Reading Charmian Clift, George Johnston and their associated biographers - and others -backwards

 Reading Charmian Clift, George Johnston and their associated biographers - and others -backwards

 

by Wolfgang B. Sperlich

 

It is an interesting exercise to accidentally read sequentially connected books out of sequence, reading backwards, so to speak. By which I mean, being prompted by a book written in the 2020s, to then read two books published in 1956 and 1959, followed by a biography of the latter author published in 2001, and then followed up by reading the last two volumes of a trilogy written/published by the latter author’s husband in 1969 and 1971, only to read his biography from 1986, and next his most famous book from 1964, plus one a further two years back. Finally the 2001 movie version of his most famous book.

 

Here is the above list in annotated order:

 

Samson, Polly (2020). A Theatre for Dreamers.

 

I acquired a copy via various reviews (e.g. in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/05/a-theatre-for-dreamers-by-polly-samson-review ) that noted as its main plot the life and times of Leonard Cohen – whom I liked as an artist - while on Hydra. While this turned out to be a pointless piece of gossip (see also my review http://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2021/08/ ) I was grateful to be introduced to Charmian Clift and her partner George Johnston who had briefly adopted Leonard Cohen while living on Hydra. These two Australian writers seemed fascinating enough to want to find out more, so I procured the following two in one volume:

 

Clift, Charmian (1956/1959). Mermaid Singing/Peel me a Lotus.

 

These two books are a revelation, as also reviewed in above blog. The life and death of Charmian Clift then became my next obsession, and I read her biography by:

 

Wheatley, Nadia (2001). The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift.

 

The cover says ‘one of the greatest Australian biographies’ and it is not undeserved. I will review the biography as part of this article. Obviously Clift’s husband/partner features larger than life, so I ordered George Johnston’s (1964) My Brother Jack from the library but for some reason got his second and third books (in one volume) of his trilogy, namely his (1969) Clean Straw for Nothing and his (1971) A Cartload of Clay. Again these are reviewed here. Then I ordered Johnston’s biography:

 

Kinnane, Garry (1986). George Johnston.

 

Again this will be part of my review here.

 

Next on order was:

 

Johnston, George (1964) My Brother Jack from the library (it’s the 1965 reprint version of the reprint society London, where the blurb mentions that ‘George Johnston … now lives with his family on the Greek Island of Hydra’). 

 

To get a feel for George Johnston’s other novels, I got:

 

The Far Road (1962)

 

And finally:

 

The 2001 movie version of My Brother Jack.

 

Obviously there are far more books, articles, TV series and what-have-you, in what appears to have become a whole industry in honour of Charmian Clift and George Johnston, and by extension Martin Johnston and Nadia Wheatley (Australian academics Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell – authors of Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 - who also unearthed the reminiscences of the New Zealand writer Redmond Frankton Wallis add to the mix; see also a conversation with Martin Flanagan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lieD0JHixQ). As such I do not claim to have covered the field, merely having crossed it here and there. My account might be that of the accidental tourist who discovers a treasure trove, maybe like what happened to Polly Samson when doing her Leonard Cohen thing on Hydra.

 

Let us begin with the very book that sparked my present obsession, namely Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers (2020) which I reviewed on my blog, which included reviews of Charmian Clift’s Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel me a Lotus (1959), which I re-edit here.

 

German anglophiles, like myself, love a type of wicked and sardonic British humour, typified by the likes of the Goons, Spike Milligan, Faulty Towers and Dinner for One. The latter sketch is apparently always watched by millions of Germans around X-mas time. There is something very amusing about having a dinner party with guests that have passed away, and the Lady of the House - and her butler – pretending that they have turned up nevertheless, what with the butler having to drink all the toasts, thus getting wasted, ending in the nudge, nudge innuendo at the end, where he helps the old Lady up the stairs to the bedroom, her answering his question “same as usual?” with “yes, as usual as every year”. Polly Samson says that her literary treatise A Theatre for Dreamers has a similar background idea, namely what would it be like to have a dinner party with one’s favourite luminaries that have since passed away? To embed (note the pun) oneself in a historical period with various historical characters of one’s choice, is of course a well-tried genre, for example Mark Twain’s A Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889) as a well-known satire on feudalism and monarchy. Polly Samson’s treatment of an almost contemporary period from the 1960s up to completing her book in 2019 or so, is however a quite different kettle of fish. Here, the king of the castle is none other than Leonard Cohen during his time on Hydra. The slave-queen (see below for clarification of this appellation) is, however, not his well-known muse Marianne Ihlen but one Charmian Clift, hitherto an to me unknown writer whose only claim to fame, up to that point, seems to have been to have provided some short-term hospitality for Leonard Cohen when he first arrived on Hydra.

 

This was all news to me, so allow me some background information. Having been an avid fan of Leonard Cohen’s lyrical music for a long time (and having read his Favourite Game) it did not escape my attention when the Guardian reviewed Polly Samson’s new book. Up to that point I was familiar with Polly Samson due to also being an admirer of Heathcote Williams -with whom she a had a child – and of course her liaison with and marriage to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd - their music also being in my favourites’ collection. So, obviously, I had to buy her book and having read about her illustrious family background and her personal trajectory, I thought, one could only expect only one or the other, either a shallow celebrity concoction, or more appropriately, a classical tragicomedy, a la Plautus:

 

I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don't think it would be appropriate to make it consistently a comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I'll make it a tragicomedy …

 

So, how come, knowing quite a lot about Leonard Cohen, I had never heard of the slave-queen (I am parroting Plautus) Charmian Clift? Polly Samson, who with her very successful and very rich husband had of course rented/bought (albeit belatedly) a house on Hydra, in a seemingly one-up-man-ship with rock royalty, had come across a novel called Peel me a Lotus on a bookshelf of someone in the know on Hydra, read it, and was blown away by it. So, I too had to do a bit of research, like reading the book in question (in addition to her Mermaid Singing) and, like Polly Samson, follow up with Nadia Wheatley’s ‘big and brilliant’ biography of Clift (The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, 2001). In the first instance, having stopped reading A Theatre for Dreamers, I read Mermaid Singing, Charmian Clift’s autobiographical account of their time on Kalymnos. This was so well written, and so at odds with all the tragic family attributions found elsewhere, I was doubly intrigued. How would her follow-up treatment of life on Hydra deal with the endless innuendo, debauchery and drunken escapades as later detailed in Polly Samson’s and Nadia Wheatley’s books? Surprisingly perhaps, Peel me a Lotus ends before Leonard Cohen arrives in 1960, and as such does not dwell at all on these turbulent times from 1960 to 1964, when Charmian and family returned to Australia. While legions of ‘decadents’ (as George Johnston, Charmian’s long suffering writer-husband, called them) had arrived on the island before then, and were described by Charmian in fantastically sardonic fashion, there are only a few hints in Peel me a Lotus regarding her deteriorating relationship with her husband, instead focussing on the literary struggles that George endures with the daily help and support of his wife, while all the while keeping a very sharp eye on what is happening around them. Peel me a Lotus as such has the makings of a classical tragicomedy. 

 

So, why does Polly Samson begin the story in 1960 in London? Obviously the main ingredient would be missing if we were only to ‘embed’ ourselves in the period of Peel me a Lotus, namely the belated king of Hydra, one of the greatest rock/pop stars of our time, called Leonard Cohen. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have Charmian Clift’s observations from 1960 - 64, for after all, there is now a whole industry devoted to Leonard Cohen, delving into every cook and cranny of his life – especially on the now mystical beginnings on Hydra. There were/are any number of hangers-on who either wrote up their memories in various journalistic efforts (including Leonard Cohen’s own) or could make themselves available – if still alive - for interviews for Polly Samson, or lacking that, make up a story based on her somewhat lurid imagination.

 

So, I can see the temptation to ‘embed’ oneself in this heady cocktail of life on Hydra from about 1960 to about 1964 (and with an odd visit some 10 years later), especially if one has a certain savoir-faire in these matters.  Polly’s own life up to this point in 2017 or so, was of course deeply immersed in the British literary rock scene, similar to the ups and downs of a Marianne Faithful (and her hilarious sounding connection with Heathcote Williams), and with the endless dramas associated with drug and alcohol fuelled sex, disguised as ‘free love’ (some of which may have been quite genuine, as for example Polly Samson seems to credit Leonard Cohen with, during his early love affair with Marianne Ihlen). Thus coming across Peel me a Lotus on Hydra in 2017 or so, was more than a coincidence, it was a calling Polly Samson could not refuse, especially as she now had all the time and resources to write a block buster. She has the inside knowledge of a rock’n’roll muse with the added incentive - as articulated by Charmian Clift – to now rise above it. 

 

The only problem now is to imagine what Charmian Clift would/could have written from 1960 onwards. Can Polly get inside Charmian’s head and let her speak? Does she have Charmian’s literary talent for tragicomedy? Like, when Charmian - on Hydra – let’s rip on the expatriates, like the infamous Jacques whom she describes as a ‘little curly dog in season, whose imperative it is to sniff after any and every lady dog (p. 342)’, we can appreciate her scorn with a wry smile. When Charmian decries the poverty they (sick husband and three children – one a baby born on Hydra) live in, waiting in desperation for royalty cheques, she mocks the wannabe expatriate artistes on Hydra as freeloaders absolving themselves ‘from all responsibility, all control, all moral laws, all sense of duty (ibid.)’. In contrast Charmian publicly defends her husband as a great writer, and yes, she regrets that she has not enough time for her own literary work – working as a housewife and literary adviser to her husband George. Poor guy, he is a physical wreck, taken to drink, he ‘looks baffled, uneasy and afraid.’ It is Charmian’s moral duty to support him whatever happens, however much his bitterness turns back onto her. As in Mermaid Singing she writes so well about the Greek people on Hydra, their customs, their way of life, their foibles, their love of children, their love of the sea, their squabbles. their struggles to survive on this rocky island where ‘sweet water’ is in perennial shortage. The winters are cold and the summers are very hot. Charmian is not given to politics – as opposed to her gloomy husband, a celebrated war journalist in his native Australia who is convinced that the cold (nuclear) war will annihilate all of them – but still produces an unforgettable glimpse with her description of the EOKA problems, noting how her children denounce the English just like the locals do. Then there is the glorious satire of the American movie production on Hydra, with their ‘major stars, shining with a cool, remote light in the frenetic whirl of their satellites … (p.396)’, while the locals are screaming “Dollaria”. Having worked on an American film production myself, I appreciate her mild sarcasm, observing that any and all production problems are solved with a fistful of USD. When the movie people have gone, normality returns and Peel me a Lotus ends with Creon, the Greek man of the world, living on Hydra, like some latter-day Onassis, gathering up the remaining, shattered expatriate souls, inviting them to Katsikas’ Bar for yet another jug of retsina. Does Polly Samson realise that the strength of Peel me a Lotus lies in giving voice to the local people rather than go on and on about the expatriate community? Having lived on various ‘foreign’ islands myself (as an anthropological linguist and UN consultant), I am painfully aware that expatriate enclaves become islands within islands, what with incestuous relationships and dramas played out, much to the amusement (and sometimes contempt) of the local populations. Expatriates make for some good, salacious story telling but rarely for what should pass as literature.

 

Comparing the Greek ending of Peel me a Lotus with that of Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers, sadly, you can see this woeful preoccupation with the expatriates, whereby she interprets a now famous photograph of Leonard Cohen and Charmian Clift https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-9526811/Behind-sun-kissed-image-pop-legend-friends-lay-darker-story.html, ostensibly taken before they depart Hydra (Charmian and family off to England), making up a dialogue, Charmian saying “You know, I was never in love with you, Leonard” with him replying “No, me neither” (is this attested?). The constant, salacious insinuation throughout the novel had been that Leonard and Charmian had a seething affair. That she sits close to him (Leonard wearing a tie, for heaven’s sake!) looking up to the sky signifies nothing – but to Polly it is evidence that can be used in a literary court of law. Sad story, and nothing like the great Greek ending in Peel me a Lotus.

 

As emphasised before, there is nothing authentic from Charmian’s writing that Polly can work with. There is no Leonard Cohen, no Marianne Jensen (nee Ihlen), no Axel Jensen (Marianne’s wayward husband) as the main protagonists. She has to rely on secondary sources only, and spin a story without the literary support from Charmian the writer. Hence her contrivance begins with an attempt to have her young alter ego, Erica, connected via a fictional friendship between her mother and Charmian while living in London. Erica, the 18 year old, is escaping from London and her strange father – her mysterious mother has just died and left her some money, and a car for her brother. Since their mother had kept in contact with Charmian – a mother figure to replace her own - they know she is to be found on a Greek island called Hydra. Erica, with her boyfriend Jimmy, and her brother drive all the way to Greece. It’s not clear to me what the purpose is of this lengthy introductory chapter, what with endless emotional speculation about what Charmian might know about her mother’s affairs. Maybe this is an unexplained throwback to her own family history that is rife with strange relationships (Polly’s biological English communist father living in East-Germany while Polly’s Chinese mother moved to England, eventually marrying Mr Samson of Continental Jewish background), not to speak of her own turbulent life during and after the relationship with Heathcote Williams. Indeed her own history sounds far more fascinating than that of her alter ego, Erica, which up to that point reads more like a Mills and Boons story. When they finally get to Hydra, Polly Samson can lift the atmospheric land- and seascape description from Peel me a Lotus and supplement it with her own experiences of Hydra much later in life (as the wife of David Gilmour). She does rise to the occasion, and since she has the authentic experience of actually writing the book while staying in the ‘Australian’ house, she has the added advantage to look into every nook and cranny of the house, and imagine what is must have been like almost 40 years ago. Obviously the house has been modernised but the basic layout remained the same. This is the terrace where George did all his writing. This is the kitchen where Charmian did all her cooking and living. And the waterfront is still more or less the same. And the hills and the rocks and the swimming hole are still the same. Leonard Cohen’s house is still the same, now some sort of museum for rent, managed by the Cohen Estate. It’s just that the people of the 60s are not there anymore. Still, one knows who was there at the time. Digging around for information will yield the most improbable sources, one of a New Zealand (where I now live) origin, namely one Redmond Frankton “Bim” Wallis and his wife, with the former having left notebooks and fragments of a novel on Hydra that were deposited at the National Library of New Zealand. ‘Bim’ turns into one of the characters larger than life in Polly’s book. I haven’t read his accounts, so I don’t know how much Polly has lifted from his pages. Her idea to be as authentic as possible does extend to her statement that the dialogues involving Leonard Cohen are based on his published utterances (however, see his supposed reply to Charmian at the end) but unfortunately, I think, this does not extend to Charmian Clift. As such Polly has to make up the dialogue between Erica and Charmian, as well as all the other monologues and dialogues involving all the other bit players in this Theatre for Dreamers. I don’t believe Charmian’s voice comes through at all: Polly, despite her obvious admiration for Charmian as a woman, does not represent Charmian, the writer’s voice. It may be true that Charmian and George and their children were the toast of the town, the undisputed leaders of the expatriate pack (mainly due to their local knowledge acquired over some 10 years on Greek islands) and that the shenanigans amongst the ‘decadents’ involved Charmian - as remembered by the somewhat unreliable ‘decadents’ who would embellish the meagre truth in order to shine like satellites (remember Charmian’s movie world quote above). After all, the only superstar was Leonard Cohen who actually had very little to say about Charmian and George other than that ‘they were very helpful, more drunk than all the others, more often sick than all the others, and more quickly recovered than all the others’. While Cohen, on his arrival to Hydra, as an erstwhile poet and writer would have been of some interest to George and Charmian, they had very little in common music-wise, what with George and Charmian listening to Brahms and the like, and Cohen becoming a pop-singer (albeit a very good one, in my opinion). Sure, around the camp fire when everyone was drunk or high on drugs, Leonard with his guitar could enchant almost everyone. Having seen him play live in two concerts, first in his early days in the 70s in Munich and then in his twilight years in Auckland, I can attest to my fascination with him. No such emotion, however, is attested for Charmian (or George) after they moved back to Australia – no such mention is made in Nadia Wheatley’s biography at least. Surely, they must have heard about Leonard’s rise to stardom but is sounds like that by that time in the 1970s even their teenage children had more interest in head-banger music rather than the mellow tunes of a Leonard Cohen. I must say too, that now in my old age I am beginning to prefer the likes of Brahms to Cohen. The fact that Cohen stayed with Charmian and Co. for a while until he found his own accommodation, is not very significant either, as Charmian’s household was a crash pad for almost any new arrival in need of shelter from the storm. I think this was an endearing feature of a type of Australian hospitality I have experienced myself in Australia, in places like Darwin and Sydney, where fair dinkum Aussies opened their homes to any traveller needing a place to sleep. Anyway, with Erica’s arrival on Hydra, the novel does become more interesting reading, even if only at the level of who is doing it with whom. The party scene at the waterfront bars and in private homes, not to mention the beach parties and midnight hill (Mount Eros no less) climbing, all titillate with scantily clad young women and an assortment of male wannabe artists, quoting Keats and Sartre (Erica is given de Beauvoir’s Second Sex to read by Charmian), all with a secondary focus on Marianne and Axel Jensen whose tortured relationship and the latter’s open philandering is given top billing. All the while we hear the fictional Charmian running down rotters like Axel, who treat women as their ‘slave-queen’ muses, who must provide the patriarchs with food for their stomachs and sex for their phalluses. This is constantly contrasted with Charmian’s domestic situation where she too provides the food but cannot provide any sexual services for her husband (due to his supposed impotence caused by TB). George is portrayed as an insanely jealous character who suspects and berates his wife in public rages and tirades. Is Charmian doing it with Jacques (remember her disdainful description of him in Peel me a Lotus)? Is she doing it with Leonard or any other strapping male that frequents the island? Is George’s sordid imagination running overtime or is it his literary forte to feature a nymphomaniac in every one of his many novels? Most of all – and now Polly Samson writes from hindsight – will George really implicate his fictional wife in his up and coming Closer to the Sun to have it off with a fictional Jacques? Does Charmian mind? And what does Charmian know about Erica’s dead mother’s supposed infidelities? There is a lot of beating about in the bushes, keeping the suspense going. Polly Samson’s strange idea is that Charmian confesses to her (Erica) that she could no longer stand these pathetic insinuations and innuendoes, and proceeded to write the passage for George herself, whereby she has sex with Jacques – saying it actually was nothing like it (if it was something at all). And yes, Erica’s mother did it as well. Polly seems to have a strange fascination with the dilemmas posed by couples (man and woman, married or not) going off with others, for reasons as mysterious and unexpected as possible, so as to make a good detective story out of it. When men like Axel Jensen (and later Leonard Cohen) leave their loved ones for the next one in line, they are portrayed as men to be avoided by women, since they cause nothing but emotional pain and suffering. On the other hand the emancipation of women, in Polly’s mind, seems to entail a women’s equality with men, insofar that women have the equal right to be as stupid as men, i.e. why shouldn’t women have affairs too? If Charmian has an extramarital affair, it’s her god-damn right to have one. When Erica’s beautiful boyfriend Jimmy finally betrays her with a local woman – totally out of the blue as far as she is concerned – it serves as a reminder that you never quite know what is going on in the alleyways after dark. Sex as some sort of competitive sport has always been a key ingredient for the so-called bohemian lifestyles that proliferate in the 1960s – or indeed has always been a lucrative literary side-line since year dot. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are legend, and Polly Samson would know more about it than others – it just strikes me that involving Charmian and George in this merry go-around as enthusiastic participants/onlookers is taking things too far. Erica, after Jimmy’s departure, has sex with whoever lies next to her and when at a party the lecherous talk turns to the arts of the blowjob, the lowest point in the novel ‘comes’ when one of Charmian’s admirers’ says to her “I came for you” and smears sticky ejaculate on her hand. Sure, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album had equally crude insinuations but at least they did not explain the details on the sleeve. There is even a mention later on where Marianne comments on Leonard’s famous song So long Marianne, saying that the original title was Come on Marianne which would have a different and ambiguously lurid meaning. Really? At the drunken party mentioned above, it was speculated by all and sundry that Marianne must be well practiced kneeling before him. Such prurient interest sells copies but I am not sure it lives up to Polly Samson’s ideal of great literature. I am all for sex as long as it remains in a private sphere – to flaunt explicit sex in public may serve as temporary relief but leaves a taste behind that interferes with romantic notions of love and happiness. Even Leonard Cohen’s lyrical contributions to this topic are a bit more subtle (well, apart from his Don’t go home with your hard-on on the infamously Phil Spector produced Death of a Ladies’ Man, which Cohen later on disowned as his not-so-great effort). In literature, I prefer the oblique mentions of ‘afternoon delights’ in Ovid’s Amores. Most notably though, there is no talk of sex in Charmian Clift’s two works cited, apart from the oblique references to randy Jacques. So, where does Polly Samson get her ideas from?

 

When Polly fast-forwards towards the end of her novel, she does so to inform us of what is already well-known: that Marianne and Axel’s son lived out his adult life in an asylum because his father had given him LSD when he was still a teenager. We learn of Charmian’s suicide in 1972 and of Georges death a year later. Their children Shane and Martin in their adult years in Australia meet equally tragic ends, Shane by suicide and Martin due to alcoholism. Finally we are told of the baby that Charmian had given away for adoption when she was only 19 in Australia. Said child, only later in life, found out that her biological mother was Charmian Clift (and she wrote a book about it). Polly’s final contrivance is that George always tortured Charmian with having given away her baby (long before she met George) and that Charmian somehow saw Erica as her lost child. Is this a tragedy of Greek classical proportions or a story of everyday dysfunction that is played out in millions of homes around the world? Conflating fact and fiction over a few short pages does neither any service. 

 

Somewhere amongst all the publicity pieces for her novel, Samson is reported saying that her novel is conceived as a bildungsroman (spelled with a small ‘b‘ betraying a certain ignorance of German spelling of nouns), often defined in English as ‘coming of age novel’ what with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1759) cited as a prototype. Note, however, that the German word ‘Bildung’ means ‘education’ hence the idea of the Bildungsroman is more towards ‘coming-of-age as an education for the reader’. That Polly Samson’s own life story might amount to a Bildungsroman is quite a possibility, given what I have read about her. Her fictional treatment as Erica in A Theatre for Dreamers does, however, not live up to such a lofty aspiration, in my opinion. She could have aspired more in the direction of her erstwhile partner in crime, Heathcote Williams, who as a brilliant lyricist (better than Cohen) and activist has done more for English literature than any other of his age. Imagine A Theatre for Dreamers as a ballad à la Heathcote Williams (set to music by David Gilmour à la Pink Floyd’s Brick in a Wall)! Even so, with all the shortcomings, Polly Samson must be congratulated for having resurrected a great writer, namely Charmian Clift. That many commentators/reviewers/writers now focus on Clift (and her family’s) tragic life during the latter few years on and after Hydra, is a pity. It is in her earlier Mermaid Singing and to a lesser degree in Peel me a Lotus, that her literary genius is plain to see. Nevertheless, since Polly Samson also referred to Clift’s biography by Nadia Wheatley (2001) The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, this was my next reading, reviewed below:

 

First a few words about Nadia Wheatley herself by herself – in the extraordinary tale of her relationship with Martin Johnston – the eldest child of George and Charmian – in her Author’s Note, detailing the long gestation of the biography. Her seven year liaison (from about 1972 to 1979) with Martin and the subsequent stops and starts after Martin’s death in 1990 culminate in a first draft of the biography in the late 1990s – evoking a schizophrenic position as the biographer, i.e. half in-sider and half out-sider. Noting that in the early days she and Martin hardly ever talked about George and Charmian other than mentioning anecdotal bits and pieces – as they were young and interested in other things, especially Martin who seemed to have a distaste for biographical details, although he had consented to write about his parents as part of a literary grant he had secured – he spent the money on writing an experimental novel instead, or so Nadia relates in her extensive Author’s Note, which, in retrospect – having by now also read Kinane’s biography of George Johnston – is almost more interesting than the rest of the book. Nadia has an expanded version of the whole saga on her website http://nadiawheatley.com/remembering-martin-johnston and there is an extensive collection of materials (mainly devoted to Martin Johnston but by extension also to his parents and Nadia) https://www.martinjohnstonpoet.com/news. 

 

Whilst it is not uncommon that biographers have some sort of relationship with their subject – take the recent (2020) example of the bizarre book by Marry L. Trump about her brother-in-law entitled Too Much and Never Enough – how my family created the world’s most dangerous man, reviewed on my blog https://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-great-review-of-too-much-and-never.html - Nadia  Wheatley’s involvement is extraordinary in every sense of the word. While the biography itself is, obviously, meticulously researched, and rightfully touted as ‘one of the greatest Australian biographies’ (by the Sydney Morning Herald) there is in the end a palpable feeling of associated tragedy, for both of her subject and her at one time beloved subject’s son had passed away, caught in the eyes of  literary storms – and trying to fathom them. Nadia Wheatley, who emerged as a ‘writer’ under the influence of Martin Johnston who in turn had emerged as a writer and poet under his parents’ influence, was after all a novelist in the first place before she undertook to write the biography. Whilst I am not at all familiar with her literary output apart from said biography – save from what one sees on her impressive web-site that accentuates her involvement with Australian indigenous activism – one has the clear impression that her biography benefitted greatly from her narrative style as a novelist. The story – the life and myth of Charmian Clift – is not only fascinating in itself as a Greek mythological tragedy but has that added dimension of Nadia, as a detective with inside knowledge who tries to disentangle the myth from the life, so as to ‘detect’ all those who are guilty of ending a life. As the biography was commenced and finally published after Charmian’s, George’s, Martin’s and Shane’s deaths, there was certainly a lot of guilt to be uncovered. Be it suicide or disease, the end of a life is never the result of the proverbial beginning of the end, however much it exists in the popular imagination. Nadia Wheatley, as much as Garry Kinnane, are at pains to point out that there are no pre-determined events in the lives they describe, that would culminate in an inevitable end. Of course, in George’s case a terminal illness can have a fairly predictable medical course of events, as much as Martin’s alleged alcoholism is said to have led to his demise. Equally, of course, in the case of suicide, we all look for the suicide note as if it will explain everything – if anything. Charmian’s note has thus become the Rosetta Stone that has to be deciphered, even though it is in plain English with a literary quote in it. Even George didn’t know what to make of it, leaving him bereft and confused, leaving him to having him to write about it in his A Cartload of Clay. Death never makes any sense, however much those who are left behind want to explain it. Nadia Wheatley to her great benefit does not try the impossible. She simply tells the story that has a beginning and an end, and where the end is not explained by the beginning.

 

As such the beginnings of the life of Charmian Clift are as amazing as what is to follow. An archetypal Australian working class story with a literary twist, namely the father who quotes from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, drinks and swears like Rabelais. The former sounded rather obscure to me, although a bit of research makes me want to read the story which Schopenhauer apparently called ‘one of the four immortal romances’. With the anti-authoritarian streak from both authors, one can understand how a lowly quarry engineer working for the railways in a then remote coastal place called Kiama has a certain influence on his two children, boy and two girls, what with Charmian a mermaid that calls the ocean beach her spiritual home. Charmian’s upbringing is described in masterful strokes of a literary narrative, evoking both the Australian and anti-Australian sentiments that are part and parcel of a thinking man, stubbornly clinging to the belief that the working man equals the thinking man. Such ambivalence can destroy lesser men but not Charmian’s parents who both in their funny Australian-English ways carve out a living amongst the settlement of the quarry workers, just outside Kiama proper. While their social circle includes a few relatives strewn around the country – and grandparents living in Kiama proper – the Clifts are self-sufficient as a family unit in a small-town with a small-town mentality, as far away from the world as Australia is to the rest of the world. In those days even the back country of Kiama is already an extension of the great outback of Australia, that vast land that is unknown to all but to the Aborigine. As many children growing up in small-town environments, there comes a time when the wider world beckons, like the real town up the track called Wollongong, where the local high school is, and yonder still, the great city of Sydney. Charmian’s sexual awakening might have commenced with frolicking in the waves naked, on the deserted beach – as so vividly described by George later on when they have an ecstatic honeymoon – although in Wheatley’s biography we only learn about the rather sordid sounding teenage adventures with taxi drivers. The late 1930s in small-town Kiama would not have been a hotbed of sexual adventures amongst the largely devout inhabitants who equated sex with sin but our non-conformist Charmian did not have to contend with parents who, while themselves sexually conservative, would not have preached sexual abstinence. Given Charmian’s physical prowess as a lithe body surfer turned photographic model – via her sister as the photographer and for all the world to see in retrospect – one can feel the sleazy male gaze or the more innocent teenage blues that leads to sexual experimentation without much inhibition. Given that sex, or the lack of it, in later matrimonial life seems to have played such a destructive part, one might have expected a deeper exploration of such matters in the biography at that stage. Maybe, Nadia Wheatley as a feminist writer, did not want to entertain the male gaze or else did not find any references for it. After all, in those days – and even these days – one does not talk about it, one does not write about it, one just does it, whatever it (sex) is. Nevertheless, since in later life, Charmian does recommend Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as essential reading – in strange contrast to George’s loathing of French existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre – one could engage in a bit of psychoanalysis of Charmian’s teenage years, leading up to the time when in Sydney she had a child with a young man she was not particularly acquainted with. At least one could have invoked the 1960/70s sex-drugs & rock’n’roll line of teenage angst, as per Bob Seger’s ‘Night Moves’:

 

            Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy

Workin' on mysteries without any clues

We weren't in love, oh no, far from it

I used her, she used me but neither one cared

We were gettin' our share

 

Or better still, Nadia Wheatley could have used the famously gloomy Leonard Cohen lyrics - the Johnstons after all cohabited with him for a short while on Hydra:

 

            And lie beside me, baby

That's an order

Give me crack and anal sex

Take the only tree that's left

And stuff it up the hole

In your culture

 

While Charmian was not of this rock’n’roll generation, she brushed against it via the likes of Cohen and the teenage years of their own children. Nothing much is known about Charmian’s musical tastes in her teenage years although we know that later on in life she shared George’s appreciation of classical music.

 

Wheatley’s biography, which I read before Kinnane’s, did of course introduce me to the whole story which in part is replicated by Kinnane for George Johnston. Had I read Kinnane first, as I should have, as per chronology of publications, then Wheatley’s biography replicates Kinnane’s from the point of George meeting Charmian. Naturally Wheatley acknowledges Kinnane, although in somewhat obscure terms as an ‘academic’, indicating perhaps that she is not one of this ilk who have no personal involvement in their subject other than academic interest. Either way, Wheatley’s biography is essential only for Charmian’s life before George, which is up to p.162 (out of some 654 pages, not including endnotes). Of course the story of their life together, from a feminist writer’s perspective is bound to differ in sentiment from the male ‘academic’ one, even if the bare facts are the same. For this we must be grateful too, especially as Wheatley, notwithstanding her personal involvement, had access to sources that Kinnane did not. 

 

It is from this point of view that Charmian’s life before George must be a key to what happens next – including her sex life. Wheatley is more interested though in the literary development of young Charmian: first the literary influences via her father – and a bit from her mother – and then via the English teachers at her schools, ending up with her brush with military journalism. Wheatley does however dwell on the time just before Charmian joining the army, i.e. recalling a conversation with a friend whereby Charmian reveals that she had written a story called “Walk to the Paradise Garden” and on top of that had written a whole book, although it lacked an ending. As Wheatley concedes, nobody knows anything about these literary efforts other than her much later attempts at novel writing included a tome entitled “Paradise Gardens”. Wheatley further assumes that these early efforts – pre 1943 – were the seeds that occupied Charmian for the rest of her life, endlessly reworking the themes of her life as fiction – much in the style of George’s later literary output – and as Wheatley speculates:

 

Meanwhile, as Charmian Clift could not write about her life on paper, she would turn her life into her version of the Great Australian Novel (p.138).

            

While I doubt that anything of the sort was on her mind after joining the army, but once she had advanced to become ‘editor’ of an obscure army ordinance magazine called For your Information (sic) she had become a writer of sorts, one that earned her army money from editing and writing. Better still was the next move: by divine coincidence she ran into one Major Bruce Kneale who just happened to be a former colleague of George Johnston and for the time being, even better, a wannabe writer himself, albeit one with very good connections in the trade. Upon learning from Charmian that she too was a wannabe writer - and a very good looking one at that – Bruce wrangled his connections to get Charmian published, namely in the Australia National Journal with a story called ‘Other Woman’. Charmian was overjoyed, according to Nadia Wheatley, noting by the way that Charmian and Bruce – described as a short and kindly man – had an affair that ‘flamed and fizzled’ (p.155). One might draw the conclusion that Charmian’s first publication success had more to do with charming the Bruce rather than with her literary prowess (one cannot avoid the Cohen song line here: “… she had to meet so many people, without clothes …”). When she was then invited to a literary party at the Menzies – the political power player of the time (Australian PM from 1939-41 and again from 1949-66) Charmian had arrived at the very top of Australian society. Given her anti-authoritarian working class background one would have thought that she might have declined the invitation. Clift’s political views are never fully explained  by Wheatley, so one wonders if she was ever as plagued by guilt as much as George Johnston was for his self-confessed fraudulent patriotism – as opposed to his father’s and brother’s supposedly true love for the motherland. Only in his darkest thoughts might George have approved to Samuel Johnson’s famous quip of patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Since Charmian seemed to enjoy her military uniform – having risen to the rank of lieutenant without any qualifications, more than George did his, having accepted the rank of (honorary) Captain as an accredited war correspondent – one can only assume that Charmian did not entertain any thoughts, political or otherwise, of analysing the rampant militarism of the time. 

 

Since we are now at the stage of Charmian meets George for good, we can also question Wheatley finding it ‘necessary’ (p.163) to launch a full investigation of George’s life up to this point – when all this had been done by Kinnane before. For me who hadn’t read Kinnane at that stage, it was of course ‘necessary’ to get the lowdown of George’s life up to this point. In retrospect I am not sure how much Wheatley lifted from Kinnane, since it is unlikely that she had had any sources other than those used by Kinnane, only that the female sources might have been more forthcoming in their evaluation of George, especially as George the scoundrel and George as his fictional alter ego, David Meredith. Wheatley uses a quote from Charmian to get at the essence of the man ‘a benevolent steamroller’ – also used as a heading for chapter 8. Since up to this point of time in my reading sequence I also had not read My Brother Jack, I was blissfully unaware of the extent and importance of this semi-autobiographical novel which Wheatley (and Kinnane) quote at length, pointing to the strange inconsistencies between fact and fiction. To me again, this seemed rather a by-line as I was interested in the facts only – of course after reading My Brother Jack, I am as perplexed as both Wheatley and Kinnane must have been when writing about George Johnston alias David Meredith. As far as I know now, few, if any, writers have questioned their own motives as much as George Johnston does in in My Brother Jack and in the following two volumes of Clean Straw for Nothing and A cartload of clay, to the extent of fictionalizing parts of one’s life to drive home certain points that seem to have no psychological reality. 

 

The interesting question associated with the enigmatic George is of course how Charmian falls for George – or is that George falls for Charmian. From Wheatley’s narrative we don’t really get a sense of what exactly happened, except that love is blind, or else that it was written in the stars that these two people were meant for each other – soul mates of mystical proportions, or as Wheatley quotes their friends, it was ‘instantaneous combustion’ (p.186). In the cold light of the day one must not forget the less than romantic truth of the matter: George was married and had a daughter. Charmian had a child that was given up for adoption. Charmian had a sort of upper-class fiancée desperate to marry her. That one could drop such loved ones at the drop of a hat is not exactly an endearing feature. On the other hand one cannot simply argue that Charmian is a ruthless social climber since George was neither very rich nor from a patrician family that ruled the roost (she could have had both with her earlier fiancée). But viewed from her literary ambitions it is of course a very good match. George on his part couldn’t believe his luck in scoring a young sex goddess-beauty who also seemed to have some brains. 

 

So, let us resume Wheatley’s perspective from the point of view she calls ‘Setting out together’, headlining chapter 9. From here on, while the basic facts have been already covered by Kinnane, we now have the feminist angle plus inside information that was not available to Kinnane. Does it make a big difference? While Kinnane might have emphasized Charmian’s alleged promiscuity, Wheatley on the other hand might have emphasized George’s womanizing and his possessiveness and absurd jealousies. Of course none of these concerns mattered at the beginning of their blissful honeymoon that flickered on and off for the rest of their lives. Wheatley even delves into a bit of psychoanalysis by explaining their age difference of some eleven years by way of saying that Charmian was destined to look for a father figure based on her own ‘dominant’ father Syd – although this didn’t seem to be the case with her first dalliance with a young man her age, resulting in the child that was adopted out. Given that Charmian and George both worked at the Argus newspaper, there was the additional sensation to engage in a bit of societal analysis, for even liberal Melbourne society was not ready for such a scandal. Since they both were sacked/resigned from their jobs must have come as a shot to the bow – George being fond of maritime metaphors – but George the ‘steamroller’ ignored the broadside and sailed on happily into the storm. Wheatley admits to not having unearthed any information on how Charmian felt about this whole saga of being fired. Instead Wheatley embarks, as before, on the literary development of both Charmian and George, now that they are temporarily free of job commitments, both of them typing away on their typewriters, passing pages over to each other – or as Wheatley assumes, it’s mainly one-directional, i.e. George using Charmian as a ‘sounding board’ while Charmian is more secretive in her output. Given that they practically sit next to each other, I kind of doubt that, other than George being the main man in this enterprise. Either way it must be an exquisite feeling of being able to just write all day without having to worry about having to go to work. Being set adrift they meander along, drifting back to a conventional life – George divorced and now married to Charmian who is with child – but also tasting literary success with winning a major award for their novel High Valley. Their new life in Sydney and another child along the way is described by Wheatley with breathless detail, what with juggling creative work with the endless tedium of domestic life. Always on the cusp of some breakthrough, life grinds on and on. The dream of fame and fortune never materializes, especially in the latter department. They certainly showed their working class roots by never investing their money to earn more money – they spend all they earn on entertainment and travel, wining and dining and all the accoutrements demanded by Australian semi-celebrity status, thus living from pay check to pay check. Debts were made on the expectation of royalties to arrive. As Wheatley points out, this scenario impacted on Charmian in particular as she saw herself succumbing to be a ‘suburban drudge’ in an Australian cultural desert of mindless consumerism and right-wing politics. Plotting the escape from all of this was in the first instance a total failure, following the bizarre instinct of colonial settlers to having to return to the homeland in order to escape the pathetic mentality of the colonials. It doesn’t take a genius to foresee that bleak London is actually worse if not the same as Melbourne, Sydney or any other new-world city for that matter. Worse, the colonial mentality engendered in the homeland can be more demeaning than in the colonies itself. Perhaps, Wheatley as a latter-day Australian colonialist only belatedly woke up to the dilemma faced by the Johnstons, singing along with Midnight Oil’s “it belongs to them, let’s give it back”. Certainly there is no hint of such an anti-colonial analysis posed by Wheatley when it comes to trying to understand why Charmian, in her subconscious mind, disliked Australia so much. 

 

So, let’s skip that boring bit when the Johnstons ‘escape’ to London, living it up like some litterateurs with the means to send their kids to summer camps while they travel in France, Italy and Greece. No doubt, for Charmian this extended escape from Australia broadened her mind – as travel is supposed to do – while George as the seasoned world-traveller was merely happy to trudge along with his broad mind unable to be broadened any further, other than to realise the highly questionable financial implications, i.e. how much cheaper it would be to live in rural Greece than in London. The choice of Kalymnos was also rather more prosaic: the potential to land a bit of a journalistic coup what with Australian plans to let the impoverished Kalymnos sponge divers resettle in Darwin as pearl divers – as related to George by an old friend he ran into while on Regent Street. It appealed to George’s sense of bizarre adventure out of which yet another novel could be constructed. For Charmian and the kids this was pure adventure – no strings attached other than the idea that they would live off the royalties that were yet to come from their literary outputs. 

 

Wheatley’s vivid descriptions of that time on Kalymnos are of course aided by Charmian Clift’s masterpiece Mermaid Singing from which Wheatley quotes at length. I am not sure if Wheatley ever lived on a small ‘foreign’ island that is only accessible by boat (she did visit Kalymnos as part of the launch of the Greek version in 2022), as for example I did with my wife and two small children on a very small, remote island of some 200 hundred inhabitants in Vanuatu, doing fieldwork, i.e. studying and describing their language. Whatley thinks that Charmian displays wishful thinking when she writes in a letter that ‘… we are accepted everywhere on the same basis as all the other Kalymnians, excepting perhaps that a little extra kindness is always added’ (p.299). I disagree, as we experienced similar sentiments on our six months on these fairly remote islands. Sure we had the ‘luxury’ to leave by boat that came months apart but for the day-today life there was no question that we had become islanders amongst the islanders. Just like on Kalymnos, the islanders took our children into their care as much as all children on the island were the property and responsibility of everyone on the island. Of course our children, as much as the Johnstons’, were the apples of the eyes of all the ‘mothers’ on the island, and in no time were the children integrated into daily life, speaking a new language and adapting to seasonal work rituals that centred around tending gardens up on the hills to cutting firewood to fetching water from the village well. Thankfully the Johnstons were not antiquated anthropologists studying the natives, hence the account Charmian gives of their experiences transcend the often awful academic tones one finds in such works. Wheatly is also a bit unkind in her assessment in that she thinks that all this went to Charmian’s head a bit, including the notion that Kalymnos was the beginning for Charmian’s and George’ ‘dangerous conclusion’ (p.302) in that they failed to distinguish between fact and fiction, becoming characters in their own novels. This may be a possible scenario for George but I don’t think this was the case for Charmian. Her Mermaid Singing to my mind is a suburb travelogue where the destination – Kalymnos – is all that matters. Occasionally anthropological studies do rise to such a narrative niveau, such as Ludvigon’s (2005) Kleva: some healers in central Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu – and as such Clift deserved to get a PhD for her Mermaid Singing. One must give Wheatley credit though for saying that it was ‘arguably’ her best solo book. Wheatley’s analysis of  Mermaid Singing includes a discussion as to why Mermaid Singing sold poorly in Britain and the US, comparing Mermaid Singing to Greek-centered bestsellers of the day, like the Durrell books, and coming to the conclusion that Mermaid Singing ‘was far ahead of the times’ (p.313), especially on account of Clift’s feminist perspectives. It is a somewhat ambiguous stance to take, i.e. do I console myself that the reason nothing I submit to the publishers gets accepted, is, that what I write is way ahead of my time? From an intellectual point of view what better compliment can one get? From a realist point of view one must wonder if one’s writing is not up to scratch, at least compared to those who succeed according to the advertising slogan of ‘nothing succeeds like success’. Wheatley puts it down to the ‘market’, i.e. ‘Mermaid Singing … was written three decades before the market was ready for an Australian woman’s account of living in a Greek village’ (p.318). That seems a cop-out to me even though a book with a similar theme sold well three decades later – for if this invisible hand of the market (cf. Adam Smith) rules human affairs (and literary success) then all is lost, in my opinion. As we all know, the Western publication industry is tied up with capitalist motives of fast profits, hence creating demand is in the hands of ruthless manipulators (cf. Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent) long before the illusionary demand is actually met. Clift was not ahead of her time – nobody ever is. Clift was a victim of bland literary commercialism. Wheatley as a fairly successful writer can only congratulate herself. 

 

So, on to Hydra, the island of Leonard Cohen. Thankfully, Wheatley does not buy into it. Cohen is only mentioned a few times, noting only that the Johnstons had put him up in their house until he could find suitable accommodation. There is none of this sensationalist nonsense promoted by the likes of Polly Samson, that Charmian and Leonard might have had an affair, largely based on a by now famous photograph of Cohen playing his guitar under the village tree with Charmian’s head resting on his shoulder. Nevertheless one has to thank Cohen for his quite enormous celebrity status that occasions devoted fans to visit Hydra to see Cohen’s house – like a shrine – and by the way may also pass by the Australians’ House. This type of literary tourism has become quite the thing and I must admit that I fell for it as well, not to visit Hydra (although I am a fan of Leonard Cohen) but to check out the locations of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things while on a holiday in Kerala – it was a rather disappointing experience. 

 

Wheatley devotes some five chapters to the Johnstons’ 9-year stay on Hydra, by some accounts a very long time but in terms of a life span perhaps not so long. As with Kalymnos we have Clift’s Peel me a Lotus but which technically only covers the year from the time they bought the house. Wheatley therefore can only engage on a literary critique on that account – descriptions of the rest of the tumultuous time rely on Charmian’s letters and on so-called witness statements from family and friends – and of course George’s account in his notorious Free Straw for Nothing. Wheatley later on quotes Kinnane to the effect that he thinks that George’s depictions of life on Hydra in Free Straw for Nothing are quite benign in relation to what really happened:

 

… the picture could have been one of squalid drunkenness, public love-making, violent quarrels, beatings …

 

Both Wheatley and Kinnane are ever so euphemistic when it comes to the more salacious innuendos: were the expatriates fucking on the streets, on the rocky beach? Beating the shit out of each other and rolling in it? I was in Barcelona in 1968 and a few nights on the beach where there was some overt fucking going on, what with the Spanish vice squad arresting the more obvious (’public’) bodies. In 1971 I was in Sydney and one midnight at Bondi beach we sat stoned amongst the dunes and observed a couple of naked studs chasing a naked woman who seemed to enjoy being screwed by both of them – in front of our eyes, like a in a porn clip. Did this go on, on Hydra? Was Charmian the porn star? Polly Samson in her version of Hydra, as noted in my review, the lowest point in the novel ‘comes’ when one of Charmian’s admirers’ says to her “I came for you” and shaking her hand smears ejaculate on her. Did Charmian give random blow-jobs? Wheatley is more frank in her assessment of Martin Johnston whom she characterises as liking to ‘fuck’ women – but never in public I presume. At this juncture I invoke Chomsky’s dictum that nothing is impossible but many things are unlikely, and I would invoke the latter at least for ‘public love-making’ by all concerned. As for violent quarrels and beatings, one is more likely to involve some of the local inhabitants with the dark underbelly of a patriarchal society that never evolved from the Middle Ages. That the local police tolerated a certain amount of expatriate and touristic decadence is more a reflection of the voyeuristic tendencies of male police officers who secretly masturbate at the sight of itsy-bitsy bikini-clad women. Of course the only, possibly real Lothario on Hydra, the French (sic, couldn’t be any other nationality) Maurice, gets his teeth smashed in as a just punishment for his indecent sense of dress, not to speak of his obsessive attempts to have intercourse with every available cunt (my words only), like a ‘randy dog’ (as Charmian describes him, being most explicit in her choice of words). As noted before, even George who dislikes Maurice more for his pseudo-intellectual interest in French existentialism, reports that Maurice told him that he never slept with Charmian. BTW, I, as a liberated ‘free love’ hippy, also travelled in Greece in 1969, what with Mykonos being the place to be, I never experienced or observed any ‘public love-making’ anywhere. On rare occasions I did observe drunk local men abusing their women, as one can do anywhere in the world, unfortunately. BTW, only English seems to have this quaint euphemism of ‘making love’ – which in my opinion sounds very nice and as such should have nothing to do with what Kinnane insinuates, i.e. being ‘squalid and violent’. 

 

My bet is that nothing of the sort actually took place on Hydra, especially not involving Charmian. George of course couldn’t have done anything of the sort, by his own sad admission of being a ‘once in year man’, hence even the slightest indications of ‘free love’ would irk him no end. That Leonard Cohen on Hydra famously shacked up with Marianne, a married woman and mother of a small child, may well be a sign of the times but then again such convoluted liaisons – in the privacy of their bedrooms – are nothing new, even in conservative Greek society. The cult of Leonard Cohen and his fictional sexual exploits as best exemplified in his song Closing Time (and accompanied by a great video clip) evolved long after his time on Hydra, what with rock’n’roll pundits like Polly Samson assuming – falsely in my opinion – that it all started on Hydra.

 

Nevertheless the presumed sexual politics engendered on Hydra by commentators, who were not there, is the ‘squalid’ spice that keeps the myth-making enterprise afloat. Kinnane, Samson and perhaps to a lesser degree Wheatley, all dwell on sex more as a reflection of their own Freudian conflicts, torn between prudery and wishful sexual abandon.

 

These sentiments are also on display when Whatley describes the final episode on Hydra, what with George having already left for Australia, leaving her to sort out house and kids, not to speak of the thoughts at the back of her head whether or not to actually leave Hydra. Her daughter Shane certainly did not want to leave, hence when Anthony Kingsmill moves in there is the faint possibility that they all remain, happily, on Hydra. Given that Kingsmill is now immortalized as having been described by Leonard Cohen as ‘painter, drinker and gifted conversationalist’ but having no other famous merits to his name, one wonders what this liaison with Charmian was all about: could they just have amused themselves in conversation? Both Charmian and George as extremely hard-working writers always held in contempt those who, like Kingsmill, ‘survived on commissions of never-to-be-completed work’, i.e. Charmian quickly came to the conclusion that Kingsmill was not an option as a companion – nor as a sex partner? Whilst all and sundry assume they had sex – Charmian the adulterer – there is actually no published evidence of it, as far as I can make out. That George in his sad jealousy might have jumped to such conclusions, as before and after, is no great surprise but in my view a contributing factor in Charmian’s even sadder ending, given George’s endless and often brutal assertions of her infidelity that are based on his sordid imagination alone. Excusing his unwarranted behaviour with his terminal illness is a heroic act on behalf of Charmian but one she could not maintain in the end.

 

So let us cut through to Charmian and the kids’ return to Australia: Wheatley dedicates the last part (IV) of her biography to this narrative entitled ‘Return to Ithaca’ playing on the theme of Charmian’s odyssey. That Charmian has Homeric qualities cannot be doubted but there is a certain irony in the reality of the return to Australia – a country lacking in any Homeric tendencies. Struggling with a very sick husband and quarrelsome children and yet establishing herself as a writer of belles-lettres, as a publicist, as a revered columnist in Australia’s main newspapers, as a cultural icon, is indeed a feat that is hard to comprehend. Wheatley describes it all very well, especially the toll it takes, noting that in all of this she is a ‘lone woman’ that becomes ‘public property’. In modern parlance Charmain is a minor Australian celebrity – and god knows how George hates the moniker ‘Australian’ when being identified as a writer – while a deathly George is on the way to becoming and being a major literary celebrity, who very much depends on the support of his long-suffering wife, something he takes for granted, like some patriarchal bastard he has become. I will skip here all the literary successes and failures that Wheatley dwells upon at times and simply fast-forward to the end: a sad ending that in hindsight seemed inevitable, a suicide as the last cry for help. For the days leading up this dreadful event, Wheatley lets the family member at the scene, Jason, do the speaking – interviewed long after the event, of course. Jason, strangely does not detect any signs of the impending disaster, saying on the contrary that despite their differences, George and Charmian loved each other and that Charmian was fiercely protective of George. Even the family doctor did not suspect anything, indicating he was feeling more depressed than Charmian, or so Wheatley tell us. She then repeats Kinnane’s report from Toni Burgess – Charmian’s best friend – that paints Charmian as an emotional train wreck. Charmian goes home in the morning and starts drinking again, only to be upbraided about it by George, as usual. George is reported as saying that nothing unusual was happening and that Charmian was not ‘affected’ by the alcohol. He went to bed at 9pm. She went to his room – he must have been in a deep sleep by then and didn’t notice her coming in – and took his bottle of phenobarbitone, went to her room, wrote the suicide note, took the pills and died at some time during the night. George found her at about 8am. 

 

People who commit suicide often do it with the faint hope that someone will find them in the act of doing it, and be saved. Here we have the curious act of Charmian going into her husband’s bedroom to take the bottle of pills. What if George had woken up? What if he was still awake? What if George was asleep at the time but would wake up later only to notice his bottle of pills on his bedside table had disappeared? Or if he simply went to her room to see how she was? What about Jason? Did he sometimes check up on his mother? In other words, in my view, there a number of potential roadblocks that could have saved Charmian. Wheatley does entertain such thoughts also. Obviously if you take an overdose of sleeping pills you do it in the knowledge that you will go to sleep, quite peacefully – and maybe wake up again or maybe never. It is not a violent end like hanging yourself or shooting yourself in the head – with no potential safety net at hand. Her rather flippant note of ‘I would quite like some flowers’ would indicate to me a vague sense of having to explain herself afterwards. Wheatley leaves it hanging in the air with this whiff of inevitability, even when she describes the suicide as a ‘spur-of-the-moment response’. Or, as Wheatley speculates next, was it predicted perhaps in the literary pieces where both Charmian and George wrote about suicide? Was it a romantic-dramatic-tragic death à la Keats? Was it an ‘accidental’ suicide? Apart from Wheatley’s epilogue, explaining the myth making of Charmian – the title of the biography is after all ‘The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift’ – the last words are given over to Charmian from her Peel Me a Lotus, a fittingend indeed .

 

Nadia Wheatley is praised by the Sydney Morning Herald as having written ‘one of the greatest Australian biographies’ – as is prominently displayed on the cover of the book – and so we have this cringe-worthy epithet again: ‘Australian’. George would have hated it. Of course one could reinterpret this by claiming that it is a biography that happens to be about Australians. For me personally this is the case: while I hadn’t ever heard or read about Clift or Johnston prior to reading Polly Samson’s notorious A Theatre for Dreamers that dwells on the iconic Leonard Cohen what with Clift and Johnston as supporting actors, it can be seen by this effort of mine that I now consider Clift and Johnston on par with Leonard Cohen, if not a league above. That Clift and Johnston – and Wheatley – happen to be Australians means not much to me. While I lived in Australia for a year or so and have visited there on various occasions – and do harbour certain opinions about Australians and Australia – I find that Clift and Johnston (and Wheatley) are internationalists in the best sense, that travel did broaden their minds in the most amazing ways, and that they thus transcend a narrow view of the archetypal Australian Ocker, Clift more so than Johnston (who strangely enough has an Ocker moment at the end of his last novel A Cartload of Clay). 

 

Johnston, George (1969) Clean Straw for Nothing and his (1971) A Cartload of Clay.

 

Reading these two volumes after Clift’s Mermaids and Peel me a Lotus and the Wheatley biography, the great anticipation was to find out, first of all how Johnston described and fictionalized all these events known to me, and secondly and perhaps more importantly, to find out what sort of a writer he is. As noted above I had ordered My Brother Jack from the library but ended up with the book combining Clean Straw for Nothing and A Cartload of Clay. Fate operates in mysterious ways! Let me state the overall impact straight away: Johnston is a bloody good writer of literary fiction, quite unique actually, and it is easy to see how he influenced Clift to do the same in her own inimical way. Johnston seems to have had a flair for hitting on a title for a novel before writing it (except that My Brother Jack seems to have been suggested by Cohen), hence Clean Straw for Nothing is of course a title as a novel in a nutshell. As a heavy drinker – would he be diagnosed as an alcoholic today as was his son Martin? – he appreciated the hang-overs one has to suffer, a consequence never acknowledged by the barons of the vast alcohol industries but somewhat mitigated by the pub and bar owners who in Gin Lane who provided the proverbial ‘clean straw for nothing’ – to sleep off the alcohol accumulated in the brain, only to return as happy customers the next day. This is a philosophy in itself that has defined the world at large ever since fermentation and distillation was discovered as a chemical process to derive alcohol for drinking. Brought up in Bavaria, I had my first alcoholic collapse at the age of 15 or so, drinking a whole bottle of whiskey at a party, vomiting all over the couch and being transported home unconscious, being dumped in the shed to sleep it off. The next day I awoke wondering what had happened, only to be told to get ready for a game of soccer for the local village team. I was greeted as a hero by all and sundry, having come of age. Since Australians famously frequent the Oktoberfest in Munich – an event that celebrates drinking as much beer as possible – to live up to their reputation of being world champions of consuming the most quantity of alcoholic beverages, I can appreciate the alcoholic brotherhood (sisters included) that exists between these nations. Johnston and Clift inhabited this world anywhere they went, including of course Greece, and Hydra in particular. I still enjoy a beer or a glass of wine on occasion but I never overindulge, being mindful of that disgusting display I must have occasioned as a 15-yrear old. It seems Johnston and Clift never became aware of what alcohol really did to themselves and to those around them. Alcohol remained the crutch for them to banish the demons that might have prevented them from their alcohol-induced brilliance as social animals – and more dangerously, to assuage their private and lonely battles. This issue, BTW, was not really addressed in depth by Wheatley and Kinnane, even though Clean Straw for Nothing seems to be a clue that Johnston provides himself - not withstanding Kinnane’s note on ‘squalid drunkenness’ as remarked upon above.

 

So, apart from the London sign in Gin Lane, we should also acknowledge Johnston’s ‘author’s note’ in which he emphasises that this is a book of fiction however much autobiographical background there is. His reference to his earlier My Brother Jack was of course not relevant to me as I hadn’t read the actual book yet (although I was somewhat familiar with it via Wheatley). So, when we start off at a party – Sydney 1968 – with a very detailed description of what the women were wearing (mainly mini), and what the smart set men were talking about, like in boring ‘verbal colour slides’ about ‘London and Paris and Athens and Messina and Majorca and Amalfi and Porto Ercole and Hydra’ – and then ‘you’ could see Ginna’s ‘white cups of her bottom’ as she was bending down, which leads to a brief editorial interlude that seeks to explain this male gaze as an evolutionary process by which our female ape-ancestors ‘developed those unique fleshy hemispherical buttocks as a sexual come-on for the males’, at least as extrapolated from the writings of a ‘quite eminent zoologist’ whose name we do not learn in case we want to check up. Sex as a scientific fact. Or is that something that he eludes to in the next chapter, i.e. when he implores us that when we get to a certain age we should stop doing things rather than trying to keep doing them? One can begin to understand Johnston’s sexual frustrations as a result of having been deprived, much earlier than deserved, of the evolutionary advantage – having sex for fun and recreation – due to his terrible affliction that is TB, and that would eventually kill him. The next, even shorter chapter (barely one page) is also entitled ‘Sydney 1968’, where we learn about his raison d’être for writing this book: ‘ … to get it straight before it is too late’, i.e. to prevent memory from falsifying experience. And so we go back to 1945, Melbourne (detailing his disaffection for Helen, his wife), West-China, Japan and Melbourne again before we return to Sydney 1966. As a baby-boomer born in 1948, I have no post-war memories of living in in a small village in Bavaria, and the grown-up men and women who did, never seemed to talk about it. Only when I became semi-conscious of what is called history – in high school German Gymnasium – did it occur to me that my various relatives had survived WWII and the Third Reich and that our teachers might have been Nazis, and that the French, English, Dutch, Russians and the Jews had contempt for Germans at large. Post-war Melbourne where the victorious Anzacs paraded year on year is pure fiction for me, even though when now having lived and worked in New Zealand for most of my adult life, I can appreciate the role of the RSA where my father-in-law celebrated his birthdays. Johnston’s journalistic escapades taking him from West-China to Japan where he ‘witnesses’ the Japanese surrender on the US Missouri and visits Hiroshima are history lessons par excellence. Now that the war is over, a world-war-correspondent has become redundant. He could have carried on with the endless regional wars that erupted shortly afterwards, or else report on the Cold War but, no, Johnston was not having any of it, searching instead for something, something, anything. Writing about it, like he says, by way of novelistic if not journalistic journal entries, the reader gets used to the succession of titles, depicting year and place, switching backwards and forwards, each being a vehicle for an episode that is as astounding as the next one. Take Lebanon Bay 1946, aka Kiama, aka Paradise: frolicking in and on this private, isolated beach, amongst rock pools to die for, what with Cressida aka Charmian being the mermaid, the sex goddess, the pagan beauty. “We must always remember this”, he whispered, because this is a memory that can sustain a lifetime. 

 

Now consider for a moment that Charmain read a draft of this: there cannot be a greater compliment paid to a woman than this (at least from a male perspective), and one cannot but wonder if Charmian did indeed carry this memory as ‘sustenance’ for a lifetime, standing by her man when things turned to dust, valuing George as a writer more than a husband and failed lover due to his contraction of TB. If in the end this sustenance ran out for a reason for living, is a moot point.

 

In the meantime, sadly, this time in Paradise had to come to an end because they ran out of money. Working class reality bites, leaving marks that never heal. 

 

Since only one ‘journal’ entry is not dated in Clean Straw for Nothing it is telling that this one chapter is entitled FROM AN EXPATRIATE’S JOURNAL. This covers their European trip (without their children in tow) in 1950s, covering England, France, Germany and Italy. As someone who grew up in West-Germany, I was interested to read about their bizarre adventure in Heidelberg where they were accosted by neo-Nazi students. This chimes with my teenage upbringing in the 1960s whereby the German Nazi past was as much suppressed as celebrated. Apparently, most of this ‘journal’ entry is lifted from Charmian’s notes of this journey, with a noticeable shift in the style of writing, being vividly descriptive of people and places. For George, of course, this was in part revisiting the wartime destinations as a war correspondent, e.g. Rome. As a European, one can hardly imagine the scenario of a post-WWII Europe, even less so of an Australian couple who were hardly touched by it in their country. No wonder they call Europe a ‘bad dream’. Being part of the victorious allies did not make them feel any better. Nevertheless Charmian’s dreams of travelling the world had come to some sort of fruition, so no wonder that Greece would become the ultimate destination, the two islands in particular, Kalymnos and Hydra. 

 

Indeed George’s next journal entry is called THE ISLAND, GREECE, 1956. These early days on Hydra are an enchanting assortment of expatriate parties where intellectual discussions revolve around contradictory sentiments, e.g. can they ever be part of the local fabric or not? While Cressida says that ‘we’re still aliens’ she also vehemently claims to ‘never’ want to return to Australia (or England). David Meredith is not so sure. Since quite a few entries detail the dramas of Cressida & Archie/Jim (the fictitious Calverton and Galloway) in London and on Hydra, we do get into this abysmal story-line of the suspicious mind suspecting that Cressida has an affair with Archie and Jim. As noted by both Wheatley and Kinnane, this is a construct of all the men that George suspects to be after Charmian, given that she is his prize possession that attracts the eyes of men in the know, like him – a sort of perverse compliment that acknowledges the primitive notion that his wife as the most beautiful woman on earth who cannot help but attract wayward attention (he would be disappointed if she didn’t). Later on this changes to an almost hateful realisation because due to his illness he cannot fight back anymore and drive off his ‘healthy’ competitors that circle Cressida like moths attracted to the light. I suspect that married women in general have a better rapport with men than with women, if only because most of their life is spent in the company of a man. That Cressida/Charmian had an easy way with men is probably an understatement but always with an absolute understanding that David/George was her man, her only man. Fact and fiction is however rife with certain slippages, especially drunken ones whereby à la Leonard Cohen ‘a hungry kiss’ is only followed by ‘nothing much happened since’. It may well be that Cressida/Charmian fell into this category, a ‘hungry’ kiss or two, playing footsie under the table, or even an explicit comment on virility and showing off more than intended. Crossing the line to having sex (of any sort) is of course what David/George cultivate in their fertile minds. On the other hand Cressida/Charmian isn’t helping to stop this increasing obsession when she says that she has ‘always been terribly fond of Archie’ – not that we can be sure that is exactly what Charmian would have said. George as the consummate writer is of course tempted to make a Greek tragedy out of it, citing similar male writers that have put their truly fictional women into the frame: ‘Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Moll Flanders, Emma Bovary’. The main difference would have to be that these famous writers didn’t exactly use their wives as role models. To do so, as George does, turns fiction into fact, however much he protests that it is fiction only. 

 

So let us forget Hydra (and quite a bit of Athens) – looks like nobody else is doing so – and arrive back in Australia. Clean Straw for Nothing from that point on is really a sad story: literary success, house hunting, seriously declining health, enormous pressure to write and be creative while under Sydney media scrutiny, family quarrels with grown-up/growing-up children around, punishing social life with heavy drinking, all the while this life is turned into fiction, with a readership fascinated by George’s self-flagellation and Charmian’s alter ego being publicly and bitterly exposed. The last entry, SYDNEY, 1968 is a melancholy home-coming from hospital, ending with an even more melancholy remembrance of coming home to Australia, looking down from the aeroplane, sadly contemplating ‘you are an alien because there is no one you will ever really know, not even yourself …’. The implication that he never really will know Cressida/Charmian either, is either a brutal insult to her or else a brutal admission on his behalf that he is lost with no way home – domestically and nationally.

 

To continue this line of story-telling with his final (possibly unfinished) novel A Cartload of Clay we are already dumfounded, knocked over by the title. It is explained in a preamble, quoting Pausanias, i.e. that Prometheus fashioned mankind out of clay. More pessimistically, in line with the contents of the novel, I would add, this is how all end up, as a cartload of clay, or rather this is what will be dumped onto our coffins. A Cartload of Clay, as opposed to Clean Straw for Nothing is organised by chapters, so presumably we are moving away from the journal idea, somewhat into the unknown since the ‘chapters’ have no titles apart from being numbered. As such Chapter 1 is a somewhat odd introduction, while melancholy as before, detailing Miranda’s baptism in Greece and now her Greek wedding in Sydney. Since Charmian’s and George’s daughter Shane was not at all fictionalized in Clean Straw for Nothing, here she pops up as Miranda. Given what we know now, that Shane committed suicide in 1974, we are at a loss what prompted her father to open his last novel with her alter ego. Maybe it was her love of all things Greek that remains as a theme for all of the family, in fact, long after they are gone – or is it just to establish the contrast between youth and his increasing decrepitness, languishing in his bedroom (now separate from Cressida’s) which in Chapter 2 is described like a hospital room, what with ‘the neat white cylinder of the medihaler’. Moving into the kitchen he finds a mess left behind by his son Julian (aka Martin), noting that Julian, the budding poet, had left open a book about the Chinese poet Wen Yi-tuo, whom he had met in real life when travelling in China so many years ago as a war correspondent. We also learn that Julian likes Ravi Shankar, a detail that fascinates me as I also like him, having seen him live in two concerts, one in KL and one in Wellington (and being bit of a sitar player myself). The Cressida appears and in Chapter 3 they talk about Julian and then David breaking into thoughts about Cressida as not being a morning person, even though she appeared to him ‘with a strong sexual attraction’, with an addendum in brackets ‘(which was sad for both of them)’. Sad indeed. Tragic I would say. The crux of the matter, almost a question of life and death. As such he is now reduced to walking the suburban street they live on, observing the urban goings-on while reminiscing about China and Wen Yi-tuo, and about the American woman Phoebe who had introduced him to the poet (to assuage his sexual frustrations he remembered that he ‘fucked’ Phoebe even though it wasn’t the greatest of sexual encounters. The reminiscing goes on and on, walking the street, from China to Egypt to Sicily and back to China – and back to thinking about Cressida, as the ‘different’ one, the one he cannot fathom. Chapter 6 is again all about bad sex, a rather sordid story about a young woman attempting to give him a blow job in a toilet. She had recognised him as a famous writer, soon after he had returned to Sydney from Greece (with Cressida and family still there). Earlier in the piece he sees a young ‘girl’ walking past him on the street and he comes up with a bizarre but accurate reflection in that the girl was ‘able to judge him as a dirty old man perving at a young girl while conceding him his reasons’. Wow, what a statement! Conceding him his reasons? Chapter 7 digs deeper with the Ocker talking to him out of nowhere (well, from the bus shelter), commenting derogatorily on the ‘girl’ that had just passed them, saying ‘saw you giving her the bloody once-over’. The Ocker follows up with the complaint that the young ones dress like sluts and generally have too easy these days, nothing like when they were young during war time and had to work for their living, etc., etc. Meredith argues with the Ocker, telling him that his son is a poet which is a red herring for the Ocker, and when the Ocker disappears on the bus which is late, Meredith continues on his street-walking contemplations, mainly about poetry, citing Rilke at the end who advises that ‘the chief thing was to keep living’. Apart from the odd Ocker story – which appears again at the end of the book – there is this other central theme, poetic maybe but more than melancholic, more likely depressive in the sense that life has nothing more to offer than life itself. This is David Meredith/George Johnston’s outlook, to simply battle on till the end – fighting death. Maybe this is why he is invoking the Ocker theme, namely that this is the human condition, across all nations, across all the people on earth, regardless if you are a poet or an Ocker. It also alerts us, without saying so, that Cressida/Charmian does not belong to this sort of life. Chapter 10 might be a counterpoint to the Ocker, namely talking to Miss Aubrey at the bus shelter, the former owner of the house he had bought of her – now living in a flat just across the road – an 84-year old spinster, music teacher with a love of Beethoven, using English anachronisms that amuse Meredith, accomplished at small talk and then comes the bombshell: ‘I have greatly missed your wife, Mr Meredith’. I suppose anybody reading the book even shortly after it came out, would have known of Charmian Clift’s tragic death by suicide. The question was how would George Johnston present it as a fiction. Well, the announcement comes from an old lady who embodies Rilke’s dictum ‘to keep living’. To a reader without any background knowledge, it would now leave the question open how his wife died. Meredith does not elaborate, he merely philosophizes that death for the surviving party means they have to ‘think it into another shape’. This is a curious way of looking at it but somehow fits the notion that life must continue for those still living. Chapter 11 has more contemplation on death, this time about his former friend Jim with whom he had had a narrow escape from Tibet. Jim had gone back to Tibet again and again, only to step back carelessly when taking a photograph on a steep ravine. He was never seen again. Meredith thinks this was a fitting end. Life and death left to pure chance? A short Chapter 12 he asks himself if he ‘dares’ to stand still in the ‘secret room’ that was Cressida’s domain – from which he was shut out until her death. And so, by Chapter 14, after various descriptions of the contents of the room, with an interlude with Julian, we finally learn the bitter truth: the suicide note that shed no light on WHY. That she could not go on, but WHY? Quoting Keats ’I shall cease upon the midnight with no pain’. Cressida/Charmian had taken HIS vial of barbiturates which he had kept by his bedside table in case he couldn’t stand the pain of his illness anymore. Meredith/Johnston endured the pain instead. Cressida/Charmian did not. And so life goes on for another three chapters or so, petering out with the awful Ocker coming in for a beer, complaining about the wogs. 

 

In my own time in Australia in the early to mid 70s, I worked in Gove, the remote bauxite mine in Arnhem Land, then only accessed by the workers by plane. I had not idea about construction but was employed by a Brisbane plumbing firm that did the corrugated sheet installations on all the warehouses, in charge of a team of ‘wogs’ (mainly Yugoslavs) who slaved away in 40°C heat, needing heavy gloves to handle the sheet metal. I remember one young guy, my age in the mid 20s, who had escaped from communist Czechoslovakia, now considering of returning as he was sick of being treated like a dog. My Kiwi friend (who had gotten me the job) and I wrote a piece in the workers camp news sheet about a team of wogs who celebrated the death of their Aussie foreman boss. We were surprised they actually published it  but then again they were secure in the knowledge that the wogs couldn’t read it, or maybe the Ocker ‘editors’ of the news sheet considered it a bit of a laugh. 

 

As such I am still perplexed about the Ocker ending of A Cartload of Clay even though some commentators, Wheatley and Kinnane included, speculate that the novel was not finished and might have had a different ending had it been. The only conclusion one can draw is that Prometheus fashioned all people out of clay, returning dust to dust, ashes to ashes, regardless of class, race or gender, the Australian archetype included. Meredith’s incomprehension of his sexual frustrations – or comprehension by bringing them out into the open – might echo Leonard Cohen’s complaint of ‘I ache in the places I used to play’. To constantly evoke memories of a Ladies’ Man (again after Cohen) who swept all the beauties of their feet is no way to walk the street with an oxygen tank in your pocket. Maybe Cressida/Charmian felt so sorry for him that she chose to remove herself as a living memory. But what do I know. Nothing really. Only what I read.

 

So now, let’s re-read and review the next book on my list, my third one by Johnston, which is of course, the first one of his trilogy that established Johnston as one of the most celebrated writers of Australia, winning him the prestigious Miles Franklin Award. Since the ‘novel’ is semi-autobiographical – which is to be debated later on, given the preamble by André Gide ‘Fiction there is - and history’ – there are of course time lines that shadow the life of George Johnston up towards the end of WWII, notably intertwined with meeting Charmian Clift à la fictional Cressida Morley. Down to the last page I was surprised and not surprised that this book would appeal so much to the Australian reader. Of course Australia in the 1960s and 70s was undergoing a revolution – imported from the US and Europe – that turned a largely conservative nation into a diverse mixture of tribes, some of whom questioned the very fabric of a ghastly suburban society, while others clung to the Waltzing Matilda cock -‘cock’ as a term of endearment used by  fictional Gavin Turley, David Meredith’s best friend from the writer-journalist cubicle of the Post – mixing high minded literature with earthy Ockerism, living it up on Bondi Beach or any other beach that Australia is blessed with (was the youthful beach culture also imported from California? If so, they certainly outdid the Californians at their own game.). We/I already know that Charmian Clift/Cressida Morley is the ultimate beach baby from Kiama, so there is an irresistible attraction to the character as a femme fatale of truly Greek tragic proportions. Since Johnston wrote My Brother Jack while living on Hydra – and incidentally the title was proposed by none other than Leonard Cohen – we clearly see the connection: the azure blue ocean that surrounds parts of Australia as much as Hydra in particular and Greece in general. It is no accident that George’s first love were the ships he saw in Melbourne harbour, not so much in azure waters but more in the grey and muddy variety that holds no sway ultimately. His first adventures in journalism – with the apparently purely fictional pen name ‘Stunsail’ – was in the maritime genre, which at the time, the late 1920s, was, and still is to some degree, the crux of a colonial history that defines Australia (and New Zealand) to this very day: they all came by sailing ships. Beautiful ships in the eyes of the ‘young man and the sea’, fooling the erudite editor who thought of the articles sent to him as more in the genre of the ‘old man and the sea’. The romance of the ships was only later supplanted by the ‘flying ships’ (as named in some South Pacific languages), the aeroplanes with which George Johnston travelled the globe. In any case, when the editor, the fictional Mr. Brewster of the Post newspaper, first meets the writer of these amazing articles, he is bowled over by a 15-year old ‘young man and the sea’. Indeed Mr Brewster is so impressed that he offers him a job as a cadet, and so, eventually, David’s career takes off, where the sky is not the limit. Up to this point however we have to contend with David’s childhood: a brutal father – denied in the Kinane biography – who beats him senseless, a house full of cripples from WWI looked after by his long-suffering mother, an older sister, and of course the older brother Jack, who is rough as guts but - to the very end of the novel – is also the hero denied. There is a fascination for the working class milieu of the 1920s and 30s, and George Johnston pulls it off brilliantly: brutal but honest, patriarchal but with an understated motherly love, misogynistic nevertheless, racist (the indigenous people do not feature at all) in the sense of the old colonial attitudes, Irish Catholics are not much better than European immigrant wogs and drongos, and what other wonderfully colloquial names spring up in the wonderfully crafted dialogues. 

 

So, from this intro alone I can appreciate the attraction of the book, as it shakes the 1960s, 70s Australian liberal mind by the scruff, perplexing the younger generation with a pastiche of a literary genius, while the older readers of his generation saw themselves revealed for the first time, as an ambiguous assemblage of beating oneself up, while at least having beaten the Huns and the Japs, yes, mostly with GI help, let the truth be known. An yet, the Australian diggers carved out a myth as heroic fighters, from New Guinea to North Africa to Greece, a myth created by none other than Australia’s most famous war journalist, one George Johnston, who as his fictional alter ego, Dave Meredith, posts dispatches from the theatres of war, writes a book or two (notably Australia at War) and then after the war questions the whole enterprise as a cowardly act of avoiding active service. On the other hand of course, Mr Brewster and the Australian corporate media in general being in cahoots with the English and US media, know exactly how important the media is as a tool of benign propaganda, to be the ‘urgers’ of the nation, to make sure young men enlist with great enthusiasm and sense of adventure, to brush over death and destruction, to glorify a just war. George Johnston – or so says David Meredith – was very good at it and so contributed to the war effort more than his hapless bother Jack who was hell bent on getting to the front but ended up, crook, in the paymaster’s barracks in Melbourne (not even a posting to Darwin is successful). These tragic contradictions are brought to life, pulling no punches (brother Jack loves boxing similes), sparing no one, least himself. Such brutal honesty is rare: given George’s/Dave’s fascination with the Chinese communists’ struggles against the Japanese and the Kuomintang, one wonders what he would have made of Mao-tse-tung’s late cult of self-criticism, which is not an outlandish suggestion, given also Johnston meeting with luminaries such as Gandhi and the like, and having observed first-hand the terrible effects of the wars in China. One might even suggest, from a psychoanalytical point of view, that Johnston beating himself up has an echo in his (fictional?) father beating up boy George. Adding weight to this assertion is also the scene where his father throws him out into the street when he comes home with a type writer, i.e. the (just?) punishment for being a useless writer? The subsequent and also supposedly fictional episode of Johnston moving in with his artist friend is perhaps the weakest link in the book. While Johnston’s meticulously detailed description are always a joy to read, here the endless story of a drunken artist party (with brother Jack in attendance at the end) is so drawn out, it becomes a bit boring. One positive aspect of this scenario is Johnston/Meredith’s lifelong affection with fine arts, especially painters whom he considered as the only true artists, at least in comparison to the writers like himself. His training as a lithographer made him appreciate the intricate technical skills needed for this craft, as well as his occasional attendances at the National Gallery for drawing/sketching classes (including the hilarious life-model sessions which introduced him to the female body of advanced age). His real life connection with modernist painter Sydney Nolan was one of the more extraordinary relationships, so no wonder, painters make an entrance in many of his books, My Brother Jack included. Johnston/Meredith’s other love, books, especially illustrated ones, starts from an early age, sitting in his bedroom with a few of his equally interested nerdy friends – brother Jack and his father suspecting homosexual undertones – reading and discussing world literature, from Conrad to Dostoyevsky, without really understanding what it was all about. What set him apart from his nerdy friends was, of course, that his reading was not just for intellectual entertainment but for research for his own writing. In the beginning this was centered on his maritime interests but soon blossomed into archaeology (even learning to read hieroglyphics) and world-wide travel. All this in a working class bedroom with no sign of any other books in the house at all (well, perhaps with the exception of his mother’s nursing text books) and without any prospect of enhancing his literary and intellectual knowledge via a higher education. As an extraordinary autodidact he later rubbed shoulders with educated elites who no doubt looked at him with a mixture of disdain and admiration.

 

In the meantime his preoccupation with books leads David to one of the most amazing chapters in My Brother Jack, namely the story of Helen. As the book-keeper of a little bookshop she meets David and promptly seduces him, or so the story goes. David the virgin is taught the game of sex played out on the sofa in the shop, perhaps remembering vague instructions from brother Jack, what with Helen as the liberated, very left-leaning woman who has pictures in her locket of two Italian-American anarchists who were electrocuted in 1927. David, off-handed, calls them ‘bolshies’. Helen who has Marx and Veblen on her bookshelf urges David to read Upton Sinclair’s book Boston which is about Sacco and Vanzetti but it did not make ‘much of an impression’ on him. This is an interesting point to make when analysing Johnston’s political stance. It is also one of the most contradictory aspects that follows on as far the fictional Helen is concerned. So, we kind of know what Johnston/Meredith’s sexual politics are following his initiation: he enjoys sex as a kind of physical satisfaction, not adverse to the casual one-night stand but with something at the back of his mind that echoes Leonard Cohen’s line of love having something to do with it, i.e. ‘not just a shakedown and a shower but always, always …’. Helen provides a service as a lover without much love in evidence, ‘a neat, clean, expedient, safe lover …’, a relationship that is at odds with either the straight working class or bourgeois conception of a young woman using sex to lure a suitable husband. Strangely enough, Johnston/Meredith then changes tack and turns Helen into the most bourgeois wife known to mankind. Has this conversion something to do with Johnston’s comparative lack of political understanding, for only a fairly a-political writer could envisage such a turnaround. To smooth over the cracks he invents the notion that Helen, the seemingly radical reader – if not activist – actually doesn’t understand anything she is reading, deriving only ‘slogans’ which she employs like a  placard waiving demonstrator paid to march down the street. As my mate Noam Chomsky is fond of saying ‘nothing is impossible but many things are unlikely’, I’d add this to the collection of ‘very unlikely’, for how can a widely read person turn out to be a superficial, sloganeering bore? Johnston himself gained all his sophisticated knowledge through reading, so why deny it to his protagonist Helen? Using Helen as a prop for his quite radical denunciation of consumer society, if not capitalism itself, seems quite unfair. Personally, from a purely political point of view, I have never quite understood how one can be a non-Marxist when denouncing capitalism but then again since Johnston cites Veblen who is often referred to as a non-Marxist critic of capitalism, one might assume that Johnston himself is a bit conflicted, citing Marx and Veblen in one breath – or perhaps he could have at least indicated that the two political writers are poles apart, and maybe Helen too was not sure which side to follow. However, giving her Sacco and Vanzetti as an emblem, this is more of a problem for Johnston as a writer than a manufactured problem for Helen. As noted before, Johnston’s sympathies for the Chinese revolution and his generally anti-fascist stance make him a progressive, perhaps in the mould of the Australian Labour Party’s left wing. On the other hand he seems politically conservative when he succumbs to a benign sort of patriotism, especially in his guilt trip of not having signed up for the army. His disdain for highly intellectualized politics, especially of the post-structuralist French version à la Sartre is, of course, expressed in his loathing of the young French Casanova in Clean Straw for Nothing who spouts Sartre while presumably seducing Cressida/Charmian - who by the way quite likes Simone de Beauvoir. Obviously, Johnston is not a political writer but he lets his political and social biases creep into his stories, just as his sexual politics are conflicted in his writings as much as in real life, it seems. 

 

In any case, whatever the motivation may have been, the story of Helen as the bourgeois housewife living it up in the sterile desert of a new, upper class subdivision in Melbourne, is of course priceless in itself. Her consumerism, her suburban fashion, her colour coordinated furniture, her socialising with the equally obsessed neighbours, the relentless acquisition of the latest gadgets – Johnston is very good at making lists (a funny one is all the things that David’s mother has ever knitted). David’s rebellion in the form of planting a native tree is equally priceless. Harbouring a somewhat infantile, insipid hatred of Helen’s domestic enterprise is softened by his frequent absences, the journalistic and otherwise tours of duty, betraying a bit of guilt for his extramarital affairs abroad by sending Helen precious little gifts to add to her collection of Knickknacks. The relentless list of his travels and the people he meets is like a fast-forward movie scene, with every stop along the way worthy of another book by itself. If all true to life – as more or less attested by his biographer, Gary Kinnane – Johnston/Meredith is one hell of a jaded globetrotter, and thrown in all the war-time experiences, he no doubt can hold any gathering in his thrall by knocking off a casual list of adventures, be it in Venezuela, China, the USA, Europe, New Guinea, Japan or India. His collected gems of wisdom along the way, while knocking off a book or two, make him a wandering encyclopaedia that few writers can muster. Considering all that, it is hard to understand that Johnston did not achieve his dream to become a writer who can comfortably live off his writings while domiciled on the beautiful island of Hydra. It’s a real Greek tragedy that success in the form of My Brother Jackcame too late and at the cost of baring his soul and spilling the bitter pills that cost him his love of his life. This love of his life makes her entry towards the end of My brother Jack, this weird and wonderful human being, this archetypal Australian beauty made from sand and sea, this young autodidact, like himself, a wannabe writer, keen to see the world, to escape the confines of Australia, however vast a continent she is. This Cressida Morley aka Charmian Clift now takes centre stage, displacing Helen like a bourgeois, Victorian ragdoll. Displacing brother Jack as well, as in the end he is left waiting for David who he says ‘would never let anyone down’. It’s a clever ending because now the innocent reader really wants to check out the sequels to find out what happened next. 

 

Poor me, being guilty as having read the sequels beforehand (and the biography), had to reconcile all the background knowledge with pretending that what I was reading was news to me. It is testament to Johnston’s fine writing that I was captivated from beginning to end, only harbouring a few minor/major niggles as elaborated above and below.

 

On to the next book in this random order: Gary Kinnane’s 1986 biography of George Johnston, published some six years after Johnston’s death. Kinnane, an English literature lecturer at Melbourne University, or so I gather, is to be congratulated on having done extensive research and having read most if not all of Johnston’s extensive oeuvre, thereby giving an authoritative account. Here my review goes off into tangents not necessarily related to Kinnane alone, notably meditations on Johnston’s and Clift’s literary merits.

 

Of immediate interest is to check with Kinnane as to who is who in My Brother Jack. Leaving aside whether or not, or to what degrees, David Meredith equals George Johnston and Cressida Morley is Charmian Clift, are all the other characters, especially family members and work colleagues shadows of the real ones? Johnston himself is at pains to point out that he took liberties, and so much so that any of the characters that would recognise themselves via their relationships in real life are warned not to identify themselves, especially in all the negative characterizations. The stand-out example is of course Helen, Meredith’s first wife as much as Johnston’s was Elsie. Kinnane must tread a fine line between what the author asserts versus what the real characters have to say about their perceived incarnations. The plot certainly thickens when we learn from Kinnane that the fictional Helen is based on one of Johnston’s girlfriends who indeed worked in a subscription library, and was bit of a lefty but certainly not the one he married. So why invent this whole scenario? Well, why not? Time for a bit of psychoanalysis: Kinnane surmises that the library character named Helen originated from a semblance of the real thing but the strange conversion to a wholly unsympathetic bourgeois housewife is pure fiction designed to chastise himself, suggesting ‘role reversals and sex changes’, i.e. to chastise himself for his then tendencies of being a bourgeois character himself. Having dabbled in the genre of biography myself (Noam Chomsky being my subject, albeit very much alive) I quickly learned that to second-guess the motives of the subject is a pointless exercise – in my case helped by Chomsky reading my drafts and correcting any misconceptions/errors. Of course ‘dead poets’ cannot defend themselves when biographers deduce all sorts of crimes committed, safe in the knowledge that habeas corpus cannot be invoked. So, Kinnane engages in second-guessing, practicing a bit of layman’s psychoanalysis with regards to Johnston’s motivations in relation to the Helen character. Personally, as indicated before, I think that the Helen character is a weak link in the overall story but is brilliantly drawn as a precursor to the ‘real housewives of X’ TV genre. 

 

So what about the central theme: brother Jack? Kinnane cites Johnston’s letter to Elsie in which he supposes that people will be hurt, like ‘Jack maybe’. Given that Jack comes off mainly as a sympathetic character, there are nevertheless episodes where Jack is painted as a bit of a looser and ambiguously sketched as a working class hero who lives in a milieu that one wants to escape if at all possible. Kinnane thinks that Jack comes off as ‘a simple stereotype’. As such the real Jack might have been indeed hurt a bit. As far as I can see there is no recorded reaction from the real Jack as to his alter ego. All we learn from Kinnane is that Jack felt sorry for George on his return from Greece and later Jack somewhat reluctantly signing an undertaking not to sue the Johnstons for making a TV series based on My Brother Jack. The latter would suggest to me that the real Jack was not really happy about his portrait by his brother but at the same time felt sorry for his brother’s complicated fate as a ‘sooky’ writer. Kinnane’s contention that the whole book was a quest of relentless self-analysis on Johnston’s part, swinging back and forth, being both a Daedalus and Icarus, is, as noted above, an attempt to psychoanalyse Johnston’s state of mind at the time writing the book (and with the background knowledge of what happened next). I am not sure this is a job for a biographer however tempting it may seem to invoke Freud and Co. 

 

The same can be said for Kinnane asking why Johnston invented such a miserable childhood when in effect it was quite normal. Again it is tempting to invoke a Freudian mechanism by which early childhood determines life as an adult, i.e. Johnston had to invent such misery - as his father beating him up regularly – so as be able to explain his failures as an adult.

 

So, why am I writing all this? I suppose like all writers (published or not) I feel compelled to do so but don’t ask me why. Certainly Clift and Johnston are great examples of such compulsion, having produced the most amazing literary outputs during their lives that defy easy description – as the biographers like Kinnane attest to. Not that Clift and Johnston feature in the annals of world literature, as they perhaps should if such annals were not merely the result of number of copies sold, which of course begs the question if it is a demand and supply issue, or a supply and Pavlovian demand conundrum – and as one who has received his fair share of rejection slips from the publishers, one is inclined to believe in the latter. Clift and Johnston battled with these make or break episodes all their lives, seemingly achieving a break-through at the end and mostly posthumous. Some writers give up and either because they convince themselves that they failed to attract publishers and readers because they were not good enough writers, or else resign themselves to the philosophy of bad luck – again I tend to embrace the latter. Clift and Johnston never gave up, writing, that is. Clift gave up living while Johnston followed Rilke’s advice of ‘just living is the main point’ however hard it may be.

 

As Kinnane shows, Johnston wrote and wrote, always hoping for the blockbuster success, all the while with Clift by his side, encouraging him, reading every line he typed, also in the hope that the next book will bring in the royalties that will save them from financial ruin, having to scrounge for a few pounds and dollars to tie them over. Tragically, when they finally see the money rolling in when back in Australia, it is all too late. Had they made it when they were young and in love on their islands in Greece – or even before that on the beach in Kiama – they might have lived the dream. Speaking of Australia, Charmian’s upbringing on a wild beach is in itself a legend that is not matched by any other Australian beauty, while George’s childhood in a dreary Melbourne suburb and his subsequent escape into the wide, wide world is equally amazing. Both biographers, Garry Kinnane of George, and Nadia Wheatley of Charmian, put a lot of emphasis on the Australian connection – both Garry and Nadia are Australians – as if there was some sort of Australian character that comes with being born and raised there, a kind of ‘Ocker-ness’ that Johnston confronts at the end in his A Cartload of Clay. As mentioned before, having lived and worked in Australia for a year or so, I have always joked that I loved the country but not the redneck Ockers. Kinnane goes as far as saying that Johnston had a secret admiration for the Ocker when in the face of it he detested them. Both Johnston and Clift were progressives of the left-wing persuasion, at a time, especially in the 1960s, when young Australians became part of the global youth counter-culture, what with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in the popular imagination and socialist student politics as the anti-establishment furore that had to be put down by fascist police forces, not only in Australia. Indeed Johnston is quoted in Kinnane (p.277) as saying that he sees Australians ‘veering towards a fascist style of authoritarianism’. As such, I think Johnston’s and Clift’s assumed Australianism Ockerism – even if of the mildest sort – is totally misplaced. Equally perhaps there is an emphasis – especially in Samson’s biopic – on the ‘sex’ of the ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ scenario that was said to revolutionize the 1960s, what with Charmian and George somehow being the forerunners. It is interesting that as far as the musical connection goes – what with Leonard Cohen in the mix as the sexy Ladies’ Man – both Charmian and George had classical music tastes, and the likes of Leonard Cohen are only briefly mentioned in their writings as potential literary figures (had they lived long enough to hear that Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for literature, they would have LOL – as I did). While their biographers did of course realise that sex is a universal theme as old as humanity – and that sex sells – the titillating notoriety ascribed to both Charmian and George has a 1960s feel to it, what with Charmian’s assumed credo as a radical feminist that allowed her a sexual freedom unheard of in conventional/conservative Australia and what with George’s initially clumsy male macho attitude to fuck the beautiful sheilas. That the sexual politics eventually invaded his intellect to become a jealous guy is quite another matter. While George struggled with the personal and public psychological implications in his writing, there is never a time when Charmian comments on such matters. It is only in the biographers’ imagination – or deductive analysis – that Charmian’s sex life is of great interest. Did or didn’t she have affairs? Was the sex they had on the beach in Kiama out of this world, as George seems to indicate in his fictionalised accounts? What is fact and fiction anyway? George the writer succumbs to the dictum that fiction is autobiographical, hence his avatar, Meredith in his trilogy, becomes the fictional writer who looks over George’s shoulder to ensure that the writer’s writer does not deviate from the fictional truth (as elaborated very intelligently by Garry Kinnane in Ch. XII). Kinnane also points out quite rightly that in Clean Straw for Nothing Johnston does not do revenge porn (as one says these days) since Charmian’s avatar, Cressida, is not at all the primitive nymphomaniac that some conservatives might have assumed she is but that it is Meredith (aka George) whose insane jealousy drives her mad. However Kinnane then assumes that Charmian killed herself partly because she could not stomach the immanent publication of Clean Straw for Nothing which she suspected painted her as a mean person. While it may be true that she had not read the final draft of the book, she had ‘loved’ an earlier version that must have had basically the same content. She had noted in an interview that writers should have the freedom to write whatever they wanted but in George’s case the readers should be aware that she is not the same person in the book of fiction. Her suicide note is most revealing, I think, when she writes ‘Darling please forgive me …’ (Kinnane p.281), indicating that life had become ‘too much’ to bear, ceasing ‘upon the midnight with no pain’. Such a tragic but poignant note has nothing to do with George’s book but is a deeply poetic cry for help that is all too late. Indeed George was as puzzled as anyone who really understood Charmian, the Amazon warrior who loved George as much as she loved the life of writers, as much as she so brilliantly wrote herself – and as always acknowledged by George. That they seemed to degenerate into a kind of alcoholism that was rampant in Australian drinking culture must have a serious impact on their relationship, as witnessed by those around them. Charmian, like many an intelligent woman of her time (and still true today) needed a sedative, be it alcohol or pills or both together, the proverbial ‘mothers’ helpers’, to juggle the impossible tasks heaped upon women, especially as they aged: the impossibility to project a youthful, sexy beauty that was one their trademark, to be the good mothers to their children, to cook and clean the house, to humour the husband who just wanted one thing, to have a career, to hold it all together, to write to deadlines, to hang on to the last vestiges of freedom. George’s drinking never seemed to be totally out of control – possibly mitigated by how much he could stomach given his battle with TB – but bad enough to engage in violent verbal slurs instead of a loving embrace in the face of a verbal attack occasioned by alcoholic desperation. These rows, although forgotten the next day and made up with a kiss and a cuddle, had nevertheless a corrosive impact on their relationship, as detailed by both biographers, analysing the tragic trajectory as if they were seasoned psychiatrists. I think this is a weakness in both Kinnane’s and Wheatley’s biographies, especially when it comes to Clift’s apparent suicide and speculation what lead up to it. The literary quests of both Clift and Johnston are much better analysed since there is the textual interpretation, and the reader can make up his/her own mind whether or not it is fair dinkum or shit – to employ some Aussie slang, favoured by Johnston. Generally, I think, Kinnane (male) is more sympathetic to Johnston than to Clift, while for Wheatley (female) it is the other way round – maybe this is a gendered thing. Kinnane harps on about Clift being ‘sexually aggressive’ quoting just one source who is peeved by Clift being the centre of male attention while she’s not. More alarming though, Kinnane cites a friend of the Johnstons in Athens who says that he threw out a Greek man whom Charmian had brought into her bedroom one late night while she was staying there. The Greek man was said to have beaten up Charmian who afterwards confessed to the friend that she had acquired this habit when she was thirteen, doing it with taxi drivers in Kiama. It is interesting that Wheatley does not mention this episode at all (given that she must have read the Kinnane biography in great detail), while generally exonerating Charmian for her perceived sins, putting blame on Johnston for his male chauvinism, possessiveness and jealousies. 

 

As noted before, while Johnston in his writings has a preoccupation with conventional sex, what with various nymphomaniacs playing parts in his fiction, there is almost no hint of sex in Clift’s autobiographical novels of Mermaid Singing and Peel me a Lotus – I am not familiar with her other writings. One would expect some scandal or the other at least in Peel me a Lotus since this deals with their time on Hydra, where is assumed by all and sundry that Clift had it on with various men. It is even not quite clear what happened when Johnston returned to Australia by himself, leaving Clift and kids behind. By all accounts they had left open the option to separate (i.e. Clift and kids staying on in Hydra), so when Clift shacks up with the American Chadwick upon Johnston’s departure from Hydra, one might suspect that they had sexual relations but not necessarily so. As far as I know, Clift has never said so one way or the other. Her three children at the time were aware of the man in the house but if there was any hanky-panky, they must have been discrete enough not to make too obvious to the children who at that age were old enough to know about such things. Another contradiction arises from the infamous Maurice who occupies much space in Samson, Wheatley and Kinnane, as the suave French lover of all and sundry – Clift included – when in fact in Johnston’s account Maurice confesses to never having slept with Charmian, and what with Clift’s dismissal of him as a randy dog, we can dismiss him as well. While Maurice was on Johnston’s list of suspicious lover characters, Johnston mainly disliked him for what he thought was his pseudo-existential posturing (Maurice claimed to have had conversations with the great Sartre), eschewing all the 1960s new-age philosophies. The flamboyant Maurice was later in life to have become a sedate French government official: what irony! As I also noted before, the Johnston/Clift fleeting acquaintance with Leonard Cohen on Hydra did not translate either into an embrace of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Rolling Stones’ like - although later when back in Australia they were sympathetic to their son Martin’s radical left-wing politics and musical tastes (interestingly including Ravi Shankar). Samson’s weird idea that Clift might also have had an affair with Cohen, is therefore only good for sexy gossip that sells copies. One of the more amazing developments of Charmian Clift as the presumed femme fatale was the observation of various friends and onlookers when she arrived back in Australia: a haggard looking, overweight woman with rotten teeth, with all her former beauty gone! And yet, within a short time she asserts her status as an essayist, projecting a glamorous if not celebrity image in the broadcasting circles of Australia. The enduring idea of Charmian Clift as some sort of sex goddess was mainly promoted by Johnston as a youthful scene on the wild beach of Kiama where they made endless love amongst the dunes. That Charmian Clift had a charismatic personality is not in doubt, nor that George Johnston was a conversationalist of the first order. As a man of the world he could spin a yarn for any occasion, and never far from the truth. Johnston’s lexicon was more educated than that of any Oxford don, and being widely read – looks like he could read as fast as he could write – he was no doubt sometimes amazed at his talents: ‘it just pours out of me’ he is quoted as saying. His literary allusions as well as his mastery of complex vocabulary woven into even more complex sentences make Johnston a great writer, as witnessed in his Clean Straw for Nothing and A Cartload of Clay at least. I must read some of his early novels to check out both Kinnane’s and Wheatley’s assertions that by and large his earlier literary output was not worth the paper it was printed on (eventually I did read The Far Road, see below). Proof seems to rest with the agents/publishers who rejected quite a number of his manuscripts – which in my mind is no evidence at all. Obviously there was some sort of writerly development from Johnston’s early journalism, at least in terms of content, if not in style. His coverage of WWII and its aftermath was by all accounts a stroke of genius, what with bringing home to the Australian readership a sense of initial patriotic pride, only to be deflated by the disillusionment of warfare that resulted in such outrages as Hiroshima (which he saw first-hand) and the Chinese conflagration caused by Chiang Kai-shek. Just as his father had returned from WWI as a cripple, the wholesale waste of human life made Johnston a consummate humanist, questioning himself as much as any others, friends and foes, all the same. Apportioning blame in this crazy world, from ancient dichotomies to modern contradictions, is a Sisyphean task well suited to an increasingly despairing writer like Johnston. Not sparing himself in the first place, he is relentless in self-analysis to the point of abhorrence of himself. Having swindled himself through life as a writer he is at a loss what he could or should have done instead. Live like his brother Jack or like his father? Certainly not the latter. Perhaps more like the Chinese poet he admired? But poets are writers too, and amongst all the writers he read and admired, from Conrad to Rilke, there was no escaping the notion that writers sit on the fence, making intelligent observations but having no influence on the events that unfold in front of their eyes. The example of the war correspondent is a case in point. The writer observing life in general is just an extension of that. The intricacies of love life is another. Maybe life is a permanent war zone. As such Johnston’s style of writing jumps easily from one to the other, what with intricately embedded sentences – always grammatically correct – of an almost Nietzschean quality that surpasses mere streams of consciousness. His detailed descriptions of interiors – like the kitchen in A Cartload of Clay - connect with exteriors – like the rock pool in Greece – weaving the web of past and present, what is remembered, what is happening now. In short, Johnston’s prose is always a pleasure to read. 

 

When contrasting this to Clift’s style of writing one would expect a lot of similarities, given their close collaboration as writers. Obviously Johnston had a head start as a journalist while Clift had to fashion a style all of her own, not allowing her to be swamped by Johnston’s elaborate prose mixed with down-to-earth dialogues. Clift did have early literary influences going back to her childhood, via her parents, her father in particular who venerated some rather obscure literature that satisfied his working class ethos – namely The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne as well as some Rabelaisian works that encouraged her father to swear a lot. Charmian also learned to recite poetry off by heart. This a potent mix that infused a young mind but it took quite some time to germinate. Having drifted aimlessly until joining the army, she got her first taste of journalism as a contributor to an army information sheet. Naturally, George Johnston was a bit of a hero in this genre and when the two met and fell in love there was no looking back. Now her own working class voice blossomed in the shadow of her lover, who strongly  identified with the working classes although he never wrote for them, i.e. his style of writing was of such a calibre that delighted – in the end – the academic and artistic libertarians of Australia. Not so for Charmian Clift, at least in the beginning.

 

As mentioned above, to judge Johnston’s quite far-ranging writerly output one must plough through quite a few volumes, such as Kinnane has done – and has arrived at the judgement that basically only his trilogy merits the term ‘literature’. To check, I did at least venture off into one of Johnston’s ‘other’ novels, namely The Far Road.

 

Since the novel begins with ‘The City of Kunming, West China. The time, early July 1945 …’ we might assume that what follows is at least in some aspects based on historical events. Not knowing much about the theatre of war in West China, one might also reasonably assume that even some of the protagonists are based on historical figures, like the ‘Generalissimo’ Chiang Kai-shek (Johnston uses Cantonese romanization throughout the book), and of course in the knowledge that Johnston served as a war correspondent in China during that time, stationed at times in Kunming. It is not unreasonable to assume that there were war profiteers, like the character Fabian Ling, the ‘banker’ who orchestrates rumours of an imminent Japanese invasion of Kweilin – the city some 1,000 km to the east – with the immediate result of the yuan being devalued to next to nothing, only to be followed up by another communique from Chiang Kai-shek’s henchmen that no such invasion is imminent, with the result that the yuan gains in value … the banker making a cool 7 million USD in the process. Since nothing further is heard about Kweilin, Meredith (aka Johnston) enlists a young American war correspondent, named Bruce Conover - whom we can accept as being fictitious given his appalling behaviour – to drive to Kweilin to find out. When they arrive, the city is deserted and destroyed, only a dying old man tells them that upon the rumour that a Japanese invasion was imminent, the garrison and practically the whole population fled to the next city of Liuchow – some 160 km to the south. A small contingent of the Japanese army actually had arrived and finished off what was left. Hence Meredith and Conover resolve to drive on to Liuchow to find out what happened next. As the ‘far’ road becomes littered with the corpses of the refugees, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, the gruesome journey to Liuchow – with Conover raping a dying young woman along the way – ends with the utterly devastating scenes of the refugees that had made it from Kweilin, and the enlarged population of Liuchow now trying to escape the rumoured Japanese advance, what with the last train leaving the station, people hanging on and dropping off along the way while Meredith and Conover drive back to Kunming – the far road.

 

It is somewhat disconcerting to find out that, historically, nothing of the sort actually happened. A US Army history volume entitled China Offensive tells us that: 

 

In October 1944, provoked by American bomber raids from China on southern Japan, the Japanese began a major offensive to eliminate the airfields used for staging the air attacks. On 11 November, less than two weeks after Wedemeyer's arrival in China, the Japanese Eleventh Army captured Kweilin, 400 miles southeast of Chungking and one of the Fourteenth Air Force's largest bases. The Twenty-Third Army, moving west from the Canton area, seized another air base at Liuchow, 100 miles southwest of Kweilin. From Liuchow the Japanese moved southwest toward Nanning, some 150 miles away. On 24 November the town fell, allowing the Japanese to establish tenuous overland communications across all of eastern Asia between Korea and Singapore. By mid-November many of the major airfields used by the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force and the XX Bomber Command in China had been occupied, and Japanese forces shifted their advance westward toward Kunming and Chungking. Both of these cities were critical: if Kunming fell, the Hump aerial supply line would be cut; if Chungking, Chiang's wartime capital, was lost, the blow to Nationalist prestige and authority might be fatal.

 

Hence both Kweilin and Liuchow had been under Japanese occupation since October 1944. Furthermore both cities were liberated in June/July 1945:

 

On 26 June Chinese forces recaptured the airfield at Liuchow, but sharp fighting ensued as the Chinese attempted to cut the Japanese line of withdrawal near Kweilin, on the railway about one hundred miles north of Liuchow. By the end of July, the Chinese had concentrated sufficient troops in the area for an attack, but the Japanese, the bulk of whom had cleared the area moving north, relinquished the city. As August began, the Japanese had almost completed their redeployment into the areas they intended to defend to the last.

 

Given this historical context it is strange that The Far Road begins, as indicated above, in July 1945. What war correspondents would have covered, is the liberation of Kweilin and Liuchow, and not what Meredith and Conover are said to have encountered. So why did Johnston invent this particular set-up? I suppose, in the first place such a scenario is quite believable in the context of the chaos of the Chinese theatre of WWII where millions of Chinese were sacrificed on the altars of internal political expediency and war profiteering, not to speak of the Japanese atrocities committed against the Chinese. However it seems to me that the main reason for the set-up in The Far Road is to provide a frame for the devastating, personal account of what war-time news reporting is all about. Written long after the war ended, on Hydra in the early 1960s – when Leonard Cohen was around – it is a cathartic reckoning with the nightmares that a war correspondent must have, having traversed the killing fields, discussing the day’s events at the correspondents’ bar, sending off ‘copy’ to the news agencies in metropolitan centres of the world. The whole enterprise of journalism is at stake here: the so-called ‘fourth estate’ that so self-righteously assumes a societal cornerstone to keep the others honest. Johnston as the erstwhile avid practitioner who has the gift of the gab to rattle off ‘copy’ from here and there and everywhere, comes to the realisation that it’s not all what it seems to be: indeed it is a callous, deceptive and often cowardly enterprise to feed the readers at home the equivalent of a fast-food take-away dinner that has no substance, to be washed down with a dose of patriotic balderdash. Johnston/Meredith’s deepest insight is perhaps the observation that as soon as a real event is ‘represented’ (re-presented) in the form of a news story, together with the shots taken with the camera, the connection with the real event is lost. Detachment sets in immediately, and the hunt is on for more of the same. Meredith in his deepest moments of horror actually believes that Conover is literally shooting his victims with a Luger when actually using his camera. This reminds me of the crazy movie with Klaus Kinski in which he uses a camera that has a built in gun to shoot people – and  literally filming their dying moments. On a more sober note The Far Roadcould be a precursor to Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988  Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the seminal book that exposes the often neo-fascist submission to corporate capitalism, the journalists playing the role of useful idiots – knowingly or unknowingly – who disseminate the truth as established by their masters. 

 

Johnston/Meredith’s personal agonies in this chain of events escalate from the twisted corpse of a young woman in the middle of a square in Kweilin, to Conover’s depravity, to an army on all fours digging for ‘juicy’ roots amongst the corpses, to people dropping off the last train … a grim, horrific, gruesome trip on the far road. The ending seems without redemption: ‘But Meredith was staring ahead, blindly staring, and weeping as he drove’. Kinnane (p.193) interprets this as Meredith suffering ‘a mental breakdown’. I read it more as a capitulation, reduced to tears in the face of what the French philosopher Derrida questioned as ‘can one forgive the unforgivable?’. It seems that Johnston throughout his life never surrendered to breaking down, taking Rilke’s dictum to his heart, namely ‘to live is the main thing’. 

 

When first reading the novel one might be irritated by the cliché on the first page of the ‘slit-skirted Chinese girl (sic, my annotation) dancing with O’Flaherty …’ and the subsequent descriptions of such ‘hostesses’ linked with a 92% incidence of ‘VD’, etc., etc. While it seems a fact of life that in war time, soldiers (and war correspondents) and prostitution go together, there seems to be no literary need to dwell on it. Only when we get to the horrific scene when Conover rapes the dying Chinese ‘girl’ on the way to Liuchow, do we begin to understand the message, or at least I do, namely the age-old contradiction of sex as ‘making love’ versus sex as a violent act, i.e. rape. Since Johnston invokes Goya as the artist who best renders the horrific images of war, one might in this context also invoke the various ‘artistic’ (sic) representations of the Rape of the Sabine Women, from the point of view (sic) of the male gaze as if there is an element of the erotic to be seen. Conover’s ‘excuse’ that she was asking for it, even in her diminished state, is of course the oldest and most pathetic excuse ever to be employed. That she was a ‘whore’ by profession – Meredith questions this assertion – is another provocation to be put on the page. Meredith can’t get the image of the corpse out of his mind, as seen in Kweilin, of a young woman left spread-eagled in the dust, most likely violated before her death. Nobody, including Meredith, had the decency to at least turn her over and cover her with a blanket. Is Johnston reinforcing Stalin’s infamous saying that a single death is a tragedy but a million  deaths are a statistic? Conover – Kinnane thinks he is Meredith’s alter ego – is the statistician and the singular perpetrator rolled into one. There are no solutions, no way out except to run, to accelerate down the road lest the wretched death train catches up.

 

According to Kinnane this was Johnston’s first ‘serious’ novel, the precursor to the Brother Jack tribology, as indeed the book is dedicated ‘for Charmian, in earnest’. Kinnane further informs us that Charmian was the one who encourage him to take on the subject in the first place, and that she ‘loved’ the novel when finished. I would have thought that The Far Road is a difficult book to ‘love’, however profound it may be. Some of the introspective passages drag on a bit as the reader wants to know what happened next. As an anti-war book it could rival Nothing New on the Western Frontespecially as it deals with a theatre of war that is not well known in the histories of WWII. To Johnston’s credit, the immense suffering visited upon tens of millions of Chinese peasants is here ‘represented’ with empathy, and with a sense of outrage as to how this could happen.

 

As I write this the war in the Ukraine is raging on, at least as much as I know from the reports in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the TVNZ six-o’clock news. The ‘reporters’ – shall we call them ‘war correspondents’ – show footage of death and destruction and describe the individual tragedies as much as the statistics of the day, e.g. some 15,000 dead soldiers on the Russian side and fewer on the Ukrainian side - which is favoured as the victim of Russian aggression. Are these journalists characters like Meredith and Conover? Since the Russian soldiers are accused of raping Ukrainian civilians, might a journalist also take advantage of what is on offer? Are they all holed up in a swanky hotel in Kyiev having after-hour drinks in the bar downstairs? In the morning, do they don their bullet-proof vests with PRESS emblazoned on them and take off in various army jeeps pretending to be ‘embedded’ with the troops on the front line? The American and British army ‘advisers’ – as in Johnston’s description of them in West China at the time – giving their favoured reporter buddies the lowdown? Is there an army ‘censor’, as in Johnston’s account, through whom all ‘copy’ must pass? More likely today it is Chomsky’s description of corporate media censorship whereby the reporting jobs are given to carefully selected journalists who know what to write and show and what not – what the chief editors in New York and London expect to read and watch. Johnston played this game very well in his early days, sending back patriotic copy so as to keep morale high ‘at home’. In the same vein we are assured daily that the Ukrainian army is bravely resisting the Russian invasion and that they are poised to push them back and recapture lost lands.

 

Kinnane is puzzled and asks ‘What made Johnston suddenly launch an attack on his old profession?’ Apart from the unfortunate military metaphor – something that few writers seem capable to escape from – what is the problem? That Johnston is a whistle blower? I mean, good on Johnston (and Charmian) to expose this sordid business! Kinnane thinks Johnston is a hypocrite, when after finishing the novel he returns to Fleet Street begging for a job. Well, in the first instance Fleet Street didn’t give him a job, and second, when in desperate financial straits – as the Johnstons were at that time – one is forced to sink low (and he didn’t apply for a job as a war correspondent). Presumably the Fleet Street bosses had become suspicious of Johnston who had pursued independence from the strictures of conventional life, suspecting he might not tow the line any more. 

 

It is sad but not surprising to hear that The Far Road was a commercial failure and only sold some 82 copies in Australia. Kinnane (p.195) is brave enough to say that it is a fine novel, deserving more attention than it has so far received. I would certainly endorse this sentiment!

 

In the overall scheme of things I am still puzzled as to what it is that Johnston has written that doesn’t measure up. Should I read his first and second books, Grey Gladiator and Australia at War to get the shock of my life and re-evaluate Johnston as a hack writer? Johnston after all has already re-evaluated himself, most forcefully in The Far Road, so maybe I wouldn’t be surprised at all (I shall report on this matter when the time comes). 

 

Oh, I nearly forgot the 2001 movie version of My Brother Jack. We thought it was a pretty bad adaptation with stilted performances by the actors, maybe with the exception of the guy who played Jack. Must make an attempt to watch the much earlier TV version co-produced by Charmian Clift.

 

 

GRAND CONCLUSIONS

 

Having immersed oneself in this extraordinary saga that is and surrounds the lives of Clift and Johnston, one cannot but help to ask: what next? Join the fan club? Do a literary tourism tour of Kiama? I sort of tried this with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things which was interesting but somewhat disappointing. Do the Hydra thing (including Kalymnos)? Retrace their Europe trip of the 1950s? Check if there are any neo-Nazis writhing in the beer cellars of Heidelberg? Comb through literary archives for yet undiscovered bits and pieces and write another book about it all? Best not to become too obsessive about it. Let us leave them with the observation that it was a most interesting literary exercise, akin to a stretch of physiotherapy, good for body and soul (the latter arising from the former), like transitory travel that broadens the mind, like the psychedelic trips I had in Sydney’s Darlinghurst without rhyme and reason – all grist for a mill that is life. Metaphors we live by? Clift and Johnston and their books I read – and the books about Clift and Johnston – inspired, if not obliged me to enter into this solitary dialogue – call it a re-view. If you happen to read this, I’d certainly encourage you to take it further on your own.

 

 

Some references

 

https://history.army.mil/brochures/chinoff/chinoff.htm

 

Ludvigson, Tom (2005). Kleva : some healers in central Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/07/theres-a-raw-energy-hydra-artists-haven-still-casts-its-spell

 

http://nadiawheatley.com/remembering-martin-johnston