Yellow Notebook Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard.

  Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Recorded with frankness, humour and steel-sharp wit, these accounts of her everyday life provide an intimate insight into the work of one of Australia’s greatest living writers.

  Yellow Notebook, Diaries Volume One, in this elegant hardback edition, spans about a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip. It will delight Garner fans and those new to her work alike.

  ‘We are here for this—to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out.’

  PRIMO LEVI, The Periodic Table

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  1978

  1979

  1980

  1981

  1982

  1983

  1984

  1985

  1986

  1987

  ALSO BY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1978

  Maybe it’d be a good idea to start another diary, just to cream it off. I bought this yellow book today.

  ——

  Man in the metro, a 1950s relic but real, not an affectation—untidy, perfectly period clothes—lumber jacket, tight trousers, big, worn, nondescript shoes. He was playing an exquisite basic rock-and-roll guitar and singing ‘Corinna’ through a little amp that looked like a white Daisy Duck radio.

  ——

  Monkey Grip appears to have won the National Book Council Award. Letter from T in Melbourne: ‘Sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that jobs and money and grants are luck instead of recognition for talent and hard work. Do you feel that still?’

  ——

  I know what the matter is. I haven’t got any women friends here. I miss, I miss. I feel crazy and weepy.

  ——

  F says he’s not really French: that he comes from the south, that it’s different there. He says if you don’t turn a mattress it starts to smell bad. He sings to himself as he works. If he looks over my shoulder at this I’ll start screaming.

  ——

  Actually, I don’t care if he reads this. I’m protected by the fog of incomprehension that’s always between us unless we work singlemindedly at direct contact.

  M and I work to wall off a sleeping space for her at one end of the living room. We stretch a length of unbleached calico tightly over the back of the high, open shelf we bought at Habitat, stand it at right angles to the wall, then lie side by side on her little bed and gaze at the tent-like structure. A bottle of Scotch on the living-room side picks up the light and shines a brown glow through the fabric. When we do a task together she turns me into a better mother. She’s a witty person, companionable and kind. ‘Got any idea how to draw a hamster?’

  ——

  Rilke wrote that when people know your name they ‘scatter your forces’. He suggests changing your name as soon as they get hold of it.

  ——

  I must disabuse myself of the illusion that I once sat down and wrote a novel. I am not good at constructing major pieces of work. I have a short concentration span. I can work only in small, intense bursts. I don’t seem to work consciously. I write to unburden myself, to amuse myself, to arrange in order the things that bulge in my head, to make myself notice things.

  ——

  Jerzy Kosinński’s absolutely unemotional style. As clear as crystal, as objects arranged in a line. Whenever the lost child in The Painted Bird approaches a farm to ask for work or for shelter, the peasants ‘consult their neighbours’.

  ——

  At Cap Fréhel F tried to stop me from tackling the cliff. ‘Don’t climb!’ he cried, white-faced, seizing my ankle. So as not to watch me, he went to prise mussels off the rocks with his knife. I climbed. His fear had infected me. The void sucked at my back.

  ——

  I have a lot of trouble with self-disgust. It disgusts me that I repeat things in this book that I have already written in letters. It disgusts me that I am so lazy.

  ——

  A critic in Melbourne writes that ‘some people consider Monkey Grip’s subject matter distasteful’. Someone else said I was a traitor to my class. I now grasp the meaning of the term provincial.

  ——

  Cure for homesickness and ennui: walk. I must have walked ten kilometres yesterday. Bought two jumpers and a pair of red shoes, which are perfect.

  ——

  I went to shake hands with Solange. She laughed and went ‘Oh!’ as if to say ‘Come off it!’ and kissed my cheeks instead.

  ——

  M didn’t understand the information the teacher gave about the week’s holiday for Toussaint: she thought it was a school camp, and tried to ask if she was supposed to bring her sleeping bag and something to eat. The teacher had no idea what she was talking about. M gave up and came home bewildered. She cried when she tried to explain to me what had happened.

  ——

  Drank some kir and this and that. In Charlie Hebdo I read: ‘BOUM! = NO FUTURE x 7.’ I laughed and laughed. I don’t even know why it’s funny. If I lived alone with my leedle cassette player and idiosyncratic assortment of tapes, I’d probably drink myself stupid.

  ——

  F took an old wooden-handled hammer out of his briefcase this morning and laid it on my desk. It’s still there.

  ——

  How he pronounces VAPORUB.

  ——

  We went walking in the cold, up to Place Clichy and rue Joseph de Maistre etc. He put his hand through my arm and I was happy.

  ——

  The visitor on his way to London—‘It’s my spiritual home!’—spoke about his poems as being ahead of their time. ‘In ten years people will see what I was trying to do.’ I doubt this. Also, he was too cheap to pay fifty centimes to use the toilet at Parc Monceau.

  ——

  I wish I lived peacefully somewhere. I wish I had a shit job involving physical exertion.

  ——

  In Toulouse our hostess made a dormitory of her bedroom and she, M and I slept comfortably in a row. All the sheets and towels, from her trousseau sixteen years ago, are embroidered with her initials. At about 4 pm I remembered that it was my birthday. She took us out of the city to stay with some friends in a village. On the drive she told us that the husband had had an affair. The wife had fought it, or sat it out. He had returned to her. ‘So,’ she said with a satisfaction that did not quite convince me, ‘she won.’ The air in the house was thick. The husband and wife did not look at each other. In the afternoon we walked halfway up a small mountain. An easy track. Chestnuts still bright with yellow leaves. At night the darkness and silence around the house frightened me.

  ——

  A drunk black man in a cobbled street yelled at us that we were ‘de la pourriture’.

  ——

  Tweezers. Wool. Needles. Pencil sharpener.

  ——

  A certain graciousness of manner; a deep courtesy.

  ——

  ‘I’ll be the toughest kid in the whereabouts,’ says M.

  ——

  ‘The fact that the glass is raised to the lips without being smashed into the face is a tribute to the subtle weighing abilities of the outstretched limb. And the fact that the glass remains at the mouth while losing weight as it is emptied shows how punctually the news is updated: without this information the glass would levitate as it was drained.’ —Jonathan Miller

  ——

  Some teargas got in my eyes at the demo. It was my first dose, unbelievably confusing and painful. I was surprised at how philosophical people were about it. They covered their noses and mouths. ‘Aii!’ said F’s friend. ‘It hurts your eyes! Well, that’s what it’s for, I suppose.’ Everyone around him laughed.

  ——

  Despair and sadness and fear are easier to write about than hope, happiness, confidence.

  ——

  Middlemarch. A substance smooth of surface but containing firm lumps of foreign matter.

  ——

  The famous publisher and his translator took me to lunch at Brasserie Lipp. I am sure they will not want my book. They addressed me in perfect English. They were unbearably chic. When I offered my hand to the translator, all she gave me was her little finger. My cheeks were red with awkwardness. She worked hard, I suppose: ‘See the man with the moustache? That’s Romain Gary.’

  ‘He looks sad,’ I said.

  ‘He’s been looking like that ever since Jean Seberg left him.’

  ——

  F is sick. I’m looking after him. He hates to be ‘dépendant’, but he appears to have abandoned attempts to fight it and is sitting up in my bed reading Playboy France.

  ——

  M cries because I get eight letters and she gets only a postcard. She refuses to speak to me, then bursts into tears, casts herself on to my lap, and sobs: ‘I had a sudden feeling of meanness.’ In the afternoon we sit together knitting. She is so thrilled about her new cherry-red knee-high boots that she can hardly sleep. Soon after midnight I wake to find her standing beside my bed, fully dressed for school: ‘I thought it was morn
ing!’

  ——

  I quarrelled with F because I wouldn’t show him a fan letter I was writing to Woody Allen. He says that he and his former girlfriend used to show each other everything. He says I’m secretive. It’s strange to realise that I am a very different person from the one I thought I was.

  ——

  Siouxsie and the Banshees at l’Empire. They were revolting.

  ——

  Divorce papers came today from Australia. I was sad, remembering that failure, afraid of another one, of being unable to go on loving someone eminently worthy of love. ‘Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there.’ —Louis Aragon, quoted by Patrick White in A Fringe of Leaves

  ——

  It was snowing at Père Lachaise. My sister in a pink beret, long blue coat, pink scarf. We picked our way between the graves looking for Proust’s. A frozen jonquil lay on his shiny black tombstone. A dark day, very still and cold. Tomorrow she’s taking M home to Melbourne.

  ——

  We didn’t cry at the airport. She was excited to be travelling home to her father with her groovy aunt. I got back to the dark apartment and tidied up her belongings. That’s when I howled, finding the dozens of little half-used notebooks in which she had been obliged to amuse herself drawing and writing because she had no playmates. My girl, stuck in a foreign country with her cranky mother. Is there any point to this guilt? What she learned from being here I can only guess at.

  ——

  I read the paper and doors open in my head like those in a cuckoo clock. I had forgotten why people read papers. You learn things. Ideas come to you. Connections strike off each other with ringing blows or slot together like carpenters’ joints.

  ——

  Everyone’s talking about Apocalypse Now. My work seems piddling, narrow, domestic.

  ——

  I helped F’s journalist friend spackle the walls in his new apartment. I was afraid he’d scorn me for my ignorance of politics but when I happened casually to mention Ibsen he looked embarrassed and said, ‘Qui ça?’

  ——

  At the Parc de Bagatelle we had to pay to get in. One franc, fifty. It was worth it. Crocuses and daffodils.

  ——

  M rings from Melbourne: ‘Me and my best friend did a show, and the kids applaused really really loudly. Louder than for the other kids who did a play.’

  ——

  Postcard from my sister, a Renoir pencil drawing of a heavy-bodied, half-naked girl reading. A thought balloon: ‘Will my shape still be fashionable in the 1970’s? Probably not.’

  ——

  F and I took our bikes on the train to the forest of Compiègne and rode along the paths and avenues. Only one squabble. Pale green leaves everywhere. Blue flowers like cloud shimmered in the clearings. A deer bounded across the road in front of us—it came flying from nowhere, struck the ground a single blow with its dainty hooves, and took off again into the trees. In a cafe we raved about it to the barman. He was too bored even to fake interest. We felt foolish and urban; drank up and pedalled away.

  ——

  The film-maker’s blue jumper and bright blue eyes. He says that at Cannes people took him for Mick Jagger and asked for his autograph. I never noticed till today that he’s rather beautiful. I say ‘rather’ because he is affected, physically. I wonder what he’s like when he’s alone.

  ——

  I think all the time about the thing I’m supposed to be writing, that I’ve got a grant to be writing. I’ve found a library to work in. Rue Pavée. If I write what I want to, about the people I know at home, I’ll never be able to live in Melbourne again. About the woman who always sang in a register too high for her voice, and that wasn’t the worst of it. Lazy, charming G in his band, all the girls hanging round him waiting to be fucked. I don’t even do the dishes or cook. I change the position of my bed. I buy huge sheets of drawing paper, pin them to the bedroom wall, cover them with diagrams of characters and their inter-relating. I play the High Rise Bombers tape full-blast and dance by myself, jumping high in the air. Then I crash into appalling bouts of self-doubt, revulsion at my past behaviour, loathing for my emotional habits and the fact that I still feel the need to expose, thinly disguised or barely metamorphosed, my own experience. In the metro this morning, on my way to the library, I felt grey and shrivelled, watching the tunnel lights slip past in their rhythm, wishing that I spoke French twice as well as I do and had a real job with people I didn’t particularly like, so I wouldn’t have to produce my own raison d’être every day, like a spider yanking thread out of its own guts, or wherever the hell they pull it from.

  1979

  I’ve found a workroom I can rent, over a dress shop in Moonee Ponds. It looks north towards a low mountain very far away. In a corner, a hand basin. Its drain is clogged and it’s full of old brown water. Maybe mozzies will breed in it. I don’t care. I’m writing three sentences a day. Wretched, ill-tempered, nervous, unbearable. Maybe I’m a one-book woman.

  ——

  M brings home a note about the school concert: ‘Children should come dressed to the hall. Boys to come in pyjamas. Halos and Wings will be put on by teachers.’

  ——

  HG: (getting out of the car at 2 am) ‘There’s the saucepan.’

  F: ‘What?’

  HG: ‘See that first star? Go up from there, and further, and there it is.’

  F: ‘That is not the saucepan.’

  HG: ‘For thirty-seven years I have called that star formation “the saucepan”. When I was a little girl my father took me by the hand and pointed up and said, “That is the saucepan.” You can’t tell me that’s not the saucepan.’

  ——

  M ate a real egg from my sister’s chook. It was so rich that she retired to bed groaning and sobbing, and couldn’t go to school till 10.30: ‘I feel all eggy inside.’

  ——

  M and F found a brown pup at the market. Beautiful, but dumb. Our training methods don’t work on her. This morning she took off at the front gate. With me in hot pursuit she bolted, trailing her lead, across four lanes of traffic on Mt Alexander Road. She made it unscathed and wound up cringing on her back under a palm tree, shivering and pissing. As I thundered up to her I realised that what she was running from was me.

  ——

  The Italian girl who works in the dress shop is engaged. She tells me that for her trousseau her grandmother has given her a quilt that’s ‘stuffed with duck leaves’. When she talks I feel like swooning. I could stand on the bottom step and listen to her rave all day.

  ——

  At the Kampuchea Benefit I saw half a dozen people I knew at a table and I was too shy to walk over and say hello. I was scared to.

  ——

  ‘F is very funny,’ said one of the guys in the band. ‘He’s got such a fantastic delivery that you laugh even if you don’t understand what he’s said.’

  ——

  There was a bird singing in the garden. When I opened the back door it was sitting on the chimney trilling away, but as soon as I appeared it flipped across the vegetable patch to a tree on the other side of the fence, where it threw back its head and sang tune after tune, its little beak open like a pair of scissors.

  ——

  Riding round the corner on to Brunswick Road I change gear clumsily and the whole bike locks. I get it on to the footpath (F already a yellow dot half a mile away on the freeway bridge) and crouch beside it, helplessly regarding the hub and sprockets. A well-dressed pedestrian in her forties stops beside me. ‘Got troubles?’ ‘It’s jammed.’ She takes one look and points: ‘There—it’s stuck there.’ The chain is wedged between the smallest sprocket and the white frame. I poke my finger in and wiggle. I seize the chain and yank at it. To my surprise it’s got give, and spring—so that’s how it works! I jerk it free and fit it on to the correct sprocket. A bunch of tissues appears near my face. ‘Thankyou!’ ‘That’s all right,’ she says with a cheerful, impersonal smile, and strides away. I wipe my hands on the tissues and shove them into my pocket. Now I know I’m home. My country, right or wrong.

  ——

  Memo: do not drink coffee. It makes me uselessly nervy, even trembly, and engenders baseless optimism about my powers of creation.

  1980

  I met Frank Moorhouse today in Tamani. He remarked that ‘organisation of energy’ was a crucial matter. A very nice man. Greying curly hair, massive head—a bullyboy in form but sharp and reserved and intelligent in expression. Very careful about wiping his lips while eating. Two blokes I vaguely knew came in and sat with us. They turned on a Carlton performance: rapid-fire wisecracks about Chomsky, war, politics and corrupt journalism. I wanted to scream. Later Frank bought a bottle of ‘good bourbon—seeing as I can afford it’. I walked with him (having trouble keeping up) to his office at the university.