Comment – Helen Garner – The Lockdown Diaries

 

In the early '90s returning to university, I landed a job as a telemarketer, selling space for The Melbourne Weekly. Later, the department's ad supervisor put me on advertorial writing because the journalists got tired of writing them. A floor directly above the Weekly's was Text Media. (Helen Garner's publisher) More than once, I would pass Helen Garner on the street or on the elevator, and always was greeted with a warm smile.

If you're reading this from another country, must know that Helen Garner is one of Australia's most celebrated novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, etc. Garner's first published novel, Monkey Grip (1977) immediately established her as a new force in Australian fiction.

In The Monthly magazine latest October issue has an interesting piece by Helen Garner, The Lockdown Diaries. Admittedly, before buying this issue, I had a dream about it, flipping through its covers trying, without success, to find Garner's piece to read. I don't put much importance on my dreams, but in this case, it prompted me to purchase the issue at my local newsagent.

The entries are short, written in simple prose, and come across as unashamedly honest.

First line in the piece:

My teenage grandson is on the phone, planning Dungeons & Dragons with his friend. “Do you want me to give you a run-down? Right. You're in a post-apocalyptic city.”

In a good way, this opening entry floored me. Why? Because most of us in varying degrees have felt that if this virus is comparable, for instance, to the Medieval bubonic plague, which killed millions - are we look at the true beginnings of a dystopian world?

The entries move between personal encounters, her family, observations, and speculations about the future. The use of irony and the themes of confronting one's mortality are expressed well through these entries.

Emails flash between the members of out Metamorphoses reading group. Is it alarmist to cancel our monthly meetings? If everything goes to shit, the two oldest of us are squarely in the most vulnerable cohort. We agree to cancel. “We have to move Ovid to Skype.” Skype? No fucking way!

Then from another entry on the emotional spectrum:

A strange mood in the streets. Low traffic noise. The air's not moving, the sun shines gently, doves call. It's paralysis. We don't know what we're waiting for or how long it's going to go on.

Yes. For many, the streets' mood did change, quiet, pressing, an invisible presence looming. Something not necessarily jumping out and attacking, but a fog, smoke floating by and silently infecting us with ill intent.

There are repeated diary entries about an old German couple, who Garner appears particularly close to. Our lives all come to an end, but the old couple is nearing, and Garner ensures communication between them continues, despite the virus.

I can't visit the old professor and his wife in their new Camberwell fastness, so I make them a special postcard every week. My granddaughter watches me crouched over the coffee table busily tearing and gluing, and beams on me a smile of benign approval. I buy express envelopes in bulk: you can't trust bloody Australia Post with an ordinary letter.

Later she writes:

I keep sending the old Germans their weekly postcard. They never reply, they're beyond it now, but I keep it up so they won't forget that they once knew someone, and that someone knew them, or tried to.

Later on, we read that Garner finally connects to the German professor on the phone, and, for me, it rang of a strange combination of resignation and hope.

Australian's watching the news about corona-virus massively hitting New York City: seeing huge refrigerated trucks, parked outside filled with the dead from the disease, was shocking.

Garner writes:

Why are they dead, and we're not? Is there any reason? Will we ever understand what's happening to us?

More heart-wrenching still, in Australia:

On TV a battered old Aussie bloke from Queensland, suffering and grieving stammers out his love for his wife, who has caught COVID 19 on the Ruby Princess and died: “She was the best wife a bloke could ever have. We never had a single fight, not a single one. She wouldn't fight. She refused to fight.”

Garner has managed in a mere few sentences, a few pages of text, to say what Australia and the world have been feeling and thinking since the arrival of COVID 19 and the subsequent lockdowns. Despite our differences, though we may respond to the crises differently, there's that core piece of humanity we all share.

And that piece of humanity, in the end, is we all care.

Reference: THEMONTHLY.COM.AU