Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane [Murnane, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925818840
Google: RW97zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing Company
Published: 2021-11-15T23:21:59.332953+00:00

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is called a collection of essays, but this convenient classification covers over some inconsistencies. ‘Stream System’, for example, had previously been included in Velvet Waters, which presents itself, of course, as a collection of short fiction. ‘Birds of the Puszta’ was meant to be a book review. ‘Meetings with Adam Lindsay Gordon’ and several other items were commissioned articles for literary periodicals or newspaper supplements. ‘Pure Ice’ was at first the speech that I wrote and delivered for the launch of Inland at the Adelaide Festival in 1988. (And here, now, is my chance to correct an error that has troubled me often during the twenty-five years since I became aware of it. My having made the error in the first place is yet more evidence that my reading – and not just the reading of fiction, but any sort of reading – is no search for facts or truths but rather an endless quest for elements in my unique mythology. My meeting-up with the female personage mentioned in the fifth of these essays was sufficiently momentous to have blurred for me much else that I learned from the pages nearby. I declared to my audience in Adelaide that I had never been able to suppose that a certain young woman had been able to read, even in the language of ghosts, any pages of mine. A few years later, after I had read a second time what had become blurred during my first reading, I understood that the young woman would have been able to read any pages that she chose to read in the Magyar language. Each estate-owner in the Kingdom of Hungary was obliged by law to provide an elementary school for the children of workers on the estate. Gyula Illyés had filled six pages of his book with accounts of his schooldays on Rácegres Puszta – pages that had become blurred after I had read a certain other page of the same book.) As for the long piece that gives my book its title, it was delivered in 1989 as one of a series of lectures to meagre audiences in an obscure art gallery. (The other lectures, none of which I attended, were on such subjects as de Chirico, New Wave Cinema, and Heidegger.) I had begun the text for the lecture by recording noteworthy thoughts of mine while I read, for the third and final time, the Scott Moncrieff translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. This, of course, is the same method that I’ve used to write the essays in this present collection – while re-reading each of my published books, I make a note of certain thoughts that occur to me. I’m hardly interested in recurring or predictable thoughts but I’m eager to follow up the unsought-for and the seemingly incongruous.

I can’t recall why I wrote an author’s note for the first book of mine to be published for ten years, but I suppose I was somewhat uncomfortable with the appearance of the word ‘Essays’ on the title page.

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