Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Let's begin by looking at the book at the very beginning and I want you to read to us from the beginning of your novel.

Helen Garner: Okay. [reading from First in my spare room I swivelled the bed... to ...'Don't tell Nicola.']

Ramona Koval: That is the best description of shattered glass on the rug and the cleaning up of it and the worry that it's going to get into someone's foot that I've ever read. I don't think I've ever read one...'you've ever read', I mean. It's a great attention to detail.

Helen Garner: There is something particularly and especially awful about broken glass, isn't there, especially when you think of children's fat little feet.

Ramona Koval: And the broken mirror, of course, the bad luck.

Helen Garner: Yes, seven years of it. Touch wood.

Ramona Koval: I think anyone listening to that can feel that something is going to happen from that opening. All the hairs on the backs of our necks are up now.

Helen Garner: Good.

Ramona Koval: Is that what you want?

Helen Garner: I wanted it to work that way, yes.

Ramona Koval: It starts off with the clean pillows and the Manchester. Tell me about making a bed.

Helen Garner: Well, it's one of life's more enjoyable tasks, I think. There's something about cotton that's very pleasing to human skin. A friend of mine who is a psychotherapist once said to me...I said to her how I loved going to bed at night and it was my favourite moment (I'm talking about solo sleeping here), and she said, 'Oh, bed is mother.' And I thought that was a very enlightening remark because there's something enfolding and enclosing and clean and welcoming and restful about a bed. It's also the place where you go to retire, as it were, from the active part of life, you're allowed to become passive in a bed, and it's the sort of trapdoor into which you let yourself down into sleep and dreams. I suppose in that sense you could call it what they call a liminal space. It's on the threshold of things.

Ramona Koval: Making a bed for somebody else, though. You use a quote from Elizabeth Jolley; 'It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.'

Helen Garner: I love that. I first found that line of hers when I was writing a piece about her work a good 20 years ago. I was so struck by it, it stayed in my mind ever since. Like a lot of things that Elizabeth Jolley said, it seems to take the tiny tasks of daily life and make something rich out of them. She seemed to have this wonderful way of connecting humble daily tasks with very deep meanings. So I always knew that I was going to be able to use that as an epigraph when I wanted to write this book, so I did, and I'm glad.

Ramona Koval: This Helen in this book plumps the pillows and makes everything nice. It's almost like she's setting up a bed and breakfast, the sort of things you want when you go and stay at someone's house, just the little touches. It turns out that she's letting herself in for more than she perhaps bargained for. There is something about feeling good about yourself about being a good hostess, about getting the spare room ready.

Helen Garner: Yes, there's a sort of a vanity in it really, and there's a little thin thread of that running through the book where the Helen in the book...and I'm going to refer to her constantly as 'Helen'...

Ramona Koval: That's her name of course.

Helen Garner: That's her name...she is a bit vain about her fantasy of herself as someone who can provide a resting place for someone. She said, 'I was supposed to be good in a crisis.' She thinks that she's the kind of person who can deal with what she's about to cop, but she finds out that she can't, and in a way that's what the book is about.

Ramona Koval: But she gives us a few clues because she says things like...she's putting the pale pink sheet on since the friend of hers, Nicola, had 'a famous feel for colour' and 'pink is flattering even to skin that has turned yellowish'. That's the first paragraph. There's a pretty hard, cold eye there at the beginning.

Helen Garner: Where do you see the cold eye at when you read that out? Do you mean the yellow skin?

Ramona Koval: The 'skin that has turned yellowish', yes.

Helen Garner: I wanted the reader to know immediately that this was a sick person coming, and I didn't want to start off by saying 'this person has cancer'. I thought, okay, everybody knows what yellow skin means, it probably means you've had chemo. So I just wanted the awfulness of her predicament to...I wanted to drop it in in little tiny drops rather than whack it down as a...

Ramona Koval: But then the swivelling of the bed on the north-south axis, 'Isn't that supposed to align the sleeper with the planets' positive energy flow or something?' There's a kind of 'my old friend who's coming and she's a bit funny'...

Helen Garner: A bit of a hippy, yes. But then right through the book there's also a sense (well, I hope there is) of how both these women have lived through a period of history where all sorts of whacky ideas were considered to be quite attractive and according to which they arrange their domestic lives perhaps. I have absolutely no idea whether there is such a thing as a positive energy flow in the planet, but it's a sort of a lovely idea. So when people said to me back in the 70s, 'Oh all beds should always face north and south,' for that reason, whenever I put a bed in the room I think I'd better put it north and south. But I don't. But actually the bed I sleep in at the moment runs west, north-west. But those ideas are...these women belong to a generation where the outer edge of which was hippyness, and even Helen who fancies herself as rational is, as it were, captive of lots of crazy ideas.

Ramona Koval: Helen of course meets Nicola, and Nicola is actually in a much worse shape then she thought, she's really sick. In fact she's got stage four cancer and there are only four stages, so she's on her way out. Nicola has decided that she's going to go to this place called the Theodore Institute, she's going to be fine by next week.

Helen Garner: Yes, by the middle of next week they'll have it on the run.

Ramona Koval: And so we meet this character and we think, well, what do we do with someone like this who is coming to stay in your house? But Helen is very good, she takes Nicola to the Theodore Institute, and I wanted you to read a little bit about what she finds at the Theodore Institute, because this is some kind of doctor or not a doctor, it's some kind of alternative clinic, and they're doing things like giving huge amounts of vitamin C or doing hocus-pocus businesses. Read this little bit.

Helen Garner: I'm going to go into the middle of a scene where the first visit they make to this clinic, and they've been at this point waiting four hours for their appointment. I believe this is quite common in certain types of alternative clinics. So Nicola was supposed to have been seen at 4:00 and around about now it's 8:00 and instead of seeing her and giving her a consultation the doctor comes out and says he's going to give a presentation. There are various other people in the waiting room.

[reading from The doctor set up a screen against a wall... to ...a shapeless cargo of meat.]

Ramona Koval: How brilliant to put the shapeless cargo of meat in juxtaposition with that. That's the art of the novelist, isn't it, to put things like that together, all the shattered glass and making the bed, just the resonances.

Helen Garner: I always like to work with the material world a lot. I've never been much good at thinking or arguing abstractly. I don't feel comfortable unless I've got a lot of objects on the page, and they seem to do an awful lot of work if you can arrange them into the right configuration. They carry a huge amount of energy and meaning, and it's just a matter of respecting them really.

Ramona Koval: In what way respecting them?

Helen Garner: I mean letting them do their work. Perhaps you have to have done a lot of inner work yourself for that to...

Ramona Koval: Inner work like thinking about why you think the way you do or..?

Helen Garner: No, I think I mean practice, yes, that's what I mean, because for as long as I can remember I've written every day for at least an hour or so. What I've written, it's called a diary I suppose, but a lot of it is practice, and whenever I'm teaching writing, which I occasionally do, I try to stress this to people, that you've got to practice every day. You often don't have anything particular to say when you sit down to write each day, you're only writing just for the pleasure of handling words or sometimes just the pleasure of handling a pen, but if you bring your mind to bear on the very minor events of the day or things that you've seen or conversations you've overheard, and if you practice getting those into readable form, that's how it becomes less necessary to waffle. Because you're writing just for pleasure, and it's not about self-expression or any of those waffly ideas either, it's really just a matter of practicing handling the language. It's like practicing an instrument if you're a musician or keeping your tools sharpened. You've got to use them on something, and to use them on the material world, after many years of daily practice of doing that you actually build up a competence, I think, yes.

Ramona Koval: The Spare Room, the title is very wonderful, and the spareness...and the word 'spare' is an interesting word, it's the extra room, but it's also about simplicity.

Helen Garner: Yes, and there not being much there.

Ramona Koval: But the prose is very spare as well. There's not a lot of filigree going on, which I like, which is direct, which goes to the heart of things.

Helen Garner: I did a hell of a lot of slashing and cutting. There were points writing this book where I knew that I was completely on the wrong track, and every day I'd go to my office and start, and I'd know that even though what was on the paper looked all right and seemed all right and it read all right, that it was going nowhere. I think that often happens when people are writing novels. I guess I had forgotten that too because it was so long since I'd written one.

Ramona Koval: How do you know you're on the wrong track and where do you think you ought to be? How does it feel?

Helen Garner: There's just a feeling that the gears aren't engaging. There's a sort of a whizzing sound but there's no forward motion. Yes, I think that's what it is. Often in a novel you don't know where you're going, and that's the kind of thrill of it which I'd forgotten over all these years of writing non-fiction, that when you're writing a novel you don't even know what the material is that you're working with sometimes, you just throw yourself into a dark place and start flailing about. So you're working enormously on instinct. You read about people throwing away whole books, that they might get right to the end of a draft of something and realise that it's crap and they throw it away. But it always interests me that people can have worked that long against this feeling that they must have had that they were barking up the wrong tree, that they could go on for 140,000 words pushing against that resistance and not listening to that little voice that's saying, 'Go back, go back, you took the wrong turn about 40,000 words back there and you're wasting your time.'

Ramona Koval: So when that happens to you, when you get that 'I'm on the wrong track', what makes you go on the right track? Do you have to leave it for a while?

Helen Garner: Yes, you have to leave it for a while. You just go and walk around miserably for a couple of days and read something or just ride your bike around or just go and dig in the garden or something.

Ramona Koval: So when you say you didn't know where it was going, a woman comes to stay for three weeks and she's going through these terrible treatments and she's in terrible pain, and Helen says, 'I'll kill anyone who hurts you.' She goes up in the lift to this Theodore Institute this first time and she's suspecting...she wasn't sure what's going to happen, but she's acting out of fierce love for her friend. But how come you didn't know where it was going?

Helen Garner: How can I answer that? I knew that Nicola was going to die, but I didn't know how...I knew that in order to keep the thing racing forward as I wanted it to I'd have to contain it within the three-week time factor, and of course Nicola leaves Helen's house still alive because actually Helen can't hack it any longer and she sends her back to Sydney, and I knew that Nicola's death had to be in the novel and yet I had to contain it in three weeks. So I didn't know how I was going to get from Nicola's departure from Helen's house to the actual death in the hospice, and that was where I tried it this way and I tried it that way, and I knew it was wrong. Actually what was on the paper was all right, I'd be sitting there and I'd write and I'd think, yes, I think this might be all right, and then I'd read it over and think, it's wrong, it's wrong. I don't know what's wrong with it but it's not right.

And then one day in my despair I went to the toilet and I was miserably washing my hands and walking back, and I suddenly saw how I could do it, I saw that I could write a flash forward and that I could tuck that flash forward into the pocket of the three-week section, as it were, or stitch it in there. And I rushed back and I just banged it out. It took me a couple of hours to write that last section, and I'm a really slow worker. I just bashed and crashed until it was done and then I threw myself on the floor and I howled and I howled for ages and I sobbed and wept...

Ramona Koval: With relief?

Helen Garner: No, just this enormous rush of emotion came over me, and I know that it was partly because...in retrospect I could see that my inability to write that last section was a huge resistance against describing the death. Even though I'd actually set out to write a book about someone dying, I still dug my toes in and I wouldn't go to it, and I would do anything except approach it. Somehow it was as if I had to nut out a structural way of doing it before I could dare to approach it.

Ramona Koval: That's interesting you say that, although before that, fairly early in the book...maybe this was written after in one of the other drafts, but Helen says, 'Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul, it leaches out virtue, it injects poison into friendship and makes a mockery of love.' And it's there, you wrote that, but are you saying that somehow it didn't become part of your understanding until you were on the floor crying?

Helen Garner: It doesn't matter how intellectually you accept death. You can say, 'Oh yes, I know that I'm going to die and I know that my friend is going to die because she's got cancer,' and you think, geez, I'm so cool because I have accepted death. But when it comes to the crunch nobody wants to die, and people will do anything to avoid being near it or...one thing that happened since this book came out is that I did two interviews that were published in The Australian colour magazine...three actually, one in The Age and one in the Sydney Morning Herald, and there was this obsession that people had with whether this book was fact or fiction.

People seemed to have this crazy obsession with pinning me against the wall to find out if these things were based on real stories, or had I got the right to call it a novel, and it occurred to me...well, actually it occurred to someone else who pointed this out to me, that this is another way of avoiding getting close to what the book is about, death. Let's not talk about the death stuff, let's just talk about the mode in which it's written, or we can make a lot of clatter and noise over here and the death part can just stay over there in the dark and we won't have to worry about it. Even intellectually grasping that doesn't help, because the fact that we're all going to die is just sort of intolerable on some terribly profound and unreachable level.

Ramona Koval: And certainly it's intolerable for Nicola because she will just not accept to Helen's satisfaction what's actually going on here. She's having rigours at night, she's sweating, she's in terrible pain, the clinic she's in doesn't seem to care about the pain and says it's part of the cure, which is horrendous, and Helen is desperate for Nicola to admit it, saying, 'Let's all admit it, we'll all help you.' And part of the strand is what right does Helen have to impose her view about what's happening on Nicola, even though it is what's happening. Nicola at one point...I wonder whether she's saying she can't die because she hasn't lived.

Helen Garner: Yes, I think that's exactly what she's trying to say.

Ramona Koval: Because she hasn't had a marriage and children, and she hasn't begun to live, in a sense. Is that what's she's saying?

Helen Garner: Yes, I think that's what she's saying. Yes, she's saying that. In the book there's a very minor character who is a palliative care nurse who Helen wants somebody to come...she wants to get her on the books of palliative care people so that if there's trouble at night...because the nights are terrible when someone is pain, that they might be able to call for help and the district nurse would come to the house, but Nicola won't even be in that. She so refuses the truth of her situation that she won't even agree to that.

But after Nicola is refused a visit from the palliative people, Helen has a conversation with the palliative nurse on the telephone and the palliative nurse has seen....who knows way more about death than Helen ever well, other people's deaths anyway, and she very patiently and quietly and unreproachfully says to Helen, 'Look, perhaps there are people who will not ever acknowledge that they're dying and right up to their last moment they refuse to acknowledge it. And this is one way of doing it,' she says quietly and gently.

But, you know, there's another aspect to this which is that when somebody's dying they're not the only person in the room. That's the struggle, that there can be an enormously domineering thing that happens that a dying person, particularly one who's refusing to acknowledge it, can wield an enormous power over the people that are caring for them. I have seen that happen and I've experienced it and it's a feeling of enormous rage. It's a kind of...it's terrifying. I think it's particularly terrifying for those whom not to tell the truth is to be in bad faith. There might be people who...the Helen in this book and me myself tend to have a rather puritanical or shall we say fundamentalist belief in the efficacy of facing facts or of telling the truth as one sees it.

Ramona Koval: Does it feel funny for you to be saying 'Helen'?

Helen Garner: No.

Ramona Koval: Why did you call her 'Helen'?

Helen Garner: Particularly for this reason that I'm trying to articulate now, which is that I have looked after several dying people, one in particular, and I was horrified by the feelings that I had in that situation. I thought that I would be tender and patient and competent and that my feelings would all be glowing ones of generosity, but in actually fact I found that the situation plumbed the depths of me in ways that turned up some very ugly stuff, some kind of muck from the far corners of my psyche. I was horrified and shamed by many of those feelings.

The whole time I was writing this book I was thinking, geez, I'm going to come out of this looking really bad. It was frightening to think of those feelings of intense rage and even a kind of bullying. So I thought, well, okay, this is a novel, I've taken enormous numbers of liberties with it, but there's one thing I do want to own as mine and that is those feelings. I particularly thought that I wanted to put them out there and see if other people had felt them, I suppose. And I think some people have.

Ramona Koval: Yes, of course they have. As always you are always very brave about what you decide to talk about and the way you decide to talk about it. You're the kid who says it in the class, who says, 'But what about that? And we're all thinking about that and why don't we talk about it?' People often find that, as you say, difficult. This Helen basically says, 'So far and no further. I imagine myself as the kind of person who plumps pillows and makes a beautiful bed, but actually if you want more than the three weeks that we've bargained for, I can't do it and you've got to go.' And that's a really tough thing for everybody. As always you've made art out of these feelings, these ideas, and you've done it in this small book.

Helen Garner: It's more because I cut off all the sentimental bits.

Ramona Koval: Oh really? Why?

Helen Garner: That's another way pf dodging the terror of death and its brutal reality is to go soft and blurry and to put Vaseline on the lens and smooth it over. I worked very hard at making it just as tough as I could and not sparing the narrator and not sparing the dying person either. I wanted it to be right out there.

Ramona Koval: And that struggle of wills is so wonderful, and the question about anger. Helen says, 'I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I know it was anger.' It's a meditation on anger, it's a meditation on many things. It's called The Spare Room and it's published by Text, and Helen Garner, it's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Helen Garner: Thank you.

Publications

Title: The Spare Room

Author: Helen Garner

Publisher: Text Publishing, 2008