Helen Garner is the author of three true crime books, The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), alongside several novels, including Monkey Grip (1977) and The Children’s Bach (1984).
Izabella Scott is writing a book on a criminal trial titled The Bed Trick, forthcoming from Atlantic. Her book on communication blackouts, Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir, co-written with Skye Arundhati Thomas, is out with MACK.
The writers discuss courtroom dynamics, trial transcripts, and the relationship between law and literature.
Izabella Scott:
I’m pretty star-struck meeting you Helen. You’ve written three significant books on criminal trials, which each examine the stories produced in courtrooms. I am writing a book about a trial right now, the story of a creative writing student convicted of an offence known as ‘rape by deception’. I follow the trial, appeal and retrial, a legal process that unfolds over many years. Your books have shown me the way.
I want to begin with a simple question – do you remember your first time in a courtroom?
Helen Garner:
I remember the first time I went to a murder trial. I didn’t go for the purpose of writing, but to accompany a friend of mine. His teenage stepdaughter had been killed. This was the 1980s in Australia, and she’d gone camping with her boyfriend in the bush, sleeping in an open top ute, which is a small truck. Two soldiers shot them in their sleep. To cut a long story short, the trial was set to take place in Victoria. My friend asked me to accompany him. I had a burning curiosity. It had never occurred to me that you could, as a citizen, go to a criminal trial. I was in a state of strange ignorance that even the highly educated tend to have. Still, people often say to me, ‘how did you get permission to go to this or that trial?’ Back then, I thought you had to ask people, and I would never have dared. So I sat through that trial, and it was extremely gripping – and painful. My friend was in a traumatised state. But what I really remember was that, towards the end of the trial, the judge came to give his instruction to the jury. And he told the jurors that the evidence against one of the soldiers – a woman – was not sufficient to sustain a conviction, and so they must find her not guilty. The other soldier would carry the can. When he said that, I was thunderstruck, as was everyone in that courtroom. I had this astonishing feeling. It was almost like a vision . . . as if there was some being or consciousness in the room. I felt it’s presence. I sort of gasped. I look back now, and I remember thinking to myself: so it’s true, they really do have to prove it. It was the spirit of the law in the room, I thought. The spirit of the law was restraining our primitive urge for revenge and punishment. I’ve never really gotten over it.
I only stopped going to court because my hearing packed up. I’m eighty-one. I’ve got hearing aids. They don’t work well in spaces with bad acoustics. It’s clawing to me, because I love being in court. It’s sort of addictive – do you find that?
Scott:
I strongly believe in the principle of ‘open justice’, the idea that citizens can go to a trial. You can walk in; you can sit in the public gallery. It’s such an important part of the justice system, and this also includes the way trials are recorded, and transcripts can be requested from courts.
I spend most of my time with legal documents and transcripts, so I’m not often in the courtroom. When I am in court, I can’t quite believe I’m there. Part of my desire to talk to you is to try and understand what it is about trials that compel me. A criminal trial is often the worst day of a person’s life – one of the lowest points. There’s no other way to describe it. I often find myself asking: what does it mean to be there?
Garner:
I used to think about this too: why am I so completely gripped by this, why does it mean so much to me? I think what draws me in is the spectacle of the law trying to deal with something that nothing can deal with – just the wildness of people.
Many of the trials I’ve written about are murder trials. Robert Farquharson, the subject of This House of Grief, drove his three young kids into a dam. How can we understand this? A lot of men I spoke to were greatly distressed by the fact Farquharson left his kids in the sinking car. They wanted to believe that they would not leave their kids to drown. But you don’t know. Not many truthful people would say, ‘I would never ever do that.’
The idea that you could be arraigned before some powerful force, a social force, that is going to pronounce a judgement on you – there’s something thrillingly intimate about that. Perhaps everyone has, looming inside them a sense that their behaviour will be judged. It suggests an endpoint, when life has few endpoints aside from death.
I’ve discovered as a general principle that people like to be written about. It’s not self-importance, but just having attention paid to what they spend their life doing. I was really moved when I realised that.
A few years after the Farquharson trials, I wrote about the case of Akon Guode, a refugee from South Sudan who drove her children into water. At the sentencing hearing, the only people talking were the judge and barristers, and they were murmuring together, speaking quietly, trying to figure out the right way to deal with this terrible thing, this poor damaged woman. A full-on jury trial, when it’s rolling, is like a symphony performed by an orchestra – all these different witnesses come in and play their solos – and the great roaring pulsing bass that rolls through it all is the law. A sentencing hearing, by comparison, is more like a string quartet. It’s intimate; everyone is quiet. Nobody is grandstanding, nobody is pounding the floor, using rhetorical explosions to make a point. I was really struck by the quiet thoughtfulness. You see that the people who work in the law suffer too. What are you supposed to do to people who have murdered their children? What is the right thing to do?
Scott:
Your description of the intimacy of a sentencing hearing resonates with me. In contrast, there is something so bombastic about the adversarial nature of the trial itself: two sides, battling it out before a jury. As a writer, part of me understands that this mechanism is intended to test a story and quest for truth – two lawyers, advocating on behalf of a defendant or victim, trying to tell the most convincing story. But I also know that storytelling is never innocent. I often ask myself: what makes a good story – one that convinces, one that convicts? Are good stories familiar, fluent, artful? The problem is that good stories and truth don’t often share the same corner of the room.
During a sentencing hearing, I’m always startled by the moment when the defendant is addressed by the judge in the second person, as ‘you’. At Farquharson’s sentencing, for example, in This House of Grief, he’s back in the dock and the judge begins to read from his document: ‘You had a burning resentment . . . You formed a dark contemplation.’ It’s a tightly contracted version of the trial – a haunting recitation of the story that won.
Another tendency of the adversarial system is that it often produces extreme stories. Farquharson is either the man with a ‘burning resentment’ who murdered his children, or else he’s the innocent dad, who had a tragic coughing fit while driving, and somehow steered into a dam.
In your writing, there’s a desire to step between these legal narratives, which can feel like simplifications, to find the grey-space in the middle – which is what I seek too in my book, The Bed Trick, which tries to understand an intimate trial story, which turns on a broken relationship between two friends. In This House of Grief that space is both rich and painful – the reader feels that Farquharson is in such denial that he can no longer admit what he’s done – neither to the court nor to himself. His self-deception runs so deep that he cannot, or will not, face the truth. You allow him to be guilty – but not in the way the prosecution argues. He’s a pathetic figure who has committed an irreparable act, cutting a hole of pain in the universe – and there’s nothing that can be done.
Garner:
The Supreme Court in Melbourne, where Farquharson stood trial, is an old Victorian building with a central courtyard and a library. During breaks in the trial, I would try to avoid his family. They were the sort of people I would have liked, very straightforward country people. But I could hardly bear to look at them sometimes, because of what they’d gone through, because of what they’d lost. Instead, I would hide in the library at lunchtime. There were bookshelves up to the roof with judgments and decisions. I’d climb up a ladder and pull them out at random, and then sit at a table with these old bound documents. I saw, in those judgments, the pain that judges go through, and I felt this enormous uprising of affection for the people in these documents, who admitted they were overwhelmed.
Joe Cinque’s Consolation follows the trials of two students accused of murdering Joe Cinque. I remember this moment at the end of the one trial. His girlfriend Anu Singh admitted she caused his death, but the defence was diminished responsibility. The judge announced a very light sentence, and there was this terrible silence in the court. It felt as if everyone was waiting for Joe’s mother, Maria, to speak. And she got to her feet and yelled, ‘Four years! Is that all my son is worth?’ It was a pulse of rage and grief. Nobody could have said it for her. I eventually spoke to that judge; he really felt the weight of his duty. That was 1999, and I’ve stayed in contact with Maria over all these years. She’s the toughest person I’ve ever known. I first spoke to her during the trials. I went to the toilet and found myself standing next to her at the basin, washing my hands, and we looked at each other in the mirror. She was combing her hair. She asked if I was a journalist, and I admitted I was. I’d never spoken to a person in such extreme circumstances before, and something inside me lurched. Before she left, I said, ‘If I wrote about this, would you speak to me?’ And she looked me up and down, measuring me – she had a good look – and said ‘yes’. I felt an enormous gratitude to her. It was as if she opened a door and I walked through it.
Scott:
I remember that moment in the book – it’s so significant, especially considering your earlier work. In The First Stone, which is about a sexual assault scandal that took place at a university in Melbourne in the nineties, you were unable to speak to the two women making the complaint. In a sense, that book tells the story of your attempts to speak to those women. You later described the book as ‘full of holes’. The victims didn’t trust you; they thought you had sided with the accused. That moment of intimacy with Maria Cinque is so different. She sees something in you and says ‘yes’. You must have felt the pressure and honour of living up to that.
Garner:
I didn’t know how to write the book at first. People ask me, ‘Why did you do it in the first person?’ The reason is simple: I tried it the other way and couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t extract myself. When I’m in court, I think one thing one day, another thing the next. I get swung around, and that process seems to me really interesting. As soon as I started to write in the first person, I relaxed. The looming dread of having to do a God-like narration receded.
During the trials, I kept a daily journal devoted to the matter in question. It turned out to be very useful. Each day when I got home, I’d sit down and write out what had happened that day, which people I’d talked to, how they’d struck me, the sort of stuff you don’t have time to write in court. And I realised, when I sat down to write the book about Joe Cinque, that the stuff in that journal was the matter of the book. I couldn’t have cut myself out of it, because my response was so personal. This brings me on to something I want to ask you – will you write yourself into your book, as I do, or is it more objective?
Scott:
This is something I enjoy so much about your books – that you are a guide and friend. We think with you, as you agonise, worry, speculate, guess. You’re so honest, and you’re not afraid to admit that you feel fury one moment, boredom the next, that you don’t understand, that you feel stupid. And that you feel compassion or pity for defendants, like Farquharson in This House of Grief, or the accused college master in The First Stone.
The subject of The Bed Trick is a queer sex offence trial. When I first started writing it, I felt sure that I didn’t want to be in it at all. But extracting myself was impossible, perhaps even unethical. During the process of writing, I swung the other way: I began to pour myself in. The horrible truth of sexual violation is that it’s such a common experience. I have my own story to tell, and at times, I wondered if I should take the stand too, as a complainant. But in the end, that didn’t work either. I felt I was getting in the way. I ended up somewhere in the middle.
In your books, you are there in court. Sometimes you arrive late, but you are there with your notebook, recording the event. My book is different, in that my main material is the transcripts.
Garner:
I remember the first time I saw a trial transcript. I was so besotted by it. I sort of fell in love. It was during the Joe Cinque trials – there was a series of trials, and I had missed one, and eventually I managed to read the transcript. I imagined it was going to be like reading a novel. But it was a complete mystery to me. I thought, ‘I can’t follow this! What is all this talking? Just tell me what happened!’ But then, you dive in, and you start to recognise all the highways and byways. And at a certain point I fell in love with the transcript, to the point where I couldn’t stop quoting it. In the end, this was a darling I had to murder in the final draft. I had to start using my own voice more. As it says in the Bible, we must ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’.
Scott:
I find transcripts fascinating: a trial is translated, and reduced, from an event to a text. In Janet Malcolm’s The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999), the protagonist, a disbarred lawyer, claims she has been wrongly accused of fraud, after her zealous defence of a con man. She contacts Malcolm, and the book begins with Malcolm reading the trial transcripts, which she describes as Chekhovian ‘duels before dawn’.
I wanted to ask you about Janet Malcolm, actually. I began with her fiery book on journalistic ethics, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), and then I devoured all her work. She is another writer who has shown me the way. I know she’s influenced you too, because you often quote her in your books. In your published diaries, there’s an entry from 1993, when you were working on The First Stone, that reads: ‘Janet Malcolm’s big New Yorker essay on the biographers of Sylvia Plath: boom! She shows me that the things I’m too timid to write can be written’. Do you remember this moment – the sense of permission she gave you?
Garner:
I find just about everything Malcolm does vitally interesting. Her whole approach to people and life is never what you expect. She comes in at these little angles, then pulls the rug from under your feet, and you have to reconsider the whole question.
I met her once at a university party in New York. Somebody said casually, ‘Oh, Janet Malcolm is downstairs.’ I couldn’t believe she was in the building. Eventually I walked down, and sitting on an armchair was Janet Malcolm, with big glasses on. There was a baby on her knee, facing outwards, so I remember a stack of faces. I began stammering away, telling her how much she meant to me – and at that very moment, Francine du Plessix Gray, the journalist, burst in and said ‘Janet, Darling!’ – and the moment was swept away.
Later, I reviewed Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011), her book on a murder trial, when it was published in Australia. She had written it after her husband died. She always said he was her first reader and main editor, and he was obviously brilliant. It seemed to me that, in Iphigenia, Malcolm hadn’t made up her mind where to go into the story – it has about fourteen starts – and so I wrote about that. A couple of weeks later, I got an email from her, thanking me for the review, which she said was perceptive. I thought someone was pulling my leg, and I wrote back asking if it was a joke – but it really was her. Years later, I was invited to someone’s place for lunch and Malcolm was going to be there, but I chickened out – I pretended I had another arrangement. I was just too scared. I thought, what if we don’t like each other, and I get my heart broken?
Scott:
She was famously formidable. There’s an interview in the Paris Review, from a decade ago, where she starts interviewing the interviewer back . . . You put it so well, the feeling of reading her work – the angles, the rug-pulling – it’s electrifying. Perhaps some of that coolness is missing in Iphigenia, but as in her other books, she draws out the storytelling aspect of the law. She has this phrase, ‘the malleability of trial evidence’, which she uses to describe how the same evidence can be employed, by competing sides, to tell totally different stories.
Malcolm was loosely involved in the law and literature movement – an area of study that began in the 1970s, and which is of great interest to me. One of the central ideas was to look at the law as literature, and this included literary scholars joining law departments and vice versa. In the 1990s, Malcolm took part in a Yale symposium that looked at the uses of narrative and rhetoric in law. Her paper demonstrated how tools of literary criticism can be applied to the study of law – and especially the trial. Other areas of law and literature attempt to reclaim legal documents as works of literary merit. Have you been involved in this field?
Garner:
In the 1990s, the Judicial College of Victoria ran a writing course for judges, designed to improve their written communication. The college invited local writers to help teach the course, and I agreed to participate. Gosh, I learnt a lot from that. These judges were pressed into doing the course, because their judgments were too long and confusing. On the first day, I was sent various documents to read, and I couldn’t understand a thing. I worried I was going to make a fool of myself. Later, when I had a one-to-one workshop with a judge, who was from a mining town in Western Australia, I came clean – I told him I had no idea what his judgment was about. He was genuinely shocked. But when he explained it to me, it was crystalline. He told me there was a bit of land, with some gold in it, and described the mining company dispute. Now I understood perfectly – but none of this was in the judgment. During the workshops, the penny dropped for lots of these judges, and they started to write completely differently. I felt there was a lot of fear in those over-long judgments, and I learned the judges were terrified of being appealed by the court above. Eventually, one year, we got an appeal judge in, who implored them to shorten, to digest, their texts. That was a great illumination for me. It was the first time I understood what you have to do in very complicated stories – you’ve got to stride through it. With the Joe Cinque transcripts, I was creeping along, as if commando-crawling flat on my stomach – and that’s what the judges were doing too. They had to learn to be confident, to give opinions, to take risks, say what they think. Working with judges was the best fun. They were so smart and blocked. Now I’m older than a judge – that’s a strange feeling.
Scott:
Three of your books have recently been republished in the UK– This House of Grief, along with two much earlier novels, Monkey Grip (1977), and The Children’s Bach (1984). In the lead-up to this conversation, I enjoyed digging out old nineties copies of your books, which have very different covers. What’s it like seeing them anew?
Garner:
I can’t get over the fact that Monkey Grip is still alive. I wrote it in 1977. It was my first novel, and it came out of my diaries. Sometimes, when I do a public event in Melbourne, a middle-aged woman will come up to me with her teenager – and it’s someone I taught in high school, back in the seventies, and it’s her daughter clutching the book.
Scott:
It’s gripping to read, but also almost structureless, a series of episodes. One moment in the book stands out to me now. Nora, the protagonist, is trapped in a relationship. As she escapes her partner, a whirlwind comes after her. She doesn’t understand its meaning, and later, another character explains: ‘It was a doorway specially for you. If you’d known what to do with it, you might have gone into another world.’ The whirlwind makes me think of your earlier description of the spirit of the law, that presence you felt in court. Do you remember the wind, that door?
Garner:
Nobody has ever asked me about that before. I’m really interested that you spotted it. Back then, I was just a slack leftie. I was too much of a smart-arse to open the door, to have a look. As the years have gone by, other things have happened in my life, which have made me much less cynical. In later life, I can’t get through that door quick enough.
Scott:
You described meeting Maria Cinque in the bathroom as a kind of doorway.
Garner:
She opened a door when she said ‘yes’, and I went through it. I tried to back out of the book at other points. I look back on that with such horror. Maria phoned me up, and said to me, ‘What do you mean you won’t write it! We gave you our story! We say write!’ And that was a really good thing she did for me. She opened a door, but she also banged it shut behind me. She drove me on.
