Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  I would like to be sure that the image of the tall flowers and the stone wall first appeared in my mind while I was reading Swann’s Way in 1961, but I can be sure of no more than that I see those flowers and that wall in my mind whenever I try to remember myself first reading the prose fiction of Marcel Proust. I am not writing today about a book or even about my reading of a book. I am writing about images that appear in my mind whenever I try to remember my having read that book.

  The image of the flowers is an image of the blooms of the Russell lupins that I saw in an illustration on a packet of seeds in 1948, when I was nine years old. I had asked my mother to buy the seeds because I wanted to make a flower-bed among the patches of dust and gravel and the clumps of spear grass around the rented weatherboard house at 244 Neale Street, Bendigo, which I used to see in my mind continually during the years from 1966 to 1971, while I was writing about the house at 42 Leslie Street, Bassett, in my book of fiction Tamarisk Row.

  I planted the seeds in the spring of 1948. I watered the bed and tended the green plants that grew from the seeds. However, the spring of 1948 was the season when my father decided suddenly to move from Bendigo and when I was taken across the Great Divide and the Western Plains to a rented weatherboard cottage near the Southern Ocean in the district of Allansford before I could compare whatever flowers might have appeared on my plants with the coloured illustration on the packet of seeds.

  While I was writing the previous paragraph, a further detail appeared in the image of the garden beside the wall in my mind. I now see in the garden in my mind an image of a small boy with dark hair. The boy is staring and listening. I understand today that the image of the boy would first have appeared in my mind at some time during the five months before January 1961 and soon after I had looked for the first time at a photograph taken in the year 1910 in the grounds of a State school near the Southern Ocean in the district of Allansford. The district of Allansford is the district where my father was born and where my father’s parents lived for forty years until the death of my father’s father in 1949 and where I spent my holidays as a child.

  The photograph is of the pupils of the school assembled in rows beside a garden bed where the taller plants might be delphiniums or even Russell lupins. Among the smallest children in the front row, a dark-haired boy aged six years stares towards the camera and turns his head slightly as though afraid of missing some word or some signal from his elders and his betters. The staring and listening boy of 1910 became in time the man who became my father twenty-nine years after the photograph had been taken and who died in August 1960, two weeks before I looked for the first time at the photograph, which my father’s mother had kept for fifty years in her collection of photographs, and five months before I read for the first time the volume Swann’s Way in the paperback edition with the brownish cover.

  During his lifetime my father read a number of books, but even if my father had been alive in January 1961, I would not have talked to him about Swann’s Way. Whenever my father and I had talked about books during the last five years of his life, we had quarrelled. If my father had been alive in January 1961 and if he had seen me reading Swann’s Way, he would have asked me first what sort of man the author was.

  Whenever my father had asked me such a question in the five years before he died in 1960, I had answered him in the way that I thought would be most likely to annoy him. In January 1961, when I was reading Swann’s Way for the first time, I knew hardly anything about the author. Since 1961, however, I have read two biographies of Marcel Proust, one by André Maurois and one by George D. Painter. Today, Monday 3 July 1989, I am able to compose the answer that would have been most likely to annoy my father if he had asked me his question in January 1961.

  My father’s question: What sort of man was the author of that book? My answer: The author of this book was an effeminate, hypochondriac Frenchman who mixed mostly with the upper classes, who spent most of his life indoors, and who was never obliged to work for his living.

  My father is now annoyed, but he has a second question: What do I hope to gain from reading a book by such a man?

  In order to answer this question truthfully, I would have to speak to my father about the thing that has always mattered most to me. I would never have spoken about this thing to my father during his lifetime, partly because I did not understand at that time what the thing is that has always mattered most to me and partly because I preferred not to speak to my father about things that mattered to me. However, I am going to answer my father truthfully today.

  I believe today, Monday 3 July 1989, that the thing that has always mattered most to me is a place. Occasionally during my life I may have seemed to believe that I might arrive at this place by travelling to one or another district of the country in which I was born or even to some other country, but for most of my life I have supposed that the place that matters most to me is a place in my mind and that I ought to think not of myself arriving in the future at the place but of myself in the future seeing the place more clearly than I can see any other image in my mind and seeing also that all the other images that matter to me are arranged around that image of a place like an arrangement of townships on a map.

  My father might be disappointed to learn that the place that matters most to me is a district of my mind rather than a district of the country where he and I were born, but he might be pleased to learn that I have often supposed that the place in my mind is grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance.

  From the time when I first began as a child to read books of fiction, I looked forward to seeing places in my mind as a result of my reading. On a hot afternoon in January 1961, I read in Swann’s Way a certain place-name. I remember today, Tuesday 4 July 1989, my feeling when I read that place-name more than twenty-eight years ago, something of the joy that the narrator of Swann’s Way describes himself as having felt whenever he discovered part of the truth underlying the surface of his life. I will come back to that place-name later and by a different route.

  If my father could tell me what mattered most to him during his lifetime, he would probably tell me about two dreams that he dreamed often during his lifetime. The first was a dream of himself owning a sheep or cattle property; the second was a dream of his winning regularly large sums of money from bookmakers at race meetings. My father might even tell me about a single dream that arose out of the other two dreams. This was a dream of his setting out one morning from his sheep or cattle property with his own racehorse and with a trusted friend and of his travelling a hundred miles and more to a racecourse on the edge of an unfamiliar town and there backing his horse with large sums of money and soon afterwards watching his horse win the race that he had been backed to win.

  If I could ask my father whether the dreams that mattered to him were connected with any images that appeared in his mind as a result of his reading books of fiction, my father might remind me that he had once told me that his favourite book of fiction was a book by a South African writer, Stuart Cloete, about a farmer and his sons who drove their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep out of the settled districts of southern Africa and north-west into what seemed to them endless unclaimed grazing lands.

  One of my feelings while I read certain pages of Swann’s Way in January 1961 was a feeling that my father would have agreed with. I resented the characters’ having so much leisure for talking about such things as painting and the architecture of churches.

  Although January 1961 was part of my summer holidays, I was already preparing to teach a class of forty-eight primary-school children as from February and to study two subjects at university during my evenings. The characters in Swann’s Way mostly seemed to lead idle lives or even to enjoy the earnings of inherited wealth. I would have liked to frogmarch the idle characters out of their salons and to confine them each to a room with only a sink and a gas ring and a few pieces of cheap furniture. I would then have enjoyed hearing the idlers calling in vain for their servants.
<
br />   I heard myself jeering at the idlers. What? Not talking about the Dutch Masters, or about little churches in Normandy with something of the Persian about them?

  Sometimes while I read the early pages of Swann’s Way in 1961, and when I still thought the book was partly a fictional memoir, I took a strong dislike to the pampered boy who had been the narrator as a child. I saw myself dragging him out of the arms of his mother and away from his aunts and his grandmother and then thrusting him into the backyard of the tumbledown farm-workers’ cottage where my family lived after we had left Bendigo, putting an axe into his hand, pointing out to him one of the heaps of timber that I had split into kindling wood for the kitchen stove, and then hearing the namby-pamby bleating for his mama.

  In 1961, whenever I heard in my mind the adult characters of Swann’s Way talking about art or literature or architecture I heard them talking in the language used by the gentlemen and lady members of the Metropolitan Golf Club in North Road, Oakleigh, where I had worked as a caddy and an assistant barman from 1954 to 1956.

  In the 1950s, there were still people in Melbourne who seemed to want you to believe that they had been born or educated in England or that they had visited England often or that they thought and behaved as English people did. These people in Melbourne spoke with what I would call a world-weary drawl. I heard that drawl by day from men in plus-four trousers while I trudged behind them down fairways on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. In the evenings of those days, I heard the same drawl in the bar of the golf club where the same men, now dressed in slacks and blazers, drank Scotch whisky or gin-and-tonic.

  One day soon after I had first begun working at the Metropolitan Golf Club, I looked into a telephone directory for the addresses of some of the most outrageous drawlers. I found not only that most of them lived in the suburb of Toorak, but that most of this majority lived in the same neighbourhood, which consisted of St Georges Road, Lansell Road, and a few adjoining streets.

  Six years after I learned this, and only a few months before I first read Swann’s Way, I travelled a little out of my way one afternoon between the city and Malvern. On that fine spring afternoon, I looked from a window of a tram down each of St Georges Road and Lansell Road, Toorak. I got an impression of tall, pale-coloured houses surrounded by walled gardens in which the trees were just coming into flower.

  While I read Swann’s Way in 1961, any reference to Paris caused me to see in my mind the pale-coloured walls and mansions of St Georges Road and Lansell Road. When I first read the word faubourg, which I had never previously read but the meaning of which I guessed, I saw the upper half of a prunus tree appearing from behind a tall wall of cream-coloured stone. The first syllable of the word faubourg was linked with the abundant frothiness of the pink flowers on the tree, while the second syllable suggested the solid, forbidding wall. If I read a reference to some public garden or some woods in Paris, I saw in my mind the landscape that I connected with the world-weary drawlers of Melbourne: the view through the plate-glass windows of the dining room and bar in the clubhouse of the Metropolitan Golf Club—the view of the undulating, velvety eighteenth green and the close-mown fairway of cushiony couch grass reaching back between stands of gum trees and wattle trees to the point where the trees almost converged behind the eighteenth tee, leaving a gap past which the hazy seventeenth fairway formed the further part of the twofold vista.

  My father despised the drawlers of Melbourne, and if ever he had read about such a character as Monsieur Swann, my father would have despised him also as a drawler. I found myself, at the Metropolitan Golf Club in the 1950s, wanting to distinguish between the drawlers that I could readily despise and a sort of drawler that I was ready to respect, if only I could have learned certain things about him.

  The drawlers that I could readily despise were such as the grey-haired man that I heard one day drawling his opinion of an American film or play that he had seen recently. The man lived in one of the two roads that I named earlier and was wealthy as a result of events that had happened before his birth in places far from the two roads. The chief of these events were the man’s great-grandfather’s having brewed and then peddled on the goldfields of Victoria in the 1860s an impressively named but probably ineffective patent medicine.

  The American film or play that the drawler had seen was named The Moon Is Blue. I had learned previously from newspapers that some people in Melbourne had wanted The Moon Is Blue to be banned, as many films and plays and books were banned in Melbourne in the 1950s. The people had wanted it banned because it was said to contain jokes with double meanings.

  The drawler had said to three other men, while the four were walking among the complex arrangement of vistas of green fairways that I would later see in my mind from 1961 onwards whenever I would read in one or another volume of À la recherche du temps perdu the name of one or another wood or park in Paris, “I’ve never laughed so much in my whole life. It was absolutely the funniest show I’ve ever seen!”

  On the afternoon nearly forty years ago when I heard the grey-haired drawler drawl those words, I readily despised him because I was disappointed to learn that a man who had inherited a fortune and who might have taken his pleasure from the ownership of a vast library or a stable of racehorses could boast of having sniggered at what my school-friends and I would have called dirty jokes.

  Six or seven years later, when I read for the first time about Swann, the descendant of stockbrokers, and his passion for Odette de Crecy, I saw that the Swann in my mind had the grey hair and wore the plus-four trousers of the great-grandson of the brewer and peddler of patent medicines.

  The Swann in my mind was not usually one of the despised drawlers. Sometimes at the Metropolitan Golf Club, but more often when I looked at the owners of racehorses in the mounting yard of one or another racecourse, I saw a sort of drawler that I admired. This drawler might have lived for some time during each year behind a walled garden in Melbourne, but at other times he lived surrounded by the land that had been since the years before the discovery of gold in Victoria the source of his family’s wealth and standing—he lived on his sheep or cattle property.

  In my seventh book of fiction, O, Dem Golden Slippers, which I expect to be published during 1993, I will explain something of what has happened in the mind of a person such as myself whenever he has happened to see in the mounting yard of a racecourse in any of the towns or cities of Victoria an owner of a racehorse who is also the owner of a sheep or cattle property far from that town or city. Here I have time only to explain first that for most of my life I have seen most of the sheep or cattle properties in my mind as lying in the district of Victoria in my mind that is sometimes called the Western Plains. When I look towards that district in my mind while I write these words, I look towards the north-west of my mind. However, when I used to stand on the Warrnambool racecourse during my summer holidays in the 1950s, which is to say, when I stood in those days at a point nearly three hundred kilometres south-west of where I sit at this moment, I still saw often in the north-west of my mind sheep or cattle properties far from where I stood, and doubly far from where I sit today writing these words.

  Today, 26 July 1989, I looked at a map of the southern part of Africa. I wanted to verify that the districts where the chief character in my father’s favourite book of fiction arrived with his flocks and herds at what might be called his sheep or cattle property would have been in fact north-west of the settled districts. After having looked at the map, I now believe that the owner of the flocks and herds was more likely to have travelled north-east. That being so, when my father said that the man in southern Africa had travelled north-west in order to discover the site of his sheep or cattle property, my father perhaps had in mind that the whole of Africa was north-west of the suburb of Oakleigh South, where my father and I lived at the time when he told me about his favourite book of fiction, so that anyone travelling in any direction in Africa was travelling towards a place north-west of my father and myself, and
any character in a book of fiction who was described as having travelled in any direction in Africa would have seemed to my father to have travelled towards a place in the north-west of my father’s mind. Or, my father, who was born and who lived for much of his life in the south-east of Australia, may have seen all desirable places in his mind as lying in the north-west of his mind.

  Before I mentioned just now the map of the southern part of Africa, I was about to mention the second of two things connected with my seeing on racecourses the owners of distant sheep or cattle properties. I was about to mention the first of those owners that I can recall having seen. The owner and his horse and the trainer of his horse had come to the summer meeting at Warrnambool, in one of the early years of the 1950s, from the district around Apsley. At that time I had seen one photograph of the district around Apsley: a coloured photograph on the cover of the Leader, which was once the chief rival of the Weekly Times for the readership of persons in rural Victoria. The photograph showed grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance. Something in the colours of the photograph had caused me to remember it afterwards as having been taken during the late afternoon.

  The only map that I owned in the 1950s was a road map of Victoria. When I looked at that map, I saw that Apsley was the furthest west of any town in the Western District of Victoria. Past Apsley was only a pale no-man’s-land—the first few miles of South Australia—and then the end of the map.

  The man from the district around Apsley stood out among the owners in the mounting yard. He wore a pale-grey suit and a pale-grey hat with green and blue feathers in the band. Under the rear brim of his hat, his silvery hair was bunched in a style very different from the cropped style of the men around him. As soon as I had seen the man from the district around Apsley, I had heard him in my mind speaking in a world-weary drawl but I was far from despising him.