“I judge books by what you retain from them 30 years later,” says Gerald Murnane. “One sentence from a book: it was worth reading that book just to have that sentence become part of your own mental landscape.”
It’s not every day that you get to speak to one of the English language’s most highly regarded writers, who’s regularly tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bookies have Murnane, an 84-year-old Australian writer still not widely read in Ireland but with a strong cult following, as second favourite for the 2024 award, after the Chinese writer Can Xue. Jon Fosse, last year’s Nobel laureate, is a fan, saying Murnane “has a unique voice and way of seeing”.
That is one way of putting it – there is no one remotely like Murnane – but he is much more affable and relaxed than his status suggests: he joins me via Zoom from his local men’s shed, where he works as treasurer. For the last 15 years, since his wife died, he has lived in the town of Goroke (population 300) in Victoria. He has copies of his books on the table in front of him, ready to refer to them, and from time to time drinks from a tall tankard of beer while we talk.
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With a name like Murnane, I say, you must have some Irish blood. “I knew you’d ask that!” he says. “I’m an unusual person genealogically. Of my eight great-grandparents, only one was Irish and he was the one who gave me my name. [The others were English.] He came from Co Limerick. His brothers, in about 1820, they got angry about something to do with land, and these young men, they beat sticks and banged on the doors of a man, Fox, with whom they had a grievance. It was probably a religious sort of difference. The crime was ‘assault on the dwelling’ – they banged on his house – and for that they got life transportation.”
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The conversation with Murnane is, unusually for these interviews, a two-way exchange. He asks about me and is pleased that I’m familiar with his work – work which is worth describing in more detail. After his first two “fairly conventional” novels, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), he made a breakthrough with The Plains (1982), where the story of a film-maker coming to a strange town on the Australian plains becomes what one critic called “a thinking man’s fable”.
When I’m at my best, I’m in touch with a level of thinking and feeling which is far below the everyday level
The Plains was followed by Inland (1988), Murnane’s fourth novel; the reason we are talking today is that Inland is being reissued this month. Like all Murnane’s mature fiction, it is plotless and light on character, taking the form instead of perfectly weighted sentences reflecting on memories and images in the narrator’s head; the people, places and books he has known, from his experience of reading Wuthering Heights to the memory of a girl from his childhood. “I would have said I like her,” goes one passage. “But by now enough time has passed, I think, for me to use the bolder word. Today I write I love her.” There is an obsessive, insistent quality to it. Murnane elsewhere has described himself as a writer “whose fiction is no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of his mind”.
If this seems unclear, even Murnane agrees that describing Inland can be “a bit confusing.” “I once tried to write a long letter to a very perceptive friend of mine,” he says. “He offered me an interpretation of Inland, and I said, no, that’s not the way I see it. I started this letter, and the further I went, the more tangled up I got. This was my own book! And in the end I said, I don’t really know what Inland is about completely. I know up to a point.”
Murnane’s reputation precedes him, and not just in literary terms. If you google him, you will always find the same things. The fact that he is a “recluse” – in reality “I’m probably the most gregarious person in this little town. I’m on committees, I play golf twice a week, I walk into the pub and people are, ‘Hello Gerald’.” The fact that he has rarely left his home state of Victoria and has never been on a boat or plane. (Perhaps he shares with the narrator of Inland a morbid fear of drowning.) These “facts” feed into the picture of a man who is austere, even eccentric, but, speaking to him, it’s clear he is none of these things.
I ask about those Nobel rumours. He is certainly happy for his name to be mentioned. “If somebody had fired a question at a literary journalist in 1980 or 1990, ‘Who are the top 10 Australian writers of fiction?’ I would barely get into the top 10. I always get named now because of the Nobel connection.”
But does he care about winning it? “I’d like the money, to give to the kids. I’d hate it to happen in one way, because half this town lives on welfare, and they’d be forming a long snakelike queue to my back door. [But] to be serious, it would disrupt my life very much.”
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The sort of writing Murnane gives us – focused, precise – probably depends upon a life free from disruption: free to think and take time and put one word after another with as much care as possible. “Just because I call myself a writer, I have nothing in common with a man who’s writing novels about the politics of Australia. I’m my own special little kind of writer.”
One quality that distinguishes Murnane is that he is “a fanatic about the shapes of sentences. I could never dream of writing in non-sentences.” There’s a difference between what he calls “film-script fiction” – external plot and action – and his own, which “comes from a rational, meditative reflecting”. What makes a sentence shapely? “Because they have the feeling of human thought. Virginia Woolf said the feeling or the emotion creates a wave in the mind. When I’m at my best, I’m in touch with a level of thinking and feeling which is far below the everyday level. And that’s probably the greatest satisfaction or fulfilment that I get.”
Who, I ask, writes the best sentences? “I can’t answer that straight off,” says Murnane, but then does so. “Parts of Proust. World Light by that Icelandic man [Halldor] Laxness. Some of the sentences in Moby-Dick have stayed with me,” he adds, then exclaims, “Oh! Oh! George Borrow. Almost forgotten.” George Borrow? I look blank. “Confess your ignorance if you have to!” I confess my ignorance. “Borrow was a 19th-century man who wrote a book called Lavengro and another one called The Romany Rye. Borrow’s a prose master.”
But back to Murnane’s own fiction. It doesn’t have what most novels do – plot, characters in the traditional sense, even a clear setting at times – and yet to read it with an eye on what’s not there is to overlook what is. It plunges deep into the way our minds work, the connections between memories and images that make up what we call our selves. Indeed, reading Murnane’s fiction, stripped of the usual elements, actually makes other novels seem thin by comparison. How does he account for this?
“I love what’s called considered narration, where [the reader] gets the feeling that the voice and intelligence behind the book are not limited in any sense, there’s an enormous persona, and all their wisdom and feelings and memories are drawn on, that powerful reservoir, in order to write this book.”
Inland opens with a quotation from Ernest Hemingway about writing and trying “to make it absolutely perfect”. Is this what Murnane attempts to do? Is it a struggle? “It’s a struggle all right, but it’s got easier and easier. It’s like any skill, if you practise long enough, you get [better].” Yet is it true that he’s given up writing now?
Some of the sentences in Moby-Dick have stayed with me. Oh! Oh! George Borrow. Almost forgotten
“I’ve given it up about four times, but this time is for good.” Immediately, he clarifies this. “When I say ‘given up writing’, only for publication. I cannot stop writing. I even go to my phone – any text message that has any relevance to my books, or about what matters, I spend the whole day every now and then typing them up and they go in the archive.”
Typing up text messages! And, ah yes, the archive – another certain result when you google Murnane. The archive comprises a series of filing cabinets where he keeps documents related to his life, his books and his love of horse racing. Murnane once shared some entries from his life archive, which show his sense of humour, including files with titles like “Telling white lies to the Literature Board”, “I give up writing fiction – again!” and “Peter Carey exposed at last”.
Murnane tells me cheerfully that our interview will go in the archive too. “There’s the literary archive, which has 16 filing cabinet drawers, one for each book. There’s about 40 filing cabinet drawers of the life archive. And it’s lovely! When I wake up in the morning they tower over me!” he laughs. “I could even be killed by my own writing if someone pushed them over on top of me.”
“Look,” he adds, “I’m one of the luckiest blokes. I’m 84 and I’m in very good health. I’ve survived prostate cancer. And when I look at these things” – he gestures at the books arranged before him – “I didn’t write these things to be famous, I didn’t write them to make money. I wrote them because I had to.” And after this personal tour for the last hour of his mental landscape, of some of the contents of his mind, I absolutely believe him.
