They told a rather different story, of a bossy and solitary little girl who didn't know how to play properly, who always wanted to be leader in the games and who didn't share her canoe. . One morning — I remember it so well — I was sitting in my work room, which at that time was a bungalow separate from the house, and I was typing out a particular sentence Clift had written about her childhood in the essay 'Winter Solstice', which was produced in the last couple of months of the author's life. I had read and typed out this sentence a number of times before, but on this morning I needed again to type these words: 'Isn't it strange how your childhood dogs you and tracks you and will not let you be?'. The family lives in a flat in Bondi. Of course, Johnston was perfectly entitled to do this in a work of fiction. They told a rather different story, of a bossy and solitary little girl who didn't know how to play properly, who always wanted to be leader in the games and who didn't share her canoe. After all, she herself wrote that. I feel more and more ardent about it - that fiction is a way of capturing existence. I should begin by explaining that I never set out to be a biographer, and nor did I have some sort of burning desire to discover what made Charmian Clift tick. Thus not only the writer but also the, The difficulty, therefore, with foresight in this particular case is that — unlike Charmian Clift —, I have often said that, as far as I am concerned, Charmian Clift's suicide is the, While this discussion has focussed on various legends and lies, I believe that it is ending with truth. Johnston published Death Takes Small Bites (London, 1948) and Moon at Perigee (1948), and began to write in collaboration with Clift. As I did so, the words kept repeating themselves in my brain: Isn't it strange how your childhood dogs you and tracks you and will not let you be? Despite her clipped accent, which belies her current place of residence, Johnson's warm, forthright manner is unmistakably Australian. Again, I have borrowed this term from Penelope Lively, who has her character Mark, the young biographer, complain that he contemplates his subject, the eminent dead biographer Strong, with 'the wisdom of foresight'. Thus over the last twenty-one years, when I have mentioned that I have been writing a biography of Charmian Clift, most people have immediately asked: 'Why did she kill herself?' View the profiles of people named Shane Clift. Arrives March. As she herself wrote: 'A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade'. As if that was the single most important fact or issue raised by her life. And in fact, at one stage, I had to sell my part-share in a house that I owned with one of my ill-chosen boyfriends . Within a couple of years Martin had pulled completely out of the project, but for some reason he wanted, I have borrowed the title of this essay, ‘Lies and Silences’, from the novel. It was from the distance of Britain that Johnson wrote her latest novel, inspired by the life of one of Australia's best-loved female writers, Charmian Clift. If Charmian Clift went to great pains to hide this information from the public, and even indeed from her three legitimate children, did I have the right to reveal it? Margaret laughed uproariously and replied: 'I have never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life!' In The Broken Book, Johnson has disguised Clift as the writer Katherine Elgin who shares many biographical details with Clift but is - Johnson is at pains to emphasise repeatedly throughout our conversation - a fictional character. Thus not only the writer but also the reader of a biography is all the time inclined to view the subject with an omniscient advantage. A considerable part of my job as a biographer, therefore, is to try to trick you into forgetting what you know. Since his arrival three months earlier he’d bought himself a blue Burberry raincoat, an Olivetti typewriter and completed an autobiographical novel. They were to have three children, Martin (1947-1990), Shane (1949-1973) and Jason (b.1956). but in some ways that's an arrogant assumption.". But as my seven-year-old Charmian was strangely unconvincing, the motivations and psychology of my adult Charmian were also problematic. . Nor did Martin give me information, except for a short taped interview in an ABC studio, and an untaped interview in a restaurant. Peter Craven, Black Inc, 2002. Thus I did not try to remember what he told me, let alone make notes. Join Facebook to connect with Shane Clift and others you may know. As I did so, the words kept repeating themselves in my brain: Still standing at the gate, I thought: if I accept for a moment the hypothesis that Charmian Clift had an. I have often said that, as far as I am concerned, Charmian Clift's suicide is the least significant thing she ever did. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. MARTIN JOHNSTON was born in November 1947.By the time he was 30 his mother, Charmian Clift, and sister Shane had committed suicide - the former in 1969, his sister in October, 1974 - and Johnston's father had died in 1970, officially of tuberculosis, although by then his health must have been undermined by long years of heavy smoking and drinking. Driving past the Royal Melbourne Hospital, just the day before our interview, Johnson experienced "a momentary shiver and thought of all those people still in there who are cut off from life in that really profound way that you don't know until you've been sick yourself". All I know is that, by the time he left, we had a piece of paper on which we had a plan for a collaborative biography of Charmian Clift and George Johnston. As I went back through all the evidence that had been staring me in the face for so long, I realised that Charmian as a child had herself started to make up and believe a kind of legend about how happy she was. This is the case whether the biography is about someone who lived a long and apparently fulfilled life, or whether the biography is about a subject who died prematurely and apparently without completing her or his life's work. Despite this sort of evidence, I kept believing Clift's autobiographical account of her happy childhood. If those two examples of 'lies and silences' in the life of Charmian Clift caused me years of misdirection and moral dilemma, perhaps the biggest problem facing a biographer is to do with what could be call foresight. I have that kind of capacity . I wasn't a substance abuser or anything but I still veer towards binge drinking . In a word — the. As I went back through all the evidence that had been staring me in the face for so long, I realised that Charmian as a child had herself started to make up and believe a kind of legend about how happy she was. The neighbours also described the whole Clift family as being alien in the close-knit working class community. Similar accounts were also given to friends and acquaintances, and to journalists doing interviews. Many of those original fans of Clift's newspaper columns feel particularly protective of her reputation. One day, when he came to my place for lunch, we started talking about the problem he was having because he had received a couple of Literature Board grants to write a memoir of his parents, but he was finding the work too painful. This problem with this, however, from the point of view of Clift's biographer, is that most readers take Johnston's trilogy — My Brother Jack, Clean Straw for Nothing and A Cartload of Clay — to be a cross between a journal and an autobiographical memoir. Could I go into print, saying something that would seriously hurt Margaret, and which would imply that I believed she had lied to me? I really wanted to write so that's what I did. "I have no doubt that if I was completely ruthless and completely committed to writing the best book I could, I wouldn't have had children. Johnson wanted to avoid causing further pain for their remaining child, Jason. However, looking back, I can also see that I had swallowed the myth that Martin had been brought up on, and which he had passed on to me in incidental anecdotes. This area of lies and embroidery is, of course, part of the myth of Charmian Clift, which had to be unraveled before I could get at the facts or the 'truth' of the story. After years of living overseas, she returned to Australia in 1995 when she fell pregnant, because she believed the health-care system would be better here, which is ironic, given the belated treatment of her fistula. Their first joint novel, "I suppose because I thought that she's in the public domain already by writing her book.". Certainly when I was young I was completely driven, really driven. the voice is quite similar, the diary style. It was always hard to say no to Martin. This was largely because she was so insistent on it, in all her writing and in published interviews with her. So, who were George Johnston and Charmian Clift and how did they come to live on Hydra? Through their writing talent and incredible charm both became much loved in Australia, England and Greece. The family lives in a company flat near Kensington Gardens. George Henry Johnston OBE (20 July 1912 – 22 July 1970) was an Australian journalist, ... daughters Gae and Shane and two sons Jason and the poet Martin Johnston. Johnson's book is a multilayered reimagining of these stories - just as messy and unresolved as the real-life details - but ultimately deeply rewarding. Second, Martin and I never actually discussed or tried to analyse his parents and family life, and nor did I ever ask him any personal questions about his childhood or his parents. Invited back to London in 2000 as part of an arts delegation in the lead-up to the centenary of federation celebrations, she fell in love with that city again and felt she was being offered a "second chance". It made sense of the adult Charmian, who seemed so confident and gregarious but who was extraordinary vulnerable, and who had few intimate friends. In my experience, people who truly had the sort of sunny country childhood that Clift describes are unable to remember much about it. Not long after purchasing their house on the island, the "house by the well" in January 1956, their third child, Jason, was born there on … For a while I believed her, but then I came to feel that she was concealing the truth, in order to preserve the reputation of her sister and also of her family. Until I had my children, I think I was a really delayed adolescent. So is Katherine Elgin a thinly veiled Susan Johnson? The Broken Book is published by Allen & Unwin at $29.95. The neighbours also described the whole Clift family as being alien in the close-knit working class community. Freshly attuned to the emotional extremes of motherhood and to the conflict between maternity and creativity, Johnson researched infanticide, mother-child relationships and the accounts by writers' children about growing up with parents who channel so much of their energy into the creative process. Throughout these first twelve or so years of researching and writing the book, I had particular difficulty writing about the childhood of my subject. George Johnston and Charmian Clift were unique Australian talents. A recurring image of Clift's childhood anecdotes was of herself at the centre of a crowd of happy playmates. . Johnson too has spent much time in Greece, living there for a year in her early 20s. I feel like a zealot about this as I get older. In the following passage — which purports to be part of an essay by the fictional biographer, Strong — Penelope Lively points out a significant difference between the genre of the novel and the genre of biography: This is a useful distinction between some of the intentions of these two genres, it also provides a convenient focus for some of the issues I confronted in writing the biography of Charmian Clift. I think I was a really late developer. That's exactly how the novel will be read in Britain and the US when it is published there early next year. Nor did she want to offend any surviving family or close friends of the Johnstons, for the Clift-Johnston legacy has already cast a dark shadow over the succeeding generation: their daughter Shane killed herself three years after her mother's suicide and their son Martin died of alcoholism in his 40s. Obviously I wanted to be more deeply involved in the emotional and physical life because I think there's a real risk with someone like me that I could not be involved in real life. George’s reputation is largely based on the trilogy of autobiographical novels beginning with My Brother Jack, and Charmian’s on her essays and weekly newspaper columns. She did not live her life from day to day in the knowledge of the end of the story. She chronicled both her bodily breakdown and her sense of creative erasure owing to the all-consuming demands of young babies in her astonishing memoir, A Better Woman. Martin was born three … Related people/characters. Clift and Johnston were destined, however, to leave Australia, exasperated as they were with the country’s postwar social and political conservatism and eager to explore the world. Not that she realised at first that this was the direction her writing would take. Join Facebook to connect with Shane Johnston and others you may know. Her self-professed wild streak notwithstanding, Johnson takes her writing extremely seriously and has a high regard for the novelist's role in society. I think when you are young you have the hope that you will one day write a masterpiece and as you get older you have to accept the limitations of your talent.". This had given me a fair amount of experience in creating child characters. Nadia Wheatley. If the subject's death is tragic, that knowledge will loom as a particularly large part of our foresight. For a biographer, like any historian, it is difficult to know what to do with information for which there is no documentary proof. As she sits with her lover, Justin, in a bar, she tries to explain to him how her 'memories of childhood were permeated with the smell of the creek' that ran beside the cottage where the family lived on the outskirts of a country town: In all the early drafts of the biography, written over a period of about twelve years, I dutifully typed in long quotations such as that one, and wrote about Charmian Clift's idyllic Kiama childhood and her loving and wonderful family. As I walked through the gate into the garden, the world spun around me, and I was so severely disoriented that I had to put out my hand and steady myself on the gatepost. The problem is not just that the biographer knows how the story ends, but that the biographer knows that in most cases the reader will also come to the story with foresight of the ending. 1947-1951 . I have borrowed the title of this essay, ‘Lies and Silences’, from the novel According to Mark by British author, Penelope Lively. Although I had a postgraduate degree in history, I had just spent five years reinventing myself as a fiction writer, and I was determined not to get a job in a university. And if the tragic form of the death is the taboo act of suicide, this is particularly the case. In that fictionalisation, the author had structured his authorial point of view through the technique of breaking the chronological account, then shuffling the pieces into an apparently random order, and leaving certain large and significant gaps. 12 November, born Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, the first child of writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston. The difficulty, therefore, with foresight in this particular case is that — unlike Charmian Clift — you most probably begin her story knowing more or less how it will end. So I do have a capacity to go over the top, which I think Clift had too. We often feel that the book is spoiled if someone tells us the main plot point or the ending. If you have read Clean Straw for Nothing, you will remember that the Charmian character, Cressida Morley, is described as having a certain fey or 'away' expression that is characterised as her 'dripping tap look'. Johnson claims she was unaware of this interpretation of her project while writing The Broken Book. Please try again later. To paraphrase the Jesuits: 'Give me a child to the age of seven, and I've got her for life.' While Charmian's mother was known locally as 'Lady Muck', Charmian's sister was called 'the Duchess'. This was a case in which inside knowledge proved a disadvantage. In her characteristically frank way, she offers further parallels between herself and Clift: "I'm a fairly impulsive person. Fifty years after her death, Australian writer Charmian Clift is experiencing a renaissance. Despite seeming to make a great deal of personal revelation in her newspaper columns, Charmian Clift is famous for being elusive and enigmatic. 3 February, Shane is born. With a biography, however, we usually buy or borrow it precisely because we know the end and/or the main bit of the story, and we want to fill in the other bits. In 1984, she abandoned a successful journalism career and much-loved job with The National Times to write full-time. I think she has that great attraction about her work - you feel it reflects deeply something about your own nature. 1951. . Johnson's novel mirrors the structure of George Johnston's autobiographical novel Clean Straw for Nothing in terms of its fractured, kaleidoscopic quality - and even borrows its opening line - but is written from the wife's perspective. This psychological framework made sense — not just of the child Charmian, but of the adolescent Charmian, whom the writer Clift described in a short passage of raw first draft text as acting bold and brave and even somewhat promiscuous in order to hide a secret cry of 'Love me love me help me someone'. Just as some children invent an imaginary friend, it was as if Charmian had invented a playmate who was her own alter ego — who lived in a parallel universe in which she was happy and popular, and felt utterly safe and loved. I didn't know the answer, and it held up my writing for about six years — that is, until Margaret died in early 1990. Her attendance at the conference was supported by Arts Queensland. De 1949 à 1953, avec Charmian Clift, il écrit trois romans dont High Valley qui remporte le The Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competition.
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