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INTERVIEWER
How are you going to cancel someone who writes, “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled”?
HAYES
Beauty can’t be canceled. O’Connor is problematic, but she’s indispensable. I think of Calvino’s “Uses of Literature,” his notion of a universal library that’s always expanding around a core of canonical books. The core may be less fixed for those of us looking for alternatives to a white, male, Eurocentric canon—but the important thing is that infinitely expanding shelter, which is tethered to history but always gravitating toward what’s still outside it, toward what Calvino calls the “apocryphal.” No books are removed from this library. No books are burned. I’m not going to remove Faulkner. I’m not going to remove Wallace Stevens. I see them as flawed, complicated, dimensional people.
It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. Multiple things even. Had to. It was part of life, sure. But this time it transcended all things and applied to everything. Like your brain after a severe blow, turning off all functions except what’s needed—breathing, but that’s about it. I just didn’t give a shit, for better or worse. Things I liked / things I didn’t like, didn’t matter. Didn’t want to paint. Didn’t want to write. Didn’t want to talk to anyone. Respond to emails or texts. None of it. I barely went outside even. Just baseline survival. And sure, I had also fake “not given a shit about anything” before, in the way many do—to prompt the world to say, “But I give a shit about you!”—sure. Still this was different. Now there was no desire, no disappointment. I didn’t want anything. I wasn’t angling. Just flatlining alive. It was something. The world had been on a rampage trying to get me to give a shit, too. All kinds of shit, you wouldn’t believe it. More and more. On TV, on the radio, the bench ads outside the grocery store, they all expected me to give a shit about something. I was asked to give a shit by video screens at gas pumps even. Yard signs accused me of shit. There were flags! Everywhere, everyone wanted me to give a shit. And it had to be the right kind of shit, or people would give a shit about how I gave a shit, and then I had to give a shit about that. It was an endless cycle. A terrible ceremony. So I fought back with nothing. Like air to an incoming blow. No dodging, blocking, or absorbing. Just gone. Not even there. I witnessed transparent versions of myself slowly exit my body and float away, at the grocery store, in the post office, bumping up against the ceiling. Birthed from my head and floating away, trapped somewhere in the atmosphere. Bumping the undersides of clouds while the real me waited below. I’d sit by my bedroom window looking outside, like a cat, just staring. Days, ate that way. I watched cars go by. People biking. Clouds. I used my binoculars to look at birds on power lines. I watched the man with the sores on his leg walk slowly to and from the liquor store every day. I watched the sun go down. Watched it come up. Days, ate. It was something. Made me realize I had gotten too good at what I’d been doing. You can get too good at something that’s meant as a temporary solution, and then it becomes the problem. You start living in it. And the worst part is, it’s not bad.
heh
His real life, outside of our destination, was complicated by ambivalence. Since childhood, his basic needs had been met as if by an invisible force. At first, he believed his mother and father were providing for him, but when they died, he was surprised to feel that he had suffered no loss. He envied the fact that people like me didn’t have desires, as we were still struggling to fulfill our basic needs. His own desires felt paralyzing, because none of them were motivated by need. Everything was available to be possessed, which made it impossible to quantify any particular object’s allure. He wished he felt more lust for his mistress. I tried to relate to him and understand his concerns.
lol
I asked the woman if she liked the president and his wife. She told me that she didn’t like them or dislike them, because she wasn’t interested in them as individuals but as representative historical actors. I didn’t know what she meant by that, “representative historical actors,” so I asked her to clarify. She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. For most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a sense of humor. It was necessary to cut through all of that, she said, if one wished to have a grasp on one’s place in history. She seemed excited by that idea, having a grasp on one’s place in history, but then she sighed, so I wasn’t sure if she was excited or felt some other emotion. Unfortunately, she said, the American people had no sense of history. They believed that everything that came before them was irrelevant, except insofar as it had given them what they needed. They hoped that their children would have children, and that those children would believe in hardship the way they themselves had once believed in fairy tales.
In the early seventies, when my daughter was two, I moved into the first of these hippie houses—what were called communal houses—in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. It was while I was living there that I had an affair with a guy who was addicted to heroin, and as it rolled on over a year or so, the chaos of it became painful and obsessive-making. I’d been keeping a diary for a couple of years and was enjoying it—I needed to write it, and I was learning to write through it, by means of it—and as this relationship grew in complexity, as my life thickened up and became more eventful, I could see that my experiences were forming themselves into the kind of curve that we call a “story.” Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it, and I could feel this one coming. I suddenly thought, Maybe I could write about this while it’s still happening, as it’s coming into its bend.
I decided to look back in the diary to the moment when I first fell in love with the guy. I skipped over all the boring stuff, and transcribed the interesting bits into another notebook. I wanted to see if I could shape it into something. For about a year in the mid-seventies I sat every day in the state library with my two notebooks and kind of blindly thrashed along. So the truth is that Monkey Grip really was my diary, with links between passages and with some passages expanded.
I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But then he was out at night a lot, and I was home holding down the fort with my daughter, and I started to get lonely and sad.
My mother’s life, the life of a married woman with children, had never really appealed to me. It had dawned on me when I was quite young that my mother could never go out for more than about three hours at a time. She always had to be there at lunchtime, at dinnertime. I’d grown up as the eldest child in a family of five girls and one boy, and everybody was always squabbling and looking at the others to see if they were getting more—counting the strawberries in one another’s bowls. I remember it hitting me when I was about fourteen that our mother was in a sort of cage.
INTERVIEWER
The ending of the novel—that list of paragraphs all beginning with “And … ”—is strikingly beautiful.
GARNER
I suppose it’s the book thinking about itself—about what is going to happen in the world after it stops being a book. I didn’t want the book to fade out. I wanted it to feel like the way Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Two-and Three-Part Inventions—the way he flings the final notes away with force.
<3
So I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother wished to see me. And because of my nerves about it, I’d felt so unwell over the whole long weekend that I suffered from severe constipation. On top of this, I should say that I’d written a novel a quarter century ago which I’d titled, for some reason I regrettably no longer recall, Faserland. It ends in Zurich, out in the middle of the lake, so to speak, somewhat traumatically.
That chapter of my life came back to me for the first time in years when, in Zurich as I said, down on Bahnhofstrasse, I purchased a dark brown, rather chunky wool sweater at a little stall hammered together from wooden beams, not far from Paradeplatz. It was already evening, I’d taken some valerian, and the effect of the pills and the despair of the Swiss autumn and the twenty-five preceding years weighed, leaden beyond measure, on my mood.
i like this
My mother’s situation—and now I’ll get to the point—often forced me to visit Zurich, this city of posers and braggarts and debasement, and had completely paralyzed me for years. It had become vile, altogether heinous, it had become more than I was able to bear, than one should have to bear. My mother, in short, was very sick, which is to say sick in the head, too—not just there, but primarily there. In order not to lose touch with her, I’d decided at some point to accept the misery in which she had been wasting away for decades, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, unopened bills from various Zurich sable-fur warehouses, and the crinkling foils of her pain medication. Not to mention all those still shrink-wrapped articles of clothing she had bought, out of some compulsion stemming from the war and the postwar years—the sweaters and cardigans and pleated slacks, which had wandered into the armoires in her apartment, stacked and stowed away and archived, as it were, next to the dozens of Hermès handbags and the quite literally hundreds of Ferragamo shoes that were never worn.
She had neither an email address nor a mobile phone, and spurned the internet altogether. Too complicated, she’d always said, and the computer keys? Too small. I guessed, however, that she refused it all out of arrogance. She made a performance of liking to read the newspapers and Stendhal. Her skin had the texture of dry silk, and she was always slightly sunburned despite never sitting outside on the terrace, among the hydrangeas.
So, instead of returning straight to my hotel in the Old Town, I did in fact go to the bar in Kronenhalle, where the door always did exactly the opposite of what one expected. If you wanted to pull it, it could be opened only with a push, and vice versa. I took my seat there in the back, down at the farthest end of the bar, right by the toilets; the tables at the front were always reserved for money-grubbing Zurich middle management and their mostly Ukrainian female retinue. People visiting the city tended to think that the spirit of Joyce or of the Cabaret Voltaire would waft about them, but in reality they found merely an array of depressing hustlers. It had been a very long time since I’d given up hoping for a better seat. At the bar in the back, by the toilets, you have it just as good, I thought; at least you’re served the same white saucers of salted almonds, paprika chips, and little pretzel sticks with your drink as at the tables up front, and even if one day that were no longer the case, one could presumably still go to the bar, and for all intents and purposes the effect would be the same.