by
Helen Garner
project/panopticon-diaries
Helen Garner,
Eve Babitz,
Lauren Elkin,
Haley Mlotek,
Elizabeth Hardwick,
Alba de Céspedes,
Liv Ullmann,
Leslie Jamison,
Nona Willis Aronowitz
eve diary fragments
H: ‘Let’s take out hospital insurance.’
V: ‘Why.’
Pause.
H: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s agree not to ask each other why in that aggressive way. Could we avoid that tone? Do you think? For the New Year?’
V: ‘Why is one of the most important words in the language. It’s an absolutely crucial word. It’s a much better word than Let’s.’
Short silence.
H: ‘Do we have to be in competition all the time?’
He makes out he doesn’t know, can’t imagine what I mean. I point out his placing of why and let’s in opposition. He acts as if he’s amazed by this ridiculous suggestion.
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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 don’t know what she would make of this but here’s what I think happened: I wanted so much to be loved that I tried to turn myself into the sort of woman I thought I would have to be, in order to be lovable. In the process I falsified myself, lost part of my soul, made myself sick with swallowed rage; I connived, I enabled; and I allowed him to set hard into worse versions of the misogyny he already felt: the little tin god, the artist as superior being whose needs must be met, no matter what it costs or who pays.
In other words, it’s not all his fault.
</3
The Polish philosopher, on the phone: ‘Let’s say you decided to leave V. What would be holding you back?’
Long pause. I walk through our life, as it were room by room. It is very bare.
‘In my heart I know I have to leave. But I’m hanging on. Because I’ve got this terrible need for him to tell me the truth. And because I’m scared.’
‘What of?’
Longer pause.
‘Failure. This is my third marriage. Fear of my failure to sustain intimacy. To sustain a relationship.’
‘Intimacy,’ she says, ‘has to go both ways. And the aim of a relationship is not to sustain the relationship.’
The more I read and watched, the more I wondered what I was doing. What did I need from these stories, or more to the point, what was I avoiding? What feeling or action did they allow me to replace? I believed everything I saw, even though I knew it wasn’t real, or even meant to be interpreted as real. I had a precipitous gullibility that I indulged, allowing myself a passive but committed dive headfirst into a narrative, or a character, or an end. No matter how often these concepts disappointed me by being exactly what they were (narrow, for one; embarrassing as a posture to adopt in real life, for another), I still held out a little hope. Maybe I just hadn’t found the right one yet.
In lots of fiction, divorce is not so much a genre as it is an event. Ending a marriage can be a plot point in a tragedy or farce or any combination of the qualities that make both; it can be romantic or dramatic, tearful or a celebration. On the other hand, there is clearly a small yet prominent kind of divorce narrative that could be called its own genre. The conventional marriage plot reminds us that love stories end with a wedding. Heartbreak stories have slightly more flexibility. They can begin or end with a divorce, or the question of separation can be the conflict that drives the entire story. But I do think that over time a clearer pattern emerges, one that intertwines the question of whether people define the law or the law defines people. Traveling backward from Levy and Gilbert, the contemporaries of divorce writing, to the gossipy novels of the 1970s and the bleak suburban despair of 1950s novels, I sense something that connects them together. I see the same in the glossiness of modern divorce movies that come alongside the pained dramas that reference custody battles or infidelities or other betrayals, to the grainy film stock of auteurs and independents, to the stark black-and-white depictions of toothy dialogue in the comedies of remarriage or the grayscale yearnings of Hays Code–era melodramas. It is a genre that knows blame without fully accepting it, a fiction that says: you cannot possibly fault me for telling you this, because either I have been honest or I have been right.
Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-programming a divorced woman’s film festival.
I knew what I was doing here. I even joked about it, suggesting to other people going through breakups that they redirect their hurt and sorrow into organizing their workplace. Into programming a film festival about their experience. Anywhere else but as something kept inside. The night before we were all laid off, I prepared myself for my last bargaining session to negotiate severance, and then I sat on the edge of my bed and wept—really wept—about everything for long enough until it all became a feeling as large and hopeless as nothing.
<3
One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porches, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage ends, a love affair begins. I worried the movie would make me too sad, as though recognizing where I once lived was too dangerous. Instead it made me feel the opposite of homesick. I was grateful for how far away I was from what I was seeing.
I was reminded of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the class dynamics in his chosen comedies of remarriage. He thought that wealth had to remain a given for at least one character: not because the working or middle class can’t spend time inside their sadness, but because their days don’t have the time to maintain the same dedicated interest in it. “This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth,” he wrote. “The people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily.” A movie or book about that sadness in between shifts would have so many smaller revelations, the single moments alone and unremarked on, but no less deeply felt. Like when I, on one workday, turned the corner in the hallway of my office kitchen and felt myself to be so completely grateful to be divorced. What would that have looked like? Like any other day, which it was.
<3 <3
can’t imagine what it would be like to be together without having children in front of you, it just sounds like a big blank. What are you going to do, travel? To see what? What would you be moving toward? What else would you be living for? Sex? Companionship? Being? Without the forward straining what is there to give you urgency? Just an inevitable end to everything? I’m talking too much, I don’t know why it’s irking me the way it is that she doesn’t want children, who cares, what is it to me? Plenty of my friends and patients don’t want them and it doesn’t put me in this state.
It occurs to me that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t want them.
Love isn’t about straining toward something, she says. Other people try to move you forward. And then I never think I love anyone enough to want to tie myself to them for all eternity, Clémentine says. It never feels like enough. But at the same time once I commit I have trouble leaving. Or at least I’ve had trouble in the past. I worry I might marry the wrong person merely because I couldn’t leave them.
[...] It really feels like things might be changing, like we might actually have a chance at changing the law. (The more he sits there, rigid, the angrier I get. It seems to me, with Henry sitting beside me, still angry that I dared to buy a paper he doesn’t like, that it is men like him who might actually be the problem: officially supportive, but inwardly seething.) I also haven’t forgotten the jokes he made about the three hundred and forty-three women who signed the manifesto saying they’d had abortions but no doubt about it if I got pregnant he’d waste no time finding out what we’d have to do to get rid of it. There is so much he shuts himself off to, because it threatens the way he understands the world; but even Max, who is worldly enough not to confuse ego and politics, is blinkered, doesn’t understand what women are telling him, the body of work we are founding. He doesn’t see that his revolution is incomplete as long as he and men like him are the ones writing it. (I brought this up at our meeting last week and we had to stay an hour later than usual, everyone had something to say about it. I came home late and Henry wouldn’t speak to me, lord knows where he thought I was. Some of the girls were talking about joining Halimi’s group Choisir, if I thought I could pay the dues without Henry finding out I would.)
On the way home I think about my feelings of envy for Claude. I want a baby, but do I really want to be in her place? In her chic suburb with her asshole husband? Still, I do, I envy her. She’s secure enough to do it, in spite of her asshole husband, she is her own supporting wall. That is what I envy. It’s not that she has a perfect life or marriage, it’s that she feels sufficient unto herself. She says she’s going to keep studying, no matter what Jibé thinks, that even if it takes her longer she’ll finish her degree, she’ll do her internships, she’ll be a therapist. She’ll keep coming to our group. The answer is never the husband, she tells me, the group is the answer.
I think maybe I chose wrong, that I followed the heat of those early days into a marriage too quickly, without being sure we wanted the same things. Henry doesn’t want a baby. He is still a baby himself, he says. And I know I can’t argue with that. He goes off to the club with Jibé in Jibé’s hot little two-seater, I know all about it, it’s the source of much frustration for Claude, how are they supposed to get around with a baby when there’s nowhere to put it? He just laughs at her and says he’ll buy her a station wagon, and then she smacks him in the face, because he wants to turn her into a maman, in her unwieldy family vehicle, while he gets to zip around town, a single guy to all appearances, zip to work she says, zip to the club, unzip whatever it is he’s unzipping, zip home again, zip zip zip. He is so modern.