by
Helen Garner
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I am a woman. I (i) long to be of service (ii) like domestic order (iii) am socially quite skilful—at organising lists of appointments etc (iv) can do basic cooking (v) feel an urge to fill gaps where otherwise chaos, awkwardness, discomfort (physical, emotional, social) might occur (vi) like to make practical demonstrations of love. All I need to attend to is that I keep enough of myself free for my work and the hours of private mental time this requires. I mean that my attention to him and his needs should not outweigh my attention to myself for work. ‘All I need’! This terribly hard thing, for a woman.
heh
Swam ten laps at 6 am. Now I feel my stomach muscles. Read some Hemingway, then Carver again. Carver’s middle period. Large respect for him, the jagged voices, the catastrophes, the spare language and the striving for spare imagery. In such a landscape of struggle, panic, despair, the old images he uses have a deep and emblematic power. The hem of the garment. The simple becomes tremendous.
:)
Dreamt that V’s wife drove up to my house in a car packed with her belongings; it had been arranged that she could store them all at my place. I offered to give her a hand. The house lacked storage space but I saw I could pile her things up against a wall in my bedroom, which was enormous, bare, dim and pleasant, with floorboards and a shuttered window; they wouldn’t be in the way, and I could keep an eye on them for her.
lol
I never knew before the difference between sadness and sorrow. Sadness is general, broad, heavy, passive. Sorrow is sharper, more focused, more active, working hard. I could even say labouring. Labouring with sorrow. When I think of his wife’s unhappiness, my own ‘indignities’ almost vanish—because the reason he gives for requiring them is to save her from further pain. He does not see that this is unlikely to work, in the long run.
emphasis on the almost
V showed me a couple of American short stories he likes: Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’ and ‘Mixed Doubles’ and then one by Cheever, ‘The Enormous Radio’. They brought me up once more against the hopelessness of men and women, the vast chasms between them—the death of sexual love, wandering attention, physical degeneration, men’s wide-ranging sexual fantasies and greed. At the market we had a stupid quarrel about a melon. In the car he wouldn’t meet my eye, and down I plummeted. I longed to say, ‘What happened? What’s gone wrong?’ but I was scared he’d say, ‘Nothing! You’re neurotic! You’re imagining it!’
We quarrel over his demand for furtiveness. I find it humiliating. He says I’ve over-reacted to a minor event. I say he doesn’t know how minor or major this incident is to me. Our wills clash. I feel the toughness and irony in him and I display my own. He says, ‘I’ve suffered horribly through all this, these last few months.’ ‘I know you have. But you don’t show it.’ ‘You only had to look at me, to see it.’ I begin to be ashamed of myself. ‘I love you,’ he says, ‘without pride.’ ‘I know you do,’ I say humbly; ‘I love you, but proudly.’ I return to E’s, a sobered woman. This terrible pride. Through it I begin to understand the imagery of Christianity—the longing to be washed, to have chains struck from me.
Dreamt I was in a play but had not learnt my lines. Another character spoke to me expectantly and my mind was blank. I feigned a collapse, fell to the ground and lay there for a long time. Nobody came to see how I was. I looked up and everyone had gone.
Reread my screenplay. The last section is dreadful—a post-mortem feeling. R came over to E’s for tea. Her light presence. We talked about standards in art, what it means that her mother likes Pro Hart, whether aesthetics is separate (as a study) from ordinary life. Whenever she’s with me I feel cheerful, curious, hopeful. In the evening I wrote out a series of system cards for the screenplay, one for each little scene. Gloom rolled away. I called F and we spoke affectionately of this and that. Woken at 6 am in my balcony room by crackling thunder and a steady flood of rain.
:)
Melvyn Bragg interviews Saul Bellow on TV about The Dean’s December. Bellow grandly puts shit on sociologists, psychologists and criminologists for their failure to cure what’s wrong with society. V gives an admiring cheer. I am disappointed and say little. ‘I think,’ says V, ‘you weren’t very interested in what he was talking about.’ I realise I am withholding so as not to rock V’s boat. So I say, ‘I’ll tell you what I really think. I think he’s a windbag.’ To my surprise when we discuss this V comes a long way towards my point of view. So we are not dug in. Our egos are not in charge of our ideas. We try to list writers who became windy. Hemingway. Henry James. Faulkner? (I haven’t read him.) We agree that windy-ness is a male failing on the whole, and that women’s failing tends to be wetness. ‘Your mate Carver,’ he says, ‘is not windy at all.’ Is windy-ness to do with ambition? Is it also an American failing? Chekhov, we agree, is never windy. We decide to go away for the weekend. To have ‘an adventure’.
:)
At E’s I opened the balcony door. A wind rushed in and blew my screenplay system cards all over the floor. I saw at once that this was a sign: that having used the cards to show me the order of the (hopeless) third draft, I had been allowing that order to dominate my rewrite.
hahaha