by Helen Garner
True Stories
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Her award-winning books include novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. The First Stone, her first work of non-fiction, became an instant bestseller.
Books by Helen Garner
FICTION
Monkey Grip (1977)
Honour and Other People’s Children (1980)
The Children’s Bach (1984)
Postcards from Surfers (1985)
Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)
The Spare Room (2008)
NON-FICTION
The First Stone (1995)
True Stories (1996)
The Feel of Steel (2001)
Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004)
FILM SCRIPTS
The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992)
Two Friends (1992)
True Stories
Helen Garner
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
The paper in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company Pty Ltd
Swann House
22 William Street Melbourne Victoria 3000
Copyright © Helen Garner 1996
www.textpublishing.com.au
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published 1996 by The Text Publishing Company
This edition published 2008
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
Design by Susan Miller
Typeset by Midland Typesetters Australia
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Garner, Helen, 1942–
True stories : selected non-fiction / Helen Garner.
ISBN: 9781921351846 (pbk.)
Short stories.
Australian essays—20th century.
Australia—Social life and customs.
823.3
‘A Scrapbook, an Album’ first appeared in Sisters, ed. Drusilla Modjeska, HarperCollins, 1993, and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher. ‘Three Acres, More or Less’ first appeared in Gone Bush, ed. Roger McDonald, Transworld, 1990. ‘Cypresses and Spires’ first appeared as the introduction to The Last Days of Chez Nous & Two Friends, McPhee Gribble, 1992. Other pieces in this book, some of them in a different form, first appeared in the Age, Digger, Eureka Street, Independent Monthly, National Times, Scripsi, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Papers, Sunday Age, Time, Times on Sunday, and Vashti’s Voice.
To Michael Davie
Contents
The Art of the Dumb Question
PROLOGUE: Mr Tiarapu
Mr Tiarapu
PART ONE: A Scrapbook, An Album
The Schoolteacher
Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?
My Child in the World
Sad Grove by the Ocean
At Nine Darling Street
A Scrapbook, an Album
Wan, Tew, Three, Faw
Three Acres, More or Less
PART TWO: Sing For Your Supper
Patrick White: The Artist as Holy Monster
Sing for Your Supper
Cypresses and Spires: Writing for Film
Dreams, the Bible and Cosmo Cosmolino
Elizabeth Jolley’s War
Germaine Greer and the Menopause
On Turning Fifty
PART THREE: The Violet Jacket
At the Morgue
Sunday at the Gun Show
The Violet Jacket
Killing Daniel
The Fate of The First Stone
PART FOUR: Cruising
Cruising
Aqua Profonda
A Day at the Show
Five Train Trips
Beggars in New York
Marriage
Death
Labour Ward, Penrith
The Art of the Dumb Question
MY WORKING LIFE has been a series of sideways slides, of adaptations rather than ambitions. It seems to me that I have never actually been trained to do anything—except by one person. When I was nine my parents took me out of Ocean Grove State School, on the south coast of Victoria, and put me into the fifth grade of The Hermitage, an Anglican girls’ school in Geelong. There I had a ferocious teacher called Mrs Dunkley. She was thin, with short black hair and hands that trembled. She wore heels and a black suit with a nipped-in waist. She mocked me for my broad accent and my slowness at mental arithmetic. I was so frightened of her that I taught myself to count on my fingers under the desk at lightning speed (a skill I still possess). My mother says I used to scream out Mrs Dunkley’s name in my sleep. But Mrs Dunkley also taught grammar and syntax. She drew up meticulous columns on the board and taught us parts of speech, parsing, analysis. She was the person who put into my head a delight in the way English works, and into my hands the tools for the job.
I left school and never saw her again. Naturally, she died. Ten years ago I had a dream about her. In the dream I walked along the verandah off which the Hermitage staffroom opened, and looked in through the glass of the big French doors. I saw Mrs Dunkley moving across the room as if under water—but instead of her grim black forties suit, she was dressed in a glorious soft buckskin jacket of many colours. As she moved, colour streamed off her into the air in ribbons and garlands, so that she drew along behind her a dense, smudged rainbow-trail. It’s only now, writing this, that I make the connection between Mrs Dunkley and my favourite character in all fiction, namely the Fairy Blackstick in Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, who came to the christening of a certain baby princess and said, over the cradle, ‘As for this little lady, the best thing I can wish for her is a little misfortune.’
In the mid-sixties, when I crawled out of Melbourne University with a hangover and a very mediocre honours degree in English and French, any dingbat with letters after her name could get a job as a high school teacher. You didn’t even need a Dip. Ed., they were so desperate. One summer morning I bowled up to the Education Department in Treasury Place and presented my meagre qualifications to the lady on the front desk. She gave them a cursory glance, and pointed to a large map of Victoria which hung on the wall behind her. ‘What do you want?’ she said wearily, ‘Werribee or Wycheproof?’ All I knew about Wycheproof, in north-western Victoria, was that the railway line ran down the middle of the main street. I chose Werribee, thus forfeiting my chance to live and work in the Mallee, the region my father comes from.
My enjoyable but less than brilliant career in teaching lasted, on and off, for about seven years, and ended in ignominy, as one of the stories in this book relates. To this day chalkies of both sexes approach me with a grin in public places and say, ‘You owe me a day’s pay. I went out on strike for you in 1973.’ It was a great stir, and I’m happy about the support but, after wasting a lot of perfectly good time in regret and martyrdom, I was obliged to acknowledge that getting the sack was the best thing that could have happened to me. It forced me to start writing for a living.
I worked for—or, more correctly, I ‘was part of the collective that produced’—the counter-culture magazine the Digger for a couple of years in the early seventies. Then I caught hepatitis. I went home and got into bed and stayed there, expertly cared for by my housemates, for weeks. I read War and Peace. Somebody brought me the stories of the Russian writer Isaac Babel. When I read, in Lionel Trilling’s introduction, that Babel’s work had got him offside with the Soviet authoritie
s because ‘it hinted that one might live in doubt, that one might live by means of a question’, I put down the book and howled.
Maybe it was just the gloom that goes with hepatitis—but more likely it was because till that moment I had never admitted to myself how ill at ease I was, writing for a paper like the Digger. (Only one story I wrote for it has made it into this collection.) Things I wrote then felt false to me. I was bluffing. I secretly knew myself to be hopelessly bourgeois.
I was also greatly taken by Babel’s statement that ‘there is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a full stop placed at exactly the right point’. This of course was Mrs Dunkley’s territory, though I failed to realise it at the time, and though she would not have expressed herself so stylishly. Years later I was reminded that I ought to keep a lid on my passion for punctuation when I bragged to my friend Tim Winton that I had just written ‘a two-hundred-word paragraph consisting of a single syntactically perfect sentence’. He scorched me with a surfer’s stare and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of shit.’
When I got over the hep, I rode my bike down to Silver Top in Rathdowne Street and applied for a taxi licence. But before I could do the test, a communist friend pointed out to me the existence of the Supporting Mother’s Benefit and my eligibility for it, as a separated mother of a small child. I applied for one of these instead, and got it. I still regret that I never drove a taxi.
This was the period now loosely referred to as ‘the seventies’. The group was paramount. In certain circles a person could offend by being ‘too articulate’. But along with all the absorbing collective stuff—dancing and love affairs and communal households and consciousness-raising groups and women’s liberation newspapers and Pram Factory shows and demos and dropping acid and mucking around all summer at the Fitzroy Baths with the kids—I got a fair bit of solitary reading done. At government expense, and don’t think I’m not grateful, I launched into Proust, lying on my bed all day by the open window with my head propped on two big pillows and one small hard one, the weighty volume resting upright on my chest.
One day, struggling with a Shakespeare sonnet, I got bogged down in its syntax, and took it across the hall to a bass player who had a science degree he wasn’t using. He laid his guitar on the bed and said, ‘OK. Let’s see if we can work it out.’ We dismantled the sonnet and pieced it back together. The pleasure of this process was so intense as to be almost excruciating: it felt more illicit than sex. Neither of us ever mentioned it again. More typical of my chosen life at the time was the response I got from a boyfriend when he was sick in bed and, thinking to alleviate his boredom (or my own, now I come to think of it), I said to him, ‘Hey—how about we discuss the nature of good and evil?’
‘Steady on, Hel!’ he said, shrinking back against the pillows.
So I opened my sewing box and mended his shirt instead, while he watched me fondly and played a little tune on his harmonica. In my diary I wrote a song. It went like this.
My charming boy’s got a rip in his jacket
I’d take out my needle and thread and attack it
If I wasn’t hip to this particular racket…
In those days there weren’t many rackets I was hip to, for all the talk. I couldn’t even spot my own.
I don’t remember ever planning to write a novel. There’s nothing like having studied literature at university to make you despise your own timid attempts to tell a story on paper—or even to describe people and houses, or write down dialogue. For years you turn on yourself the blowtorch of your tertiary critical training. You die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you’ve written. Somebody somewhere says, though, that ‘the urge to preserve is the basis of all art’. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around every day with impunity, but because without it you will lose your life: its detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.
Then one day it occurs to you that you can see a shape to the diary, a curious sort of bulge or curve in the order of events. You try to ignore this, but it keeps coming to mind. One morning you put the Spirex exercise books in a plastic bag and hop on your bike. You dink your daughter to school and, instead of turning round and going home, where a band will later be practising in the front room and the egg cartons tacked to the wall will fail to muffle the roar of the speakers, you pedal on through Carlton and down to the domed Reading Room of the State Library in the city. You sit down under one of those green-shaded lamps, and turn back to the day in the diary where you think you can see a possible starting-point: an end of wool poking out of the tangled skein. ‘Without hope and without despair,’ as Isak Dinesen says, you begin.
At first you simply transcribe. Then you cut out the boring bits and try to make leaps and leave gaps. Then you start to trim and sharpen the dialogue. Soon you find you are enjoying yourself. You can’t wait to get there each morning. You make yourself stop at one o’clock and ride home, because if you do more than three hours at a stretch you’re scared you’ll have a heart attack from the excitement. It takes just over a year. Then you retire to your bedroom and you type it. The thunder of your second-hand Olivetti drowns out the band. For the first time in your life you don’t care if you’ve got a boyfriend or not. You know nothing about lay-out, and produce a horrible-looking manuscript on cheap quarto paper, single-spaced, with mingy margins. But it’s fat. It’s got a title. Your name is on the front of it. You wrote it. So this is what it’s all been for. What is it, though? Have you got the gall to call it a novel?
A year later, Monkey Grip was in the shops. But between the day I signed the contract and the day the book appeared, I circulated the manuscript round the households, in an attempt at candour, since the book’s dozen characters were all versions of actual people. And here’s the weird bit. Not a single one complained. I’m not saying they all liked it. But no one objected. The only person who went out of his way to contact me with a comment on his (very small) appearance in the book was a roadie who phoned me one afternoon, excited and happy, to thank me for putting him in. ‘It’s one little bit of my life,’ he said, ‘that hasn’t been lost.’
Becoming self-consciously ‘a writer’ after the surprise success of Monkey Grip, I tried to apply what I thought of as ‘fictional techniques’ to the mess of my experience. I got lost in the attempt and, like many writers, produced a second book which was poorer in spirit than its artless predecessor. The more I tried to disguise real people as ‘characters’, the more furious they got with me for writing about them at all. This second book of fiction, Honour & Other People’s Children, in its clumsy and premature attempts to shape painful experience into ‘stories’, caused wounds in certain people which have not healed.
The question of writers’ ‘use’ of ‘real’ events and people in their books is not new. It has always caused vexation and it always will. It’s the nature of a writer to exhibit what Nadine Gordimer calls ‘a monstrous detachment’. Writers, she says in the introduction to her stories, have ‘powers of observation heightened beyond the normal…The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer’. I used to think that if I examined my motivation as ruthlessly as I could, I would be able to do better than just write fiction which was a ‘settling of accounts’ with people. I thought I’d be ethically in the clear as long as I wrote ‘in good faith’—that is, if I laid myself on the line as well, applied to myself the same degree of analysis and revelation that I did to the other people concerned. I still happen to think this attitude is legitimate, as far as it goes—but it’s based on an assumption of consciousness in the novelist which is over-optimistic to the point of being grandiose.
I realise, specially since I published Cosmo Cosmolino, in 1992, that in fiction, when you get down into the muck of life-marriage and sex and God and death and old, old friendships— you are working blind. You think you’re seeing what you’re doin
g, but you’re seeing only darkly. You may start from the ‘real’—but in fiction you soon forget which bits are ‘true’ and which bits you made up. You get so engaged with the technical problems of making a story work that the connection between its characters and what exists outside the book becomes less and less visible to you, and of less and less interest. It can be years before you see with real clarity (if you ever do) what urges you were gripped by when you were writing that book. Often, what you thought you had a handle on turns out to have had a handle on you.
In non-fiction you don’t have the freedom—ethical, aesthetic, or temporal—to go in that deep. Non-fiction isn’t easier than fiction, but for the most part it’s broader and shallower. In non-fiction, the writer’s contract with the reader is different. Someone reading a novel wants you to create a new world, parallel perhaps to the ‘real’ one, in which the reader can immerse himself for the duration. But a reader of non-fiction counts on you to remain faithful to the same ‘real’ world that both reader and writer physically inhabit. As a non-fiction writer you have, as well, an implicit contract with your material and with the people you are writing about: you have to figure out an honourable balance between tact and honesty. You are accountable for the pain you can cause through misrepresentation: you have a responsibility to the ‘facts’ as you can discover them, and an obligation to make it clear when you have not been able to discover them. Fiction’s links with the ‘real’ are more complex and tenuous. But they can still get a writer into all sorts of personal trouble. I didn’t know this in 1980 when Honour got me into hot water, but I notice now how soon afterwards it was that I started busily doing journalism—really throwing myself into it. It may have been firstly to earn a living—but it was surely also for the relief: instead of feeling an irksome obligation to make things up, in journalism I was not allowed to.
When I hunted out the stories that make up this book, I was amazed at the sheer quantity of non-fiction I’ve written over the last twenty-five years. You forget how hard you have to work, to make a freelance living. Also, there’s a kind of snobbery that makes you forget everything you’ve done except the books. They stand up in the landscape behind you, visible at a distance and clearly marked with dates, while the non-fiction and the journalism lie flat, forming a dense, prickly undergrowth. All right—I accept that theatre and film reviews, though they put food on the table for years, don’t belong between covers—but how could I have forgotten writing about Mr Tiarapu? The marmalade display at the Royal Melbourne Show? The purchase of the violet jacket? Deadlines give you time for only a minimal amount of polish and perfecting. Like the doctors of the Penrith story in this book, you have to keep moving—on, on, on.