I hadn’t read such unstructured fiction before – the crashing of the waves of junkie narrative made me feel sick and disoriented. But Monkey Grip changed reading for me. For the first time I was consciously learning about writing. For the first time I was not reading for story (every so often I take up Monkey Grip to remind myself what happens in the ‘end’: Javo is a junkie; he continues to be a junkie; Nora continues to exist), but for words, for images, and for the way they were put together.
I reread it immediately. This time I read it more slowly, not feeling so ill, unmoored in the sea of the story. It was so unusual in its form, so intimate in its expression, that I needed to know how it was written.
Monkey Grip was met with some confusion and hostility by Australian reviewers, many of whom have lived to see their comments become part of the story of Garner’s success (and the controversy she continues to stir up). The controversy centred not just on the fact that Garner was writing explicitly about sex and women’s desire, but that she had based her ‘novel’ on her diaries. Had she simply copied out her diaries, rather than written a novel in the ‘right’ way? This was hotly debated at the time. There was no question that Garner had done something to the novel, had dismantled our idea of what it should be, what a plot was, what a beginning, middle and end should be.
Years later, Garner defended herself against this criticism in her famous article ‘I’, published in the journal Meanjin:
Shouldn’t a real writer be writing about something other than herself and her immediate circle? I’ve been haunted by this question since 1977 when a reviewer of Monkey Grip asked irritably what the fuss was about: as far as he could see, all I’d done was publish my diaries. I went round for years after that in a lather of defensiveness: ‘it’s a novel, thank you very much’. But I’m too old to bother with that crap any more. I might as well come clean. I did publish my diary. That’s exactly what I did. I left out what I thought were the boring bits, wrote bridging passages, and changed all the names. It was the best fun I ever had, down there in the domed Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria in 1976, working with a pencil and an exercise book on one of those squeaking silky oak swivel chairs. I’ll never be that innocent again.
Certainly Monkey Grip reads like a diary, with its return and return to the same beginning, its characters repeating themselves in patterns of love, difficulty, disappointment, love, difficulty, disappointment. Is it a novel? The same question has been asked about her latest piece of fiction, The Spare Room. It is a question worth asking, and worth examining, but for the purposes of this essay, let me simply say that Monkey Grip was, for me, a new kind of novel; not just a random accretion of information, but a thoughtfully observed, deeply felt work of art about a woman who has been caught, as Garner puts it, in ‘the gap between theory and practice’. The book is not just about loving a junkie; it is about trying to love and let go at the same time; trying to put into practice the idea of free love, of shared partners, and trying to be stoic about the kind of pain this causes. For me, at least, Garner had cracked narrative open. She had written, in a way, the kind of literature that Virginia Woolf had begun in her diaries and given full expression to in her fiction. She had followed a consciousness that did not bend easily into the more traditional shape of a novel. You could say she had written a women’s novel.
In her Meanjin article Garner went on to say:
Why the sneer in ‘All she’s done is publish her diaries’? It’s as if this were cheating. As if it were lazy. As if there were no work involved in keeping a diary in the first place: no thinking, no discipline, no creative energy, no focusing or directing of creative energy; no intelligent or artful ordering of material; no choosing of material, for God’s sake; no shaping of narrative; no ear for the music of human speech; no portrayal of the physical world; no free movement back and forth in time; no leaping between inner and outer; no examination of motive; no imaginative use of language.
It’s as if a diary wrote itself …
What Garner was doing with words was something I would attempt to do myself. She was working like a poet, with images. Plot is invariably secondary in Garner’s work, and in her earliest fiction it is the image that is paramount.
This scene comes from the early pages of Monkey Grip:
We slept too lightly for rest. Early in the morning I climbed over him from the wall side of the bed, pulled my clothes on over my bloody legs, and wheeled my bike out his front door. A wild yellow sky, dry grey air full of turbulence. The street surfaces were burnished, blown clean as a bone. My bike tyres, pumped up hard, whirred on the glossy bitumen. Autumn, air, air, moving in dry warm blusters.
When I was younger these images altered the way I saw the world. They made me feel somehow present, alert to the shifts in light or weather, to the look of a street or a park or a house. A writer must be awake, and it was Garner who made me see this. She looked around her with an eye like a torch, sweeping across everything, pausing to select or reject, pausing to illuminate.
A great book is a companion, a friend, and like a friend it changes with you. When I was a teenager, Monkey Grip did not speak directly to my own experience – it taught me about life, gave me some idea of what was to come. But when I reread it, as I do most years, it makes me consider the life I am living now, with its similarities to Nora’s (I have a daughter, lived for a long time in share houses, and am also a writer) and its great differences (I live with my partner and two children, and my experience with drugs and the miseries and pleasures of love affairs is a thing of the past). This passage, worth as much to me today as it was then, but changed now that I have changed myself, makes me consider how few of the day’s deserted, illicit hours I currently inhabit. My life is more limited, more conventional than Nora’s. If I am out at night or very early in the morning it is unusual. If I am I will look at the sky and note how thick the stars are (here in the mountains they prickle through the sky in their millions) or the quality of the new light. I will also notice how many people there are outside, pursuing their lives, when I am always, always indoors. This is reading, waking you up, reminding you of how you live: Garner’s writing, speaking to me now more than thirty years after my first engagement with it, makes me remember my teens and twenties and treasure them, for all those empty hours, for the warm air full of turbulence and the street surfaces blown clean as a bone.
Since then, I have read every word that Helen Garner has published; the fiction so many times that her syntax seems entwined with my DNA. Somewhere in one of Garner’s early books a girl holds a hose and ‘whacks’ the ‘silvery rope’ of water against a window. It is not possible for me to see a running hose without thinking of this moment. When I write sometimes Garner’s sentences surface in my mind; I feel myself imitating a certain rhythm she has. I know I am not the only Australian writer who experiences this. Her language is embedded in my way of thinking, and in the way of thinking of many readers. We would be different people without her.
* * *
Did Garner influence me? The answer is yes, at first.
Bombora, my first novel, was written over a year or more, when I was in my early twenties. It is the story of a small family – father, mother and daughter. It is the mid-1990s. Leo is a musician, Madeline is a painter, and they live in a share house in inner-city Sydney – the suburb of Enmore, to be precise – in a large terrace that I’d once inhabited in London Street, which continues to provide me with material. I was living in Newtown by this time, writing whenever I could, retreating to my bedroom during the long slow days, sitting up at night when I’d come home drunk from a party, waking at first light to seat myself at the desk and begin again. I did not know what I was doing; I only knew that I was trying to get something right.
I’d started several novels and abandoned them, disgusted by the voice in them, the self-absorption, the lack of momentum. Then I began writing Bombora, at the scene with which it still begins, when the child character Annabelle is standing in a ga
rden, feeling the absence of her mother. It is the day of her mother’s funeral, but I did not know that when I started writing – all I knew was the phrase that found its way into the book: ‘The absence was like a presence.’ My own mother had not yet died, incidentally, and I am still intrigued by the power this phrase had to set me writing. Annie Dillard says:
One line of a poem, the poet said – only one line, but thank God for that one line – drops from the ceiling. Thornton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler’s hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you…
While I was writing Bombora I was reading Helen Garner. I had all of her then-published fiction on the desk around me. I also had Dillard’s The Writing Life, and I had my Norton Anthology of Poetry, which contained amongst its disparate riches the poems of Sylvia Plath. In his near-perfect story ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’, Nam Le’s eponymous writer-character says, ‘For inspiration, I read absurdly formal Victorian poetry and drank scotch neat.’ To me, the scotch and the poetry work in the same way: they induce intoxication, in just the right degree. The writer reads prose as though drinking clear water from a running stream, but poetry is meant to get you drunk.
I wrote Bombora as one should write all first novels – in a dream of pleasure. I can remember running up the flimsy stairs of the house I shared with my friend Patrick, smiling to myself. It was like coming back to a lover. The manuscript never rejected me – it was always glad to see me, always rich with possibilities, always ready for more complicated, thoughtful joy. I was twenty-four and I had been trying to write a novel since I was seventeen, but the ideas had kept drying up, stopping, running out, stalling. I am not sure exactly why the words suddenly began to work. It has to do, partly, with that first line occurring to me. And then the process that Dillard describes, laying down each following word or sentence and tapping it into place.
Perhaps I had reached a kind of critical mass with my own reading. I was so full of Garner that I needed, in a sense, to shed some of it. Or perhaps it was simply finding that elusive thing: a voice. Finding a voice is sometimes immediate, as in the moment that my line ‘dropped from the ceiling’, and sometimes can take years. You bait your line, you cast it: nothing bites. You re-bait, you cast, again and again. Sometimes you never get a bite, and eventually it is time to give up that project and turn to another.
Writing, when it is working, is about connecting – look, this joins to this, and this joins to this. I also remember the final edit I did on Bombora, before printing it out and sending it off. It came to me late at night that I needed to write, that I needed to reorder my narrative. I got out of bed in the dark and took the single step to my desk. I switched the light on, and then the little box of my Mac Classic. It seemed as though the novel hung in the air before me – I could see all of it, and almost without thought I moved scenes around, married one idea to another, joined my stories up. As Garner did (speaking back to her diary, to the way a life is actually lived), I had written discrete scenes that piled up, that formed narrative without recourse to the usual tools, without perpetually turning to the clock: and then… the next day… when they got back… after the party.
The effect is cumulative, rather than linear. Garner does not write, in The Children’s Bach for instance, ‘And then Athena and Dexter, Vicki and Elizabeth went to see Philip’s band…’ to open a scene that marks the first parting of ways for the married couple Athena and Dexter. Instead she writes:
Vicki spent an hour getting herself ready. She tied a diaphanous scarf round her head, stuck a yellow rose in it, and put a lot of makeup on her flat, smooth, pale face. She looked striking, and flustered because of the lipstick she had rubbed into her cheekbones.
Garner does not do bridges. We are left to find our own way into this scene – Vicki is going out – where is she going? Who is she going with? What will happen? It is the detail that carries us. We follow from one brightly coloured image to another, led like bees from flower to flower. I found this style enormously attractive. It was like poetry.
When I wrote Bombora I was influenced by Garner in a way that I am not influenced by anyone anymore – not Garner herself, not Alice Munro, nor George Saunders nor Kazuo Ishiguro, although I have read these writers every year of my adult life. I reread her deeply, greedily, as I was writing. I wanted to see how she did it, but I also wanted to feel the spell of her writing. It was a kind of enchantment.
* * *
Helen Garner is the author of four novels, two novellas, several collections of short stories and essays, three books of nonfiction, and most latterly, her published diaries. All of these remain in print. Martin Amis says, ‘When we say we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less.’ I love more than half of Garner’s work; more importantly, I respect every word of it. It is necessary, always, to read her closely, engaging with every sentence. Her writing, though never less than deeply political, is about things: the way they look, how the light falls on them. It does not lecture or harass, or try to curry favour. Garner looks around her and shows us what she sees. Her attention to the texture of life, to the silvery rope, to the ‘juicy cough’ of a granddaughter in The Spare Room, and to something as simple and as central as the weather, keep us intent, absorbed, on every page. In The Children’s Bach, spring comes, and ‘in the morning, when the first person opened the back door, the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed’.
Sometimes I feel as though, without literature, I would have no memory. Reading this passage, I can see the open door in the Balmain house that Russell and I shared with our baby Alice. I look down the light-filled hall. Alice beetles along the carpet on hands and knees.
Still, it is not uncommon for me to find myself wishing that I did not have to record everything and could live my life in a kind of contented, animal silence. There have been times in my life when the detail, the multiplicity of things – and the urge to record them – has felt too much. I can’t read Garner then – I can’t read anything. I can’t bear to keep noticing things. Like the tulips in Sylvia Plath’s famous poem, the detail hurts me.
At other times, when the words are coming, when, as Garner once put it, ‘the real stuff runs down our arm’, it is as though there is nothing better in life, nothing more real nor more satisfying. This is when the conversation with other writers feels as alive as the conversations I have with living people. When they are companions as much as teachers. And Helen Garner can seem as much my parent as my own mother.
The difficulty is the point
I’ve just finished marking forty-odd exams, mostly written by people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. In them the students had to answer questions about aspects of literature such as writing in the first person, free indirect speech, genre, reading for landscape or gender or ethnicity. They also had to write an essay of one thousand words on the work of Helen Garner, Christos Tsiolkas, Judith Wright, Jack Davis or Tim Winton.
My students are, for the most part, education students who live in regional Australia. If they get their degree, they are bound for early childhood centres, preschools, primary schools, high schools. These will be our new teachers.
If you have little to do with tertiary education you might not have noticed that there is a whole new cohort of young people attending university, people who might not have done so thirty or forty years ago. Our economy has been transforming itself from blue to white collar for decades; an apprenticeship that relies on the written word is newly necessary.
Added to this, the university’s relatively new status as a business – all univer
sities are now forced to consider profit before anything else – means that it desperately needs students and will make it as easy as possible for everyone, anyone, to enrol. When I began teaching at this university the ATAR for education degrees was officially 60, but many students were entering the university through alternative pathways: TAFE, bridging courses at the university itself, written application. Universities are businesses. Students are customers. The more customers, the better the business does.
It follows that a business will want to retain its customers. The best way to retain a customer is to keep them happy. I’d suggest that happiness for students might arise from challenge, from hard work fairly rewarded, or from the acquisition of new and valuable skills. But there is of course a quicker route: you keep students happy by not failing them. And then – surprise! – when they graduate they are not literate, or numerate, or knowledgeable enough to perform the work they have been studying for.
But just because the horse has bolted doesn’t mean we can’t slam the stable door. And the way we do this in New South Wales is through the implementation of the compulsory ACER Literacy and Numeracy test for Teacher Education, which students take at the end of their degree. They cannot graduate without passing it. For the past four years I have been teaching a subject designed to actively interrogate reading and writing abilities, and make students capable of passing the literacy part of their ACER test. Let’s call the subject English One.
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