Sex, Drugs—And Children

The Australian author Helen Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, and her third, Children’s Bach, published in 1984—both recently reissued in the United States—are considered classics in Australia, and they really are fantastic books. They’re also likely to freak you out. This is not because they’re full of sex and drugs—who worries about that anymore?—but because they seem nonchalant, even indifferent, to a truth we hold sacred today, which is that children should be shielded from the sordid doings of adults. Social media has made this conviction more morally urgent, even desperate.

What shocked people when the books came out, though, were the actual sex and drugs. Monkey Grip, a largely autobiographical novel distilled from Garner’s diaries—autofiction avant la lettre—is the story of a divorced young feminist writer, raising her daughter in a quasi-commune. In the free-and-easy 1970s, the mandate was experimentation. Sexual norms and family structure were being broken and remade; illicit substances were regularly consumed. Young Australians seized on the book and within five years of publication, it had sold 100,000 copies, and today it’s taught in schools. The critics, for their part, debated whether the book was immoral, perverse, or just rambling: It retained the open-ended quality of a diary, and felt just as uncensored. “What was to be made of a woman writing about the need for, and joy of, fucking?” is how Garner’s biographer summarizes the novel’s reception.

What stood out about Monkey Grip to me, however, when I read it recently, is that no one thinks twice about how the main character’s lover, who’s addicted to heroin, shoots up in the group home right in front of her little girl, a kindergartner. Indeed, at one point, everyone, including the child, stands around him in a semicircle watching him jab a needle in his behind. Meanwhile, Children’s Bach glosses over what today most people would think of as statutory rape, or something close to it. The desiderata of that moment, in that generation, were joy and freedom—from monogamy, patriarchy, shame. The young were thought to be wiser than their elders, more in touch with their bodies and everything else that mattered. How could frank talk about, or even exposure to, sex, love, and life be bad for them? It would liberate them from hypocrisy. In short, Garner’s early works demand of early-21st-century readers a level of forbearance that can be hard to muster.

The attempt is worth it, though, because these novels teach an important lesson about literature from the past, or near past: that its authors may understand the moral complexities of their age better than the inhabitants of the enlightened present are willing to admit. Garner in particular makes herself easy to underestimate. Her prose is plain, artless; her narrators don’t give a lot away. They describe; they don’t judge. But their author does. Garner has many harsh things to say about her protagonists and their louche mores. It’s just that she offers her criticisms on the down-low, and a reader who dismisses her as out-of-date will miss them. Garner’s preferred mode of distancing herself from her adult characters is dramatic irony, and the instruments of ironic reversal are, in fact, the children.

The master class in child-centered dramatic irony is Henry James’s 1897 What Maisie Knew, and the comparison between that novel and Garner’s is instructive. In What Maisie Knew, James restricts the point of view to that of Maisie, child of a nasty divorce. She sees a great deal more than we’re comfortable having her see, registers it all, understands and doesn’t understand it, is at constant risk of being corrupted. She seems too innocent to grasp the sexual and moral depravity of the scoundrels who surround her, but we aren’t, so we can condemn them. Maisie will turn out to have been a better judge of character than the reader the whole time, an irony James layers on top of the first irony.

Garner doesn’t filter the debauched worlds of Monkey Grip and Children’s Bach through the eyes of the children; they’re mostly to be found at the edges, rather than the center. The novels proceed from the perspective of adults. But she does occasionally switch to the child’s perspective, unexpectedly, briefly, like a camera swinging around to catch the other half of a dialogue. And when she does, we glimpse the adults as the children see them—then we return to the status quo and may forget the whole thing, until the next time, and so on as we finally begin to see what she wants us to see.

Both novels pit the needs of the grown against those of the still-growing; it’s a war of eros versus care. Nora, the narrator of Monkey Grip, records her failed attempts to break up with her “junkie” lover Javo. What she craves above all is sweetness, and he is nothing but, except when he’s lying and stealing. During sex, she sees “his mad crooked face very sweet in front of my eyes; I felt the thin bones in his shoulders, and my heart dissolved to see him change away from abruptness to this kindness.” Children are sensual-sweet too: Riding home from the beach in the back seat of a car with her lover; her daughter, Gracie; and another child, she thinks, “Oh nothing can be as sweet as this: to have two children on my knee and a man beside me and the singing and the summer traveling.” Gracie, a playful child who mostly stays in the background, is all sweet mischief in a gold-lamé superhero cape.

Nora wanders from bed to bed and from beach to party, sometimes with Gracie in tow. She drops acid, snorts cocaine, and even tries smack once, though she’s not really a drug person. The mother in me kept wondering, However does she support herself? Who looks after Gracie when Nora’s out and about? (We get answers eventually: She receives a government stipend for single mothers, and her housemates help with child care.)

But every so often Gracie comes into focus, reminding us that she is present and watching. Sometimes it seems like she’s the only one who is. As the household gathers almost ritualistically around Javo, Gracie suddenly sings out in warning: “Don’t do it, Javo. You’ll want more and more.” When Nora takes Gracie into a bar for a night of dancing, the child tells her mother, “You’ve already had a hundred drinks. You’re going to get drunk. I don’t want you to!'”

The novel makes sure that we see Gracie seeing; it’s as though she’s looking right at us, forming a secret bond: Do you see what I see? As problematic as she is, Nora will ultimately win our sympathy, first because Gracie seems intact, even quite healthy, and second because Nora finally starts to confront her maternal ambivalence. That sort of inner struggle has been much written about by now, but you almost never heard about it in 1977, and seeing it laid out so honestly is still exhilarating. Nora kept hating Gracie, she writes, “because her existence marked the exact limits of my freedom; hating myself for hating her; loving her, all the while, gut-deep and inexpressibly; and beginning each day with the dogged shouldering of a burden too heavy for one person: the responsibility for the life of another human being.”

Children’s Bach turns on the same tension between adults’ and children’s needs, but winds up in a bleaker place. Garner signals her theme in what effectively serves as a prologue, a close description of a photograph of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his family: The poet looks into the distance, his wife looks at him, one child also looks at him, and a second child looks straight at us, with a version of Gracie’s appeal to the reader in his eyes.

The novel shows that Garner has matured as a writer. Children’s Bach, written a few years after Monkey Grip, is virtuosic and highly crafted. She takes the title from an actual children’s keyboard primer, The Children’s Bach, and uses the music itself as a model for the novel’s form—the work is contrapuntal, polyphonic. It’s a fast, graceful dance. Point of view is passed from one character to another and back again, like a ballerina being spun from one dancer’s arm to the next. The ensemble cast—two couples, the more or less homeless 17-year-old little sister of one of the women, and the younger children in their orbit—move in a circle, forming and unforming alliances and mésalliances in the suburbs of Melbourne.

And yet there’s something dead at the heart of all this motion. The characters each exist in their own space, disconnected, emotionally starved; to use the dominant metaphor of the novel, they sing in counterpoint, separately rather than together.

As the story begins, the younger sister, Vicki, is flying to Melbourne to move in with her much older sister Elizabeth—the gap in age is 20 years. Their mother has recently died, and Vicki’s been left to drift. She has stopped going to school, and though she rejected Elizabeth’s guardianship earlier, now she wants Elizabeth to take her in. Elizabeth has agreed, grumpily. “It’s not my job. Why the hell should I?” she complains to a friend. Elizabeth, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac, and steals an address book in the airport store that she later decides to give to Vicki as a welcome present.

As soon as Vicki lands, we start switching back and forth between her angle of vision and Elizabeth’s, at which point it becomes clear that Elizabeth is even more awful than she first seemed. She’s like a joke: How horrible can a sister be? She lives in a bare loft with one bed, a TV, and a phone on the floor, and when she brings Vicki home with her, she leaves the girl standing around while she puts on music and dances by herself. Vicki has to share the bed with Elizabeth; the forced intimacy makes her feel so self-conscious that after she takes a bath in the morning, she can’t bring herself to ask her sister for a towel, and drips dry. For the rest of the day she wanders the city, “savage with homesickness and loneliness.”

Athena Fox, the mother figure of the novel, takes Vicki in. A nurturing sort, her home kitchen is compared—aptly, given her surname—to “a burrow, rounded rather than cubed, as if its corners had been stuffed with dry grass. The air shimmered with warmth.” Vicki stalks Athena until she is invited to move in; she craves domesticity and worships Athena, who seems cool, self-sufficient. Hence it comes as a shock when Athena says of her young son, Billy, who has an unspecified disability resembling severe autism—he wails, rocks, and can’t speak—that she and her husband are “just hanging on till we can get rid of him.” There might be a place for him at an institution in a year or so. “I used to think there was some kind of wild, good little creature trapped inside him,” she says. “‘But now I know there’s …’ (she knocked her forehead with her knuckles) ‘…nobody home.’”

But somebody is home; we know this because Billy speaks the language of the novel, that is, music. Vicki takes Billy to the park, and when she’s pushing him on the swing, she realizes that he’s not screaming mindlessly; he’s singing. “Of course he sang no words, only a round-mouthed ooh-oohing, but the tune was perfect, its rhythm was timed to the rushes and pauses of the swing, and his voice was high, sweet and melodious.” (There’s that sweetness again: Garner’s word for an indescribably perfect thing.) She recognizes the song and joins in. Later, he makes a point of rubbing up against her, to her mild disgust. But he’s desperate for contact.

Billy serves to expose Athena’s radiant motherliness as a mirage. So does Vicki. Athena and her husband may have given the girl a home, but they can’t seem to keep in mind that she’s still a child. Vicki affects a jaunty knowingness, but it is easy to see through. And yet when Elizabeth’s boyfriend, Philip, a tattooed professional guitarist with lots of groupies but also a teenage daughter close to Vicki’s age, takes Vicki to Athena’s house after a concert one night and has sex with her against the fridge, Athena and her husband hear them and giggle. “Isn’t she a little monkey,” Athena says. “I hope she’s on the pill.”

It bears repeating that in the early 1980s, the dying days of sexual liberation, there wasn’t much societal concern about grown men seducing 17-year-olds. But most readers would have felt shocked—and even back then, because Garner makes us amply aware of Vicki’s vulnerability. We look to the adults to save her, but they’re too self-involved. That is when we understand that this is a terrible world they’ve created.

So much time has passed, the world has changed so thoroughly, that we may not grasp how contrarian Garner had to have been to call foul on the quest for personal freedom by her generation, which came at the expense of the next generation’s well-being. In a later essay, she confesses that she was never as radical as she seemed: “I was bluffing. I secretly knew myself to be hopelessly bourgeois.” The key word is secretly. She wasn’t about to preach. She preferred to ironize. She knew exactly what she was doing, and we’d be foolish to mistake her reticence for a lack of moral clarity.