Yellow Notebook, page 22
‘For sure. At the bottom of every bit of trouble there’s always a man.’
‘Yes. You only have to look, and there is.’
This banter, which to me is flippant, is perhaps less so to him.
He presses: ‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘See, I think what women don’t realise is that men like to be with other men.’
‘That shouldn’t cause problems necessarily, should it?’
All evening I am dodging and feinting, to avoid being pinned down.
——
‘What did you do in the fifties?’
‘Lay on my bed and read. Listened to Little Richard records and danced. Mucked around with my family. What did you?’
‘Cars,’ says V. ‘I was crazy about speed. I drove an MG, stripped down, no floor.’
‘Where’d you put your feet?’
‘Well, there was a bit of floor, on the driving side. But in the rest you could see the ground going past.’
——
Me: ‘What’s your house like?’
V: ‘You should come there one day.’
Me: (thinks) ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous.’
——
‘You know how marvellous it is,’ says the woman in Notturno, ‘to be with another writer. They don’t get bored or think you’re mad.’ But this stuff I’m writing in here will embarrass me later when V ceases to be a MYSTERIOUS STRANGER and reveals all his meanness and weakness (and I mine).
——
Thelonious Monk playing ‘Ruby My Dear’. Over and over. On the cover: ‘He had evolved an unorthodox approach to the piano, involving crushed notes and clusters, and left-hand chords made up of seconds and sixths instead of conventional triadic jazz harmonies.’ They’re only technical terms but I wish I’d made up ‘crushed notes and clusters’.
——
V turned away from me, while we were looking in a shop window, and I caught a whiff of him—only faint—but it was a plain smell, unadorned and unperfumed (not like that of L, who’s all fresh and herbal)—a smell of wool, of ordinary skin—not young—a smell that reminded me of my father and my grandfather—I was jolted by the connection—and I thought, If I do know you when you are old, it will have been a plain life indeed.
——
Gloomily coming into my bedroom I stump towards the bed and see the mess of New York Reviews beside it, and a copy of Joan London’s stories that are so beautiful, and I think, Whatever happens, I’ve got this one little power—I’m a writer. I can use everything that happens, I can use it and shape it and in that way I can get control of it.
——
It has been discovered that humans emit certain smells or substances which cause health in the opposite sex. Men can only pass on their health-giving substances by sex. Women’s, however, can be conveyed over distance and even tend to permeate the atmosphere—and women’s, also, work on other women. Really?
——
I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.
——
Family lunch at the Latin. Just as my sister is getting red-faced and shrill about the nurses’ strike, two men rush through the room, one cringing under the blows of the other who is covered in a white mess of food and roaring in a fury: ‘How dare you! You’re only a waiter!’ They roll on to the street and disappear. ‘You can tell it’s a joke,’ says my sister, ‘because he said, “How dare you?” No Australian would say that. He’d say, “You bastard!” and punch him in the face.’ ‘Aww, I dunno,’ says our father. ‘I reckon if one of ’em had had a knife there’da been real trouble.’
——
In the shack I get up to take the kettle off the fire and see through the narrow window a pretty sight: a blue wren flirting with his own reflection in the outside mirror of my car. He flips up, whirring his wings like mad, performs a caracole and a pirouette in mid-air before the glass, then perches on the mirror’s rim and looks around in confusion—then back he goes and does it all again.
——
‘Most people are not aware of such a call’ (to the numinous) ‘yet they may feel the strongest attraction to make some sense of the “God-feeling” within them, and be overwhelmed by feelings of sickness, sadness, depression and despair if they suppress it because they disagree with conventional kinds of religious belief, or are afraid that others will think them mad or odd…They will find it painful to begin with to admit to being driven by such an improper longing, but if they can get past this stage they will discover that most people have a very good idea what they are talking about and are repressing similar longings and experiences of their own…We are all contemplatives to a greater or lesser degree, and we all need, to the limit of our capacity, to admit the experience which we may, or may not, call God.’ —Monica Furlong, Contemplating Now
All this is true, and it is what my novel should be about. The spirit comes to an unhappy woman. She denies it. It departs. I’m frightened of all this, I think.
——
Fear—of being drawn to another man whose phlegmatic nature will limit and distort mine—or for whose sake I will limit and distort myself. And yet I am so much stronger, now.
— The only way I can have anything to do with him is by (a) lies and (b) hurting someone. Am I prepared to do this?
——
Annie Gottlieb’s dream that when she began to enjoy her ‘powers as a writer’, her mother had her sterilised. The terrific jolt of this: I didn’t simply dream being sterilised. In the year between the writing of Monkey Grip and its publication, I had it done to myself.
——
The university year ends. Our law student is moving out.
Me: ‘How will I live without you?’
Him: ‘Who’ll I talk to?’
——
‘There are virtually,’ says V, ‘only two things that go wrong with a car engine. Petrol, or—far more likely—spark.’
——
The window is open, the curtains lift and drop on a warm breeze that smells strongly of dry grass.
——
Went and had a little haircut. I think the hairdresser’s freaking out. He cut it dry, a thing he’s never done before. He was late. He looked pale, distracted; is going to France on Thursday. Has moved out of his house and is sleeping in the salon.
——
The biographer talks about her progress. ‘I didn’t want to write another book about a put-upon woman. At first I was full of admiration for her. I thought she was a heroine. Then I saw what really happened, and I was angry. And then I sulked.’ She gives her tuneful laugh. ‘Yes—I sulked. And now I know that if it has to be a book about an oppressed woman, that’s what it’ll be.’
——
Because I know that someone finds ‘almost everything about’ me ‘interesting’, I am walking round in a cloud of power.
——
In an old diary I find this exchange between me and Y:
Me: ‘I’d like to have a man in another city. I’d like him to be crazy about me, and for him to write me wonderful letters, once or twice a week, and to come to me every now and then, and me to him—a real passion—but for him not to want to make me his wife.’
Y: ‘Now you’re talking.’
I forgot to mention that I would like also to be crazy about him.
——
Invited to eat with two high-powered academics, philosophers. I’m happily surprised by their worldliness. While she works in the kitchen she has the radio on low and I hear her singing along to the Bangles: ‘Walk like an Egyp-she-an.’ She tells a tale of drunkenness, of ‘calling for a bucket’. Feel no longer shy of asking them what, for example, Heidegger was on about. Rain fell, quiet and vertical, at dinner.
——
A letter I can’t quite bring myself to write to L:
‘I’m no good at these reticent, half-hearted affairs. I thought for a while it was what I needed, in my awkward, bruised convalescence; and because you seemed to be in a similar state I felt it all to be appropriate. But I feel your wariness and it’s brought out all my own: it made me grow a thicker skin. And now you’re on the outside of it and voilà.’
If I told the whole truth I would have to say: ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’
——
A woman has reviewed Postcards from Surfers and The Children’s Bach in the New York Times Book Review: ‘…lit by a kind of eerie, slanted light, reminiscent at times of Jane Bowles’s work, as are Ms Garner’s sharp, strange images and the dense, rich texture their layering creates.’
I know it’s dangerous to dwell on praise but allow me a little moment of delight at being mentioned in the same sentence as Jane Bowles.
——
I am mean to our dog. I ignore her when she casts herself at my feet. I must be in love.
——
Dreamt I sat on a couch beside another person, a cheerful man I knew to be a semi-reformed crim. From the floor a dog, hairy and importunate, wormed its way between us. We went to a strange house, where in a derelict room with no furniture a fire was only just alight in a big, empty fireplace. While I waited for him to come into this room (were we going to make love?) I took the poker and moved the fire around, grouped its fallen parts and tried to make it burn properly. There was no wood, the room was quite empty and dark, and the fire was almost ashes, but still gave out a little bit of warmth if not a clear flame.
——
Sun came out of the clouds while I was in the pool. Water suddenly full of little yellow feathers.
——
The Polish philosopher said she had found Stendhal’s On Love attractive and relevant ‘as an adolescent’, but that now she considers love to be ‘a cancer of the mind—you pick a man out of the crowd, and you demand that he should play a part, that he should be this, and that—it’s grotesque! It’s ridiculous!’ I came away rather sobered. Fortunately I was en vélo and this always cheers me up in doubtful moments.
——
An Italian photographer from a magazine. He reminded me of the one who said to me meanly in the seventies, ‘Your profile, it is not the best.’ But this one ended up charming me into smiling and laughing. He even laid his palm against my cheek.
——
‘All the kids in maximum security,’ says the poet, ‘have read your book. And they love it.’ Am I supposed to believe this? His alarming gaze. He can fix you for up to five minutes without blinking. Is that a jail thing? His hard, forceful presence, his hard talk and anecdotes, his need to keep talking, his discourse of violence—what he said to men who crossed him, what he said he’d do to them, what he in fact did do to them. ‘I jumped up and down on his arm, I was yellin’, “Ya cunt, if you break her arm I’m gunna break yours.”’ I kept thinking, must I take account of this? Is it middle class not to want to? ‘I was bored with m’ wife,’ he says. ‘I kept saying, “Here, go and buy yourself a nice dress or something.” But she wouldn’t. She’d wear a tracksuit, ’n’ ugg boots.’
——
Out all day with the jaws of my purse straining wide. Horror of Christmas. But I exchanged friendly looks with many strangers…I like people when they are in a great mass, thousands of lonely or rather solitary blobs, each one with ‘le front barré de souci’.
——
The barrier of shyness that attacks us both (and especially V) when we’re together. I mean sexual shyness. As if we were learning each other by some more decorous means. An inversion of the modern order.
——
One day I’ll have to burn this book. I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.
——
The landlord comes to examine the cracked wall and the powerful wisteria on the house-front. F is visiting. I set up the ironing board and say to the girls, ‘Sing to us.’ One plays the piano, the other sings: An die Musik. While I work, F sits quite still with his forearms on the table. I don’t dare look at him; it’s a song that brings such painful memories of the music we discovered together. ‘Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden…’ They sing other less poignant songs, and shift into carols. We join in. Meanwhile the landlord wanders up and down the stairs. I pass him in the hall. He’s standing still, listening to the girls’ voices: ‘Isn’t it lovely!’ Later, in the kitchen, he tells me a story: ‘When I was a kid I had a really good voice. I sang all the time, in choirs. I was good, and I loved it. My father—he was a wonderful man—used to get me to sing for him when we were going along together in the car. Then one day I overheard him talking to another bloke, someone he knew, a neighbour or someone he worked with. He was saying, “Some blokes have sons who are footballers. Some have sons who are runners. But I’ve got a son who’s a singer.” I thought he was ashamed of me. So I stopped. Gave it up. Never sang again. And years later he said to me, “I’ve never understood, John—why’d you stop singing?”’
On the doorstep he pauses. It will be fine with him, he says, if the four girls live here when I move out.
——
Maybe he’s the kind of man who conducts flirtations with women in such a way as to allow his wife to find out; she then puts a stop to the developing affair and, though he grumbles etc, this is what he wants, and needs. No idea why I thought of this. Just running through the painful possibilities.
——
On TV a dramatised life of Freud. Very enjoyable. Did he really have a black lower lip, like a dog’s? The madwomen in the hospital: raving, twitching, and nothing that could be done.
——
‘You look well. You look happy. Are you?’
‘Yes, I am happy.’ Feeling my flesh light on my bones.
——
The visiting German editor wants me to write a big piece about Melbourne. Though his monthly circulation is 250,000 he offers me only $1200. I make a series of small sounds meant to indicate slight interest in the piece but lack of excitement about the money. We agree to write to each other. Before my foot hits the pavement outside I have lost interest.
——
‘I’m a woman now,’ says M, pirouetting at the kitchen door.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I got my learner’s permit. I’m allowed to drive a car. I can drive a car.’
We laugh so madly we have to lean on the walls. Fact: I love her more than anyone in the world.
——
Whenever I start worrying about not being beautiful and young, I try to imagine a man of my age, someone whose age shows, who is not glamorous, who’s got wrinkles, but who’s got a sexual presence and an authority of personality. I imagine him in a group of people, sitting there quietly, not making a fuss. And I think, if he can be attractive, so can I.
——
In the car with F and M, last night, tired and crabby, I began to see my secret new fantasies as silly and pointless. How long does it take two people to slide into being a couple? But then F gave me a garden spade for Christmas. In my fatigue I had forgotten all the nice and lovely things about him, how funny he is, how on the drive home (he drove) we sang together, with M, for miles.
——
A two-year-old girl has been stolen from her bed (the person cut through a flywire screen) and ‘sexually assaulted’. She was found ‘crying and wandering’ in a street ten kilometres away at 1 am. Doctors have had to operate on her to repair ‘internal injuries’.
——
Cried and bawled by myself in front of the Mediaeval Mystery Plays on TV. Abraham and Isaac, what a terrible story, it made me hate God, the jealous God who demands appalling tributes, but then at the end when he tells Abraham he may spare his son, and says, ‘I am going to sacrifice my son, later on,’ I was pulled up short.
——
Mum brought to Christmas dinner some very old photos of us four girls as kids, outside the house at Ocean Grove. I saw myself at nine or ten looking so tragically plain that I lost heart for twenty minutes. Dad picked out the one who in the photos looked the most ‘cute’ and ‘timid’, then showered her with affection for the entire day. The rest of us craned sideways from a couch in the next room to watch him hold her, with his arm around her waist, while she stood beside his chair. Later she came up to us and said, ‘I think Dad loves me.’ We went into convulsions of embarrassed laughter.
——
T mended my pink trousers and then we lay on her bed and sofa and shrieked about fucking young or boring men. She fancies a bloke in a pub where she goes to play music. I said, ‘Is he a murderer?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He’s boring and has no sense of humour. But every time I see him I feel all stirred up on the way home.’
——
Dreamt that somebody had a baby but it died. A great deal of sobbing. The father was terribly distressed. I was trying to be of use but did not know how. In a paved courtyard I lit a fire in a metal container with a lid. Smoke poured out of it and I went back into the house and forgot about it.
——
Looking around this room I realise I’ll only be sleeping in it two or three more times.
1987
A hot, dry day on the Hume, a sky full of detailed, small clouds. Saw two or three dead wombats, a couple of dead kangaroos, and a live brown bird on the gravel with half a dozen live brown chicks. In the dunny at Tarcutta a Vietnamese woman was washing a baby’s trousers in the basin. I smiled at her. She said, ‘How—to Sydney—how many?’ ‘Four hours.’ ‘Four hours! Very far!’ She showed me the child’s clothes, made a spewing gesture: ‘My boy—vomit.’ I entertained myself with songs and sexual fantasies. What will become of me? What if he’s already thought better of it? Important: do not wait. Flying through an outer suburb of Sydney I saw a boy crouched on the footpath with one hand on the side of a dog that had apparently been hit by a car: the boy turned up his face to a standing man. A car was stopped at the kerb. The sheepdog, glossy, long-haired, brownish-yellow, was panting violently, its tongue lolling right out. Oddly matter-of-fact expression on the boy’s face. I may have misread the situation.
