Stephen Carroll, Spectrum, Saturday July 16 2022

‘Susan Varga’s distinctive memoir (incorporating her taut but resonant poetry) comes over like an effortless blend of the epic and intimate, and easy to read – but hard won. Your finish with an admiration both for the book and for the writer. Born in Hungary in 1943, she fled after the war with her mother, sister and step family (her father dying in a Nazi labour camp) to Sydney, where at university she entered the daunting, mostly male – dominated Sydney Push. Sex followed, relationships and marriage, until she met the woman with whom she fell in love. She started writing, was happy, was unhappy, and at 68 had a stroke. Hard Joy, global in its sweep but deeply personal, was written in its shadow. Beguilingly simple, she draws you in, covering the emotional and intellectual highs and lows of living – and of the writing life.’

Susan Sheridan Australian Book Review, July 2022

Reclamation

An affecting memoir of loss and change

‘When Susan Varga made the momentous, long-delayed decision to commit herself to writing, her “first task was to write her mother’s story – that of a Holocaust survivor who migrated from Hungary to Australia with her second husband and two daughters in 1948, when Susan was five. That story, which is also one of a complex and difficult relationship between mother and daughter, became the award-winning Heddy and Me (1994).

The author, in her mid-forties, had already lived a full if tumultuous life without any clear sense of purpose. The decision to become a writer coincided with – indeed, she suggests, was made possible by – forming a relationship with the woman who was to be the love of her life, journalist Anne Coombs. Varga recounts with a comic touch the scene where she admitted this desire to give up her practice as a barrister in order to write: on a road trip she requested a mid-morning stop at a country pub; in a conversation over drinks in the hallway (for privacy), she made her stammered confession, fearing it would be met with scorn or even anger. ‘Is that all?’ said Anne: ‘So when are you going to start?’

At mid-life Varga had made ‘landfall’, as she names the third section of this memoir. She had found her purpose in writing, and ‘felt for the “first time that I was embarking on life with a partner in every sense’. Hard Joy has four sections: Bearings, Tumult, Landfall, and Fate. But “first, a brief prologue revisits the events told in Heddy and Me: the perilous early months of Susan’s life, hidden with her mother and grandmother in a village during the last years of the war; then a few years back in Budapest before the communist regime prompted the re-formed family to leave, their passports stamped ‘never to return’. #e story is told in the present tense, in short, sharp scenes.

Part I, ‘Bearings’, follows Susan through childhood and troubled adolescence (less obvious reasons for this trouble emerge later in the narrative), rebelling against not only her parents but also the middle-class life they aspired to.

The book’s cover invites us to read it as ‘an intimate and incisive portrait of our times’. As a contemporary of Susan Varga, I enjoyed her evocation of student days at Sydney University – the brilliance of theatrical performances like John Bell’s Coriolanus or Germaine Greer’s Mother Courage (I remember Greer in ‘Revue of the Absurd’), as well as the mystique of #e Push (which I observed warily, but of which Susan was one of the stars). Nostalgic bells rang as I read her stories of travelling overseas without a care in the world for establishing a career or settling down. Her accounts of feminist activism during the Whitlam years, of setting up a women’s shelter, of making videos and collective living, also resonated with me. Yet the memoir she has produced chooses not to focus on the political and social contexts of our times, but has a more inward perspective. It’s a book about a woman claiming and reclaiming the power to shape her own life.

The narrative is pared back: it frequently opens out into poems and photographs, but ‘skims through vast stretches of [her] life-landscape’, only pausing longer to explore experiences she characterises as ‘personal mountains’.

In Part II, ‘Tumult’, looking back on ‘the most tumultuous and vivid years of my life’ in the early 1970s, Varga expresses dismay: at her marriage to ‘the Dutchman’ falling apart, the ‘half-arsed and random a!airs’, the succession of people and jobs. ‘I am amazed that with my personal life in such disarray, I functioned at all,’ she concludes. Then with the sudden end of that period of intense political change, she retreated from that communal life into a long, unsatisfying relationship with another man, during which she studied law and began practice as a barrister.

Part III, ‘Landfall’, tells of the life that she made with Anne Coombs, a life rich with writing, travel, country living, activism, and philanthropy. As well as their individual books, together they researched and wrote the controversial Broometime (2001). They set up the successful community advocacy group that became a network, Rural Australians for Refugees. Later, they would establish a foundation to fund social justice projects, which they ran for ten years.

The final section, ‘Fate’, recounts several cruel breaks in this life: “first, the deaths of Susan’s parents, followed by Heddy’s last, fatal gift to her daughter. Susan’s struggle to accept her mother’s suicide fed into her novel, Headlong (2009). Then came another traumatic break. In 2011, in her late sixties, she suffered a severe stroke. She ‘lost her words’ (as a friend of mine said of this experience), and it took her years to reclaim them. Returning to writing, she tried poems, and they accumulated until she had a book ready for publication, Rupture (2016). This was a long, hard struggle, where she almost lost her beloved, along with her best self. The title, Hard Joy, is exact. As she writes in the epilogue:

I had no idea how rocky the road to ageing would be … But nor did I expect to have to dig so deep to find new, essential skills to survive until death finally takes me …Even here, at this stage, joy can be found and mined. Maybe the hardest joy.

As I was finishing this review, I looked up Anne Coombs to see what books she had published, and was shocked to learn that she had died some months ago – another cruel blow for this courageous woman, Susan Varga. What she has achieved in Hard Joy is a heroic act of reclamation, and what she shares in this memoir is immensely moving.’

Julia Taylor, Books and Publishing, worked in trade publishing for many years, July 2022.

Susan Varga spent the first half of her life having affairs with inappropriate men, including some of the older leading lights of the libertarian Sydney Push. At the same time, she struggled to find her real vocation, studying for a law degree she barely used and once turning down the chance to be assistant director for Peter Weir’s first major film. Luckily for Varga, everything changed for her in midlife: she found true lasting love with a woman and finally dared to out herself as a writer. Perhaps Varga just needed many years of distance from the psychic damage inflicted by the Push’s patriarchal superiority and predatory sexuality—as well as from the overbearing influence of a moralistic mother. Hard Joy mainly details Varga’s endlessly eventful life, but it’s framed by her mother, Heddy—their difficult relationship forged in Varga’s babyhood during a desperate Holocaust escape, ending over 60 years later with Heddy’s descent into despair. ‘Hard joy’ is the term Varga uses to describe the act of writing, and it is a very appropriate title for this exploration of a privileged but often dissatisfied life. Written with tremendous honesty and clarity of expression, it is enhanced by black-and-white photographs and punctuated by occasional poetry. Don’t let this put you off—Varga is a born poet, even if it did take her most of her life to realise it, and the poems deepen and transcend the prose on the page. Anyone interested in the Sydney Push, the lives and battles of creative women, or the Holocaust and its immense repercussions will find much food for thought here.

Drusilla Modjeska, the well known novelist has written a penetrating essay on Hard Joy.

Here’s the first few paragraphs…

Reflections on reading Susan Varga’s Hard Joy: Life and Writing

Susan Varga was a child of five when she left Hungary for life in Australia. It was December 1948, the Communist regime was in power, the Iron Curtain was about to fall, and on the train that day, there were seven of them: her mother Heddy, her sister Jutka, her brand-new stepfather – whose name they were travelling under – his brother, his wife and their baby. As they approached Austria, the border guard came to check their documents, their passports stamped Never To Return. ‘What is your name, Miss?’ he asks the young Suszi. She punches her fist, and says, ‘I know. I know it, I know! But I’ve forgotten.’

‘A heavy silence. The guard puffs up his cheeks and looks down his nose. Then he closes the carriage door, walks down the corridor and out of the train.’

Susan Varga tells this story in the short, powerful prologue to her memoir Hard Joy. Was it a memory? Or was the memory of the guard, so vivid in mind, created from the story Heddy would later tell her? It had been Heddy who’d got them all onto that train, and who’d done the hard grind of procuring the documents. And it was Heddy who’d schooled the children in their new name. Could salvation be snatched from them in an instant by the vagaries of a child’s memory? The child whom Heddy had swaddled and protected through the last, brutal years of the war, the child she’d born in October 1943, refusing the option of an abortion despite the escalating horror, the forced deportation of Jewish Hungarians that would soon take her husband, Suszi’s birth-father, to the Fertörákos labour camp where he died. By the time the Nazis were in retreat the following winter, the infant Suszi was so weak that she, too, would have died had Heddy not made the hazardous journey to the liberated zone in search of clean water and medicines that saved her life.

That day on the train at the border when the guard walked on down the corridor, Varga writes: ‘Silence in our compartment. A few miles further into Austria, we draw breathe and dare to celebrate.’

Hard Joy. A title that makes you stop and think. And not only for the opening preface of war and escape. Even when danger is left far behind, joy is rarely straightforward. Hard Joy: Life and Writing is the full title.

There is the hard joy of writing, which any writer will recognise; not only the long hours at the desk, but the journey writing can take us on, as we come to understand our small part in the larger scheme of things. And there are the hard joys of life, the joys we mistake, the things we run after, hoping they will be joys. And there are all the things we avoid, thinking that avoidance will bring joy, not knowing, or not yet, that the hardest joy of all may be to turn and face them. Face the paradox, enter the space between the past and the present, the expressed and the repressed. Hard joy.

For many years the young Susan Varga bought Heddy’s line that she was only a baby during the war, and that once it was over she began to thrive again. Heddy was the one who suffered, not her. But even with Hungary cast into the past from the safety of Australia, it remained for Susan ‘a place of fear, shadows, danger’. She would be in mid-life before she turned to face that past, with the hard joy of writing Heddy and Me, her memoir of 1994.

The challenge of writing, Deborah Levy says in The Cost of Living (2018), is ‘to climb between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure.’ Memoir is an invitation – both for the writer, and for the reader – ‘to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.’ An invitation to see ourselves, our own small lives as part of that wider ecology, the larger histories, Levy’s infrastructure, in which we all exist.

And that is what Susan Varga achieved with Heddy and Me, a breakthrough book not only for her, but the writing of Australian memoir. Hard Joy widens the lens, looking back across the span of seventy years to consider those fundamental human questions of what makes us, and who makes us. To what extent do our roots, our origins form us? Can we escape them and start again? What does it mean to be an immigrant to this country?

These are the questions we are invited to consider in Hard Joy, and how they unfold through a life recalled, the drama enacted over four acts, replete with stories and photographs that draw us back to the moment. And, most significantly, poetry.

Being of the same generation as Susan Varga, and a friend of the last decade, this essay is less a review than a reflection on reading Hard Joy – for it tells the story not only of her own life, her own hard joys, but the changing ecosystem in which she became a writer – and so many others of us too – the ways in which the tensions between looking forward and looking back played out over a generation. The things we did see in youth, and the things we did not see; the things we refused to see, and those that we were blind to. The insects and the tree.

So there they are, this family of seven, newly arrived in Sydney. The smells are different, the light, the air, the clothes people wear, their restrained gestures. And tea served in ‘bleak cafes’ and ‘coloured with milk!’ Australia.

Act One has begun.

Heddy is not deterred…. if you want to read more, click here the Sydney Review of Books

A few responses to Drusilla’s essay:

Bronwyn Barwell – “It was a great review, work of art itself!”

Jared Gulian – “Hard Joy catches it all…. Reading Hard Joy, I understand again how very important that understanding of inherited trauma has been in the changing ecology of language and meaning in this country.” Fantastic!

Emma Ashmere – “Marvellous….. very thoughtful and insightful.”

Alice Grundy, PhD Candidate, Australian National University,

The Conversation Aug 2, 2022

Susan Varga’s Hard Joy explores the possibilities and limits of memoir.

It is an idiosyncratic and often intimate work – likely her last, as Varga says towards the end of the book.

This memoir does not situate itself as part of the current publishing trend, which is perhaps one of the reasons it has been released by the small independent publisher Upswell, whose stated aim is “making books to last: books with the potential to still be noticed, and noted, after decades”.

Hard Joy is a highly personal account of some of Australia’s major cultural moments since the second world war, featuring a large cast of characters. It speaks of the importance of honest relationships and a rich life of the mind.

The book opens with Varga’s journey to Sydney as a child – a move forced on her family after the war. She escaped the Nazis in Hungary with her mother and sister; her father shared the fate of millions of other Jews and did not survive the war. The journey out of Hungary and her mother’s story were the subjects of Varga’s first book, Heddy and Me (1994)… read more here

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