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There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (”Fourteen years since the war! Did you mark the date? What a long way we have traveled, as peoples, from that bitterness!”), with their deeper personal connection. Told in letters between Jewish American, Eisenstein, and his business partner, the German Schulse, this (very) short novel spans fifteen months in the early 1930s during the Nazi machine’s rise to power.

In the first few exchanges the friends are genial, talking shop, Germany (”the breadth of intellectual freedom, the discussions, the music, the light-hearted comradeship”), and mentioning Griselle, Eistenstein’s headstrong sister and former fling of Schulse, who is traveling Europe as an actress. Liberal politics abound, then darkness descends as Eisenstein asks  (”Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany?”)

What is initially frightening about Address Unknown is how Schulse, privileged in Germany following his economic success in America (”we employ now ten servants for the same wages of our two in the San Francisco home”) makes the rapid volte-face from declaring Hindenburg “a fine liberal whom I much admire” to a scathing attack on liberalism:

A liberal is a man who does not believe in doing anything. He is a talker about the rights of man, but just a talker. He likes to make a big noise about freedom of speech, and what is freedom of speech? Just the chance to sit firmly on the backside and say that whatever is being done by the active men is wrong. What is so futile as the liberal? I know him well because I have been one. He condemns the passive government because it makes no change. But let a powerful man arise, let an active man start to make a change, then where is your liberal? He is against it. To the liberal any change is the wrong one.

The powerful man that arises needs no introduction, and it’s not so much Hitler who features in the novel but the poison that his Fascist tenets instills in a man’s mind. From an early observational capacity Schulse describes him (”the man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be”) but it’s soon obvious that any impartiality is slain by the sword of oratory:

As for the sterm measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

Although the change in relations between the two men seems rapid, with the letters following each other as the pagination insists, its the long gaps between these in the story’s time, often months, that add to the book’s power. We are left to wonder what has been happening in these unwritten periods. How has Schulse allowed himself to secede and convince himself of the efficacy of Hitler’s regime? Have Eisenstein’s nights been sleepless as he anticipates the next reply? And what of their common bond, Griselle, travelling between Vienna and Berlin, especially when her brother notes about the letter he has sent her?

…it has been returned to me, the envelope unopened, marked only address unknown, (Adressant Unbekannt). What a darkness those words carry! How can she be unknown? It is surely a message she has come to harm.

Into its minimal pages Address Unknown packs an incredible wealth of content, describing through one man Germany’s “hysteria of deliverance” under the auspices of a doer —

The whole tide of a people’s life changes in a minute because the man of action has come. And I join him. […] I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.

— and showing how words are just as much a weapon as armaments, perhaps even more so with their power to control people that will readily renounce who they truly are to follow a crazed destiny they would otherwise never consider. When Schulse talks of German destiny —

If I could show you, if I could make you see — the rebirth of this new Germany under our Gentle Leader! Not for always can the world grind a great people down in subjugation. In defeat for fourteen years we bowed our heads. We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men. We rise in our might and hold our heads up before the nations. We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements. We go singing through our valleys with strong muscles tingling for a new work — and from the mountains ring the voices of Wodan and Thor, the old, strong gods of the German race.

— the words of the Nazi doctrine are evident, for this is a man who has lived comfortably in the United States, and never suffered the hardship of post-war Germany.

If the compact nature of Address Unknown is powerful itself for Schulse’s journey, Taylor strengthens it further by working the idea of words’ power to a wonderful twist that plays on the paranoid, censorious nature of the regime it successfully lambasts. Taylor could not have known what horrors were yet to come from Nazi aggression, but in this tale she rallies against its rise, and the results, when they arrive, are both satisfying, abrupt, and apt.

Helen Garner is a new name to me, having recently discovered a number of her books were available in the Penguin Modern Classics range, albeit only in her native Australia. Reading around, it seems her work deals autobiographically with elements of her life. But after her 1992 novel, Cosmo Cosmolino, she effectively stopped writing fiction and now, sixteen years later, has returned with The Spare Room (2008), another take on her life, and, given that the narrator shares her name, lifestyle, and talents, it may just be her most personal yet.

While the novel has moments of comic relief, one can’t ignore that death underlies it. Opening with Helen preparing her spare room, plumping pillows and airing it out, it may hint at a new beginning, but she’s doing this because her friend Nicola, diagnosed with bowel cancer, is coming to Melbourne to stay for three weeks while receiving alternative treatment from the Theodore Institute, a local clinic.

Said clinic, charging two thousand dollars a week and manned by unprofessional staff, runs on the ideas of its founder, Professor Theodore, a quack with some strange ideas about medicine:

‘High dosage vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer and boost the immune system. And our ozone sauna treatment is based on the old natural-therapy approach to cancer - sweating out the toxins. Most doctors don’t know this stuff. But it’s good science.’

Outfits like this, as Helen notes, “tended to keep people linked to them in cloudy hope, right to the end.” And linked to it Nicola most certainly is, walking around with a permanent smile on her face, worrying for others rather than herself, and flat out refusing to acknowledge the truth that she’s going to die. (”‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain - that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’”)

The relationship between the two women is in turns comic (on the subject of coffee enemas) and downright heart-breaking. Helen’s journey as friend and carer is punctuated by ugly thoughts, worryingly detailed, as Nicola infuriates her again and again with her embracing of dodgy treatments and her mustn’t-grumble attitude. It’s certainly a far cry from Helen’s sister, herself dead from cancer:

She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her.

In further contrast, Helen’s sister was a nurse who believe in western medicine, whereas:

…in recent years, shortly before [Nicola] became ill, Buddhist terms had entered her discourse. She knew how to pronounce rinpoche and where to get a ticket when the famous ones were coming to town. She subjected herself to ten-day vipassana boot camps in the Blue Mountains: her account of these speechless ordeals were shaped to make me laugh, but she always came back to the city elated. She referred casually to weekend teachings, and to new friends with names that sounded made up; she had taken to wearing little thread bangles, or a string of knobbly, dark red wooden beads. So I imagined that somewhere in her free-wheeling nature she was quietly equipping herself, as everyone must, with whatever it is one needs to die.

In The Spare Room there’s lessons for both sides, although being told from Helen’s perspective, we never truly get inside Nicola’s mind, but this is skillfully circumvented by the right portion of dialogue or crisp description that hints at unreachable depths. In anger, there’s the need to be kind (”Dying was frightening.”) and in that no matter if you look the other way, you can’t cheat death:

To try is grandiose. it drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

While the story between the two women works extremely well, the inclusion of too much of Garner’s non-fictional life, such as her ukulele playing, feels a tad superfluous, even if it is a comfort to her fictional self. But to document one’s feelings on a heart wrenching topic, and to do it in such a warts-and-all way, creates an real empathy for the narrator and, by extensions, Garner herself, who expertly conjures up the memory of a friend to fleetingly fill the room she left spare.