In Helen Garner’s The Spare Room the protagonist, called Helen, lives next door to her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. Five-and-a-half-year-old Bessie is a constant presence in Helen’s life as she moves easily between the houses. When Helen’s friend Nicola arrives, the household dynamics are thrown into disarray. Nicola is extremely ill. Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation have failed to halt the spread of bowel cancer to her liver and bones. She comes to Melbourne to undergo three weeks of treatment at the Theodore Institute.
The novel opens with Helen preparing for Nicola’s arrival. She goes to great lengths to make her spare room as welcoming as possible. Bed linen, floor covering, a mirror, are all carefully chosen. Helen arranges the bedside table and plants geraniums in the window box. She is going to be an exemplary carer. When the newly hung mirror falls and shatters, the portent is less to do with superstition than with facing facts; no illusions will remain in place by the end of this visit. The masks erected by each woman will be brutally shattered.
With Bessie in tow, Helen heads to the airport to collect her glamorous friend but the “tall, striding” Nicola has been reduced to a “staggering … old crone”. She needs a wheelchair and Bessie, terrified of being left alone with her, is commanded to go and ask for one. The tussle between friend and granddaughter – which becomes a tussle between death and life – is established: “I pushed [Bessie] away from me.” On their arrival home, Nicola’s presence displaces Bessie entirely. “Go home, sweetheart … Go home,” says Helen.
Nicola’s treatment includes massive doses of infused vitamin C, which cause her to shudder incessantly. She fronts up to the Theodore Institute for more of it every second day, and her physical reactions become even more extreme. On the less traumatic days, she submits to ozone saunas and peroxide drips. Over the three weeks she imbibes essence of cabbage juice and crushed apricot kernels and struggles to self-administer coffee enemas. Like Nicola, Helen was part of the counterculture movements of the 60s and 70s and therefore accepts, to an extent, her friend’s need to believe in the efficacy of alternative therapies. But Helen suspects that Nicola is being cruelly exploited. Her medico friend Leo agrees. When Nicola says that she needs Helen to believe in the treatment, the tension mounts.
Garner’s prose is stripped bare. As Robert Dessaix points out in his Monthly review of the novel, Helen’s speech is “almost all subject-verb-predicate – ‘I put it down … I grabbed her hands … I said … She tried’.” Helen strips, bundles and breaks out new linen. She kicks sheets to the laundry and stuffs them in the machine. She tears open the newspaper. She trudges. She speeds on her bike for lemonade which she pulls out of the fridge. She grabs chocolate bullets and shovels them into her mouth. The reader is privy to Helen’s barely repressed rage and Nicola’s complete unawareness of it.
The way in which Garner marks time, tracing Nicola’s symptoms through passages beginning with “On Tuesday”, “That night”, “On Friday”, “that afternoon”, intensifies the claustrophobia of the friends’ increasingly volatile relationship, while also emphasising the unrelenting assault the treatment is having on both Nicola’s body and Helen’s psyche. There are moments of wondrous respite between infusions when the women go to the movies, a magic show, the nursery or on a picnic. They are always followed by the smiling, suffering Nicola taking to her bed.
The spare room is now a place of sickness. The new sheets become one set among many that need continuous washing. The blind is closed to the geraniums. The rug has a strange smell and needs to be removed. Perhaps Helen should adopt a role beyond carer. Both Leo and Helen’s sister Lucy suggest that maybe Nicola has come to Melbourne so Helen can tell her she is going to die. But Helen does not want to be the person to dash Nicola’s last hope. “Who was I to tell her she had to drop all weapons and face death?” Eventually, Helen raises the idea of palliative care. Nicola baulks and Helen, aware that she has “dragged” her friend to face the spectre of death, forces Nicola to explain her reticence. Helen is chastened yet defiant: “I looked at her there … fighting to hide her terror, and my heart contracted into a knot of pity, love and rage.” The arrangement of those emotions to privilege rage is significant.
Helen is perplexed by her own anger. She knows she is being unkind, but she refuses to back down from her position. After yet another appalling night, Nicola agrees to call the palliative team. Only then does Bessie make a tentative appearance at the back door. Ostensibly, she has been banished because she has a cold. But she has been exiled by death. “Death was in my house,” Helen muses. “Its rules pushed new life away with terrible force. I longed for the children next door, their small, determined bodies through which vitality surged.”
Sixteen years earlier in Cosmo Cosmolino, Garner wanted to test the possibility that three different forms of spirituality might be able to coexist and form something whole within a household. In The Spare Room, her first work of fiction since Cosmo, she returns to investigate how divergent belief systems might interact. Helen has no idea how she can remain detached from her anger in order to “serve” Nicola. Tactfully, the palliative-care nurse legitimises Nicola’s denial of her situation: ‘“I’ve learnt that there are people who never, ever face the fact that death’s coming to them. They go on fighting to their last breath.” She paused. “And it is one way of doing it.”’ She wonders if Helen is able to accept that Nicola might be such a person.
Earlier in the narrative, Helen’s repeated sequences of “maybes” signal her attempts to be more open-minded:
What did I know about cancer? Maybe there was something in these cockamamie theories? Maybe they were the future. Maybe Leo was wrong when he said that vitamin C did not shrink tumours. Maybe it was unfair that these pioneers had fallen foul of the authorities.
The truth is, she wants Nicola to stop attending the clinic and accept her imminent death in the way Helen’s sister Madeleine accepted hers: “She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her.” Bessie’s first conversation with Helen includes some philosophising about Saddam Hussein and tyranny. Tyranny threads through this narrative. Physically, we witness the tyrannical cancerous destruction of Nicola’s body matched only by the tyrannical regimen of treatments to which she willingly submits. Psychologically, there is also something of a tyrannical power play operating between the friends. Nicola’s permanently fixed smile, her refusal of proper pain relief and her resistance to palliative care are manipulative and harsh on Helen. Helen’s need to wipe the smile off Nicola’s face and compel her to get ready to die is forcefully cruel. Their friendship is real and deep, but the laughter and intellectual camaraderie that has bound them together for 15 years has given way to a sickening falsity. Together they are trapped in their seemingly isolated world of pain, grief, love and fury. Garner takes us into that world; she exposes the harsh realities of caring for a loved one who is dying.
***
When Nicola decides to stay on in Melbourne for spinal surgery, assuming blithely that Helen will continue to care for her, a panicked Helen calls a halt. Three weeks was her limit. Her hospitality is at an end. On their final day in the house together, Bessie comes knocking when Helen is out. Nicola pretends there is nobody home. Death has fully colonised the once-welcoming heart of Helen’s house. Sure enough, when Nicola goes out, Bessie makes her entrance through the front door. She bounces on to the bed and talks to her nanna about death and souls. She takes hold of Helen’s wrist and plays with her old, loose skin.
Garner decided to compress the action of the novel into three weeks, culminating in Nicola’s death. How to accommodate these requirements when the story was based on real events? She began to write about Nicola’s surgery and postoperative care in the same time frame as the rest of the novel. It didn’t work. She overcame the technical problem by casting much of the conclusion in the simple past tense that looked into the conditional future: “I didn’t know then, as Bessie and I lay on my bed and reasoned about fate and the universe, that Nicola’s mad dream of flying her carers down to Melbourne and putting them up at the Windsor would come true.”
In a few short pages Garner traverses the final months of Nicola’s life. She writes of the things Helen had not foreseen: coming to love the intimacy of caring again for Nicola in Sydney; of bearing witness to the “thrilling alto drone” of the Buddhist women who chanted her spirit away and of accounting for herself and her relationship at Nicola’s memorial service. Helen discovers Nicola’s letter, which validates some of the tortuous emotions the friends experienced over their weeks together:
I had no idea that before she left my house, Nicola would write me a valedictory letter of such self-reproach, such tenderness and quiet gratitude, that when I came across it, months later, in its clever hiding-place, I was racked with weeping, with harsh sobs that tore their way out of my body, as she had fancied her toxins would rush from hers.
But the narrative swerves back to that afternoon with Bessie and confirms the one thing that Helen was certain of at the time: “If I did not get Nicola out of my house tomorrow I would slide into a lime-pit of rage that would scorch the flesh off me, leaving nothing but a strew of pale bones on a landscape of sand.” In place of tears there is relief, an acknowledgment of guilt and an honest feeling of failure.
Garner knew she had to kill Nicola in the pages of her text.
She told the critic Shannon Burns:
… when she was dead I lay on the floor and I wept and howled and sobbed for half an hour. The book demanded that she should die. But I didn’t want to make her die. I’d had to force myself to do it. The reason it was unbearable to me was that while forcing myself to write her death I had to acknowledge the fact that I also have to die. In fact, while it’s only mentioned in one tiny moment in the book, a lot of the book’s rage was actually the rage at knowing that I also have to die.
The Spare Room was translated into 11 languages. Reviewers everywhere were glowing in their praise. They wrote of the “elegance and taut style of the narrative voice”; that it was an “extraordinary, exhilarating novel”; that it fulfilled the brief of “great fiction” by “demand[ing] us to reset our moral compass and look at our value coordinates all over again”; and that “it’s a fiction about truth; about witnessing to truth … A hymn to friendship tested to its limits”. James Wood listed it in his New Yorker column for the Books of 2009, commenting: “The Spare Room is a far more powerful re-writing of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich than Philip Roth’s much more self-pitying Everyman.” In Australia Robert Dessaix praised The Spare Room for being “a quietly devastating book, written with superbly refined ordinariness, on ageing, women’s friendship and how to look death in the eye”, but insisted that, like Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach and Cosmo Cosmolino, it could not be classified as a novel. As Garner explained to Burns:
It is morally a novel even though it’s very closely based on my real experience of those three terrible weeks in my life. By calling it a novel I’m saying: this is not a memoir, this is not nonfiction, this is a novel and there will be things in here that are invented, that didn’t really happen, and I’m going to take … every sort of liberty I need to take in order to turn it into the sort I book I want it to be.
Garner had thought she would be a tender and patient carer for Jenya – her real-life friend who informs the character Nicola – and was dismayed yet fascinated by her anger. She wrote about that anger in order to understand it further and she wrote the novel as a way of containing, or giving shape to, her intense sorrow. Initially, she named the protagonist Carol, but she wanted to investigate her response and she felt compelled to own her anger, hence, the switch to Helen. She knew some readers would find the anger distressing and offensive, but she was convinced that she could not be the only person who had experienced such feelings in this situation. Surely some readers would benefit from her honesty. She was prepared to chance it.
Following publication Garner was invited to talk to audiences of a kind she had not before encountered. She recounts addressing the annual conference for Carers Australia – a support and funding group for people involved in long-term care for family members who are ill or children with disabilities:
When I started to talk about anger I could see that there wasn’t a single person in that room who was offended or surprised ... At the end a woman in her 70s came up to me and said, ‘Helen, we all feel that anger. You must never feel guilty or ashamed about it.’ That was a huge relief to me – because there is something shameful about anger, especially if you’re a woman.
In September 2011 Garner took part in the Narrative and Healing Symposium I convened at the University of Sydney with Dr Frank Brennan, a palliative care physician, and Joan Ryan, a palliative-care clinical nurse consultant. The day was designed to bring writers, clinicians and counsellors together with members of the public.
Garner did not speak much about The Spare Room. She noted that, having never had cancer or lost a child or grandchild, she would consider it an impertinence to speak of consolation or healing. Rather, she spoke about the ethical obligations that informed her nonfiction. She spoke about bearing witness to the suffering of others, and the shame and guilt attached to her powerful curiosity about people’s suffering. She admitted to being worried that she had given the impression of feasting “bright-eyed on people’s pain”. She described being on Darwin radio following the publication of The Spare Room and being taken aback by a comment from a reader that yet again she was forcing her way into the centre of somebody else’s pain. On reflection, she said she wished she had responded in the following way:
I hope what I’m doing in writing is taking someone else’s trauma into the centre of me where I can contemplate it and brood over it in some kind of thoughtful and intimate way, and then try and shape it into a piece of writing that will respect its complexity and maybe even relieve some of the pain that the existence of the trauma causes to everyone who is aware of it, not just the person to whom the pain has happened.
This is an edited extract from A Writing Life, Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan. Text Publishing,$32.99.
