He

I have been re-reading Helen Garner's trilogy of diaries, which roughly follow the story of her relationship with author Murray Bail, anonymised in the diaries as 'V' (though it's certainly not hard to find out his real identity). At one point he objects strongly to the idea that she is writing about him in her diary, and anticipates with horror and dread the day when they might be published, or read by academics, and her private portrait of him and their marriage will become public -- which is exactly what has happened, and it's true, the image of him that emerges from those pages is far from flattering. She argues back that she can't live fully without writing in her diary, that the diary is what makes it possible for her to live her life at all. Eventually she agrees not to write about him except in the barest, most functional way, a resolve which is soon broken. But I thought, from some sense of fairness, that the least I could do was to read Bail's own account of himself, and see how things looked from his side.

He is not exactly an autobiography. It's composed of fragments of memory and reflection, some floating free of context, all couched in the safely distancing third person point of view. He does mention his first and second wives (Garner was number two), without naming them, and expresses admiration for Garner's writing without disclosing their relationship! In her diaries, Garner often bemoans V's refusal to admit to feeling or expressing emotion, and it would be hard to imagine a more clinical piece of autobiographical writing, in which the word 'I' never appears!

He is, however, a beautiful work, filled with evocative images and remembrance, though the meaning of each fragment and their connection to each other is left for the reader to put together. I did feel I had a bit of an advantage in understanding Bail's character after seeing him through Garner's eyes -- at first intrigued, then in love, then increasingly frustrated, and finally devastated. Reading He was an interesting exercise, and a window into a certain kind of man's perception of the world. But I'm not sure I want to spend too much time inside his head.