Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 194 to 353, mid 1986 to partway through 1988
Helen Garner’s diaries continue to give me joy, five pages first thing each day.
A lot has happened since my last post. The character known as V has appeared and Garner’s relationship with him has become a dominant narrative thread. Even if a kind blog-friend hadn’t sent me a key to some of the people in the diaries, I would have guessed that V is novelist Murray Bail, who was to become Garner’s third husband. At this stage they are besottedly in love and Helen is spending a lot of time travelling back and forth between her home on Melbourne and hotels and other temporary abodes in Sydney, where V lives.
Other things are happening. Books are published and reviewed (she mainly quotes the negative ones). She appears at literary festivals all over the world and converses with the famous. She writes a screenplay, probably for Last Days at Chez Nous. A benefactor gives her money to buy a small house in rural Victoria. She moves out of the home she has shared with her daughter. Other young people come and go in her life. She has a religious experience and someone she calls ‘my nun’ appears. It’s hard to believe that this is less than two years in a life.
In today’s reading, there are 24 entries, ranging in length from a single short sentence to half a page. She watches Passage to India on the television and goes to the Australian Opera production of La Forza del Destino. She and a woman writer friend have an alarming conversation with an unnamed male poet about child abuse. She records a dream or two. She writes about the stars in Primrose Gully (‘How small they were, how far away’) and the ‘astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter’. (I just went walking in sunlit rain yesterday in Sydney in early winter, and I was astonished too.) She quarrels with the friend she lives with, ‘perhaps for the first time’. She records snippets of conversation, some overheard, some of which she is a part.
Diaries are often places where people write their misgivings and doubts rather than their considered opinions. There’s a lot of that in the entries about V. If it was a movie the audience would be silently crying out, ‘Don’t do it, Helen! Get out while you can!’ In today’s reading alone, she receives a letter from him that makes her want to shake him and fantasise calling it all off. She visits an art gallery with him and finds it impossible to tell him why a particular painting means something to her, partly for fear that he’ll tease her and laugh at her. She imagines him reproaching her for her reading habits. And she agonises over what their affair means for his wife, though they don’t seem to be able to talk about that – as in this on page 253:
‘His father went to jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’
‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’
Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.
But every now and then, almost by accident, we get a glimpse of why she’s in the relationship:
In Neilsen Park the astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter: tremendous towers of cloud coloured delicately in greys and pinks, boats sliding or toiling, clear cool air. How can that hard-looking mouth be so soft?
I believe Garner when she says she didn’t alter the text of these diaries except to protect people’s identities (though not all the identities are well protected). I expect that she left entries things out. I’m in awe of her moral fortitude in deciding over and over again what to leave in.
I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the astonishingly beautiful land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.
Me fail? I fly! 