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Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (1940)

Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.

And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”

She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:

This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.

Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”

How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.

Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.

But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.

Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”

Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.

One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:

Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.

Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:

After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.

If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.

Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:

After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.

(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.

Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.

Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.

Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:

While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.

“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.

No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.

Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.

Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.

Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.

Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers)
London: Peter Davies, 1940

Undercurrent, by Barbara Jefferis (1953)

Cover of US edition of Undercurrent
When Miss Doxy, the spinster at center of Barbara Jefferis’ novel Undercurrent, sits down to breakfast in her boarding house dining room, she notices a strange man sitting at a table near the door. “They have so much,” she thinks. “So much money, so much power, so many people. They can change their man three times a day if it suits them.” As she travels by train to work this morning, she sees the man on the platform of a station along the way: “Clever to use a car and pick up the train two stations ahead of where she had caught it.”

She is being followed, of course. The reason is clear: her work involves the care of important documents, highly sensitive material related to a secret project underway at Duncan & Son, a consulting engineering firm. The consulting part is just a shell designed to hide the real work going on in the laboratory. Something of profound importance, more important than the atomic bomb itself.

Miss Doxy spends much of her time in reflection, remembering her happy times with her beloved Papa and her misery suffering the unjust torments of her hated mother. Papa was a talented and charming man, misunderstood by his wife. Only Miss Doxy — Blossom — understands and comforts him. He needs a lot of comforting, usually in the mornings after he goes off for one of his long nightly walks.

Through her reflections and her interactions with people at work, Jefferis gradually and deftly reveals Miss Doxy as profoundly disturbed — a functional but deeply traumatized schizophrenic. While showing us the world through her strident and conspiracy-filled eyes, Jefferis also gives us glimpses of the mundane realities of which her grasp is quickly slipping.

Undercurrent is a lean, efficient novel, a tight and satisfying entertainment — barely 150 pages, and hardly a word out of place from start to finish. This may be explained by the fact that Jefferis wrote the book — her first — in the space of three weeks to compete for a prize offered by the Sydney Morning Herald for the best unpublished novel. She shared the award but was unable to find an Australian publisher interested in the book. So she contacted publishers in the U.K. and U.S. and sold the book to J.M. Dent in London and William Sloane Associates in New York. Dent published the book with its original title, Contango Day, which is a term used on the London and Sydney stock exchanges for second day before payment of a contango debt — a debt incurred from paying a higher futures price for a commodity than it ends up selling at (its spot price) — is due. As much as the title might offer an analogy for Miss Doxy’s situation, I’d have to say Sloane made the right choice in changing.

Undercurrent, by Barbara Jefferis
New York: William Sloane Associates, 1953
As Contango Day
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1953

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest (1959)

Cover of first edition of David Forrest was the pen-name of Australian writer, academic and historian David Denholm (1924-1997). Among his numerous works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed history, The Colonial Australians about the early white settlement of the country, were a few novels. The Last Blue Sea, published in 1959, was his first. The book drew considerably praise and attention when released in Australia and the US. However, the novel went out of print by the early 1970s and was then largely forgotten. Penguin Books Australia published a reprint in
1985 but the book has remained off the shelves since.

Forrest, a veteran himself of WW2, fought with the 59th Battalion of the Australian Army in New Guinea in 1943. That unit, although it had fought as a regular formation in the First World War, had been down-graded to a part-time reservist (militia) unit during the inter-war years. When the Second World War began, the 59th was re-assembled as a militia force. During the war, such militia units, comprised of conscripts and a smaller number of part-time reservists, formed a large part of the Australian army after 1942.

During the war, there was considerable animosity between the militia units and the men of the AIF (Australian Imperial Force), the latter comprising the volunteers who enlisted in the early part of the war. With some justification, the AIF units regarded themselves as better-trained, more professional and more motivated than the Militia men, whom the former nick-named “Chockos” i.e., chocolate soldiers who always melted under fire. There was no doubt that some militia formations deserved their poor reputations, especially those that remained garrisoned in Australia and were rife with in-discipline, desertions and poor morale. Yet some militia units performed remarkably well in the New Guinea Campaign, most famously at Kokoda in 1942. One can say “remarkably” considering the often poor training, lack of equipment and indifferent leadership many militia units were burdened with (some men arrived in New Guinea literally never having fired a rifle before).

With this background in mind, Forrest’s novel depicts a Militia unit—the 83rd battalion—in the campaign in eastern New Guinea in 1943 as US and Australian forces advance northwards, slowly pushing back the Japanese. The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of characters, including the battalion’s senior officers. But the primary focus is on one platoon and, in particular, on one of its’ sections comprising a Corporal and eight privates.

If the novel has any main characters, they would be two privates, 19-year-old Ron Fisher, a Bren-gunner and 26-year-old Robert “the Admiral” Nelson, a former schoolteacher and now an Owen (Australian-made sub-machine-gun) gunner. Nelson, the oldest of the section, has the fatherly role of the group. Yet even he, with his worldly wisdom, appears in awe of Fisher, an enigmatic figure, mature far beyond his years and whose background is only hinted at but indicates that he survived a tough childhood and is now a man that understands life more than many men twice his age.

The platoon engages the Japanese in the steaming, thickly forested steep slopes of New Guinea. The enemy, under-supplied and starving, fight desperately and with suicidal courage. In this struggle, there is no quarter, the enemy is never examined close-up, he remains a distant, hated figure. The militia men have to endure the taunts and insults from their AIF cousins. As the platoon advances through a ruined town, watching them are some AIF commandoes who snort with contempt “any battle they start, we have to finish.” The army is on a race against time, not just against the enemy but against the jungle and its climate. The campaign must be won before too many men succumb to malaria and before their rotting uniforms literally fall from their bodies.

The potential weaknesses of the militia is personified in one soldier of the section, private “Nervous” Lincoln who deserts early in the campaign but is caught and returned to his unit. He nearly makes it through to the very end of the advance before succumbing to his fear. To modern eyes, this might redeem him but as far as his comrades are concerned, “they would remember all their lives that Lincoln was not with them.” A major theme of the novel is the meaning to human existence that can be discovered by the endurance of hardship and danger. The Pacific Ocean (the “last blue sea” of the title) becomes a symbol as it slowly, tantalisingly becomes nearer as the exhausted soldiers advance through the jungle against the surviving enemy. A symbol of promise, of peace, of a just reward for hardship, sacrifice and duty. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that faint-hearted types like Lincoln were the exception, not the rule. “Their uniforms were rotting and falling apart, but their weapons were spotlessly clean.”

The novel explores the inner musings of the characters. In this, it anticipates such a device employed in the 1998 war movie The Thin Red Line although Forrest’s novel is not as dreamily lyrical as that film. Like all war novels published prior to the 1970s, there is a curious lack of coarse language, a reflection of the need to satisfy censors of the day. One critic did suggest that the novel’s depiction of Australian soldiers lacked the cheeky humour that they were known for, saying the Aussies in this novel are “way too serious and philosophical” in their manner. That might be unfair, given that these half-trained soldiers had been sent to one of the harshest terrains of the war against one of the most fanatical enemies, so a sombre mood might be understandable. In one later scene, Nelson, now a walking wounded case, is sent back to the rear accompanied by a younger injured soldier. The two crippled men have to climb a forested mountain, through clinging mud and steaming rain, their wounds crawling with infection. Seeing that the younger man’s will and strength is failing, Nelson saves him by goading him, “Didn’t you have to fight for anything, Jonesy? Was life just dished out to you on a silver plate?”

In another scene during the long trek back, Nelson says to Jones, “You can make this mountain mean something. I climbed a mountain once. When I was your age. And then I wasted the next seven years. You see, I should have gone on and climbed the next mountain. Only when I was over the first one, I sat down. I had to come to New Guinea to wake up to myself ….”

The Last Blue Sea remains curiously little-known in Australia, despite the lavish attention bestowed on this nation’s military history. It is one Australian novel that deserves a fresh audience.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest
Melbourne: Heinemann, 1959

Christina Stead recommends a “Romance of Tasmania”

Melbourne University Press edition of The Escape of the Notorious Sir William HeansIn a letter to poet and dramatist Ettore Rella that appears in Talking into the Typewriter: Selected Letters (1973-1983), Christina Stead recommends a long-forgotten novel by Australian writer William Hay first published in 1918:

I have just finished a a truly remarkable novel that probably will not come your way: The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans (and the Mystery of Mr. Daunt) [which Hay subtitled “A Romance of Tasmania”] (that is the title) by author William Hay — British-born Australian author (died in 1945), writing about the penal settlement days in Tasmania (one of our worst convict settlements, that of Port Arthur). Given to me by friend-novelist Patrick White: he so greatly admires it that he “keeps buying it and giving it away.” This magnificent writer is a most serious deepdyed scholar, student of the epoch and his work is a sort of epic, an Inferno, not the usual horror-story of beatings and killings in prison (though he mentions it once or twice) but the story of an English gentleman sent to the Tasmanian penal settlement for “abduction”; and his life there — he is relatively well-treated, because of his station and his manners and dress which he keeps up with difficulty but without decline, until his escape; and this finickiness is an outward sign, not of vanity, but of his resolution. After two failures (accidental misfortune) he does escape and his escape with the help of some others (an aboriginal woman, a “lady” woman and even her husband, a prison architect) over the “goblin hills” (high dangerous heavily wooded and “paved” with the skeletons of previous escapees who could not find food in that unfamiliar bushland) is a real heart-teaser, you can hardly stand the tension; but it is also, one at once recognises, an ascent from Avernus. (But alas poor Sir William, all his friends are in Aervnus; and he goes to live in Dieppe — the closest he can get to England, the country that tossed him out to prison and exile.) It is done with great thought, painful solitary thought and the sensitivity of a “gentleman” — for the writer was, too. The women are beautifully, delicately treated. One of his wonders is his extraordinary use of the human face as a stage for conflicting emotions — often all at once! And for this play, these plays, his wonderful adjectives. Very fine writing…. No more on that. I would have you read the book, if you ever got a copy from me. I’ll look around. Should be able to get it here in sacred Erewhon [she was living in Australia].

Here are a few extracts to illustrate the strong prose and narrative drive of this remarkable novel.

On faces:

It is strange how the world will give a man a second chance — especially if he be a good-looking one. This perennial instance of man’s patience is no more evident in our male clubs and criminal courts than in the cabinets of the women. Sir William Heans’ crime — his sin — which we shall touch on most briefly hereafter, and the committing of which had pushed him from the places that he loved into exile and boredom in a wild island at the bottom of the world — his sin seemed like to have been forgiven him by certain of his new acquaintances…. This had not arisen from a rumour which had arrived with him … but from the far more potent argument of his good health and handsome face.

…

Steel-hard was Mr. Daunt; vigilant, regretful, deadly, a little sharp, a little careful, a little old. You would hardly have known him for other than a gentleman, in very difficult company, keeping himself on the civil side, except that upon the bottom of his face there was a smile-like contraction of the muscles, such as people have, they say, who have expired of thirst. It seemed involuntary. Perhaps he was trying to smile kindly. But that was not the significance of it as seen in conjunction with the vigilant eyes.

And the first moments of Sir William’s escape through the streets of Port Arthur:

He passed several people, and the face of one which he saw advancing right on him gave him a heavy pang. It was that of the small police sergeant who a year ago had ushered him into the waiting-room of Franklin’s audience-chamber: the man like a half-drawn knife. He was in smart cords and clawhammer and eyed him and his saddle with just a ghost of steely interest. He passed, however, without stopping him, and Sir William, on his part, threw him from his vision with a remarkable calm. Near the end of the street, he passed also, very down on his luck, a fellow with whom he had played at Fraser’s: a man who was remarkable for staring at each of the company in turn, and for long intervals, and saying never a word. He was aware that this gentleman stopped and stared after him disturbingly….

About the cart, as he looked, came the troublesome fellow on the restive horse. Heans stood there for a moment and stared steadily at this rider. He was a handsome man, with quite a Byronical air, a fine thin face, and prettily groomed whiskers. He came nobly and abstractedly along the road. He seemed younger than Sir William had supposed: not more than thirty to thirty-five years. Sir William did not think that he was particularly observed by him; nevertheless, he turned away with an unquiet heart-beat. A few yards on along the footpath was Six’s curio shop, and before he quite knew what he had done, he was standing before it, and looking at the prints and pieces of brass and copper. He there endeavoured to win back his calm of mind. Immediately, over the white glass behind, he saw Henry Six himself, his head a little bowed and the newspaper in his hand. For a flash Heans hesitated, but decided to wait again till the rider had passed by.

He waited five-six minutes. A horse with a vehicle passed down, but no hoofs passed up. He waited another three, four, five. Six continued to read his paper. No horseman went by. He now stole a glance southward. He immediately felt a sense of relief, for he could not see his sheep-like follower among the stockmen or by the wagon, and believed he had gone at last by his right-hand turning. He was mistaken, however, for on turning to look behind him, he recognised not the rider, but not far down his fine roan, held by a tout before a warehouse. Here were Six’s brass and copper baubles, here was poor Six sunk in his paper, and yonder was the horse, now singularly familiar even to its green forehead-band. Sir William examined each for a brief while; shifted his saddle to his left arm; and continued slowly up the north hill.

The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans (and the Mystery of Mr. Daunt) is also available on the Internet Archive: Link.

The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans (and the Mystery of Mr. Daunt), by William Hay
London: Allen & Unwin, 1918

Snake, by Kate Jennings (1997)

Cover of US edition of "Snake"Snake is a tight short novel about two people who come at their marriage from very different directions.

Everybody likes you. A good man. Decent. But disappointed. Who wouldn’t be? That wife. Those children.

Your wife. You love and cherish her. You like to watch her unobserved, through a window, across a road or a paddock, as if you were a stranger and knew nothing about her. You admire her springy hair, slow smile, muscled legs, confident bearing. If this woman were your wife, your chest would swell with pride.

She is your wife, she despises you. The coldness, the forbearing looks, the sarcastic asides, they are constant. She emasculates you with the sure blade of her contempt. The whirring of the whetstone wheel, the strident whine of steel being held to it, that is the background noise to the nightmare of your days.

Just 157 pages long with 77 chapters, some no more than a paragraph long, Snake is a novel distilled to a series of moments across a twenty-year relationship, and goes down as strong and biting as a good whiskey. Setting her story in a dry land of farms where drought and dust sometimes leech the life out of all living things, Jennings also reduces her words to lean, sinewy lines: “She chewed on the injustice of it like a dog with a piece of hide”; “Irene always said nobody could read thoughts; they were the only things that were truly your own”; “These were people so certain of their own superiority they need not remark on it; in their complacency, they resembled well-stuffed sofas.”

Snake is one of just two novels written by Kate Jennings. Moral Hazard (2002) is equally brief, with a similar structure of pithy chapters. It draws upon Jennings’ experiences of working as a corporate speechwriter to help pay for care for her husband, graphic designer Bob Cato, who developed Alzheimer’s, and now seems prescient in its depiction of the risk-heedless appetites of Wall Street that led to the crash of 2008.

Both Snake and Moral Hazard are available via OpenLibrary.org.

Snake, by Kate Jennings
Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1997

Eve Langley

peapickers

My horizon has been widened in the last few months thanks to Jane Gleeson-White’s Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works (2011), which introduced me to the wealth of interesting Australian writers beyond the ones I’d been aware of (Stead, Patrick White, Miles Franklin). Easy the most intriguing book discussed by Gleeson-White is Eve Langley’s 1942 novel, The Pea Pickers, which she describes as “a raucous romp through the Victorian countryside in praise of Australia, and a voyage through the passions of a young woman with the soul of a poet determined to live by her own elusive law.” Novelist Georgia Blain proclaims it “a wonderful book, absurd, hilariously funny, messy, anarchic; the kind of book that so rarely gets published.”

Yet Gleeson-White’s biographical sketch of Eve Langley was even more intriguing. She wrote the novel while pregnant with her third child, entered it into a competition for unpublished works by Australian and New Zealand writers and won, but was committed to a psychiatric hospital before the book was published. Released seven years later, she took to wearing men’s clothes and had her name changed legally to Oscar Wilde. She spent her last years in conditions no better than a bag lady and was found dead in her shack in 1974. A little more digging turned up a 1989 biography, The Importance of Being Eve Langley, by Joy L. Thwaite. Drawn heavily from Langley’s own diaries and letters, it looked like an interesting read, and I sent off for a copy from a dealer in Australia.

importance of being eve langleyIn some ways, I found The Importance of Being Eve Langley even more remarkable than The Pea Pickers — even though the novel is utterly unlike any book written by a woman I’ve ever read. Langley seems never to have stopped writing, even when she was confined in the mental hospital. As Thwaite puts it, both of Langley’s two published books were taken from the “diaries, letters, poems, and jottings from her interminable stock of scribblings,” and this output flowed on to at least ten other unpublished books. Yet, as Thwaite observes early on, “It is never wise to trust absolutely in Langley’s voice.” Whether or not she was mentally ill, Langley was certainly prone to wild flights of imagination and appears to have had a relatively loose understanding of what other people would consider normal behavior.

Langley was born in at a cattle station in New South Wales in 1904. Her father was an itinerant farm worker who died when Eve was still a girl, and her mother raised Eve and her sister June while managing a small hotel in Crossover, a small town in Victoria. Although Eve’s education was incomplete, she was, as her biography Joy L. Thwaite, puts it, “a precocious and omniverous reader, a weaver of tales, a haunter of libraries.” By the time she was 20, one of her favorite amusements was to imagine herself the incarnation of some great writer she had been reading, such as John Keats or Francois Rabelais. Eve herself only half-jokingly referred to her reading as a medical treatment: “My early arnicas of Mathew Arnold, small balsams of Wide, Rabelaisian cauterizers, Shavian foments and Shakespearean liniments.”

She had also formed an extravagant passion for Gippsland, the rural area of Victoria where her mother had been raised, and in 1924, she convinced her sister June to head out with her for Gippsland in hopes of getting work picking peas. “Now that we’re going to Gippsland, we said, we must put off our feminine names for ever,” declares the narrator in The Pea Pickers. And, as in the book, Eve and June dressed up in men’s overalls and took to calling themselves “Steve” and “Blue.”

Eve and June Langley in their pea-picker guises as Steve and Blue
Eve and Jane Langley in their pea-picker guises as Steve and Blue
Over the next four years, Steve and Blue made annual trips to Gippsland during the growing season, traveling from farm to farm, living in tents and earning poverty wages hoeing and picking crops. For Langley, the experience seems to have been more like a personal transformation than a youthful adventure. “At some part of the journey, my hereditary Gippsland mind awoke. It was a totally different apparatus to my Dandenongian mind,” she would later write in The Pea Pickers (Dandenong being the fictional stand-in for Crossover).

Eve tried to make a go as a farmer herself, but was too likely to become diverted by her reading and writing to keep a successful crop going. In 1932, she moved to Auckland, New Zealand, where June and her mother had settled. She began getting poems published in literary magazines, but also had a disastrous affair with an Italian car salesman that resulted Eve becoming pregnant and giving the child up for adoption.

Several years later, she became infatuated with an artist named Hilary Clark. Clark was eleven years younger than her and more interested in men than women, but the two ended up marrying and Eve had three children by him over the next four years. (Their names were Bisi Arilev, Langley Rhaviley and Karl Marx.) They were separated and she was keeping the first two children in squalid conditions and pregnant with the third when she began writing The Pea Pickers. She typed it on cheap paper a friend had given her and couldn’t afford to buy a new ribbon when the text began to be illegible. Nevertheless, she finished the book and mailed it off to Sydney as an entry for the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize competition.

At Sydney publishers Angus and Robertson, a very large package containing a manuscript by “Gippsland Overlander” (the competition required all entries be submitted under pseudonyms) arrived in June 1940. As Jacqueline Kent writes in her biography of one of A&R’s most influential editors, Beatrice Davis: Backroom Girl of Modern Literature, “It was an editor’s nightmare — typed in single space on flimsy pink paper with a faded ribbon, words drifting off the edge of the page….”

Yet the readers quickly recognized that this was a novel of unique energy, language, and imagery. Langley’s descriptions of the Gippsland countryside, the sunrises and sunsets, the smells on the breeze were of exceptional intensity. At the same time, the headstrong personalities of Steve and Blue, never quite blending with those of the other farm workers, made for some wonderful absurd human comedy — as in this scene, when Steve and Macca, the man for whom she’s formed an overwhelming passion, go to bed for the first time.

We tiptoed into the hut and lay decorously on the bed. Excited by the events of the night, I tossed beside him and could not sleep. I wished to talk of verse and cry out passages of the Aeneid all night. He began to breathe with a monotonous regularity, slowly and evenly, opposing my short passionate breath. His calm animal sound maddened me, at last. I could not bear it. I appeared to be breathing my life away, two to his one. Then he snored faintly. Enough! I struck him sharply.

“Go home! I cannot sleep. If you won’t talk to me of the Aeneid, go home!”

Sitting up on the straw mattress, his figure black against the wirenetting window and the bilious clayey light of the moon, he said cruelly, “Steve, you’re a little cow!”

“Then, O, to be in India where they worship them,” said I. “There I could eat milk tins in the very streets, and wear a hat on my horns and who would dare to cry me nay?”

“I’m going home. It must be nearly daybreak.”

Not all the judges were as impressed, however, and in the end, the prize for 1940 was split three ways between The Pea Pickers, Kylie Tennant’s novel, The Battlers, and a biography of an early governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie: His Life, Adventures and Times, by M. H. Ellis. Angus and Robertson took the rights to publish Langley’s novel, but a great deal of editing was required to get the material into publishable shape. They also sold the U. S. rights to by Dutton, which didn’t publish it until 1945, as Not Yet the Moon.

Before the book was released in Australia, however, Angus and Robertson received a letter from the Public Trustee Office in Auckland, stating that Eve Langley, a “married woman, a mentally defective person” had been committed to the Auckland Mental Hospital by her husband. Both Langley and her husband appear to have had extreme paranoid reactions to the possibility of Japanese attack on New Zealand and took their children out on a small sailboat they owned, looking for places their might hide. During one stormy night, Langley spilled boiling water on at least one of the children and all three were taken into custody by a nurse who knew the family. Her husband became concerned about her stability, particularly because he was expected to be called up for service, and he arranged for her to be committed for observation. Langley would spend the next seven years in the hospital, and during that time, A&R heard nothing from her.

Then, in 1950, June 1950, she was released in custody of her sister June, who secured her a position in the book binding shop of the Auckland Public Library. A&R editor Davis wrote expressing her happiness at receiving the news and inquired if Langley had been able to do any writing during her confinement. A year later, Langley replied that her new book, White Topee, was progressing well, and she sent it to the publisher in 1953.

In her report on the book, A&R editor Nan McDonald wrote, “This novel, pruned and condensed, would certainly be worth publishing. It is written with Eve Langley’s characteristic brilliance and originality and no one else could have written it. But I am afraid that no amount of editing will be able to make it as good as The Pea Pickers.” White Topee (I link here to AddAll.com, since the only copy currently on Amazon goes for over $3,500!) was eventually published in 1954.

It did not repeat the success of The Pea Pickers. Reviews were few and unenthusiastic: “Not so much a novel as a marvelous oddity,” wrote one reviewer. Like The Pea Pickers, it drew heavily on the Gippsland experience and on all the materials Langley had written about it over the years. Even before White Topee was published, however, Langley sent A&R another manuscript, Wild Australia.

This time, the A&R editors found it hard to be be charitable. One called the book “dazzlingly irrational.” “Many pages were devoted to Eve’s account, as Oscar Wilde, of a trip she and her lover Lord Alfred Douglas made to Cairo so that Eve/Oscar could be operated on to become female.” When Nan McDonald wrote to say that A&R would be returning the manuscript, Eve wrote back in panic, “Nan McDonald, DEAR Nan McDonald I AM OSCAR WILDE AND YOU’RE KILLING ME… And I hate being Oscar Wilde because NO ONE WANTS OSCAR WILDE… Dear Nan, please reconsider your most awful decision and don’t send that book. O I know what death is now….”

Nevertheless, she proceeded to send yet another manuscript, Bancroft House, to A&R and a year later, another titled Somewhere East of Suez. She continued to believe that her work was something the publisher would be thrilled to receive. It was clear from her correspondence, however, that Eve was spiraling out of control:

I am just going to pack up the latest book “Last, Loneliest, Loveliest,” and send it over to you. It’s all about my life over on the North Shore in Auckland and full of rich warm glowing material from a journal kept in those days of marriage to an artist husband and a batch of children as well…. you will get “The Land of the Long White Cloud” soon. Then comes “Demeter of Dublin Street”, followed by “The Colossus of Rhodes Street”, then “The Old Mill”…. then after this one comes “Remote, Apart” to be followed by “Portrait of the Artist at Chelsea” and then “The Saunterers” and “Beautiful Isles of the Sea” and lastly “Apollyon Regius”…. Two books come in between, introducing to you “The Land of the Long White Cloud” and these are “The Nimrod Type” and “The Australian” … so that’s eight to come, no nine with “Golden Wattle Warriors”, no eleven with “The Nimrod Type” and “The Australian”.

“This is IMPOSSIBLE,” one A&R reader wrote. Nan McDonald quipped in one report that “seven full-length works are too much Eve Langley for anyone to take in a few months without indigestion.” Beatrice Davis tried, however, to let Langley down gently, writing, “Heaven knows when we shall be able to publish all these so attractively titled novels.”

eve langley with topeeIn 1960, Eve moved back to Australia. She bought a house — barely more than a shack — near Katoomba, a town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Langley referred to it as “Iona Lympus,” and began planning a trip to Greece, where she hoped to commune with the spirits of Homer and other ancient Greeks. By now, she had taken to wearing men’s clothes all the time. One of her closest acquaintances and most loyal supporters during this time, Hal Porter describes a typical Langley outfit:

… dressed in a navy-blue chalk-stripe double=breasted suit a la [Australian prime minister Robert] Menzies, and what I call a publican’s cardigan, one of those maroon and fawn things, and a tie with stripes across it. She had quite small feet in boots, they must have been schoolboy’s shoes she bought. Over this she had flung a very long fur coat, ankle-sweeping, quite an opulent one, made of black cat or some strange material. And topping all this, a white topee.

Davis helped Eve apply for a pension as an invalid, which provided pretty much the only income she had. She had a few poems published, but, as Thwaite puts it, “was living for the most part on fish and chips, cakes, muscatel and Penfolds wine.” In September 1965, Angus and Robertson received a letter from the Australian ambassador to Greece reporting that Langley had been found penniless in Athens and inquiring if she had any means of support. Eve had convinced herself that she could work picking grapes for a Greek winery and somehow managed to pay for a berth on a freighter to Athens. She enjoyed the trip tremendously, but was also, based on her journals from the time, hallucinating wildly, seeing a various times Nazi warships and ancient Greek and Egyptian vessels out in the sea around her. She lost most of her luggage after disembarking in Piraeus, and within a few weeks was surviving by scavenging food from back alleys.

Davis and other friends managed to collect and send her several hundred pounds, but the embassy put her on a plane back to Sydney in December. Back home, she continued to decline into fantasies. She thought she could transform her shack into a Greek temple. She was convinced that German soldiers were moving through the woods around her. She treated her colds and aches with home-made remedies involving treacle, kerosene and eucalyptus bark. Yet she managed to arrange a trip to New Zealand to visit her daughter in 1968, although her eccentricities soon pushed filial piety past the breaking point. An old friend who saw her during the visit recalled her “as someone living quite outside reality.”

When Eve returned to her house in Katoomba, it had been ransacked, though little of value had been taken. Eve was convinced an elderly neighbor was the culprit, however, and she smashed the woman’s door with a golf club. She began to carry on conversations with an imaginary companion named “Albi.” She collected little dolls, dressed them up, and sent photographs of them to her daughter. And the whole time she continued to record everything meticulously in her diary — which is how we know so much about her last years.

In 1974, a social worker was sent to check on Langley after a neighbor noticed that her mailbox was filling up. She found Langley’s body on the floor of her shack, beginning to decompose, her face partly gnawed by rats. The coroner estimated her time of death as a month earlier. Among her papers was found a notebook whose last entry was dated a few months before her death:

Dear god of the planet Mars, how
we wonder
how you are!

Your dear girl weeps
but I feel sleepy and
soon will sleep.

Steve Langley, Igh, Infelia Dido, of thought

The Importance of Being Eve Langley came out fifteen years after Eve’s death, but it seems to have been a little ahead of its time and has never been reissued. However, as acceptance of cross-dressing, transgender, and “fluidly gendered” people has grown, interest in Eve’s life and work has begun to grown. The Pea Pickers is now well-established as an Australian classic, even making it to #5 on a list of candidates for the Great Australian Novel. And several plays have been written to celebrate her unique life and character. Margi Brown Ash, an Australian therapist and actress, has performed a one-woman show, “Eve,” in several countries. Ash refers to Eve as “the character I keep returning to again and again … for she is the voice of the invisible female artist of the Australian landscape.”

The Pea Pickers, by Eve Langley
Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942

The Importance of Being Eve Langley, by Joy L. Thwaite
Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1989

Blindness, from The Orchard, by Drusilla Modjeska (1994)

John Hull
John Hull

John Hull, an Australian theologian living in England, went blind in his forties. Black, black blind from detached retinas. His book describing the profound disorientation of self in blindness was the first I took up on my return to reading. It took some time to finish so closely did it echo my fears: the fear of the loss of self, of being cast from God’s light. The journey he recounts is as much of the passage of the soul through darkness as of the daily reality which came with a blindness so complete that he knew that he faced the sun only by the sensation of heat on his face. Even food, unseen, lost its appeal. He was no longer hungry. Life as well as sight dimmed within him.

While he struggled with the real limitations of a life without sight, treading his way with cautious steps to avoid the sudden slide when the ground slopes, or the path diverges, or obstacles block the way, he struggled also with the archetype of blindness within which he felt himself enclosed. At first the meanings he could give to the dark were as closed and as isolated as the world he inhabited even in the midst of a loving family. And indeed it is true that in many cultures, and certainly in ours, blindness has been crudely associated with a condition of unrelatedness: of being cast out, along, ignorant and confused. Because blindness disrupts the distinction between the known and the not-known that is regulated for the rest of us by sight, it represents, he says, dissolution, the borderline between being and not being. An alternative to death; as good as death.

Immersed in this archetype, unable to deny, or refuse it, yet not accepting it either, a glimmer of light flickered, a small beacon which took the form of a paradox, which as a theologian John Hull was quick to grasp, thought as a blind man slow to understand. For of course there is a paradox. For God, that transcendent being, as the blind psalmist sings, darkness and light are both alike to thee. It is for us with our dualistic either/or thinking that one is cast from the other, that one is held in opposition to the other. But a greater reality, and one we resist in our fearfulness and limitation, is that of light in darkness, and, more to the point, that of darkness in light. None of those who dwell so noisily in the realm of light wish to consider that light might contain its own darkness. And there is little in our culture to help those who inhabit the darkness grope their way to light.

Cover of first edition of "The Orchard"In Stravinsky’s Lunch, Drusilla Modjeska notes that, in her struggle to write the story of Australian painter Stella Bowen, she gave up at one point and, instead, wrote the “novel” The Orchard. I put novel in quotes because there are many essay-like passages, including a number related to Stella Bowen, that appear to be much more the thoughts of the author than of the nameless narrator in whose voice the story is told.

Modjeska attempted to weave her story around the old folk tale of “The Handless Maiden” (or “The Girl without Hands” or “The Girl with Silver Hands”). In the tale, a father cuts off his daughter’s hands in a bargain with the devil, and, many years later, her hands are restored through the love of the king who marries her. I say attempted because it’s only told at the end and, as far as I could tell, offered little to illuminate the story. The fictional element of the book is about several Australian women, united through their acquaintance with Effie, a woman in her eighties who has always pursued a very self-directed life, mostly tending to a garden seen by her friends as a haven.

Though I wasn’t persuaded by the fiction in the book, I found the narrator/Modjeska’s asides consistently interesting, and I read the book in one sitting, on a flight from Brussels to Dulles last month. Even if the novel per se wasn’t successful as such, it seems to have allowed her to work through thoughts that came together in the subsequent Stravinsky’s Lunch. Such as:

We live in a culture that daily encourages us to find our identity in that reflection of another, to experience ourselves as most real when we are in love. We live in a culture that encourages us to see ourselves as others see us. To become an object in the regard of others means that other become objects to us; and so too do we to ourselves. No wonder we are all in pursuit of control: to make sure that object is ours.

Considering that this was written before the Web exploded and social media and selfies became labels, there is a certain amount of prescience in this. Although I might argue that today, we are encouraged to think we are most real when we get a requisite number of “Likes” (in whatever form they might actually take).

[By the way, the Macmillan Australia hardcover edition I read has to have one of the most pleasant formats I’ve read in years. 7.5″ high by 4.5″ wide, it’s larger than a traditional paperback and smaller than a typical trade paperback or hardback, typeset in 11/13 Bembo. I would be happy to have a few hundred others like it — a perfect size for a myopic guy like me to travel with.]

The Orchard, by Drusilla Modjeska
Sydney: Macmillan Australia, 1994

Stravinsky’s Lunch, by Drusilla Modjeska (1999)

The Sisters, by Hugh Ramsay (1904)
The Sisters, by Hugh Ramsay (1904)
“Let us begin with two sisters dressed for a ball,” Drusilla Modjeska writes in her introduction to Stravinsky’s Lunch. “Whenever I look at this painting — which, as it is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is quite often — I think they are waiting for the century to begin…. You can see from their faces that they are not the girls who went to balls in nineteenth-century novels; and you can see from their clothes that there is nothing of the modern woman about them.”

Cover of first US edition of "Stravinsky's Lunch"In Stravinsky’s Lunch, Modjeska looks at how two near-contemporaries of the two women in the painting (the painter’s sisters), Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith — both Australians, both painters — took on the century they encountered and carved out lives and careers very different from the conventions of the Victorian world in which they were raised. Modjeska refers to the book as “a koan in my own practice as a woman and writer.” The choice of the term is apt, as Stravinsky’s Lunch is a book that raises many questions and finds few definitive answers to them.

Questions such as those raised by the story of Stravinsky’s lunch, which Modjeska first heard over a restaurant meal with other writers and artists. It’s not really a story, so much as the fact that when the composer Igor Stravinsky was working on a composition, he insisted that his family eat lunch in silence. “All artists are selfish,” wrote Robert Craft in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (1972), “they must be, to get their work done. And they sacrifice the people around them.” for Modjeska, Stravinsky’s selfishness raises larger questions: “What are we prepared to ask of ourselves and of those who love us, what value we put on love and what value we put on art; what compromises we will make; which gods we will appease?”

Stella Bowen offers an example of a woman who, at first, sacrificed herself willingly on the altars of love and art. She happily entered into a relationship with the writer Ford Madox Ford, taking on the many domestic burdens of their rustic, near-penniless existence, in return for the sake of his love and his company: “… to have the run of a mind of that calibre … was a privilege for which I am still trying to say ‘thank you,'” she wrote in her memoir, Drawn from Life. But she also sacrificed her own development as an artist, as tending to Ford’s needs left her with little time and energy for her own work:

Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time — it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.

When, after one too many affairs with other women on Ford’s part, Bowen broke off their relationship, he failed to understand what all the fuss was about. As Modjeska puts it, he didn’t realize “that the qualities that had drawn him to her in the first place — her courage, her intelligence, her engagement with life — were precisely those that would take her away from him.” And that courage and intelligence were also what allowed her to produce her best work when she herself was free to focus. Yet, as is clear from Drawn from Life, Bowen never looked upon her time with Ford with regret, certainly not when she thought of their daughter. “Was Love the one, in the end, that she chose?” Or did she even chose one or the other? “Is choosing what she did?”

When I first read the story of Grace Cossington Smith that makes up the second half of Stravinsky’s Lunch, I was quite disappointed. There was none of the drama of Stella Bowen’s life. “No husbands. No babies. No affairs. No scandals. No cafes in Paris…. In the prejudices of her time, she was, simply, a spinster.” Smith spent most of her life in the same house with her parents and two of her three sisters. Most days, she painted scenes and people she saw around her in Sydney and the nearby country and seaside, working in a small studio her father had built at the back of their yard. She was over sixty before she was accepted as a serious artist of her own generation, over seventy when she was finally recognized as one of the greatest Australian painters of her century.

"Trees," by Grace Cossington Smith (1926)

Much of Smith’s story is a matter of producing painting after painting, moving first towards a striking mix of realism and abstraction, as illustrated by her 1926 painting, Trees. Smith said she was trying to paint all sides of a tree at once. When it appeared in her first solo show, one newspaper critic condemned it as a “freak.” Modjeska sees the work as revealing Smith’s keen eye for the dual nature of her Australian world: “For this was a young woman who understood both the settled pleasures of a garden with its bloom of peach, and the hectic tangle of branch and leaf, the mysterious possibilities that lay beyond, in bush and gully.”

As she grew older, Smith turned from subjects such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge to her immediate surroundings, painting the rooms in her family home — always with at least one window or door opening out into the world, but always from the perspective of someone on the inside. She experimented with color, settling on yellow as her primary tone, offset with blue (which is why it’s surprising that Modjeska doesn’t quote the opening phrase from Drawn from Life: “The land where I was born is a blue and yellow country”).

Grace Cossington Smith with her father and sister Madge (1919)
Grace Cossington Smith with her father and sister Madge (1919)

But there is another story that Modjeska reveals. Of Smith’s three sisters, one married early and another took on a lifetime profession as a nurse. But her sister Madge stayed at home and cared for their parents and Grace, and after their parents died, for Grace alone. It was Madge who cooked the meals and saw that the rooms were cleaned and laundry washed and ironed. Modjeska reprints a photo of Grace, Madge, and their father from 1919. It’s one of those family photos that, though accidentally and perhaps misleadingly, seems to betray a secret. “There is Grace with her strong, intelligent face lifted to the sun. Madge’s lowered head is shrouded in misery so intense it seems to burn the paper their images are printed on…. You can tell at a glance that there’d be no question of Grace taking over the kitchen.”

So, despite forging a career in art that was very much of her own shaping, deliberately enforcing her isolation so that she could focus on her work — focus to the point that her paintings from her last decades all depict scenes less than a few yards from her own home — Smith did, in her own way, insist on a form of Stravinsky’s lunch. No wonder that when Madge accompanied Grace on a trip to England in 1949, she found a widower in need of a wife and married him, leaving Grace to return to Australia alone.

Yet Modjeska admits that her attitude toward the story of Stravinsky’s lunch changed in the course of writing the book, and, in particular because of Smith’s example. The nature of the book as a koan is revealed in her realization that the story “not only buys into a way of thinking that would separate art from life, with art striding above and beyond, transcending the ordinary and humble, but it sets life against art, or art against life.” Smith never involved herself in artistic movements and stayed rooted to the home and family she knew. And as her energies diminished with age, she focused on the things she saw immediately around her: her bed, her table, her windows, her mirror.

Some reviewers objected to Modjeska’s interjection of herself, of her own reflections, into her accounts of the lives and careers of Bowen and Smith. But Stravinsky’s Lunch is not really a work of biography as much as an exercise in understanding — and as much Modjeska’s self-understanding as her understanding of the two women she portrays. In 1999, perhaps it was just slightly too early for critics to be comfortable with a work that did not fit neatly into the boundaries of one particular genre, but I think we are seeing now a proliferation of books that sweep across genre boundaries with never a second thought. I hope today’s readers will be ready to seek out a copy of Stravinsky’s Lunch and enjoy it as thoroughly as I did.

Stravinsky’s Lunch, by Drusilla Modjeska
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999

The World of Charmian Clift (1970)

Cover of Fontana Paperbacks edition of 'The World of Charmian Clift'

Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknown today. In Australia, she and her husband, the novelist George Johnston are major figures in the country’s cultural history, and adjectives such as myth, legend and phenomenon are attached to her story, and this collection of her essays can be found on the Australian Society of Authors’ list of the 200 Greatest Works of Australian Literature.

George Johnston and Charmian Clift, from the cover of The High Valley.

Had Clift been American and People magazine been in business during her life, she would have been a staple of the supermarket check-out aisles. Beautiful, smart, and talented, she was already gaining considerable publicity and attention before she met and married Johnston, who was one of the most dashing of Australia’s war correspondents and a rising figure in the country’s postwar literary scene. Their romance scandalized some, as Johnston was married and eleven years older. They collaborated on a novel set in Tibet, The High Valley (1947), that won the Sydney Morning Herald award as the best Australia novel–the first of three they would write together. “I was the journalist who supplied the substance,” Johnston later said, “She was the artist who supplied the burnish.” A vocal opponent of the government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Johnston left Australia in 1950 to take a job as a correspondent in London, bringing along Clift and their two young children.

After a few years in chilly England, chafing against the constraints of journalism, Johnston quit his job as correspondent and the family moved to Greece in 1954, where they soon set up house on the small island of Hydra. Their dream was to enjoy the warm weather, cheap living, and freedom from distractions and concentrate on writing. And at first it worked. George wrote several novels, as well as a number of thrillers under the name of “Shane Martin” (the names of their first two children), and Charmian wrote two books about life on the island: Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel Me a Lotus (1959).

But although Hydra was a small and largely forgotten island, it had attracted a fair number of expatriates, and some of them, like Johnston and Clift, were hard drinkers and partiers. They collected in the back room of a small grocery store run by the Katsikas brothers, and soon the parties were starting right around noon and running all night. Hydra’s reputation as a haven for bohemians spread, attracting, among others, the young Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen, who bought a house there in 1960. Photographer James Burke visited the island and made the expat scene the subject of a photo essay, with Clift and Johnston prominently featured. Both passionate people, Johnston and Clift gave vent to their feelings when drinking, and became known for their bitter fights. Cohen would later write of the couple that they “drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.”

George Johnston and Charmian Clift and their children, shortly before leaving Hydra

And, despite the warmth of the Greek summers, life in an unheated house took its toll on Johnston, who never enjoyed the most robust constitution. He contracted tuberculosis, and spent long months incapacitated, which cut into his time for writing and hence the family’s income. Finally, he borrowed some money and flew back to Australia in 1964, and Clift followed him soon after with their children (now three with the addition of Jason, born on Hydra).

Johnston’s health continued to decline, although he was able to complete his autobiographical novel, My Brother Jack (1965), now considered an Australian classic. But Clift had to take over as the main breadwinner, and, by happy coincidence, was offered the job of writing a weekly column in the women’s section of the Melbourne Herald and Sydney Morning Herald. The papers published a large ad announcing Clift’s engagement alongside her first column featuring her photo and mentioning the couple’s recent return from Greece.

Clift’s first piece (titled “Coming Home” but changed by the editors to “Has the Old Place Really Changed?”) reflected on the contrasts between the landscapes, urban environments, and people of Greece and Australia. She remarked how often her old acquaintances would tell her, “The old place has changed quite a bit since you saw it last.” But, in fact, she noted, many of the characteristics of Australian life — characteristics that had led her and Johnston to leave ten years earlier — hadn’t changed. It was, she found, still a country wrapped up in its concerns for conformity.

Though the column came to her largely as an accident, the timing was perfect. Australian society was beginning to open up, influenced by the racial, sexual, and cultural changes it saw happening in England and America. Before Clift began writing, the women’s page of the Herald confined itself to lightweight pieces on beauty, fashion, food, and child-rearing. Clift’s style and outlook was anything but conventional. Though her debut column noted that Australia’s symbolism was growing old, she saw on the horizon “a real cultural and social flowering, spiky and wild and refreshing and strange and unquestionably rooted in native soil.”

And she was aware of significant geopolitical changes on the horizon as well. The Menzies government introduced military conscription for young men the same month that Clift began writing her column, and soon after began increasing its commitment of troops to support the Americans and South Vietnamese in Vietnam. At the same time, Asian immigration was being seen as a threat to the Australian economy and identity. Clift argued that the shift was inevitable:

Indeed, our national policy might be dedicated to the proposition that we stay, racially, as we are — 98..7 per cent European excluding the Aborigines (although it seems doubtful whether the Aborigines are going to go on meekly submitting to exclusion) — but since the end of the war it has been impossible for any one of us, as Europeans, to ignore the fact that two great continents, teeming with the differently coloured skins that comprise half the world’s population, lie between us and home base….

Coming back to Australia one is even more conscious of Asia. Not as the Far East. Not as the Near North. Not even as Our Neighbours. One is conscious of Asia as the place where one lives.

But what set out Clift’s columns from anything that had preceded them was how personal and intimate her voice was. There was really no concession to objectivity or fitting into a pattern. She wrote about the passing of the kitchen as the focus of family life, or the act of transcribing the addresses of friends and family members from an old address book to a new one, or of the wonder of discovering a jungle filled with “billions of nasturtiums” at the bottom of a ravine near her house. “I am becoming addicted to sunrises,” she wrote in one piece:

I suspect I always was, only these days I get up for them instead of staying up for them. Staying up needs stamina I don’t have any more, although I remember with pleasure those more romantic and reckless days when it was usual for revelries to end at dawn in early morning markets, all-night cafes or railway refreshment rooms, with breakfasts of meat pies and hot dogs and big thick mugs of tea, or — in other countries — croissants and cafes au lait, bowls of tripe-and-onion soup, skewered bits of lamb wrapped in a pancake with herbs and yoghourt, in the company of truckers and gipsies and sailors and street-sweepers and wharf-labourers and crumpled ladies with smeary mascara: it is amazing how many people and of what a rich variety belong to that indeterminate dawn time. Real enjoyment of this sort of thing depends, probably, on a sense of drama, the resilience of youth, and whether you can get in a decent kip after.

Clift quickly gained a large and loyal following of readers, both women and men, who had been hungering for something original and alive in their routine newpaper fare. She was able consistently to convey, as Nadia Wheatley put it, “the sense that the writer is conducting a two-way conversation — a dialogue — with the reader.” Less than a year after she had begun the column, her first collection, Images in Aspic, was published with an introduction by Johnston. “Charmian Clift writes thoughtfully and carefully,” he wrote.

She is concerned with style, elegance, choice of the exact word. She often writes very long, unjournalistic sentences. She takes time to muse, to reflect, to drive through experience. If this is daily journalism it is very different from anything in my experience.

Johnston’s health continued to deteriorate during this time, however, and he had to be hospitalized for the better part of a year. Clift took over the job of writing the script for the television series based on My Brother Jack, and her hopes of finding the time and energy to write another novel faded. Despite the success of her essays with newspaper readers, she was sensitive to the fact that she was working in a generally disrespected form. As Wheatley writes, “Through the beauty of her prose style and her mastery of the essay form, Charmian Clift was putting literature onto the breakfast tables of these thousands of very different Australians. Yet there has always been a kind of critical question mark over her place as a writer. She herself got to the heart of the matter when she told David Higham that she was ‘writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who wouldn’t know an essay from a form-guide, but absolutely love it.’ The problem, as far as her reputation is concerned, is that she was writing essays at the wrong time and in the wrong place.”

Though she prided herself on her commitment to the regular schedule of writing the column, as she entered her forties, she appears to have begun to feel trapped.

Clift and Johnston with their children in 1969, shortly before Clift's suicide
Clift and Johnston with their children in 1969, shortly before Clift’s suicide

It didn’t help that she and Johnston had continued to be heavy drinkers. Some of the inevitable physical damage of prolonged alcohol abuse can be seen in photographs from this period. She began to suffer from depression, perhaps connected with the onset of menopause. Finally, one night in July 1969, after an evening of drinking and fighting with Johnston, she swallowed a bottle’s worth of his sleeping pills, laid down on their couch, and never woke up.

The news of Clift’s suicide came as a huge blow to her readers. According to one observer, “Thousands couldn’t believe it, bombarded the Herald with inquiries and sent the switchboard berserk.” The paper published a special Letters to the Editor section a few days later to accommodate just some of the thousands of letters sent in. The critic Allan Ashbolt wrote in a lengthy obituary piece published in the Herald, “As a columnist she found, I think, a role eminently suited to her witty and humane outlook…. She went straight to the human essence of any problem, straight to what a situation would mean in human happiness or suffering.”

Johnston assembled a second collection of her Herald essays, The World of Charmian Clift in 1970, and it was reissued again in 1983. In the second edition, her son Martin, who had by then become recognized as one of Australia’s leading poets, wrote,

For most writers with only a couple of novels — by no means bestsellers — a couple of travel books, and miscellaneous essays to their credit, that would have been that. And yet it hasn’t been. I couldn’t begin to count the number of people who’ve asked me, ever since my mother’s death, when they could expect a re-issue of one or all of the books, so I can hardly be alone in welcoming this one.

For the Johnston family, however, the tragedy continued to play out after Charmian’s suicide. George died just after The World of Charmian Clift was published. Their daughter Shane committed suicide three years later, and Martin died of the effects of alcoholism in 1990 at the age of 42.

In 2002, Suzanne Chick published Searching for Charmian: The Daughter Charmian Clift Gave Away Discovers the Mother She Never Knew. Working with newly opened adoption files, Chick discovered that her birth mother was none other than Clift, who apparently became pregnant at 19 and gave up the baby for adoption. Chick’s book is written in the form of parallel biographies, and though she harbored an unavoidable resentment toward Clift, her writing is fluid and remarkably empathetic. This was followed by several other books about Clift and Johnston, including Susan Johnson’s fictionalization, The Broken Book (2006) and Nadia Wheatley’s superb biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2014).

Several of Clift’s books, including a collection of her essays, are available in Kindle format from Amazon Australia. Aside from these, however, her other works are all out of print.

The World of Charmian Clift
Sydney, Australia: Ure Smith, 1970