Dancing with the Ghost of Charmian Clift: A Ficto-Critical Requiem

Abstract

Charmian Clift, Australian novelist and essayist, was born in the small coastal New South Wales town of Kiama in 1923, where her passion for the sea and quest for tender - ness began. Genealogically she was Jewish on both sides, with Scottish and Irish working class inflections. After encountering the awkward tragedies of pre-and post WWII early adulthood, including relinquishment of her first-born ‘Jennifer’ (aka Suzanne Chick), she married Australian writer George Johnston. Clift and Johnston worked at the Melbourne Argus, then lived an expatriate writerly life with their three children on the islands of Kalymnos and Hydra in Greece from 1954–1964. Their collaborative and individual novels spoke to each other through the alter ego of characters Cressida Morley and David Meredith; Clift and Johnston were as difficultly entwined on the page as they were in life. On returning to Australia in 1964 Clift wrote for the Women’s Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, from which she befriended readers, across class and gender from Wahroonga to Blacktown. Her column tackled such issues of the time as violence, out - door drinking, poverty and to some degree politics written into the everyday. The column was extremely successful and brought her out of the Johnston shadow in which she had lived and written since they married. Through her erudite and precise yet per sonal tone Clift actively called her readers to consciousness, to participate in the debates of the everyday. That her life ended tragically, prematurely and I suggest unnecessarily, in their Mosman home, came as a great shock to Clift’s readers, although she had spoken and written of death often. Her alter ego Cressida Morley suicided in Johnston’s last novel Clean Straw For Nothing, which was to be launched later that year.