I’m loving spending a little time each morning – five pages worth – with grumpy, self-questioning, acutely observing, word-loving Helen Garner. I’m now well into the third volume, and it’s reading more and more like a novel, with a clear narrative line.
This is the story of a marriage break-up. I imagine that even readers who come to the book with no prior knowledge would read it that way. As a reader, you know where it’s heading, but these are diary entries, so you know that the woman writing them has no idea of the shape of the story. Of course, the woman who edited the diaries for publication did know, and some sculpting of the narrative must surely happened in the selection process.
Since my last post, The First Stone has been published, and has created a storm, most of it in the form of attacks from feminists. This doesn’t take up a lot of space, but it’s interesting to read that Garner undertook to write a response to every letter she received. How glad she must be that the book was published before the age of social media.
True Stories, a collection of essays, is published. She agonises over whether to include ‘Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?’, the Digger article about the time she decided to answer school students’ questions about sex with complete frankness. (I’ve just checked my copy. It’s in there.) She worries that V, her husband, doesn’t know about that period of her life, and she has serious misgivings about the ethics. She needn’t have worried about V’s reaction – she notices that the bookmark in his copy of the book doesn’t progress very far at all.
But the main game is the marriage. The diaries record excruciating rows. V is working on a novel. (V is Murray Bail. The novel is Eucalyptus, which was published to great critical acclaim in 1998, probably after the period covered by these diaries.) He needs the flat to himself when he’s working, so Helen has to be elsewhere. It’s hard on her to be shut out of her own home, and he repeatedly dismisses her complaints. And then a couple of times when she can’t be in the house because he is working, she sees him in the street with another woman, a sculptor known as X. When she confronts him about this, he says she’s being unreasonable. Meanwhile she has started going to therapy, and the therapist – known only as ‘she’ – leads her to see her desire to escape the marriage as part of a long-term habit of running from difficulty. So she is determined to stick it out, make it work. Oh dear!
In today’s reading, I’m about a third into 1997. There’s some respite from the marital difficulties, just a couple of moments in five pages: he goes out to dinner with X, and there’s just a frisson of mutual awkwardness. Later she has a brief conversation with X in which X says she hates ‘people who tell lies’. Garner makes no comment, but that remark has an almost radioactive quality on the page. And there’s this:
V says that women’s writing ‘lacks an overarching philosophy’. I don’t even know what this means. Also, I don’t care.
She spends time on the phone with her francophone second husband, translating an interview with Thomas Bernhard. V eagerly takes it around to X, who ‘thought it was terrific’, though she has a small suggestion that makes Helen bristle..
Helen is still enjoying the novelty of working on a computer: she writes her first movie review for the Australian Review of Books, and it takes her less than three hours, typed ‘straight on to the computer’!
A US aircraft carrier comes to Sydney:
The streets of the Cross swarm with sailors. Some of the white ones are raw-looking boys, guzzling Coke, carrying bags full of boomerangs; others, especially the Black ones, are young and slender, their skin smooth and gleaming under the brilliant white of the gob caps. They stand about in twos and threes, murmuring to each other: ‘Yo. Yo. Hey, man. Wassup? Wass happnin’?’
And later she sees a sweet note from one of the sailors in the prayer-request book at her church.
She visits the Korean baths in Kings Cross, now long closed down. After going to Church at Easter, she takes the image of the angel rolling the stone from the open grave to her therapy session, and weeps for the first time in her therapist’s presence. Then she and her friend R compare notes about therapy: they decide R has a fear of bottomless grief and H is scared that if she let herself get really angry she’d ‘wreck the room or something’.
And after a short entry about a possible story about a hysterectomy, the last entry I read today is a nice example of the way the tone in this book shifts wildly from one line to the next:
Saw the Beavis and Butthead movie last night. It’s not as good as the TV show but I loved its utter grossness and moronic stupidity.
She doesn’t say if she went with V. I hope so. I hope he enjoyed it too. I think both hopes are in vain.
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.
[This post was originally published on 19 July 2008 on my earlier blog. I’m retrieving it here as Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip got a mention in the Book Group’s discussion of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song]
As I may have mentioned previously, our six-member Book Club has a general ban on talking about books at any length. The routine business of the evening is to swap books, eat and play cards, in that order. The swapping is highly ritualised: each of us offers three books, and each – in an order determined by drawing cards from the pack – borrows three books from the pool of offerings; before that happens we do ‘returns’ and ‘retentions’ from the previous meeting. Each book is given a score out of 5 by the offerer and the returner, and up to 30 seconds of discussion is permitted.
At our most recent meeting, by tacit agreement, we didn’t play cards, and lingered over dinner instead. In a striking departure from SOP, someone asked, ‘What did everyone think of The Spare Roomthen?’ It had transpired during the swapping that everyone had read that book, and now it turned out that everyone had an opinion about it.
One person, who has made a film about death and bereavement, was intensely critical of the way Character Helen avoids facing up to death and her avoidance is not challenged by the book. (I actually think this is wrong – I read the last pages of the book as undermining and even invalidating much of Character Helen’s version of events.) Another, who had serious cancer some time ago, was gobsmacked by Character Helen’s lack of compassion – she couldn’t see how anyone could write such a character and expect readers to be sympathetic to her. Yet another saw the whole issue of death as the occasion rather than the subject of the book, whose actual focus is on the way in relationships between women expectations and commitments have to be constantly adjusted and renegotiated.
I don’t know what I think, except that I loved the way the book took a narrative about emotional subtleties and made something like an action tale out of it, and (I didn’t say this) I regard the scene where Character Helen sets out to reassure her guest that she hasn’t been a complete failure as unintentionally ironic – I mean, reading other people’s novels in manuscript makes a life meaningful? Ice-cold comfort, I would have thought. So there you go, Helen Garner got us talking.
I came away from the meeting with four books, the first of which was a retention from the previous meeting (I’d only managed 10 pages or so in the six weeks between meetings, not an uncommon occurrence):
At the meeting, someone mentioned World War One Chick Lit, a genre I hadn’t heard named before. I don’t think Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy would fit that description, since quite a lot of its action takes place in the trenches. Life Class, on the other hand, probably does. The War doesn’t start until after more than a hundred pages of unrequited love among London art students. It does include graphically described mutilation and suffering in a hospital and nearby village close to the front in Ypres. There’s an ongoing discussion of how an artist should respond to the war, the main options being to ignore it because it’s just something that happens to people rather than being chosen by them, to glorify it (there’s a spectacularly noxious quote from the Futurist manifesto), or to do one’s best to tell the truth about it even though one’s work might be unshowable.
Even though Pat Barker includes an end note listing a number of biographies of artists who lived through those times, the debate pretty much sticks with the headlines, and the book amounts ends up being a footnote to the trilogy, a tale of young love thwarted by the War, not through the death of one lover, but by the creation of an uncrossable gulf between the two of them. Perhaps I’m missing something, but at times it felt as if there were two or even three different affairs being described: was her love unrequited as she felt, or his as he felt, or was she playing a manipulative, bisexual game as a third character claimed and was never contradicted. I didn’t know, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t really care.
I loved Jeanette Winterson’s opening address for the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year, and perhaps even more her chat with Romana Koval on the Book Show, which covered some of the same ground. So even though I’d been largely bored by The Stone Gods, which I’d scored at the previous Book Club meeting, I picked up Art Objects with hope in my heart. The book and I got off to a bad start with the epigraph, ‘If truth is that which lasts, then …’: I muttered under my breath, ‘If truth has nothing to do with lasting or otherwise, then there’s no point reading the rest of that sentence.’ But after that initial skirmish I was, alternately, putty in Jeanette’s hands and driven nuts by her indulgences.
The thread that runs through these essays is an argument for taking art seriously, for the need for the reader or viewer of art to work. This is wonderful, and there are bright flashes of insight on every page. She’s a brilliant and passionate advocate for things that are very dear to my heart, and yet … somehow her pentecostal rhapsodies leave me cold, and on occasion her self-proclaimed love for words can be hard to distinguish from love of the sound of her own voice. It’s probably telling that having read her lively, intelligent, lyrical essays on Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, I felt not the slightest stirrings of desire to read any of their works. Here’s a fine passage from the essay ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, that touches on the literature vs literacy debate (I still have my calico bag from the 2004 literacy convention, which sports the wistful slogan, real texts • real lives • real learning • real pleasure):
Learning to read is more than learning to group the letters on a page. Learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of body and mind. I do not mean the endless dross-skimming that passes for literacy, I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being. To recognise it in its own right, separate, particular, to let it speak in its own voice, not in a ventriloquism of yours. To find its relationship to you that is not its relationship to anyone else. To recognise, at the same time, that you are neither the means nor the method of its existence and that the love between you is not mutual suicide. The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealised world. Art is not amnesia, and the popular idea of books as escapism or diversion misses altogether what art is. There is plenty of escapism and diversion to be had, but it cannot be had from real books, real music, real theatre.
See what I mean? These are things that cry out to be said, but it’s preaching to the choir – and I do mean preaching.
On the other hand, how about this evocation of the context of her advocacy of the imagination, from ‘Imagination and Reality’:
Children who are born into a tired world as batteries of new energy are plugged into the system as soon as possible and gradually drained away. At the time when they become adult and conscious they are already depleted and prepared to accept the world of shadows. Those who have kept their spirit find it hard to nourish it and between the ages of twenty and thirty, many are successfully emptied of all resistance. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that most of the energy of most of the people is being diverted into a system which destroys them. Money is no antidote. If the imaginative life is to be renewed it needs its own coin.
She’s still preaching, but here I feel the urge to bang a tambourine accompaniment. Teresa Nielsen Hayden memorably said in her classic blog post, Things I Believe: ‘I believe we’re bound to occasionally confuse God with His creation. The part of creation I most frequently confuse with God is the English language.’ Jeanette Winterson should be forgiven if she occasionally makes the same mistake, and preaches accordingly.
‘Why is Dickens a great writer and Trollope hardly a writer at all?’ was one of the stand-out aggravating lines in Jeanette Winterson’s book. It provides a nice segue, though, to Mister Pip, in which Dickens is introduced as ‘the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century’, and whose plot revolves around Bougainvillean village schoolchildren being transported into another world through having Great Expectations read to them – so that they become in some measure Jeanette’s ideal readers.
Consensus at the Book Club was that Mister Pip was superb. I struggled, and failed, to like it. I was uneasy from the start about the first person narration by Matilda, a black village child during the Bougainvillean civil war and blockade of the early 90s who falls in love with Dickens’s Pip and witnesses terrible brutality. The voice never rang true for me – and though some of what I took to be false notes (there’s a Somerset-Maugham-ish explanation of the suddenness of nightfall in the tropics, for example, as if Matilda somehow thinks of non-tropical experience as the norm) are accounted for by Matilda’s later life as told in the final chapters, I never came to trust the voice, and the book never made sense: the last remaining white man on the island reads Great Expectations to the schoolchildren, and when the book is destroyed by soldiers, along with all the houses and possessions of the villagers, he and the children have a project of retrieving the whole narrative; then there are some scenes of hideous brutality; Matilda and a handful of other villagers escape to live in Australia; she becomes a Dickens scholar, and at the end of her narrative decides to go back to her village.
Maybe my problem with the book boils down to its being set in a real time and place, but presenting a kind of allegory about colonialism. Monstrous things did happen in Bougainville in the early 90s while the White world largely turned our collective back, and Lloyd Jones manifestly – and laudably – wants us to acknowledge that. But, almost certainly in spite of its author’s intentions, this book (in my reading) ends up exploiting the horror for literary and, as it turned out, prize-winning effect.
The Lost Dog, on the other hand, has a voice to die for. The phrase ‘jewelled prose’ came to mind: there’s hardly a sentence, and probably not a paragraph without a glowing adjective, a finely cut phrase, a many-faceted image or a sharply glittering epigram, though I don’t think you’d find any extended metaphors as laboured as that one. I was so captivated by the prose that I’d reached about the halfway point before I started to wonder if there was a plot; fortunately, just about then Michelle De Kretser started to give clues about where the book was heading. I remember someone saying of the movie Stand By Me that almost everything in it was there to allow the movie to get away with the one moment of tenderness between two boys. It’s not quite that simple with The Lost Dog – in fact, there’s nothing simple about this book – but after all its playing with time, its ruminations about modernism and post-colonialism, its playing around with references to Henry James (the point-of-view character, Tom, has just finished writing a book on James when this book opens and he loses his dog), it gives us climactic moments affirming simple human/animal realities. (The beautiful cover was designed by excellent blogger Ampersand Duck, who had clearly read the book. The book I borrowed is hardcover and a pleasure to hold in the hand.)
A general footnote: one of Jeanette Winterson’s tendentious remarks was ‘”Write from your own experience” is fine for the writing class, useless for the writer.’ Well, not entirely useless I think. Part of my difficulty with the Lloyd Jones book was that I believed the book when it was talking about Dickens, but not about Bougainvillean culture: I’m sure he did a lot of research, but it doesn’t feel experienced in the book. On the other hand, the only moments that rang false for me in The Lost Dog were those when Tom does something sexual when alone: as if that had to be included to make him a proper man. I’d bet good money, on the other hand, that Tom’s bi-cultural experience has a lot in common with Michelle’s, and that Matilda’s is a long way from Lloyd’s.
Addition: Tipped off by a review of the latest Meanjin in today’s Spectrum (supplement of Sydney Morning Herald), I found Ampersand Duck’s post about designing The Lost Dog‘s cover. It’s a terrific post, but I just want to quote this, in a self-congratulatory way: ‘For me, the most alluring part of the job was that part of my brief was to read the book properly. Hooray!’ I thought as much!
Since my last nominally monthly report on my progress with Helen Garner’s diaries I’ve spent a couple of weeks away. The Garner book is completely unsuitable for aeroplane travel, so this report is running late and I have fewer pages to report on.
One of the joys of the diaries is the elliptical narrative that emerges. At this stage of my reading, it seems that the whole 770 pages tells the story of Garner’s relationship with her third husband, the novelist known in these pages as V. In the first entries she is still married to F, a marriage which ends acrimoniously, though by now she and F are friendly again, as he helps clean up a translation of Monkey Grip and attends performances by Helen’s daughter. Then V appears and is one of two men she is having a fling with. She chooses between them, realises she is in love with V and embarks on a serious relationship with him, guiltily because he is married. He leaves his wife and for a time they live together secretly in Sydney, where Helen pines for her Melbourne home and community. Now they have moved together to Melbourne, where she is much happier and he is feeling uprooted. In the last couple of days of my reading the possibility of marriage has been mentioned, not by Helen or V but by a friend – recorded without comment in the diary.
This compelling story is embedded in a host of sharp observations of the world, notes on the progress of her writing, the twists and turns of other relationships, world events, the writerly life.
In today’s reading the main narrative advance comes in an entry where V says he finds it very hard to work in Melbourne. An otherwise unidentified ‘novelist from New York’ comments that whereas ‘traditionally’ in marriage the woman goes to live on the man’s turf, V has left his own territory and come entirely on to Helen’s:
He has no family and no kids, he’s estranged from his wife of twenty-four years, he has sold his piece of property, and he’s here.
This is a sweet note that makes one realise that the many diary entries about quarrels in which V comes off as arrogant, patriarchal, dismissive of the woman’s point of view are far from being the whole picture. The move to Melbourne was his suggestion, in response to Helen’s discontent in Sydney.
And there’s so much else in today’s five pages:
Helen submits Cosmo Cosmolino to Y (probably Diana Gribble), her publisher, they have a laughter-filled editing session, then she labours at some painful rewriting, and is scared that with this book she ‘will come a cropper’. She sees a fine cut of The Last Days of Chez Nous, and enjoys it, then is cranky when she receives faxes (faxes!) ‘demanding further dialogue for post-synching’. She mentions writing a review of David Marr’s biography of Patrick White, and delights in her father’s comment, ‘I think the writer of that book will be … enchanted by what you said about it.’
There are events from the wide world: Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated. There are notes on her reading (The Diary of the Rev Francis Kilvert) and music listened to, reports on conversations (notably one about sex on international flights – ‘For once I was entirely innocent’), a death, a divorce, a bust-up with an important woman friend. A friend becomes a grandmother. Her friend J (evidently Tim Winton) is interviewed on TV.
I like to end these reports with one entry. Here’s my favourite from today (page 458):
Out walking as it was getting light, V and I passed a blackbird singing on a wire. A very beautiful song, melodic, generously paced, sweet. V laughed: ‘I build good nests. I find many worms.’
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.
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.
Someone at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival said that we ought to stretch our attention spans by reading for twenty minutes at a time – or it may have been by reading twenty pages at one sitting. That’s probably good advice, but I’ve now been reading just five pages of Helen Garner’s diaries every morning for a little over a month, and I’m convinced this is the best way to read them.
I expected the experience to be similar to reading Seamus Heaney’s letters in the same way (first of several blog posts here). But a diary entry is a different beast from a letter, even one written to an intimate friend. Garner is not concerned to present an acceptable face or to spare people’s feelings. I expect she has done some sparing in the editing – by anonymising most people, and probably by cutting some entries – but this is not a public face on display.
The diaries were, however, meant to be well written, to wrangle her observations and reflections into precise words. Nearly two-thirds of the way in the first volume, Yellow Notebook, narrative threads have emerged. Her second marriage, to a man identified only as ‘F’, has come to an end after a long period of bitter rows, and she is coming to terms with her new unpartnered life. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, won a prize on the first page, in 1978. Now, in 1986, she seems to go to a lot of writers’ festivals where people are all too happy to give their opinions about The Children’s Bach (1984) and sometimes mistake her for a staff member. A film she wrote the script for goes to Cannes – she doesn’t name the film (it was Two Friends, directed by Gillian Armstrong) or say any more about it. There’s a thread to do with religion: she senses the approach of what she calls ‘The Mighty Force’, and the thread has peaked in a brief entry (on page 185): ‘ I dread having to become a Christian.’ Perhaps related to that is her deep friendship with ‘J’, transparently Tim Winton (they laugh at gossips who assume they’re sleeping together).
I won’t be surprised if some time in the next decade or so an annotated edition of the diaries appears with notes identifying people and places, and elaborating on contexts. Without that apparatus, it’s like reading the ghost of an autobiography – tantalising, but still oddy satisfying.
There are dreams, conversations, snippets from her reading and film-going, lovely moments with her daughter and sister, irritating moments with various men, deft little pen portraits both physical and psychological, and entries that amount to prose poems.
There’s is a recurring fascination with murder, especially child murder. Several gruesome news items make their way into the diary, and then in 1985 she attends her first trial. Here she is talking to the father of a murdered girl:
I asked him if I could come to the trial. ‘Why do you want to?’ ‘First because I thought you might like people to be with you. And second because I’m curious.’ The real truth would be in reverse order. In fact the real truth is part 2. The first is cosmetic, though it is true also, in another way.
How could she have known that this interest would lead to her brilliant non-fiction books Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), both published well after the end date of these collected diaries.
In today’s reading there’s a long, gruesome account of a visit to the dentist, a number of notes on possible books and stories to write, comments on movies (Visconti’s Bellissima) and books (she reads surreptitiously from a novel about a sadomasochistic affair at Readings book shop), snippets from conversations, descriptions of nature, quotes from a reader and a critic. Here’s a sample just from these five pages:
A micro-fiction:
At the school concert a girl’s proud father says, ‘I love you!’ and squeezes her in his arms. She shrieks, ‘Ewww,YUCK!’ and fights to break free. He grips tighter with a demonic grin
A delicious name-drop (‘the law student’ is her lodger):
Raymond Carver called collect when I wasn’t home, and the law student, confused, caused him to hang up.
A neighbourly conversation:
Out near the rubbish bins I ask my neighbour if she knows anything about Melanie Klein. ‘I absolutely detest psychoanalysis,’ she snaps. I bet you do. Look at your life.
A gruesome moment observed:
Outside the post office the dog shat out a tapeworm. It trailed behind her and I had to put my foot on it to snap it off.
A tiny addition to the underlying narrative:
Spring comes. People fall in love – or they will, when the sunny breezes blow and exams are soon and cafe tables are put out on the pavements. Will I? I can’t imagine who with?
I’m so glad she decided to publish these diaries. I’m pretty sure I’m also glad I’m not ‘the neighbour’, ‘the law student’ or even the ‘proud father’.
I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.
A generous friend gave me this whopping tome for my birthday this year.
Someone said, ‘It’s a book you dip into rather than read from start to finish.’ But I’m not much of a dipper, so I’ve decided to take it on as a slow read – five pages a day for six months or so. I loved doing that with Seamus Heaney’s letters. Why not with Helen Garner’s diaries?
The diaries were originally published in three volumes: Yellow Notebook (2019), One Day I’ll Remember This (2020), and How to End a Story (2021), covering the years 1978 to 1986, 1987 to 1995 and 1995 to 1988 respectively.
From what I’ve read elsewhere, I understand that Garner kept diaries for decades before the entries that begin Yellow Notebook, but she burned them all, and decided in 1978 to write readable diary, not necessarily for publication, but with attention to the crafting of sentences. Four decades after starting the first proper diary in a yellow notebook acquired for the purpose, she decided to publish, with minimal alterations, and none to spare her own feelings.
I’ve just read the first five pages. My initial response is to feel a little deprived that the entries aren’t dated, and people are identified only by a single initial. Any information about what relationship people have to Garner is to be deduced from the text – which is an odd bit of false reticence when of the two character mentioned so far one is clearly Garner’s daughter and the other seems to be a lover whose identity I imagine would be easy to discover. Similarly, there is no scaffolding to say where an entry was written: on the first pages Garner is feeling alone in a city, and only gradually does it merge that she’s in France, probably in Paris.
I’m probably just missing Christopher Reid’s helpful annotations in the Seamus Heaney book, and I’ll get used to this bare approach.
I hope to write a first monthly report towards the end of May.
I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.
A couple of years ago, in an attempt to limit the way this blog ate into my time, I decided that when I was writing about a book, I would focus arbitrarily on the page that corresponded to my age. No attempt at a proper review, no selection of the most quotable bits, just a look at one page.
It didn’t work out to be a time-saver. As often as not, the discussion of page 77, then page 78, became an added extra to a general discussion of the book.
I hereby resolve to stick rigorously to page 78 (and soon to page 79), and assume that my readers can go elsewhere for proper, thoughtful reviews.
The Mushroom Tapes is a good book to start my new policy. Few Australians won’t know about Erin Patterson’s trial last year for murder involving a Beef Wellington made with deadly mushrooms served up to her in-laws. If you really know nothing about it, here’s a Wikipedia link. Almost as few readers won’t know who Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein are. (I’ve linked their names to lists of my blog posts where they appear.)
This book was originally conceived as a podcast in which three writers who have covered criminal trials chatted about this one. The podcast came to nothing, and they made a book from the tapes. I come close to being its ideal reader because I managed to pay very little attention to the trial as it was happening, so I didn’t come to it suffering from mushroom-overload.
Page 78 is one of the pages that records the writers/tapers’ conversation while driving around. It occurs in Part II, ‘The Church and the House’. They have visited the church where Erin Patterson and her in-laws worshipped, and then her house. Sarah Krasnostein, the only one among them who is an actual lawyer, has just given a little lecture about the pros and cons of a guilty plea. Helen, always the one to draw attention to details of the environment, has asked what some black cattle all spread out on a hill ‘in a lovely way’ are called. Chloe has a stab at an answer:
It turns out the page gives a good sense of the flavour of the conversations generally. There’s not a lot of rambling. Having raised the subject of the cows, Helen abruptly shuts it down: ‘We don’t even really care – about cows!’ And they’re away trading insights and observations – about the jury, and for most of this page about the journalists following the case.
Sarah’s comment on the jury is the kind of thing that all three of the women contribute. They don’t all manage to get into the courtroom at every session, so each of them has a brief to observe as fully and acutely as they can and report back. What emerges is a number of verbal sketches of Erin Patterson herself in the dock, and of other players – jury member, witnesses, lawyers, and perhaps especially Ian Wilkinson, the Pattersons’ pastor sitting in dignified silence in the back row. Sarah’s comment on this page, ‘We don’t know what they’re thinking,’ is again typical. Though they occasionally agonise over whether they are just a part of the media circus / witch hunt that surrounds the case, and though much of the book feels like chat among friends, at heart these are three serious observers. None of them wanted to take on the slog and heartache of writing a book about the case, but each of them takes her role as witness seriously. As this page exemplifies, all three bring feminist perspectives to the task: here they are talking about the lot of young female journalists, but elsewhere they also bring an unsettling degree of sympathy to a woman who would kill her in-laws.
People who still see Helen Garner as the ogre who was mean about younger women in The First Stone (some of the most vocal of whom haven’t actually read the book ‘on principle’) might find fuel for their fires here: her astonishment at a journalist’s ingenious theory of Erin Patterson’s innocence pretty much leaps off the page, and she expresses amazement at the ‘makeup and hair action’ among the young women journalists. (On page 79, she sticks to her guns: ‘Everybody should smile less, especially women, in public. Every advertisement or commercial is full of people smiling with unnatural vehemence, and it drives me insane.’) I read this grumpiness less as critical of the young woman than decrying the pressure on them to look the part.
Chloe, a couple of decades younger than curmudgeonly Helen, is more sympathetic. She sees the young woman’s theory as bizarre, but recognises the story-telling impulse: ‘She’s thinking like a script-writer.’ Mind you, her image of the attractive young reporters as being ‘like Red Riding Hood with the wolf’s carnage behind her’ shows that she also has a script-writer’s eye. (Which is the kind of thing that makes this book very readable.)
Sarah, who may be a decade or so younger than Chloe, has even less distance. I don’t want to say that she’s humourless, but she tends to be the one who supplies facts in the conversation: facts about the law, and also for instance about toxic mushrooms. Here she reminds the others, and us, of the exigencies of the young female journalists’ worklives. (I remember hearing somewhere that a female television journalist’s hair is an important tool of her trade.) On the top of the next page, it’s Chloe who amplifies the point: ‘Whereas the male crime-journalists look grizzled and broken.’
That’s it. So much more to say about the book. You can read about it all over the place.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
While she was writing The Season, Helen Garner described it to friends as ‘a nana’s book about footy’. Her youngest grandson Amby was fifteen, on the cusp of manhood. Being witness to his football games and training sessions was, among other things, a way of enriching and maybe holding onto that precious relationship.
I came to the book with a lot of baggage. For a start I didn’t have a benign experience of fifteen-year-old boys when I was one. My boarding school’s focus on football made skinny, physically inept, nerdy Jonathan something of an outcast, and fifteen year old boys, however sweet they may look to a nana’s eyes, can be brutal to the designated outcasts. (Full disclosure: because the school also prized academic achievement, which I was quite good at, I wasn’t the worst abused.)
What’s more, Aussie Rules is pretty much a closed book to me. I don’t know a mark from a behind, let alone a torp, and nana Helen, who says she knows very little about the sport, is sufficiently steeped in AFL culture to feel no need to explain such terms. My whole family watched my big brother play League on Saturdays, my father yelling at the ref in cheerfully confected outrage. And the footballs I myself played at school, badly, were League, Union and soccer. We referred to AFL, then Victorian Rules, as aerial pingpong.
So, even though I’m a member of the vast Helen Garner fan club, I would happily have skipped The Season.
But what the Book Group wants …
I can’t say it completely won me over, but it’s beautifully written. While Garner’s intense desire to know her grandson – ‘what’s in his head, what drives him’ – is the heart of the book, it broadens out to look at aspects of masculinity, and aspects of being an old woman, and aspects of the role of football in Melbourne social life, in an engagingly impressionistic way. I doubt if any other book uses words like ‘sweet’, ‘delicate’, ‘graceful’ or ‘beautiful’ about men young and old with as much frequency. In the opening pages, she writes about becoming an engaged grandmother to two boys:
Never having raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence
In a recent Big Ideas podcast, Tim Etchells from the British theatre group Forced Entertainment talked about learning by finding rather than by searching. He could have had this book in mind. Garner depicts herself as going to training sessions and games and seeing what happens – no agenda, no conclusions, just acute, self-aware, finely articulated observation. Maybe this is why she kept her first husband’s family name: she garners.
The book moves through footy season from February to August. On page 78*, it’s May, and Garner has had Covid. Watching a lot of football on TV, she has surmised that Virgil and Homer would recognise the ‘hulking airborne men’ she sees in those games. After two weeks ‘reading, dozing, reading again, forgetting everything I’ve read’, she opens a newspaper to the sports pages, where she sees a photo of Buddy Franklin, a Sydney Swans player she describes as ‘a hero of the game, a dancing god of the game in his last season’, whom a Collingwood crowd has booed:
Franklin is thirty-six, battle-hardened. His face, in this photo, is calm, composed; but it is also as soft as a boy’s. It’s a wounded face, with that wiped look of someone who’s copped a ringing slap across the cheek: all his expression lines are gone. In my fortnight of isolation I must have lost a couple of skins: I shock myself by bursting into tears.
I found the photo at this link, or maybe it’s this one. To look at them and read Garner’s description of them is to recognise what a fine writer she is. Even when putting herself front and centre, bursting into tears, she communicates elegantly about the observed world.
The next sentence is a rare moment in this book when Garner allows an explicit moral judgement into the text. Elsewhere, when she narrates the attitudes of Amby and other men to physical injury – they almost seem to relish it – she maintains a kind of awed incomprehension. Even here, she doesn’t voice her own opinion, but goes into journalist mode for a moment and quotes someone else.
The Guardian doesn’t hold back: ‘It’s about the internalised hatred that men – who are the dominant force in shaping and sustaining AFL culture – have for themselves and each other. The Great Southern and Ponsford Stands merely provide a haven for the boozed up, brittle and broken to project their own self-hatred and insecurities on to others.’
I don’t read this as Garner using ‘the Guardian‘ as a mouthpiece for her own opinion. It’s as if some judgement is needed once the booing has been mentioned, but to make a moral judgement would be to disrupt her role as witness seeking understanding. All the same, she does let the harsh judgement stand, more endorsed than rejected, and returns to her primary focus.
Thursday, on the way to training. ‘I still haven’t heard about the game I missed.’ ‘Okay. Because of the pain all down my leg I told Archie I wouldn’t be able to go hard, so he kept me on full-back and full-forward. It was horrible. I was so cold. I only touched the ball twice. I was on this huuuuuge guy.’ ‘But you kicked a goal, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes, but I didn’t get any of my anger out. And the goal wasn’t very … nice. ‘You mean it wasn’t sort of heroic?’ ‘No.’ ‘But nevertheless it was a goal?’ He shrugs and runs off.
The book is full of these wonderful nanna–grandson chats. Throughout, there’s a tension between Helen the invisible old woman who comes to training sessions or chats with other parents during matches, and Hel the grandmother who is almost a confidante. He puts his big arm around her, rebuffs her attempts to fuss over his injuries, lets her tease him about his mullet, is oblivious to her shock when she realises her grandson has turned into a six-foot man, ‘his surfer’s legs covered in golden hair’.
OK, so maybe those front-row forwards who threw their weight around back when I was 15 were also just boys, far from their mums and dads and nanas, and only smaller, vulnerable boys to get their anger out on. The book has enough AFL in it to have made me want to give up on it a number of times, but I stayed to have my perspective shifted by Helen Garner, a meticulous, wide-eyed, sometimes self-mocking, always loving witness.
After the meeting: This is an all male book group. We kicked off our discussion of the book with a round of ‘position statements’ vis à vis sport in general and AFL in particular. From my point of view this round and the conversation that grew from it was at least as interesting as the book.
I was pretty much the only one who both loathed sport at school and was ignorant about AFL. There was only one total AFL tragic – all but two of us grew up with different codes. For most of us, team sport had played an overwhelmingly positive role. One had played second row forward in the same scrum as a future prime minister. Another is directly related to ‘Rugby League royalty’. One, who came to Sydney from a country town as a young man to go to university, found refuge in the football team, and felt it pretty much saved his life. For another, from an non–English speaking background, the different codes signified different relationships to mainstream Australia – and as a young person he had avoided soccer, which his father loved, so as not to be seen as an outsider. There was much more.
When we came to the book, it’s probably fair to say we all enjoyed it, but there were lots of reservations. ‘She doesn’t get football,’ one man said a number of times. Someone explained to me (and by implication to Helen) that the full-on bodily contact of football isn’t violence. Mostly it doesn’t hurt unless, paradoxically, you don’t fully commit, and any injury is incidental. There was general scepticism about the book’s underlying assumption that men have an ‘underlying drive to violence’ which team sports exist to address – there was quite a bit of chat about women’s sport, some but not all of it on this point. We all, especially the grandfathers among us, admired and envied the relationship between ‘Hel’ and Amby – the relative openness of communication, his physical ease, her tact.
Someone said the book read like a diary – proposing no particular thesis and coming to no conclusion. Only one of us had read Helen Garner’s diaries (Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This and How to End a Story), and said they were wonderful. Alas, he confessed at the end of the meeting that he’d only read 10 pages of The Season, so he couldn’t compare it with the more substantial work.
This post may be too much about me and too little about the book, but I came away from the discussion feeling that just as writing the book gave Helen Garner gained some access to arcane rituals and tenets of sporty masculinity, so did I in our conversation, from a different outsider perspective. Long live the Book Group.
The Book Group met on Gadigal land and I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where we’re fast approaching the shortest day of the year. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog. The sport of AFL, like much that is distinctive in Australian settler culture, owes much to First Nations influence: some historians believe that it owed a lot to marn grook, a game played by First Nations people.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.
This session demonstrated the strengths of a two-person panel. It was progressing quite nicely, as Sarah Krasnostein (my blog post about her Quarterly Essay Not Waving, Drowninghere) introduced the talent, Helen Garner (my relevant blog post here) and Hedley Thomas (creator of the podcast Teacher’s Pet), and asked about their writing process.
When Helen Garner is embarking on a long project, she buys a spiral bound A4 notebook and keeps a kind of diary of everything related to the project: not transcripts of interviews, but odd details, what she did, and thought, and felt. When it came time to marshal the material she had accumulated for Joe Cinque’s Consolations she was at a loss where to start, looked to the notebooks for inspiration and discovered that they contained the skeleton of the book.
Hedley Thomas was in the middle of answering a similar procedural question, when Garner was visibly excited by something he said. With a quick look at Sarah Krasnostein, half asking permission and half apologising, she interrupted to take the conversation off in a whole new direction: the way footballers tend to have a degree of immunity from police investigation because of their almost hallowed status in Australian society. From then on we were treated to a lively conversation between two people who had deep appreciation for each other’s work and were swapping stories and genuine compliments.
Sarah Krasnosteiin made a couple of attempts to restore order, but I think she could tell things were going swimmingly. This session is sure to appear on the SWF podcast during the year.
Alexis Wright’s third massive novel, Praiseworthy, was published just a couple of months ago. Ivor Indyk, director of Giramondo Publishing, stepped in at short notice to discuss it with her, replacing Sisonke Msimang, who had been called home to Western Australia unexpectedly. So, in this session, an author discussed her novel with her publisher and editor – that is to say, with a reader who had some influence on how the book turned out.
I was one of the few people in the room to have read the book. I was keen to lap up any guidance from either Ivor or Alexis on how to make sense of the experience. I’m glad to report that I got plenty.
For a start, it was reassuring that Alexis mentioned some of the more bizarre plot developments with a wicked smile, and the audience laughed quite a lot as the two of them named odd characters and moments. Ivor said towards the end of the conversation that the comedy of her work was often overshadowed by its epic qualities. For me, the issue was more how seriously to take the epic qualities when, as summarised by their author in this conversation, they had such absurd qualities.
Asked about the original idea for the book, Alexis Wright said she didn’t remember – she’d have to look up her notebooks. Perhaps it had to do asking what Aboriginal people are to in the new era of global warming and climate change. She started writing it when she was working on her multivocal biography of Tracker Tilmouth in 2017 (my blog post here), and the visionary at the heart of the novel ‘Cause Man Steel, Widespread or Planet, whatever you want to call him’) is in part based on Tracker. Widespread’s plan for a global transport conglomerate using Australia’s five million feral donkeys, though, is all hers: it’s absurd to the point of surrealism, but there’s something true in the way it leads to a cycle of vision and disappointment.
The book is in part a celebration of Aboriginal people’s will to survive, manifested in many ways, tainted by 240 years of living in the coloniser’s world. The enemy in this book is the project of assimilation.
Perhaps most interesting to me was the exchange about music. Referring to the Ice Queens – grotesque, larger-than-life women who appear toward the end of the book – Ivor wondered about the influence of opera. Alexis agreed that she loved opera, but seemed nonplussed at Ivor’s suggestion that these characters are operatic. The music she listens to most while writing is classical Indian music and yidaki (didgeridoo). She tries to capture the tone and rhythm of that music – the pulse, the heartbeat: ‘We say that we’re of one heartbeat with the country.’
‘You hear what you’re writing,’ Wright said. ‘Then it gets recorded and you want it to be the voice you heard, but it can’t be that voice.’
There was a lot more. Ivor touched on the way Wright defies conventions, at times inventing words that look like mistakes, but which are anything but.
I’ll be attempting my own blog post about Praiseworthy in the next couple of days. Wish me luck!
We made a quick dash to a smaller venue for 6–7 pm State of the Art
Kate Evans of ABC’s The Bookshelf presided over another panel. This time it was Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Tracey Lien and Colson Whitehead invited to discuss the state of the novel and the future of fiction.
I haven’t read anything books by any of these authors, apart from one novel that I hated, which I’m told is completely unrepresentative of their work. I enjoyed the ebb and flow of conversation, but didn’t have anything to ground myself in.
Kate Evans asked if ChatGPT and other AI content producers spelled the end of novelists. Tracey Lien, the youngest on the panel and the only one without a string of awards to her name (and not at all intimidated by that, she said smiling bravely), said she used ChatGPT as a research assistant, but it couldn’t do the writing. On the one hand, it doesn’t have a brain, but produces word after word by complex algorithms, and the act of reading is a back-and-forth between minds. On the other hand, ChatGPT lies.
Richard Flanagan, whose scowl occasionally gave to an appreciative grimace at another panellist’s point well made, said he didn’t care about AI. He’d just keep writing.
The subject of decent recompense for the work of writing, and of all creative work generally, provoked more interest. Digital publishing changes the landscape significantly. They all agreed they weren’t in it for the money, but money would be nice. Eleanor Catton said that working as a scriptwriter was hugely more remunerative. Responding to a question at the end about how to become a writer and also earn a living, Flanagan said he had decided to be a writer when he was very young and in order to achieve it he lived in poverty for years. There was no other way. Colson Whitehead said something similar: after a significant number of successful novels he was at least temporarily able to live on his earnings as a writer. He implied that this is precarious.
Whitehead, Flanagan and Catton spoke interestingly about not repeating themselves, each new novel being a whole new challenge.
I’ve been blogging about the online 2020 Sydney Writers’ Festival (I almost forgot the apostrophe) most of the year. The Festival is still going on, and its website is listing events to mid-January next year. I’ll keep listening, but I won’t blog any more. Here are links to the Festival podcasts currently on my phone, in case you’d like to check them out.
Secrets and Lies: Donor-Conceived Rights 21 October: Dani Shapiro, USA-based author talks to Australian author Bri Lee about issues raised in her memoir, Inheritance, including those related to children conceived by sperm donation.
Griffith Review 68: Getting On 28 October: Tony Birch, Andrew Stafford and Jane R. Goodall talk with Griffith Review editor, Ashley Hay, about getting older.
Behrouz Boochani and Tara June Winch in Conversation 11 November: Again, no elaboration needed from me about either of the participants. I will mention that Tara June Winch acquitted herself admirably in Hard Quiz recently.
Tony Birch: The White Girl 18 November: Tony Birch is here again to talk with Evelyn Araluen about his novel The White Girl.
Julia Phillips: Disappearing Earth 3 December: The author of the excellent Disappearing Earth talks to Tam Zimet, until recently associate director of the SWF.
It’s nice to finish with one of the rare books that I’ve read that also features in this year’s Festival
Me fail? I fly! 
