True Stories (2 page)

Then one day it occurs to you that you can see a
shape
to the diary, a curious sort of bulge or curve in the order of events. You try to ignore this, but it keeps coming to mind. One morning you put the Spirex exercise books in a plastic bag and hop on your bike. You dink your daughter to school and, instead of turning round and going home, where a band will later be practising in the front room and the egg cartons tacked to the wall will fail to muffle the roar of the speakers, you pedal on through Carlton and down to the domed Reading Room of the State Library in the city. You sit down under one of those green-shaded lamps, and turn back to the day in the diary where you think you can see a possible starting-point: an end of wool poking out of the tangled skein. ‘Without hope and without despair,' as Isak Dinesen says, you begin.

At first you simply transcribe. Then you cut out the boring bits and try to make leaps and leave gaps. Then you start to trim and sharpen the dialogue. Soon you find you are enjoying yourself. You can't wait to get there each morning. You make yourself stop at one o'clock and ride home, because if you do more than three hours at a stretch you're scared you'll have a heart attack from the excitement. It takes just over a year. Then you retire to your bedroom and you type it. The thunder of your second-hand Olivetti drowns out the band. For the first time in your life you don't care if you've got a boyfriend or not. You know nothing about lay-out, and produce a horrible-looking manuscript on cheap quarto paper, single-spaced, with mingy margins. But it's
fat.
It's got a title. Your name is on the front of it.
You wrote it.
So this is what it's all been for. What is it, though? Have you got the gall to call it a novel?

A year later,
Monkey Grip
was in the shops. But between the day I signed the contract and the day the book appeared, I circulated the manuscript round the households, in an attempt at candour, since the book's dozen characters were all versions of actual people. And here's the weird bit. Not a single one complained. I'm not saying they all
liked
it. But no one objected. The only person who went out of his way to contact me with a comment on his (very small) appearance in the book was a roadie who phoned me one afternoon, excited and happy, to thank me for putting him in. ‘It's one little bit of my life,' he said, ‘that hasn't been lost.'

Becoming self-consciously ‘a writer' after the surprise success of
Monkey Grip
, I tried to apply what I thought of as ‘fictional techniques' to the mess of my experience. I got lost in the attempt and, like many writers, produced a second book which was poorer in spirit than its artless predecessor. The more I tried to disguise real people as ‘characters', the more furious they got with me for writing about them at all. This second book of fiction,
Honour & Other People's Children
, in its clumsy and premature attempts to shape painful experience into ‘stories', caused wounds in certain people which have not healed.

The question of writers' ‘use' of ‘real' events and people in their books is not new. It has always caused vexation and it always will. It's the nature of a writer to exhibit what Nadine Gordimer calls ‘a monstrous detachment'. Writers, she says in the introduction to her stories, have ‘powers of observation heightened beyond the normal…The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer'. I used to think that if I examined my motivation as ruthlessly as I could, I would be able to do better than just write fiction which was a ‘settling of accounts' with people. I thought I'd be ethically in the clear as long as I wrote ‘in good faith'—that is, if I laid myself on the line as well, applied to myself the same degree of analysis and revelation that I did to the other people concerned. I still happen to think this attitude is legitimate, as far as it goes—but it's based on an assumption of consciousness in the novelist which is over-optimistic to the point of being grandiose.

I realise, specially since I published
Cosmo Cosmolino
, in 1992, that in fiction, when you get down into the muck of life-marriage and sex and God and death and old, old friendships— you are working blind. You think you're seeing what you're doing, but you're seeing only darkly. You may start from the ‘real'—but in fiction you soon forget which bits are ‘true' and which bits you made up. You get so engaged with the technical problems of making a story work that the connection between its characters and what exists outside the book becomes less and less visible to you, and of less and less interest. It can be years before you see with real clarity (if you ever do) what urges you were gripped by when you were writing that book. Often, what you thought you had a handle on turns out to have had a handle on
you.

In non-fiction you don't have the freedom—ethical, aesthetic, or temporal—to go in that deep. Non-fiction isn't easier than fiction, but for the most part it's broader and shallower. In non-fiction, the writer's contract with the reader is different. Someone reading a novel wants you to create a new world, parallel perhaps to the ‘real' one, in which the reader can immerse himself for the duration. But a reader of non-fiction counts on you to remain faithful to the same ‘real' world that both reader and writer physically inhabit. As a non-fiction writer you have, as well, an implicit contract with your material and with the people you are writing about: you have to figure out an honourable balance between tact and honesty. You are accountable for the pain you can cause through misrepresentation: you have a responsibility to the ‘facts' as you can discover them, and an obligation to make it clear when you have
not
been able to discover them. Fiction's links with the ‘real' are more complex and tenuous. But they can still get a writer into all sorts of personal trouble. I didn't know this in 1980 when
Honour
got me into hot water, but I notice now how soon afterwards it was that I started busily doing journalism—really throwing myself into it. It may have been firstly to earn a living—but it was surely also for the relief: instead of feeling an irksome obligation to make things up, in journalism I was not allowed to.

When I hunted out the stories that make up this book, I was amazed at the sheer quantity of non-fiction I've written over the last twenty-five years. You forget how hard you have to work, to make a freelance living. Also, there's a kind of snobbery that makes you forget everything you've done except the books. They stand up in the landscape behind you, visible at a distance and clearly marked with dates, while the non-fiction and the journalism lie flat, forming a dense, prickly undergrowth. All right—I accept that theatre and film reviews, though they put food on the table for years, don't belong between covers—but how could I have forgotten writing about Mr Tiarapu? The marmalade display at the Royal Melbourne Show? The purchase of the violet jacket? Deadlines give you time for only a minimal amount of polish and perfecting. Like the doctors of the Penrith story in this book, you have to keep moving—on, on, on.

When I first started publishing regular feature articles, a newspaper man came up to me at a party and said genially, ‘I like your journalism, Helen—but you should write more. You should write
faster.
' A publisher's editor standing nearby overheard this. I saw his mouth drop open. The journalist moved on and the editor said to me in a voice faint with horror, ‘That was
awful.
It was like hearing the
devil
talking.'

But in the early eighties the
Age
had a wonderful editor, an Englishman called Michael Davie. He had a black-and-white photo of Samuel Beckett pinned to his office wall. I respected his judgement, loved his dry, elegant sparkle, and was always just a little bit scared of him. When I did my first feature for him, he sent me a bottle of champagne. He offered me
a retainer.
He was funny and sophisticated and he thought writing mattered. He didn't stay long in Australia, but he was the first editor I worked for who lent dignity to the job of writing features for a daily newspaper.

After he went back to London, I made an appointment with his successor, for I was labouring under the delusion that, since I was in a very minor way on his payroll, I ought out of courtesy to present myself in person. The new editor lost no time in letting me know that he was not in the business of ‘massaging writers' egos'.
Crrrrunch.
Things were back to normal. Thus ended my formal relationship with the
Age.

It is very squashing to come to feature journalism from a publishing house, where one's work is treated with respect. These days, with newspapers and magazines, I am crabby enough to demand and get proofs, but back then I was still at the mercy of the sub-editors and their brutally applied house style. I have never to my knowledge actually seen a sub, but their harsh pencils (or whatever they use) have punctured many a balloon of my modest rhetoric. I once wrote a piece for the
Age
in which I rhapsodised about looking out the window of an interviewee's kitchen in an outer suburb and seeing ‘miles and miles of golden grass'. This appeared on Saturday morning as ‘kilometres and kilometres of golden grass'.

Further into the eighties I worked for the
National Times
and the
Times on Sunday
, which were based in Sydney. Sunday became the worst day of the week. Their typesetters were slap-happy and their subs not merely deflating—they delighted to slash and burn. Between them they could mangle the meaning out of the simplest sentence. ‘Operatic' became ‘operative'. ‘Hedonistic' turned into ‘pessimistic', ‘rhetorical' into ‘theoretical'. A friend of mine who also wrote for them phoned me one Sunday morning. ‘Have you seen what they've done to my story?' he said in a choking voice. ‘I've just smashed the toaster with a hammer.'

Journalism is a tonic for narcissists like me. It gets you out of the house—literally, but also in the sense that it blasts you out of your immediate personal situation and into direct contact with strangers. The more of it I try to write, the deeper grows my respect for the great interviewers. I used to think a lot of Joan Didion, but when I reread
Slouching towards Bethlehem
, lately, I found it rigid with mannerisms, with
style.
I'm thinking rather of writers like Janet Malcolm (
The Silent Woman
, most recently), the Englishman Tony Parker (
Life after Life
, interviews with twelve murderers), Norman Mailer of
The Executioner's
Song
—and the French documentary maker Claude Lanzmann (
Shoah, Tsahal
)
.

Lanzmann has a humility before his material which is exemplary and rare. He never shirt-fronts, or tries to get people on the back foot—but he is persistent, gently stubborn. He is the king of the apparently dumb question, the simple, unaggressive gambit that releases a flow of talk from a person not accustomed to self-expression. ‘Do you like tonks?' he says sweetly in his comical accent, to a member of an elite Israeli tank corps. A Jew, he picks up a flicker of stifled emotion in an old Nazi who is blankly justifying his role in the death camps; Lanzmann has the quiet nerve to ask, ‘Why are you sad?' He is prepared to leave the surface of his work porous. There is no one in the world less eager than he is to have the last word. I admire him more than I can say.

Interviewing is not what people imagine. Before you try it, you think it must be like pulling teeth. You approach each interview fearing that you will not get enough. But what you learn is that you must humble yourself before the other. You have to let go of your anxious desire to control and direct the encounter. You have to live for a while in the uncertainty of not knowing where it's heading. You don't lead. You learn to follow. And then you are amazed at what people are prepared to tell you.

People will always tell you more than you need to know-and more than they want you to know. This is not only because you are alert to their body language as well as their speech. I think it's because most ordinary people can't really believe that anyone else is interested in them. In your average casual conversation, the listener is only just restraining himself from butting in with ‘Well,
I—
'
.
As an interviewer you have to discipline your narcissism. You have to train yourself to shut up about what
you
did and saw and felt. You learn by practice to listen properly and genuinely, to follow with respect the wandering path of the other's thoughts. After a while this stops being an effort. You notice that your concentration span is getting longer—longer than you ever thought it could become. Fewer and fewer things bore you. Curiosity is a muscle. Patience is a muscle. What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural. And then immense landscapes open out in front of you. A woman who spoke to me when I was researching the Penrith story in this book kept cutting herself off mid-sentence and saying, ‘But this must be boring.' After the fifth time she said this, I heard myself say—
and mean
—words that I had never dreamt would pass my lips: ‘Listen. I am one of the least boreable people you are ever likely to meet.'

A risk is that you over-identify with your subject. Often it can take days to disentangle yourself. Sometimes, years later, you are still waking up at three in the morning in a sweat over someone else's troubles. Other strange processes can intrude. Once, months after I'd done a long interview with a woman I'll call X, I arranged to meet her in a cafe so she could check her quotes. I walked in on time. She wasn't there. There was only a total stranger at a table against the wall. I hesitated at the door. The stranger waved to me. I stared at her. ‘Helen,' she said, puzzled, ‘it's me—X.'

I was mortified. I realised I had completely transformed her appearance as I wrote up our conversation. When she checked the quotes and found them accurate I was giddy with relief. Perhaps what's really odd is that this so rarely happens. Clearly it's the beginning of the process of creating a
character—
a habit that slithers over the border from fiction, the land where you are always disguising people and trying to cover your tracks.