autobiography

MINOR (HIS)TORY

Helen Garner

Barry Oakley
Minitudes
Text Publishing, $30.00pb, 338pp
1 876485 59 0

IPICKED UP Minitudes, the diaries of playwright, novelist, critic and editor Barry Oakley, and furtively checked the index. I hardly know the guy, but there was my name. Uh oh. I looked up the entries. All benevolent, all distant. Phew. Moving right along, I skimmed major drinking bouts, herculean hangovers, literary events by the dozen, a lot of self-conscious wise-cracking, the names of scores of people I knew and of many I did not. When he sank the slipper into my first husband, I decided in a fit of loyalty to give the book a miss.
      Then Good Weekend ran an excerpt. Provocatively they chose his account of a five-month period starting in the summer of 1981-82, when his wife Carmel, mother of their six kids, fell in love with a house-mate of one of her sons, and left her husband and family to be with him. Could it be that an Australian bloke had written the truth about his broken heart?
      I devoured the excerpt, writhing in sympathy for the jealousy, grief and rage he went through, shuddering at his candour, jolted by a raw glimpse of a man's suffering.
      But gradually it dawned on me that during Carmel's absence he had not been quite as alone as he made out. Through the gaps in his wretched tale it emerged that he had another woman on the side -- 'a warm and caring woman' who soothed his lacerations, listened patiently to his sorrow -- and who, it transpired, had hopes. She in her turn was shattered; she wept and asked for her letters back, when Carmel decided to come home.
      'Bastard!' I screamed, flinging the magazine across the room. 'You're as bad as that pompous phoney V.S. Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival. You blokes! You strut about striking postures of heroic solitude, but in reality you can't survive half a day on your own!' That was it. No way would I read his bloody book. I opened up the email and spent several satisfying hours orating and pontificating.
      As I simmered down, though, memories of my own crimes involving sex/romance/betrayal began to slide their blades between my righteous ribs. Imagining how my diary would look if ever, God forbid, I were reckless enough to publish it, I experienced what Oakley calls an 'awful scorched feeling inside'. I started to feel for him a sort of ... well, if not respect, then a lessening of the desire to judge.
      Oakley relates this exchange at a party:

Hilary (McPhee) told me that she too keeps a diary and kept it hidden under her bed. When I asked whether it was intimate and dealt with personal matters, she said, 'Yes.' I said of mine, 'Emphatically no'.
Certainly, nothing he relates can match the emotional intensity of the Carmel-Gets-a-Life episode, and after it he returns to what he calls 'the insulated self.'
      What is the point of a diary that contains 'emphatically no personal matters'? Yes, I know, Pepys and all that -- the social world -- but what if, like me, you've spent large slabs of your life trying to dodge the particular literary and theatrical social world that Oakley is depicting? What if you couldn't give a flying fuck about those conferences, those plays, those tablefuls of ghastly punning drunks? Why would I bother to read these diaries? Do they tell me anything about him?
      It seems that, between 1974 and 1997 anyway, he wears jeans (Christopher Koch spills wine on them) or white trousers (for which drinkers mock him outside Stewart's Hotel in Carlton). He takes valium. He's a returning Catholic. He loves wordplay. He wears white socks. He is told by a woman that he has 'funny little earlobes...just like Smarties.' He's a bit peevish around international big-name authors.
      He believes, or pretends to have once believed, that 'contraception was wrong because it involved onanism'. He wears a Tissot watch. He doesn't know much about plants. He can't drive. He's a brilliant aircraft-spotter. He owns no property, and pays rent. He calls sunglasses 'shades'. He likes writers' festivals, literary events, dinners, parties, pubs. He is a big drinker who sneaks a shot before an ordeal and after it bolts to the nearest bar.
      In short, not really my kind of guy.
      But as I read, I warmed to him. Beneath the persona straining to be extroverted, the assiduously reported witticisms, lie hints of a tenderer self. When his wife has come back to him, he writes, 'In bed ... I feel like a beggar brought in from the streets.' When someone fangs him in the press, he notes, 'Said I didn't mind, but I was lying.' He shows, in rare flashes,an eye for the numinous: in Canada, he sees grass of 'a bleached wheat colour, wind-shaped, as if mysterious beings were running all over it.' Several times he asks himself, 'How long can I get by on jokes?'

Incomplete:
Helen Garner is a writer, critic and columnist for The Age

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