Who’s afraid of Helen Garner?
Is this the beginning of the diary wars? First, we had Helen Garner’s two volumes covering 1978 to 1995 and now from the same literary stable, Text, the ‘observations’ of former husband Murray Bail. The publisher tells us that this is ‘not autobiography, or even memoir, but an almost anonymous portrait of a figure passing through time and circumstances.’ Heavy, and, from what I gleaned of the ironic portrait of the young artist in Text’s extract, Joycean. Love that definitive full stop in the title He. A Man is speaking. Shut up!
Whether anonymity makes interesting reading is another question. Writers’ diaries are typically published after the author and their subjects are dead, when the publisher can reveal the writer’s acrimony without fear of legal suit. I think of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, published long after her death, and that marvelous scene where she hurls Katherine Mansfield’s stories across the room in jealous rage. It is not the jealousy per se that’s important but its object, Mansfield, the only other significant female writer in her circle, an insight that led scholars to look more closely at the correspondences in the fiction.
Garner is a living writer. Her published diaries, cut down from thousands of pages, are very impressive for their arrangement of the life narrative she wants told, remarkable too that they mask more than they conceal. While some friends are allocated random initials, or the occasional descriptors like ‘the old historian’, it’s pretty easy to join the dots. The married Sydney writer, for example, called V, with whom she has an affair, is clearly Murray Bail, and, at her best, she is very funny on him: “I try hard to examine him, him and me for weak spots that might destroy my respect once the obsession has worn off”, she writes. “He loves to tell me things and sometimes I get bored. Because it is a monologue. I have nothing to offer but my attention.”
The life narrative will interest many people. But it is the processes that Garner, not averse to flinging the odd book across the room and who understands competition as creative drive, puts on show, leading us into the mind of a writer, which defines the diaries as a major work.
I am fascinated by those unsettling entries around the writing of her 1984 novella The Children’s Bach, her modern comedy of manners:
Dreamt that G betrayed me. He robbed me of my bag, and blatantly admitted it. I woke from this dream knowing before I had even opened my eyes, what it meant: that I felt I was betraying him and robbing him by writing a character that’s based on him. But I can’t stop now.
In a hundred or so astonishing pages the writer shows us how a friend, a real person, merges into her irresponsible, charming character Philip. Other models for The Children’s Bach, such as Manning Clark and his son Axel, we already know, thanks to Bernadette Brennan’s study on Garner, A Writing Life.
Funny how so many roads lead back to Manning Clark in the 1980s. Hard to understand how an establishment figure became the darling of a supposedly radical generation just because he spoke out against Whitlam’s dismissal; or explain the grande folie of Manning Clark: The Musical! put on by the Pram Factory crew, except as a drunken joke, concocted at Jimmy Watson’s, which got out of hand.
At least Garner’s interest in Clark wasn’t reverential, as she shows us in her a diary entry from 1981:
The old historian rang. We met at a weird place in Swanston Street called Café Nostalgia, furnished with old dining room tables of the massive, polished kind. He is a gossip. Mostly I listen. He’ll never get it about women. When I ironically used the expression ‘according to the orthodoxy of the women’s liberation movement’ he jumped in his seat, as if he’s been shot.
The scene in the café leads straight into The Children’s Bach, where Dr Fox and his equally unworldly son Dexter exemplify the old patrician order, already irrelevant, but for which one occasionally feels affection and nostalgia. As this and so many other entries show, it took Garner years to draw all the different threads together in a work critic Don Anderson describes as ‘perfect.’ (National Times, June 20-26, 1986)
The meeting with Clark also takes us to Tomasetti. 1981 was the year stable mate, folk singer and feminist Glen Tomasetti published Man of Letters: A Romance, her satirical take down of former teacher Manning Clark, barely disguised as tortured romantic Sir Dorton Serry, who finally sees that his obsessive love for women is really hatred. To enter so lightly into a male mind and expose the idiocy of misogynistic thinking to ridicule is such a grand, fabulous feat. Should be compulsory reading.
I’m intrigued by the relationship between the writers and their shared usage of the Clarks. True, there are significant differences. Garner’s satirical target is the son's puritanism and Dexter’s moral fall - having drunken sex with a teenager - is far from funny. It is also clear from a diary entry, dated 1984, that Garner and Tomasetti, called ‘the biographer’, had an uneasy relationship:
When we got to the biographer’s house she spoke with exaggerated care. The grinding deliberateness of her manner was really just her ordinary tone intensified a great deal. The penny didn’t drop for a while that she was profoundly drunk and trying to pretend she wasn’t … She went very slowly upstairs and returned a long time later with some poems, which she read to us. She said no one would publish them. If I’d been frank I’d have said ‘You’re not a poet. Your poems are really prose. They’re plodding, and lecturing. You haven’t got a poet’s imagination.’ People can’t say that kind of thing, I think.
But Garner can publish it. And what are we to make of this eviscerating little scene?
1984 was the year that Man of Letters was made into a telly movie with the English actor Warren Mitchell playing Serry, Tomasetti, you would think, on the point of becoming a household name. But as Garner was putting the final touches to The Children’s Bach, Tomasetti was already lost within a biography of the pianist Hepzibah Menuhin, commissioned by McPhee Gribble some years before, the publishers’ papers, held at the University of Melbourne, telling some of the story. Tomasetti spent twenty years writing a biography she’d never complete; admiring then pitying her subject; turning obsessively from history to fiction and back again; living a nightmare that shouts warning to all would be biographers. And yet all I see in Garner’s cold scene is competition.
‘Another Friendship lost. Destroyed by Me,’ Garner writes after hurting Axel Clark with a further portrait of him in Cosmo Cosmolina. She worries that her vivisecting eye makes her a ‘monster’, a little OTT, Garner forgetting that non writers also lose friends when they actually say what they think. She’s tough. Other writers might stall within the ethics of practice, but Garner, our cycling flaneur, rides on. Me? I’m excited for Volume 3. Really want to know what He. is so urgently trying to STOP!
- J.G.