by Helen Garner
Meanwhile, Barbara shook the dust of the bush from her feet and lit out for Sydney. She was engaged as a housekeeper in pleasant Woollahra by the respected Dr Thomas Baynton, a widower more than twice her age. Barbara had learnt from her former mother-in-law how to conduct herself among educated people. Within a year, and the day after her divorce from Frater was finalised, she and the doctor were married.
Though only in her early thirties, she had experienced enough affront, desolation and rage to fuel a lifetime’s literary output. Now, sharing an orderly urban life with a man she loved and respected, she could begin to write.
It irked her that some of her contemporaries were starting to romanticise, or to present in comic form, what she knew as the grinding slog and suffering of people who worked the land. She would make it her business to show the truth.
No one in Australia would publish Bush Studies, so she took it to London, where she met the usual insults dealt out to colonials; she even contemplated burning the manuscript and going home. But at last, in 1902, the book appeared in both London and Sydney. A. G. Stephens, who had first run her work in the Bulletin, opined ludicrously that the stories offered ‘a perverse picture of our sunny, light-hearted, careless land’; but Baynton had many admiring reviews, and felt at last established.
Nothing else she published packs the raw punch of Bush Studies. Her natural form is the short story. Her novel Human Toll contains powerful and sensitive passages, but her obsession with phonetic dialogue is frustrating and fatiguing. One forgets her poetry with relief.
But what a woman! When her dear Dr Baynton died, she inherited and sensibly invested a comfortable fortune. In London during World War I she was a generous host to many a lost Australian serviceman on leave. She fought her way up the social ladder in the most audacious way. Her third husband was a baron who had converted to Islam. He was offered the vacant throne of Albania. To Barbara’s great disappointment he refused it. The marriage lasted barely a year.
By now, though certain good friends never gave up on her, she seemed stuck in the role of the perverse dowager in jewels and long white gloves, known for her jealousy, bursts of wild rage and equally violent remorse. She returned to Melbourne and took up residence next door to her daughter, whose husband had the sense of humour and strength of character to keep the matriarch in line. Her grandchildren she thrilled by writing and reading aloud to them cautionary tales ‘of human unpleasantness and folly’. These stories were never published, and when at the age of seventy-two the champagne-drinking old termagant died, her faithful daughter, who loved her, threw them into the fire.
2012
The Rules of Engagement
United 93
On a lovely autumn morning in early September 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark, bound for San Francisco. Among its passengers were four young Islamic hijackers, armed with knives and explosives. While flight 93 was in the air, three other hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By 10.03 that morning, flight 93 had missed its hijackers’ target, the Capitol in Washington, and slammed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. No one survived.
Five years have passed. We have tried to absorb the facts and find the meanings of that day. We’ve had to make peace with them, in our private ways, because we’ve got to keep on living in what is known as the post-9/11 world. So how can we bear, now, to be dragged through it again, to sit in the dark for two hours and watch the story’s relentless deathward plummet, in what feels hideously like real time?
Two things make it possible. First, the exemplary tonal and technical brilliance of United 93 as a piece of filmmaking; and second, the fact that some of the passengers on flight 93, knowing that nothing could save them, found the nerve to plan and launch a wild, last-ditch attack on the hijackers. The laws of feature-film narrative are ironclad. Without this burst of hopeless defiance, we would have no curve, no plot, no movie.
United 93’s director, Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy), is British. Perhaps this is why he has been able to steer clear of the heroic posturing and sentimental appeals to patriotism we might have feared in a native version of the story.
At the same time, the physical world in which United 93 unfolds is effortlessly American. Greengrass has cast a mixture of obscure actors and actual airline workers and flight-control personnel. Part of his remarkable achievement is to establish, in layer after relaxed layer, the texture of an ordinary working morning—to make the casual, the mundane glow under the shadow of its annihilation.
First, though, in the opening shots we see the hijackers at prayer in their cheap motel. Fresh sunlight streams past its windows. Their faces are sombre, and very young. The camera averts its gaze, accords them privacy as they wash and shave their faces, limbs and genitals. They slide knives into their belts. Then, as they step out of their cab at Newark and join the check-in queue, their approach to the plane is intercut with cheerful footage of what they have come to destroy.
The flight crew ambles with its wheelie suitcases down the pristine aisles of the aircraft. Outside, mechanics in overalls stand under the plane’s belly, gazing up at the curved metal. The camera roams along the rows of passengers as they gather at the gate lounge, engaged in the benign trivia of the departing. One of the hijackers, his face rigid, calls a number on his mobile: ‘Ich liebe dich,’ he murmurs, unanswered, as if to a machine, ‘Ich liebe dich.’ Among the readers and talkers and eaters, a grandmother sits quietly working at her crochet, a pastime that, along with knitting, has vanished from planes since that day. The plainer the people—coarse skin, double chins, unglamorous clothes—the more their tiny preparatory actions strain our nerves.
Before flight 93 has even got the signal to taxi, we cut to the command centre of the Federal Aviation Administration, where workers at their screens call out in bewilderment as one plane in flight, then another, drops off the radar or suddenly changes course. ‘They think they got a hijack!’ ‘This is sim?’ ‘No! Real world! I heard it in my ear! Check it out!’ At Newark, ignorant flight 93 turns on to the sunny runway and thunders towards take-off.
The deluge of information that Greengrass has to handle defies précis. We get swamped by it, just as the air traffic people do. In dim command centres and control towers, people in headphones stand gaping before TV screens. Smoke gushes from the World Trade Center. The second plane plunges voluptuously into the glistening wall of steel and glass. The camera itself becomes panicky, incredulous, mimicking our shock.
But Greengrass drives the narrative on with a furious authority, leaping back and forth between the dawning horror on the ground and the pale, peaceful innocence of flight 93, where the pilots are being served their little breakfasts on plastic trays, and a lady politely asks the attendant for a glass of water to take her pills.
And then the first hijacker, shouting in praise of Allah, throws himself on a passenger and stabs him to death in a welter of blood. The others murder the pilots and haul their bodies out of the cockpit. The austere, devout young man in glasses (‘Ich liebe dich’) is now in command of the plane. While his panting comrade sluices blood off his hands with a bottle of spring water, the new pilot wedges a colour photo of the Capitol among the controls and turns the aircraft towards Washington.
This is not a film about heroes. It’s not even, thank God, about characters: we don’t ‘get to know’ anyone. It’s a vast ensemble piece on speed, a densely textured, brilliantly edited, unerringly paced creation of chaos and horror.
On the ground, the civilians shout for the military, and the military begs in vain for orders. The chain of command is non-existent. The fighters they get into the air are not armed. ‘Can we engage? Do we have any communication with the President at all? How about the Vice-President? Holy shit! What the fuck? What are the rules of engagement?’ The only person with the nous to take charge is the guy who’s been promoted the day before to national operations manager at the Federal Aviation Administration. He cu
ts through the uproar. ‘Everyone lands,’ he says, ‘regardless of destination.’
‘You’re gonna shut down the entire country?’ cries his deputy. ‘Take a minute!’
‘Shut down the airspace! We’re at war! With someone!’
Flight 93, awash with blood, goes screaming across the bright morning sky. In the cockpit the hijackers hear radio reports of the twin towers and Pentagon strikes: ‘The brothers have hit both targets!’ Some passengers pray and weep, hunch over borrowed mobiles to whisper farewells, sob out promises to their children, make declarations of love.
But others, hiding from the hijackers among the high seat-backs, start to rage and mutter. It takes one cool head to galvanise them. ‘No one’s going to help us,’ he says. ‘We’ve got to do it ourselves.’ An ex-pilot thinks he can fly the plane, if they can break down the door. A bunch of them seize whatever weapons they can find—forks, a fire extinguisher—and rush the hijackers, battering the cockpit door with a heavy steel trolley.
Their violence sends a charge of crazed energy through the film’s last minutes. The air is thick with howls of terror and anguish, with cries to God in Arabic. The camera, too, is in there fighting: things blur and lurch, something splits apart, wires are trailing. The cockpit’s windscreen fills with city streets, then with the fresh dark-green grass-blades of a meadow.
I have a rule of thumb for judging the value of a piece of art. Does it give me energy, or take energy away? When I staggered out of United 93 this rule had lost traction. I realised I had spent most of the screening crouching forward with my hand clamped around my jaw. Something in me had been violently shifted off-centre. Outside in the street there seemed to be a dark grey cloud over everything. An excruciating pity for all material things overwhelmed me. This flayed sensation lasted about two days, then gradually dissipated. Then I was left with a confused mixture of respect for the craft of the movie, amazed admiration for the people who charged the hijackers, and the same old haunting question: why do stories matter so terribly to us, that we will offer ourselves up to, and later be grateful for, an experience that we know is going to fill us with grief and despair?
2006
The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters
THE great American journalist Janet Malcolm will turn eighty next year. This fact has hit me amidships. She is the writer who has influenced and taught me more than any other. I have never met her, or heard her speak, but I would know her written voice anywhere. It is a literary voice, composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep learning yet plain in its address, and above all fearless, though she cannot possibly be without fear, since she understands it so well in others.
The whole drive of her work is expressed, I think, in a phrase she uses in one of the essays collected in Forty-one False Starts: ‘the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience’.
Rapture is not too strong a word for the experience of reading Malcolm. You can feast on these essays, as on all her work. Nothing in them is slick or shallow. Her work is always challenging, intellectually and morally complex, but it never hangs heavy. It is airy, racy, and mercilessly cut back, so that it surges along with what one critic has called ‘breathtaking rhetorical velocity’. It sparkles with deft character sketches. It bounds back and forth between straight-ahead reportage and subtle readings of documents and diaries, of photographs and paintings.
Malcolm’s way of perceiving the world is deeply dyed by the psychoanalytical view of reality. She never theorises or uses jargon. She simply proceeds on the assumption that (as she puts it in another book, The Purloined Clinic) ‘life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour’. This approach, coupled with her natural flair for metaphor and imagery, allows her almost poetic access to meaning in the way people dress and move, speak or decline to speak—and in her most famous and disputed concern, trust and betrayal in the relations between journalists and their subjects.
You feel the intense pleasure she gets from thinking. She keeps coming at things from the most unexpected angles, undercutting the certainty she has just reasoned you into accepting, and dropping you through the floor into a realm of fruitful astonishment, and sometimes laughter.
She skates past the traditional teachings on split infinitives or the undesirability of adjectives: like Christina Stead she will string adjectives and adverbs together in sinewy strands—half-a-dozen of them, each one working hard. An art magazine, she says, has ‘an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised, yet oddly poised air’.
Her description of clothes and their meaning is deadly: ‘a tall, thin, bearded man wearing tight jeans and high-heeled clogs’. Her brisk shorthand often has a sting in its tail: ‘Wilson, who had an unhappy childhood in a mansion’; ‘the look of a place inhabited by a man who no longer lives with a woman’. A young art critic speaks, she says, ‘with the accent of that non-existent aristocratic European country from which so many bookish New York boys have emigrated’.
The longest piece in this collection, ‘A Girl of the Zeitgeist’, is a study of the New York art scene of the 1980s. Nothing could interest me less, I thought; but within a few sentences I found myself drawn into a scintillating anthropological investigation that I read greedily, realising that like any other microcosm this one could be studied with both entertainment and profit, and with a thrilling degree of enlightenment about the human project.
For Malcolm, life is unruly. She is gripped by artists’ struggles to get command of it, not to be abject before it. But she pulls no punches. She will observe a person and the decor of his apartment, his shoes, his clothes, his way of cooking; she will switch on her reel-to-reel, start him talking, then stand back. Her ear is so finely tuned to speech, and her nerves to the unspoken, that later, when she sits at her desk, she will recreate her subject’s utterances with a lethal accuracy, unfolding his character and world view like a fan.
She maintains a perfectly judged distance between her eye and its target. She does not suck up to the people she interviews, or try to make them like her by revealing her own personal life in exchange for their confidences. Her boredom threshold is high. She gives her subjects rope. She allows herself to be charmed, at least until the subject reveals his vacuity or his phoniness, and then she snaps shut in a burst of impatience, and veers away. Although at times she draws back in distaste, or contempt, or even pity, she is not someone who deplores the way of the world or desires to change it. She merely observes it with a matchless eye. In her work there is a complete absence of hot air.
She will not be read lazily. She assumes intelligence and expects you to work, to pace along with her. Her writing turns you into a better reader. There is no temptation to skim: its texture is too rich, too worldly, too surprising. She is brilliant at revealing things in stages, so you gasp, and gasp, and gasp again. She yokes the familiar with the strange in the way that dreams do—suddenly a wall cracks open and a flood of light pours in, or perhaps a perfectly aimed, needle-like beam. Reading her is an austerely enchanting kind of fun.
In the closing piece of Forty-one False Starts, fragments from ‘an abandoned autobiography’, Malcolm describes herself as ‘someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room’. What are those words probably and precisely doing there, bouncing off each other, striking a little chord of uncertainty? I dare to feel a rush of comradeliness. Ms Malcolm, Janet, we cannot do without you. Live in good health and keep writing, for at least another ten years. Dear boss, shine on.
2013
Hit Me
ONE morning I walked into the kitchen and found my son-in-law standing frozen in front of the TV. On the screen a bloke in a blue singlet was manhandling an electric guitar. I had never before witnessed such a noxious exhalation of inauthenticity.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s Russell Crowe. And his b
and, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.’
There seems no end to the cataract of copy set off by Russell Crowe’s movements through the world. His name is a byword for gracelessness and self-importance. The sight of him stepping out of a building, granite-faced in aviator glasses, can reduce the onlooker to helpless laughter. He and Nicole Kidman are the twin peaks of antipodean self-creation in the Hollywood of our time. One can no longer go out in public without having an opinion about him.
What was mine? First I challenged myself to write down everything I could remember about the films I had seen him in over the past fourteen years. Free-associating; no faking. As always in such tests of memory, the results were sparse.
Proof. Minor violence. Genevieve Picot sulking in a droopy cardigan. A camera? Hugo Weaving? No memory of Crowe.
Romper Stomper. Violence. Crowe fucking a girl, driving her up the bed with such force that her neck is bent against the wall.
LA Confidential. Violence. Detectives. Crowe asking Kim Basinger: ‘Why me?’ Crowe slumped in the back seat of Basinger’s car, broken-boned and bandaged.
Spotswood. No violence. Worker asks boss to put drops in his eyes. Kick to kick in factory yard. No memory of Crowe.
The Sum of Us. No violence. Crowe as a gay tradesman. Jack Thompson laughing very loudly.
A Beautiful Mind. Crowe as a mathematical genius. Ivy. Mental illness. Codes. Think I cried. Felt worked over, irritated.
Master and Commander. Water. Sky. Naval battles. Crowe as captain. Sea burials. A fiddle, Crowe playing it. Men, boys. No women. Amputation. Origin of Species?
Gladiator. Missed it. Just lazy, nothing to do with Crowe. Annoyed at myself. Pasted into my diary a still of Crowe with huge glistening muscles and an undershirt of celestial blue.