Nothing remains...

Abstract

Nothing remains... Richard Carr He. Murray Bail. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2021. 164 pp. A$27.99. ISBN 9781922330949 Murray Bail has broken his eight-year silence with a new book, a memoir (?) titled He. The question mark arises because "memoir" conjures up a range of familiar possibilities: a narrative of foundational events in the memoirist's life or depictions of influential figures in that life or a behind-the-curtain account of the writer's world, revealing truths and dispelling myths. But this is Murray Bail, a writer of idiosyncratic, often dazzling fictions, a man who early on rejected the "duncoloured realism" endemic to Australian writing in favor of the experimental. Now [End Page 392] eighty years old, Murray Bail has much to recall and on which to reflect. How will he do that? Bail closes the first extended section of the memoir with a conventional-sounding statement: "I began writing out of dissatisfaction" (45). Yet this sentence is the sole nod to a central feature of the memoir: it is the lone instance of the first-person singular in the book. Rather than "I," we have "he." Take the opening: "And in the middle in khaki shorts, dusty knees, is he. Aged twelve he already has a certain earnestness" (1). The occasion is a photograph of a family gathering; the "he" is Bail. Surveying the photo, he speaks of his parents, his brothers, his sister, then expands to the world outside their door—the grocer, the milkman and his horse, the watchmaker. Once defining figures in Bail's Adelaide childhood, "they no longer exist. Even in memory they become insubstantial" (2). And so, we have a theme here identified, one that hovers throughout. Life is full and detailed, substantial and rich in variety and potential, and then it is gone; "he," despite all he has thought and sought and achieved, will soon become "insubstantial" as well. He continues to unsettle. Bail delivers a mélange of remembered individuals, recalled observations, moments of personal discovery, even snatches from once-popular songs. Amid a seemingly random arrangement, however, we do grasp a general trajectory of the writer's life: childhood in Adelaide, marriage in Melbourne, escape from "the ordinary" to India, the necessary journey Home to England. Somewhere along the way the first marriage ends, and later there is a second (to fellow writer Helen Garner, named as a writer but not identified as a spouse). But by that time (and actual time and sequencing are left in doubt), Bail has resettled in Australia, in Sydney. This apparent randomness, however, links to Bail's larger purpose. For rather than follow the memory of lived experience, Bail ponders the puzzle of memory. He shares big events from childhood: the fire that destroyed a local department store, the sighting of a drowned man, the classmate felled fatally when "Mr Trainer, a popular teacher, … batting in the nets in the lunch hour" (30), hit the boy's head. He also gives snippets of social history, especially from his youth—the silence of Adelaide Sundays, the prevalence of tea drinking, the influence of America's Saturday Evening Post on hairstyles and tooth care. But his memory throws up other images, ones appearing without warning and holding little intrinsic meaning. Bail recalls the child "he" noticing a man sitting on a kitchen chair in the yard adjoining a milk bar, a man displaying a hook where his arm should be. "Have others remembered him seated on a chair in the footpath?" (16) he asks, later asserting, "Memories are unequal. Some don't need searching for. … Others need a concentrated effort to recall" (30). At eighty, Bail can look back on a successful career. His stories can claim classic status. My favorite is "The Drover's Wife," in which a man comes upon the Drysdale painting, decides that the woman placed in the foreground is the wife who deserted him, and then assesses her current status using the painting as guide. Among his novels, Eucalyptus (1998) was both a Miles Franklin winner and an international hit, an ingenious mixture of fairy tale, quest, and exploration of the power of story to change lives. Those who are looking...