If you’re working from life, breakfast is a good place to start. Helen Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), opens: ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives’. Informal, often unruly affairs, Garner’s breakfast scenes reveal the network of cares, desires, jealousies and dependencies binding her characters. In The Children’s Bach (1984), it is breakfast that marks Vicki’s entry into the beguiling Fox household; by the denouement – when the family has fallen to pieces around her – Vicki is making the breakfast. ‘I am necessary here. For breakfast I will cook tomatoes under the griller.’ In Garner’s most recent novel The Spare Room (2008), in which a woman named Helen cares for her dying friend Nicola, the mornings are less raucous, but still charged: Helen prepares a bowl of yoghurt and fruit for Nicola who quietly accepts the dependency she otherwise tries to deny, and they both put the horrors of the restless night behind them.
Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, a port city an hour’s drive from Melbourne. Long revered in her home country, she is belatedly finding a new readership elsewhere in the Anglosphere where her books are being issued after years of patchy availability; until recently the only one in print in the UK was The Spare Room, the dowdy illustration of wilting flowers on its cover belying the intense, savage narrative inside. Garner’s work is susceptible to such misrecognition. Her oeuvre is not straightforward, encompassing an uneven spread of fiction and non-fiction. In Australia, she is celebrated as a kind of grande dame of second-wave feminism and associated with the hippy aspirations and communal living experiments of the seventies. Yet her novels evoke a more complex, even critical relation to that era and its free-spirited ideals. She has written about her generation poignantly and mercilessly, from its sticky, stoned midst in Monkey Grip through to the hurt pride and residual solidarities of its aftermath in The Spare Room (a novel about ‘the generation that thought it would never get old’, as Hilary Mantel put it).
At the heart of Garner’s novels are homes, loosely inhabited by tangled groups of friends, relatives, lovers and children. Referred to by affectionate shorthands – Bunker Street, Sweetpea Mansions – they are part of a lineage of generously populated urban and surburban Australian houses, which includes Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, the houses on Elizabeth Jolley’s Claremont Street, and before them Christina Stead’s Tohoga House in The Man Who Loved Children. Behind this preoccupation with homemaking one can perhaps detect vestiges of Australia’s history of immigration – an anxiety about setting down new roots, a sense of being out-of-place and perhaps of the displacement that preceded it (the run-down house inhabitated by the Lamb and Pickle families in Winton’s Cloudstreet is visited by ghostly presences of Aboriginal Australians).
Garner’s shared homes are the soil of her thoroughly social worldview, which sees people as inescapably shaped by their relations with others – many others. Monkey Grip is the story of an intense love affair between Nora, the novel’s narrator, and occasional actor and heroin-addict Javo, but their romance is defined by an array of other connections: friends, other lovers, Nora’s young daughter, and, most notably, heroin. When Javo is introduced on the novel’s opening page, it is already, forebodingly, from within the context of Nora’s existing relationship: ‘It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love’.
Monkey Grip is sprawling, immersive and repetitive: how many times does Javo try to get off junk? How many times does Nora try to get off him? Countless days begin with bacon and play out on the hot concrete beside the Fitzroy Baths. Garner’s other novels are by contrast concise, even minimalist. Composed of brief scenes and clipped sentences, their crystalline forms echo the intricate configurations of her characters: amicably separated spouses, new partners, warring friends, children with loyalties to adults other than their parents.
In The Children’s Bach, Garner’s second and most distinguished novel, the scope is wider and the form more compressed. The book is about two orphaned sisters, Vicki and Elizabeth, and their encounter with the family of Dexter Fox, an old university friend of Elizabeth’s. While Vicki becomes infatuated with the Fox household – ‘the whole establishment of it’ – Dexter’s wife Athena is lured away into the ‘rough sexual world that lies outside families’ by Elizabeth’s rakish music producer boyfriend Philip. The repercussions involve countless different groupings of these characters and others: Philip’s precocious daughter, Dexter and Athena’s children, Dexter’s parents. New alliances form and re-form in each scene. A map of these relations in the manner of a family tree at the front of the novel would be uselessly overwrought.
With its precisely rendered tensions and its blunt vision of domestic life, The Children’s Bach shows some ambivalence about communal living: the Fox family initially seems appealingly solid, but is soon besieged by complications. By the time of Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), a more focussed study with a smaller cast, the dreams of the halcyon seventies have curdled. Sweetpea Mansions is ‘littered with the detritus of many a failed household’. Its latest residents are the tough, kind, Garner-like Janet, who owns the house, the recently born-again younger brother of her former lover, and a mystically inclined sculptor. Each harbours complicated, essentially selfish desires and fantasies about the others. The book contains some of Garner’s splashiest novelistic devices and motifs – a wad of stolen money, a longed-for baby, a Godot-like anticipated arrival. It also includes some of her most arresting reflections on her youth (and perhaps youth in general):
What were we thinking of, in those days . . . For all our righteous egalitarianism we were wild and cruel. We had no patience: our hearts were stony: our house meetings were courts of no appeal: people who displeased us we purged and sent packing. We hated our families and tried to hurt them: we despised our mothers for their sacrifice.
The fierce brevity of this passage, with its ruthless colons, is characteristic of Garner’s prose, whether she is describing a breakfast or a generation. ‘The best I can do is write books that are small but bleak enough to stick in people’s gullets’, she writes. In her diaries from the years following Monkey Grip’s release, it’s hard to miss her fondness for smallness: reading Peter Handke’s notebooks, she records ‘intense happiness at the tininess of his observations’; in Tolstoy she loves ‘the split seconds when a character gets everything wrong’; in Godard’s Bande à part ‘the tiny encounter with the nutcase’. Watching a film she wrote the screenplay for, she is frustrated to find ‘big, far-off images instead of the small intimate ones I had wanted.’ Small observations seed small scenes, which are ‘cobbled together’ into narratives. In The Children’s Bach, the eloping Athena and Philip sit together on a park bench and watch the world go by ‘as a series of small theatrical events’. Garner seems to see the world the same way.
In the 1980s, Garner moved away from fiction and turned to journalism, initially, by her own account, to make ends meet – ‘to feed myself and my daughter’ – though she has also suggested that she wanted to avoid competing with her then-husband, the novelist Murray Bail. But she relished the way assignments got her out into the world. In 1995, she published her first book-length work of non-fiction, The First Stone, a febrile, claustrophobic account of a sexual harassment scandal at Melbourne University. Her repeatedly stated intention to write a ‘quiet, thoughtful book’ comes to feel ironic: she grapples constantly with her own fraught reactions to the case, principally her bafflement at the accusers’ responses to what she considers a minor incident, expressed again and again in intransigent outbursts: ‘something here has gone terribly wrong’. She is rattled by the case and the book rattles with her.
An exhilaratingly self-exposing piece of writing, The First Stone is a reckoning with the passing of the values of Garner’s generation: ‘I was still skating along on ice that had frozen in the seventies’. The book drew a huge public outcry, as well as some rallying defences. Two other accounts of trials followed, Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). Both are more assured and ultimately more rewarding reflections on crime, animated by fascination with the ordinariness of the perpetrators – two young students who murdered one of their boyfriends, and a father who drove his children into a lake. But neither is as mesmerisingly unguarded as The First Stone (a conspicuous omission from the roster of planned reissues).
The book was reviewed by Janet Malcolm, author of her own celebrated and controversial books about court cases. While critical, Malcolm was compelled by Garner’s unremitting honesty: ‘The First Stone no more needs defending than our dreams do, with which there is no arguing, and which are always true’. Garner reveres Malcolm’s writing, especially her voice: ‘composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep learning yet plain in its address, and above all fearless’. But where Malcolm’s persona is highly controlled, Garner’s prose is agitated by her own uncertain presence. She admires Malcolm’s plain address and effortless demeanour, but she also values writing that allows its working and thinking to trouble the surface – she praises Elizabeth Jolley for the way her sentences show ‘the effort that has gone into their formulation’. Her description of Henry Green’s prose as ‘masterfully knobbly and casual’ captures the unpredictable shape and confident stride of her own.
Garner is celebrated as a forensically observant witness of everyday life but her disarming, precise prose means her presence as a witness is always felt. Her abridgements can plunge you into an image sooner than you expected, as in The Spare Room: ‘The morning was grey and gentle, with doves’. Or take this image from The Children’s Bach: ‘He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair.’ The shirt flung against a bookcase is hardly an ordinary sight, and takes some picturing (why would it be flung there, and how does it stay put?), while the glancing image that follows it is demandingly exact. Garner appreciates the way Malcolm ‘yolks the familiar with the strange in the way dreams do’, and here she takes quotidian objects – shirts, bookcases, kitchen chairs – and spins strange, even surreal imagery from them. We have to work to get to – or get back to – the everyday. And consider Garner’s habit of splitting lines of dialogue.‘“I love”, he said in a quiet voice, “the moistureless way in which we kiss”; ‘“Its insides”, she says, without apparent reproach, “were chewed out by rats.”’ In those unnatural, suspenseful pauses Garner is present, relishing the lines and the effect they have on her. The words feel salvaged from real life and yet at the same time emphatically crafted: Garner is right there in the middle of them.
Nowhere is Garner more present than in her diaries, published in three volumes so far, covering the late seventies up until the late nineties. They are pacy and unfailingly vivid, a rapid-fire procession of sparklingly dialogue, frank admissions of plunging self-doubt and soaring desire, acutely rendered interpersonal dynamics (‘the humiliation of being clumsily lied to’), startlingly eloquent images (the moon ‘round as a drawing’), and joyfully bathetic reports of how art fits into life (after writing a successful scene for The Children’s Bach: ‘Delirious, I ran downstairs and bought myself a pasty’).
As a writer ‘actively nourished by everyday life’, she is open about drawing on these kinds of day-to-day trouvailles. Monkey Grip was based directly on her diaries: she carried them volume by volume to the Melbourne public library, transcribed them, cut out ‘the boring bits’, changed the names, and ‘sent it to a publisher’. The Children’s Bach, on the other hand, is a work of imagination incorporating smaller fragments of observed life. In her diaries from the time of writing that novel, Garner thrills at both the flow of invention and her use of small details stored elsewhere in the diary: ‘I cobble that scene together out of elements so disparate that only a compulsive notetaker like me could have had the raw material at her disposal.’
Yet more than displaying the ‘raw material’ Garner made her fiction from, or even taking us behind the scenes of her process, the diaries’ style and ethos illuminate those of Garner’s oeuvre as a whole. In one of many telegraphic reflections on her vocation, she notes her ‘determination to write only what is personally urgent to me’, and her wide-ranging body of work – from her rawest journals to her most accomplished fiction – glows with that urgency. It’s not simply that everyday life is Garner’s elected subject; her writing seems to spring authentically from it, as a direct response to living. ‘How sentences are made is of vital importance to me’, she has said, and yet ‘a person who can’t write but who has a story that’s burning to be told can sometimes have a gravitas that shames a critic.’ Garner at her best, which is almost all of the time, has it both ways: finely wrought, startling sentences that scorch with their unmistakable necessity.
Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘True Fictions’, NLR 122.