‘Infinite Resources, Secrets, Plans, Schemes’

I am hosting a lecture for a first-year Modernist literature subject; this week we are studying the Imagists. We are in a theatre that resembles an igloo; the space is almost too small for the number of students enrolled in the subject, but it is much too large for the number in attendance. Looming over us on the first slide is a quote from Virginia Woolf. While we wait to begin, our guest lecturer asks me what I have been working on. I tell him I am writing this review, on Charmian Clift’s ‘new’ novel. ‘Fuck!’ he says, ‘You can be dead and still have a new book.’

Better late than never. Clift has, until recently, been under-read and not well known. That her work exists at all is owing to her talent for creating under mean conditions, for working with scraps of time, ‘offcuts’. While The End of the Morning, published last year by UNSW Press, is not entirely new, nor is it entirely a novel, it is part of a much deserved, albeit posthumous, resurrection.

The book, edited by Clift’s devoted biographer, Nadia Wheatley, begins with a fifty-page ‘novella’, which was part of a manuscript for a novel left unfinished when the writer died in July 1969. Included subsequently is an informative afterword from Wheatley, followed by a selection of thirty essays from Clift’s weekly column, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald between 1964 and 1969. These column pieces complement those in Sneaky Little Revolutions, also edited by Wheatley, published by UNSW Press in 2022. This year saw the re-release of Clift’s 1964 novel, Honours Mimic, with an afterword by Wheatley as well. One starts to notice the unfolding of a multi-volume project, aimed at making Clift’s work new again. Each cover is decorated with clean, Aegean-blue type and graphics, and an appropriately meaningful image: a black and white photo of the glamorous author for her selected essays, a Kalymnian port for her lightly veiled account of Australians living on the sponge-diving island. The cover of The End of the Morning features a Ken Searle painting of Bombo Headland, the promontory at the end of wild Bombo Beach (Kiama), depicted in Clift’s works as a paradisical, if lonely, playground and school. Collectively, these new books, their beautiful covers, their inclusion of special forewords, afterwords, and appendices, and of course, the publicity generated for their releases, all speak to the objective of freeing Clift from relegation to the past, of getting us to notice her, of widening her contemporary readership.

As Wheatley writes in her editor’s note, the ‘novella’ component of The End of the Morning was ‘fully revised and complete in itself’. While it stands alone, it also – owing to its brevity – suggests what could have been if only the work had been longer. It’s synecdochic – and teasing. More of the same impressionistic, admiring representations, and Clift’s own arch funniness, her ‘gorgeous’-ness (to use one of the author’s favourite words) is what I am left wanting after the final page. I’m put in mind of another description of Clift, by her granddaughter Gina Chick, winner of Alone Australia 2023: ‘Charmian, my wild, sad, brilliant grandmother, who was born too big for the life she was given’, she writes, in her recently published memoir We Are the Stars.

This sense of an abrupt, cruel curtailment is resonant with what might be deemed the problem with The End of the Morning: there was obviously supposed to be more. And what there is merely hints at Clift’s capacious brilliance and impressive appetite for life. However, in Chick’s foreword to the recent re-edition of her mother’s memoir, Searching for Charmian, she offers a potential remedy as she invokes the resilient creativity that connects her to both mother and grandmother: ‘Wombs are baskets of tears, amphora that crack and spill so their stories can fertilise new life.’ It is in this larger scope of imperfect resourcefulness that The End of the Morning might be best appreciated. For this, Wheatley herself has successfully wasted nothing, as this edition celebrates even the incomplete parts of Clift’s oeuvre.

The End of the Morning, the never-before published autobiographical story Clift had worked on for years, is the origin story of her own cleverness and pluck. Telling the story is Clift’s alter ego, Cressida ‘Cress’ Morley. Those who have read George Johnston’s 1964 novel My Brother Jack will recognise the name: Cressida is the captivating young gunner who, in a brief fifteen-page appearance, steals the heart of the hero, David Meredith, Johnston’s own alter ego. The bleed between fiction and real life was an ongoing feature of both Clift’s and Johnston’s works; the pair married in 1947 after commencing an affair the year prior, and they shared a tumultuous creative as well as romantic partnership. Johnston’s ruthless depiction of Clift’s infidelity in the novel’s sequel, Clean Straw for Nothing, has long thought to have been the trigger for her fatal overdose in 1969, just before the book’s publication.

The character of Cressida was a gift from Clift to Johnston during their early, consenting collaboration. But Clift’s own Cressida appears as an endearing, predictably overlooked middle child in this novella, through which she draws us into the Great Depression of the 1930s, vividly sketching her eccentric family and celebrating the coastal, bushy beauty of Lebanon Bay, a fictionalised Kiama. The opening paragraphs envelope us in the perpetual morning and its horizons, which Cress maps as a ‘celestial dome’. With this, the novella signals itself as a work of ascension, transforming the crude into the divine. The ‘morning dome’, Cress tells us,  

The boundaries of this enchanting idyll, so lushly described, so breathily and thoroughly detailed, are enforced by the quarry whistle, marking the titular ‘end of the morning’. At this time, Cress has the honour of bringing her father, the quarry-master, the ‘crib-tin’ her mother has lovingly prepared: ‘with its hot shepard’s pie or cauliflower cheese, its small glass jars of salad and cold butter and creamy rice pudding, packed according to ritual, covered with a napkin, and delivered by hand.’

Like a glass display dome, this novella appears forever destined to centre and cherish what is objectively small or mundane, while at the same time straying from and straining at the ends of that time and place, gesturing to what is beyond – the afternoon, the evening, the rest of the manuscript. The Morley family’s house, a wooden cottage, is at once ‘the last house of the town’ and it is ‘the centre of the world’; ‘It was obviously the end, rather than the beginning of somewhere,’ Cress precociously declares.

The grandeur of the quarry site stands in contrast to the eccentric Morley family’s delightfully humble and nurturing home; Cress recalls its ‘majestic working face’, ‘an irregular arc of blue basalt shafts so immense, so straight, so awesomely aspiring that they seemed to have been hewn and placed with deliberation and intelligence to support the crust of the earth’. There is no apparent dismay at the destructiveness of this industry, which is perhaps in keeping with the sensibility of a child narrator. Cress is unreservedly impressed by the muscle at work here and its match for the big, swelling sea, not to mention the imposing image of her distant and demanding ‘corrugated father’, ‘whose outline thrummed against the stern shafts of rock that towered beyond’.

But even as masculine toil supplies the frame for Cress’ childhood, more narratorial attention is devoted to describing women’s work, especially the unyielding creative industry of Cress’ mother. Never given a name, the mother shields her children from knowing the truth of their limited means, encouraging her children ‘to escape’ their circumstances. Our narrator reflects, 

Their mother manages the family’s money, and though pages are spent marvelling at the logistics of how this was spent and saved, Clift affords her an alchemic ability to turn cheap butchers’ cuts (bargained for) into ‘wonderful stews and curries and ragouts’, and to provide always ‘two courses for dinner and in winter usually three’. There is a visceral sense of nostalgia for these juvenile days of private, relative luxury in the almost ekphrastic depiction of the family’s dining table, ‘opulent’ with dishes comprising too the spoils of her father’s hunting and foraging ventures (fresh fish, lobster, ‘a bag of rabbits to be jugged or baked, billycans of blackberries for pies and jams, baskets of mushrooms for sauces and garnishings’). What the narrator is describing isn’t itself glamorous; she remembers that ‘if every leftover was saved and brought to the table again in a different disguise God knows we didn’t complain’; rather the meals she describes are products of a ‘creativeness’ and ‘ambition’ both outside and inside the home, in spite of, or perhaps to spite, financial precarity and looming poverty. And Clift has an eye, a little like Enid Blyton’s, for transforming ration-era meals once more through their translation into prose, so that they look, smell and sound entirely ‘gorgeous’. And perhaps in part because this brief novella covers only what Cress calls ‘the morning years’, it is wholly nostalgic, comforting and aspirational; it is all hopeful and expectant promise. ‘Oh, I would be clever all right’, Cress remembers thinking, after overhearing her parents speculate that her beautiful older sister wasn’t quite so intelligent as she. ‘That was going to be my specialty.’ And indeed it was. Clift’s collective body of work, comprised variously of novels, essays, memoirs – not to mention screenplays and all the ‘collaboration’ undertaken with and for work attributed solely to Johnston – presents an unconventional yet confident and charming presentation of herself, an intriguing proto-autofiction.   

The placement of Clift’s essays for the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Herald after the novella and Wheatley’s informative afterword indicates they are secondary material, to fill out the edition and make it more saleable. But for me they remain primary; it is too difficult to be content with Clift’s sliver of a story in and of itself when her style evokes bounty and largesse on a mythic scale, even as her focus remains mostly on the quotidian and domestic.

In one piece published 30 June 1966, Clift writes about the pleasure of displaying a Rembrandt in her kitchen on Hydra, where she and Johnston lived for most of their decade-long residence on the Greek Islands. How she came to possess the drypoint etching is itself an act of keen-eyed resourcefulness worthy of Cress’ mother – she spied it one day in an antique shop in Bloomsbury, a minor nick to the plate rendering it worthless to a collector. ‘Since I am just as prone to snobbishness as anyone else,’ she writes, ‘it has given me great pleasure to keep my Rembrandt in the kitchen […] for many years my opulent and exotic guest occupied a space on a whitewashed wall mid-way between a plaited rope of garlic and an old copper ladle.’

The Johnstons spent every bit of their contingency fund to buy the place, which would come to be known fondly, by locals and visitors alike, as the ‘Australian House’. With plaited garlic and copper ladle purposefully displayed as objets trouvés, Clift anticipated the ‘Peasant Vogue’ of the 1970s, an aesthetic she captures vividly when recounting a visitor’s remark about it being ‘pretty high camp to keep a Rembrandt in the kitchen’. Belatedly, she issues a rejoinder:  

‘Private luxury – a very personal talisman’. That sense again, of luxury in hiding, of the magical powers required to bring it forth.  One is reminded of another kitchen, in the spindly, yellow, damp, rented house on Kalymnos, which Clift describes in her 1956 memoir, Mermaid Singing: ‘Although my kitchen at first seemed to me as primitive as a fire stick, I soon realised from the envy of my neighbours that it was in fact the Kalymnian equivalent of an all-electric, I had two charcoal grates! And a kerosene burner as well!’ That which is ‘primitive’ or ‘camp’ to the undiscerning eye is revealed to be the reverse. A kerosene burn, then, to the rude ‘gentleman’ who failed to appreciate her kitchen artistry. 

Clift’s numerous acts of domestic curation and display, which she thoroughly inventories throughout her writing, are poetic and transcendent, the magical potential she locates in the Rembrandt repeating across her descriptions of food and interiors. Another essay, ‘On a Cluttered Mantelpiece’, patiently carries out a survey of the objects that have accumulated on its ledge. Despite the ‘lean, clean, and dramatic’ effect she usually aspires to, she celebrates the space as an altar for trinkets, ephemera and the messiness of family life. In another piece, ‘A Sense of Property’, she recounts falling in love with a shabby brick house located on what she deems to be wrong side of the harbour, for its being ‘just natural and friendly and quite unapologetic at being a bit seedy and out at the elbows and knees and not being able to produce a spectacular view. In fact it wasn’t a house to look out of, but to live in.’ Mermaid Singing devotes pages to learning Greek cooking from the local Kalymnian women, and their ability to turn the simplest ingredients into indulgence.

In a piece for The New Yorker, Joan Didion, a contemporary of Clift, once dissected what she termed Martha Stewart’s ‘protean competence’: 

Clift was homemaking in the fifties, but her accounts of domesticity at home and abroad read more like this later, Martha-style, almost greedy 1980s incarnation of ‘having it all’, which really only meant dissolving the borders between profession and home, art and craft. Promulgating life and lifestyle as artistry, and as a subject worthy of writerly attention, Clift generally ascribes to an aesthetic more rustic than Martha’s. But in a photograph of Martha in her kitchen at Turkey Hill in the nineties, one observes an abundance of peasant-vogue, nigh-witchy talismans: countless copper pots and straw baskets hung from the ceiling, a bounty of freshly cut wildflowers and Tuscan kale, and a Persian cat with fur a shade just shy of black perched on the counter. This shared penchant for a kind of homespun, pastoral sensibility is anything but provincial; it is curated and artful. The powers cast by Clift and Martha are, to use that word again, alchemic, in their magical transformation of unassuming objects into art. One is reminded of another portrait of Cress’ mother from The End of the Morning: ‘High priestess she was then, in drab print shapeless dress and horny toenails and bunion decently covered by sagging lisle stockings and rundown court shoes, transmuting ordinary substances such as butter and flour and fish heads and vegetables and bloody scrags of meat into another sort of poetry, or communion, or grace.’ 

In her essay about the Rembrandt, Clift discusses how luxury is relative: ‘I’ve never had a room of my own […] or a favourite sweater that didn’t end up being communal to whoever could get into it […] But a huge parcel of books has just arrived, and the Nolans have finally been reframed quite gorgeously and hung above the sofa.’ She writes this clearly taking pleasure in her own ever so casual reference to ‘the Nolans’. Sidney and Cynthia were dear friends of the Johnstons and resided during the same period on Hydra, in a cliff-top house. 

All this for a girl from Kiama. The talismanic potential of the personal, even shabby luxury that Clift appreciates is self-engineered, stemming from her good taste and frugal wiles; it’s in the discernment to spot the master’s etching in the dark corner of the antique shop, and in the charisma to attract talented friends, so that Sidney Nolan might lend you his work for display in your home, and so Leonard Cohen might call you ‘an inspiration’ – a compliment prefaced by the reflection that, on Hydra, Clift and Johnston ‘drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more’. 

If we turn over Clift’s allusion to Woolf’s famous insistence, we might find that her lack of a private, designated writing space isn’t a loss, so much as a deliberate configuration of her own creativity as central and always communal. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf remarks that though Jane Austen had no study ‘to repair to’, and that ‘most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions’, this was also the source of Austen’s material and perspicacity. Woolf notes, ‘all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes.’

Clift’s prioritisation of the kitchen as a space worthy of ornamentation, and her reorganisation of it as synchronously a site of women’s work and a social space (especially at a time when Australian domestic architecture segregated the kitchen and living areas), ensured that the cook and writer, the creator, would be visible, in fact, the star of the show. And she would miss nothing.

Clift’s capacity to document, admire and transform, demonstrated in both the content and form of her writing, aligns with what Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life identified as ‘tactic’, ‘hunter’s cunning’ or to use a Greek term, mētis, that is the eye for ‘opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”’: 

In Clift’s column dated 27 May 1965, ‘What Price Rubies?’ she casts a backwards glance at what she has understood women’s work to be since childhood, and contemplates the contemporary rise of wives and mothers undertaking tertiary education and entering paid professions. At first, a little romantically, she recalls the pre-industrial era:

This is contrasted with her reflection on ‘how lonely it is’ to be a present-day housewife.

Wheatley cautions in her notes, ‘In order to understand the radicalism of this piece, it must be remembered that Second Wave Feminism did not reach Australia until about 1970.’ Clift did not live to see this emergence, but it’s with cleverness indeed that she gently and non-judgementally, ultimately progressively, revises her own sense of the seemingly loaded Biblical proverb, ‘A virtuous woman who can find? For her price is far above rubies.’ The greatest virtues for Clift are resourcefulness and generosity; she registers these qualities in her accounts of both the pre-industrial and the new woman, and there’s a pleasing place carved therein for herself as a writer with ingenuity and muscle enough to turn impoverished living conditions into that which is vogue, ostensibly banal subject matter into gorgeous prose, and one fragment of a life’s story into a picture complete in itself.