The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

in Sydney, each signalling dedication and a need for unimpeded mental space beyond trivia and daily conventions.

Valuable insights into Bail’s thinking during this formative period are provided by Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989). Based primarily on seven notebooks from his years in London, this slim volume is presumably selected and edited to show an embryonic authorial mind at work. How does Bail choose to present himself? Essentially, he appears as a man determined to examine his responses—and the life and cultural riches laid out before him—with the utmost rigour, determined to mull over the conceptual core of potential compositions. Pages bristle with ideas for stories, many of which were subsequently realised. “The Partitions. Mad illogical race (boredom?) over the office partitions, through glass and weak walls. Women, slipped stockings. Climbing, pushing. Style is droll” (L 68) is only the beginning of an unusually long and detailed entry. Mostly Bail records little more than the germ of an idea: “Arakawa’s ambitious subject: Portrait of a Thought that By-passes Everything” (the inspiration, perhaps, for Bail’s “Portrait of Electricity”), or “couples who tour museums real and imagined” (L 115, 123), as in Homesickness. Other entries seem to have inspired disparate episodes in that novel, from the work of an Australian graffitist in Florence (L 112) to evidence in Moscow of “Lenin’s living reputation” (L 129) and a woman whose crippled leg “pulls down one side of her mouth as she walks” (L 131). These notes would prove to be a rich creative resource and aid to imaginative recall.

Equally striking in Longhand is the disproportionate space devoted to the visual arts. Though Flaubert, Proust, and Tournier, as well as Goethe and Thomas Mann, all rate important entries, not only the gallerygoer’s but also the diarist’s pen engages with a seemingly endless list of painters, offering authoritative observations on major figures from the Italian High Renaissance to American Abstract Expressionism. “All kinds of painting have interested me for a long time,” Bail has remarked, defending his predilection with the example of France and Italy—“more passionate” than cold Anglo-Saxon countries—where “the tradition is quite strong