GERALD MURNANE WITH HIS WIFE, CATHERINE, IN BENDIGO, 1989.
In his Art of Fiction interview, published in our new Winter issue, Gerald Murnane shows his interlocutor, Louis Klee, the chart he used until the mid-sixties to map out the major events and memories of his life—including his birth, James Joyce’s death, his childhood moves around the suburbs of Melbourne, the advent and return of personal crises (“nihilism,” “disaster,” “recover,” and “back to nihilism,” in one short stretch of 1960), his discovery of the writer and theologian Thomas Merton, his forays into poetry, and his courtship with the woman who would become his wife. From our interview:
MURNANE
Now, see this colored chart? Represented by about twenty-five colored lines is a diagram of my life. Gray is for vagueness. Everything, for me, has to be put in diagram or spatial form. The chart is a means of remembering. “88 River Street South,” that’s my address. Now, there’s when I met my wife. I knew her at teachers’ college a bit. We weren’t interested in each other then. But I met her again at the start of ’64. “C.L. 1”—that means the first time we went out together, in the middle of ’64. See there?INTERVIEWER
Yep.MURNANE
Right. And then all these lines are events in our courtship. And our courtship was a bit rocky. We separated at one time—it was her choice. And then, “Engagement to C.M.L.” All of them from then on are “C.M.L.” “At Brunswick with C.M.L.” “Marriage to C.M.L.”—then I abandoned the chart.INTERVIEWER
Why is that?MURNANE
Let’s say I’d struggled, as a person, to find out what the whole thing was about, and then I found somebody I was able to talk to, found someone to listen to me. I thought my troubles were all over.
A friend of the Review, Matt Benjamin, made the six-hour drive from Melbourne to Goroke, the rural town in Australia’s West Wimmera plains where Murnane lives, to scan the pages below.
Gerald Murnane was born in Coburg, Australia in 1939 and is the author of ten books of fiction.
