Everywhere I Look
By Helen Garner(Text Publishing, 2016) In This House of Grief, Helen Garner, an Australian novelist and journalist with a dozen books to her name, tells the story of a famous murder trial. She places herself within the narrative – a gripping account of the trial of Robert Farquharson for the murder of his three sons – in such a way that we feel as though we are sitting in the courthouse alongside her, looking through her eyes. Her focus is on the trial, but she is also a part of the story: “What if I were one of those tired, frightened jurors, sequestered by an oath from the comfort of work and family, browbeaten by oratory, craving the release of laughter or tears?” We experience the trial doubly: by imagining the experiences of the accused, the lawyers, the witnesses, etc., and by taking in Garner’s own responses to the story unfolding in front of her.Garner’s most recent book, the essay collection Everywhere I Look, works with a similar doubling of experience. As the title promises, the essays gesture both out toward the world and back at the one looking at the world. Garner’s subjects are varied, ranging from essays on art and culture to personal topics such as aging, moving house, and her relationship with her mother. Most essays appeared in periodicals over the past fifteen years and show both a variety of interests (ballet, Jane Austen, learning to play the ukulele) and Garner’s recurring obsessions (true crime, Australian novelists, stories about friendship). At her strongest, Garner finds exactly the right balance between the “I” of the title and the world the “I” is looking at. The best essays in this collection are a delight. When an essay falls flat, it’s either because she is too far out of the picture or too much in it, because neither the writer nor the subject are present enough and sturdy enough to carry the weight of an essay. The book implicitly considers the question of why some readers are drawn to personal essays: the answer is the magic that happens when a writer invites us to explore something new in the world and is exactly the right companion along the way.Garner excels at showing us how she observes: she invites us to stand next to her and gaze in the same direction, pointing the way toward what she sees while allowing us to glimpse the pointing arm. In “How to Marry Your Daughters,” Garner describes reading Pride and Prejudice, uncertain whether she has read the novel before or merely feels she has because of its famous opening line. She recounts the plot and describes the characters in colloquial fashion – “Lydia Bennet, at sixteen, is a piece of trash” – and tells us what she’s feeling as she reads:
So it came as a surprise to me that Mr Darcy makes Elizabeth his first proposal – which she repels in a scene of breathtaking muscle and spark – on page 210. Wasn’t this rather premature? Had she hung out the flags of love too soon? I tilted the book and examined its profile. Exactly halfway! The cunning minx! She was going to make me wait another 218 pages for a resolution! Torn between despair and violent longing, I was obliged to rise from my sopha and take a turn around the drawing room.
In her evocation of the language of romance and regency drama, Garner takes on the role of an Austen heroine herself – Marianne from Sense and Sensibility perhaps – and invites us to imagine living in the novel with her, as we simultaneously imagine that we are Garner reading Pride and Prejudice for what might be the first time.Garner is a wonderful appreciator: she invites us into the work under review by leading us along the path of discovery she has followed. Everywhere I Look contains admirations of Australian writer Barbara Baynton, the film United 93, and, surprising no one more than Garner herself, Russell Crowe’s films. Her essay on Janet Malcolm, “The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters,” is a model of this kind of piece. Here, as in the essay on Austen, she both marvels at Malcolm’s authorial power and shows us the effect it has had on her:
The longest piece in [Malcolm’s book Forty-One False Starts], “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” is a study of the New York art scene of the 1980s. Nothing could interest me less, I thought; but within a few sentences I found myself drawn into a scintillating anthropological investigation that I read greedily, realizing that like any other microcosm this one could be studied with both entertainment and profit, and with a thrilling degree of enlightenment about the human project.
This passage comes near the end of Everywhere I Look, and by this point we begin to realize that what Malcolm has done, Garner wants to do as well. Garner writes that Malcolm makes her readers feel “the intense pleasure she gets from thinking.” Malcolm wants to capture artists’ struggles to portray the unruliness of life. Her writing is never lazy; she asks the reader to work and “to pace along with her.” Garner both tells us and shows us that Malcolm has been her most important teacher, even though they never met.The Malcolm piece is one of many in Everywhere I Look that directly and indirectly spell out Garner’s aesthetic aims. In “On Darkness,” for instance, she describes the complicated public reception of her depiction of the murderer in This House of Grief, and declares that her artistic goal is to mimic the “brutal simplicity” of police photographs. In admiration of photographers who look directly at a grisly crime scene and record it without shielding themselves or viewers, she writes, “I see now that for some years already I had been trying to turn myself into the sort of person who could look steadily at such things, without flinching or turning away.” She aspires to be true to her book’s title and to look truly everywhere.But she finds that certain people don’t want to read her crime writing or they find it uncomfortable because she refuses to moralize or call a murderer a monster. These people attempt to shield themselves from the darker parts of human nature, including their own darkness, and they want to save themselves from the helplessness that comes from bearing witness to cruelty and suffering. She envies those police photographers because they have something to do; they have a job to complete,
while all I can do is sit here on the couch in front of the TV with stupid tears running off my cheeks, unable to form a coherent thought or even to locate in myself an emotion with a name.
This is not entirely true, however, because even if she couldn’t at the time give her emotions a name, readers come to see that she has captured them in the essay itself. The essay mimics the movement from helplessness to action, from wordless emotion to writing that might possibly evoke a similar emotion in the reader. In the end, dreams, imagination, and art can create meaning out of what appears meaningless: “At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal.” By putting everything around her into words as simple and clear as she can make them, she is opening the door for the “deep knowingness” of art.Garner is even willing to turn her sharply observant eye toward herself and tell us what she sees, however unflattering. “Notes on a Brief Friendship” is a portrait of the author and Holocaust survivor Jacob Rosenberg, and it is also an assessment of her failings as a friend. Both elements of the piece are equally revelatory. The essay is an account of their slightly awkward acquaintanceship, described with charming, self-deprecating candor:
He was an old man, no doubt an autodidact – he wrote that Auschwitz was his university – and his style was to express himself in well-considered, hard-won nuggets of thought. He would lay them down on the cloth between us, peering up at me on an angle with his bright eyes; and I, the beneficiary of a university education that I had been too lazy to take advantage of, would sit there gazing at them helplessly. I have never been any good at generalizing, or at responding to other people’s philosophical insights.
She wonders if Rosenberg thought she was naïve, incapable of handling the bleakness and despair he expressed to other friends, but never to her. But in no way is she offended by this: she extends generosity toward him and also toward herself. Yes, she might in some fashion be lazy; she may have mildly disappointed him and she may not be the kind of friend he wants, but this is not distressing to her. It’s simply the way it is.This clear-eyed generosity infuses her dark, haunting essay on her mother, “Dreams of Her Real Self.” Here she describes her mother’s lack of education and her inability to understand her difficult, prickly daughter. She tells a story about getting fired from a teaching job for answering students’ questions about sex and how, in the aftermath, newspapers published cartoons both for and against her. Her mother wrote a letter to the editor in her defense, but the letter revealed that she hadn’t understood that some of the cartoons were meant ironically: “I tried to explain this gently, but I knew she was humiliated. To be her intellectual superior was unbearable.” The essay makes admitting this seem unbearable as well, even as Garner does it.In the book’s weaker essays, the interaction between author and subject gets thrown off balance, so that Garner, or the persona she creates, is not a strong enough guiding presence. Three collections of brief diary entries are a case in point. Each, interspersed among other essays, contains observations and vignettes that are a few lines to a few paragraphs long. Certain themes weave their way through the sections, the odd doings of children and grandchild and the hard labor of writing especially. One of the diary chapters is entitled “While Not Writing a Book,” implying that they were written between books or in the middle of attempts to write a book. Some of the sections are amusing or pleasingly written (“’She’s one of those women,’ says my friend, ‘who put on perfume by spraying a cloud and walking into it’”), but the larger point is not clear. The diarist herself is what should hold these sections together – they are autobiographical or at least contain details from the world that made an impression on her – but a sense of an authorial presence is missing. We aren’t aware of her purpose in bringing these thoughts together and the thoughts themselves aren’t strong enough to stand on their own.Other essays seem slight because Garner hasn’t convinced of the subject’s importance. Her essay “Eight Views of Tim Winton,” a portrait of her friendship with the Australian novelist, is charming and tells us about Garner as much as about Winton and his family, but no larger point emerges. It’s not an essay convincing us to read Winton, and not an essay about the intensely full, outdoorsy, adventurous life he and his wife lead. Garner describes their friendship and her varied feelings towards him – crankiness, jubilance, jealousy, joy – but these feelings are hinted at rather than developed. Unlike her essay on Jacob Rosenberg, which is sharply defined and vital, this one remains slightly muddled.When pieces like the Winton essay and the diary series fail to satisfy, it may also be because of how difficult it is to build a coherent whole out of fragments. Perhaps asking something labeled a diary to make a point as an essay would is unfair, but if it doesn’t have a larger point, then the pieces need to dazzle, which they only sometimes do. But other essays show that Garner can make the essay-in-fragments form work beautifully. “Dreams of her Real Self” contains fragments that individually are full of emotional power and together add up to a nuanced picture of a fraught mother/daughter relationship. After Garner’s stories describing her mother’s inability or refusal to show emotion, her tendency to disappear behind her more charismatic husband, and her failure to understand Garner’s ambition and intellect, the simple statement, a section all on its own, “Oh, if only she would walk in here now” becomes almost unbearably moving.“White Paint and Calico” is another example: this essay is essentially a series of one-paragraph vignettes and observations on moving house. What makes this work is that her own story of moving is interspersed throughout all the other tales so that there is a clear through line. She describes her sense of disorientation and loss after moving to a new house, and then shifts to contemplating what it means to move in an existential sense:
I imagine that people will step in the front door, take a look around and start to pity me. “Well,” they say, trying to brighten me, “at least you won’t have to move again.” What – stay here till I die? In their concern they are consigning me to old age, to death. Is this why I have always kept moving? Because to stay in one place is deathly?
From here, she moves back to the particular, with a story about her father moving at the age of eighty-nine after his wife, Garner’s mother, has died. He is devastated by the disruption, and Garner is devastated by his response:
I hate now to think of that look on his face, both furious and desperately trusting, for he looked up at me the same way from his armchair on the summer morning, two years later, when I came in with my granddaughter to take him out for a coffee and he told me he’d stepped out of the shower and couldn’t get his breath. By the time the sun had set that day, he was dead.
To stay in one place is deathly, to move is a disruption that foreshadows death: there’s no avoiding thinking about one’s end. Later in the essay, she suggests that the disorientation that comes from living in a new house is what it must be like to be old: to be forever flustered and confused. The essay ends on a comforting note with a story about a boy whose parents tried to reproduce his old bedroom in his new space down to the last detail: “Then he said in a soft, calm voice, ‘Yes,’ and stepped forward into his room.” But in spite of this closing consolation, we know this is not the trajectory of real life. Garner has arranged the pieces of this essay to take us through loss and sadness toward comfort and reassurance, but we know – and she knows that we know – that this an artistic sleight of hand.Even Garner’s least-engaging works point toward her strengths: they show the heights she is aiming for and that, at her best, she reaches brilliantly. Her strongest essays evoke emotion through reticence and suggestiveness. They hint at depth of thought and feeling but never become ponderous. And they reveal both the writer and the world by inviting us into her thoughts so that we can see what she sees. Her successes and her failures show just how hard it for an essayist to answer the question of why we should care – why are personal essays something we might want to spend time on anyway? Her best pieces answer this question: we read them because of the richness of perspective they offer. In them, we see not only a small piece of the world, but also the writer looking at the world and looking back at us, asking us to spend some time gazing at it all right there with her.____Rebecca Hussey teaches English at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut and blogs at Of Books and Bicycles.
