The worldly text and the production of more-than-literary place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘inner north’

The worldly text in place: Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s inner north

Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip is widely considered to be a classic of modern Australian literature. It was awarded the National Book Council Book of the Year Award in 1978, and the novel continues to enjoy strong sales nearly 40 years after its publication, which is an uncommon achievement for a work of Australian fiction. Garner’s book is referred to in concrete terms such as ‘landmark’ or ‘milestone’. The book is frequently cited as a quintessential ‘Melbourne novel’, and in official discourse surrounding Melbourne’s UNESCO City of Literature status (a designation that the city received in 2008). ¹⁶ At the time of writing this article, it was featured in a large-scale digital installation at Federation Square, the symbolic centre of Melbourne’s CBD, which celebrated literary accounts of the city. ¹⁷

However, Monkey Grip’s focus is far more localised than ‘Melbourne’, a city of 4 million people which sprawls roughly 100 km from east to west along Port Phillip Bay on the southern coast of Australia. The novel is set in a counter-cultural community that emerged in the mid-1970s in the inner-city suburbs of North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy and North Fitzroy – now known collectively and colloquially as the ‘inner north’. Monkey Grip details the complex micro-politics of intimate relations between a group of friends, lovers, parents and children who live in this community and closely attends to their everyday practices and routines that are grounded in their inner-city world. The book’s narrative arc follows protagonist Nora’s ill-fated infatuation with heroin addict Javo, and their mutual, dysfunctional pursuit of each other. Nora, Javo and their friends live communally, move between partners and are unfettered by conventional ideas of domestic arrangements. The novel’s characters inhabit a transgressive cultural and social milieu during a time of revanchist social conservatism. Monkey Grip was written in 1975, a year of social and political turmoil in Australia when a radically progressive Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was ‘dismissed’ from office and replaced by a prime minister from the conservative opposition.

At the time of its publication, Monkey Grip was unlike anything that had come before it on the Australian literary scene. Australian literary culture had yet to fully manifest the social and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s that had made a mark in Australia and elsewhere globally. Consequently, Monkey Grip’s publication made a significant splash, with its casual discussions and matter-of-fact depictions of drug taking and sexuality, and female characters who counter social and cultural stereotypes of femininity. Nora, the text tells us, is muscular and burned by the sun, ‘with a crewcut and a pointed tail at the back of her neck’. ¹⁸ It is her unabashed sexual desire, not Javo’s, that propels the action in the novel.

The book’s author was already a cause célebre in Melbourne in the mid-1970s. Garner was infamously fired from her job as a teacher at the local Fitzroy High School for her libertarian approach to sex education, and these associations fed into the worldly life of the text. On first publication, Monkey Grip’s reception split between popular success and critical distaste, with the progressive aspects of the novel downplayed or undermined by mostly male reviewers in their negative responses to the novel’s domestic focus and biographical echoes. ¹⁹ Garner was upfront about how this fictional text was significantly informed by her personal journals, and her forthright admission was attacked by critics for just ‘publish[ing her] fucking diaries’. ²⁰ While these autobiographical associations were embraced enthusiastically by some readers at the time, they also gave rise to hostility among some of Garner’s peers. Soon after the book’s release, a graffito appeared on a Carlton wall: ‘Helen Garner distorts reality’. ²¹ Subsequent appraisals of the text have read this question of fidelity differently, pointing out the complicity of the reader who seeks biographic and geographic mimesis in their engagement with the text. On this point, literary critic Peter Craven wrote, some years after the book’s publication, that

It was so successful in its rendering of the inner-urban world of Fitzroy and Carlton [. . .] that a lot of readers seem to have mistaken Garner’s imaginative representation for their own backyard, a kind of photo-realism that anyone could do, like Kodak instamatics. ²²

Certainly – and again, innovatively for its time – Garner pays close attention to the lived cultural geographies that she and her cohort inhabited daily. As has been noted by Australian literary critics, ²³ the tendency in canonical Australian fiction has been to imaginatively inhabit environments that are well away from the inner-city and suburbs, the ordinary places in which the majority of the Australian population dwells. Instead, these texts deal with the unfamiliar and exotic, made emblematic in the geographic landscapes of the ‘bush’ and the ‘outback’. These are the rehearsed sites in which myths and grand narratives of Australian nationhood are located, an enduring trope in the Australian literary imaginary. ²⁴ Garner’s deliberate turn away from this tradition towards the proximate, the local (for her, and also for many of her readers) and, of course, the urban is striking. Monkey Grip methodically names places that exist on maps outside the text. Her characters roam back and forth along well-known urban streets of the inner north: Lygon, Brunswick, Rathdowne, Napier, Peel. They swim at the Fitzroy Baths (now known as the Fitzroy Pool), a still popular gathering place in the area. The book is littered with the names of cafés, shops and venues, many of which survive and are now recognised Melbourne institutions: La Mama Theatre, Readings bookshop, the University Café. The result is local knowledge that is built through an intimacy with place as much as the intimacy between characters. The book portrays a convivial sociality where encounters are shaped by the spatial:

I chased them down Russell Street to Jimmy’s in the city. I ran in, eager for a sight of their familiarity. They were sitting at a table with Willy and Paddy, who had their backs to the door. [. . .] They were glad to see me and I sat down with them to eat. When we left the restaurant we walked up Russell Street, strung across the pavement, Gracie riding on Jack’s shoulders. I put my arm round Willy’s waist and he laid his over my shoulder [. . .] Our boots beat the footpath in rhythm, and we walked back to Carlton in the cold spring night. ²⁵

Monkey Grip’s engagement with place, then, provides more than a stage or backdrop for plot or character development. Instead, it promotes a complex relationality that is a hallmark of the text. The network of local places that the characters inhabit and move through is aligned with the text’s intimate ecology of relations between lovers, friends, parents and children. A characteristic extract from Nora’s narrative reads,

I thought I would go and find a neutral bed in a neutral house and lie on it until the tears had finished: they’d already started to leak out and I could hardly see where I was going. No one home at Bell Street, or at Brunswick Street, or at Percy Street. So I turned my bike round in St George’s Road among the peak hour traffic and rode up to Rathdowne Street. ²⁶

Despite Nora’s stated yearning for neutrality, her path is very specific – it is a journey in this place and no other.

Assembling the inner north: Monkey Grip and its worldly iterations

When writing about literature and place, literary studies has been reluctant to move beyond the representational, as Kerryn Goldsworthy indicates when she writes on the ‘literary city’: ‘Writing about place is almost always an act of mimesis. The writing is a response to and a representation of something that already exists’. ⁴⁵ Work that imagines the dynamic between place and text in reciprocal terms has been left to other disciplines including cultural geography. ⁴⁶ In cultural geography, text is spatialised and place is textualised, both in multi-dimensional, material senses. Texts take on geographic and ecological forms, as in Lorimer’s description of poetry as ‘psychic weather’. ⁴⁷ Whatmore (pace Michel de Certeau) configures texts as spatial practices ‘that bear within them ghostly reminders of our journeying to and fro’, ⁴⁸ while Patricia Price acknowledges the constitutive force of stories on the world. Places ‘would not exist . . . were it not for the stories told about them and through them’. ⁴⁹

As a field, literary geography – also known as ‘imaginative geography, literary cartography, geocriticism, geopoetics, [and] geohumanities’ ⁵⁰ – has embraced assemblage thinking to challenge the dominant representational and hermeneutical approach in literary scholarship. In assemblage thinking, neither ‘text’ nor ‘place’ are finalised entities, and instead they are constituted by – and also constitute – continually composing relations that are infinitely generative. Literary geography scholars such as Sheila Hones and Jon Anderson deploy assemblage thinking to give an account of the text beyond what it means, to also consider what it is and what it does. This approach challenges what Anderson terms, ‘the perceived stability and singularity of a fictional text’, ⁵¹ and locates interest in the continually composing relations that generate the life of the text in the world. This is to look at the entity that is the text through the frame of emergence, rather than ‘resultant formation[s]’. ⁵²

Places are also assemblages. ⁵³ They are a ‘multiplicity of parts, a hotch-potch with no pre-existing whole’, ⁵⁴ and literary texts, among a host of other intensive forces, are active in this assemblage, as well as being emergent from the place-assemblage themselves (though not solely, because more than ‘place’ constitutes the text). The entanglement of text and place is affirmed in Hones’ concept of the ‘spatial event’ of the text, wherein Hones accounts for the spatialised coming-into-being of a literary work, with multiple inputs that include geographical referents, material conditions and situated responses. ⁵⁵ Hones’ concern, as Anderson points out, is primarily to map the literary effects of a book, rather than the reciprocal ‘territorial consequences’ of the textual assemblage. ⁵⁶ Moreover, Hones and Anderson both position the reader as the central actor in their accounts of literary geography – in keeping with the ‘readerly’ turn across literary scholarship: ‘as a reader taking up a text, you have set off an event’. ⁵⁷ Our perspective, on the other hand, recognises a diversification of agency through which the text and place are assembled.

Building on Hones and Anderson, and through deploying the case of Monkey Grip and the inner north of Melbourne, we are suggesting a further modality of the literature–place assemblage, one that materialises versions of place that are not exclusively literary through ongoing iterations. Our reading of Monkey Grip identifies multiple actors and forces that operate outside the assemblage of ‘literary’ production, circulation and reception and therefore exceed the relation of writer and reader with more-than-literary effects. Through this labile assemblage, residents, marketers, cultural bureaucrats and even real estate agents – many of whom will never have read or picked up the book – imaginatively, affectively and materially inhabit and mobilise the inner north of Melbourne along with writers and readers. All, through their relations, are participants in the Monkey Grip assemblage, and in turn, participants in material productions of place of Melbourne’s inner north.

Monkey Grip does more than mimetically reproduce the ‘inner north’ and the early years of the area’s gentrification. It is regarded as a geographic constituent of the area. One indicator of the place-based cultural value attached to Monkey Grip is Melbourne comedian Catherine Deveny’s only partly satirical checklist ‘You know you’re from Melbourne if . . . .’ Deveny quips, ‘When you claim to have lived in one of the houses from Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip’. ⁵⁸ Sophie Cunningham’s 2010 nonfiction book Melbourne uses the ‘Monkey Grip house’ to map her own cultural geography of Melbourne’s inner north:

For many years, when I was in my early twenties, friends and I shared a house a few doors up from the one in [. . .] Monkey Grip: [. . .] Well, rumour has it that it was a few doors up. Almost everyone I know claims to have lived near that house, and I’ve never been able to work out if we’re all talking about the same one. The place I’m thinking of is on the corner of Falconer and Woodhead streets in North Fitzroy. ⁵⁹

Cunningham’s attention to the spatialised, locally resonant aspects of Garner’s text is not unique. ‘Melbourne by the Book’, an essay by local writer Kate Holden, cites Holden’s recollection of first reading Monkey Grip and how this memory still ‘comes to me on warm summer nights’. ⁶⁰ She recalls, ‘Ten years after my high school encounter with Garner’s Melbourne, I would be living a similar life in the same place’. For Holden, Monkey Grip is an affective conduit across multiple temporalities of place (the inner northern Melbourne of the novel’s setting, the Melbourne of Holden’s youth) that erupts into the present, remaking relationships with place in an ongoing fashion.

Holden and Cunningham (and Deveny too, to an extent) are examples of writerly responses to place that are mediated through the interpretation of and the experience of reading Monkey Grip. They are, then, iterations that render the text worldly. They demonstrate that Garner’s novel does not exist discretely or singularly; rather, it is constantly produced through the infinitely generative assemblages in which it relationally moves in the world. Some iterations of the worldly text, like Holden’s and Cunningham’s, are bound to be literary. Some are representational; for example, Ken Cameron’s 1982 film adaptation of the novel or the referencing of Monkey Grip in the Australian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Other iterations are produced from and in turn produce material processes that transform place: for example, a 2011 property listing for a house at 259 Scotchmer Street, North Fitzroy, in which the book was purported to be written; ⁶¹ the registration of this address on the Victorian Heritage database as the ‘Monkey Grip House’; ⁶² and the presentation of another North Fitzroy house at 27 Falconer Street as the ‘real’ one that Garner lived in. ⁶³

Garner’s frequent descriptions of her protagonist Nora setting out from her inner north share houses, either solo, or ‘dinking’ her daughter through sun baked streets, evoke an inner-city urban mobility and mode of inhabitation still strongly embedded in current practices. Monkey Grip materially informs how people inhabit the inner north. Riding through Edinburgh Gardens in North Fitzroy on a summer evening, just like Nora, has become a reference point for contemporary creative practitioners in their construction of place-image ⁶⁴ in Melbourne’s inner north. Cunningham deploys it in Melbourne, when she writes, ‘[a]s Garner has done some years earlier, I used to ride through the Edinburgh Gardens to the hundred-year-old Fitzroy Pool, a place where the water is not just deep but, as the sign says, profonda’. ⁶⁵ It is no geographical coincidence that Cunningham, whose literary career began in the offices of Garner’s publishers McPhee and Gribble, ended up in Carlton, just as it is no cultural accident that Monkey Grip figures in Cunningham’s genealogy of place in her book on Melbourne.

Cunningham’s reference to the baths is literary and geographical. It is a reference to both the book Monkey Grip and to the Fitzroy Pool with its iconic Aqua Profonda signage. Famously, the Aqua Profonda sign painted on the wall of the pool is a misspelling of the intended Italian acqua profonda, or deep water. The sign was painted in the 1950s as a caution to the area’s newly arrived Southern European migrants, and is therefore entangled with Fitzroy’s history as a previously working-class suburb. The pool is introduced early on as a significant place in the opening chapter of Monkey Grip, which is also titled ‘Aqua Profonda’. It is where the book’s central couple Nora and Javo initially connect: ‘At the Fitzroy Baths, Martin and Javo lolled on the burning concrete. I clowned in the water at the deep end where the sign read AQUA PROFONDA’. ⁶⁶ The centrality of the sign in the text’s depiction of the Fitzroy Pool mark out a recognisable location, but also the sign’s ontological status within a place and textual assemblage. Its recognisability is due, in large part, to Garner’s novel (and Cameron’s subsequent cinematic adaptation of the novel). Monkey Grip and the sign at the pool are so closely associated that the connection to Garner’s book was cited as a rationale for the sign’s heritage listing. ⁶⁷ Another iteration of the Garner – Monkey Grip – Fitzroy Baths assemblage was Australia’s entry in the International Architecture Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Tabet, Toland and Holliday’s installation The Pool (2016) recognised the extraordinary influence of the swimming pool in Australia’s collective cultural imaginary and referenced both the Aqua Profonda sign and Garner’s text.

More-than-literary places

The touchstones rich in cultural capital from Monkey Grip have been folded into current marketing vocabularies for the now exclusive suburbs in Melbourne’s inner north. ⁶⁸ Yet many of the places that the iterations of Monkey Grip have produced have little to do with ‘inner north’ depicted in Monkey Grip. The locations depicted in the book and film are now some of the most expensive property in Melbourne. The ‘old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city’ ⁶⁹ on the opening page of Monkey Grip sold for close to AUD$3 million in 2011. The promotional material that accompanied this sale boasted that ‘Helen Garner wrote the iconic Australian novel . . . while abiding [sic] under this roof’. ⁷⁰

In 2006, Garner’s daughter, the actor and academic Alice Garner, published The Student Chronicles, her own ‘diaries’ recounting her time living as an undergraduate in share housing in Melbourne’s inner north. The marketing of Alice Garner’s autobiographical text clearly relied upon the author’s direct connection to Garner as a counter-cultural figure. ‘My childhood and adolescence were anything but conventional’, states the back-cover blurb. The demographic transformations to the area in the intervening years that Alice Garner observes form an implicit counterpoint to the radical social milieu into which Garner wrote, underscoring the gentrifying impacts in which Monkey Grip is implicated. The bohemian life that Alice Garner shared with her mother in Melbourne’s inner north 30 years earlier is a relic of the past. Noting that Fitzroy was ‘considered the slums at the time’, ⁷¹ she lived there with her parents; Alice Garner recollects her own solidly middle-class student life dedicated to studious rather than socially disruptive pursuits. Her share house is ‘spacious, well-lit with a big backyard – a place of relative calm, thick walls and no ghosts’. ⁷² Alice Garner studied at the University of Melbourne, the city’s most prestigious and elite academic institution, whose proximity to the inner northern suburbs is the reason that many students and artists took up residence in the area in the first place.

The Student Chronicles can be read as an iteration of the worldly text. Alice Garner’s experiences and understandings of Melbourne’s inner north emerge from Monkey Grip: in the novel, Nora’s daughter Gracie is based on Alice Garner; in the filmed adaptation of the book, Gracie was played by Alice herself. Yet, the place that Alice describes, one that is undoubtedly connected to Monkey Grip, is not particularly literary in spite of its association with her mother’s book and top-down literary place-making initiatives such as Melbourne’s UNESCO City of Literature designation. ⁷³ In the decades since the novel was written, Melbourne’s inner north has transformed from a working-class area, typically attractive to the cohort of counter-cultural drifters that we meet in Monkey Grip. Its suburbs are now a wealthy, arguably monocultural network of places, which no longer resemble those in the book, yet are desirable for the spatialised encounters they afford with a cultural past and present in which Garner’s novel is a canonical, resonant text.

Anderson’s question, ‘What is the valency of this book in taking and making extra-textual geographies in particular locations?’ ⁷⁴ is a provocation that we have sought to address using a canonical Australian literary work and applying tools and theories from cultural geography. In the case of Helen Garner and Monkey Grip, we have shifted how we understand ‘territorial’ impacts of the text away from literature as a place-making device and situated the worldly text as an actor in place-making that has more-than-literary reference points. This is also to acknowledge that part of the worldliness of the text is its iterative agency beyond specific communities of interest and intent (e.g. literary cultures). Our consideration of the agency of literature in more-than-literary processes of urban transformation and gentrification surely has repercussions for how we understand the use and experience of place in Melbourne’s inner north. As it is produced by the dynamic co-constitutive assemblages of Garner’s text and its iterations, place in Melbourne’s inner north is literary, but at the same time it is also neo-liberal, pragmatic and banal. While we have given an account of how this singular literary narrative produces more-than-literary place, we have not attempted to answer the enticing, though much more general, question, why are some literary texts about place worldly, and others not? Rita Felski has attempted to address this issue in her work on literature and assemblage theory, although not in relation to place specifically. ⁷⁵ Leaving this wider question unanswered for now undoubtedly marks out productive further trajectories of enquiry for cultural geography into the relations between the worldly text and more-than-literary place.