by
Helen Garner
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In Toulouse our hostess made a dormitory of her bedroom and she, M and I slept comfortably in a row. All the sheets and towels, from her trousseau sixteen years ago, are embroidered with her initials. At about 4 pm I remembered that it was my birthday. She took us out of the city to stay with some friends in a village. On the drive she told us that the husband had had an affair. The wife had fought it, or sat it out. He had returned to her. ‘So,’ she said with a satisfaction that did not quite convince me, ‘she won.’ The air in the house was thick. The husband and wife did not look at each other. In the afternoon we walked halfway up a small mountain. An easy track. Chestnuts still bright with yellow leaves. At night the darkness and silence around the house frightened me.
jesus
I read the paper and doors open in my head like those in a cuckoo clock. I had forgotten why people read papers. You learn things. Ideas come to you. Connections strike off each other with ringing blows or slot together like carpenters’ joints.
:)
I helped F’s journalist friend spackle the walls in his new apartment. I was afraid he’d scorn me for my ignorance of politics but when I happened casually to mention Ibsen he looked embarrassed and said, ‘Qui ça?’
lol
M ate a real egg from my sister’s chook. It was so rich that she retired to bed groaning and sobbing, and couldn’t go to school till 10.30: ‘I feel all eggy inside.’
idk why this gets me lol
To Dallas Brooks Hall to hear Roger Woodward play Chopin. A stiffly dramatic performance: some very controlled throwing up of the hands. I liked the music but his presence was so intellectual and contained that one might as well have been watching a movie. Little warmth; but in certain pieces his control seemed less rigid, and the left hand rolled almost sexually. In a cafe afterwards a man greeted two guys sitting at the other end of my table. He leaned over them with both hands on the table edge, stiff-armed as a detective, and said that he hadn’t liked the concert.
love her observations
The Age asks me to review Beatrice Faust’s book Women, Sex and Pornography. I file a piece in dialogue form that I really enjoyed writing. They reject it. Would I please rewrite it as a straight review. Rage and contempt. Cutting potatoes and onions, I reflect on the pain of rejection, and on how little of it I’ve had to endure. I think of my CAE students and the way I cheerfully rip into their precious work. I could try to learn a lesson from their humility. I agree to rewrite.
‘When you’re young,’ said C’s wife, ‘you really believe that two people can make some kind of dream together; but you try it, and you get older, and you come to realise that all there is is you, finally.’
What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.
The play veered between being really funny and wallowing in embarrassing sentimentality. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sentiment, as long as it’s not masquerading as real feeling,’ said Professor Maxwell at Melbourne University twenty years ago. But in this case it is masquerading. Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.
i like this
In the magazine the subs once again make me look an idiot. All my jokes cut out, the tone violated, the central argument truncated. I cry over it. I feel like resigning. I’ve felt like this a hundred times before and haven’t done it. Oh, if only I knew I had a grant I’d tell the National Times to cram it.
girlll <3