Mark Rubbo interviews Helen Garner
Mark Rubbo talks with Helen Garner about her new book, Everywhere I Look, a collection of her short non-fiction pieces.
What drew you to reportage?
I was faced with an immediate need to make a living, after I got the sack from teaching in 1972. Also, it has always felt natural. It suits me. It gets me into places and situations that I would otherwise be too shy to broach.
I remember asking Peter Carey once whether he drew on real life for his characters and stories, and him replying indignantly that he made everything up, that’s what a novelist did. Your novels draw on real experiences. Were they a progression to what you are doing now?
I’ve noticed that some people (I don’t mean Peter!) have a rather primitive idea of what ‘making something up’ actually is. An aggressive journalist who was interviewing me once thrust a copy of my novel The Spare Room in my face and said, ‘Where’s the imagination in this?’ Naturally I wanted to throttle her but I said ‘It starts here’ (pointing to page 1) ‘and it goes all the way to here,’ (pointing to the last page). She looked even more irritated, if that were possible. Later I wished I’d drawn her attention to the difference between ‘imagination’, without which nothing in the world could ever be done, and ‘invention’, which is what I think she meant – making things up from scratch. How would that even be possible? We live in a material world. We’re surrounded, and formed, by people and things and landscapes and happenings. We swim in a bath of experience; it soaks us through and through. Where would you be standing, if you were making everything up?
You refer a couple of times to Janet Malcolm, about how she was very critical of The First Stone, yet you were thrilled just by the fact that she’d read your work. How has she influenced you in your writing – are there others who have had an impact?
She’s been an enormous influence on me. She’s the power skater I followed on the rink when I was first trying to get to my feet on the ice. I was in love with the way she casually dug her blades in and surged forward without apparent effort. Reading her, I saw what liberties I could take with my observations – how I could interpret them. She showed me what nerve was – what in music they call ‘attack.’ I should also mention Raymond Carver as an influence, back in the ’80s – or maybe it was his savage editor, Gordon Lish – how to have as little as possible on the page, and make it work really hard.
I loved the collection; how did you choose what to include?
I tried to have no mercy on stuff I thought was feeble or boring or lazy.
A couple of sections of Everywhere I Look are diary entries, so obviously you keep a diary. Have you always done so and how important is it to your work?
I’ve kept a diary every day of my adult life. That’s where I put in my 10,000 hours. It’s like practising a sport, or a musical instrument. I write in an exercise book with a fountain pen. It’s never a duty – I love it. It’s how I taught myself to take risks – to sling subordinate clauses around and make them hover.
How did you decide what diary excerpts to include? Some bits, especially about your grandchildren, are quite personal.
Personal? Personal’s what I do! Same principle: I picked the bits that felt most alive, and let the rest die on the vine.
You are quite frank about your personal life – your abortions, your marriages, your affairs, your clothes, your hair – and write about it. You, your feelings, your reactions are very much present in your work. For me that makes your work very powerful, but do you ever feel you reveal too much or regret it?
Do people really think I’m revealing everything? What you learn in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is that there’s no bottom to what you know, and what you’ve learnt. It goes down and down and down. And sideways too.
Often you reach conclusions or opinions about things that are contrary to the ‘liberal’ point of view that many of your readers probably expect. I’m thinking here, for example of The First Stone, and your view of Robert Farquharson and men in similar situations. Why is that, do you think (if you agree with me) – does it worry you?
I don’t get up ‘liberal’ people’s noses on purpose, although some hyper-vigilant young feminists seem to think I do. I try to approach situations with as open a mind as I’m capable of. I think carefully about what I’m seeing, and I examine as ruthlessly as I can what I’m feeling about it. And then I try to make sense of it, or to shape it into something that will interest other people, using the intellectual and psychological tools that a life of watching people and talking and thinking and reading has given me.
You write, ‘I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who…burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.’ Is that something that’s been with you a long time? When did it become so important to you that you pursued the Joe Cinque trial?
I don’t remember. I do know that when I first sat down in a court where a criminal trial was in progress, I knew within twenty minutes that I was finally in a place where all the different parts of me could work in concert. I don’t really get this feeling anywhere else. And it never goes away.
A lot of the pieces in the book have appeared in publications like the Monthly. How do you choose what to write about, or are they commissions?
Usually I get an idea and ask if a magazine’s interested. I don’t like commissions much, though once in a while one might pop up and grab me.
A number of the pieces refer to your friendships with other writers, most notably Elizabeth Jolley and Tim Winton. Would you be friends if they weren’t writers? Are you influenced by other writers, do you influence them?
I don’t know who influences me, among Australian writers. We’re all struggling to work out of the same little patch, so we’re more inclined to defend ourselves against each other’s work than to be influenced by it. I met Tim and Elizabeth – she’d dead now, of course, and I miss her – in literary situations, but we didn’t talk about writing. We took a shine to each other, that’s all. We made each other laugh. Then, because we lived on opposite sides of the country, we had to write each other hundreds of letters, to keep the laughter going.
You’ve deservedly received two major prizes that recognise your work as whole, The Melbourne Prize and most recently The Windham-Campbell Prize. Is there a piece of your work that you are most proud of, and, if so, why?
I don’t know about ‘most’, but right now I’m proud of a story in Everywhere I Look that’s about our heeler at home. It’s called ‘Red Dog: a Mutiny’. I like dogs. Once, in high school, I was given a copy of Jack London’s book White Fang as a prize. I don’t think I ever got over it.
