Helen Garner's 'How to End a Story'

In search of lost Australian times

In my late twenties a friend’s parents divorced. You know what’s amazing? he said. It doesn’t change. They’re still as petty as teenagers. I recalled that reading Helen Garner’s diaries.

“One day somebody will want me. Somebody will need me.” Ghastly to read that from a woman in her mid-fifties. I assumed (naively it seems) that eventually those sorts of needs are satisfied. She is endlessly tormented by physical insecurity. The lifelong curse of plainness. No respite, even by your fifties. There is none of the cackle or misplaced cocksureness one reads in, say, Germaine Greer. Just the honest reckoning of a middle-Australian woman in middle age. The hopes and pangs and aspirations of a woman muddling through. She is matter of fact about the bottomless egotism of men. She doesn’t castigate, she just notices. She may be surprised or befuddled or angered by it, but her modest personality takes the black hole of male egotism in stride and seeks to accommodate it as a fact of life. This kind of noticing makes her portrait of her failing marriage devastating, inscribing it with a kind of universality. The banality of marital decline.

The sprinkling of Proust is charming and a little ironic — not because she’s out of her depth, but because Proust’s Parisian languor rubs against her self-consciously state school accent. Self-denigration is her posture, not ours; we don’t wince when she drops Virgil mid-conversation in the mean streets of Bondi Junction.

Partly because there’s a steeliness to her. You can sense it beneath the surface. Sometimes it erupts. She shot her own cat with a .410 bore shotgun, relieved that the birds in her yard were finally safe from it. (Is this some sort of self-flagellating environmentalist boomer thing?) Underneath her “doughy features” and middle-Australian manner lies a woman as wrathful as any other when wronged. She does not go gently out of this marriage, she blasts her way out. For her, marriage is a cosmic struggle. She is Jacob wrestling with the angel: she demands her husband’s blessing before she'll let him go. I will not let you go until you bless me.

Garner’s portrait of male egotism is compelling. He hates it when she cries. He’s petulant when he’s not asked about himself. Getting him to speak on the phone’s like pulling teeth. He’s a recluse and a curmudgeon. Manipulative. Resents her family. Nothing they ever argue about is about that thing but always about something else entirely. The foul shroud that clogs their home as they silently clash. The small acts of kindness that melt it away. Constant lies, big and small, destabilise and derange her. “Oh… but that is what men always do to women. And I wonder if they have any idea of the damage it causes,” her friend tells her. She withers under his auspices, aged before her time. She craves society, dance, laughter. He just wants to watch Conan the Barbarian.

There is something grotesque about the love affairs and yearnings and bickerings and jealousies and inadequacies of middle and old age. What is salacious and colourful and riveting in youth sours with age.¹

I was reminded of Warren Mundine’s autobiography. A middle-Australian life encrusted with life’s tribulations by the twilight of middle age. Similarly honest and painful at times. Garner is haunted by her two abortions. She believes she killed her children, but she doesn’t regret it. Why did I have my tubes tied, she castigates herself. Her ex is a gay ex-junkie, a waif haunted by the AIDS epidemic. Reminded me of Patti Smith’s hellish recollections of the grimy streets of New York, except Garner’s world tends to be grim by circumstance and not in her landscape. In fact, her world brims with Australia’s paradise and the everyday majesty of Sydney life: the galahs and the wrens, the jacarandas and the surf. Swimming at the Andrew Boy Charlton. Hers is a very local flavour, of Elizabeth Bay and Bondi Junction and Darlinghurst. Right down to the small ways Jews permeate parts of Sydney’s Eastern suburbs life. Garner has a close Jewish friend. She watches an infant playing with its father’s Orthodox Jewish beard.

Suicide stalks the outskirts of her world. She’d never consider it, she insists to her concerned friends. But she tells us suicides have overtaken murders. Maybe it’s a guy thing. A cute anecdote:

A woman’s husband travels a lot for his work. In his pocket while doing the washing she finds a phone number and calls it. A woman answers. Turns out he has a second domestic establishment on the other side of the country. They agree to confront him. When he gets back to whichever house he’s due at, he finds both women sitting at the kitchen table. He looks at them: ‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘Right. Just let me have a shower.’ He goes into the bathroom and shoots himself.

Her recollections are a cultural time machine. In the nineties when she was going through all this mess I was a kid, alive somewhere else at the same time, experiencing the same things in a totally different way. Seinfeld. Flubber. Princess Diana. The Titanic. Parts of her experience are of a vanishing Australia: the joy of church hymns, buying a record at an op shop. She describes the pleasure in writing on a computer for the first time.

One dismal thing: the wretched poverty of writers, even famous and acclaimed ones, even “Australia’s greatest living writer” (according to The Guardian). Occasionally Garner draws the contours of Australian classes:

Two old ladies stood beside us, laughing like schoolgirls at the fashionable people inside their wire enclosure, the merciless women with hard, thin lips and ambitious eyes.

But her memoirs make one thing very clear: one really does write despite the money. The stupid squabbles and snobbery of that circle. The smallness of the writer’s material life. Garner lives in a flat. She catches the bus and votes Labor. Even her audiobook is an ABC production. Does that say she’s destined for obscurity? To die last among Australia’s decrepit literary set? Better than most of us can hope for.

1. Yes you can clobber me over the head with this in a few decades.