The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

for writers to be connected to painting” (Davidson 267). His resulting expertise is attested by a specialist monograph on Ian Fairweather and by Bail’s having served on the council of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981. He also enjoys the company of artists and has had his portrait painted by a close friend who revolutionised local landscape depiction, Fred Williams. The impact of modern art on Bail’s sensibilities began early, when as a teenager in Adelaide he stood spellbound before Russell Drysdale’s Woman in a Landscape—“I’ll never forget it” (Chisholm 42). Later acknowledged influences included Magritte, Arakawa, and Conceptual artists; references to Malevich and Mondrian, founding figures of abstract art, recur in his novels. By the time Bail reported having happily parted with “hundreds of art books” (1989), the damage, in the form of abiding habits, had been done. Bail could separate himself painlessly from these “accidents” of modern art because he had so thoroughly internalised the movement’s history and lessons.

Not only was Bail’s interest in painting comprehensive, but his everyday observations were informed by an artist’s temperament, especially during his early career as a writer. In London a door that was slammed in his face triggered an illusory epiphany and constituted evidence of what he was seeking: “I am confronted with the grain and texture of wood, and bits of paint, a few inches away” (L 5). For a moment this seemed an encounter with the authentic, with “what is ‘real,’” and the threshold to a “new meaning of art—it should possess such a compelling force” (L 5). Both the quest for new artistic meaning and its “compelling” embodiment would exert a strong influence on Bail’s short fiction. Elsewhere a weeping, anguished face assumed for him aspects of a cubist composition, as did “mud villages imbedded in bare hills [that] slide across the mind and into cubism” (L 89). Indeed, so prevalent was this painterly mode of perception that, like the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, whom he quotes, Bail had to warn himself against comprehending humans as “nothing but the change of certain details within a configuration forming part of the general pattern of colour, lines and