GERALD MURNANE Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Horse racing provides an enthralling key to Gerald Murnane’s world.
Whenever I try to explain Murnane’s literary work I begin by saying that while he sometimes writes about families, religion and racing, a lot is to do with grassy plains with a double-storey mansion on the horizon, that the characters in his so-called works of fiction generally have no names, that the chief character in a particular book or books is known only as ‘the chief character’, that the novels (if that’s what they are) have little plot and no dialogue. At this point I have probably lost Murnane many potential readers. He is an acquired taste. Since I have read all his published books I have obviously acquired the taste and suggest that he has a cumulative and strangely hypnotic effect.
Something for the Pain answers many of the questions raised in what appear to be autobiographical elements in Murnane’s fiction, and while he is often direct, he is so in an oblique way. ‘[With] all the countless hours I’ve spent on racecourses I’ve never really looked at a horse,’ he tells us in the first chapter, and later reveals he sees racing as ‘a sort of higher vocation excusing us from engaging with the mundane’.
Murnane’s interest in racing is sparked by reading the Sporting Globe in 1946, a year which coincides with the brilliant success of Bernborough’s 15 wins in succession, and leads him to ‘find more in horse racing than I ever would any religious or philosophical system’. Bernborough’s manner of winning the TM Ahern Memorial Stakes at Doomben, Brisbane, by overtaking 20 horses in a short straight becomes a model for Murnane organising (or not organising) his life: three months in a Catholic seminary, a clerical job at the Royal Mint, two years at teachers’ college and ten years primary teaching, as well as attempting to produce literary work – a novel, stories and poetry. Twenty years later, when working as a lecturer at a college of advanced education, he maintains a display board in his office with three images attached: Emily Brontë, Marcel Proust and his favourite horse:
To the few who enquired I was pleased to explain that the young woman from Victorian England, the eccentric Frenchman, and the bay stallion from Queensland were equally prominent figures in my private mythology and continued to enrich my life equally.
Racing for Murnane is self-contained and yet it offers its own universe. He could do without a girlfriend or a wife if he could devote himself wholly to racing, he says, but had been happily married to Catherine for 45 years. As a boy he created ‘image’ men – jockeys, owners, trainers – on make-believe racecourses and, even in this account containing actual people, he idealises owners such as Alf Sands and PS Grimwade, living out comfortable retirements in Victoria’s Western District and Central Highlands.
Murnane describes his enjoyment of racing as solitary and states that no one else’s interest in the sport matches his own obsession with racing colours and horses’ names. He speaks of Catherine accompanying him to most Melbourne meetings during the last 15 years of her life, although with an essentially different outlook:
She enjoyed being a racegoer, but for six days of the week she spared no thought for racing, whereas I often walked in a fog of racing memories and racing possibilities.
Naturally Murnane enjoys a punt and is more successful in this respect than his father, from whom he learns about smart connections as well as the skullduggery that pervades the sport. Part of his mythmaking is to ascribe levels of shrewdness to various owners and trainers, the most cunning of whom come from New Zealand (Enzedders) and the Victorian−South Australian border (Borderers).
One of the most interesting sections is a four-page digression on race calling, one page praising the ABC’s Geoff Mahoney and three comprising harsh criticism of Bert Bryant, ‘the worst caller I ever heard’, ‘a self-opinionated loudmouth’ and an ‘incompetent buffoon’ who often filled the air with ‘fatuous chat’. These remarks, along with that regarding jockey Athol Mulley, who ruined Bernborough’s chance of winning the 1946 Caulfield Cup by ‘looking for arses to run into’, are as direct as can be expected.
Aside from some personal admissions – the author as a young bachelor urinating into a stainless steel sink being the most notable – Something for the Pain offers poignant observations on a cavalcade of characters, of which two examples will suffice.
One who has only a tangential link to the main theme is Glynis, a plain-looking young woman who hangs revealing underwear on a clothesline in full view of ‘a solitary young man’. What is he supposed to do?
Perhaps I should rinse out a clean pair of my own Jockey underpants and hang them on the nearest line and parallel to her undies, so that the breeze lifted each item towards each other in a series of airborne pelvic thrusts? It was all so crazy. I drew the curtains across my windows and went on with my reading and writing.
That is a pathetic story but even more heart-rending is the one of small-time New Zealand trainer Bill Coffey, whose horse Lord Pilate falls in a steeplechase event that closes the book. In drizzling rain Coffey runs 400 metres down the straight at Flemington to where a screen has already been erected in order to destroy the animal. The scene demands being told in simple prose:
The man put his arm around the horse’s neck and pressed his face against the horse’s head. The man went on lying there. The rain went on falling. The vet and the track attendants stood without moving. They were not embarrassed. They were merely being respectful. They were horsemen too.
Is there a better description than this of the love between man and beast?
Gerald Murnane Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf Text 2015 PB 288pp $29.99
Bernard Whimpress is an Adelaide-based historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is The Official MCC Story of the Ashes, 2015.
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