Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 624, 1997, to page 693, the beginning of 1998.
It’s less than a month since my previous post about Helen Garner’s diaries. But I’m getting close to the end. This morning I’ve read the first three pages of 1998, the year the diaries end. If I post today, my two final posts will cover roughly the same number of pages.
Most of this third volume has been taken up with the marital difficulties arising in part from Garner’s husband V’s demands on her while he writes a novel. She has been effectively exiled from their shared home most days so he can focus on the work. No matter that she has seen him walking up the street with another woman (‘X the painter’) a number of times. No matter that she has found herself pretty much unable to write. He remains impervious. When they moved back to Sydney he said he would rent a flat as a workplace, but he admits he lied, and he’s glad he lied, because, ‘Look at the result.’
The result is the manuscript of a novel that has been the subject of a bidding war in Europe. (And, as we know, the novel Eucalyptus was to be a critical success.) Garner is full of praise for the novel, to V and in her diaries. She spends four days checking the proofs with him and (a moment that thrills my proofreader heart) she picks up a spelling error and when he gleefully faxes the British publisher to point out the error she bets in her diary that he doesn’t mention that it was his wife who spotted it. The episode was made even more delightful to me by the knowledge that I would have missed the error completely.
The book is coming to an end, and so is the marriage, though until this morning’s pages, both Garner and V seem to think they can make it work. They have talked about her buying a separate flat for herself, but that seems unlikely to work when immediately after that conversation he scoots off to do ‘husbandly’ handyman favours for X the painter.
Just after my last post (at this link), V said he hated Helen writing about him in her diary. After much discussion she decides (on page 627), ‘From now on I determine not to write about V except in passing.’ She resists the ‘pressure cooking feeling’ that comes with this restraint for about three pages. But it adds wonderfully to the reading experience. What, one wonders, does the real-life V think about this book? For that matter, how does the real life X the painter feel about it – it wouldn’t be hard to discover her real identity.
This morning’s reading begins benignly enough with an encounter with Clive James in which he gives Garner a tango lesson. There’s the usual bit of mild unpleasantness when she tells V about it. He asks if anyone else was dancing, and when she says no he turns away ‘with that smile’.
Then, in the last two pages of today’s reading, everything explodes. For many pages now, Helen has been suspicious of V’s relationship with X the painter. He has consistently protested that he is not being unfaithful, while she insists that if that were so he wouldn’t be so secretive about it. At the lunch where Helen dances with Clive James, a woman takes her aside and hints broadly that there might be some substance to her suspicions. Helen leaves a ‘very short, last-ditch letter’ for V, who is out of town, saying she missed the trust between them and would like to be able to establish it again. The next day, as she passes through his work room on some errand, she sees a folded sheet of paper on his desk. Thinking it is his reply to her letter, she unfolds it.
A blow from a baseball bat.
It’s a love letter to X.
She stumbles into the kitchen and goes berserk. My last page this morning is taken up with the spectacle of berserk Helen wreaking havoc. Bearing in mind that V’s novel is the most important thing in his life, and that the two of them have recently spent four days immersed in proofreading it, the culmination of her rage is truly horrific:
I grab the proof copy of his fucking novel and fling it down on his desk … I rip the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof copy with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind. The nib gives way, bleeding ink, and twists into a little golden knot. I hurl it aside
She grabs a handful of his cigars and dump them in spilled beetroot soup in the kitchen sink, but before that:
I leave a note on a card: ‘Don’t you know that being lied to makes people crazy?’
I had to leave it there. I snuck a look at page 694 and see that at first he denies everything but by the end of the page he’s owning up.
Throughout most of this volume, Garner has described herself as unable to write anything apart from journalism. I can’t be the first to observe that during that whole time she was writing her diary, and I can’t be the first to observe that during what she saw as a fallow period she was in fact writing a masterpiece. An extremely uncomfortable read, sometimes vicious about other people, sometimes ruthlessly self-critical, occasionally blisteringly honest – as in her description of her berserk behaviour: one thing to have done it, but how extraordinary to make herself write in such specific detail what she did.
I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.
