University of Wollongong Research Online University of Wollongong Thesis Collection University of Wollongong Thesis Collections 2015 Let it be what it is: fact and fiction in Helen Garner's Monkey Grip and The pS are Room & Deepwater Alexandra McLeavy University of Wollongong Recommended Citation McLeavy, Alexandra, Let it be what it is: fact and fiction in Helen Garner's Monkey Grip and The pS are Room & Deepwater, Master of Creative Arts (Creative Writing) thesis, School of Law, Humanties and the Arts, University of Wollongong, 2015. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4448 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] ! ! Let it be what it is:! fact and fiction in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and The Spare Room! &! Deepwater! ! ! ! ! ! Master of Creative Arts! (Creative Writing) ! at the University of Wollongong! ! Alexandra McLeavy (BA Hons.)! School of Law, Humanities and the Arts! 2015 "1 Certification! ! I, Alexandra McLeavy, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a Master of Creative Arts, in the School of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged.! This document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution.! ! ! Alexandra McLeavy! 15 August, 2015 "2 Contents! ! Abstract!!!!!!!!! 4! Acknowledgments!!!!!!!! 5! Thesis!!!!!!!!!! 6! !Let it be what it is: fact and fiction in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip ! !and The Spare Room! Bibliography!!!!!!!!! 74! Creative work!!!!!!!! 81! !Deepwater "3 ! Abstract! ! In literature, the line between fiction and real life is often seductively thin. Taking the example of Helen Garner’s autobiographical fictions in her first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), and her last, The Spare Room (2008), the theoretical component of my Masters project examines how the first person narratives are vivified by their connection to the author’s life. The thirty-one years separating the novels’ publication saw distinct changes in the critical landscape, and I argue that while Monkey Grip was condemned for its likeness to a journal, The Spare Room capitalised on its correlation with reality. This dynamic constructs an extra-textual ‘real’ life for Garner’s novels which acts as a diegetic device, magnifying the gravity of the narratives. ! !The creative component of my project, my short novel Deepwater, was inspired by personal experience. However, finding the strictures of reality a restraint the story I’d envisioned as an autobiographical fiction grew into a work of pure fiction. The extra-textual ‘real’ life of the novel remained my entry point to the narrative, with small truths providing the flint to my imagination, but unlike in Garner’s examples the ‘I’ of personal narrative was a hindrance rather than a portal.! "4 ! ! Acknowledgements! ! This Masters project was completed at the University of Wollongong and as such, I sincerely acknowledge the University’s support. I am very grateful to all the academic, administrative and library staff who helped me along the way, especially those in the Creative Arts department.! !My profound thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Catherine Cole, whose generous wisdom, patience and encouragement was indispensable. ! !Thanks also to Ruth Walker, whose academic erudition helped shape my theoretical research.! !I would also like to acknowledge the people who inspired, in obvious and oblique ways, the characters who animate my novel, Deepwater. ! !Lastly, I’d like to thank my mother, Robyn McLeavy, for proofreading my final draft without complaint! "5 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Let it be what it is:! truth and fiction in Helen Garner’s! Monkey Grip and The Spare Room "6 ! ! ! ! ! Introduction! ! Helen Garner is an author to whom the epithets “truthful”, “accurate” and “honest” have often been applied, but despite her reputation for candour the uncertain relationship between reality and invention characterises Garner’s fiction. The first person narrator, who appears and reappears in her novels, short stories and non-fiction and shares conspicuous autobiographical traits with the author, invests the “I” with an authenticity that maddens and beguiles the reader: it is a seductive notion, after all, that we might know an author through a text or vice versa, know a text through its author. Garner ostensibly resists the idea of her textual availability, stating “(I)n order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an “I”” (2002, p. 41) but in truth, the insinuation of the author’s self inevitably animates her writings and the narrators who occupy them. ! !! "7 !In 1976, Garner approached McPhee Gribble with the manuscript for her first book, Monkey Grip, and “rather diffidently,” to Hilary McPhee’s recollection, suggested “that she thought she might have written a novel” (2001, p. 142). When the book was published a year later this designation was compromised by certain influential reviewers who insisted the book was a thinly veiled memoir and therein devoid of literary merit. Peter Corris, for example, notably condemned Garner for having “published her personal journal rather than written a novel” (1977, p. 12) in the Weekend Australian, a criticism which like many others (S. Edgar 1978; I. Dunn 1977; P. Rowe 1978; R. Conway 1978) was predicated on Corris’ unwillingness to divide the novel’s narrator from Garner. ! !! !As Kevin Brophy (1992) and Kerryn Goldsworthy (1996) argue in their insightful studies of Garner’s literary persona, reading the novel as a woman’s diary and focussing on the transgressive and romantic subject matter allowed reviewers to pass over the literary potential of Monkey Grip which, as Brophy contends, could have been read “as a strange new structure in the overwhelming presence of realism’s conventional architecture in Australian fiction” (1992, p. 275). Far from being overlooked, this critical infamy facilitated Monkey Grip’s canonisation as an expedient artefact of a progressive era: the novel subverted institutional "8 censure by proving enormously popular with readers, winning the National Book Council Award of 1978 and being memorialised, so to speak, as a film in 1982. ! !! !Garner responded to the exposure following Monkey Grip’s release with a varied and prolific output, publishing short stories, screenplays, non-fiction, an acclaimed novella and a novel. All of her writing, from the domestic drama of The Children’s Bach to the polemical reportage of The First Stone, was inspired by personal experience and told from an intimate point of view, bolstering Garner’s reputation for authenticity. In the 2002 essay “I”, published in Meanjin, Garner reflected on Corris’ critique of Monkey Grip, remembering, “I went around for years after that in a lather of defensiveness: ‘it’s a novel thank you very much’” before going on to declare “I might as well come clean. I did publish my diary. That’s exactly what I did” (p. 40). ! ! !The Meanjin essay marks a turning point in Garner’s persona, indicating she has etched a space for herself in the literary sphere and confidently, even defiantly, speaks for herself. The tone of the piece is intimate, but Garner still insists that writing the “I” necessitates an act of removal on the author’s behalf: “(O)nly a very naïve reader would "9 suppose that the ‘I’… is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you, in her purple stockings and sensible shoes” (p. 41) she writes.! !! !Thirty-one years after Monkey Grip was published and six years after “I” appeared, The Spare Room was published in 2008. Garner was instrumental in promoting the book as a novel whilst simultaneously affirming it was based on the three harrowing weeks she’d spent nursing a friend who was dying of cancer. Despite the autobiographical exactitude of The Spare Room, the most glaring element of which is a narrator called Helen, she maintained that the book was “morally” (Burns 2011, p. 28) a novel, given the liberties and inventions she’d used to shape the narrative. Naming the character Helen was a “stamp of authenticity” (Wyndham 2008, p. 26) Garner explained, for to name her otherwise seemed “a bit slithery” given the violent rage she felt towards her dying friend. The critical response to the novel was largely positive and though some reviewers took issue with its classification as fiction and others professed to boredom, none reduced her raw and often unflattering emotional candour to a moral deficiency, nor did they challenge the book’s literary standing on account of its factual origins. Unlike Monkey Grip, which suffered the imposition of reality as a denunciation, I will argue that The "10 Spare Room assimilates the implication of extra-textual reality as a narrative device that lends gravity, scope and depth to the story. ! ! !The changing way in which Helen Garner represents her personal life in her fiction writing and persona in the public sphere underpin my research project. In this thesis I will argue that although Garner’s public character was manipulated by critics at the beginning of her career, her later work actually predicates itself upon the reader’s familiarity with her history, and the tantalising, illusory familiarity of the author herself. The critical responses to The Spare Room illuminate a shift in Australian literary culture that honours Garner’s right, as a woman and as an experienced author, to speak for herself directly to her reader,