When I think of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip I think of blinding sunlight and suburban swimming pools. Is there an Australian who doesn’t know the particular tough pleasure of lying on a threadbare towel on concrete, nestling your pliant young body into that hard, baking warmth? This book makes me remember the person I was in my youth. Like all Garner’s work, it also makes me examine who I am now.
Monkey Grip is Garner’s first book, released in 1977 by then fledgling independent Melbourne publisher McPhee Gribble. Everything about the partnership between Hilary McPhee, Diana Gribble and Garner, all three aged in their 30s, was to become iconic, for it represented the wresting of Australian literature away from the grip of conservative old men into the hands of radical young women. As Bernadette Brennan writes in her superb biography A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, the publication of Monkey Grip was a watershed moment for our culture, charting “the complex female experiences of motherhood, sexuality and desire, within the changing social contexts of the seventies, and … explod[ing] notions of literary decorum”.
Readers loved Monkey Grip – it sold and sold – but critics were divided and often vicious, establishing a pattern that would recur for the rest of Garner’s writing life. She was excoriated for her frankness about sex, drugs and bodies with all their mess: blood, veins and sweat, dirt and tears and sperm. The fact that a woman was writing about these things, without shame, directly from the centre of her own experience, was shocking.
I first read the story of Nora and her doomed love of the smack-addicted Javo when I was in my early 20s. Back then, I read it with a bleak sort of recognition. Though our worlds were so unalike we might have inhabited different planets, my young self was still too close to Nora, full of plaintiveness and masochism, full of wasted love and desperate, clinging need.
Thankfully, that young self of mine – who like Nora hung around endlessly waiting, who could not, would not stand up for herself – has faded into my long-distant past.
But reading Monkey Grip is not all about a visit to the past. Rereading the novel now, deep in middle age, I discover myself to be alarmingly conservative, full of stern judgments of the novel’s young protagonists, finding a finger-wagging priggishness in me I didn’t know I had. To this middle-aged self, the lives of Nora and Javo and their friends seem outrageously rootless, drifting from gig to gig and house to house, taking possession of each other’s clothes and drugs and cars and lovers without anything as bourgeois as asking permission. Nora’s young daughter Gracie is dragged from junkie house to pub gig to late-night kebab shop, up and down hitchhikers’ highways, wearily (and wisely) advising her mother on her love affairs before she’s out of kindergarten, while Nora’s own life is governed by her erotic devotion to Javo, the novels she reads and the I Ching.
And yet I see also a childlike innocence in Javo and Nora’s haphazard bohemian lives. A contemporary book set in this milieu, with these characters living guiltlessly for their addictions, would also be soaked in nihilism – boredom, at the very least. But here there’s none of that. For all the shiftlessness, Nora and her friends are passionately engaged in each other’s lives. I’m aware of the perils of nostalgia here: the bike rides to the pool, dinking the kids on the back, the singing in the car, the handwritten notes left on kitchen tables in place of phone messages – all these signifiers of a simpler, slower existence – could be helping to colour this world as benign. But I don’t think I harbour any special romance about the era. Another way of thinking about the way they all behave, after all, might be to strike out “childlike innocence” and call it narcissistic oblivion. And yet, even while my older self tuts at the devastation they wreak, I can’t help but be drawn to the genuine idealism beneath it all.
Innocence and rebellion are woven into the novel’s very fabric. New writers now are swamped with instruction and ambition before they put down a sentence, inundated with mentoring and doctorates and pitching sessions and “pathways to publication”. Garner, by contrast, read literature, read and read, went to the library and wrote. Then she rode her bike to the publishing house and delivered her envelope.
This simplicity and freedom is found in the way the novel exhilaratingly does everything a contemporary writing workshop would frown upon. For a start, the narrative, like life, feels almost structureless: the timeline is loose, the tension does not irrevocably rise – beautifully observed events are placed side by side without Nora’s life getting much worse, or noticeably better. There are no epiphanies or redemptions, there’s no diagnosis, and while by the end Nora has agonisingly weaned herself off Javo, there’s no real sense that it’s a permanent state. Garner ignores other dull narrative conventions too. She allows unrelated vignettes to appear out of nowhere – a tender moment between strangers in a shop, say, or snatches of a song, or an observation about language itself (or, my own favourite bit of breathtaking authorial disobedience, detailed accounts of Nora’s dreams).
In an interview in Woolfe & Grenville’s Making Stories, Garner quotes Philip Larkin saying that “the urge to preserve is the basis of all art”. Monkey Grip’s highly textured, perfectly rendered stray scenes speak of this loving impulse, to honour with delicacy and precision the beauty and pathos of ordinary life. Most especially, in this book, the ordinary life of women.
All this apparent looseness, of course, is what gave succour to the book’s critics. But – as Garner herself wrote in her famous 2002 Meanjin essay, I, answering those who saw her work as too autobiographical and therefore self-indulgent, who said she had “published her private journal rather than written a novel” – it was the criticism, not her writing, that was sloppy. “I might as well come clean,” she wrote. “I did publish my diary. That’s exactly what I did.
But so what?
It’s as if this were cheating. As it if were lazy. As if there were no work involved in keeping a diary in the first place: no thinking, no discipline, no creative energy; no intelligent or artful ordering of material; no choosing of material, for God’s sake; no shaping of narrative; no ear for the music of human speech; no portrayal of the physical world; no free movement back and forth in time; no leaping between inner and outer; no examination of motive; no imaginative use of language.
These critics of Monkey Grip also missed the point that the form itself was the radical thing: an act of self-assertion, the deliberate claiming of space for the domestic experience of a modern young woman of her time. 40 years on we can see how the novel also presages Garner’s lifelong preoccupation with female passivity and the subterranean rivers of molten anger that threaten, always, to burst through the womanly duties of caring and loving to engulf, destroy.
It’s the crystalline austerity of Garner’s sentences that most enthral me now in Monkey Grip. The lives may be chaotic; the language is anything but. Its cadences are beautiful, its images ever striking, the prose gleaming with a tender, almost chivalrous formality.
I love the lithe sentences, the discriminating eye. I love Garner’s sense of joy; her gutsy, worried humility; her hilarious sense of humour. Her willingness to be as honest on the page as any writer can be about real things – small things, inner things; ugly and true and shameful things. This is what matters to me.
And, always, there’s that perspicacious self-scrutiny. In the first chapter, Nora and Gracie camp at the coast with Nora’s lover Martin and others, including Javo:
In a shop window in Merimbula I saw my face reflected and gave myself a fright: my hair was wild and stiff with salt, standing on end all over my head. My face was burnt almost back to paleness and my eyes stared out of dirty skin. I liked myself: I looked strong and healthy.
But Martin was unhappy, and to my shame I was not concerned with kindness.
Nora later comes across Javo lying on the grass.
I lay down next to him and our hot skins touched. Up close, his face was crooked, wrecked and wild. His eyes were as blue as blue stones or as water coloured by some violent chemical. I put my dry, hot arm across his oiled back. He moved like a boy, hard and gentle by turns. I heard him breathing.
A hundred yards away the children’s laughter evaporated into the blue, blue air.
There it is, that willingness to own up and face the self, right from the start.
As I said, Garner makes me look at who I am. I think this is why readers love her. Not only for saying the unsayable about the body or the heaving shifts of the heart, or even for the glorious precision of that blue, blue air, of hot concrete and chlorine or the savage stab of a broom’s straw bristles into dirty kitchen corners. We love her for how, in seeing and naming our endlessly fallible human conduct with such exactitude, she somehow steps through shame and self-justification into truth, and takes us with her. And later, after we’ve stared ourselves down through a long dark night with that pitiless gaze, she lets us wake in a clear morning and forgive ourselves.
The sunlight lay on the scrubby grass in long, pinkish-gold strips. The absentminded carolling of magpies dropped out of the pine trees half a mile away.
Time to go home.