Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  Why have I devoted a section of this book to a dream that fizzled out: a dud of a dream? The Melbourne Cup, as most readers will know, is run over 3200 metres, or two miles, as we used to call it. The race starts on the straight-six course, as we still call it, even in the decimal era. The field travels to the winning post and then around the whole perimeter of Flemington racecourse. So, twice during the running of the Melbourne Cup, one horse leads the field past the winning post. Rain Lover led the field by a spectacular eight lengths when they passed the post a second time in 1968. When they passed the first time, Palatial led them boldly. In his green and white and gold, my dream-horse was two or three lengths clear. It was no fault of Palatial, and certainly no fault of mine, that some ignoramus among the milling, jostling mob in the stairwells and corridors of my nightmare-grandstand—some ignoramus caught a glimpse, through a chink in a wall or over a parapet, of the Melbourne Cup field passing the winning post for the first time and then raised his false alarm.

  18. There Was an Emperor Napoleon

  FOR MANY YEARS now, I’ve listened to the radio only to hear an occasional description of a horse race, but things were otherwise in my childhood and youth. In Bendigo in the 1940s, my mother listened almost continually to our local station, 3BO. She was then a young woman in her twenties, and young women of her age nowadays would surely be amazed to learn that my mother’s favourite singer was the tenor Richard Tauber and that her favourite songs included Tauber’s versions of ‘Pedro the Fisherman’ and ‘The Miller’s Daughter’. In those days, no music seemed meant specifically for young persons. I may have been wrong, but I had the impression as a young boy in those years that popular music, what there was of it, was aimed at people in their thirties and forties. The first hit parade that I ever heard was broadcast from 3BO in 1948, not long before we left Bendigo, and I clearly recall my interest in the fact that the eight songs broadcast had an order of merit or popularity, as though they were contestants in a race soon to be run. I can still recall that the top of the hit parade, or the favourite in the impending race, was a song called ‘Cruising Down the River’ sung by a deep-voiced man named Arthur Godfrey.

  Until the arrival of the hit parade, the music on 3BO had been of little interest to me: arias from operas; songs from operettas and musicals, as we’d call them today; and what used to be called bel canto. I was, however, interested in the hillbilly music, as it was called, that was broadcast, for some reason, in the early morning. I was like Clement Killeaton, the chief character of my first book of fiction, Tamarisk Row, in that I was moved to tears by the song ‘There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall’, which was about a horse that died saving the life of its master.

  After leaving Bendigo in late 1948, we lived for a year in a remote south-western district, with no electricity or radio. Back in Melbourne, in 1950, we found that hit-parade music, so to call it, in somewhat the way of rabbits and foxes and sparrows, had driven out the other varieties and was thriving all over the airwaves. This bothered me not at all. I listened to as many hit parades as I could. Much of the music was of limited appeal, but a few tunes, so to call them, had a lasting influence on me. When I wrote that last sentence, I had in mind ‘The Roving Kind’, sung by Guy Mitchell to the accompaniment of Mitch Miller and his orchestra; ‘On Top of Old Smoky’, sung, I think, by the Weavers with Gordon Williams and his orchestra; and ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, performed by persons long forgotten—by me, anyway. I’m still able to sing under my breath nowadays all of the melody and some of the words of each of the three songs just mentioned. I verified that statement by singing all three just now, and my next task is to try to explain why those and other popular songs so affected me all those years ago and why I’ve never forgotten them.

  I don’t think the words of the songs had much effect on me, although I may have taken note of the tone of a singer’s voice or been moved by the crooning or the wailing of a choir. In fact, I had trouble understanding the words of many a song, and too many of those that I did make out were words to do with love, passion, desire, heartbreak—things that I believed I could readily imagine; things that I had already experienced in my limited, child’s way; but things that I considered unsuitable for singing about and best brooded over or put into writing. I think that I probably got from my favourite popular songs what I would call rudimentary narratives, or perhaps even less than that—perhaps themes, or merely hints of themes of the sort that lie behind narratives. The things that I’m trying to describe are probably beyond description, but I’ve thought of a few titles that might hint at what I seemed to get from some songs. A certain song, for example, might have seemed to be telling me of Clarity emerging from confusion. Another song might have had for its deep message Hope replacing despair. Still another might have hinted to me of Effort persisting in the face of failure. Although I’ve found it hard to write about this matter, I was easily able, throughout my childhood and my teens, to think about it. As soon as I had heard a song for the first time, I knew whether or not it had a deep message for me and, each time I heard the song later, or each time I hummed it or heard it in mind, I understood a little more of the message.

  When we tuned our wireless sets, we turned a knob and watched an upright needle move to the left or to the right behind a lighted panel of glass on which were painted the identification codes of the various stations. All Victorian stations had the numeral 3 followed by two letters, and most of the stations that my family listened to for news, music, and what we called serials seemed to be bunched near the centre or towards the right of the dial. Far to the left and rather isolated from all the rest were 3LO, 3AR, and a few regional stations that no one in our house ever listened to. These were the national stations, as we called them: the outlets of the ABC, or Australian Broadcasting Commission. If, out of curiosity, I tuned into one of the ABC stations, I heard either a male voice talking on some subject of no interest to me or a sort of music that had no message for me, being, so I thought, tuneless, repetitive, and interminable. (For a few years in my early teens, I was greatly interested in Sheffield Shield and, especially, Test cricket. I soon learned that the best descriptions came from the ABC, and I listened to them continually, but this in no way changed my attitude to their other programs.) On a couple of occasions, my brothers or I must have tuned into the ABC while my father was in the room and must have listened, or tried to listen, for a few minutes to some of the mysterious music that came from the far end of the dial. My father reacted with surprising indignation. He asked for the music to be turned off at once. He called it snobs’ music. No one ever listened to such music for enjoyment, he said. The people who went to concerts and sat through hours of the stuff did so only so that they could boast afterwards to their snobbish friends of having heard Caruso or Toscanini. He pronounced the last syllable of the last-named so that it rhymed with tinny. Sometimes my father’s opposition to a cause or a point of view made me inclined to defend it, or, at least, to investigate it. I felt no such inclination with ABC music, as I might have called it.

  Hit parades proliferated through the early 1950s, although the sort of music heard on them would seem quaint today. One day in 1955, when I was in Form Five, a boy named Michael O’Dowd turned around from the desk in front of me and performed for me a rendition of a song that had won him completely: a song that would soon, so he said, be top of the hit parades. O’Dowd had heard the song in a film that he had seen recently: Blackboard Jungle. The title of the song was ‘Rock Around the Clock’. The performers were Bill Haley and his Comets. The song would not only top the hit parades, as O’Dowd had predicted, but would change their content forever afterwards, but how could he or I have known this?

  The new music did not take over all at once. In early 1956, I was much taken by a song that seemed to me one of the old sort: a song that I was able to relate to, as they say nowadays. I rejected the words and refused to sing them. (‘There was an Emperor Napoleon / Who’d never heard of Nickelodeons…’) Instead, I sa
ng the stirring melody and waited for it to work on me. I was singing the melody in front of a boy named Brian Parker when he asked me whether I knew that my hit-parade song had been derived from a piece of classical music. No, I had not known what Brian was telling me, but my curiosity was aroused. Brian, it seemed, was well acquainted with classical music. (I learned the term from him and used it for many years afterwards.) Brian listened often to the ABC and persuaded me to do likewise.

  For the next seven years, I spent roughly equal amounts of time listening to each sort of music. Instead of the half-hour programs presenting the top eight items of the hit parade, the commercial stations now had hour after hour given over to what became known as the Top Forty or the Top Fifty or even, I seem to recall, the Top Hundred. This sort of program occupied my attention in the late afternoon and early evening. Later, after the seven o’clock news, I would turn to the ABC stations and would listen until bedtime to their sort of music. In the early 1960s, I acquired a record player and began collecting a few records. I collected only classical music and never the other sort, and one afternoon in early 1963, for no specific reason that I can recall, I walked to the radio and switched off the Top Fifty program or whatever I was then listening to. Never during the fifty and more years since then have I paid any attention to popular music. Even in the 1980s, when my three sons often played their favourite music loudly in our house, did I make any effort to distinguish between U2 and Morrissey or their kind. Did I get those names right just then?

  The reader may have supposed that this is another of those uplifting stories about someone who grew up ignorant of the world of serious music, who discovered its existence almost by chance, and who thereafter revelled in it for the rest of his life. No, this book, and every section in it, is about the world of horse racing, which has not yet been mentioned in connection with the Emperor Napoleon or with any other musical subject matter.

  I first heard in Brian Parker’s house in Glen Iris, in mid-1956, a recorded performance of the 1812 Overture, by Peter Tchaikovsky, one or two themes of which had gone into the making of the popular song that had so impressed me—the song about the Emperor Napoleon. I was greatly impressed, but my hearing the overture in company—even in the company of a school friend—kept me from understanding why the music so impressed me. A year or two later, after I had acquired my own record player and my own recording of Tchaikovsky’s piece and was able to listen alone to the music, I made a remarkable discovery.

  I hope I can say that I’m not a boastful person, but if I were permitted to boast about one achievement or one characteristic of mine, I’d boast that I’ve never accepted any popular belief or theory without first testing it against my own experience or asking what possible relevance it could have for me. Expert commentators on serious music, as I’ll call it from here on, would mostly have a poor opinion of the 1812 Overture. The sort of persons who lose themselves in Beethoven’s string quartets or Bach’s fugues would probably smile indulgently or snort in derision if they were to read the following sentence. I esteem Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture far more than I esteem any of Beethoven’s string quartets or Bach’s fugues and I esteem the overture thus because, unlike any of the quartets or fugues, the overture, from its beginning to its end, brings to my mind a series of images comprising a complete narrative: a story beginning in early morning and culminating in late afternoon; the story of a notable and closely contested horse race.

  I’m not going to try to explain in writing what I asserted in the previous sentence. I’m not going to try because I’ve come to accept that I’ve never met and will never meet anyone for whom horse racing matters so much. To put this another way: I’ve come to accept that of the millions of persons in this country who’ve listened at least once to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, I’m probably the only one who saw in mind while he or she listened a sort of mental film beginning before dawn on a remote country property where a man loads a racehorse into a horse float and ending, many hours later, with a scene in which two horses cross the finish line together. The scene is set in the 1960s, when the photo-finish system was in operation in Victoria but when the judge sometimes took several minutes to decide the issue in a finish that required him to await a developed print. (I’ve never understood the meaning of that technical term. I only know that the crowd used to be abuzz with speculation and the jockeys used to walk their mounts around and around in front of the grandstand while the judge awaited his print and afterwards looked at it through a magnifying glass.) Perhaps if I state only that the time between the horses crossing the line together and the judge finally signalling the result of the close finish is denoted, in my interpretation, by the passage towards the end of the overture in which a certain phrase is repeated several times, after which a certain note is repeated many times—perhaps if I state only this, then the astute reader may be able to acquire some notion of how the whole musical composition affects me, even today, nearly sixty years after I first began to understand the singular reason why certain pieces of music spoke to me and other pieces were devoid of relevance.

  I probably wasted a hundred words and more on that last sentence. I’ll spend no more words on trying to explain how certain passages of music evoke for me certain episodes in horse races. I’ll simply end this section by listing some of the pieces of music that I most value for their evocative powers. No, I should explain first that I did not arrive easily at my understanding of the relevance for me of certain sorts of music.

  After I had first seen in mind the complicated racing details provided by the 1812 Overture, I supposed that this might have been a one-off: an isolated incident never to be repeated. For more than twenty years, I went on listening to serious music and to all sorts of so-called folk music, some of it probably authentic and much of it probably spurious. I knew all along that some of what I listened to spoke to me eloquently, whereas other music meant little or nothing. I was not unaware that my attachment to certain pieces had to do with their providing me with racing imagery. But the penny took a long while to drop. I forced myself to listen to Beethoven’s string quartets and to some of Bach’s most difficult music, still supposing that I was missing out on some precious secret available only to persons of superior sensibility. Nothing happened. The experience left me unchanged. I thought of my father’s jeering at what he called snobs’ music.

  I can’t remember when I accepted the truth: I had been listening to music all my life for the simple purpose of getting from it what I got from horse racing. I can’t remember, but I suspect it was in the 1990s, when I had reached middle age and no longer felt that I had to learn from other people. I suspect it was in the 1990s that I twisted to my own purposes the statement of some old-time writer or pontificator, one of those so-called authorities that I was so much in awe of as a young man. I wrote in some or another published piece of mine that all art, including music, aspires to the condition of horse racing. I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I was being honest.

  Here, as a sort of appendix, are some of the musical compositions that I value most for the racing imagery that they bring to mind. The last few minutes of Beethoven’s Fantasia for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra are an exact evocation of the last furlongs of a gruelling race. Each of the first and the final movements of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony brings to my mind a race contested by a horse whose fate concerns me. In the first movement, he is blocked as Rio Robin was once blocked. In the last movement, his apprentice jockey, following instructions, takes the horse to the front from the start and tries to lead throughout the race. Challenger after challenger appears in the straight, but the hero-horse holds them out. There’s a symphony by Schubert—is it the Great or the Unfinished?—in which the first movement concludes with an exact evocation of what is often called a blanket finish. (The expression probably derives from someone’s having said that the horses in the finish were so close that you could have thrown a blanket over all of them.) But my all-time-favourite piece of music, call it what you wil
l—serious or classical or programmatic—is the first symphony by the Danish composer Niels Gade. When I first heard a recording of the work, I noticed at once that the last movement perfectly evoked the finish of a race full of meaning—well, the sort of meaning that people such as I get from racing. After I had listened a few more times to the symphony, I was able to derive from all four movements a complex series of images of landscapes and racecourses that the composer himself could never have anticipated.

  A self-appointed critic of music wrote to me recently that Niels Gade is a romantic of little interest to him. The man who told me that will probably never read these words but I wish I could engage with him one day in a discussion as to what exactly takes place in the minds of people such as himself when they listen to what they call great music.

  19. Targie and Ladies’ Pants

  IN DECEMBER 1953, I had almost reached the end of my fifteenth year. I had listened to radio descriptions of many hundreds of horse races, and I had read in newspapers the results of many thousands of such races. I had even seen occasionally in a cinema a brief black-and-white film sequence of the so-called highlights of some or another Melbourne Cup. And yet, I had still not set foot on a racecourse or watched any part of an actual race. I used to think this was the result of my parents’ policy: they were trying to keep me from going the way of my father. I’m more inclined now to believe my deprivation was simply the result of circumstances. My father bet often but went to a meeting only if he had reliable information about one of the horses racing there. On such occasions, he would have preferred not to have his eldest son trailing after him. If I had looked more deeply into the matter at the time, I would have seen that my mother might have considered herself worse off than I. She had never been with her husband to a race meeting.