Charmian Clift was ahead of her time. That much is clear. What she wrote decades ago still sparkles with clarity and vigour. But learning what she couldn't write leaves a lingering sense of literary injustice that befell a woman who came and went too soon.
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Clift, born in Kiama 1923, is the subject of frequent rediscovery. Even in her lifetime her books were being described as neglected masterpieces, having fallen quickly out of print. Writing some of the best Australian essays for newspapers did not help either, more likely as they were to end up under the budgie cage than in the canon.
More than a century after her birth, Clift has been afforded her moment. The books she wrote about her time living on Hydra, the Greek island, with her husband and fellow writer George Johnston, and their children, are again readily available. The essays - she called them pieces - which appeared in the Heralds of Sydney and Melbourne in the second half of the '60s are back in print in an excellent collection prepared by her biographer, Nadia Wheatley.
And this April marked the appearance, for the first time, of The End of the Morning, the fragment of an unfinished novel drawn from Clift's Kiama childhood, on the NSW south coast.
Wheatley, who edited the fragment and selected a clutch of essays to accompany it that take up most of the pages of the finished volume, believes it is a novella capable of standing on its own.
Reading The End of the Morning, I was left with a great sense of loss. These 50 or so pages are a market of a great missed opportunity in Australian writing. Here is the start of an impossible novel that would have been devastatingly good.
The novel Johnston drew from his childhood and beyond has become an Australian classic. Clift herself referred to My Brother Jack as the Great Australian Novel. Published in 1964, it was the result of a very close collaboration between Johnston and Clift. (Johnston's novels improved markedly once he began writing side by side with Clift, whether they shared the credit or not.)
The pair had begun an affair when they were on the staff of The Argus, a Melbourne broadsheet. Clift was sacked and Johnston resigned in protest; after a period in Sydney, they headed for Europe.
My Brother Jack, written in Greece, brought them back to Australia. And it introduced, right near the end, the reading public to Cressida Morley, Clift's fictional alter ego.
"I invented her first," Clift told the Commonwealth Literary Fund in a 1968 application for support to complete The End of the Morning. She added: "There are 150 pages done, but might need to be re-done. And I know the last sentence."
The 20,000 words which have been published are completed in the same sprightly, clear prose of Clift's ever-perfect essays. Cressida Morley comes completely into view, telling the story of her mother and father, her brother and sister, living in the last workers' cottage of the row in the settlement just north of Kiama.
The end of the morning comes when the quarry whistle blows to mark the knock off. The Morley children enjoy a kind of free-wheeling childhood that may now be impossible and almost forgotten. All hopes are pinned on Cordelia, the eldest sister, while Cressida and Ben make their own way. Their mother dreams of living in town while their father bends reality around himself as he sees fit. He's a quintessential big personality.
The fragment comes to an end with that part of Cressida's childhood. Opportunities beyond Kiama beckon. The world is about to open up, just as it did for Charmian Clift.
If this is just a fragment, it is astonishing to consider what Clift would have achieved with a complete novel. But finishing it was never going to be easy. She gave it up to focus on the newspaper pieces, and caring for Johnston. Clift was also keeping a dark secret.
There was a year in the 1940s Clift always fudged when she laid out her own timeline. She had fallen pregnant during the war and given birth to an illegitimate child, whom she gave up for adoption.
This experience - traumatic, heart-breaking and then the source of deep and complex shame - illuminates the stories and subsequent myths of Clift's life. The details in her autobiographical fiction may be adjusted from life, but Clift's achievement as a writer is her essential honesty about herself.
It's hard not to think that being unable to write about having to give up a child for adoption as a young, unmarried mother during a war that challenged gender roles, but only up to a point, meant Clift was unable to finish The End of the Morning. Clift died by suicide in 1969, the manuscript left incomplete.
Wheatley is right: The End of the Morning can stand alone as it is. But part of its quietly beautiful effect comes from it being unresolved. Clift had more to say and was never able to. Cressida Morley's story was told by Johnston in his own, incidentally unfinished, autobiographical trilogy. This, too, feels unfair: Clift's Cressida was set to be much more than an unfaithful wife.
Though they are too few, each sentence in The End of the Morning is perfect. I have no doubt the one Clift had in mind to end it would have been too.
- The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift, edited by Nadia Wheatley. NewSouth. 240pp. $34.99.
Jasper Lindell
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
