by
Helen Garner
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I offered to go right back and expunge all—or all unfavourable—mentions of him. He looked sceptical. I said it would be a distortion, but that I’d do it if it was necessary. I also offered not to mention him any more, except procedurally. I said it was the first time I’d had to make a decision between being a writer and being married. He laughed and said I was overstating it. I said I didn’t think I was. This morning we spoke further about it. He expressed his revulsion again, but said he felt ‘awkward’ about seeming to ‘demand self-censorship’ from me. He said I should write an account of this disagreement, and then continue to write as before. This to me is not quite right. But I don’t know what I ought to do instead.
It would be a ridiculous distortion not to write about him at all. There’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up. And I won’t burn the notebooks or leave instructions for them to be burnt when I die: this last is where he’s putting the pressure on. Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.
thinking about why i feel differently about this vs the caveh zahedi (eg) approach to things ... it's definitely gendered, but the gender aspect is only a proxy for some bigger moral battle ... i think the typically feminine approach is to use art as a way to wrestle with the moral stakes of a situation, to find clarity that can be used to guide one's actions. whereas the male approach is almost the opposite, to abdicate one's responsibility to find the moral center by instead dramatizing it. (thinking also of Rejection and why i hate it so much)
maybe i'm overreaching by trying to overlay it on a gendered axis but i don't think it's the worst framework for thinking through the matter tbh
another way of putting it (the more generalized conclusion) is that there is a difference between using your art as a place to figure things out, to draw conclusions that you can then apply in your life (with the side effect of there being some record of it for posterity), and giving up entirely on achieving any sort of moral equilibrium because you think that dramatizing it is your primary responsibility. the dramatization should always be of your attempt to make things right
I rang up X and said I was sorry if I’d seemed ‘rude and cold’ to her on the phone. She was puzzled: ‘I didn’t think you’d been rude and cold?’ ‘Oh. That’s what V told me you’d said.’ We didn’t know what to say next. But wished each other well and hung up. This must be what G meant when he said he thought of V as ‘a manipulator; a spider in the middle of the web’.
I’m coming to see that he has no conceptual equipment—nothing that would help him to analyse a mess like the one we’re in. All he can do is repeat his statements of will and purpose. But when I calm down and start taking things apart, he listens to me and almost always agrees. Or appears to. Because what I say lets him off the hook. Of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Neither of us is a criminal. At those moments I have a powerful sense of myself as working.
We’re engaged in a bitter struggle to define ourselves, each against the other. He sets his face against things that have meaning to me; and my urge is to split hairs and demand exactitude. I suppose I’m just as unbearable to him as he is to me.
I’m dangling in the space between old customs and new ones I don’t know how to establish.
At lunchtime I take V to see the place. He says very little. I notice myself becoming anxious and disappointed: I want to drag a response out of him. I want him to like it. He withholds in obedience to some dark part of his nature. I keep control of myself: whether he likes it or not is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. In fact, this irrelevance is part of the point of my renting it in the first place. Finally he says, ‘You can bring some of our old clapped-out cups and saucers down here.’ ‘Bugger that. I’m not putting anything in here that I don’t really like.’
heh
Walking home from La Buvette.
H: ‘These sandals have turned out brilliant. Last year I thought, “Oh bum, they’re a lemon,” but suddenly they’ve gone all soft and comfortable.’
V: (glances down; grunts)
H: (mimics his voice) ‘Huh. Pity they’re so ugly.’
V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You bloody women! You always think you know what a bloke’s thinking!’
H: ‘No we don’t! We have to make it up! You won’t engage with us! You won’t answer when we speak! You present us with a blank face! We have to invent a response, out of loneliness and despair! So we won’t have to live in an emotional vacuum!’
lollll
He says he can’t talk to me any more, that I keep correcting everything he says, that I’ve got a list of subjects that I don’t want to hear about any more.
I say it’s because he never has anything new to say on those subjects, and only rants and fulminates—how boring young people are, the worthlessness of popular culture, the tedium of first-person writing. He says he experiences my response to this as censorship, and trimming. I say I can understand why he wants to spend time with someone fresh, who hasn’t heard all his opinions yet, who can admire him and be refreshed by him and look up to him, and be advised by him on what to read—the Stendhal, the Berlioz. His love of certain writers is new to her. He seems miffed by this.
damn
Don DeLillo, interviewed by David Remnick in the New Yorker: ‘Between books,’ he says, ‘what happens is, I drift. I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, because my mind is at odds. It’s not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on something, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a completely different way. I can’t account for a day, a given day. At the end of a day, I don’t know what I did.’ The work, when it starts, ‘comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming.’
V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please a man. They are much more feminine than women who wear flat shoes or runners.
i hate this guy