by
Helen Garner
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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
The end of the movie. Who can help me with this? I groaned all day and then at 5 pm something happened. Strange power and freedom I experience, when I start to invent. It has its own logic. I feel my way along some kind of dark thread.
<3
A visit from Mum. Terrific strain I’m under, when she and I are with other people. When we’re alone I can submit to this vast, slow, stunning stream of monologue and apply as little of my concentration to it as I need to (about fifteen per cent) in order to remain calm. Yesterday she talked so much—on the drive in from the airport, meeting E, shopping at Leichhardt, having coffee at Via Veneto, driving to Manly, walking on the beach—that by bedtime she was hoarse. She never asks a question, or listens. She starts every anecdote days, months or even years before its proper starting point. Her only liveliness in speech comes when she can criticise: idiot skateboard riders, lunatics on motorbikes, men unloading trucks in narrow streets, stupid dills who drop rubbish or leave security doors ajar. A film of the world as she sees it would be always swelling, blurring, lurching, swivelling—sparkling and looming with danger. At moments, while she drones on, there comes over me a painful tenderness. This ‘tenderness’, which if I told the truth I would have to call pity, has to do with my dread of becoming like her. V asks her straight out which of my books she likes the best. She says, shyly, ‘The Children’s Bach.’ I am embarrassed and don’t know where to look. I always give them copies, with a loving message written in the front, but she has never told me whether she’s read any of them. And I’ve never asked.
‘I sometimes think the world is divided into people who survive from their own inner strength and those who have to latch on to others to survive.’ —Elizabeth Jolley, interview in Good Weekend
what's the synthesis. finding even greater strength through occasionally trusting other people?
I’ve sold my books. I’ve let my house. I’ve agreed to sell Primrose Gully. I’ve changed cities. I’ve got no home. I am not to answer the phone at V’s, or be present when certain visitors come, or leave my stuff lying around. I am forty-six-and-a-half and I am humiliated. V is unable to resolve the thing by telling his wife the truth. I say to Z that I wish V would deliver the coup de grâce. ‘The trouble is,’ says Z, ‘that to do that, which I agree he must do, he’ll have to admit, to himself as much as to her, that his leaving her had something to do with you. He seems to need to keep the two things separate in his mind. He’s still saying they’re separate—as late as yesterday he was saying it. What I think he should do is tell her that your existence hastened the end, but that he’d felt it was over for quite some time already.’ ‘And did you tell him that?’ ‘Oh no.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. That would be to deny the whole way he sees himself and his situation.’ ‘But Z. You’re his friend. It’s the responsibility, the duty of friends to help each other see what they’re doing. How else can we find out what we’re like?’ Z seemed very surprised and put off by this definition of friendship.
Work offers come and I take them. I don’t want to go over to V’s. What if his wife comes visiting and I’m there? Maybe a terrible explosion of truth is exactly what’s needed. I said, ‘She needs you to tell her the truth. Somewhere in herself she knows you haven’t told her everything.’ He will not accept this screamingly obvious fact. He decides to invite two friends to dinner, and casually assumes that I’ll cook. I say I won’t: he can’t expect me to turn on wifely service and then when it suits him pretend I’m only a casual acquaintance. He’s furious. We slug it out. He says he objects to the way I make flat pronouncements. I say he makes assumptions that aren’t even acknowledged by him as assumptions until I challenge them. I can’t see he’s got a leg to stand on here. We reach a truce, the passionate kind still available to lovers. But there’s a reserve between us. We both feel it.