Helen Garner’s books explored by academic Bernadette Brennan

Helen Garner ‘has always been a boundary-crosser’, argues academic and researcher Bernadette Brennan.

Author Helen Garner’s says her work is ‘‘one book. The book of what I make of the world and my life.”

Edges are magic, writes Ali Smith in her genre-crossing 2012 book Artful. ‘‘[T]here’s a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it.’’ Australia’s Helen Garner ‘‘has always been a boundary-crosser’’, argues academic and researcher Bernadette Brennan.

Fittingly, Brennan’s book A Writing Life re-imagines the intersection between life writing and literary criticism. It contributes to a vital conversation across and about Garner’s work, where questions of borders, transgression and ethics recur.

Brennan is the author of a monograph, Brian Castro’s Fiction (2008), and editor of two collections of essays. Just Words? Australian Authors Writing for Justice (2008) explores writing and justice, while Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (2008) brings together 12 essays by poet and academic Noel Rowe.

This cross-disciplinary and collaborative work suggests the applicability of Brennan’s comment on Garner’s work to her own: ‘‘[refusing] the constraints of literary genre, she has sought to write across and craft her own versions of them.”

A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her Work by Bernadette Brennan.

Neither ‘‘conventional biography nor a strict monograph”, A Writing Life combines meticulous scholarly research with textual analysis, interviews with Garner’s friends, colleagues and Garner herself, and archival material.

Brennan’s style is understated and unfussy, beautifully pitched, balancing rich complexity with narrative energy. The work entwines an oblique portrait with consideration of portraiture itself, examines the purpose and nature of the ‘‘I” that crosses Garner’s fictive and nonfictional work, and explores Garner’s body of work as an entity.

This reflects Garner’s comment that her work is ‘‘one book. The book of what I make of the world and my life as I have lived it.” If A Writing Life is a biography, it is a biography of Garner’s oeuvre, generically reminiscent of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer (2010) and inspired by Janet Malcolm’s fragmented portrait of artist David Salle, Forty-One False Starts, each of which dramatises the provisional and mobile nature of the form.

Each chapter, writes Brennan, “can be read as a room describing Garner’s house of writing”. This is because domestic spaces are crucial to Garner’s work, and partly as a means of re-imagining form to blend life writing with literary criticism. It’s an open-plan space, chapters opening into one another so that conversations reach from one room to the next.

Like Garner herself, Brennan considers writers’ — especially female writers’ — lives, and the question of what responsibility or expectation there may be for an artist to disclose the facts of her life, as well as ideas of invasion, privacy and injury.

A Writing Life begins with two anecdotes suggesting the book’s terrain. One involves Garner’s irritated response to the suggestion by American writer David Shields during a conference that “because we experience almost no ­reality in our actual lives, we crave the real” in our reading. In response “Garner said that, living next door to her three young grandchildren, she did experience real things”.

The second quotes Garner’s comment in an interview with Jennifer Ellison 30 years ago that she “would never be so famous as to be recognised when she walked into a room”. Brennan shapes her study around questions of the definition and dynamics of the real and imagined and the ways “Garner’s life and work inform and shape each other”.

Brennan argues the “I” in Garner’s nonfictional work is, as Malcolm has said of her own work, “almost pure invention”. For me, re-reading Malcolm’s Paris Review interview, her analogy leaps out: “the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way — the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent”. Not so tenuously at all, arguably, and the further complication, for both Malcolm and Garner, is the melding of the journalist’s “I” with the autobiographer’s. For Malcolm, the autobiographer operates “in a treacherous terrain”.

Ted Hughes once said of Sylvia Plath that she “went straight for the central, unacceptable things”. Garner writes about what she calls “the excruciating realms of human behaviour”. Writing about the public pillorying of Malcolm, and taking his cue from her book on Plath, The Silent Woman, Craig Seligman comments that, “like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness … Malcolm’s blade gleams with a razor edge”.

Malcolm was born in 1934, two years after Plath. Garner was born a decade later, in 1942. Gendered proscriptions about what might constitute “nice” subject matter, or what a “nice” woman might write about may have shifted, but they persist. In the sense of Seligman’s surgical metaphors, Garner’s writing, like Malcolm’s, is very nice indeed. For all this acuteness, Brennan notes that Garner has avoided “probing her past too deeply”:

“If I poked even one rational hole in the thick skin of that closed-off world, who knows what would come squirting out.” Maybe in response, Garner’s work has regularly poked holes in her adult life and, increasingly, the lives of others.

From her first novel Monkey Grip (1977), which Patrick White, among others, listed as one of his books of the year, but which others recoiled from because of its honest depiction of intimate lives or its apparently autobiographical underpinnings, to Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), with its triptych of stories involving the angelic and the allegorical, the reception of Garner’s fiction has been mixed. The lean, poetic novella The Children’s Bach (1984) is perhaps her most celebrated work.

It is her nonfictional work, though, that has been more polarising, especially the disturbing The First Stone (1995). In her monograph on Garner, Kerryn Goldsworthy describes the book’s subject matter, reports of sexual harassment by women students at the University of Melbourne, as being, “for [Garner], a complex site of psychic unease”. Praising the book, Australian writer Shirley Hazzard wrote it “seems to engage much, much of inner and outwards life — so much that one mentally gets up and walks around while reading it, trying to sort out the unsortable from the sortable”.

Brennan’s treatment of the book’s riven reception is measured and sensitive. When she notes, though, that “The First Stone ends on a bitter note: ‘If only the whole gang of them hadn’t been so afraid of life’ ”, her own assessment of this ending is clear: “The suggestion that the complainants were ‘afraid of life’ is harsh and unfounded.” One measure of literature may be its durability. The First Stone’s heteronormative discussion of eros, for instance, problematic two decades ago, seems antiquated these days.

Analysis of Garner’s subsequent ground-breaking book-length studies of criminal cases, Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), allows Brennan to evaluate form, again, and to consider questions of bearing witness, consolation and the ethics involved in writing about others’ lives. Trauma theory, especially Dominick LaCapra’s concept of a “middle voice” capable of balancing empathy and involvement, gives Brennan a way to evaluate Garner’s placement of her “I” amid others’ traumatic experience.

It would be interesting to see further consideration of the traumatic impact on the writer of the work of bearing witness Garner shoulders. That it is not her own trauma she explores gives the discussion another dimension. In This House of Grief, especially, there is a sense of Garner’s continuing to bear witness when others look away from the ugliest human acts.

Brennan’s own voice is sensitive, judicious and clear. Occasionally, there is a sense that she holds back from debating with some of Garner’s ideas, perhaps respecting the hurt Garner describes at having her work harshly judged or, as she sees it, at times overlooked. Last year’s award of the $US150,000 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction may have assuaged this. Garner discovered the news when she found an email in her spam folder.

The intimacy and trust of Garner’s and Brennan’s conversation is implicit throughout the work, but perhaps softens some of the sharper edges of the discussion. The Writing Life made me keen to see more of Brennan’s own intelligent and insightful “I”. This book offers an illuminating discussion of Garner’s boundary-crossing work. Its own magic lies in bringing elements of memoir and criticism into an absorbing conversation that begins with a rich contextualisation of Garner’s work, and extends into the literary and ethical questions with which Brennan has long been concerned.

Felicity Plunkett is a poet, editor and critic.

A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work

By Bernadette Brennan

Text, 334pp, $32.99