Early in One Day I’ll Remember This, the second volume of Helen Garner’s collected diaries, one of the entries reads as follows:
“V quotes Degas quoting Delacroix: ‘An artist must have no passion except his work and must sacrifice everything to it.’ Privately I consider this to be bullshit.”
It’s a delicious glimpse of what makes the publication of Garner’s diaries such a pleasurable, significant cultural contribution. As in the first volume, the names of the people in Garner’s life are obscured and largely irrelevant; characters emerge over time through interaction and dialogue, the discreet single letter quickly coming to denote friends and antagonists, lovers and fellow writers alike. The thrill of reading comes not from the prurience of recognition, but from the access to what Helen privately considers as she makes her way in the world.
For an author so celebrated for her unflinching eye and merciless honesty, the promise of a glimpse into her unvarnished observations about life – the world according to Garner – is tantalising.
And she’ll be joining Guardian Australia’s next Zoom book club – at 1pm on Friday 6 November – to discuss it.
Last year I had the chance to interview Garner about the first volume of her diaries, Yellow Notebook. In front of the enormous Sydney crowd who came out to see her, she was generous and insightful. That the collision of her private writing and her published work had produced something so crystalline was astonishing to me, and I loved her explanation for how writerly the diary entries are. “The whole point of the diary for me is to articulate coherently something about what I’m going through,” she said. “It was never sloppily written, it was just about things that were being sloppily felt.”
The pleasure of Garner as a writer – and as a diarist in particular – is that she is always disarmingly open. Late in the diary, after an encounter where she rises above and plays nice with others despite her sense of frustration and hurt, she berates herself: “Spew spew spew. I’m so terminally nice.” She is bracing in the precision of her insights, but she reserves the highest standard and the sharpest criticism for herself – in public and on the page. For the world around her she displays significant curiosity and sympathy without sentiment.
When Garner informs a partner that she’s not interested in a book of history because she has “no feeling for the past at all”, he responds that she has a “pretty strong sense of the present”. Through these diaries we’re able to read the evolution of a writer several decades ago, but as a kind of preserved present.
And it’s extremely rewarding. Long-time fans of Garner’s work will find delights on every page: declarations like “I want to write charmingly, using ‘I’ but without becoming grandiose” give us direct insight into her development as a writer. Or this, when writing a piece for the Age about autopsies: “I hardly know how to write what I was shown … The demeanour of the people who work there, their quiet efficiency, their respect and modesty, made it possible for me to witness these things without fear or revulsion.”
This second volume, which traces the years from 1987 until 1995, is more melancholy than its earlier companion; its author consumed with love and fear, even in the moment intuiting some of the scale of disaster that awaits her. Traversing the years leading up to the publication of The First Stone and its fall-out, following the disappointment and heartaches of a marriage, this is a book of power and grief. But it’s also a deeply funny book: her trademark spiky observations and tender pen portraits spark on every page – perfectly crafted fragments that together paint a vivid picture of a life, and individually inspires barks of laughter, groans of sympathy, floods of personal recollection and reverie.
We are so lucky to have a writer of Garner’s clarity, her unflinching acuity coupled with overwhelming compassion. And we are equally lucky to have these diaries. They are masterpieces of Australian literature and should be on every shelf.
Which is why I couldn’t be more excited that Helen will be talking with us this Friday. Join us to ask Helen your questions about the agonies and rewards of keeping a diary across more than 40 years, the challenges of sharing those innermost thoughts with the world, and the things it has shown her about why she writes.