Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

He often tried to work out why he had turned, in that year, from a normal Catholic boy in a decent household to a sex-crazed satyr rampaging across America. Thinking it over in the quiet valleys of the Otways he was inclined to blame American films.

Not that he had ever seen his favourite film stars on the screen. It was not as simple as that. Adrian Sherd the schoolboy never saw more than five or six films a year. Half of those were Walt Disney films and the rest were chosen by his mother because they were classified ‘For General Exhibition’ and recommended for children.

Adrian’s mother used to say before he went to one of these films, ‘There’s bound to be a bit of love and romance and that sort of rot. But just put up with it and wait for the adventure parts.’

From the distance of the Otways, Sherd suspected that these supposedly harmless films might have started him on his year-long orgy of lust. Meditating on a leafy hillside, he watched them again and blended their complex plots into one.

An American man arrives in a strange town near a jungle or a desert or an enemy country that he must soon venture into. He looks across a hotel lobby crowded with foreign faces and finds himself staring into the eyes of a beautiful American woman aged about twenty-five. He falls in love with her at once, but he knows from the cold way she meets his eyes that others before him have fallen for her and been repulsed.

The man goes to hire the native porters for his expedition or to rendezvous with an army officer or a master spy who will give him his final instructions. When he returns to the hotel, he finds the woman sitting alone at a table in the dining room. Because he is leaving next day on a mission that may well cost him his life, the man is keyed-up to an extraordinary pitch of bravery. He sits down at the table without being asked, and even starts a conversation with the woman.

He soon learns that she is single. (If she had been married, the romantic interest of the plot would have ended there and then — the man would have apologised for bothering her and left the table.) She has never allowed a man to do anything more than hold her hand or give her a friendly goodnight kiss. (This becomes apparent when the man’s eyes glance downwards at the inch or so of cleavage above the neckline of her evening frock. She catches him at it and gives him a long severe look that makes him glance away and fiddle with his glass from embarrassment.) She is visiting remote parts of the world to recover from a broken heart. (She is understandably vague when she talks about her past, but the most likely interpretation of her pauses and broken sentences is that she fell in love with a man in her home town in America but found her love was not returned.) Finally, she has no steady boyfriend just at present. (She says quite explicitly, ‘There’s been no one else since — I don’t think there ever can be.’ The man at the table understands from this that he is free to become her suitor.)

The man and woman dance together in the hotel ballroom, then walk out to the marble balcony. He tells her a little about the journey that he must begin next morning. A stranger leaps out of the shadows and throws a knife at the man. The man dodges the knife and shields the woman with his body. He is so anxious to protect her that the mysterious stranger escapes. However, the man is well rewarded when the woman leans on him and clutches the lapels of his coat. He does not hide his pleasure at having her so close to him. And it makes it clear to her that she has awakened his strongest instinct — the urge to protect a beautiful helpless woman at a moment of danger.

Because she is now frightened of the foreigners in the hotel, the woman asks the man to her room for a drink. While he fills her glass and hands it to her, he looks her over. Her hair is so neatly done and her lipstick and make-up are so carefully applied that she would obviously not welcome any man who tried to kiss or embrace her and disturb it. Her dress is securely fastened across her breasts. (It has not slipped a fraction of an inch during the whole time that Adrian has been watching it.) The dress is such a tight fit that no man could hope to loosen it even a little without her noticing what he was trying to do. Below her breasts the cloth is as taut and forbidding as a suit of armour — and there are no fastenings visible on it that a man could try to interfere with. Even the furniture in the room is designed to keep a man at a distance. She sits with her arm outflung along the back of a thickly padded couch that makes her look as regal and unapproachable as a queen.

Nevertheless, the man does dare to kiss her once before he says goodbye and leaves her room for the night. He does it in a restrained polite way, pressing his lips against hers for no more than half a minute and holding her so that no other parts of their bodies come into contact.

The man starts on his journey next day. He has many worries on his mind, but when he looks back for the last time at the town where the young woman is waiting, he is obviously hoping she will be true to him until he returns to continue his wooing.

Soon afterwards, the woman learns how perilous the man’s journey is and prepares to set out after him. When she explains this to a girlfriend, the girlfriend teases her and accuses her of getting too serious about a man who is only an adventurer. The young woman denies this, but with a dreamy look in her eyes that suggests she really is falling in love. She appears to have known from the way the man kissed her that he was in love with her, and now her own heart is beginning to melt.

For a long time after this the film shows only the troubles of the man on his journey. The woman is captured on her way to join him. It seems as though they will never meet again and have the chance to declare their love for each other. But in the end, the man (helped by loyal natives or friendly foreigners) outwits his enemies and approaches the place where the woman has been kept captive.

The very last scene between the couple has to be watched closely to reveal its full meaning. First, the man notices that the top buttons of the woman’s blouse have come undone during her struggles with her captors. She is still tied to a post with her hands behind her back. She is at his mercy. If he were only interested in her body he could lean forward for a moment and peep down the front of her gaping blouse or even slip his hand inside it or do much worse to her. But he does not even pause to consider these possibilities. He rips away the ropes that bind her and takes her tenderly in his arms.

This time she lets him kiss her more than once. She knows from the gentlemanly way he has rescued her that he really is in love with her. And in the excitement of being rescued she sees no harm in allowing him a few extra kisses, especially since the leader of the native porters or the foreign peasants is standing only a few yards off and grinning at them.

The film ends before the man actually proposes marriage. But anyone can see from the more relaxed way they behave towards each other that the man is only waiting for the right moment to ask her and that he knows already what her answer will be. And the woman seems to know what is in his mind and to be only waiting for the chance to say ‘yes’.

Looking back at such films from the pure air of the Otways, Sherd understood how they had contributed to his year of sin. The films had introduced him to a kind of woman he never came across in Australia — the attractive young woman in her twenties who had no boyfriend but travelled around waiting for the right man to fall in love with her and begin courting her. Because her heart had been broken in the past, she was fairly reserved with a new suitor. She only let him kiss her after he had given some proof of his devotion, and she would have slapped his face if he had tried to touch her improperly.