Gerald Murnane describes himself as a “technical writer,” compelled to find words for “the contours of his thoughts”, a phrase he borrows from Herbert Read’s English Prose Style. “It is a magical phrase for me,” he writes in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, “It has helped me in times of trouble in the way that phrases from the Bible or from Karl Marx probably help other people.” There is nothing decorative in Murnane’s prose: each word is a necessity, tested against the internal landscape it is meant to render.
I read Barley Patch nine years ago. I remember a mild intrigue, Murnane’s evident pleasure in language, but no urgency followed. That slow, obsessive pattern that sometimes overtakes me, reading everything, chasing influences, disappearing into a voice, did not take hold. At the time, it was Virginia Woolf, then Dante, then Coetzee and Knausgaard, Welch, Wolf, Lispector. My present return to Murnane, prompted by the essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, finds me newly susceptible: both the reader and the reading have changed.
It is not only that Murnane compels reflection on metaphysical questions, though he does. More unexpectedly, his writing opens quiet, unbounded spaces. He recalls reading On the Road: “The book was like a blow to the head that wipes out all memory of the recent past. For six months I believed I had all the space I needed.” Such space, mental, almost architectural, is rare in prose; rarer still is a writer who can evoke it without claim or grandeur.
These are the landscapes that draw me back to literature: ecstatic, impersonal spaces made by those I’ll never meet, but who remain companions as I move through a world that so often contracts the soul.
“… companions in navigating this often ghastly world around me” — precisely, Anthony! Thank you for sharing!
Thank you!
Very much recommend A Million Windows as next Murnane novel to try. I like Barley Patch; A Million Windows changed the way I’ve read every novel since. Barley Patch was greater rereading after Windows (strongly recommend Inland and the latest and supposedly last Border Districts too)
A Million Windows is on its way from Giramondo. For the time being I’ve been able to get hold of Tamarisk Row and intend to read all the novels chronologically. But I will take your suggestion and jump to A Million Windows when it arrives. Thanks for commenting.
Sometimes it has to be the right author at the right time, I find. I’ve gone back to someone who didn’t fire my imagination first time round later on and their work has had quite a different effect. I’ve heard lots about Murnane and since I’m drawn to non fiction right now, this might be a good entry point for me.
These essays are a good introduction. The universe he creates for this writing is clearer after reading the essays.
What an interesting post! I like to read multiple books by an author I love though I tend to do it over time rather than all at once. I’ve read all of Edith Wharton’s novels (I once loved her though I don’t feel as enamored of her anymore). The authors I’d like to read more of–and much of whose work I’ve already read are Henry James (a controversial choice, I know!), Thomas Mann, George Eliot, and Hermann Broch. And I’d like to explore Patrick White, Nabokov, and Mathias Enard.
And this is such a great sentiment: “I discover ecstatic spaces from human beings that I am never likely to meet, but considers companions in navigating this often ghastly world around me.” That is perfectly phrased! It’s very much how I often feel.
I once read multiple Nabokov back to back as a project, but haven’t read him much since.
I read a single Jon Fosse book years ago, but this time around I am reading through all the available books, and starting with his essays was great because it is opening up so many possibilities in my reading of the fiction. Will look for this Murnane collection before diving into his fiction as well.
Fosse’s collection of essays, When an Angel Goes Through the Stage, is extraordinary and I’ve amassed what I think is all his translated work to read through chronologically. Murnane’s essays are I think even more useful to understand his project, which he conceived as one vast work.
I’ve read most of Murnane, although not this collection, and I see the pair “pleasure and necessity” in your first sentence a little differently. The “pleasure” would be in the solution of what he perceives as problems, and the “necessity” would be the compulsion to solve those problems by constructing written structures. I see him now as largely autistic, by which I mean driven by compulsions that sometimes result in objects we can take as publicly oriented literature. (See the essays in his filing systems, and his imaginary horse races…,)
You may be right. I haven’t read his enough of his work. What I see from the little I’ve read (these essays, Barley Patch and most of Tamarisk Row) seems something a little rarer: the perspective of a child, that unencumbered clarity that Picasso often talked about but failed to attain. An erudite and articulate child of course, but also with a child’s attention to everything. Once lost it cannot be regained in the way that Picasso (and Stein) sought, but if that dimension is never lost, one might perhaps retain a perspective like Murnane’s?
Hello Anthony,
are you aware of this partly Murnane-themed issue of Music & Literature? Still not sold out.
https://www.musicandliterature.org/issues/3
That issue along with Coetzee’s essay in NYRB some years back are great to have among secondary material.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/20/quest-girl-bendigo-street/
Happy Murnane-reading,
Mattias
Thanks, Mattias. I discovered that issue of Music & Literature recently. It looks very good. Thanks for the links, very much appreciated.