and politics. Because you are looking for the answer to the greatest questions that go beyond them all.
Gerald: Other people who have interests in those things and the energy to do them, yeah. We can’t all do everything. There’s lots of books I could have read, lots of things I could have done. When you talk about television, I know there’s a few things worth watching on television. But I don’t have the time! When I give little talks - I went to a little book club in my district, not a public appearance, it’s private. I once said two years ago on my eightieth birthday that I’d have no more public appearances. They asked me how I found the time to write all these books. I said, just think of the amount of time people spend their evenings watching television, just think of how much you could do if you didn’t watch! That’s one of the things I gave up, but the wonderful thing is that I’ve had the time to do so much. For example, I spend an hour each day playing the fiddle. I spend two or three hours each day adding to my horse racing archives, which is all imaginary, and I play golf two times a week, and I still save a day and a half a week writing my essays. So a lot of it is just good time management.
Drew: When you do these things - when you practice the fiddle, play golf, imagine the horse races - how do you think that fits into the world or that life’s task which is going to the big questions? Do you think they connect to it?
Gerald: Yes, but I don’t know. I don’t force myself to think those things. I know what you’re saying. I’ll be on the golf course and i’ll have a funny little insight. I’ll see a bird or I’ll think a thought, I don’t go looking for it. Somebody once said, I don’t go looking for any of my subject matter, it comes looking for me. That’s the way I feel. I’m not going to have any profound thoughts right now, I’ve been too busy thinking about your questions, but I could be in a place like this one day, not thinking of anything much and then it will come to me. The other thing is there’s a time delay! The importance of what’s happening today - Marcel Proust proves this, over and over again, he’s a great hero, his books had a terribly great influence on me - he said ‘‘the significance of what we do today sometimes won’t appear to us for years.” If it’s not significant we may never think of it again, but if there is something significant about today, you’ll remember this a long time after.
You’ll feel a cold gust of wind, and a sound - I heard a Lapwing calling out before. It’s called bíbic in Hungarian, a lovely name. Now the sound of that Lapwing might bring back the memory of this afternoon. So, things are all interlocked, but you don’t go looking for things, they’ll appear to you and find you eventually.
Drew: I think that’s a very nice insight. I think I will remember this for a long time. I think that’s a nice way to end it. Thank you so much Gerald!
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