Love & Death
The Age
Friday March 28, 2008
Author Helen Garner on her new-found fascination with death, being a grandmother and living next door to Alice (Garner). By Peter Craven.
"I'm very interested in death," says Helen Garner, starting to explain the motivation for her new novel, The Spare Room. "I have had five people who were very dear to me die in the last seven or eight years. I found out a lot about the way people approach the course of death." She continues: "It's about not pretending that it hasn't happened. It's also about how the person you care about can be a pain in the arse. By the time of the third death we went through, we got good at the eulogies. I came to realise that you had to acknowledge what someone was actually like. Everything that was good about someone and what was awful too. The older I get the more I hate bullshit and the more I hate timidity." In The Spare Room, Garner writes about a woman who attempts for a few weeks to look after a dear friend, a woman who is dying of cancer. The novel is in part about the pain of watching someone die, someone who won't accept the fact that it's happening, and someone else who cares for them and who is engulfed in pain and rage and all kinds of indecorous emotions as a consequence. It is also an act of homage to the friend Garner fictionalises as "Nicola" in the book, a sparkling, vivacious, upper-class bohemian who becomes a spectre, at once heart-rending and infuriating. "What I learned as a consequence of seeing people I loved as they were dying is that all sorts of emotions overtake you that you make an effort to suppress and which distort everything," says Garner. That's one reason why she presents The Spare Room as a novel, but then she also - no doubt to the bewilderment of many readers - proceeds to call the carer character "Helen". The fictional self-portrait is, as is usual with Garner, far from flattering, and it also breaks the taboo about what can happen when a dear friend or loved one has to endure the spectacle of someone else dying. "Because I can't be the only person who's felt those things," she says, "I had to work very hard not to soften the image. I was constantly forcing myself to go back and to be tougher." She looks up and says, "I come out of this looking really bad. I wanted to put those feelings out there. So they could be recognised and embraced." Death has certainly been on the 65-year-old's mind. She talks about a dream she had: "I was going to die in 10 minutes time and I had only that time in which to do something and I thought, all right, what do I want to do. I decided that the one thing I wanted to do was tell Alice (Garner's daughter) how much I loved her. It was like a movie and a door opened and Alice was there. And I thought to myself then that I didn't have to tell her how much I loved her because she already knew. I didn't have to say it. And when I realised that I felt so full of joy." It seems to sum up the central fact of her daily existence: mother and daughter are so close they live next door to each other. Garner may be famous in Melbourne for her portrait of Fitzroy in Monkey Grip, but her home is now in Flemington in the inner west, next to her daughter and her three grandchildren. "I love it, with its rather curvy streets and the way you can feel it dropping away towards the Maribyrnong River. It's very beautiful. There are enormous slopes and there's a sense of grass. It's a place of grasslands almost stretching down to the mighty Keilor Plains and in the evening you can smell the grass on the air." She is also rapt about the way she lives next door to Alice and her husband. "It's less like being a neighbour and more like living together but having separate quarters." She's almost dreamy. "I think everybody who gets on with their parents should live with them. It's a very enriching thing for both sides. It makes family life a bit less crazy. As a grandmother if there's some commotion you can always take one of the kids out of it to ease the situation." She laughs about her life in Melbourne and the fact she once said that in Melbourne she had committed outrages on every street corner. No, it's more that this is the landscape where she became herself. "I lived in Sydney long enough to know that I didn't belong there, even though I had some happy years there. I understand Melbourne in a historic sense. My early self was formed here. I didn't come to Melbourne until I was 17" - she was a country girl, schooled in Geelong - "and when I did, I felt as if I'd died and gone to heaven. I can still remember the gorgeous dinging of the trams that sounded like bells." Why, then, did she burn her early diaries, the raw material (with whatever degree of fictional transformation) behind her first novel, Monkey Grip? "They were just so boring!" she says. "So I made a fire of (the diaries) up until 1980 when I came back from France. That's when other people came flooding in and they became more interesting. It was just so tiresome getting nothing but what I thought and said." She has kept her diaries since, however. "I don't need to know what to do with them. They're just a form of practising, the way a real musician is relaxed when he practises on his instrument. They're pleasant work. I could still burn the lot of them. We'll see. They will certainly never appear until I'm dead. It would simply be too embarrassing." No one, least of all Garner, has ever denied that her fiction, alongside her non-fiction, has always derived from life. This is the woman who used the breakdown of one of her marriages as the basis for the script of the Gillian Armstrong film The Last Days of Chez Nous, in which the main players (herself, her sister, her former husband) are recognisable to anyone who knew the story.Nor does she deny that The Spare Room is based on real events, but she emphasises not only the compression and rearrangement and invention, but that this new book was born out of a sense of liberty that meant she felt her primary obligation was to the form in which she told the story. "You know when you write non-fiction you feel a tremendous sense of constraint not to violate the contract you have with the people who have told you their stories." Garner has in her time endured barrages of controversy for her non-fiction books, which are written from her point of view and with the drama of her feelings and opinions very much present. The First Stone - the story of the Ormond College affair, in which a number of young women accused the Master of groping them - polarised readers because of the degree of sympathy Garner brought to all the players who spoke to her (the girls had refused). In 2004, she wrote Joe Cinque's Consolation, the story of how a young woman of Indian background had killed her boyfriend, and her subsequent trial as it unfolded before the eyes of Helen Garner, who sometimes represented herself as burned up with a desire for vengeance and who is always, throughout the book, in deepest sympathy with the Italian mama who weeps for her son and will not be comforted. In both accounts, the narrator - the Garner figure - is often represented in an unflattering light, and it is possible to admire the power and complexity of those books without agreeing with what she is saying at any given moment. Garner has always been a writer who loves the drama and the spectacle of conflict. For now, however, she has written a remarkable book about the pity and terror of two women, one dying, one caring. One version of Helen Garner is in that book - the berserk, bewildered one. But the woman who looks at me across the table is not like that. She's still absolutely young in manner - still a passionate one-time hippie - but she is also a master of language, who is aware of having come a long way. "I'm really very happy," she says. "It's funny this late in life to have landed on my feet." (m)The Spare Room is published by Text Publishing on April 7 ($29.95)
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