Tamarisk Row, my first book of fiction, was first published in 1974. I was already thirty-five years of age at the time, and I had been trying to write such a book since early 1964, ten years before.
The earliest abandoned fragments hardly resemble the published text. Sometimes my projected book had a title quite unlike Tamarisk Row. That title first occurred to me in 1968, and almost at once I was able to foresee the contents of the book and to outline the shape of it. For the first time in five years, I felt confident of completing a work of fiction.
During the five years when I was able to write no more than a few thousand words before giving up, I sometimes supposed I was incapable of writing a book-length work of fiction. I believe nowadays that I was incapable of writing what seemed to me a conventional book of fiction: a novel with a plot, with characters deserving to be called credible, and with numerous passages of direct speech.
As a boy at secondary school, I had had much trouble writing critical essays about novels. Ten years later, as a mature-age student of English at university, I had, if anything, more such trouble. Even after I had seemed to myself to have grasped something of the literary theory then fashionable, that theory remained wholly unrelated to my experiences as a reader of fiction, let alone a would-be writer of it.
I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading. I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read.
The personages that I seemed to move among while I was reading were not only what other readers would have called characters. Often the personage whose presence most awed me would have seemed to me to exist on the far horizon of the place where the fictional events were taking place. (And yet the awesome personage sometimes seemed to loom beside me – we two were looking out from almost the same vantage-point.) The awesome personage, as I might have called him or her long ago, I call nowadays the Narrator or the Implied Author, and I still find myself often nowadays as much affected by him or by her as by any fictional character alleged by him or by her to exist.
The notebooks or journals that I kept during the early 1960s include pages of speculation about the way in which I ought to write the latest draft of my first book of fiction. A recurring question was ‘How much should I claim to know?’ Another matter that troubled me was the distance that should lie between myself-as-narrator and the nearest character in the fiction. While I was writing about these matters, I sometimes thought of myself as dithering or as needlessly agonising over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my much younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so.
I have my own term for the sort of narration that I used in Tamarisk Row. I call it considered narration. It might be said of some works of fiction that they bring to life certain characters. I would hope that the text of Tamarisk Row could be said to have brought to life the fictional personage responsible for it: the narrator through whose mind the text is reflected.
Some persons have supposed that the image on the dust-jacket of the first hard-cover edition of Tamarisk Row shows a part of the planet Earth. In fact, the image is of a part of the surface of a coloured glass marble. It was not my decision to have on the dust-jacket of my first book of fiction an image of a glass object the defining features of which lie within the object. And yet, I believe no image could have been more apt. The text of Tamarisk Row may seem to a hasty reader to be an account of so-called actual events on the surface of a well-known planet, but my hope was always, from the time nearly fifty years ago when I made my first notes, that an appreciative reader of my book would seem to be viewing fictional scenes and personages as though through coloured glass.
The text of the first edition of Tamarisk Row contained several misprints, and these have been corrected for the new edition. As well, the last two sections of the book have been restored to their original positions. ‘The Gold Cup race is run’ is now at the very end, where I had always intended it to be. The editor of the first edition insisted that the book should not end with the account of the race. I, still unpublished, meekly gave way to her.
Over the years, several readers have told me that they consider ‘The Gold Cup race is run’ an example of so-called stream-of-consciousness prose. It is no such thing. What is now the last section of the book consists of five very long compound sentences, each comprising a main clause and numerous subordinate clauses, together with a description of part of a horse-race. These six items are interwoven, so to speak. The first sentence begins; soon afterwards the second sentence begins; later the third begins, and after it the fourth followed by the fifth. Finally, the race-commentary begins. Soon afterwards, the first sentence continues, only to be interrupted by the continuation of the second sentence, followed by the continuation of the third sentence, and so on. In due course, the five sentences come to an end, one after another. The race-commentary, however, does not quite come to an end. The very last words of the book are the words of the race-caller as the field of horses approaches the winning-post.
Gerald Murnane, 2007