Cosmo Cosmolino

RAMONA KOVAL
is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is the editor of
Best Australian Essays
and for many years was the presenter of ABC Radio National's
The Book Show
. Her most recent book was
Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers
, a collection of her international literary interviews.

ALSO BY HELEN GARNER

Fiction

Monkey Grip

Honour and Other People's Children

The Children's Bach

Postcards from Surfers

The Spare Room

Non-fiction

The First Stone

True Stories

The Feel of Steel

Joe Cinque's Consolation

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Terrible Strength of Angels
by Ramona Koval

Cosmo Cosmolino

‘What mysteries can survive the lunchtime mood of houses?'

‘Did I write that?' says Helen Garner, when I read
it out to her over lunch in her ordered hospitable
kitchen. But what a sentence it is! Does it describe a mystery or a mood? A miracle or a fantasy? Or just the stillness, the time of day?

We are discussing
Cosmo Cosmolino
. Published in 1992, it was Garner's last work of fiction before she found a mass audience with her bestselling books of non-fiction
The First Stone
and J
oe Cinque's Consolation
.
Cosmo Cosmolino
is a book of three linked parts—two short stories and a long one. It is remark-able for its baroque language, a contrast to the spare style of her first novel,
Monkey Grip
(1977), and of
her later work.

I remember
Cosmo
as a book of cremations and angels, the book from which, as Garner says, ‘people in the literary world recoiled. They were saying
that Helen Garner's found God. I think some were embarrassed—you know the way that Australians can be very embarrassed about things that are not rational?'

Cosmo
begins with ‘Recording Angel', a story of a long friendship between the as yet unnamed narrator and Patrick who is suffering from headaches and memory loss. He is her recording angel, a friend who has an encyclopaedic memory of everything they have shared.

Patrick is direct with the narrator, often cruel.
She imagines how, when he dies, all his memories and views about her life will go with him. She finds and burns a stash of postcards she has sent him over the years, from a panoply of places, houses, pit-stops.

As she waits with his wife Natalie after his brain tumour operation she asks whether Natalie has ever wished that someone she loved would die, to obliterate all her crimes and failures.

If ever there was a recording angel it is Helen Garner herself. She agrees that it is her practice to take stories from life. She remembers that the man on whom she based Patrick was pained by the story in ways that surprised her. She felt guilty that he was so wounded and it taught her how men think about their privacy.

‘In my diary of the time what struck me was that all the women who liked the story said it was full of
love, and that's what I felt, desperately, when I was writing it. Men on the other hand understood why a man would be deeply distressed by being depicted in a hospital ward, at a moment of great helplessness. I was thunderstruck by that. For the first time in my life I grasped how much it matters to men to be seen as
strong and in control…for women, our relationship with our bodies is such that we have to accept a
certain level of abjectness.'

This wasn't the first time Garner used her life and her friends to inspire her work or that a friendship
was shaken by it. Later she was to apologise for hurting him, and he was to forgive her.

The Christian value of forgiveness for trespasses is strong in
Cosmo
, and there is an otherness that makes its presence felt: ‘something in soft soles was keeping pace with me wherever I walked, padding
along silently behind my left shoulder.'

Did she consider herself Christian when she was writing this book?

‘I've probably thought of myself as a Christian all along. My parents didn't have us baptised but I went to an Anglican school. I had a bit of a religious revival when I was nineteen and got myself baptised, but it only lasted about two weeks and then I went back to my wicked ways.

‘Just before my husband left me for my sister [the subject of Garner's screenplay
The Last Days of Chez Nous
], when I sensed there was something wrong in the marriage, I often had the feeling that a column of darkness was standing behind me. I described it to my husband. Naturally he freaked. I suppose now that I was having some sort of crack-up. But it was also a religious experience—the dark thing was waiting for me to turn around and acknowledge it.

‘I knew that it was something of tremendous but benign force. It wasn't going to harm me. It was just waiting for me to stop doing all the frantic stuff I was obsessed with. I never turned around because I knew I would have to go down on my knees to it. I'm not saying it was God. I don't know what God is, I'd had no direct experience of God. But when I told Tim Winton about it he didn't find it strange at all. He said, “I'd call that the Holy Spirit.”

‘And I liked that. I was glad the Holy Spirit was there. I felt comforted by it.'

The first of Garner's angels appears in this opening story in the form of a ‘small serious stone-eyed Angel
of Mercy'. And there is another surprising presence—
the trams of Melbourne, riding in and out of the
narrator's mind, sometimes threatening (one of her
old crew, Ursula, was killed stepping in front of one) but mostly comforting, like patient, blundering angels chattering down the tracks of her history.

If trams are a motif, so are funerals.

Readers of Garner's journalism might remember her writing of a body burning in a crematorium. I recall a pacemaker being the only recognisable thing left of one old man.

A burning body appears in the second story, ‘A Vigil', set earlier than ‘Recording Angel', which describes the death of drug-fucked Kim, Ursula's daughter. Here we meet Raymond for the first time. He might belong with the careless set of housemates we encounter in
Monkey Grip
, but he is worse than careless.

Ursula forces him to come to Kim's funeral, a sordid affair where no-one is dressed properly or knows what to say or do. Garner writes of the absolute pathos of people at odds with traditions that have evolved to
help them get through the great sadnesses in life.

Now the angels arrive, two heavy-booted, Cuban-heeled, blazer-wearing, toothpick-wielding types who remind me of a couple of toughs from an early Pinter play. The verbs Garner uses as they bundle Raymond into Hades—or is it just the crematorium?—pound us along, rippling, propelling, swaying, blurring, smelling and buckling.

In the title story we meet the narrator again and learn that she is called Janet. Her second marriage has ended and she is living in a huge, dilapidated house by herself. Garner brilliantly describes Janet's devastation, her euphoria, her hypersensitivity to light and sound.

She is soon joined by Maxine, a crazy artist who takes the shed at the back of the garden, and by Ray, whom we have already met and who turns out to be the younger brother of an old boyfriend, Alby. Ray has become a born-again Christian who tells Janet he has been sent. He means by his brother, but crazy Maxine, who is pining for a baby, thinks he is an angel and has been sent to provide her with one.

The title of the story, and of the book, came in a kind of annunciation too. ‘I had a dream,' Garner says, ‘that there was a baby and it was called Cosmo Cosmolino. World, Little World.'

Her themes emerge. We have a battle between the prosaic and the otherworldly; between the old hippie way of life and the necessities of making a home; between those who search for meaning in new-age pursuits and those who do it through art or religion.

But where did those long rollicking sentences come from?

‘I don't remember deciding to write this completely purple kind of stuff,' Garner says. ‘But I loved doing it. I wanted to throw some syntax around. When I was
at school I was taught grammar and syntax by a ferocious woman and I loved the way an English sentence could be built—thundering great subordinate clauses back to back. I thought, I'm going to line some of
those up and see if I can make them work.'

Such is her talent for working the language, at a climactic moment she propels one of her characters and all of her readers right off the page, leaving us to ask the giddy question—how did she do that?

Garner is an acute and wry social historian. Her description of the glory days of 1970s share houses runs for two pages, like a galleon loaded with treasure. Here's a fragment:

Any room you peered into had its little drama going on: two women haranguing some poor bastard about housework; a couple of blokes
in armchairs with cups of tea on the floor
beside them, arguing about a strike or a distant war, or working away on acoustic guitars, learning and teaching; a girl in a floppy, flowery dress mending a bike or covering page after page of her diary, never needing to cross out, or reading the long summer afternoon away with the book propped on her chest, while round the next half-open door a lover, pale with jealousy, leaned over a table to snoop on a letter; upstairs in their wide front room the kids—whose were they? which ones
actually belonged to the house?—paraded about in dress-ups making imperious gestures, or crawled naked up the bunks, or madly scribbled with the pencils, colouring in; along the hall someone waddled backwards on her haunches, painting the skirting-boards blue, or teetered on a ladder with a roller tray and the radio; if you tapped on the bathroom door you would be screamed at by someone inside who was trying to develop photos; downstairs a visitor picked out a walking bass line on the gutted pianola; on the back verandah somebody's boyfriend since last night sat grinning, head bowed, caped in a towel, submitting to
the application of shit-brown gobs of henna; and three times a day the food hit the table, great crocks and tureens of it, coarse with garlic and beans, weird salads hacked to
chaff, onions, brown rice, the occasional sausage, vegetable curry that burnt your
mouth when you gulped it and later tortured you with farts—but filling!

Janet's house, two decades later, stands for the self. There are rooms that she can't bear to enter for fear of the disarray she will find. There is a miracle in one room, if only she will open it up. And there are the people, the hack, the artist, the fervent believer—how can they inhabit this place, this body, together? How can Janet make a home out of chaos? ‘She thinks of praying,' Garner writes, ‘It would be rhetorical to say
O Lord
. It would be sentimental to say
Our Father
. It would be humiliating to say
Help me
.'

In a sense Janet's spiritual longing is for order—the order that a belief system can bring to our lives, the way that knowing what to say and when to say it can mark the moments of birth and death, and make it possible for all of us to understand that this has happened before, that the void may not be endlessly horrifying. That every angel is terrible, as Rilke says, but that
sometimes we need the terrible strength of angels to light our way in the dark.