In Toulouse our hostess made a dormitory of her bedroom and she, M and I slept comfortably in a row. All the sheets and towels, from her trousseau sixteen years ago, are embroidered with her initials. At about 4 pm I remembered that it was my birthday. She took us out of the city to stay with some friends in a village. On the drive she told us that the husband had had an affair. The wife had fought it, or sat it out. He had returned to her. ‘So,’ she said with a satisfaction that did not quite convince me, ‘she won.’ The air in the house was thick. The husband and wife did not look at each other. In the afternoon we walked halfway up a small mountain. An easy track. Chestnuts still bright with yellow leaves. At night the darkness and silence around the house frightened me.

I helped F’s journalist friend spackle the walls in his new apartment. I was afraid he’d scorn me for my ignorance of politics but when I happened casually to mention Ibsen he looked embarrassed and said, ‘Qui ça?’

I read the paper and doors open in my head like those in a cuckoo clock. I had forgotten why people read papers. You learn things. Ideas come to you. Connections strike off each other with ringing blows or slot together like carpenters’ joints.

M ate a real egg from my sister’s chook. It was so rich that she retired to bed groaning and sobbing, and couldn’t go to school till 10.30: ‘I feel all eggy inside.’

To Dallas Brooks Hall to hear Roger Woodward play Chopin. A stiffly dramatic performance: some very controlled throwing up of the hands. I liked the music but his presence was so intellectual and contained that one might as well have been watching a movie. Little warmth; but in certain pieces his control seemed less rigid, and the left hand rolled almost sexually. In a cafe afterwards a man greeted two guys sitting at the other end of my table. He leaned over them with both hands on the table edge, stiff-armed as a detective, and said that he hadn’t liked the concert.

The Age asks me to review Beatrice Faust’s book Women, Sex and Pornography. I file a piece in dialogue form that I really enjoyed writing. They reject it. Would I please rewrite it as a straight review. Rage and contempt. Cutting potatoes and onions, I reflect on the pain of rejection, and on how little of it I’ve had to endure. I think of my CAE students and the way I cheerfully rip into their precious work. I could try to learn a lesson from their humility. I agree to rewrite.

What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.

‘When you’re young,’ said C’s wife, ‘you really believe that two people can make some kind of dream together; but you try it, and you get older, and you come to realise that all there is is you, finally.’

The play veered between being really funny and wallowing in embarrassing sentimentality. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sentiment, as long as it’s not masquerading as real feeling,’ said Professor Maxwell at Melbourne University twenty years ago. But in this case it is masquerading. Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.

In the magazine the subs once again make me look an idiot. All my jokes cut out, the tone violated, the central argument truncated. I cry over it. I feel like resigning. I’ve felt like this a hundred times before and haven’t done it. Oh, if only I knew I had a grant I’d tell the National Times to cram it.

I watched the beginning of La Règle du jeu on video. It’s marvellous but I’ve never been able to sit still long enough to get to the end. Renoir’s love of people, that unfashionable thing: the sense of a rich, three-dimensional, teeming life away there beyond the flat screen and spreading out from it in all directions. A kind of fizzing and bubbling that goes on. Everyone busy living.

I made a plan: in the mornings I’ll try to write my book, and in the afternoons I’ll work on the translations of the Malraux programs for SBS. I started this morning at 8 am. I loved it in my room, quiet all around, barely even properly light. I rewrote Vicki and Elizabeth, the very beginning of the book. I worry that I ought to pour out a whole draft and then go back and rewrite. What I do is write a page, then fix it up straight away and go back to the beginning to see if everything fits. So my progress is slow. But the work is solid. After lunch I sat at my desk with the big dictionaries, the mild afternoon sun on my back through the window, and wrestled away. Writing in the morning is battling through jungle. Translating in the arvo is riding along a flat country road on a bicycle.

The only way I can keep a rhythm going is to keep off booze, go to bed early, and not drink too much coffee. 8.30–12.30 work on novel in office. 2.00–4.00 translate at home. 7.30–10.00 read Vogel Award manuscripts at home. Most of them are unbelievably terrible. One was like a black hole in space: all my energy was sucked into it, it drained and sucked and gave back no spark. It scared me.

I’m worried about art, what it’s for, whether what I do is any use to anyone, whether I’ve been kidding myself all these years that I’m any good at it, that I’ve got anything at all to offer the human race, whether I should just chuck it in and look for a job.

I don’t enjoy the way the therapist fixes me with her unblinking gaze. She seems to want to urge me to undertake a search and reconstruction of myself such as the one she herself is attempting. When I think of her ugly clothes and the quite stunning, almost deathly ugliness of the inside of her house I shiver. She is trying to get me to face the most difficult area in myself. I don’t have the courage to do it. Not now, anyway. Thinking about it is like contemplating a mountain range in winter.

If I were a man of a pre-feminist generation, with a wife to provide my meals and clean my house and bring up my children, perhaps I would have a free mind for the large thought, the unlimited plan; and free time for night work, for hours without the necessity to think ahead about trivia—will we have veal for dinner or will I send the girls out for Lebanese take-away? Will the dog be lonely all day? Why didn’t I defrost the fridge before I went to the market? Or is my mind slack and small for other reasons?

I went to work and broke through a brick wall or went round the side of it or dug under it or something: Athena’s moral crisis and flight. The pace picked up incredibly. Present tense. A weaving and twining of many a disparate thread. All these years of note-taking, of being what Joan Didion calls ‘a lonely, anxious re-arranger of things’, are now paying off. I even got in the skier on the colour TV in the Italian cafe! That image has been dogging me for ten years at least.

The day I realised my novel was going to be a short one, and that its domestic subject and setting were quite proper, I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed chairs, a window. I thought, That’s a beautiful painting. And it’s only the inside of a room.

To Paul Crossley’s piano masterclass at the Con. After three hours of intense concentration I was completely exhausted. His teaching was very challenging. He was not a giver of praise or even of encouragement, except to one girl who played Ravel; everyone else played Debussy. I loved the language he used: not only because it was clever and striking but because it showed me that the way I have been trying to write about music is not, as I had feared, hopelessly romantic or amateurish. ‘A furtive texture,’ he said. ‘A harmonic wash in the left hand. Then he clears the texture. Let the harmony settle again, before we take off. Hover above what you’re going to do.’ The concept of phrasing began to have meaning for me, not to mention texture. And now I know what the pedal is for: to ‘avoid breaking the sound’.

At Castlemaine it was very warm. Even the night was milder than I’d expected. Discouraging memories presented themselves as I roved about the slopes picking up firewood. What does this almost-finished book say about men and women? There doesn’t seem to be a way of planning this. My attitude emerges as the story tells itself. I couldn’t help agonising over it, thinking of the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, its bourgeois nature. What critics will say. What my friends will think and not say. How I will appear before the world. Oh shut up.

We stood on a slope and watched the moon rise: up it came, round as a drawing. We saw how the stars became brighter, sat deeper in space. M and her friend struggled to philosophise. They laughed, and were excited. ‘I can’t sort of grasp,’ said M, ‘what there is beyond the universe.’ We all played the ukulele when we felt like it. She made up a song called ‘In the Paradise Cafe’. The boy read Tom Sawyer aloud: he couldn’t restrain his laughter. I woke at two in the morning, lay there filled with a kind of shame. Looking out at the moonlit bush, silver by night, grey by day. Don’t be so proud. Accept criticism, accept editing and guidance. No one will think less of you. I got up at dawn. There were tasks and I did them: finding wood, making a fire, boiling water. The sky became more orange and the wind began to stir. The coming light. It creeps across the dull grass and pinkens it, between the thin trunks. My panic left me. The problem becomes merely the work I still have to do, rather than an indictment of my whole personality and talent and social position.

I typed THE END. I rushed home ‘dizzy with unconsumed excitement’. Could not seem to get much of a response from the people present. ‘I’ve finished. I’ve typed the words THE END.’ ‘What—again?’ ‘Guess what, I typed THE END.’ ‘You’ll have more to do.’ But then someone went out to get champagne and they made a fuss of me, which embarrassed me, for I felt I should have been mature enough and tactful enough to have demanded less of them. I will never get this right.

Spectacular dawns I see from my bedroom window. Sometimes I look out at this richness of sky—layer after layer of colour rising from a bed of dove-grey cloud—and I think, This is a rich person’s view, or an adult’s view. As if I were not entitled to it, or had it only temporarily, or on sufferance.

Is this ‘the artist’s’ fate? Always to be loved less than I need; or somehow to repel love, or what is seen in the myth or dream of our society as normal marital love? I feel I’m reaching my strength, in my work, but there’s a corresponding falling-away…It’s terribly sad.

In my dream someone said to me, ‘I want to look for some graves.’ I said, ‘So you can desecrate them?’ Even in my sleep I was laughing.

Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.

The Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante says that the writer is important not because he can write but because he can listen. His job is ‘to catch the human voice in flight’.

Peter Handke’s notebooks, The Weight of the World. Intense pleasure at the tininess of his observations. Actually, they’re not observations so much as junctions between moments. When I read them I feel that I am not after all crazy or even weird. I feel strengthened, private, encouraged. I feel the worth of very small things. The whole cast of his mind is familiar to me.

‘Writing: safe again.’ —Peter Handke. He’s more brutal with himself than I have ever been. He inspires me to try to be more truthful in this book. It’s hard, for I am always hiding something, either from myself or from the person who may or may not, today or on some future day, read this and be inclined to think less of me.

Handke: ‘I thought of art as a parachute that would stop me from falling.’

I read through the first draft of my story and saw immediately the point at which it goes off the rails. It gave me great satisfaction to know that my critical apparatus is in working order.

It seems I am a really awful person. Pushy, aggressive, demanding, always wanting everything to be clear, worked out, resolved. Also I have bad table manners: I was the first to put out my chopsticks at Brilliant’s when the food was served. My enthusiasms, my expectation that others will follow me, lead people to do so against their will: apparently I phrase suggestions in a way that brooks no refusal. When I said ‘Let’s go to the nude beach on Sunday’, my manner made him say, ‘All right’ instead of what he really felt which was ‘Maybe’. Growing more pathetic, dismal and contemptible every minute, I tried to explain my feeling that there is a link between my ‘enthusiasms’ and the bluff that’s needed to be a writer. No, no—many writers are quite introverted. I will have to tone myself down. I couldn’t help crying. Silent sobs, with a lot of tears running out. I despised myself for giving way to a spasm of self-pity. I wish I could bawl out loud, get some voice into it and howl.

Sunset last night was like a swap card I once had of a pirate ship: torn clouds, dramatic perspective, orange, gold and green. And now a dawn sky of delicate purity, and a smell of eucalypts. Maybe a marriage can get up again and walk, after a terrible beating.

A couple passed us on the beach. We guessed they had met through a dating agency. I said the man couldn’t find a woman because he talked all the time and expected her to listen. F said the woman couldn’t find a man because she listened all the time with her head on one side and made attention-murmurs, and was ‘limp’.

In the bookshop I picked up the new Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, a book whose existence was unknown to me. I knew I could not be represented in it because they would have had to ask my permission. I examined its index. No, I wasn’t there. I felt the world seesaw. I walked to the tram stop wretched. I am full of shit. I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at forty-two I can’t even get into the Oxford book.

He’ll be like the Russians: he’ll retreat and retreat and retreat until I freeze to death.

Clear statement: I have very strong urges (irresistible urges) towards some kind of religious or, rather, spiritual experience. This frightens me, not because the spirituality in things is so inscrutable but because I don’t know what it will do to my ordinary life arrangements, my friendships, my attitude towards my work, if I turn around and acknowledge something I privately refer to as ‘the mighty force’. It’s there behind me, and in me, all the time. It’s benevolent, it’s totally good—not morally—I mean that it only wishes me well. But I’m afraid to find out what I’ll become if I stop running away from it. It’s as if I were always swimming against a tide. How do I turn round and face it? How’s it done?

He tells me that the vision of life that’s in my work is not real; it’s much less bad, dark, mischievous, painful etc than real life. It holds out some belief in the essential goodness of people. It is a picture of the way I’d like life to be rather than the way it really is.

‘I’m afraid your pessimism will contaminate me,’ I say.

‘If you believe in good, why are you afraid that bad will contaminate you?’

It’s like arguing with the devil.

In the discussion I ran the line against possessiveness that we thought was so cool in the seventies: ‘Jealousy is a completely useless emotion.’

Psychoanalyst: ‘On the contrary. I think jealousy is at the cutting edge of the psyche.’

Me: (riveted) ‘What do you mean?’

Psychoanalyst: ‘It’s painful, but it shows us in no uncertain terms that we are not rational beings. That our lives are not under our conscious control.’

A poem translated from the Arabic called Homesickness. Words to the effect of ‘Once again you take out your knife and stab me’, and then this: ‘Nobody knows whether I am dancing or staggering.’

‘There is something between me and her.’

‘Since when?’

‘Two weeks.’

I keep walking but put my hands in my pockets.

Nobody knows whether I am staggering or dancing.

I told the Jungian how I hated and feared the kind of privilege claimed by beautiful women.

‘And how have you claimed attention, Helen?’

I did not like being asked this question.

‘Sex. Using my brains.’

I am a forty-three-year-old woman, a mother, healthy, reasonable-looking; I am in my own city; I am able to make a living; I am sometimes sad or frightened, and recently I have been hurt; but I am also learning to examine myself and my crimes less defensively; the Mighty Force has not lately come to me in the form I was expecting; but it does not abandon people, and it won’t abandon me.

The gist of it is, I guess, that I wasn’t vulnerable, or feminine. F says that I didn’t need him enough, that I barged straight through him. I have to accept this in silence. Because it is true.

In the Botanic Gardens A and I lie on two blankets that he’s spread on the Oak Lawn and read The Europeans aloud. The bliss of being read to. The speckled shade, small children shouting and running across the grass. We take it in turns, chapter by chapter. The long sentences tax our powers of forward-seeing, but our skills develop as we warm to it. My crabby temper evaporates in the beautiful autumn day. The leaves are hardly brown, let alone on the ground.

‘Afterwards she repented it bitterly, but she was hopeless at apologising: instead of retracting her feelings, what she always did was to say that she was sorry for expressing them, a kind of amends that costs nothing and carries the built-in rebuke that the other person is unable to bear the truth.’ —Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The Redhead’, in The Transatlantic Review

Primrose Gully. My sister comes down the track from the car, all in black, sunglasses, white-faced, like a refugee. Very upset and weeping. The married man she’s having an affair with, his coldness in public, his failure to turn up, she lay awake all night waiting. Disgusting memories of my own. I talked at length about humiliation, low self-esteem, self-punishment etc. I must learn to shut up. Talking loosely and inefficiently is an indulgence. We went for a walk to look at the river, and back across the gully under the big pine tree. We picked up firewood. In the morning she said, ‘I woke up once in the night and looked out the window. The sky was full of stars. I thought I must be in heaven.’

A doco about Berlin after the war. Footage of a boy of eight or so picking his way across a huge pile of building rubble, cap on head, pack on back, bare knees, boots—answering the questions of a disembodied voice: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ve lost my family. I’m looking for them.’ ‘How long since you saw them?’ ‘Six weeks. Goodbye!’ He smiles, turns and walks away, a man with a mission—then a few yards further on turns again, waves, calls out ‘Goodbye!’ and goes on his way. I stood at the sink dumbly washing and stacking, despairing of ever having anything worth saying. I know nothing of what is savage and cruel in life. My work is as ignorant as I am. I don’t know anything. But maybe it’s the devil talking when we get the idea that someone who knows no savagery knows nothing—as if only evil were real and the rest weightless.

V’s proprietary tone when he speaks of the high priests of European literature—‘Yes, they are peculiar titles,’ he says about Canetti’s autobiography—reminds me of the German poet who boasted to me about how he had once sat up all night reading Chekhov’s letters. As if no one else had ever done this.

On my way out of the Athenaeum, so tired I could hardly speak, I was approached by a young woman.

‘I heard you read that story about the friend. The painter. It made me very angry. I thought it was a cruel story,’ she said, clenching her hands. ‘You took all the little illusions that people use to make life bearable, and you stripped and stripped and stripped them away. I’m trying to be a painter, and I—’

Exhausted, looking at her smooth pale skin, her items of silver jewellery here and there, I thought, Come back in twenty years, sweetheart, and tell me about your little illusions then.

I walk away, get into my car, drive home, and go straight to bed, at five in the afternoon. What I could have said to her was, ‘Listen. There is no comfort. And if you think there is, then maybe you’re not really an artist.’

When I have begun to carve out the little country of a story in which I will make my home for the next few days (or months, if it should be a novel) I feel a secret power. I don’t need to chatter.

After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. All the air went out of me. I felt my face drop on its bones. He noticed and said, ‘What’s up?’ I said, in a small voice, ‘I feel sad. And scared.’ ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just hate it when things like that happen, when people treat you like—’ I wanted to say, ‘He doesn’t scorn you, or hate you—he just made a mistake.’ But his whole ego was bound up in it. My own iron grille came down. I missed the chance to level with him. From then on we were both deep in reticence but keeping the superficial intimacy going. In the morning, a shyness. I like him. I envy his beauty and I hate the way it distorts his life. He is all split and troubled; and his loneliness is as bad as mine. We would wear each other out.

What am I setting up for myself, here? Some happiness, perhaps. I’m calm, and in good spirits, quietly, as if something important and good were about to happen. I’m not scared or nervous. I can’t even imagine it, how it will be, what it will look like, what felicities or clumsinesses either of us will commit. Bucket of cold water: he’s married. He is an intellectual and I am not. ‘He lives,’ said Z, who introduced us, ‘almost entirely in the world of books and ideas. I imagine that’s why he didn’t want to have children.’ Maybe he’s in the habit of having quick, harsh, demanding affairs. Or maybe this will be an important relationship, for both of us.

Gloomily coming into my bedroom I stump towards the bed and see the mess of New York Reviews beside it, and a copy of Joan London’s stories that are so beautiful, and I think, Whatever happens, I’ve got this one little power—I’m a writer. I can use everything that happens, I can use it and shape it and in that way I can get control of it.

I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.

The only way I can have anything to do with him is by (a) lies and (b) hurting someone. Am I prepared to do this?

One day I’ll have to burn this book. I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.

Maybe he’s the kind of man who conducts flirtations with women in such a way as to allow his wife to find out; she then puts a stop to the developing affair and, though he grumbles etc, this is what he wants, and needs. No idea why I thought of this. Just running through the painful possibilities.

The monolith of his marriage, and my own solitariness and flimsiness by comparison. I feel very small, slight, impermanent. It is not too late for me to save myself.