letter #45 The Closest Thing I've Had to a Literary Spat

A literary spat of the most minor kind

My dear friend

Tickets for my (Second) Annual, World Famous, One Night Only Live Christmas Letter Reading are on sale here. It’s very lighthearted, festooned with fairy lights and friends. A look back over the year with stories that are mostly true but slightly made up too.

But this letter that I send you now has no Christmas in it.

Would you like a short story of the only literary spat I’ve ever been—am ever likely to be—involved in? If yes, keep reading. Though in saying that, I don’t want to oversell it to you. It’s extraordinarily minor.

If you don’t care for the story of a minor literary spat, scroll down to the bit where I’ve bolded the heading The story I intended to tell you. (Or simply delete the email. I mean, you won’t lose anything deleting it, I can assure you that reading it through to the end won’t change your life or even your day).

Both stories begin the same way, so this first part is

The story of how I spent the first two hours of today

I was looking for a Helen Garner quote and I was sure that I would find that quote in my copy of Everywhere I Look. First, I spent an hour sifting through the many piles of books piled around the house (I’m in the midst of a major house reorganisation and the final stage is the books) looking for my copy of Everywhere I Look. I couldn’t find the book anywhere. Yes, that’s right, although I looked everywhere, I failed to find Everywhere I Look.

Tangent: to ensure the search was not a waste of time I sorted books as I went, and there’s a small pile ready to take to the second-hand bookshop later today (or in six month’s time, you know how it goes).

An hour into my search, I had the moderately-genius idea of checking the library through my libby app. There was the book, available to borrow and all downloaded in the space of three minutes. (Which leads to the tangential thought ‘why don’t I just give all the books away and use the libby app a bit more often’, but that’s another thought for another day).

But a reasonably thorough search of the book has yielded no result. I can’t find the quote anywhere.

It must be in a different book. I know this is possible because in my time as a librarian I dealt very often with the phenomenon of a person coming into the library and saying to me, ‘I’m looking for a book, I can’t remember the title of the author, but it’s blue and it’s about this big.’ And then I would find the book and we would see that the book was not blue, but red, and that it was only half the size the person had first indicated.

I don’t love everything that Helen Garner has written, but I do like the quote I’m looking for. Helen Garner is standing in a quiet suburban street at night and she ends the piece with something like ‘everything has meaning if you let it’. This is a big paraphrase, but it’s something like that. I’m left unsure about the book the quote is in, but I know the quote exists and I know it includes the word ‘everything’ and herewith:

The story of the only literary spat I’ve ever been—am ever likely to be—involved in. But I don’t want to oversell it, it’s very minor.

I once quoted this quote of Helen Garner’s (I had the right book and I typed it directly from the book), in a comment on a friend’s facebook post. This was in the days before facebook was a wretched wasteland and you could spend an hour or a day in pretty decent conversation. In reply to this comment, a friend of the friend replied pointedly to me ‘everything?’

I knew it was pointedly because some time previously I had left a comment in a different conversation (which might have been on facebook but I think had been on a blog, I mean we are really getting into our time machines here). This conversation was one of the conversations that nerdy wordy types sometimes have about accuracy in writing and in reviewing. My comment was along the lines of ‘I once had a reviewer damn something of mine with the faintest of praise. It would have been fine except that I was writing about my life in Abu Dhabi and they kept talking about Dubai even though I hadn’t once mentioned Dubai.’ And this was a pointed comment made by me because I suspected that reviewer was a friend of this friend and would read my comment. I say that my comment was ‘pointed’, but I admit that it was also a bit pathetic and petty.

So anyway, that’s how I know the ‘everything’ that they later wrote was pointed. Either that, or they had long since forgotten they even read my essay let alone reviewed it, and they meant nothing at all by the ‘everything’ except ‘that seems a bit overblown’. As Dr Phil paraphrasedly says, ‘you’ll be surprised how often people aren’t talking about you at all.’

And that’s it, the only literary spat story that I’ve got. Which I guess is the result of having finished so little and having published even less. I mean, I’ve shown that I’m petty enough for spatting, I just don’t have the material.

The story I intended to tell you

I don’t like everything Helen Garner writes, but some of the things she has written I love very much indeed. The quote that I describe above is one of those things. I read it at a time when I was feeling everything extremely deeply. It was in the times when I had a decade’s worth of life experiences squeezed into three or four (young children, my father dying, my grandfather’s memory changing, partner travelling, moving overseas).

They were the most intense of years. I nearly drowned in this intensity. It seemed that not only my own life, but the whole world was magnified.

For example: On the tram one summer evening, travelling down King William Road, crossing the Waymouth/Wakefield intersection, I was looking towards the hills. In that moment I thought I would never again see such a perfect blend of grey and purple. It felt as if I did not simply see it but absorbed it. The colour filled my throat as if I had swallowed it, filled my chest as if I had breathed it, brushed the backs of my hands as if I had touched it.

I was completely absorbed in my own world, but at the same time, read great meaning into every interaction.

For example: At the bakery around the corner, the woman behind the counter would scrape her nails against my palm every time she handed me my change and said, ‘have a good day.’

I had always been like this, noticing life’s details and life’s textures but now it was even more. I thought it would kill me, to live like this. I was afraid that eventually I would be so filled with the intensity of even the simplest of exchanges that my body and my mind would explode.

Reading that sentence by Helen Garner reassured me. Not only would it not kill me, but it was normal to believe in the meaning of everything.

I haven’t found the exact quote, but I have found someone on instagram quoting from Helen Garner’s diaries:

“Meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there, only revealed.”

Over time, and without even realising, I began to live with much less intensity of connection. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because my life has been much more straightforward. Perhaps because I have lived my life on a much smaller scale. Perhaps because I have been tired. Or perhaps because the internal intensity brought about by depleted stores of oestrogen doesn’t leave room for the external. But as is the way with such things, it is only in these last six months or so that I have felt it returning. In its return I have recognised its absence.

For example: at the end of yesterday, I turned off my computer, tidied my desk and went for a walk down to the esplanade. I was feeling out of sorts and a little lonely and a little worried about this and that and the other. I didn’t want to go for a walk, but movement is medicine and I never come back from a walk along the beach feeling worse than when I left.

The spring storm from earlier that day had receded—no more rain, no more lightning, no more thunder—but the wind still lingered. The sea was grey from the shoreline to the horizon. There was no sunset to capture, a thick band of clouds covered the sun. Down on the beach, people walked with dogs on their leads, another fifteen minutes until eight o’clock when, in daylight saving times, dogs are allowed off their leads. In the distance I could see a man, out in the ocean up to his knees, a straw hat on his head, a fishing rod in his hands. He looked so much like my father I had to stop and look again. But of course if my father were still alive, he wouldn’t look like that anymore, because he’d be fifteen years older.

As I began my walk, I crossed paths with a woman, taller than me by a foot and younger than me by a decade at least, her long hair twisted into a bun on the top of her head. She was crying. Scraping the heel of her hand first across one eye and then across the other.

Half a kilometre later, I crossed paths with another woman, taller than me by a foot, younger than me by two decades at least. She was pushing a pram. She walked, looking at nothing in particular. When her child spoke, the woman replied with words of little consequence. ‘Yes it’s a seagull,’ she said. ‘Yes, the dog is barking.’

At the jetty, I turned, ready to start my walk towards home. Behind my eye, I felt the faintest of thuds. Is it the hint of a virus, a surge of oestrogen, a gust of wind, the memory of my father that causes the thud?

I crossed paths again with the woman pushing the pram, the woman still scraping the heel of her hand across her eyes. Each time, I smiled. But neither of them saw me and behind my eye, the thudding continued. Faint, but persistent. Down on the beach, the man who looks like my father is still fishing, and the dogs are off their leads.

The thudding grew stronger, and I stopped for a moment, looked out to the horizon.

In that moment I thought I would never again see such a perfect blend of grey and blue. It felt as if I did not simply see it but absorbed it. The colour filled my throat as if I had swallowed it, filled my chest as if I had breathed it, brushed the backs of my hands as if I had touched it.

I never come back from a walk along the beach feeling worse than when I left.

I will write again soon, maybe next week or perhaps next month, or, looking through the history of these letters perhaps it will be in another year.

Until then, I will think of you often and with love

Your friend

Tracy