He.

by Murray Bail

And in the middle in khaki shorts, dusty knees, is he. Aged twelve he already has a certain earnestness, the solemnity, trying to comprehend what is incomprehensible, ‘he wouldn’t know what day it is’.

He. is an elusive, elliptical, often beautiful thread of observations and memories. It is not autobiography, or even memoir, but a portrait of a figure shown to be passing through time and circumstances.

In vignettes, sometimes mere fragments, we glimpse moments and lives—parents, teachers, wives; in Bombay of the 1960s, Paris and London of the 1970s, Melbourne and Sydney—as this figure remembers the years.

These are Murray Bail’s last reflections on his life: the final book from the acclaimed author of such classic novels as The Pages, Eucalyptus (winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award) and Homesickness.

Genres: Australia

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

Murray Bail (born 22 September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia. He has lived most of his life in Australia except for sojourns in India (1968–70) and England and Europe (1970–74). He currently lives in Sydney.

He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.

A portrait of Bail by the artist Fred Williams is hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The portrait was done while both Williams and Bail were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia

Reviews

[Lee Kofman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a fan of Bail's fiction, but this little idiosyncratic memoir was a treat. More a poem than a story, and it evokes so beautifully days bygone as well as offers a view of today's reality through yesterday's lenses, which I found refreshing. I'd have preferred this work to be a touch less impressionistic, a bit more storytelling and confiding at times, but overall this is a treat - something to read in small and delicious doses.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book reviews in traditional print media almost never influence my decision whether to read a book or not. I enjoy reading them and I love robust critical discourse (never trust a critic who loves everything they review) but they don’t usually sway my reading. I had zero intention of reading this book despite having read all of Bail’s fiction over the years. Stream of consciousness recollection memoir is just not my thing – for that I have Levy who is all I need. I was left with such a negative impression of Bail after Garner’s latest diaries I felt a bit done with him. But everything in Declan Fry’s review changed my mind. And I’m glad it did. Garner gets a tender mention (I love that Bail and Garner share a publisher) and it’s all just very a life lived. Bail’s so versatile with memory and experience and if this is his last piece of published work it’s a fitting tribute to what came before.

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seven years older than me, Bail’s early memories overlap but do not quite match mine. Our later, adult lives were quite different, so I have little affinity or even sympathy for those memories. And there are times when what he believes to have been, what he passes off as personal recollections, are actually closer to received opinions. And yet, I cannot help but engage with this innovative third person autobiography.
Last will and testament? That’s the way it is being marketed and received. A noble attempt to do something a lot harder to accomplish than seems likely when setting out.

[Text Publishing]

The following reviews have been shared by Text Publishing - publisher of He.

‘He. is a record of observing…Observation, rather than interaction, is His approach to the world…The images and memories break out in a disorderly jostle. But they are the memories He keeps…There is so much that is pleasurable in He.—the aperçus, the aphorisms, the vignettes of time and place.’
Australian Book Review

‘[Bail entangles] the relative coherence of his early memories with more fragmentary snapshots of adult life. The effect is startling, a Cezanne-like combination of expressive delicacy and absence…The suave and lugubrious line of his prose in these pages, its intensely visual character, cuts all the way to sinew…The result is a memoir that fails as autobiography but succeeds—miraculously, stainlessly—as literature.’
Geordie Williamson, Australian

‘There are certain books, the publication of which it would be an understatement to call anything less than an event. He. is one…Bail’s writing remains nimble in a way that cannot help but inspire envy…He., for all its concision, need say nothing more. It is full of uncanny energy, gracefully panoramic. Like life, it may be short; yet, of all the books I have read this year, it’s perhaps the most wondrous, the most inordinately beautiful.’
Declan Fry, Saturday Paper

‘Murray Bail has for decades been one of the most significant writers in Australia…[He.] is a meticulous collage of tiny crystalline worlds that were vanishing even as they were perceived…Behind everything in this very strange, intimately familiar book, there is what Shakespeare called “a woman’s longing” for experience and it is executed with an immense gravity and tender care…It is a frail wonder of a book with the potency of dream.’
Peter Craven, Age

‘Murray Bail’s He. seems to enclose most of a life and much of the world…[It] slips seamlessly across time and place…One must soften one’s heart to read it, letting it break open, at the same time as laughing or being aghast…Bail’s books will live on, as did his beloved Stendhal’s.’
Moya Costello, Overland

‘[A] beautifully crafted assembly of fragments.’
InDaily

‘He. is short, but highly condensed…Memories—the very personal, the public, the poetic, or the textural—are captured in one or two paragraphs, sometimes one or two pages, sometimes one or two brief lines…He. moves with a looping stride, focusing on overlapping groups of time—early childhood, teenage years, life overseas…The most poignant of Bail’s recollections are of his early life, and of his mother and father…Reflections on the gradual transformation of society, particularly in terms of language and fashion, inject lightness…In He., Bail is able to take the ultra-personal and make it resonate with the general.’
Guardian

‘Couched in curiosity, astringency and a surprised tenderness...Melancholy but with muscle.’
Adelaide Advertiser

[Caren]

It has been noted that with its significant full stop at the end of the title, “He.” will be Bail’s last publication after a successful career as a celebrated Australian author. Not a memoir, not an autobiography, the text is a collection of remembered moments, impressions, images “[i]in whitish light, blurry when figures appear, virtually no colour. At least that is how he can remember the years, a more or less motionless series of times.”

Significantly, Bail refers to himself as “he”, never using the pronoun “I”, which perhaps gave him distance and, thus, freedom from the confines of autobiography. I admired the written craft of Bail’s text, the immediacy of his scattered images achieved through his visual, sensual, aural details. However, I remained utterly confused by the non-linear sequences of his observations, the absence of connections between the content of one comment and what had preceded or followed it. Because of the “jumbled” presentation of the “series of times”, I struggled to remember what I was reading about as I desperately wanted some chronology and connections to make sense of what had prompted Bail’s memories. Because of this, I did not enjoy the book, but rather felt frustrated despite some beautiful writing and images.

[Declan Fry]

There are certain books, the publication of which it would be an understatement to call anything less than an event. He. is one.

It is Murray Bail’s first work in almost a decade. It’s being marketed as his last.

Reading it, I was reminded of Hamlet’s words to Ophelia: “We will have no more marriages.” Part of what makes Hamlet’s invocation so shocking is the sense that, from the outset, before the play has even begun, everything – the players, the stage, the meaning of it all – is already finished. Hamlet lives the end of his days, the end of all our marriages, as if it were all he and Ophelia had ever known.

He. is animated by a similar sense of dissolution. Entropy drives the narrative; recurrent intimations of forgetting everyone and everything.

The “he” of the title may in fact be “I”. But Bail, of course, distrusts the “I”. Perhaps it’s a case of preferring the more mythical properties with which “he” – distanced by discretion, the fig leaf of the third person – might imbue a life. As Bail writes of his narratorial surrogate, awakened to the atavistic power of myth by a 1988 performance of Wagner’s clamorous Meistersinger in Sydney: “At intervals and without warning a feeling of perplexity: he could only just accept being alive.”

That year I, too, had to accept it – this whole business of being alive. While Wagnerian events took place in Sydney – “Germany’s gift to Australia for its bicentenary” – I was preparing to be born. Murray Bail, as editor, was readying The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories, having released his second novel, Holden’s Performance, the previous year.

Now, it’s a mug’s game to imagine oneself and one’s birth connected, Saleem Sinai-style, with world events. Nonetheless, when I read Holden as a young boy, some 14 years after its publication, I felt as if I were encountering one.

Continue reading: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/c...

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much to think about in Murray Bail's memoir He.  It's not a chronological memoir — indeed, it reminds me obliquely of Rodney Hall's 'historical' novel Vortex (see my review) in the way that fragments dance about to form a narrative that is deliberately not quite whole.  IMO that's as a memoir should be because that kind of narrative mimics the way memory works when we're trying to revisit the events of our lives.  We remember scraps from childhood, faces without names, events of disproportionate importance, and consciously or unconsciously we suppress private and embarrassing and guilt-ridden memories.  Memoirists with integrity are scrupulous about what they include about the lives of others when they intersect with personal history.  For Murray Bail, married for the second time to a notable author of nonfiction, the risks must have been clear.  In reflections on Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, Moya Costello unpacks this couple's contrasting approach to 'tell all' and quotes Bail in an interview as saying ‘Divulging secrets and dropping names isn’t the only way to uncover something of ourselves.’

Wise to the flaws in memoir, in He. (with its emphatic full stop) he interrogates his own memory:

Images which keep appearing without reason, encourage seemingly unrelated lesser images.  Most common are moments of beauty, such as the sheer elegance of nature—of a small part of the world—or else extreme experiences, usually violent.  On the way to Brisbane as he passed the Volkswagen it moved over too suddenly and into the dirt and rolled over  He stopped and reached the car on its side to help the two women, one screaming. (p.70)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/01/12/h...

[Andrew Deakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Australian novelist Murray Bail's 2021 (small) book 'He.' of memories and reflections seems initially to be an unassuming, end of life compilation of scattered and casual observations garnered from a productive and reflective life, but, like well composed chamber music, the book develops an intimate, forceful, and structured presentation of a man's development through life, with all extraneous detail cast aside, and giving the reader an opportunity to observe a somewhat sensitive, sometimes self indulgent, literary sensibility that lives its life with, at times, limited self awareness.



The memories seem at first random, flitting in an apparent stream of consciousness across time, events, and people. However, like the pointillist composition of an impressionist painting, a pattern gradually emerges, and the reader can discern with increasing certainty a life of substance lived amidst a cultural milieu that the writer obviously finds somewhat alienating, albeit without the wit and intelligence to appreciate the limitations of his own socially cloistered existence.



The details of Bail's life emerge gradually: raised in suburban post-war Adelaide by provincial Methodist parents, aware vaguely of his literary talent, moving to Melbourne (not unaware of that city's smug provincialism), an initial career in advertising, marriage, a move to India inspired by the Apu trilogy of Satyajit Ray (shades of 1960s trendyism worthy of the Barry Humphries academic caricature Neil Singleton of that period), a move to London, travels through much of Europe and West Asia, divorce and remarriage, and finally settling in Sydney as a successful writing career elevates him to one of Australia's most acknowledged short story writers, novelists, and critiquers of the Australian identity of the late twentieth century (the titles are not mentioned, but Drover's Wife, Homesickness, and the spectacular Eucalyptus come to mind). The book ends with Bail obviously in his late seventies, with 'He.' being his final recollection and implicit self assessment.



Bail appears to be more of his period than he would like to admit. The grimly one dimensional 1950s Australia is (understandably) not to his taste, but reactions such as the aforementioned move to India, the superficial disdain for Australia's provincialism, the weary acceptance of the country's political culture, the distaste for signs of economic growth and development as the architecture of the cities becomes more commercial, the flirtation with socialism as a remedy for social inequalities (immune to obvious evidence to the contrary as witnessed in trips to Russia and Eastern Europe), the inane distaste for opera (walking out of a production of Tosca because he feels opera is unrealistic, before later, belatedly, developing an interest in Wagner), and a simple belief that 'liberated' women can manage sexual relationships with the same casual appetite as the modern man of letters - all these suggest a readily identifiable type and sensibility that moved in the confined and socially smug circles of journalism, academia, artists, and writers of late twentieth century Australia (and elsewhere), a type that was proud of its socially 'progressive' views, unaware of its economic illiteracy (albeit vaguely aware that the Hawke/Keating periods of government were modernising Australia), disdainful of suburbia, and generally comfortable with the left of centre take on life relentlessly promoted by the national broadcaster.



Titling the book 'He.' suggests Bail may be casting a third person look at himself, possibly with some sense of irony and awareness of his limitations. His literary achievements display great observation and intelligence. It is not clear that this impressive memoir marks a more nuanced understanding of Bail's life and times. Nevertheless, it is a moving reflection of a life lived in the post war Australia that is now developing the sepia tinges of a period which time has now abandoned to history.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review by Lisa Hill led me to Murray Bail's memoir, https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/01/12/h..., a reading experience that will stay with me for a long time.

He offers memories as recalled images of places, people, things he's done, and thoughts that arise from time to time, like these, in the young part of his life:

Time which doesnt vary offers a certain regularity, while everything within it is uneven and jumbled.

to be intelligent and natural. does one interfere with the other?

Or this, on Australian visual culture in the 1950s: 'It was a landscape culture. the painters continued working through their impressions of the landscape. these had to be more or less settled before a young nation could move on to painting pure and simple.' Music and literature went through the same process.

Though it covers the whole of his long life span (he's born in 1941) it's only sequential in a loose sense, as memories come to the fore while thinking or writing about something else - as they do in life.

He writes revealingly of himself, and himself in relationships, and kindly names neither of his two wives nor any of the other women with whom he spent time (I assume this from the memoir).

It's a book to mull on, to spend time with, not to race through it.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual memoir told as fragments of memories that have stayed with the author over his life. I love it.