Helen Garner arrives in America
The Australian author's books get their first wide release
The set-up is simple: an old friend re-enters sending what was a comfortable and predictable life into chaos and disorder. It’s not a new story, but in Helen Garner’s hands a transformation happens. In 1984, the Australian author and journalist published her short novel “The Children’s Bach,” her version of the outsider coming into a marriage and created something new and original from a timeless plot.
It starts with the married couple Athena and Dexter and their two children. They live comfortably in Melbourne, Australia in 1972. Dexter is opinionated and old-fashioned in a lot of ways: he doesn’t understand modern music or culture. Athena is resigned to being a housewife, hanging laundry and cooking meals. But their life vaults into the into the unknown when Dexter runs into Elizabeth, an old school friend who he’d lost contact with.
Garner writes:
“How strange is it that in a city the size of Melbourne it is impossible for two people who have lived almost s sister and brother for five years as students to move away from each other without even saying goodbye, to conduct the ordinary business of their lives within a couple miles of each other’s daily rounds, and yet never to cross each other’s paths. To marry, to have children; to fail at one thing and to take up another, to drink and dance in public places, to buy food in supermarkets and petrol at service stations, to read of the same murders in the same newspapers, to shiver in the same cold mornings, and yet to never bump into each other. Eight twenty years may pass! How strange!”
Dexter runs into Elizabeth at the airport while she is picking up her much younger sister, who is coming to live with her. After the re-introduction, the two families become intertwined and Phillip, Elizabeth’s “bohemian” musician boyfriend, arrives, sending Dexter and Athena’s marriage into murky waters.
The story seems simple, and in a way it is, but Garner doesn’t fall into the pitfalls of something usual or normal. Instead, she reaches into the depth of the human psyche without ever explaining or searching for answers on the page to tell a story about the cost of love and feeding our desires. Her ability to shift between the poetic long-line and the short declarative sentences of her journalism background brings a beautiful quality to “The Children’s Bach,” which clocks in at 160 pages with remarkable breadth and passion.
In Australia, Garner is a national treasure, but she’s barely known in America. From the moment her debut novel “The Monkey’s Grip” was published in her home country in 1977, Garner became a lightening rod. Well, even before that she set fires across the country with her writing.
In 1972 Garner was fired from her teaching job after she wrote an article for the Australian alt-magazine The Digger about a sex education class she gave to a 13-year-old student. After that, she started writing for The Digger and eventually “The Monkey Grip” came out and established her as a new voice in her home country.
Narrating “The Monkey Grip” is Nora, a single, who falls in love with a heroin addict. Nora tells the story of not only her love with a drug-addict, but also the struggles of raising a raising a daughter in Melbourne during the late 1970s.
Lauren Groff writes in the foreword to the new American edition:
“In less adept hands, more than three hundred pages of lovesickness and drugged-out hijinks might either be cloying, or dark and painful, like pressing a bruise over and over. Helen Garner is too brilliant, too unusual a writer for that.”
Throughout her career, Garner hasn’t stayed comfortable in her work. She’s jumped between fiction and non-fiction. She’s stirred controversy in 1995 with “The First Stone” (1995). She’s taken what Truman Capote did for the true-crime story with “In Cold Blood” and turned it on its head in the same way Janet Malcolm did with “The Journalist and the Murderer” by examining not only the facts, but also the people who get to tell it with “This House of Grief.”
Garner, who turns 81 in November, is a stylist and a voice of a generation. She’s a rare writer who you can entrance a reader with her style while also telling a compelling story. The moment I finished “The Children’s Bach” this summer, I turned back to the beginning to start all over again.
Seven of Garner’s books are being re-released in the United States by Pantheon Books. “The Children’s Bach” and “This House of Grief” are being published on Oct. 10.
Garner is on tour in the United States for the release of her books and agreed to speak over the phone. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did this happen now? Because, to be honest, I hadn't ever heard of your books until now.
Well, don't be embarrassed. I never had the ambition to be published all over the place. I felt very Australian. These days people feel they're not really noticed until they're noticed in America and in the U.K. But I never felt like that. I think my generation wasn't quite so focused on ambition, or on sort of exterior ambition as people are now. So I would've gone to my grave thinking, well, you know, I did okay in Australia, and that's all right. And then suddenly this happened.
Let’s start there then. I think there's just a different level of making art before social media and the globalization of it, right? I read your first story was in an alt-magazine, which is where I started working and it's where I wanted to work. I didn't have, grand ambitions at first. It was: when can I get to the Boston Phoenix? How do I get there?
I feel like that too. I don't know how old you are, but I'm 80 and so we're talking way back. And of course there's a whole — how do I put this? — I'm, I'm eager not to get into the whole gender matter, but, you know, back in the sixties in Australia, I thought all the great books in the world are A. written by men, which is absurd, but that's what I thought, and B. by people who aren't Australian. So I never even had an ambition to write a novel. So I started writing in a magazine and then I don't know, something happened slowly and I came up with a novel, although some people said it wasn't a novel. Some said, oh, she's just published a diary, which, you know, in a way was true?
They always say, “write what you know,” right? Don't try to write something you don't know, especially for a first book. So, how did the first book, “The Monkey’s Grip”, happen?
I guess I taught myself to write by writing letters and diaries. Ever since I was a girl I knew that writing was the only thing I 100 percent enjoyed — however minor a thing was, I was trying to get it into words. I had been keeping a diary since I was a girl, but it got more interesting as my life got more interesting. And I got involved with this guy who was addicted to heroin, this is back in the seventies, and it was a sort of painful relationship. In many ways he was a lovely guy, but he was a dope addict.
So as this relationship sort of inched its way towards its sad ending, I started to see that and I was writing about it in my diary all along and I started to see the curve in it. I thought, this is actually a story. It's not just my life plotting from day to day with no shape. I began to see that there was a shape to it and that made me feel really excited.
I would take my little girl to school, to kindergarten and I would drop her off and and I would ride my bike to the Melbourne State Library. I had two exercise books, one of them was the diary and the other one was sort of like a new exercise book, and I started copying the bits that were about this guy and me into the second book and left out the boring bits in the diary, or, I hope I did. Then I just followed it through until it ended. Then I thought, maybe this is actually a book now. So I took it to a publisher and they thought it was a book, and they published it.
Just like that?
I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but that's how I wrote it. I didn't think, oh, boy, I'm gonna write a novel about what's happening to me at the moment. I just thought, I'm gonna write down what's happening to me at the moment in the way I write down everything and then I I could sense it, sense there was a curve. And I reckon that's what a story is: it's a chunk of life with a bend in it. There's gotta be a curve or a bend and when you spot that or you're onto something.
So then you just walk into a publisher's office and it's that simple?
Well, no. Look, this is Australia we're talking about. So there were big publishers, but not the kind of massive sort of behemoths that there are today? I've got to point out too, that this is at the time of early kind of feminism in Australia and there was a publishing company that had been set up by two women who I vaguely knew and remembered from university. They had this little outfit that was in a sort of garage out the back of a house in a suburb. They'd already published one or two books and I rode around there on my bike with a thing in the basket and said, “look, I think I've written something.”
They said, “oh, leave it with us and we'll have a look at it.” I rode home and two weeks later they wrote me a letter — that's the way things were done in those days — and said they liked it and they wanted to publish it.
I mean, if I'd taken it to one of the bigger publishers, which you were often sort of offshoots of British publishers, because back then Australia still sort of part of the British publishing world. There weren't many independent Australian publishers, but this was one.
I signed a contract and it came out and and it kind of like went off. It sold very well and won a prize. I couldn't believe it. I dunno what I thought. I can hardly remember. But it was very surprising to everybody, and a lot of people said, oh, this isn't a novel, she's just published a diary. We were, I guess, at that stage a bit lagging in the in the sort of progress of what could be called a novel. So and of course, I had “just published my diary” But I had done a hell of a lot of work on it as well.
I got quite sort of snake-y and I would say, well, of course it's a novel, how dare you? But then now, years later, I say, yeah, okay, it's based on a diary. Every character in it is based on a real person. The guy who was a junkie survived, it took him a couple of years, but he got off it, and he's got kids and grandchildren now. So, in a sense, it had a happy ending. But, he said to me quite recently, “you know, I think looking back, you should should have called us all by our real names. So he doesn't have any hard feelings about it.
But I think there was a very snotty feeling about women's diaries back then. People thought, oh, they're just, it's just sort of over emotional outpouring, and it's really tedious and, and narcissistic. But I am a great fan of the diary, I think, as a sort of lifesaving. People talk about it as journaling these days, which irritates me for some reason, but it’s a perfectly legitimate way of keeping yourself balanced and not going crazy, and understanding what's happening to you and understanding yourself. I think the diary is a wonderful thing as a phenomenon.
Isn't all writing trying to understand something? You're looking for an answer.
Not even for an answer. You're sometimes just looking for the question.
In college I had to read Joan Didion's essay on journaling (in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”)and it made me like the idea of getting down your daily thoughts and your memories. It can be vital later in life.
Also it's a great training if you wanna be a writer. It's the best sort of training because it's just a daily practice of putting sentences together and I think that's how I sort of taught myself to write better because I don't sit down and just kind of rave on. I sit down and I write in proper sentences. With a diary, you've got the raw material there. You don't have to go looking for the material because it's your daily life and some people don't find that their daily life interesting enough to write a diary about it or it's too scrambled for them to get a handle on without freaking out.
There is an evolution to your writing. You mentioned you took things from writers previously, and I'm wondering what are the things you were taking? Who were you taking from? I can see the Janet Malcolm influence.
Her influences her was pretty late in my life.
I feel like Janet Malcolm gets a lot of fame for “The Journalist and the Murderer”, but the psychology books are just as fascinating. And the later murder trial books, I think they're even better. And even her way f approaching journalism starts to change. And it seems like with “This House of Grief”, there is a lot of that in there.
I learned a lot from her. I read her all along. I mean, I started with Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
Which was an early one of hers.
It wasn't until years later that I actually went into psychoanalytic psychotherapy myself, but it gave me a sort of handle on the whole thing. It gave me a handle on all that. But I, followed all her books as they came out, and I found what I think of is the psychoanalytic approach to observing other people's behavior. I learned a lot from that. For example, I, I think when I read that book about hers, about the biographies of Sylvia Plath, that's when I noticed most strongly how she will fearlessly interpret somebody's behavior and body language and turn of speech in ways that I realized that I had been holding back from doing. The sort of things she noticed I also would notice in a situation, but I used to feel — before I saw what she did with it — I was kind of constrained by some sort of feeling that it would be going too far to do what she did. I was always holding back and then I saw what she did, and thought, I'm just gonna let this rip. Then I started to really enjoy myself.
There's a scene in a book I wrote called “The First Stone”, which got me into a lot of trouble because it took a position on current feminism back in the 90s, which was very unpopular among younger feminists. I was blasted for that book. But there's a scene in it where I was interviewing an old, retired lawyer, and he knew everything about this college scandal that I was trying to write about. He was at home in his large suburban house and I went out there to interview him and we were sitting there having a conversation and, like the lawyer he was, he was talking a lot without actually saying anything. At a certain point there was a cuckoo clock on the wall and a little cuckoo stuck its head out and struck the hour. He said, “11 o'clock, let's have a coffee.” He went out to the kitchen and came back with a tray, and on the tray there's a little screw top jar containing some homemade biscuits or cookies. He opens it up and serves the coffee. I take a biscuit and it's the most perfect biscuit I'd ever eaten in my life. We talked a while and I went back and I took another biscuit, and then I went back and took a third one. At that point, he got up from his chair, walked across the room to the table, and put the lid back on the jar and screwed it on and went back to his seat. As he was returning to his seat, he said to me, “oh, I didn't do that to keep you out of there.” And I thought, yes, you did. That, for me, was a perfect Janet Malcolm moment because basically what he was saying was, “you can take as many briskets as you like, but you’ll never know what I have got and what I've got I'm not giving you. I'm putting a lid back on it now.”
The meaning of that would've dimly occurred to me if I hadn't read Janet Malcolm. But having read Janet Malcolm, I thought, wow, that is the most symbolic piece of behavior that I've just witnessed.
Well, it's something you often take a note of as a journalist, and then leave to the side because It's not something you can prove. Your newspaper editor is not going let you put that in.
Yeah, I guess that's true, isn't it?
All my working life I made a living between books by doing freelance journalism. That's how I I managed in life because you can't live on books in Australia. The population's too small. I did a lot of freelance journalism and a lot of interviewing and going into strange situations and coming back with a story, that kind of thing. So I've always had a great respect for nonfiction. I love it. It kind of thrills me the fact that as a journalist you get into places that you would never normally. Do you find that as a journalist, that you've got that privileged access to situations that are closed to most people?
I wouldn't say privileged access. I would say I pay attention to things a little differently. I think anybody can get access to almost anything, but…
You think so?
Yeah. People are just not willing to ask.
Yeah, that's true. You haven't got the nerve to ask loudly.
I was and I still am a pretty shy person, but as soon as I started working in journalism, it seems to unlock this feeling, oh, I'll just ask a question. My wife will get mad at me. because I won't ask people things in our daily lives— I won't like push somebody on something— but as soon as I have to do my job, I'm like, I can push you, this is fine. It's not the privilege, but it is this feeling it unlocks in you. And I think because I'm shy, I've always been uncomfortable, so being in an uncomfortable situation doesn't bother me.
I suppose I'm thinking even about simply about courts.
Do you like the courts?
I adore courts. What I was thinking of was situations when, at the beginning of this part of our conversation, when we were talking about situations that journalism gives you a privileged access to, I didn't realize, like most people, that anybody can walk into a court and sit down.
I thought when I first went into a court, at any minute now someone's gonna come up and tap me on the shoulder and say, “ who the hell do you think you are? Get out.” But and then of course this is a democracy, and the courts are open and I'm a citizen and it's my right to come in here. I was thunderstruck by, this revelation.
I mean, you see old people in courts, retired people, and that's what they do. They go to courts all the time. That that's how they entertain themselves in their old age. I thought, you know, they're actually really interesting people to talk to because they notice all the things that a journalist hasn't got time to notice because they're working so fast.
I love courts because even the boring parts of trials don't bore me. I'm so fascinated by the enormous machine of the law and how it's well motivated, but it often goes right off the rails, or something crazy in the process derails the whole thing. I sort of love the law because life is so terrible and we are so cruel to each other, and there's so much misunderstanding between human beings and to watch decent lawyers and a decent judge handling somebody's terrible story is greatly moving to me. I find it quite, quite wonderful and sort of elevating in some way.
Your point about going to courts for the first time, I think that's how I approach journalism a lot of times. A lot of people don’t realize you can do that.
Exactly. And something I found in journalism is a lot of people cannot believe that anyone is interested in their work. I'm not talking about lawyers so much because a lot of them are sort of vain and they're performative and and laying it on. But I remember once I spent a week in a hospital and I was following a a gynecologist — a young woman — around in her work. I sort of hung around in the hospital. I could go anywhere I wanted to. I realized I am almost totally not bored. I mean a guy bashed my ear in there for half an hour about how angry he was about the way they built the shelves in his office. And I was completely gripped by his account of shelf placement. Normally I couldn't give a shit about where the shelves are, but there's something about his emotional response to the shelves that was deeply fascinating to me.
I find, I find that all the time. I'm not sure if I still would, but I think I probably would because people are so sort of delicate. I love to see how people fight their way through those moods and keep going.
How did this thing with Pantheon happen?
My publisher in Australia Michael Heyward and his company Text Publishing, which has been publishing me in Australia for quite some years now, he went around talking about my work at all book fairs in Frankfurt and places like that. I think he got it in his head that he was gonna get me published outside Australia, and there was was an auction and Pantheon bought my backlist. He also sold it into the U.K. But I what's happening here now is the very first phase of this process that he set in motion. So he's the person I've got to thank for this.
Were you you taken back by the process and this happening all of a sudden?
Absolutely. He said to me, “I'm gonna get you into America.” And I sort of thought, oh, yeah, whatever. I'm a grandmother and I'm still writing and publishing, but I never had the ambition to get out there. I mean, I'm thrilled to be. I'm excited and happy about it now, but it was never something I thought was on the cards.
So I'm still completely staggered that it's happened. And that it's happened so late in life that it, I don't know what it means.
It means, you know, enjoy life, I guess, right?
That's what people keep saying to me. My friends keep saying, “oh, for God's sake, stop complaining, this is the most wonderful thing and enjoy it.” But it's not my nature to sort of, to simply enjoy things.
I don't think you would be a writer if you simply enjoyed things.
I must say that's one thing Joan Didion said. She described writers as lonely, anxious rearranges of things. I thought that was terrific.