New respect for Charmian Clift

If Charmian Clift had received recognition of her literary talents, she might not have died by her own hand, and may have lived to enjoy the status that was instead bestowed upon her husband.

Writer Charmian Clift in Sydney in 1964.

Author Charmian Clift used to say that sometimes, you win the prize first, and have to work for it afterwards. This was certainly true in her own case.

In 1948, Clift and her husband, George Johnston, won The Sydney Morning Herald prize for their collaborative novel, High Valley. The Herald described the winners as “Mr George H. Johnston, a Sydney journalist, and his wife Charmian” (no surname) and the Sun newspaper announced the award with the headline ‘JOURNALIST, WIFE WIN NOVEL PRIZE’.

Twenty years later, Clift wryly recalled: “I was 24 and suddenly found myself a literary celebrity except that most people didn’t think I’d had much to do with it.”

George Johnston would go on to win the 1964 Miles Franklin Award for his autobiographical novel, My Brother Jack. He won it again in 1969 for the sequel, Clean Straw for Nothing. Over that same time period, Charmian Clift became a household name, thanks to the weekly newspaper column she wrote for the women’s pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald.

But after that initial prize in 1948 she never received another literary award.

Politically radical since her youth, Clift used her public profile, and her column, to speak out against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, against the right-wing junta in Greece, against the growing gap between what she called “the Haves and the Have Nots”, and against censorship in the arts. She spoke up for women, for young people, for “migrants” (among whom she included herself) and for the Yes vote in the 1967 Aboriginal ­referendum.

Her personal following was so great that the postman delivered a swag of fan mail to her Sydney home every day, and a major Sydney department store purchased the full-page advertising space next to her column on a regular basis.

The literary establishment, by contrast, put greater value on the works by Clift’s husband. In her 1964 essay “Second Class Citizens”, Clift described the “continuing sexual apartheid in employment, wages, social standing, and moral judgments”. As a feminist writing before the women’s liberation movement took off, she was ahead of her time.

Mermaid Singing (the novel Clift wrote while living on the Greek island of Kalymnos in 1955) and Peel Me a Lotus (written on Hydra the following year) received good reviews but poor sales, arguably because even women in the 1950s did not want to see the exotic landscape of a “travel book” from the point of view of a woman looking after her household.

With their tough-minded female protagonists, the novels did not meet the expectations of women’s fiction. Although her newspaper column was popular with men as well as women, the author felt her “pieces” (or essays) were dismissed as “women’s journalism”.

The “sexual apartheid” of which Clift spoke became more obvious when Johnston applied to the Commonwealth Literary Fund for support to write his autobiographical novel, Clean Straw for Nothing. He received $6000 in instalments over 12 months. When Clift applied to the same body for funding to write her autobiographical novel, The End of the Morning, she was awarded $3000 over six months. It would be hard to find a clearer example of the gender pay gap.

Clift and Johnston with Leonard Cohen, Cohen’s muse, Marianne Ihlen and Ihlen’s baby (plus unknown person) on the Hydra waterfront 1960.

As if that were not bad enough, the CLF held back Clift’s final monthly instalment (due in May 1969) because she had not finished the book. This increased the author’s sense of lost time, lost opportunity, and failure to do the thing she most needed to do for the sake of her career, her self-esteem and (most significantly) her understanding of the narrative of her own life. This may, in turn, have contributed to the complex mix of professional and personal reasons for the author’s July 1969 suicide.

Perhaps if Clift had received greater recognition of her literary status, she might have lived to complete The End of the Morning. Thankfully, the 20,000-word typescript she left is now being published for the first time.

Set in the little quarrying settlement on the NSW south coast where Clift grew up, it describes the childhood of the author’s alter ego, Cressida Morley, who had first appeared in print in My Brother Jack but whom Clift had (in her words) “invented first”.

The publication of this last work is now commercially viable because Clift is receiving professional recognition, at home and abroad.

Never published in Australia during the author’s lifetime, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus have in recent years been published in the UK, followed by translations into Greek, Spanish and Catalan. The international market for these books has been helped by the popularity of Hydra as a tourist spot, and especially by Hydra’s association with singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who was given free rent and lodging at the Johnstons’ home when he arrived on the island, penniless and unknown, in the summer of 1960.

Last year, when I visited Hydra, the current owner of what is still known as “the Australian house” very kindly invited me to have a look around. Things were a bit of a mess, he explained, because filming of Norwegian television series So Long, Marianne, about the love affair between Cohen and his muse, Marianne Ihlen, was only recently complete. Naturally, the singer’s first friends on the island (with Clift played by Anna Torv and Johnson by Noah Taylor) are part of the story.

The "Australia House" at Hydra, once home to Charmian Clift and George Johnston, picture courtesy Nadia Wheatley, who visited last year.

An Australian documentary based on my biography of Clift is scheduled for release on Foxtel later this year. In Life Burns High, made by Rachel Lane and Sue Milliken, the author’s own words are drawn from her essays and travel memoirs. The interviewees include writer Rodney Hall, who also stayed with Clift and Johnston on Hydra, and Richard Walsh, who was Clift’s editor at Pol magazine.

In Australia, it is the essays that are the reason for Clift’s growing readership. When a selection appeared two years ago under the title Sneaky Little Revolutions, reviews were glowing and sales were so strong that a second print run was quickly needed. This interest is not a case of nostalgia. Rather, it reflects the fact that Charmian Clift’s ideas seem as fresh today as they did when these essays first appeared. An additional 30 are included in the new work.

Yet Clift’s subject matter is only part of her appeal. Great writing doesn’t have a use-by date. Australian critic Peter Craven has described Clift’s writing as having “more lightning and quicksilver, more brilliance and more skill of execution, than any Australian writing other than the great novels of Patrick White and Christina Stead”.

Lucas Villavecchia, publisher at Barcelona-based company Gatopardo, which has brought out the Spanish translation of Clift’s travel memoirs, is as enthusiastic. When I asked him how Clift’s voice resonates in Spanish, he pointed out that, as a Romance language, Spanish “tends to lend itself to lyrical prose”. He went on to say that “Charmian Clift’s language is very evocative, atmospheric, full of details and nuances. It flows like a river. It is not dry or deadpan like a lot of English prose of the 20th century – the usual suspects: Hemingway, Orwell, Carver and ­company”.

The End of the Morning is written in the Cliftian voice, simultaneously lyrical and conversational. Yet here it evokes not a Greek island but the beach and valley where she grew up.

“It is a book about young dreams and young longings,” the author wrote, “and is filled with sand and sea and sun and wind and seaweed draped on the front picket fence after a storm.” She also described it as “the novel that every writer wants to do”.

Written at a time when Charmian Clift was at the height of her very considerable powers, its publication, 55 years after her death, is perhaps the long-awaited prize the author deserved.

Nadia Wheatley is the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (HarperCollins, 2001) and the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions — Selected Essays of Charmian Clift (NewSouth 2023). She is also the editor of The End of the Morning (NewSouth), a review of which is published on this page.