fiction
Garnering Garner
Don Anderson
Helen Garner
My Hard Heart: Selected Fictions
Viking $22.95pb, 291pp, 0 670 87974 X
'When a woman realises that she hates Madame Bovary, darling girl,
that's when she knows she's come of age.'
WHAT DO WE TALK about when we talk about Helen Garner? About her writing, that is, about such a consummate novella as The
Children's Bach, about extraordinary stories such as 'A Vigil', in Cosmo
Cosmolino , about the eponymous 'Postcards from Surfers', and a dozen others?
We talk about domestic realism, we talk about fiction that encompasses
not merely the present supposedly self-obsessed Baby Boomer generation
but children and grandparents also, we talk about discipline, control, and
the assurance that more is less. We talk, despite her 'despair of
feeling trapped inside [my] own style' (in True Stories: Selected
Non-Fiction, 1996, from which my epigraph also is taken) , of a virtuoso
who hit her distinctive style early -- in Honour , say -- and has
progressively refined it to more and more subtle effect. We think of a
connoisseur of the moral and emotional life who renders these with
unflinching honesty, whatever the cost, whatever the pain, to herself and others.
We -- or, rather, I -- talk about her modesty, while not assuming
patriarchally that woman ought to be modest, but with Jane Austen's letter
of 1805 in mind: 'If [s]he were less modest, [s]he would be more
agreeable, speak louder & look Impudenter; -- and is it not a fine Character of which Modesty is the only defect?'
Such modesty is not merely textual, it is epistemological and metaphysical as well. Thus, perhaps, the uncertainties of the
third, final section of Cosmo Cosmolino, with its yearnings for a
world elsewhere of which it cannot convince us that it is certain.
Of what distinguished company do we talk, then, when we talk of Helen
Garner? Of the renaissance of the short story and the novella in the
1980s and 1990s; of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus and Richard Ford and
Janet Kauffman and Bobbie Ann Mason and Jayne Anne Phillips. And, a
shadow presence behind all of them, Anton Chekhov who, as Dubus
reminded us, 'wants you to know what it feels like'. That is what Helen
Garner wants.
Such a modest realism declines large gestures in the direction
of a metaphysics of presence, but repeatedly suggests that there is
something other than merely the here and now. It may be a case of the
Samuel Becketts, of 'no symbols where none intended'. Consider the ever-enlarging ripples of signification in Richard Ford's
Wildlife :
Your father said he saw a bear catch on fire. Isn't that
something? He said it had climbed a tree to get away and the fire exploded
in the branches all around it. The bear jumped out completely on fire
and ran away. That's a thing to remember, isn't it.
Compare the effect of this with the end of 'Honour', included
in My Hard Heart, a novella concerned with a man, his former wife and
child, his future wife, and the relations between the two women. The
story ends with the two women on a see-saw in a children's playground:
The child stepped back. Jenny, who was nearer the ground,
gave a firm shove with one foot to send the plank in motion. It responded.
It rose without haste, sweetly, to the level, steadied and stopped.
They hung in the dark, airily balancing, motionless.
Isn't that something?