A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, Orlando (1928)
In the cover image of Everywhere I Look Garner stands centred. She looks directly into the camera lens. Once the full cover is opened, however, she shifts to one side of a group of people. Suburban life appears to go on around her. In the essays and diary extracts that make up this collection, Garner is a shifting presence, observing from both the centre of the action and from a distance. In most entries, she stands behind the lens recording herself recording.
In his 2016 Sydney Writers’ Festival address, Julian Barnes touched on the relationship between photography, representation and biography. Admitting to his suspicion of biography, Barnes asked his prospective biographers to include the caveat: ‘This is not how I was. This is how I looked when I was being biographised.’ The biographer—or literary portraitist—interprets a life through her own imaginative, cultural and political filters. In crafting a coherent narrative, she chooses what to include, omit or emphasise. There are always alternative biographies of the same subject that might be written.
Everywhere I Look can be read as one possible biography of the writing persona that is Helen Garner. As always, Garner has carefully selected and arranged her pieces. Their publication dates, with one exception, span the sixteen years since she returned to Melbourne in 2000, but their content looks back to her childhood and through to the present day. Garner marks out her journey from a lonely, somewhat dislocated individual to a grounded, more confident woman surrounded by friends and family. Along the way she lets go a little of her ‘puritanical savagery’ and ‘defensive primness’. Throughout the entries she is gently chastised by friends and loved ones. More forcefully she castigates herself, but there is also a sense of deepening self-acceptance, even a cautious equilibrium.
Her publisher Michael Heyward proposed putting this collection together as a means of restoring Garner to balance after the battering she had taken writing This House of Grief. He was surprised by the speed with which she assembled the work. Perhaps the timing was perfect for this particular project. Garner and I had been discussing her life and work quite intensely over the previous year. In Everywhere I Look, Garner seizes control of her own representation. She sketches a series of self-portraits.
We see a woman revelling in sharing the lives of her treasured grandchildren. She enters into their games, dinks them home from the crèche, makes up stories and takes them seriously. We see a woman who dances alone in her kitchen. A ‘sopha’-leaping, vodka-slugging Austen fan. From a different angle, we meet a woman who befriends a lonely traveller, ladies on a suburban train and a hospital volunteer. We witness how acutely Garner observes and records her world, a world where Shostakovich and Dürer sit comfortably alongside Felix the Cat, Mad Men and Gary Cooper, and where children, movies, music, literature and politics are all woven together.
Garner offers two explicit images of herself. The first is as a sturdy, battle-scarred kitchen table. To a trained eye its damage is glaring; it is held together by ‘crudely jammed’ pieces of ‘raw’, splintered wood. In the right circumstances, however, the table radiates a ‘warm, dark glow’. And its cobbled construction lends it a certain strength. In her second portrait she is both the obstreperous, destructive brat and the obedient older sister from Supernanny: ‘aspects of myself…in their eternal struggle for dominance or recognition’.
In Everywhere I Look Garner offers three large excerpts from her diaries, the third previously unpublished. Polished, moving, witty and revealing, these snippets offer insights into her life, imagination and writing practice. Garner says that she does not regret burning her diaries for the years prior to 1980. The diaries she has kept since then are legendary, not least because no one has seen them. The New York-based literary anthology Freeman’s published ‘This Old Self’, another set of extracts, in August 2016. These spare, poetic diary fragments signal Garner’s command of yet another distinctive literary form.
The more humorous, outward-looking perspective that informs much of this collection stands in sharp contrast with the dark tone of This House of Grief. To date, reviewers have been rapturous in their response, commenting on the perfection and economy of Garner’s prose, the beauty, depth and honesty of her observations, the uniqueness of her voice and the sense of joy that infuse so many pieces. Anna Goldsworthy, in her review for the Monthly, concludes that Garner’s writing in Everywhere I Look ‘expresses a hard-won grace’. ‘It brings you closer to the world, and shows you how to love it.’ Felicity Plunkett writes warmly about the ‘tender, witty and whimsical’ nature of the work, while also acknowledging the ‘unsettling savagery’ of Garner’s moments of wrath. She identifies how ‘shame and admirable honesty [are] balanced against defiance’ in these moments. Shame, honesty and defiance structure this entire collection. As Garner grapples with each of them, she also articulates her sense of gratitude, need for atonement and increasing self-acceptance.
We meet again the terrifying Mrs Dunkley. Now a wiser, gentler Garner acknowledges more fully the debt she owes and the truth of Mrs Dunkley’s existence: ‘I saw you at last, my teacher: an intense, damaged, dreadfully unhappy woman, only just holding on, fronting up to the school each morning, buttoned into your black clothes, savagely impatient, craving, suffering: a lost soul.’ ‘Dear Mrs Dunkley’ was first published in 2011. So too were Garner’s tribute to Jacob Rosenberg, two diary extracts and ‘Suburbia’. At that time, she was mired in the darkness of the Farquharson trials. These pieces reflect her search for, and celebration of, moments of gratitude and grace. They form part of her larger declaration of thanks for the blessings of friendship and family.
In ‘Suburbia’ Garner re-examines her ‘bohemian contempt’ for her parents’ social world of the 1950s. Having discovered the benefits and satisfactions of suburban existence, she feels compelled ‘to speak up, now that it’s too late, for my parents, and my parents’ friends—those shy, modest, public-spirited people’. Age has afforded her a broader, more mellow perspective on her parents’ lives. In ‘Dreams of her Real Self’, Garner confesses to the barriers she erected between herself and her mother, and lacerates herself for them. She articulates how much she misses her mother and longs to atone for the cruelty she dealt her. Garner concludes ‘Dreams of her Real Self’ with the story of a photograph from 1943. She is six months old, ‘still an only child’, being nursed by her ‘strong’, capable mother, a woman not yet stricken with grief by the loss of her beloved brother to war: ‘She is my mother, and I am content to rest my head upon her breast.’ Back in 1992 Garner made a copy of this photo into a postcard and sent it to Peter Craven, thanking him for his review of Cosmo Cosmolino.
In the essay Garner also writes about her father’s difficult personality traits and mentions again that his mother died when he was only two. Some years earlier, she realised how profoundly that loss may have shaped him. When he showed her the 1915 Hopetoun Courier notice of his mother’s death, Garner spied a small article at the bottom of the page about ‘little Bruce Ford’ being taken to hospital with severe convulsions. He was treated with strychnine injections. The toddler had been literally convulsed with grief. In their eulogy for him, Bruce Ford’s children suggested that he may well have held on to that ‘deep and inconsolable sorrow’ for his whole life. They acknowledged: ‘He left us floundering, in frequent fits of shabby sibling rivalry and jealousy, in his long, cold lapses of attention and love.’ But they also celebrated his strength and their shared bond in loving him and each other.
Garner writes most of this collection from within her new configuration of family; she is the Nanna embraced by and embracing her daughter’s family next door. In ‘Before Whatever Else Happens’, however, she tempers the narrative of joy surrounding her grandchildren with a reflection on her early mothering years. Garner admits that she was competent and had a sense of humour but that she was not sufficiently adult. There is quiet regret, a coded apology. And heartfelt admiration: ‘But there she goes across the yard, my daughter. With her light firm step.’
Janet Malcolm, in her essay on her abandoned autobiography, writes: ‘Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness… The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins.’ In these self-portraits Garner neither forgives, nor justifies, the actions of her younger self but she does appear to ease up a little on her self-contempt. The ‘I’ of these pieces becomes increasingly assured and playful. The ‘white calico and paint’, once sufficient to project an acceptable veneer, has given way to a deeper confidence.
In March 2016 Garner told Phillip Adams that being older allowed her to ‘see all sides of a question’, and be less quick to judge. With experience, she said, ‘everything becomes richer and more interesting’. Garner revels in the liberation that age has brought her. She also admits to making ‘a pest of myself to some extent’. In ‘The Insults of Age’, Garner exchanges her ‘convalescent sofa’ for a night out. In Swanston Street she observes a ‘lanky white’ schoolgirl mocking and frightening women of Asian appearance. Garner is livid: ‘In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, “Give it a rest darling”.’ The startled girl runs off. Garner falls back in step with her companion. This essay stirred a familiar controversy. Some online posts applauded Garner’s takedown of a bully. Others decried her inappropriate use of violence to express her rage. Anecdotally, there was mention in some academic circles that Garner was once again too ready to attack young women.
Garner laughed out loud while writing the essay. It was, she said, the best fun she’d had in years. She wasn’t backing away from her actions one little bit. At the same time, she knew she had crossed a dubious line:
Everyone to whom I described the incident became convulsed with laughter, even lawyers, once they’d pointed out that technically I had assaulted the girl. Only my fourteen-year-old granddaughter was disapproving. ‘Don’t you think you should have spoken to her? Explained why what she was doing was wrong?’
Shortly after its publication Garner sent me a postcard depicting an irate Madame Hare confronting a cheeky young rabbit: ‘Did you pull my tail?’ On the back she had written: ‘So my attack had a literary precedent!’
In delivering the 2006 Judith Wright Memorial Lecture, the poet Fay Zwicky noted that the ‘personality of many writers has a built-in ambivalence, awkward for the writer to live with and equally difficult for the reader to understand’. She spoke of the struggle, begun early in a writer’s life, between ‘the need for privacy and the need for recognition’. She also suggested that for some writers the ‘desire to please the world fights the impulse to tell the world what’s wrong with it’. In conversation with Jennifer Byrne, Garner admitted that for a long time she, like Simone de Beauvoir before her, wrote ‘in order to be loved’. Experience has taught her to surrender some of that need. Hence there is a heightened sense of mischief—even delight—when she provocatively owns her opinions and examines her less appealing character traits in these essays.
The central ambivalence in Garner’s personality is the way that her powerful self-belief is married to a fragility fed by self-doubt. I interviewed many people in the course of assembling this literary portrait who spoke of Garner’s honesty and brutal self-examination. Her longtime friend and colleague Michael Gawenda identified a key, seemingly contradictory, aspect of Garner’s writerly persona:
Helen has the ability to be an intense observer of people including strangers even when she seems to be relaxed, even when she seems to be shy and reluctant to ask difficult and prying questions. She can seem, uncertain, tentative, but really, she knows exactly what she is doing. Helen has this capacity to make herself invisible, make people forget that she is examining them, listening to them, watching the way they look and sound. She is a ruthless and fearless writer.