by
Helen Garner
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A heaviness, around the heart. A heaviness in breathing. I keep running through details of the story, trying to ‘be him’ and ‘see it through his eyes’. Is it a vengeful story? Not as far as I can tell, in my present state of awareness. Does it give a complex picture of my relationship with O? Yes. Very. It goes through the worst of both of us, and the best of him. It was necessary for me to write this story. I remember asking Raymond Carver if there was any line he drew round parts of his life, or people he’s been engaged with, across which he would not go. He thought for a moment, very carefully, and said, ‘It’s my job to write down life as I see it.’ Pause. ‘It’s a jungle out there.’ Patrick White’s savagery. His utter ruthlessness. Chekhov, the women in The Darling and The Butterfly: do people imagine that he made up these terrible characters, from thin air?
The characters that people I know become when I write about them are, to me, almost totally separate from the people themselves, once I’ve finished the piece of work and put it aside, or published it. It’s as if I’ve extracted or borrowed from the real person the aspects of them that I needed to struggle with, and the character consists only of those aspects. I can return to the real person with no sense of overlap. Cold comfort.
It was a warm summer night and we talked for a long time without quarrelling. V said he had to have ‘an asbestos suit on’ in order to criticise my work. We came at this vexed topic from several angles, lying on our bed beside the open windows. I said, ‘I know I’m hypersensitive and unpleasant. But I’ve been trying hard lately to be more reasonable.’ ‘Well, it has got a bit easier, but I’m very wary of it.’ I tried to explain that I would readily accept his criticisms if only he would preface them by telling me whether the work had affected him, whether it had touched him in any way. He said he’d told me something in the book was ‘quite moving’. I think I would have remembered that, but maybe I’d had a moment of deafness; anyway I privately seized on ‘quite moving’, knowing it was all I could ever hope for. I said that I had a very high regard for him as a reader, and deeply respected his literary opinion, but that after his technical comments he’d never mentioned the book again. He’d dealt with it briskly, like an obligation, and buried it. I said that I kept hoping he might mention something that had stuck in his mind or made him laugh—but he never did. I said I was disappointed that he hadn’t been more…comradely. He listened, without interrupting. Then he said, ‘I would never expect you to respond to my work in the way you’re describing.’ ‘But I did. Didn’t I? When your book came out? I talked about it a lot. I said how much I liked it, I quoted lines from it, I remembered turns of phrase and things that were clever and funny—I enjoyed talking about it.’ ‘I do remember you being very nice.’
Oh, what’s the point of all this—saying it in the first place, writing it down later. I don’t know how we’ll be able to live together as writers. I can’t see a way, unless I drop all this craving for…what? These grudging crumbs he’ll drop in front of me if I pester him? I long for him to let me see how my work affects him. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it leaves him cold.
Last night, V sat beside me on the kitchen couch and took my bare feet on his lap and told me what he really thought about ‘Recording Angel’—that it was ‘a very strong story’, but that O would have been shocked to read a description of himself at his lowest, in hospital after that dreadful operation: to be revealed and scrutinised while in that state. I began to feel the horror of what I’ve done. I heard myself jabbering the same old justifications, how I thought I’d done this and what I’d meant was that, and it made me sick. I broke off mid-sentence and got up and walked over to the sink. He said, ‘What’s up, sweetheart?’ I said, ‘I’m sick and tired of myself, that’s all.’ He came and put his arms round me and gently kissed me. The awful truth is that no one can help you carry the consequences of your behaviour. You are required to carry them on your own.
Woman after woman, five of them in a few days, came up to me to say they liked ‘Recording Angel’. And each of them said a version of ‘It’s full of love.’ I’d better get used to this. Men see it one way, women another.
While I was cleaning the bathroom basin V came in and we had an interesting discussion. Leaning against the door jamb with his arms folded, he advised me that it was time for me to stop writing ‘about the 70s’. Oh? Why’s that? Because the 70s was a ‘period of bullshit, of clapped-out theories that Victoria is now bearing the brunt of.’ Apparently G shared his opinion; indeed he had told V that he’d already had ‘a little talk’ with me about it. I said we hadn’t spoken about this as far as I recalled. Shifting my energies to the bath, I pointed out that certain social changes had occurred in the 70s that people had been deeply affected by—that this could not be scrubbed out of either my characters or me, and that to attempt it would not make sense. I said that his work was coloured by different assumptions because his ideas were formed in a different era and through different experiences. I said that whenever I read him I felt that I was in the 50s. He said that much of his work was set in no-place and no-time. I said that it was in the relationships between men and women, and in the underlying assumptions about these, that period still made itself felt. He asked me what I thought about what he’d said. I said, opening the toilet lid and attacking the rim of the bowl, ‘I don’t think anything in particular.’ He pressed me harder. I said, ‘I understand the point you’re making. But I can’t say how it will affect me, until I sit down to write the next thing.’ I forbore to point out that in the simple fact that I was on my knees scrubbing the porcelain as we talked, and in the fact (which he had only the other evening admitted publicly without shame or remorse) that he has ‘never cleaned a lavatory in his life’, resided a thundering piece of…whatever it is we were talking about: a whopping great assumption about men, women and domestic labour which dates him, and judges him, as accurately as does any misplaced nostalgia that I have been reproached with.
heh
‘I think you should learn the second Czerny,’ said my piano teacher. ‘They make a pair. You’ve been on the first one long enough.’ ‘Okay. I love boring exercises.’ ‘I’ve noticed,’ she said. ‘You must be looking for something deeper in the music. Something spiritual.’ We laughed but I wasn’t quite sure whether she was teasing me.
I’ve been offered a job reviewing movies for a monthly magazine. Out of the depths of my ignorance I take it. The editor, gossiping about a certain journalist, says, ‘Like all bullies and authoritarians, he’s very easily wounded.’ Later I report this to V. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s good, isn’t it. Did you, um, think it might apply to you? A bit?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ I said, hanging my head. And the more easily wounded one is, the more bullying and authoritarian one becomes. To protect the shivering chasm at the core.
At the Sydney International Piano Competition I sat in the second row where one can see the sweat splashing off their noses and chins and soaking the hair on the backs of their necks. I’d been in a mood for never hearing Mozart again, but a Frenchman played a rondo with such airy clarity and creamy smoothness that I nearly passed out. People in the audience become intimate friends with strangers. By the next session they have completely forgotten each other.
pretty
We walked along the creek this morning. Wind very sweet and balmy, a drying wind. High, creamy clouds, burst through by sheets of sparkling sun. The first spring-like morning. The green shoots clearer on every tree, and everything seems in motion, standing up to the wind in good humour.
she likes the word creamy!