by Helen Garner
When I first started publishing regular feature articles, a newspaper man came up to me at a party and said genially, ‘I like your journalism, Helen—but you should write more. You should write faster.’ A publisher’s editor standing nearby overheard this. I saw his mouth drop open. The journalist moved on and the editor said to me in a voice faint with horror, ‘That was awful. It was like hearing the devil talking.’
But in the early eighties the Age had a wonderful editor, an Englishman called Michael Davie. He had a black-and-white photo of Samuel Beckett pinned to his office wall. I respected his judgement, loved his dry, elegant sparkle, and was always just a little bit scared of him. When I did my first feature for him, he sent me a bottle of champagne. He offered me a retainer. He was funny and sophisticated and he thought writing mattered. He didn’t stay long in Australia, but he was the first editor I worked for who lent dignity to the job of writing features for a daily newspaper.
After he went back to London, I made an appointment with his successor, for I was labouring under the delusion that, since I was in a very minor way on his payroll, I ought out of courtesy to present myself in person. The new editor lost no time in letting me know that he was not in the business of ‘massaging writers’ egos’. Crrrrunch. Things were back to normal. Thus ended my formal relationship with the Age.
It is very squashing to come to feature journalism from a publishing house, where one’s work is treated with respect. These days, with newspapers and magazines, I am crabby enough to demand and get proofs, but back then I was still at the mercy of the sub-editors and their brutally applied house style. I have never to my knowledge actually seen a sub, but their harsh pencils (or whatever they use) have punctured many a balloon of my modest rhetoric. I once wrote a piece for the Age in which I rhapsodised about looking out the window of an interviewee’s kitchen in an outer suburb and seeing ‘miles and miles of golden grass’. This appeared on Saturday morning as ‘kilometres and kilometres of golden grass’.
Further into the eighties I worked for the National Times and the Times on Sunday, which were based in Sydney. Sunday became the worst day of the week. Their typesetters were slap-happy and their subs not merely deflating—they delighted to slash and burn. Between them they could mangle the meaning out of the simplest sentence. ‘Operatic’ became ‘operative’. ‘Hedonistic’ turned into ‘pessimistic’, ‘rhetorical’ into ‘theoretical’. A friend of mine who also wrote for them phoned me one Sunday morning. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to my story?’ he said in a choking voice. ‘I’ve just smashed the toaster with a hammer.’
Journalism is a tonic for narcissists like me. It gets you out of the house—literally, but also in the sense that it blasts you out of your immediate personal situation and into direct contact with strangers. The more of it I try to write, the deeper grows my respect for the great interviewers. I used to think a lot of Joan Didion, but when I reread Slouching towards Bethlehem, lately, I found it rigid with mannerisms, with style. I’m thinking rather of writers like Janet Malcolm (The Silent Woman, most recently), the Englishman Tony Parker (Life after Life, interviews with twelve murderers), Norman Mailer of The Executioner’s Song—and the French documentary maker Claude Lanzmann (Shoah, Tsahal).
Lanzmann has a humility before his material which is exemplary and rare. He never shirt-fronts, or tries to get people on the back foot—but he is persistent, gently stubborn. He is the king of the apparently dumb question, the simple, unaggressive gambit that releases a flow of talk from a person not accustomed to self-expression. ‘Do you like tonks?’ he says sweetly in his comical accent, to a member of an elite Israeli tank corps. A Jew, he picks up a flicker of stifled emotion in an old Nazi who is blankly justifying his role in the death camps; Lanzmann has the quiet nerve to ask, ‘Why are you sad?’ He is prepared to leave the surface of his work porous. There is no one in the world less eager than he is to have the last word. I admire him more than I can say.
Interviewing is not what people imagine. Before you try it, you think it must be like pulling teeth. You approach each interview fearing that you will not get enough. But what you learn is that you must humble yourself before the other. You have to let go of your anxious desire to control and direct the encounter. You have to live for a while in the uncertainty of not knowing where it’s heading. You don’t lead. You learn to follow. And then you are amazed at what people are prepared to tell you.
People will always tell you more than you need to know-and more than they want you to know. This is not only because you are alert to their body language as well as their speech. I think it’s because most ordinary people can’t really believe that anyone else is interested in them. In your average casual conversation, the listener is only just restraining himself from butting in with ‘Well, I—’. As an interviewer you have to discipline your narcissism. You have to train yourself to shut up about what you did and saw and felt. You learn by practice to listen properly and genuinely, to follow with respect the wandering path of the other’s thoughts. After a while this stops being an effort. You notice that your concentration span is getting longer—longer than you ever thought it could become. Fewer and fewer things bore you. Curiosity is a muscle. Patience is a muscle. What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural. And then immense landscapes open out in front of you. A woman who spoke to me when I was researching the Penrith story in this book kept cutting herself off mid-sentence and saying, ‘But this must be boring.’ After the fifth time she said this, I heard myself say—and mean—words that I had never dreamt would pass my lips: ‘Listen. I am one of the least boreable people you are ever likely to meet.’
A risk is that you over-identify with your subject. Often it can take days to disentangle yourself. Sometimes, years later, you are still waking up at three in the morning in a sweat over someone else’s troubles. Other strange processes can intrude. Once, months after I’d done a long interview with a woman I’ll call X, I arranged to meet her in a cafe so she could check her quotes. I walked in on time. She wasn’t there. There was only a total stranger at a table against the wall. I hesitated at the door. The stranger waved to me. I stared at her. ‘Helen,’ she said, puzzled, ‘it’s me—X.’
I was mortified. I realised I had completely transformed her appearance as I wrote up our conversation. When she checked the quotes and found them accurate I was giddy with relief. Perhaps what’s really odd is that this so rarely happens. Clearly it’s the beginning of the process of creating a character—a habit that slithers over the border from fiction, the land where you are always disguising people and trying to cover your tracks.
Writing fiction is lonelier than doing journalism. Journalism feeds your extraversion, while a novel demands years on your own in a room with the door shut. When in 1992 I hung out for three days with notebook and pencil at the city morgue, I was strangely happy. I felt sociable, accepted, content. I never wanted to go home. I mentioned to one of my sisters how much I was enjoying turning up at the lab on the dot of nine each morning, and exchanging casual greetings with the technicians. ‘Hi, Helen!’ they’d say, glancing up from their corpses. ‘Hi, Jodie! Hi, Kevin!’ I’d answer. My sister regarded me for a moment with narrow eyes. ‘What you need,’ she said dryly, ‘is a job.
’ A job! I haven’t had what you could call a job for over twenty years. I remember how enviously, in Paris in 1978, I witnessed one morning through the guichet the astonishing spectacle of bank employees arriving at work and doing a leisurely tour of the office to shake hands with every single one of their colleagues. I remember my first job, at Griffiths’ bookshop in Geelong in the early sixties, when Australians still had manners, how one greeted the two brothers who owned the shop: ‘Morning, Mr Jack, morning, Mr Bob’; and how at half past five when the working day was done we all said to each other, seriously, ‘Goodnight’. I remember a kind old bloke called Mr Winstanley who, if some scallywag neglected to return his formal greeting, would turn away murmuring ironical
ly, ‘Silence was the stern reply.’
Most poignantly of all, though, when I get fed up with working alone, I remember Victorian high school staffrooms of the sixties and seventies: the rigid hierarchy with its irritations, but also the chiacking, the squabbles, the timely advice from some old stager with a fag drooping off his lip. The awful decorated tea mugs, the solemnity of a new fiancée describing her ‘sheets and towels in autumn tonings’. The rough teasing, the flirting, the ping-pong games, the laboured jokes about longing for Friday and whether one was ‘happy in the service’. The sudden hush when the principal walked into the room. The groans at the sound of the bell, the quoting of what the kids had said, their howlers; the seething about the unfair timetable. And the line of silent, companionable admirers, along the top-floor windows, watching the Greek and Italian boys playing soccer, down in the rainy yard.
I used to have a fantasy (if I ever thought of the future at all) that one day I would be able to live on fiction. It was only a matter of time, I thought. Meanwhile, journalism would feed me and my daughter, and fill the gaps—but then I found, and am still finding, how well journalism suits me. ‘Ideas’ for non-fiction come flapping over the horizon from editors, or seeping out of the ground right under my feet. One will always present itself to save me, just as I’m about to sit down before the abyss of thinking about a novel. There is always some public ritual I’d like to gape at, a place I long to loiter in (a crematorium, a hospital) to which the only passport is a reporter’s notebook—and where I might stumble on material whose meaning journalism will not exhaust.
But there is also the other sort of notebook, the one where you scribble down the tiny things that sprout persistently in the cracks between non-fiction stories. I file them under ‘Notes: aimless’.
the proximity of rivers
cicadas: columns of sound
a man called Terry Treasure
their feeble personalities can make no impression on the impassive house
she relishes obstructions
the cheerful orphan
‘black with sin as I am’—Chekhov
a man trying to stuff a huge, dun-coloured eiderdown into a locker at Spencer Street station
landscape of childhood: worn out from being looked at
champions practising
the gift of tears
‘sparkling jewels and opulent mantles’
the language of furniture
Melbourne girls with their great brown crinkly capes of hair
I open the folder and see with a secret thrill these strange notations. Why did I keep them? What did I plan to do with these lost things? They have detached themselves long ago from their origins in ‘reality’, and floated free. But I recognise them—I know what they’re for. They are the hints and tremors of fiction, and that is where, one day, I will make the place where they belong.
PROLOGUE
Mr Tiarapu
Mr Tiarapu
ONE SUMMER I went to Sydney to visit my friend in hospital. He had just had a brain tumour removed and was lying, on a very blustery day, in a ward with flapping blinds and no air-conditioning. My friend was recovering well, considering. He was quite shaven, and half his head was bandaged.
When I arrived he was propped against his pillows, eating oysters out of a flat grey cardboard box. He offered me one and said, ‘Pity you didn’t arrive ten minutes earlier. Because do you know who gave me these oysters? Patrick White. I was hoping you’d arrive before he left; but another friend of mine came instead, and when I introduced them she looked terribly excited and said, “Not the Patrick White?” and he said, “No. A Patrick White”.’
We ate the oysters. When we had finished them, my friend said, ‘But I would like to introduce you to the bloke in the next bed. Because he’s from Tahiti, and lives in Noumea, and he can’t speak English—perhaps you could talk French with him.’ He sat up with his bandaged head and called to the man, who appeared to be asleep. ‘Eh, M’sieu.’
The man turned his body slowly towards us. He was a very tall man with a big head, perhaps forty-five years old, and evidently in pain: his brown islander skin was greyish and his cheeks were hollow. My friend, in his carefully enunciated fourth-form French, explained that I was someone who spoke French better than he did. The Tahitian put out his hand and took hold of mine.
‘Enchanté, madame,’ he said.
We exchanged courtesies and platitudes about our experiences among the French.
‘Les Français sont des racistes, des hypocrites,’ he said. ‘They speak to you politely, then they massacre you behind your back.’
He told me that he lived in Noumea, and that he had a wife and six children at home. He did not know what the matter was with him, except that he was unable to walk, and had not been able to for some months. He said that he had been taken to hospital in Noumea for this unexplained weakness of the legs, and that suddenly hospital officials had told him he was to be sent to Sydney ‘to have some tests done’. Since his arrival at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, he had not understood anything that had happened to him, nor anything that had been said to him, until he had been moved into the bed beside my friend with the opened head. ‘Your friend,’ he said, looking earnestly at me, ‘is a very very nice person.’
I asked him if he would like me to stay till the doctors came, and try to interpret for him. He said he would like this very much, but that I was not to put myself out if I had something else to do. He said that he had not been given time, in Noumea, to see his wife and children before they had bundled him on to the plane. He said that he would like to write to his wife to tell her that he was all right and where he was and that he was waiting for tests to be done. He said he had not been able to write before, because he had not been able to ask for paper.
I asked a nurse for paper and a pad was procured, also an envelope and a biro. He sat up as far as he could and leaned on a magazine and wrote, in a large formal hand, a long letter. While he wrote, I talked with my friend. It was very hot indeed and, because there was a nurses’ strike on, the nurses who wanted to strike but who did not wish to leave their seriously ill patients unattended were working dressed in ordinary street clothes instead of uniforms. This gave them a less brisk, less intimidating appearance, but it did not help the Tahitian man with his language problem. One of the nurses said to me, ‘They arrive at the hospital from Noumea in plane loads.’
I asked when the doctors would be coming round, and the nurse said they would be there any minute. The man, whose name was Mr Tiarapu, finished his letter and addressed the envelope and stuck it down and then lay there with it against his chest, as if not sure what to do next. He looked from side to side.
I said, ‘Would you like me to take it downstairs and post it for you?’
He said he would like that, if it were not too much trouble.
Two doctors entered the ward. They were very young men, younger than I was, and one of them was Australian and the other was Thai. They came to the end of Mr Tiarapu’s bed shyly, as if they and not I were visiting. They looked at the chart attached to the foot of the bed.
I said, ‘I can speak French, and wondered if I could explain to Mr Tiarapu what is the matter with him, because he doesn’t know.’
The doctors looked at each other like two schoolboys, each waiting for the other to speak. The Thai said, ‘Well, we are going to do some more tests.’
I said, ‘Can you perhaps tell him more than that, because he must be very anxious, not knowing what is the matter with him.’
The Australian said, ‘Does he want to ask us any questions in particular that you could translate?’
I translated this for Mr Tiarapu who was lying with his big head held up in a strained position, as if trying to understand by sheer effort of will.
He said, ‘I would like to know if I will be able to walk again. It is my legs, it is awful, not to be able to walk. Will you ask the doctors why I can’t walk, and whether they can do anything about it?�
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The doctors, speaking in duo, said that there was a blockage in the spine somewhere, and that the tests they would do were to determine the possibilities of a cure. ‘If it is only a blockage,’ said one of them, looking slightly helpless, ‘tell him he will be able to walk again if he does the exercises we will give him. If he does the exercises, he can only improve, if all he has is a blockage.’
I translated this. Mr Tiarapu looked much less anxious. He did not seem to want to make further inquiries, and the doctors said they would come back at a certain time the next day and that they would appreciate it if I could be there to interpret again. I said I would be there.
Mr Tiarapu took my hand and thanked me. He looked at me in a way that made me feel very bad, and sad, as if I were a kind of lifeline. I would have liked to kiss his cheek, but I was afraid of overstepping some line of protocol that might exist between white and black, or well and ill.
I said goodbye to my friend, and to Mr Tiarapu, and picked up the cardboard box with the oyster shells in it and dropped it in the rubbish bin on my way out of the ward. I took Mr Tiarapu’s letter across the road in the gritty wind and into the post office, and got them to put the right stamps on it, and posted it.