I stab and stab

In​ 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt the world seesaw and walked away wretched. ‘I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford book.’ Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, sold well and won a national award in Australia, so she was not unknown, just rejected by the anthologists who anyway preferred poets. When I look at the contents page, I find that, of 38 names listed under ‘Contemporary Writing’, eight are women. Among the male names I do not recognise (my bad), one is a judge-poet and two are lawyer-poets, and this feels, to me, already distinctively Australian.

On the other side of the scales of justice are two drug-addicted poets who died in their early twenties and one mentally ill poet who shot a politician at point-blank range through a car window, explaining afterwards to police that he had to do something to set him apart ‘from all the other nobodies’. I mention him because Garner was also, in her day, accused of looking for attention after finding herself on the wrong side of the establishment. In 1972 she lost her job as a teacher because of an impromptu sex education class in which she answered written questions from her 12 and 13-year-old students. One of these – ‘WHY DOES THE WOMEN HAVE ALL THE PAIN, MISS?’ – became the title of the essay she published about the lesson in a countercultural magazine called the Digger, but it was perhaps the spoken query (‘Miss – have you ever had a suck?’) that got her the sack. Or it might have been her answer: ‘Yes.’ Or it might have been the fact that her article contains nine iterations of the word ‘cunt’, one of them in the lines, ‘I tell them that I’ll get the sack if it gets round that I’ve been saying fuck and cunt in the classroom. They nod solemnly.’ Anyhow, it got round. The Digger was fined for obscenity, Garner lost her job, and there were articles in the national newspapers alongside cartoons, whose irony Garner’s bewildered mother failed to understand. More than twenty years later, a journalist tried to speak to her about all this and, as Garner recorded in her diary, she ‘sat there, silent, sick with horror, thinking, “They were right to be enraged. It’s a wonder I wasn’t lynched. I should have been lynched.”’

Garner wrote Monkey Grip as a sacked single mother living on welfare, scraping together extra cash by writing for the Digger and other magazines. ‘She cares too much about money, I’m afraid’ was one of the bitchy, anonymous comments about her in a 1989 article on Australian fiction in the New York Times. ‘She only writes about her own life’ was another. It took Garner a long time to meet the accusation that Monkey Grip had been cobbled together from her diaries with the happy admission that there had been an amount of cutting and pasting involved; longer again to turn her diaries into something of value in themselves. You might say she ended where she began, moving from being a plagiarist of her own life to an acclaimed celebrator of the poetic quotidian.

It is the daily, diaristic churn that gives her unloosed first novel the sense of a fully textured fictional world. Monkey Grip is beautifully under-plotted and immersive; marked by tonal variation and structural ease, the finished shape of the book affords the pleasure of musical completion. Narrated by Nora, a single mother living in an arty, lefty collective house in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, it is one of those books so authentically of its time and place that, once read, it is hard to think of Melbourne without it. The novel also contains an amount of supremely focused writing about sex between Nora and her drug-addicted lover, Javo.

As a subject, Javo would have been just the type for the Oxford Anthology – Nora, not so much. Garner’s second novel, The Children’s Bach (1984), now widely considered a classic, didn’t make the cut either. And I should leave the poor Oxford Anthology alone – it was only, after all, of glancing importance to Garner – but I am taken by the inclusion in it of a neat short story called ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1975) by Murray Bail, with whom she began an affair the year after she flicked through to the index. Not that his writing had anything to do with the initial attraction, which reads as something else. She gives an account of their first meeting in her diaries, in which Bail is anonymised by the letter V and Helen goes by H:

Against Z’s back door jamb, after the Rigoletto rehearsal, leaned a small, white-faced, long-headed, warped figure. Weird, like something that had crept out of a dark hole where it had been lying for a long time in a tense and twisted position. ‘This is V’ said Z. When the others went out of the room I felt nervous, like a schoolgirl having to entertain a grown-up.

Some two years after that first meeting, V, who lived in Sydney, left his marital home and Garner moved from Melbourne to be near him. Four years later they were married, he for the second, she for the third time, and six years later again, they were done. The combustion of their marriage makes the diaries a propulsive, almost voyeuristic read, but it is the way the couple’s creative rivalry undid or reshaped Garner’s talent that makes them intriguing and sad. While they were together, Bail wrote Eucalyptus, his best-known novel, and Garner decided to stop writing fiction altogether. She had never been any good at ‘making things up’, H thinks, then ‘suddenly it strikes me that what I’m doing is vacating the field.’

The couple’s particular disaster is, at every moment, contained in the attraction, like a switch waiting to be thrown. The distance between what she knows – H is never less than astute – and what she cannot help doing forms much of the narrative tension. When V writes H a first letter, ‘a gong of terror sounded in the bottom of my stomach. Something chilling in him. His intellect.’

The V of the diaries is ‘severe’. He does not take his clothes off on the beach. He does not dance. His father was ‘a tyrant and a disciplinarian’ who died when V was 24, and he ‘hated’ his mother for no reason apparent here. (‘Well, I don’t want to lose touch with you. Because I love you,’ his mother says to H after the break-up. ‘Keep on sending me your little cards, won’t you?’) According to one of his friends, V is ‘an old-fashioned Australian country man who’s passionately interested in modern European culture’. He loves Wagner, is profoundly informed about the visual arts and is the kind of snob who judges people ‘according to whether or not they’ve read Thomas Bernhard’. By the alchemy of this kind of hauteur, he has connections to London publishers which H does not.

It is no surprise that V fails to praise his wife’s work when he does not pretend to like his own. He reads his stuff aloud ‘badly, in a stubbornly unemotional voice’ and when she admires something he has done he ‘writhes and looks away’. And yet, when Peter Carey wins the Booker for Oscar and Lucinda, H realises ‘how differently we think about our work in the world: I see that he is able to imagine his work in that league, while to me it is not even thinkable – it never crosses my mind.’

If the intellectual in V likes to conjure Stendhal, Canetti, Musil and Broch, the old- fashioned Australian country man likes to inveigh against ‘bloody women … flapping around like headless chooks’, or complain about ‘the ugliness of bloody women crying’. Early in the relationship, Garner hears him refer to a woman as a ‘poor bitch’ and thinks: ‘Let’s stop now, before I get so far in I forget where the exit is and have to blow up the building to get out.’

Of course she does not get out, of course the house is reduced to rubble. It is impossible to know whether happy material was left out of the book, but V is also sweet, you can sense it in the way he holds her attention. H comes to the relationship as an absolute force and he makes a worthy creative companion. ‘I feel … that for the first time in my life I am able to stand up to, or with, a man of my own age whose strength of purpose and self-discipline are at least as great as mine.’ V says she has an extraordinary mind: ‘You think things right through, by prisming them through yourself. Your mind is ten times as good as mine.’ And yet, there will be no dancing. When she moves in with him, V asks H not to ‘behave briskly – with brisk independence’ and she feels ‘chastened, as if taught’.

The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle about whether women could even do … um … art, which in those days was a concept both grand and known. V ‘loves to quote the sculptor’s dictum: “When the chips are down, women don’t give a fuck about art.” He asks, “What’s stopping a woman from just getting canvas and paints and crashing through?”’ The men he hangs out with seem oddly invested in their exclusion, and the windiness of it all is not lost on those obliged to listen. At a dinner party ‘one of the painters began again his diatribe against domesticity and its adverse effects on men, especially artists.’ At this, ‘the women laughed scornfully, and the hostess fell asleep in her chair.’

It is not the cultural exclusion that hurts H so much as the personal. When she ups sticks and moves to Sydney, leaving her daughter and her garden behind, V is still officially married. ‘I am not to answer the phone at V’s, or be present when certain visitors come, or leave my stuff lying around.’ She turns up at his apartment on the evening of her birthday ‘wearing heels and a long skirt, thinking he had invited me to dinner’, only to find he thought she might bring the food and cook it herself. This expectation, that she tend his household without occupying it, persists through their married life. He needs the whole apartment if he is to do any work. ‘He will not consent to close his workroom door. So once again I find myself wandering the streets.’

The lack of a ‘proper life’ makes her feel dispossessed, not just of space but of language itself. H reads ‘a severe article about German literature’ and thinks ‘I will probably never write anything large, lasting, solid or influential.’ She finds it impossible to tell V why a painting means something to her, perhaps because ‘the language for talking about paintings is formed in such a way (i.e. by men) as to make my thoughts foreign to it.’ This is Helen Garner! A woman fluent in French, who compares translations of Rilke for fun. Like the protagonists of her novels, the writer of these diaries is a resourceful, socially skilled woman who takes great pleasure in domestic order. In one way, she longs to ‘be of service’, but that does not stop her also being a scrapper, a fiercely loving mother and one of the best writers (if we could only reach into the past and tell her so) around. Here is the way, in 1988, she describes a good day at the desk:

I’d been quite faint and wild with pleasure all day long, shaping sentences, juggling the pages, trying to get sense and pace into them without flattening the imagery or becoming even the smallest bit explanatory – trying to trim adjectives without losing the sensuous detail they afford – and feeling the shape of the story changing under my attentions – it expands, becomes richer, more leisured and yet still packed. I ate things, cleaned up, walked from room to room, thought, wrote again. In my absences from it I could sense its faults of structure, pace and narrative. Got to stop it from galloping away.

The sense of overspilling delight may owe something to her new romance with V but, even early in the relationship, it seems to rise in her and leave at the same time. H notes ‘the jumping force field of interest between V and me, both mutual and outward, that makes the world seem so rich and teeming with spectacle. His pen moves fast and light across a sheet of paper. The way he can physically put words down makes my pen seem a log.’

Later, speaking of her spiritual life (which V declines to understand), H writes of ‘a dark column of meaning’ which enters and then becomes her. ‘I mean it fused with my spine, and I was full of such powerful joy that tears ran down my cheeks.’ An ‘astonishing sunset’ secretly reminds her ‘of a long orgasm: pulsing, wide, vivid, generous – the whole sky filled with clouds of every kind.’ The description continues (well, this is a diary) through ‘wide slivers of gilt and blazing orange, then delicate grey scooped veils, then tiny bright scallops high up – to the north a tender, apricot-pink, melting wash’.

When she is with V, her prose narrows. There are fewer flights of description or of forensic pleasure; she loses her eye for an interesting child. H remembers how intensely she used to notice things when she was on her own: ‘My senses were sharp. Now I’m dulled and ordinary. I plod from day to day.’ That first year in Sydney her writing feels ‘false and stiff’ till V goes travelling and she has the place to herself. She realises she has been ‘trying unconsciously to write like a man, i.e. at too great a distance from myself’. For V, the novel is at the top of some artistic hierarchy and she has to get free of that. ‘I need to devise a form that is flexible and open enough to contain all my details, all my small things. If only I could blow out realism while at the same time sinking deeply into what is most real.’ In his absence V’s book is well reviewed and she writes him a letter ‘confessing envy of how seriously his work is taken in the British literary world’, which mercifully goes astray.

By​ 1990, the work is going well enough. Hours pass ‘in big bursts’ and she reels back to V’s ‘with sore eyes and an empty head’. A title, Cosmo Cosmolino, ‘strode into place’ for a volume of three narratives she describes as a novel and, at V’s instigation, the book is signed up by Bloomsbury in London. Proofs for Cosmo come in and V does not get round to reading them for some time. When he does his comments are ‘technical’, ‘subtle’ and ‘good’. Shortly afterwards he starts his own novel: it is as if they are taking turns. From the door, H can see plans spread out all over his desk. ‘Strange how differently we approach writing. I blunder in blindly and scrub-bash my way through a trackless forest, but he stays well back until he has laid out the route, created a fundamental map. He has an aim in mind.’

The book, Eucalyptus, will take seven years to write, so it may be these plans aren’t as good as they look. Meanwhile, H is ‘on a hair trigger’, suffering from nocturnal hot sweats, and V says that he has to ‘have “an asbestos suit on” in order to criticise her work’. One evening in 1992 before Cosmo is published, he takes her bare feet in his lap and finally tells her what he thinks of it. The first section makes ‘a very strong story’ he says, but her friend O, who suffered from a brain tumour, would have been shocked to see himself ‘revealed and scrutinised’ on the page. In another discussion, V says she has an obsessive interest in ‘death, rape, murder and so on’ and H wonders if this is true and, if so, ‘Is it wrong?’ He is also of the opinion that she is limited by her subject matter; she should get away from the 1970s, which he describes as ‘a period of bullshit’. When H counters that his work feels like the 1950s, he says it is set ‘in no-place and no-time’. (Ah, the men who don’t write about anything.) The relationships between men and women, she says, make it feel like the 1950s, realising, as she says it, that this conversation has been conducted while she is on her knees scrubbing the toilet, with a man who is publicly proud of the fact that ‘he has never cleaned a lavatory in his life.’

Two years in, and despite his beautifully laid plan, V’s novel is in trouble and he starts telling people that ‘he feels he’s going to die soon.’ Meanwhile, nothing else is allowed to happen in their lives. Above all, no one can visit. When her daughter, M, comes through town for a few days in 1995, H wants to book her a motel and V objects to this too. ‘You’re mad! Mother-mad!’ he says. ‘Why do you go peculiar and behave in these exaggerated ways when she’s about to visit, and when she’s here?’ Of all the losses detailed in the diaries – her piano, her car, her garden – nothing feels so sad as the way V ‘is so mean’ about her daughter. ‘Imagine marrying a woman with a child and not letting her have the child to stay. What have I been thinking of, to let this be the state of affairs?’

The accusation of ‘mother-madness’ comes at a stressful time. Her next book, The First Stone, is facing legal challenges from the women whose story it tries (and signally fails) to tell. When it does come out, there will be hostile letters and interviews. H goes into hospital for a hysterectomy and comes home to the news that it has sold 40,000 copies. The controversy may all be ‘a media beat up’ but she finds herself ‘crazed by the accusations’, some of which have never gone away.

The idea for the book came in September 1992 when Garner spotted a newspaper article about two female students taking the Master of Ormond College in Melbourne to court for indecently assaulting them at a party. In The First Stone she tells of the ‘repeated rushes of horror’ she felt on reading the article, how she dashed off an immediate letter of sympathy to the accused man. ‘He touched her breast and she went to the cops? My God – why didn’t she get her mother or her friends to help her sort him out later?’ she writes, inviting the unlikely image of a student’s mother striding up the college drive in order to wag a finger at the perpetrator.

In the interests of moral clarity, Garner recalls her own sacking as a teacher accused of discussing sexual matters with students: she wonders if her sympathy for the Master is an ‘upsurge of the rage I’d had to swallow at the time, when I’d been sent sprawling.’ Just as in the diaries, however, accurate self-observation is not the same as insight. H reads Camille Paglia, who ‘momentarily takes away my fear, and replaces it with a kind of over-excitement that is almost defiant’. The victims refuse to talk to her and still Garner goes on with the book, waiting in vain for them to ‘convince’ her, feeling in the face of these young feminists’ ‘prissiness, cowardice and brutality’ increasingly ‘importunate’ and ‘forlorn’.

The amazing thing about this oddly kiltered book is the way it argues so powerfully against Garner’s own point of view. She highlights poor college procedures, discusses the difficulties of conciliation and describes the chilling self-assurance of the men in charge. Arguments against sexual harassment that we now see as natural or self-evident are presented with great lucidity, though they are punctuated by Garner’s incomprehension, which can seem a bit blustery at times. It is a book about ambivalence that manages to skip the concept of consent. She finds it all so exasperating. Why do women who find themselves in bad situations go all passive? Why are we so afraid to insult the fragile egos of the men who do us harm? Why did the women (or perhaps their mothers) not just give the guy a slap? Towards the end of the book she talks on the phone with her own daughter who agrees in ‘her dry, thoughtful voice’ that she would never, in such an instance, go to the cops. V reads the book in manuscript. ‘Having established the pointlessness and tedium of my project, he made several very sharp and useful editorial suggestions,’ which she incorporates. After which, she publishes the thing and everyone starts shouting at her.

H dreams she is wearing men’s shoes in a public place. ‘A size too big, somebody else’s.’ She goes back to Paglia’s writings about sex: ‘Take your blows like men.’ (‘Yikes,’ H says.) At a party in the house of her neighbour X, a painter, she looks at the hostess’s ‘un-Australian’ expressive gestures and thinks: ‘She comes from a culture where women are different from men, and don’t try to resemble them.’ Shortly after this, at the desk: ‘I seem to have lost my nerve as a writer. I feel guilty and nervous all the time.’ Her book is a success, as measured by sales and public noise, and this makes V unhappy. ‘Why are men so fragile?’ He is a better novelist than she is, she says (when did that become true?). ‘He can handle broader ideas, more characters etc – This is not the problem. The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. It somehow stops him from working.’

H starts to see a therapist, which is the kind of thing that drives V ‘berserk’. He thinks artists should stay away from analysis, saying, ‘I had an unhappy childhood. Most people’s childhoods are unhappy.’ The therapist tells H her responses to V ‘are like your responses to your father’. (No shit, Sherlock.) Her father, Bruce Ford, is a man who, when he heard she was travelling with her then boyfriend, Bill Garner, told her never to contact her family again. This is the man who declined to enter her house to see his newborn grandchild, a man who suffers ‘that jealousy of nothing’, according to his wife, by which she means ‘everything’. He is a wool merchant, a money guy, with a tendency to bully, to be impatient and angry, that H finds sometimes in herself. She talks about this with her sister, who responds that ‘it’s better to be him, to have those characteristics … than to be like Mum – a bloody doormat.’ The family stays tight, father and daughter are not estranged, but H refuses to dance with him, ‘I’m double-parked, Dad.’ Finding her photograph in his bedroom, separate from those of her siblings, which are near his desk, she thinks: ‘Dad … Can’t you stop being jealous, and let me be happy?’

Her therapist will say, after some pleasure-limiting remark from V, that ‘it can be hard to recognise jealousy in someone else.’ And yet, in the ‘force field’ between the couple, it will be H who is struck, consumed and self-harmed by jealousy as a result of the slow trap her husband sets.

One morning in 1996, while H is sitting on a bench, V passes by, ‘inches away’, deep in conversation with X the painter, and H thinks ‘but you never see anyone … before lunch – isn’t that why I have to go out to work?’ Later, he explains that he needed to give X an article about Bernhard’s translator. He cries off going to the theatre because he feels sick and when she bails out at the interval she finds that he is not home – he has been doing ‘some paper punching’ for X. The next two hundred pages are spent by the reader in a state of dreary appal. X lives down the street with her mother. She needs a lot of help and advice. ‘I gave her the Stendhal and wrote a couple of letters for her.’ On and on it goes. When H asks why he never invites X over to their place he says: ‘Oh, she’s not interested in you.’

V’s novel picks up. He opines that ‘women’s writing “lacks an overarching philosophy”.’ He shows her some pages, and H sees in them something ‘that’s been missing from his previous work’. In a real ‘head-on smash’ he asks her not to write about him in her diaries and she does her best, but ‘there’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up.’ And though she knows the marriage is not great, she also knows she will not rock the boat until his book is finished. When the final draft is done, she gives V ‘many sincere and thoughtful compliments’ and he touches her arm. ‘You’re a good person,’ he says. Later, friends will tell her: ‘He could never have written this if it hadn’t been for you.’ A book of condemnatory essays about The First Stone has come out containing ‘a malicious personal attack’ and ‘every night while we sleep, faxed offers for V’s novel flood in from publishers in the UK, Europe and the US’. H admits she feels ‘irrelevant, small, hollow, untalented, worthless’, though there are tiny compensations: V is anxious that the great eagerness of foreign publishers might be a sign that the book is ‘mediocre’, even ‘middle-of-the-road’. The friend who reports this to H ‘bares her teeth and hisses, “I hope it is a bestseller.”’ His British publisher phones to invite H to London with her husband and she tells him that V has serious doubts about doing publicity. ‘Long pause. “He has to come here.” Longer pause. “It matters im-mense-lah.” Tremendous pause. “People have to hear him thinking.”’

In the dying light of the marriage the couple manage a sweet kind of quiet, now and then, like boxers between rounds. ‘We talk, lying under the yellow sheet, till past midnight. He lays a lot of our troubles at the door of my “going to a shrink. You turned away from me. You turned inwards and became self-absorbed.”’ The explosion is not far off, however, and electrifying when it comes. She finds a love letter V has written to X and trashes his espresso machine, his cigars and finally his novel: ‘I wrench 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 really hope all that is true. Garner went on, after the marriage was done, to write many books – of non-fiction and near-fiction and probably, mostly, fictitious fiction. She now lives beside her daughter and grandchildren in Melbourne. She loves a courtroom, a judgment, a moral ambivalence; she circles things that can be described but not known. Her work is now, by every available measure, more successful than Bail’s abroad and at home (and yet, Eucalyptus is a fine book). In the spring of 2024, I went into a beautiful antiquarian bookshop in Melbourne not far from the courthouse featured in This House of Grief and the library where she wrote Monkey Grip and I did not find her work on the shelves. Eight different books by Bail, none by his more famous, more celebrated, more loved and justly admired ex-wife. How could she be so excluded, I thought, even now? And so close to home? Had she annoyed the bookseller in some way? Knowing Garner, the way her readers think they do, I wouldn’t be surprised. Slowly, it occurred to me that her work had sold out.