by
Helen Garner
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From a review of Jessica Anderson’s short stories: ‘…we are made to see the futility of trying to prolong an affair beyond its natural limits, and how little an outsider—even an ardent lover—can ever know of what actually binds a husband and wife together.’
oof
Weird feeling, when I look at a photo of V that I took, that once again he does not exist, I have never met him, I have invented him, he is a FIGMENT. If a long enough silence should fall between us we would forget each other and slip back into our previous lives. Does he exist? No particular emotion accompanies these fancies. In fact it’s a breathing space between bouts of reality. I don’t miss him. How could I miss a flicker, a quick darkness. It would be easier if we never had any further contact with each other, but left each other’s lives alone. He won’t leave his wife, they’ll live out the rest of their lives together, side by side, without passion but with a strong familiarity, used to each other. What’ll I do? I’ll take up piano lessons again, learn to make plants grow, write novels. Summer will come. I’ll grow older. I’ll be happy. If I could be this calm, when we’re apart, then we could live it properly, honour it, without causing smash-up, pain, grief, humiliation. On the other hand, this state seems unreal to me, a kind of nothing state, an interim—or like sleep, or death. ‘First—chill—then stupor—then the letting go—’
:(
While I’m in America, V is going to Africa. My fantasy: he doesn’t come back. I find out from someone that he’s lost. I fly to Sydney and say to his wife, ‘Come on. We’ve got to go and find him.’ She won’t come, flatly refuses, but when the me character gets to the airport, there she is. The two women set out. The conversations they could have! The silences, resentments, outbursts. And quieter passages: they have to share a bedroom in some shit hotel, two single beds, they lie parallel, like sisters, exhausted, angry, frightened. One begins to talk…would there be flashbacks? Voice-over? Flashbacks that don’t match what’s being related in the voice-over because each of them is having to embroider the truth.
lmao
Rain pours down. Lightning. A huge roll of thunder. He’s telling me about his famous friend in England and his ‘flat-chested, pug-nosed, short-sighted wife, a real sweetheart. She serves him.’ I want to say, ‘Does your wife serve you?’—not meanly, but because I need to know. I’m afraid that if she does, that this is what he needs and will continue to need so he can work. And before long he’s saying, ‘Do you think two writers can ever live together?’ I hardly know what load this question is carrying.
Possibilities: this will run its course and subside. He’ll sink back into his married life, its comfort, taking with him whatever he’s learnt from this. But what about me? I tend this seed of fear, water it, want it to sprout.
Each time I go to see Three Sisters at Anthill the same thing happens: when Masha makes her confession of love and asks rhetorically, ‘Is it wrong?’ the audience holds its breath. Everyone wants an answer to this question—even perhaps an absolution—but Chekhov won’t give one. There isn’t one. ‘These things cannot be legislated.’
<3
Women can endure things and keep going because our lives are made up of small practical physical tasks, and no matter how lonely or sad or humiliated you are you do the dishes, or wash the clothes, and you come to the end of a small task and see a small result.
<3
There’s a tremendous weight coming from somewhere, pushing me towards feeling that I’m being short-changed, that there’s something humiliating in my situation. I hate it. I think it’s wrong. I fight it. Because I’m happy, when I don’t think about it in that way.
Z lambasts a new biography of Hemingway for its ignorant assumptions and ‘psychologising’. Compares Hemingway’s photo on the cover (‘that terrible face—but good’) to the biographer’s on the back (‘isn’t he awful—so smug—and it’s taken by his wife, dear little woman’). ‘These bastards,’ he says, ‘they’ve never written a novel, they don’t have a clue about the writer’s life. They live all their lives safe in a university, with a wife and kids. They’ve got no idea of the risks writers take—I don’t just mean the risks on the page but the way we make ourselves uncomfortable in life, so we’ll learn things.’
M talks about a 2 am death freak-out she had in the motel at Numurkah where we shared a room. ‘I kept looking at things in the room—chairs, a table—and thinking, “What are they for?” ’ Why didn’t she wake me? My punishment for her arms-length upbringing is her powerful independence, her resolute not-need of me. But when I told my friend with cancer this story he said, ‘Two things. First, she’s able to get through a dark night of the soul without needing to wake anyone. Second, dark nights of the soul are personal. You feel you want to go right to the end of it, and afterwards you’re proud of yourself for getting through it alone.’