True Stories

by Helen Garner

  Writers, for their part, aren’t supposed to get instant gratification. If they wanted that, they’d be in a different line of work—singing, or acting, or stand-up comedy. The danger of writers’ festivals, for the writers, is that ‘one’ can get an inflated idea of one’s importance. ‘One’ can go home with a fat head—or wake up next morning like someone after a huge party: wondering whether one has been a fool, revealed the nastier sides of one’s nature, failed to recognise someone and thus created an enemy.

  Worst of all, ‘one’ has forgotten how to be lonely, which is the sine qua non of the writer’s life. It sounds as if I’m saying that writers and readers should be kept apart. That’s not what I set out to say, but maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

  1992

  Cypresses and Spires: Writing for Film

  YOU CAN WRITE a whole novel with your left arm curved round the page. You can get to the end of the last draft without having shown it to a single person or made one compromise. Even if you have to battle with an editor, the book reaches the reader pretty much as you intended it. All its mistakes and failures are yours, totally and forever, and so are its little glories. When the chips are down, you are the book, and the book is you.

  Why would a novelist turn her back on this marvellous freedom, this privacy and independence, and sneak into the bunfight of screen-writing?

  I did it for the money. That was my first reason, anyway. At a friend’s wedding I met a producer I liked who asked me to contact her if I ever felt like writing a movie. Being broke at the time, I rushed home and rummaged in my folder of unexamined ideas. Out of it stepped Kelly and Louise, the young girls who became Two Friends.

  But within a week I realised that though money is a spur, it’s also only a mirage, once you’ve sat down at the desk. I found that filmwriting is powered by the same drives as fiction. You do it out of curiosity, and technical fascination, and the same old need to shape life’s mess into a seizable story.

  I’ve seen a lot of movies, but I hadn’t a clue how to write a screenplay. The formal stages of its development—outline, treatment, drafts—were utterly foreign to me. When I write a novel or a story, I never plan. I circle round the dark area of life (mine, or someone else’s) to which my curiosity is attracted, and I search for a way in. My method of work is a kind of blind scrub-bashing.

  But now I found I was required to sit up brightly in a watchtower and tap out a preliminary map of the territory. I had to turn my old, organic, secretive, privileged, hyper-sensitive work process inside out.

  This was the hardest part of the change, for me. I’m used to working alone. It suits my nature. I can’t stand it if anyone (no matter how dear) comes into the room behind me while I’m working. I have to cover the pathetic, scrambled mess on the page. I like to get the thing as perfect as I can make it, before I hand it over.

  With movies, this won’t wash. I had to learn to walk into someone else’s room, whack down my idea like a lump of raw meat, and watch it quiver while it was rolled and prodded on the table.

  This might easily have been as gruesome as it sounds; but in fact my brief experience of filmwriting has been an intense pleasure, because of the calibre of the people who introduced me to it: the directors Jane Campion (Two Friends) and Gillian Armstrong (The Last Days of Chez Nous), and Jan Chapman, who produced both these films. Long script sessions with these three classy, generous and challenging professionals taught me to drop my defensiveness and become more flexible at an earlier stage, before my thoughts could set themselves in concrete. They showed me the priceless art of the apparently dumb question, and the calm brazenness that is required in order to ask it. From Gillian Armstrong I learnt that before you can cut something out of the story you have to understand fully what it is, instead of dropping it because you’re too lazy to think it right through. I learnt (from Jane Campion in particular) to follow and trust intuition, no matter how alarmingly it swerves. And, most valuably of all, because it applies to everything written in any genre, all three of them forced me to learn and relearn the stern law of structure.

  What I had seen in a late draft of Chez Nous, for example, as a perfectly smooth narrative curve would turn out, under their skilful probing, to be more like a little Himalaya of mini-climaxes. Special effects a novelist might pull off on the page by bluff or flashy language simply will not transpose to film. Everything has to be re-invented through the eyes. It was very squashing to have to leave my precious prose at the door and be pushed back again and again to the bare bones of structure and dialogue. There is nothing else, it seemed at times. So hard, to be so stripped!

  But, by the same token, how shockingly easy just to write ‘Night, a desert motel’, or ‘She takes her father’s arm’, and to leave the rest, the complex labour of providing the detail that will fill the bare places and acts with meaning, to the director’s incredibly numerous and expensive army of actors and technicians! The ease of it—it seemed criminal; I felt almost guilty.

  Does anyone understand the alchemy of many imaginations that distils a film? An actor’s wonky emphasis can throw a whole carefully crafted piece of psychology out of whack. The wrong brand of teacup on a table can skew a family’s fantasy of itself. But by the same token, the tiny upward movement of one facial muscle, spontaneous, unconscious, impossible to write, can transform the emotional mood of an entire sequence. A director can take hold of your stick of an idea and make it blossom into a poetry your plodding typewriter could never have dreamt of.

  I’ve read the horror stories and I know how lucky I’ve been with these two films. At the start I was hampered by pathetic gratitude that my work was even considered filmable. I didn’t (and still don’t) understand the writer’s position in the hierarchy of the production army. I was often too proud to ask the ignorant question that would have taught me what I needed to know. I discovered in myself a passivity I never knew was there. I stayed away while the films were being shot, and when you’re not present, when you’re in another town, everything you think is always too late. I accepted without a struggle, over the phone, last-minute changes the necessity of which I was too inexperienced to judge. I still haven’t learnt how—and when—to fight for what I see as crucial. I haven’t yet learnt to foresee the flashpoints where imagination and budget might collide, and to take a stand long before the moment, on location, when the crucial is found to be impossible and the lesser road must be taken.

  In Chez Nous, for example, there are the cypress trees.

  From the main character’s bedroom window I wanted a row of pencil cypress trees to be visible, growing in some distant and unidentifiable neighbourhood garden. These trees, to me, carry a heavy freight of meaning. They are Mediterranean, thus connected with the origins of our culture. They are calm, sturdy, graceful. They are a reminder of darkness, of stillness, of death—and thus of the question of God, and the soul. At certain charged moments in the plot of Chez Nous, people glance out the window and see the cypresses. Once, Beth speaks of them to her pregnant friend in a way that tells us a good deal about her.

  But you will not see the cypresses in the film of Chez Nous.

  When a terrace house in Glebe was chosen for the film it was perfect in every way except one: there were no cypress trees. The cypress trees, it seemed, would not be possible. I went to the house with Jan Chapman and Gillian Armstrong, and we walked from window to window, looking for something to replace them. Then, from an upstairs room we saw, beyond the thick summer foliage into which the house backed, the tip of a church spire, just floating there. The building to which it was attached was completely hidden by leafy branches. The spire was grey, rather pale, almost insubstantial. At that anxious moment it seemed a gift, and we persuaded ourselves that the spire would do.

  And in a sense it did do—but a resonance departed. A spire, no matter how indistinct and beautiful, is literal. It represents a known religion, a particular theology, with all the sectarian and social meanings that this entails. The mystery of the
image is lost.

  So when I published the script of Chez Nous I removed the spire, and put the cypress trees back in.

  The qualities of air and light in a certain place, I now realise, are more than purely aesthetic. They form the tone of people’s lives, the way people move about and behave towards each other and feel about themselves. Both these films were imagined in Melbourne and shot in Sydney. I didn’t think this would matter, but the experience has taught me that the two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from LA, or Lyon from Marseilles. The very image of a house, on which both films heavily depend, bears one sort of psychological emphasis in warm, open Sydney, and a completely different one in Melbourne, where dwellings are enclosing, curtained, cold-weather-resisting: more like burrows.

  These are only a few of the lessons I have learnt. I don’t know yet whether I will have another chance at applying them to a film. I think I will always prefer to write fiction. Collaboration, if you’re used to the long spells of obsessive loneliness that fiction demands, is weirdly over-exciting. You go home each day suspecting that you have made a complete fool of yourself. It feels illicit. All that laughter! Can this really be work? People hang around whose job is to bring you a cup of tea! A sandwich on a plate! And to clear away the crockery afterwards while you go on writing! You are afraid of being swallowed up by the seductive machinery of it, the intricate balancing of forces that you barely understand.

  And as for the money—the appalling sums it costs, to make your ideas visible—I will never get used to this. Thinking about it nearly makes me keel over. Yes, at the beginning I really thought I was doing it for the money. But now I know that if I do it again, it will be for the slightly crazed pleasure of collaboration, and for the subtle little quiver of possibility that the enterprise gives off at the start—the distant flicker of a not yet perfected story that might end up satisfying and deep, if the chemistry is right. And, of course, for the moment when you sit down in the dark and see your characters walk and talk, with tones in their voices and expressions on their faces; when you see them spin away from you and out into the world of strangers.

  1992

  Dreams, the Bible and Cosmo Cosmolino

  YEARS BEFORE I wrote Cosmo Cosmolino, its title came to me in a dream.

  My friend, in this dream, was in the last stages of pregnancy and I ran about looking for a doctor as she began to labour. Slow-motion frustration: no doctor or nurse to be found. I would have to deliver the baby myself. My friend was quiet, she was not panicking, she was ready to give birth. ‘Squat, squat,’ I said, remembering stories of peasants. I spread out two old blue sleeping bags and a towel in the hallway of a terrace house. I took hold of her shoulders. She was perfectly calm and at ease. I held a mirror under her: her cunt opened like a shitting arsehole and the top of the baby’s head appeared. It didn’t move, or come further out, so I squeezed her cunt as one squeezes a pimple; with pressure from a small distance away, and pop! out it came, the strange bald head, as far as the nose, through which it immediately took a breath. The rest of the baby slithered out into my hands: suddenly there we had it, the child, already wrapped up and quickly old enough to crawl about and eat an apple. We called it Cosmo, Cosmolino—world, little world.

  I had been keeping a record of my dreams for a long, long time. I had always been interested and attracted by dreams, decades before I realised that they spoke a kind of language, a poetry—and that they had something to do with me. Long before I realised there was a way of getting a handle on them, I loved their vividness and their weirdness. I used to keep a book beside the bed, and would sit up straight out of sleep and write them down, in that precious and brief state between sleep and full wakefulness.

  Later, when I reread them, I’d often envy that me, the half-awake me who had grabbed the pen and written a whole page before the reasoning, embarrassable mind got back into the driver’s seat and jammed on the brakes. I used to think, ‘These dreams—the way they express themselves, their bluntness, their bare-faced frankness, their utter lack of irony, shame or guile— these dreams are better than anything else I’ve ever written.’

  I felt both responsible for them—I mean pleased with them—and at the same time innocent of them—as if I shouldn’t take credit for them because they weren’t exactly mine. It was more as if I were theirs. I had a strong sense that they were passing through me. (I once read an interview with a saxophone player who said, ‘When I play badly, it’s my fault, but when I play well, it’s got nothing to do with me.’)

  The daylight me, who sat at a desk, fed, watered, fully dressed and wearing shoes and socks, who laboured to produce articles and reviews and stories and novels—this working me longed to recover that state of being in which I was able to dash off these dreams. The dream writing was writing without effort, without strain, without ambition.

  I don’t mean, though, that it was automatic writing, or gibberish like someone talking in tongues. My half-waking mind was able to construct sentences of syntactic grace and correctness. Better still, the language it used was completely without embarrassment or social constraints. It could handle sexual ecstasy or excretion or shocking physical cruelties or tremendous natural phenomena (floods, earthquakes) without the slightest hesitation. It was equal to anything, of any scope, vast or tiny, complex or simple. Nothing was too squalid or too glorious for it to express. It found (or possessed—there seemed to be no struggle involved) a language appropriate to whatever spectacle it had witnessed or taken part in, while I slept.

  And most enviably of all, it had a style which I longed to command. This style was urgent, direct, simple; stripped of ornament yet rich in imagery, correct in syntax and grammar, and graceful in its movement; muscular in its verbs; laconic without being desiccated; capable of fine distinctions without nit-picking or pedantry; able to move easily between high diction and blunt serviceable everyday speech.

  In short, it was everything the daylight me wanted, as a style, and could not have.

  So, when I started working on what was eventually published as Cosmo Cosmolino, one thing I wanted was to find a way of incorporating dream into the writing.

  I say ‘into the writing’ rather than ‘into the story’ on purpose. It’s easy enough to put a dream into a story—that is, to make a character have a dream. (One writer I know says he’s suspicious of dreams in novels. ‘As soon as someone in what I’m reading has a dream,’ he says, ‘I either skip it or put the book down.’ He thinks that to make your character dream is a kind of cheating.)

  What I tried to do, in Cosmo Cosmolino, was to enrich the texture of the story, to get beyond the fairly simple psychological realism I’d been writing previously and out into a more wondrous world that would still stubbornly be this world. I wanted to write something that had all the squalid panic, the wild swerves of narrative, the radiant emblematic objects and the passages of swooning bliss that I had found in dreams.

  It was not easy.

  But I found another source—the Bible. I began to read it, partly, I think, because one of my characters was a fundamentalist Christian, and I wanted to become familiar with his territory before I tackled him. But it was also because—

  At this point I recognise a false tone in what I am saying. I mean the sort of not quite lies but not quite truth either that a writer can slide into when speaking about her own work. I am starting to talk as if I knew what I was doing when I wrote the book. In retrospect, one starts to take credit for things in the work which, at the time of writing, were desperate stabs, blind lurchings, or steps off cliffs into thin air. The truth is that I forget why I started to read the Bible. What makes us pick up one book and not another? I do remember buying for a dollar a battered old copy of a 1950s translation of the New Testament in the Cat Protection Society op shop on my way along Enmore Road to work. I remember taking it to my work room, reading a few pages, then deciding—because my writing was going so badly—to get hold of the King James Ve
rsion and the Jerusalem Bible as well, to go back to Genesis, to sit there and read the whole damn thing. I remember realising it would take months, and deciding that since I had a two-year Literature Board grant it was the perfect time to do it.

  I also remember being relieved at having set myself a serious task that would remove for several months my appalling attacks of guilt at not being able to write the novel I was trying to write—that I had been given taxpayers’ money to write.

  I remember being astonished at the intensity of the reading pleasure I got as a writer from the Bible—I mean technically. It would be too neat to say that I found in it something approximating to the style my half-waking self commanded but which was beyond the range of my daylight self. But there were passages of narrative in the Bible that made my hair stand on end—with horror, bliss, and technical awe. The Book of Tobit, for example. Chapter 5, verse 16: ‘The boy left with the angel, and the dog followed behind.’ This is a story in which an angel just stands about casually in a doorway; a man unwittingly hires an angel ‘at a drachma a day’. I found, too, certain brilliant ways of launching a story, of grabbing the reader’s sleeve and commanding his attention: ‘A man had two daughters’ or ‘Consider a carpenter, who…’ This blunt, urgent address reminded me of fairytales.

  And I recognised, often, the emblematic objects of my dreams: things that seem to radiate a tremendous, mysterious meaning: the cloak that Elijah throws over the ploughboy’s shoulder; the hem of Jesus’ garment, through which the ‘virtue’ runs out of him when the sick woman touches it; the staff that puts forth shoots and leaves; a little pancake; the details of sewing and carpentry in the building of the temple.