You never have the sense of an ending when you are writing about a living subject.
DEIRDRE BAIR, ‘IN SEARCH OF THE REAL SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’ (1992)
Why do books of letters move us as biographies do not? When we are reading a book of letters, we understand…the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience.
JANET MALCOLM, ‘A HOUSE OF ONE’S OWN’ (1995)
Garner is famous for her letters, postcards and, more recently, emails and texts. Her richly varied forms of communication populate the archives of writers across the country and the world. As a twenty-year-old, Helen joked to Axel Clark: ‘One day these letters will be famous—“The Life, Loves and Letters of Helen Ford”.’ She envisaged neither her fame nor that Axel would keep and later archive her early correspondence. Despite giving me permission, Garner was troubled to think that I had read her early private epistles, because she continues to feel guilt for her youthful narcissism and personal failures. For my part, I was struck by the consistency of her voice and imaginative drive over five decades. The letters confirm that from her undergraduate days Helen sought to understand herself and her relationships primarily through reading and writing. Her lived and imaginative worlds were inextricably intertwined from the start.
Garner has had a handful of letters to editors published. In 1994 she wrote to Quadrant, defending Manning Clark’s kindness and generosity. She suggested that Peter Ryan—who had written an angry essay about Clark’s histories—should moderate his tone in order to engage in reasoned debate. In September 1995 she sent a brief response to the reports about Jenna Mead’s Sydney Institute address to the Age, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. Then in February 2002, she signed a joint letter to the Age, along with Peter Carey, David Malouf, Tim Winton, David Williamson, Tom Keneally and Richard Flanagan, protesting mandatory detention for refugees. The writers pleaded for ‘more compassionate practices’, asserting that the ‘the issue of this policy—hatred, scapegoating and denial of human rights—threatens to corrode the soul of our nation’.
In 2010 Garner was one of five women invited as part of a Women of Letters event to ‘pen a letter to the night they’d rather forget’, and to perform that letter at Melbourne’s Trades Hall. She did not follow the brief. Instead, she wrote a series of fragmentary notes to people, living and dead, hoping they would ‘add up to one big letter’: ‘The Letter I Wish I’d Written’. Garner wrote to her grandfather, to some old family friends and to her science teacher. She addressed a lonely old woman with whom she briefly shared a bench in the Carlton Gardens in 1969, her grandmother who gave her a typewriter when she was fourteen but from whom she was later estranged, a classmate from her daughter’s primary school and the manager of the Fitzroy Baths. In the final pieces, she wrote to the now accomplished Muslim doctor who kissed her on a summer evening in 1957 at Ocean Grove and concluded with ‘a thankyou letter’ to her husbands.
Garner thanks her first husband for giving her ‘a new name, a daughter, and grandchildren’; her second for teaching her to ‘speak a language I had only ever known in books’. To Murray Bail she states: ‘you scared the shit out of me with a painful but somehow awesome demonstration of what an artist will do to clear the decks for work’. She admits that in the marriages there was ‘a lot of misery’, but she is grateful that each husband gave her ‘a completely fresh gift of laughter’. She seeks mutual forgiveness before bestowing a blessing on her husbands and offering that there is no longer anything to forgive.
In ‘The Letter I Wish I’d Written’, Garner acknowledges the sometimes painful truth about her quick-tempered spontaneity and regrets that her thoughtlessness and self-absorption precluded moments of kind companionship. The letter affirms her desire to make amends. Yet she also writes that she will never forgive herself for not having been attuned sufficiently to the suffering or loneliness of others. I asked two people who have known Garner for over forty years about her shame for past actions or omissions. Raimond Gaita judged Garner’s self-interrogation to be ‘absolutely proper’. The way in which she continues to say ‘this is what I did’, and to feel remorse for it, he explained, is evidence of her deeply ethical nature. David Malouf, approaching the question from a literary rather than philosophic viewpoint, speculated that perhaps Garner regretted not being sufficiently self-reflexive in her youth.
In 2005 Sara Dowse asked Garner how she would like to be remembered. Knowing that it might sound ‘trivial’, she replied: ‘I would like people to remember me as someone who was fun to be with…I’d like people to miss me when I’m gone and think, God we used to laugh, we used to dance.’ She said that she would love to know that something she wrote made her reader laugh. Laughter, she explained, ‘is some kind of deep erotic connection you can make with people’.
Garner’s friends and family attest that while she can be self-absorbed, impatient and ‘a real pain in the arse’, she is also open, playful and funny. Helen Elliott identifies ‘a fundamental lightness and loveliness in her…A sort of tenderness towards the world similar to that shown by George Herbert, with whom she identifies.’ Catherine Ford captures a sense of shared sisterly humour when she writes of Garner’s importance in her life: ‘Beloved sister, mentor, texting buddy, fellow member of an important club dedicated to raising awareness about the totally suss and utterly overblown national appreciation of Nicole Kidman’s acting chops.’ James Button delights in how Garner’s correspondence abounds with ‘jokes, shouts of excitement or fury, snatches of writing she has loved and expressions of fellow feeling’.
The ways in which Garner will be remembered by readers are still unfolding. She should be remembered as a brilliant stylist. As a writer who has taught us how to see and feel the texture of the everyday, natural world. As a champion of interior lives and the domestic sphere. As a writer prepared to journey into the heart of trauma, absorb the darkness she finds and transform it, often at great personal cost, for the reader. As a writer who dissects gender relations and the complexity of human emotions and motivations, as a boundary-crosser who has redefined and shaped literary genres to accommodate her material.
In the mid-1990s the controversy surrounding The First Stone was one of a number of political and cultural events that sparked much discussion about the role of public intellectuals in Australian life. In 1997 Robert Dessaix conducted a series of interviews with noted commentators for Radio National, later publishing an edited collection, Speaking their Minds: Intellectuals and The Public Culture in Australia. Garner featured on radio and in print. Dessaix modified Stanley Fish’s basic definition of a public intellectual for Australian conditions. Garner fitted the bill:
an independent thinker and performer who, working from some core area of expertise, takes as his or her subject issues related to the public good…and, by the grace of the media and an outstanding ability to communicate with many publics…has the attention of a considerable segment of educated Australia. And denies it.
Garner absolutely denies the title. Yet in March 2005 the Sydney Morning Herald ranked her eighth in its list of the top 100 Australian living public intellectuals. She was one of three women included in the top ten, along with Germaine Greer and Inga Clendinnen.
Garner has never made any secret of the disappointment she experiences when her books miss out on literary prizes. She says that she has grown a thicker skin since publishing The First Stone, but she continues to be sensitive to negative criticism or to any impression that her work, particularly her nonfiction, may be overlooked. In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize for the body of her nonfiction work. She felt tremendous validation knowing that her ‘three big tormentuous non-fiction works’ had been recognised as literature. Back in 2004, however, she was ‘stung’ when Joe Cinque’s Consolation, which she cared about deeply and had worked so hard to write, did not seem to ‘meet with literary favour’. When some critics insisted, four years later, that The Spare Room was not a novel, Garner withdrew for a time from the literary world. ‘I stopped going to festivals and launching other people’s books and writing cover endorsements.’ She built for herself ‘a weird lonely but free space’ outside of Australia’s writing culture and she felt that in order to keep functioning she had to stay out there. Nam Le, discussing Garner’s ‘straight-on grace and crazy generosity’, captures this sense of Garner as a lonely observer:
It’s hard to overstate how much she’s helped other writers, by action as well as example, and yet, in the best way, she’s not really ‘part’ of the writing community—she’s in it but not of it. I think of Helen somewhat as a totem pole on our local landscape: silent, upright, observant, acceptant of every manner of meaning, drawing weather and copping shit but still there, outlasting it all, just there.
In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James employs the metaphor of the house of fiction, with its many and varied shaped windows and balconies, to describe how the artist, at some remove, perceives ‘his’ world and shapes that unique perception into a particular literary form. Garner, notebook and pen always at the ready, has lived her adult life as James’ watcher. The image of her cycling through Fitzroy and Carlton, sitting in court or conversing around her kitchen table may seem far removed from James’ disembodied ‘pair of eyes’ watching the world through ‘a field-glass’. One would not readily think to paint a portrait of Garner ‘perched aloft’, peering through an aperture in a ‘dead wall’, and yet she has been offering just such an image of herself. Remember what she has told us about her sense of detachment, her constant struggle to find the appropriate form for her material, her dismissal of the artificial boundaries of genre? The rooms in Garner’s house of writing are far more carefully crafted and connected than they may appear.
When we read Garner’s work together as an organic whole, we can appreciate more fully how Garner writes about her experiences, which, as Philip Roth argues, takes us a long way to understanding why she writes about them.
There can be no sense of an ending to a study of a writer still in full creative flight. I now find it impossible to answer Heyward’s question about what I consider to be the most significant book in Garner’s oeuvre. The ways in which Garner’s writing and life interweave, shape each other and send out rhizomic connections to other writing, writers and readers, suggest to me that her life and work whisper, worry, laugh and sing to each other. Garner’s work is not ‘one book’ of what she makes of her world and her life as she has lived it; rather her work and her life are perhaps best thought of as a complex, sometimes discordant, always modulating musical score.
Indeed, in the course of my final edits to this manuscript I was surprised to learn of a new interest Garner was pursuing. Hilary McPhee suggested I ask Garner about their small reading group. I assumed this was the group, now in its fifth year, that had tackled the great works of Western literature. I emailed Garner: ‘Do you have another tale to tell me?’ She replied:
The new group: It happened like this: one day Hil was sad because she wasn’t in a reading group. I said, How about we start one? She goes, OK, what’ll we read? HG: How about poetry? How about the Sonnets? HMcP: Ooh yes, but wait – how about the psalms? HG Fabulous – who’ll we invite to join? Hilary suggested Peter and Colin. HG: OK you invite them, let’s meet on Monday at yr place. I’ll bring my King James bible.
She emails: the blokes are keen and would love to do the psalms.
A week later at 7 pm we rock up to her place with a ragtag bunch of bibles—three old King James, the Book of Common Prayer, and my Jerusalem Bible which I thought might be useful because of the footnotes. Hil has a fire going in the living room and a tray of cheese & biscuits and two bottles of wine one white one red.
I refrain from laying down the no-drinking rule that we have in the Milton/Homer/Virgil/now Shakespeare group I also belong to. Someone says, ‘We’ve never been in a reading group—how do you do it?’ HG: ‘Well, one person starts reading and goes for a while and then the next one takes over, and so on round the ring.’ I forget who started, anyway away we go, ripped into Psalm one changing every few verses. Then we read a whole psalm each. After half an hour Hilary says, ‘we’re going too fast, I can’t absorb it, could we read each one twice?’ great idea. We do this, with profit. An hour later we spontaneously look up and start talking about what we’re reading. Peter knows a lot about different translations and the history of how and when they happened…At the next meeting, a fortnight later, I bring the Revised Standard Version and someone comes up with the brilliant idea: to read each psalm in four different translations: Peter the KJV, Hil the Book of Common Prayer, me the Jerusalem, and Colin the Revised Standard. This works so well we’re completely bowled over. And fascinated by the different takes on the same text—the feel of the translators’ struggles.
What I notice is how our immersion in a (mighty) text brings everyone to his (or her) best self. Everyone becomes serious. We read as well as we can, slowly and carefully until we get the hang of it, stopping and going back a verse when we haven’t quite grasped it.
Is that a story?
Helen