Why it took Murnane a lifetime to begin to publish his fiction

Having finished reading Gerald Murnane's 1987 collection, Landscape with Landscape, in which the final story, Landscape with Artist, recounts the narrator's (author's?) visits to an artist community in the outskirts of Melbourne, first ca 1960 when he was a relatively young aspiring author extremely awkward with women and drinking to the point of alcohol poisoning and later, ca 1980, as a seemingly more mature man, still an unpublished writer, but far deeper into his obsessions, so much so that he has left his wife and family and moved to a rented (or bestowed) room in the artistic community, which he sees as part of a predetermined migratory pattern in his life. He still drinks too much and is almost criminally neglectful of his 12-year-old son whom he brings w/ him to one of the all-night parties at an artist's house. In short, anyone who'd met Murnane ca 1960 - or 1980 - would believe he was an alcoholic w/ a number of mental illnesses, notably OCD and some form of autism, that his devotion to his writing, while incontrovertible, is more of an obsession than a calling and that it would seem obvious that he would never complete a work of fiction much less publish any significant writing - and yet - here we are reading his collection of stories (and more works were to follow, to the point where he is today, in his 80s, attracting an international following. So what gives? Is the obsessing behavior of his narrator all just part of the story? From what we know based on a recent mag profile, no - the obsessions are really Murnane's. So perhaps it has taken a near lifetime of work for Murnane to be able to capture his ideas, many of them odd, and his "lost time," much of which was wasted in drink and clouded by sexual obsessions and by Catholic guilt - with the result being a # of unusual late-life works of fiction (and perhaps essays as well). As noted yesterday, his works are unconventional in content though not in form; in fact, all of the writers he mentions in this collection - and there aren't many, he seems to have lived and worked in isolation from all literary movements and academic refuges - are fairly conventional in re their writing styles (if not subject matter): AE Housman, Dylan Thomas, (a prodigious drinker), even Jack Kerouac, a drinker and a chronicler of his life (like Murnane) but an adventurer and traveler, completely unlike Murnane, whose adventures are explorations of interior, as he would put it, "landscapes."