True Stories

by Helen Garner

  (I took notes, and later, when I did find a way into writing Cosmo Cosmolino, I shamelessly borrowed and stole.)

  Dreams and the Bible have certain things in common. One is violence. Some days I’d come out of my workroom white and shaking after reading one of those hideous tales of rape and butchery that the Old Testament is sprinkled with—just as we wake from certain dreams in a lather of horror. What could be a more practical gift, to a writer of my age who has been brought up in a civilised, peaceful country, a member of a generation that has not had to go to war?

  When I compare Cosmo Cosmolino with the half-waking dream-writing I still do, I see the very wide gap that lies between my waking, working self and the unselfconscious scribbler sitting up in bed. Cosmo Cosmolino got away from me, somehow. It went into the purple. I had a huge amount of fun with it, slinging the clauses this way and that; but I didn’t come within cooee of my longed-for dream-style, with its simple urgency and directness. Still—at least I figured out how to get dream into the texture of the story. And I got far enough past my pragmatic Australian inhibitions to find the nerve to write a world in which angels stand about casually in doorways, or steal money, or accept a massage, or fly away straight after breakfast.

  A few mornings ago my husband said to me when we woke up, ‘You talked in your sleep last night. I noted it down. Look-here’s what you said: IS IT SPECIAL LOOKING?—DOES IT REALLY EXIST?’ If I was talking about my wonderful dream-writing, I believe it is special-looking, and it does exist—but I haven’t found it yet. I’m still searching.

  1992

  Elizabeth Jolley’s War

  ‘IN THE MIDDLE of the journey of our life’, when we start to feel the weight of the crimes we are hauling behind us, we might turn to literature for wisdom. It is not readily available, but I have always found it in Elizabeth Jolley, even before I knew what I was looking for. The Old Testament, in one of its great hymns to wisdom, calls it (among other things) ‘manifold, subtil, lively, clear, undefiled, plain…’ and adds that its ‘conversation hath no bitterness’. All these things apply.

  I picked up My Father’s Moon with eagerness.*; I had noticed over the preceding year or so the appearance in magazines and anthologies of new stories by Jolley which entered territory her work had hinted at before but not yet fully broached: in particular, the world of nursing, and not the shonky little rip-off nursing home of Mr Scobie’s Riddle, but a big British training institution, a military hospital in wartime.

  Now here is the novel and it richly rewards the wait. All the elements of Jolley’s previous work, its familiar (even obsessive) moods, motifs and subject matters, are swung into balance with each other. It becomes clear that it was this early experience of training as a nurse in wartime England which, though she held back so many years from tackling it directly, was all the while sending waves of subdued power through everything she wrote, imbuing it with a personal and particularly female authority of tone—the authority of someone who has bitten the bullet, learnt to bear things and to be useful—an authority sometimes missed, or misread as whimsical headmistressliness, by those unmoved by her simple statements of pain and stoicism, or untickled by her crooked, skidding humour.

  It is sad when senses of humour fail to meet, for nothing can be done about this, and how tedious the straight-faced must find it to be told of the spasms of enfeebling hilarity her work can provoke—something like the wild laughter of nurses, or nuns. But when one reviewer disobligingly remarked that the book reminded him of Rachmaninov, I was astonished. If there’s any composer Jolley brings to mind, it’s not a grandiose tear-jerker of a Russian but someone more like Satie—always resolutely human in scale, modest, thoughtful, quirkily melodic, with flashes of oblique humour and a light touch.

  The plot, if it were wrenched against its weave into a rough chronological form, would go like this: Vera, a plain, naive girl with a German-speaking mother (social and patriotic embarrassment) and an English father, is sent away to a Quaker boarding school then on to train as a nurse during World War II; at the hospital she does well at work and study but is socially a flop, resorting to dobbing, sucking-up and petty sabotage, until she is taken up by a reputedly promiscuous doctor and his gushy wife; she falls in love with him, gets pregnant, is abandoned (the doctor vanishes as the war ends: ‘dead or believed missing’) and, rejecting her parents’ offer to take on the illegitimate child, stubbornly drags the little girl away into a dismal life of privation and precarious survival.

  Vera’s first-person narrating voice shifts back and forth in time among these events with a suppleness that keeps us hovering several inches above the ground. Its loftiest vantage-point, the brief now which encloses the story, is that of the middle-aged Vera who sees on a train a woman she believes to be a nursing companion from that wartime hospital: Ramsden, a slightly senior nurse, also slightly superior in social class, who, though Vera at the time was too proud and too ashamed to accept what the older girl offered her, has remained a symbolic focus of unconditional generosity and grace throughout Vera’s memories of that world without comfort in which she struggled.

  A sentence that stays with me from one of Elizabeth Jolley’s earlier books is this: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.’ In My Father’s Moon, too, certain remarks resound like quietly struck chords.

  The strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child does not seem a part of the child which can be given back to the parent.

  There is something hopeless in being hopeful that one person can actually match and replace another. It is not possible.

  However much a person resembles another person, and it is not that person, it is not of any use.

  If, as Emerson says, prayer is ‘the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view’, these remarks, still showing in their hesitant or repetitive syntax the effort that has gone into their formulation, function as prayers, and for me they have the same calming, if not comforting, power.

  She said…that love was infinite. That it was possible, if a person loved, to believe in the spiritual understanding of truths which were not fully understood intellectually. She said that the person you loved was not an end in itself, was not something you came to the end of, but was the beginning of discoveries which could be made because of loving someone.

  Stendhal, in his charming if not very helpful book on love, declares that there are some things which even the most resourceful and experienced woman would not be able to face: for example, ‘just how beastly a wound can be’. Later came nurses. Perhaps Jolley has been working her way back, all these years, gaining skill as she went, towards something she needed to write about a soldier, hardly more than a boy, whose legs have been amputated above the knee and who also has a terrific wound in his stomach. He begs the nurse to put the crucifix from around his neck into the wound: the prim Quaker girl, gold-medal nurse, refuses ‘because it isn’t sterile’.

  I brush something small and white out of his bed. It seems to roll up like a soft bread crumb. As I swab the wound it seems something is moving in it. It is a maggot. I pick it out quickly with the forceps trying not to show my shock. Suddenly I see there are maggots everywhere. It’s as though he is being eaten alive. They are crawling from under his other bandages and in and out of his shirt and the sheets. I lean over him to try to stop him seeing and I ring the bell, three rings for emergency…I try to cover him but the maggots have spilled on to the floor and he has seen them. I see the horror of it in his eyes.

  The charge nurse comes around the screens straight away. ‘Fetch a dustpan and brush nurse,’ she says to me, ‘and ring for the RSO.’ As I go I hear her raised voice as she tries to restrain him and to say words of comfort—that the maggots have been put there on purpose, that they have cleaned his wounds and yes of course she’ll put the gold cross wherever he wants it—yes, she’ll put it there now…

  What is the detail that screws this scene into its tightest focus? Isn�
��t it the comically humble dustpan and brush?

  The book’s surreal quality undercuts me whenever I start a sentence that is even faintly psychological or sociological. Yes, Vera is isolated and cramped by class, the story is riddled with it, but how can I soberly examine this when the characters who outclass Vera are nurses with names like Diamond and Snorter who ‘never wear uniform and…sing and laugh and come into theatre in whatever they happened to be wearing—backless dinner dresses, tennis shorts or their night-gowns’? The book itself will laugh if I become pompous about it: it ranges so liberally, it’s so flexible.

  There are striking passages about the actual process of learning. ‘It’s like poetry, I want to tell them, this anatomy, this usefulness of the pelvis… “Describe the acetabulum, and do it without looking at the book”. “A deep, cup-shaped cavity, formed by the union of three bones…” ’ The acetabulum, when I look it up, is the socket of the thigh-bone, and in Latin means ‘vinegar cup’.

  Under a sequence about study, the pleasure of hearing the pennies dropping, bubbles the half-hysterical meanness of schoolgirls:

  As I write the essay, the staff and the patients and the wards of St Cuthberts seem to unfold about me and I begin to understand what I am trying to do in this hospital. I rewrite the essay collecting the complete working of a hospital ward into two sheets of paper. When it is read aloud to the other nurses, Ferguson stares at me and does not take her eyes off me all through the nursing lecture which follows.

  I learn every bone and muscle in the body and all the muscle attachments and all the systems of the body. I begin to understand the destruction of disease and the construction of cure. I find I can use phrases suddenly in speech or on paper which give a correct answer. Formulae for digestion or respiration or for the action of drugs. Words and phrases like gaseous interchange and internal combustion roll from my pen and the name at the top of the lists continues to be mine.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ll be top in invalid cookery too!’ Ferguson says and she reminds me of the white sauce I made at school which was said to have blocked up the drains for two days. She goes on to remind me how my pastry board, put up at the window to dry, was the one which fell on the headmaster’s wife while she was weeding in the garden below, breaking her glasses and altering the shape of her nose forever.

  Schoolgirlish? Jolley upends every silly book I ever read as a child about merry boarding school pranks and (later) nurse-and-doctor romances. Her schoolgirls are tight-lipped savages with sliding eyes, measuring and preying on each other. ‘We both shake with simulated mirth, making, at the same time, a pretence of trying to suppress it.’ She knows the warped forms that ingenuity can take in lonely children or unpopular girls, and the self-disgust of those who, forced to adopt protective colouring, discover in themselves unexpected depths of cruelty and yet carry on practising the art of survival.

  Vera, starved of affection and hopelessly lacking in ‘Sex Appeal’, becomes a weird gremlin loose in the hospital, wreaking havoc among prettier and more popular girls, plundering secret food stores for dainty treats with which to woo her oblivious superiors. These splendid, crazy chapters flash between bright and dark moods with a bizarre energy: they dive in and out of surreal horror, the panic of having to learn a job by doing it, the pleasure of order achieved, the longing for revenge and for intimacy.

  In a fog of the incomprehensible and the obscure I strive, more stupid than I have ever been in my life, to anticipate the needs of the theatre sister whose small, hard eyes glitter at me above her white cotton mask.

  Isolation…is approached by a long, narrow covered way sloping up through a war-troubled shrubbery where all the dust bins are kept… When I go out into the darkness I can smell rotting arms and legs, thrown out of the operating theatre and not put properly into the bins.

  Night Sister Bean…is starch-scented, shrouded mysteriously in the daintily severe folds of spotted white gauze. She is a sorceress disguised in the heavenly blue of the Madonna; a shrivelled, rustling, aromatic, knowledgable, Madonna-coloured magician; she is a wardress and a keeper. She is an angel in charge of life and in charge of death. Her fine white cap, balancing, nodding, a grotesque blossom flowering for ever in the dark halls of the night, hovers beneath me. She is said to have powers, an enchantment, beyond the powers of an ordinary human. For one thing, she has been on night duty in this hospital for over thirty years.

  Every day, after the operations, I go round the theatre with a pail of hot soapy water cleaning everything. There is an orderly peacefulness in the quiet white tranquillity which seems, every afternoon, to follow the strained, bloodstained mornings.

  When the attention of the glamorous doctor is momentarily turned her way, she seizes it with the greed of the deprived, though she knows she is a lesser creature and that these ‘very long and very sweet kisses’ can’t last. But their effect, what they lead to, is related obliquely in choruses of nurses’ gynaecological gossip—ignorant, pitiless and (for the reader) hilarious—which whip the final section into a disorienting coda of distress. This thins out into one piercing line of dialogue. Lois, an erstwhile friend or perhaps even lover, spots the sixpenny wedding ring Vera has bought in an attempt to legitimise her still secret pregnancy. As the nurses are about to go on duty, ‘Lois, in her cloud of smoke, extinguishes her cigarette. “Whoever,” she says leaning low across the table, “whoever would ever have married you?” ’

  The book’s final page, only twenty-five lines, returns in a calmer key to the silent woman on the train, who may or may not be Ramsden. It is important that she should be Ramsden, not for sentimental reasons but because Ramsden was the only person in that insane world of the wartime hospital whose behaviour endorsed Vera’s knowledge that music can be a channel for grace, that words can be arranged to form poetry, that love can exist and have a meaning. If the woman is Ramsden, then something can be salvaged, the past can be made to yield up something that is pure. Thus the bleak, delicate question, the intake of breath on which the novel ends: ‘Is it you, Ramsden, after all these years is it?’

  1990

  * My Father’s Moon, Elizabeth Jolley, Viking, 1989.

  Germaine Greer and the Menopause

  WHAT A STRANGE secret the menopause is. I would need the fingers of both hands to count the women of my age (forty-nine) and slightly younger who, when I mentioned to them that I was reading The Change, dropped their eyes with a shudder and said, ‘Ugh—I don’t want to know about menopause. I don’t even want to think about it.*

  ‘No, no!’ I’d cry. ‘It’s not what you think! It’s wonderful! We’ll be free!’

  Some laughed and turned away. Some hastily changed the subject. Some looked at me with sidelong, sceptical smiles. And one said, ‘Not now. Not yet. I’m in love. I’m getting on a plane next week to go and meet him’—as if she feared that menopause was like a fire-curtain in a theatre: boom, it drops, and overnight you are cut off forever from energy, light, risk-the place where things are burning.

  But The Change is full of energy, light and risk. The whole work is that rare thing in modern public discourse, a passionate argument for spirit. Its trajectory describes a beautiful curve through indignation, anger and grief, and out the other side to a vantage-point with a high, calm view towards death. One English reviewer I read, a woman, remarked crabbily that she ‘could have done with less talk about “soul” and “spirit”.’ In fact this is the central concern of the book, stated early and many times repeated: how a woman can learn ‘to shift the focus of her attention away from her body ego towards her soul’. To wish for less of this is to miss the point entirely.

  The word around the traps is that Germaine Greer is against hormone replacement therapy. For many, the core of the book has seemed to be her chapters about HRT and its purveyors, an assault vastly documented and couched in the language of fierce irony that we have come to expect from her; and yet somehow, despite its vigour, this attack I found confusing, almost perfunctory, as if, while s
he knows her obligation to deal with the chemical question, which the world sees as central, her heart and her real thoughts were focussed elsewhere.

  Her critique of HRT has raised hackles, particularly among women who have read only reviews of the book: for as women of my age approach the end of ovulation with its aura of ill-defined dread, and as the first symptoms of the change ‘from the reproductive animal to contemplative animal’ begin to manifest, we are now routinely urged, by female and male GPs alike, to start taking replacement oestrogen, even if what we are experiencing is only mildly distracting, and physically not traumatic at all.

  The peculiar fear of menopause, which this book has dispelled for me but which many otherwise well-informed women will admit to in private conversation, tends to bathe the proffered HRT in the alluring light of a rescue. A rescue from what? We barely know—and that is why Germaine Greer has written this book.

  In her view, the prevailing attitudes towards menopause in our youth-obsessed culture fall into two broad strands: on one side, a brisk denial that women at this stage of their lives go through anything significant at all; on the other, an insistence that menopause is a deficiency disease, that the cessation of ovulation and menstruation hurls a woman into a chasm of mania, suicidal melancholy, foul temper, inappropriate lusts (or lack of any libido at all), malice, ugliness, uselessness and despair. It is hard to know, she says, which picture conceals the cruder misogyny: the no-nonsense materialist approach to the climacteric as nothing in particular (‘the goal of life,’ snaps Greer, ‘is not to feel nothing’), or the catastrophe model, where femaleness itself is seen as pathological, and treated accordingly.

  This is how menopause appears to men. In vain we ask the older women we know how it appeared to them: they go shy and vague, or claim to have forgotten. Women, Greer argues, know themselves so poorly, have adapted themselves so thoroughly to men’s (and children’s) requirements of them, and have allowed their own version of their intimate experience to be so muffled and distorted, that the whole phenomenon of menopause has been whisked away from them and defined for their own purposes by men, to women’s infinite loss, and cost.