Helen Garner is one of Australia's most revered writers; an elder stateswoman of the Australian literary scene, with her true crime writing in particular praised for its empathy, realism, riveting explorations of the mysteries of human behaviour; "a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse."
But it is a strange understanding, an empathy that stretches to murderers and sex abusers - but not to young women who speak up against the men in positions of power who do the abusing.
I'm a, shall we say, qualified admirer of the writing of Helen Garner. But as one of the apparently twenty six Australians who paid little attention to the trial and conviction of mushroom murderer Erin Patterson as it was going on, I was unaware that Garner was part of the 76 podcasts following the case, nor that she and her fellow podcast hosts, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, have just published a book, The Mushroom Tapes, largely based on transcripts of episodes of said podcast.
Although I've read and enjoyed books by all three authors, I'll probably give this one a miss. In particular I find the narrative qualities of Helen Garner's writing to be..uneven . Garner will on one page provide a particularly illuminating take into the human condition, then within a short space one comes upon a scene so odd that the reader is jolted out of the tale, wondering why on Earth that action was worthy of a lengthy description of what she saw in her mind's eye, where that odd take came from.
In This House of Grief, her 2014 account of the trials of Robert Farquarson for the drowning deaths of his three sons, Garner writes: "The ex-wife swore at the committal hearing that he loved his boys. So? Since when has loving someone meant you would never want to kill them?" Which is tragically, horribly true, and something missed entirely in the coverage of these crimes (it is putting such thoughts into action that divides the vast majority of us from the horrible few who actually commit these murders). Putting such a sentiment to paper reframes our thinking from the outset, setting Garner's work apart from the oh-isn't-it-all-ghastly, easier to digest accounts of the case. Human behaviour and motives are complicated, and we should leave dichotomies of evil (them) and good (us) to... well, the Daily Mail. Later in the book however, Garner pens a lengthy, romanticised account of the strength and skill required to pour a concrete block for the contstruction of a new house, the symbolism of the act as performed by the mother's new partner - an odd event to record at all let alone in such detail, unsettling in ways that add nothing to the narrative, that left this reader thinking only "umm, weird take, but okay."
Sometimes, it is Helen Garner's focus as a writer that turns in odd directions; others, it is her sympathies entirely. Which brings us back to Erin Patterson, of whom Garner writes in Mushroom Tapes:
But I felt for her today in a much deeper way than I had before. The gap between her and me shrank down really small.It’s not that I’m big-hearted or anything, it’s just that I have this awful feeling – that could be me.
As I said, I haven't read the book or listened to the podcast, so necessarily these comments are taken from media reviews of The Mushroom Tapes, and are therefore taken out of context. But the context is that Helen Garner is a revered elder statesperson of Australian literature; no one publishing book reviews is ripping her most salacious comments out of context to boost clicks by playing "gotcha" (HELEN GARNER: I COULD BE MUSHROOM KILLER! Daily Mail Book Review*). The thrust of most reviews is that Garner and the other authors ponder the pressures of family, in laws, child rearing, divorce, and intellectual ambition unfulfilled in middle aged women in order to understand just how someone - Erin Patterson, to wit - could do such a thing.
In The Mushroom Tapes, Helen Garner and her fellow authors show more empathy to a woman who spent weeks planning the gruesome murders of her family than Garner showed to the two female university students at the centre of her 1995 book The First Stone, who filed police complaints claiming that the Master of their residential college at the University of Melbourne had indecently assaulted them each in turn at a college party. Garner, who had herself attended the college in question, Ormond, in the 1960s, attempted to interview the two women who made the police complaints.
One morning in August 1992 I opened the Age at breakfast time and read that a man I had never heard of, the Master of Ormond College, was up before a magistrate on a charge of indecent assault: a student had accused him of having put his hand on her breast while they were dancing.
I still remember the jolt I got from the desolate little item: Has the world come to this? All morning at work I kept thinking about it. I got on the phone to women friends of my age, feminists pushing fifty. They had all noticed the item and been unsettled by it. ‘He touched her breast and she went to the cops? My God – why didn’t she get her mother or her friends to help her sort him out later, if she couldn’t deal with it herself at the time.
But Garner's first feeling upon reading the article was horror - not at the idea of a middle aged man in a position of power groping the young women under his remit, but that said young women reacted not by exclaiming "well, I never" amongst their young lady's reading circles, but by going to police. Her discomfit increased the entire day after seeing the article, and that same evening, she penned a letter to the man at the centre of the allegations:
Dear Dr Shepherd,
I read in today’s paper about your troubles and I’m writing to say how upset I am and how terribly sorry about what has happened to you. I don’t know you, or the young woman; I’ve heard no rumours and I have no line to run. What I want to say is that it’s heartbreaking, for a feminist of nearly fifty like me, to see our ideals of so many years distorted into this ghastly punitiveness. I expect I will never know what ‘really happened’, but I certainly know that if there was an incident, as alleged, this has been the most appallingly destructive, priggish and pitiless way of dealing with it. I want you to know that there are plenty of women out here who step back in dismay from the kind of treatment you have received, and who still hope that men and women, for all our foolishness and mistakes, can behave towards each other with kindness rather than being engaged in this kind of warfare . . .
As the legal case continued, her attempts were rebuffed - perhaps unsurprisingly, as Garner sought to learn why they went to police at all. We didn't bother ourselves with such trifles, Garner says of her fellow travellers - despite that many feminists of Garner's generation did try to speak up about these issues, and that it's no thanks to feminists of Garner's ilk that men in professional settings, at least, may think twice about doing so today. Young women should just expect bumbling middle aged men to grope and fondle them and not make a fuss? It was a gross take in the early 90s (and bless Virginia Trioli and others for speaking up at the time) and it's gross now but one Garner has never publicly repudiated.
Garner therefore turned her feminist anger not on the alleged perpetrator, but on the young women who made the complaints. To Garner, for a 50-something man to subject young women at a college dance to unwanted groping - specifically, clutching the women's breasts and buttocks - was merely a "hapless social blunder". These women were letting the side down by not brushing aside these actions and turning their focus on issues that mattered, to Garner and her second wave friends who agreed with her - ‘Look – if every bastard who’s ever laid a hand on us were dragged into court, the judicial system of the state would be clogged for years.’ Maybe if a few of the bastards had been dragged into court, some of those who would have followed would have thought again before extending the groping hand?
It's very odd platform upon which an ostensibly feminist writer builds an entire book. Perhaps Garner's vision was blurred by the generational divide, unable to relate, at 50, to university students they way she could relate at 80 to a 50 something woman who'd been through marriage, childbirth, separation , managing extended family; maybe one needs some runs on the board to gain her respect. (As a side note, Erin Patterson, born in 1974, in another life might herself have been a student at Ormond in 1992). Perhaps it's an unconcious jealousy that women in 1992 felt able to speak up in ways that seemed impossible to Garner and her friends in the 1960s - even if that bravery was rewarded by vilification of which The First Stone was only a small if notable part.
Less charitably, it's possible Helen Garner fell victim (as it were) to the subconcious anger affecting professionals in fields where one becomes accustomed to being confided in - from long form journalism to mental health - when a particular subject of their professional interest can't or won't do so. "I'm an empathetic professional carrying a tonne of vicarious trauma on account of people like you, and now you of all people won't trust me? I guess you're not such a sympathetic or trustworthy character yourself, and you certainly won't be getting any professional courtesies from me."
After hearing the women were upset at quotes from Garner in an article regarding her upcoming book:
At that moment something inside me snapped. I wanted to find Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart and shake them till their teeth rattled.
I skim-read The First Stone again whilst writing this post, yet again feeling the nauseated anger not only at the internalised misogyny, but also the sense of entitlement from a writer furious that subjects who disagree with her views won't dutifully explain themselves. It's an entitlement that extends to anyone involved with the case who doesn't give Garner the primacy over the subject and answers about it which Garner believes are her due. On learning that the young complainants, having resisted Garner's every entreaty at an interview, were planning to speak to Vogue (italics in the original):
Vogue! I gnashed my teeth so hard I saw stars.
When I got home from work I found that the Vogue journalist had been trying to contact me. I rang her number and got an answering machine which told me she had gone to Bali. I left the politest-sounding message I was capable of.
The young women at the centre of this case have the nerve to consider speaking to another journalist, and not Helen Garner who has spent so many months demanding answwers from them. And then - this journalist attends to such fripperies as going on a Bali holiday instead of waiting for Garner's call? How dare she! Good heavens, I'm surprised Garner could bring herself to leave a message at all!
But there's no real reason for anyone to read it; Garder says at the start of the book "I felt so much sympathy for the man in this story and so little for the women," and that sums up the entire work even though she goes on for another two hundred pages.
But that Helen Garner can muster more sympathy for a woman who murdered three people and wanted to kill five than for young women attempted to hold an older man in a powerful position who used his power to grope them and get away with it is very weird. Garner admits that, in her 80s, she's likely now at the end of her working life; these misplaced sympathies have caused her little lasting professional trouble, and if we don't know what to make of them, such construction seems unnecessary now. To quote Garner's fellow author and podcaster Sarah Krasnostein, "If you’ve got delusions about your own power or entitlement – if you expect more from relationships than what’s reasonably attainable – where does all of that take you?". Helen Garner isn't moving now.
* Is the Daily Mail Book Review even a thing? If so, I hope I never, ever encounter it.
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