A Season on Earth is Gerald Murnane’s second novel, published in 1976. It is not very much like the work that followed in the 80s, The Plains, Inland, Velvet Waters, the work for which he is celebrated, in which imagination itself is the subject, rather than something caused by the imagination. It’s important to note at the outset that while Murnane came to declare, in Barley Patch (2009), that he had no imagination, and rather disdained it, he was referring to conventions of imagination. He is “imaginary to the second degree,” as Sartre described Genet.
Despite the outward dissimilarities, A Season on Earth is as vital a book as Murnane has written. This is mainly because the principles that underlie his work are extremely rigorous, and the skill with which he applies them call to mind a man free-climbing the sheer face of a mountain. That is what I think he means when he says he has no imagination: his mind is elsewhere. The only alternative to an austere diligence is a plummet to certain mediocrity (from the Latin for “middle of a rugged mountain”), and a kind of death. He opened Barley Patch with a quote from Rilke: “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?” The novel is also intrinsic to Murnane’s body of work, not any kind of errancy.
Before 2019, A Season on Earth was known as A Lifetime on Clouds, and was half as long: the first two of four parts, roughly two hundred and fifty of five hundred pages. The new edition opens with Murnane’s description of how a decision to publish half a book, with half a character, came to be made.
“The six years between the publication of A Lifetime on Clouds and The Plains were the bleakest of my writing career. There were several other causes for this, but I’ve never doubted that my writerly misfortunes during those years were mostly the result of the butchering of A Season on Earth.”
That’s easy to believe, now, but I read Lifetime in 2013, when Text Publishing reissued it, after I’d read Dalkey Archives’ editions of Inland and Barley Patch, and enjoyed it immensely. Personally inclined to take things as they are, or had been, I was dismayed when Season was published, and couldn’t really understand how what I’d read was only half a book. In effect I was thinking that I did not want my pleasure interfered with. I even suspected some kind of marketing trick. Finally I wondered if, given how far up the cliff face the plainsman had come with regard to distinctions that he felt must be made about the unreliability and even dishonesty of certain kinds of narrator, he was somehow going to step in and disown what I’d read and enjoyed, or place it in some new context that I wouldn’t find enjoyable.
Turns out I was wrong to worry.
Part One opens in this way: “He was driving a station wagon towards a lonely beach in Florida—an immense arc of untrodden white sand sloping down to the warm, sapphire-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. His name was Adrian Sherd. His friends in the car with him were Jayne and Marilyn and Susan. They were going on a picnic together.” An elaborate fantasy is dramatized, ending with Jayne and Susan, naked, watching Adrian “grapple, subdue, and copulate” with Marilyn. The next scene takes place the following morning, and we see fourteen-year-old Adrian in a Catholic boy’s school in a Melbourne suburb, in the early 1950s. He and a small group of friends live to masturbate. They have little in common beyond their enslavement to this mortal sin, and even in the commission of the sin find their fantasies and procedural requisites are, at least to themselves, quite different. That they are being raised in strict Catholicism and are more or less poor—Adrian has a new school suit and an old school suit and nothing else in his wardrobe—is the extent of demographic identity. The self-conscious bravado, careless candor, and daring vulgarity of the boy-talk is rendered in a straightforward and deadpan way. There are laughs on nearly every page, but they are produced subtly, and depend on our knowing on one hand how sincerely and perhaps innocently Adrian holds his religious beliefs, and on the other how addicted he is to his elaborate fantasies and the frenzy of their fruition.
“Adrian often wondered how the other regular sinners got through their confessions…. Cornthwaite never confessed impure actions—only impure thoughts…. Seskis had a trick of faltering in the middle of his confession as though he couldn’t find the right words…. O’Mullane sometimes told the priest that his sins happened late at night when he didn’t know whether he was asleep or awake. But one priest cross-examined him and got him confused and then refused him absolution for trying to lie to the Holy Ghost…. Carolan used to confess to just four sins each month [and] kept a careful record of unconfessed sins and swore he would confess every one of them before he died…. Di Nuzzo boasted one day that a certain priest in his parish never asked any questions or made any comment no matter how many sins of impurity you confessed. ‘I’ll never go to any other priest again until I’m married. You just tell him your monthly total and he sighs a bit and gives you your penance.’”
But it is with Adrian that Murnane becomes singular, and not, as one effort at publicity apparently had it, an Australian Catholic Philip Roth. (There are other big differences, chief of which are Roth’s reliance on melodrama and gimmicks.) Where the moist, red lips of a movie star is all it takes for one of his friends, Adrian employs a small model railroad and a crudely drawn map of the US. “Each few inches of railway track gave access to some picturesque scene from American films or magazines…. Sometimes he was content to wander there alone. But usually he went in search of American women.” To the deadpan humor come the intricacies of an imagination not to be trifled with. So-called sexual perversity—i.e., the lengths to which people will go—is often hilarious. Richard Pryor comes to mind, with his instructions to a partner that she should, after he’d run around the outside of the house three times, jump off the roof and land on his face.
Thus Murnane, but what matters is not the means of orgasm, but the means of imagination. The end justifies the means, absurdly and absolutely, and the end is not an orgasm at all but rather an understanding that “the place we commonly call the real world is surrounded by a vast and possibly infinite landscape which is invisible to these eyes [Murnane, lecturing, points to his eyes] but which I am able to apprehend by other means.”
Part Two has Adrian swearing off masturbation. He has seen a girl from another Catholic school on the train, and fallen in love with her. He desires and imagines a devout marriage and a long life lived in grace, in which he gently teaches his innocent wife about the sexual needs of a man. She is demure but eager to understand. When he fails to see her for some time, he wonders if she’s gone on holiday to a beach where the wealthier boys at his school go. Without a blink in the deadpan eyes and only the faintest frisson of a shift in tense, he sees her “in the shed [where] the non-Catholic girls were putting on their two-piece costumes. But what did she wear? Adrian couldn’t go to sleep until he had reassured himself that she chose her beachwear from the range of styles approved by the National Catholic Girls’ Movement.”
There are elements in Adrian’s modus operandi that resemble (what I imagine to be) that of a stalker: the presumed purity of the young woman, the confidence that once they meet she will see in his eyes everything he wants her to see as well as everything that she wants to see there, the shared sense of what is good and right and ordained by a loving God. What prevents creepiness is Adrian’s decorous lack of guile, which may be seen as central to all of Murnane’s work. But because Adrian is a character in a novel and not a breathing person, what’s finally salient is the seamlessness of his movement from the actual to the imaginary. The faint frisson is not a change of tense, but a change in the capacity of a tense. The simple past of the narration can now hold the “vast and potentially infinite” narration of spellbinding images.
By the end of the quietly spectacular Part Two, Adrian has not only given up on his dream-girl, but on marriage entirely: he decides he wants to be a priest. Part Three covers his time at a Charleroi Fathers junior seminary, a place within a landscape that he believes will foster austere contemplation. He has taken up as well the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose Seven Storey Mountain and Seeds of Contemplation inspired a kind of craze for vows of silence and isolated meditation. Adrian doesn’t last long at the seminary, as his main concern is to appear deep. But while he is at pains to substantiate this vision of himself by looking meaningfully off into the distance and planning a move to a truly austere life at a Cistercian monastery, Murnane is showing why his butchered novel deserves to be read whole.
“Each morning before mass Adrian performed a simple spiritual exercise. By effort of willpower he caused his fellow students and the inessential details of his surroundings to disappear, and in their place he put the [Cistercian] chapel at Yarra Glen filled with white-robed monks.” The “inessential details of his surroundings” is the key to understanding all of Murnane’s work. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is full of indications of what is to come: its hero, a grade-school boy (equally obsessed with sex), wonders, for instance, what life is like in the green and golden glow beyond the squares of stained glass in the door of his home when it’s struck full by the setting sun. Adrian Sherd, on the other hand, is making adult decisions, however humorously arrived at, about what constitutes the essential as he looks at “the yellow-brown undulating paddocks, the scattered roofs of farmhouses, the subtly folding forested hills [that] seemed always to be drifting slowly out of his reach.” It is at this point that he realizes that Merton was a poet as well as a monk.
In Part Four, Adrian gets a job in the Victoria State department of education and tries to find poets whose work and more importantly whose lives will be models for him. He makes notes for a long poem called “Pilgrimage to Yarra Glen,” but drops those notes into the toilet of a train he’s on.
“Kneeling beside the toilet bowl he discovered something more wonderful than any poem. Near the bottom of the window was a small scratch in the whitish stuff that was supposed to coat the glass and keep the room private. So long as he stayed kneeling, the tiny ragged rectangle of clear glass was only a few inches from his eyes. And through this private window he saw a new country. At any one moment he glimpsed no more than a splinter of landscape—a sweep of grass beyond a blur of foliage, a steep slope that might have led down to a river valley, a mass of coppery-green treetops below the level of his eye. But these baffling fragments might have been part of a whole land far more complex and variegated than Australia.”
He no longer needs to imagine women in his landscapes. “With his eye still at the window he reached inside his trousers and took out a part of himself that had always responded to stirring landscapes…. A peculiar cluster of vague golden hills, detached from all known continents, drifted past him. Before they were gone he had poured out his seed into the toilet bowl.”
The cheap and more or less dishonest version of what Murnane does is marketed in the US as “autofiction.” The term itself is the product of marketing and nothing else. The wish-fulfillment brand-promotions of Ben Lerner are a good example. Moreover, what Murnane does differs in the kind rather than the degree of autobiography that he writes. Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf is avowedly autobiographical (and is mainly about an obsession for horse-racing that he shared with his father and uncle—obsession always to be understood as a guide rather than a neurosis, and it should be noted that he was named after a winning horse). But Murnane is on record, speaking of a conjectured self in the third person, who “should never have tried to write novels or novellas or short stories but should have allowed each piece of his fiction to find its own way to its natural end.” And back to first person: “I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or anything in between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.”
There are few editors capable of dealing with writing that isn’t carefully labeled and more or less uniform, but there are many readers who would have little trouble dealing with a statement like this, if it were presented to them as a way of reading that transcends category: “A thing exists for me if I can see it in my mind, and a thing has meaning for me if I can see it in my mind as being connected to some other thing or things in my mind.”
Murnane quotes Kerouac: “The turf was so complicated it went on forever.” And he quotes Henry James: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million.” But this singular, and singularly accessible, writer says it best himself (Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Giramondo Publishing, 2005): “I spent much of my childhood assembling elaborate daydream worlds that I thought were foreshadowings of my later life. Even at thirteen I was filling an exercise book with pedigrees to the third generation of an imagined herd of Guernsey cattle that I intended to own one day, and with maps of my dream farm showing how each paddock was differently stocked in each season of the year. At the same age I built from wet clay a Trappist monastery—half a span high and two metres square—and wrote down the names of all the monks, together with their roster for celebrating mass in the main chapel and the private oratories…. Other people saw the same streets of the same Melbourne that had always surrounded them. I saw the surfaces of those streets cracking open and broad avenues rising into view. Other people saw the same maps of Australia or America. I saw the colored pages swelling like flower buds, and new, blank maps unfolding like petals.”