Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane
"…the man bearing my name becomes a different person whenever he sits at his desk in order to write fiction or that he becomes concerned with matters different from those that usually concern him."
Gerald Murnane is one of Australia's finest writers, and one of our least recognised. Prior to Last Letter to a Reader (2021), I have to admit to not having read any of Murnane's published works. In a way, it was nice to come to this book - a sort of summing up of his literary career, straight from the writer's mouth - without any preconceived ideas.
Because there certainly are some. Shannon Burns, whose fantastic profile of Murnane appears in The Sydney Review of Books, draws attention to Murnane's "relatively marginal status in Australian literary culture, compared with writers like Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Helen Garner or Alex Miller." He does not conform to literary trends or conventions, and always demands "to be read and understood on his own terms." After reading, I'm left with a portrait of a writer who is dedicated, singular, original and uncompromising.
At the age of eighty-two and at the end of his literary career, Murnane sat down to reread his fifteen published works and report on the writing of them. The essays are not straightforward "reports" as such, but full of the images that have recurred throughout his lifetime and across his fiction and nonfiction, as well as the evocative connections between them. We also learn of his lifelong passion for horse racing, his fascination with the Hungarian language and his relationship with Giramondo Publishing and Ivor Indyk.
It helps that Murnane is a meticulous and detailed archivist: his eleven famed filing cabinets that make up the Chronological Archive of his personal life, and the Literary Archive related to his writing, contain even the early scribbled notes and drafts for his first novel, Tamarisk Row, published in 1974. Last Letter to a Reader was originally destined for these archives before it became the book it is today.
Murnane considers his life's work to be writing, primarily fiction and poetry. For him, this means a lifetime devoted to "moods, feelings, mental imagery, and with doubts, confusion and imprecision." Central to understanding his writing is how he sees his Mind: as something broad, unknowable and infinitely complex. He does not subscribe to the idea of an “Unconscious,” as he says: "I cannot bring myself to think of the mind as a sort of mineshaft. My mind appears to me as extending horizontally in all directions and usually as a variegated landscape."
Plain-like landscapes, such of those of regional Victoria where Murnane grew up and later moved after his wife's death, are central to his fiction - and the title of his seventh novel, Border Districts (2017) evokes this physical and mental geography. Burns states that "Murnane clearly privileges idiosyncratic, foreign and marginal sensibilities, as do a good many of the narrators and personages who occupy his fiction."
I found Murnane very interesting on the subject of craft, such as how he visualises the "shape" of his works: he sees his book-length projects as "charts and diagrams with much breadth and depth but no other dimension" while his shorter works appear as "three-dimensional structures, often transparent and containing further states of complexity." The long, faultless sentences of his fiction are evident here in his nonfiction - so well constructed they seem bolted together, as securely as the Harbour Bridge. Again, the unfailing archivist logs the word length of his sentences, and how many clauses they contain.
What I also found refreshing was that he enjoys rereading his work, and finds satisfaction in appreciating his sentences. I too have reread pieces of work I’m proud of, with the pleasure of reading it almost as if it was written by someone else. It often seems that Australian writers feel they must constantly fall over themselves to be self-effacing and self-deprecating. Not in the case of Gerald Murnane.
In the final essay, he uses the words "exhilaration" and "elation" to describe the act of writing. He writes not for the market nor for applause, but solely for what he calls his "Ideal Reader." He states, "I've drawn strength and meaning throughout my life from a mythology uniquely my own," and for writers, this is surely what we all hope to accomplish.
Overall, this book is a serious and measured insight into the writing life of an original author in his own words. I feel excited to have been introduced to Murnane now - the same excitement I felt when discovering Christina Stead and Randolph Stow - and I'm sure this book will encourage many readers to read, or revisit, his expansive body of work.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can say hi at emily@anikopress.com.