Helen Garner: Monkey Grip

HELEN GARNER (1942- )

Key Study: Monkey Grip

 Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip plunges into the chaotic bohemia of 1970s Melbourne, where the melting pot of artists, actors and musicians experiments with new ways of living and loving. Single mother Nora falls hard for actor Javo, but their relationship is fraught with problems from the beginning. Javo is a heroin addict; Nora is no less hooked on love, and neither of them can escape the trap that they have willingly walked into.

            Javo is described initially as a bludger with scars on his face, who has just ‘got off’ heroin.[1] Nora describes his life as ‘a messy holiday of living off his friends’.[2] She is attracted to his face, ‘crooked, wrecked and wild’ and the boyish flow of his movements[3]; already it appears that Nora’s preference for Javo is an act of adolescent-like rebellion. She rationalises, ‘People like Javo need people like me, steadier, to circle around for a while’[4], which emphasises her naivety and childlike approach to relationships.

            Javo is restless and idle, never making an active effort to steer his life’s course, but rather waits ‘for the tide to lift and carry him’.[5] Sometimes he shows Nora a deeper, more reflective side to his character, but only in private[6]; again, this is a childish pattern of behaviour: Nora and Javo are both children where their relationship is concerned, although Nora is more responsible and adult in other aspects of her life, such as caring for her daughter Gracie and supporting her friends in times of need. She at least recognises that Javo cannot stay off heroin permanently: ‘He’ll always do it again’, she states baldly, realising it is useless to argue with Javo about it.[7]

            Nora is wholeheartedly committed to her relationship with Javo, but their love is not enough for him without heroin.[8] When he comes down off the junk, he is troubled and moody, and does not acknowledge Nora except in his bouts of anxiety, which are the only times that he needs her, for reassurance purposes.[9] ‘He became my sick child,’ Nora says of a particularly bad episode[10], where Javo takes so much heroin that his skin becomes infected and he ends up in hospital with septicæmia.[11] Javo leaves hospital before he is cured and expects Nora to care for him and administer his penicillin shots.[12] Soon afterward, he travels to Bangkok and is arrested for stealing a pair of sunglasses; he writes to Nora that he needs ‘strong love’ but when she complies with fervent daily letters he does not respond.[13] At his best, Javo is charming but weak and selfish nonetheless; at his worst he becomes the ‘king of beasts’, as Nora disgustedly describes him one day when he jokes about wanting to give heroin to a non-junkie acquaintance.[14] ‘Javo the monster. I don’t know him when he’s like this. I wish he would go away,’ Nora says desperately, wanting the ‘old’ Javo back but knowing it is unlikely to happen.[15] As he descends further into his junk-crusted oubliette, Javo becomes ‘filthy and neglected’ in appearance[16]; and it becomes correspondingly clearer that Nora’s love for him is as dangerous, destructive, and addicting as the heroin. Why doesn’t she leave? She does confront him at one point: ‘I told him he was living a sordid life, which he tried to make dramatic by saying things like “I might as well go out and shoot myself”; that he was cutting off his options, one after another...’[17] but Javo turns the tables on her, insisting that his life is not sordid and that he uses less heroin and his life seems simpler when he is away from Nora.[18] Things come to [19]a head when Javo steals eighty dollars from Nora’s housemate; they have an altercation and Javo takes off for Hobart, where his mother lives, and where he goes to get clean. Upon his return, Nora sees immediately that he is back on the heroin, but the time off it has made him ‘alive’ again, and she rejoices.[20] It’s a vicious cycle. And they do finally break up, but Nora’s addiction proves to be hardest to shake; Javo begins a relationship with Claire but Nora feels jealous and lost, and is unable to finally let go until she takes a trip down to a nearby coastal town, where she is soothed and healed by the solitude of the beach.

            Because of the nature of her addiction, Nora’s character is more nurturing and generous than Javo’s. She is grounded by a streak of realism that prevents her from romanticising too much about Javo when she knows that the heroin will always come first; it doesn’t change her love for him, but she feels compelled to try and save him, and she warns herself constantly against needing him too much or becoming dependent emotionally on him. She cannot stop herself from fantasising, though, and feeds her addiction with dangerous dreams such as the one where she gets her loop removed secretly so she can deceive Javo into knocking her up, giving her a ‘piece of him’ that she can love unconditionally.[21] She treasures even the smallest instances of trust Javo shows in her; when he goes to deny that he is stoned and then admits ‘Yes’, she feels that their relationship has progressed.[22] When they are apart, Nora only remembers the good things about him.[23] When they reunite after a separation, Nora feels complete and tells him that she never wants to stop loving him.[24] Nora cries and rages over the futility of Javo’s heroin habit, but when she and Javo look at or touch each other, everything falls ‘simply and momentarily into place’.[25] She tells herself she is strong, to justify her love for a junkie; she rationalises her behaviour by insisting that ‘Women are nicer than men. Kinder, more open, less suspicious, more eager to love.’[26] When Javo tells her he’s going to quit, she wants desperately to have faith in him despite what her common sense tells her. Yet when she allows herself to feel hopeful, Javo betrays her trust again and again. They break up and continue as friends, but Nora still fantasises about him and every time they meet, it ends in lovemaking.[27] Like any addiction, Nora’s recovery begins only when she admits that her love for Javo is destroying her and that if she is to survive, she must learn to get over loving him.[28]

            Garner captures Nora and Javo’s mutual and separate struggles excruciatingly well. Their story is a tragedy, in that both eventually recover from their addictions but in doing so, must reforge their lives apart from one another. The concept of love as a drug is especially potent amidst the tumultuous mixture of music, drugs and free love that is bohemian Carlton in the mid-1970s, where everyone searches for their individual high in order to be part of the collective high. However, the book’s greatest triumph is in keeping Nora a sympathetic and likeable character, despite her persistent inability to break away from Javo and her willingness to join with him in spite of her awareness that his promises to her are hollow, his commitment faltering, against the lure of drugs. Or maybe it’s just that we’re more sympathetic to the idea of being addicted to love – traditionally represented as an emotion of purity – than something so sordid as heroin? Certainly something to consider, anyway.­­­

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garner, Helen. Monkey Grip. Ringwood: Penguin, 1978. First published in 1977.

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[1] H. Garner, Monkey Grip (Ringwood: Penguin, 1978), p. 1

[2] Garner, p. 2

[3] Garner, p. 4

[4] Garner, p. 7

[5] Garner, p. 8

[6] Garner, p. 12

[7] Garner, p. 21

[8] Garner, p. 70

[9] Garner, p. 27

[10] Garner, p. 30

[11] Garner, p. 38

[12] Garner, p. 40

[13] Garner, p. 53

[14] Garner, p. 170

[15] Garner, p. 78

[16] Garner, p. 85

[17] Garner, p. 113

[18] Garner, p. 119

[19] Garner, p. 244

[20] Garner, p. 198

[21] Garner, p. 23

[22] Garner, p. 32

[23] Garner, p. 55

[24] Garner, p. 65

[25] Garner, p. 67

[26] Garner, p. 82

[27] Garner, p. 132

[28] Garner, p. 138