New book explores Johnston & Clift

Charmain and George
Reviewer Warwick McFadyen, May 22, 2004

CHARMIAN AND GEORGE: THE MARRIAGE OF GEORGE JOHNSTON AND CHARMIAN CLIFT
By Max Brown
Rosenberg, $29.95

What holds a marriage together? What is the stitching that joins two lives despite the pulling at the cloth and the unravelling of the seam? Some may call it love. In the case of George Johnston and Charmian Clift, it may well have been love at the start. Certainly at the end, it was not. Perhaps, to slightly alter T.S. Eliot, in their beginning was their end.

Johnston and Clift met in 1947 and were married two years later. Clift killed herself in 1969. A year later, Johnston died. He had been ill with TB for some time. In those two decades together, the couple traversed landscapes, spiritual and physical, that for the times, most Australian couples would not have dreamt of. The pair yearned for literary fame, they took on Fleet Street and the British literary world, they struck out for an island in the Greek sun, settling first on Kalymnos and then Hydra, they moved back to England and the Cotswolds. They made another attempt at Fleet Street, then moved back to Hydra. They returned to Australia 14 years after they left.

In that time, the keys of the typewriter were pounded; the bottles of alcohol were hammered; the arguments were sparked, inflamed, doused and reignited, the extra liaisons embarked upon and then washed up. Remarkably, they stayed together.

Max Brown was a contemporary of the couple. He worked with Johnston on the Melbourne Argus and the Australasian Post. However, he only met Clift once, in 1949, after the pair had moved to Sydney and Johnston was working on The Sun. Johnston, in the early days, was the star. He was the much-travelled, experienced journalist, the war correspondent, the rising literary lion. He was appointed to head The Sun's London bureau in 1950.

The importance and significance of Clift, however, was apparent when their collaborative effort High Valley, won The Sydney Morning Herald's prize for best novel in 1948.

"No amount of shared vision splendid can mask the flaws in the glass."

They dreamt of making a life and a living from their writing. What emerges in this folksy, Reader's Digest-style condensing of the tale is that at the core, we each dream alone. For Clift and Johnston, no amount of shared vision splendid can mask the flaws in the glass when the relationship is put up to scrutiny.

Where did the faults lie? Brown makes clear his views from the outset. In the first paragraph of the preface, he writes: "Charmian and George is about a marriage but it also explores and challenges the myth of greatness surrounding the late George H. Johnston, double winner of the Miles Franklin Award."

It is, in essence, Brown calling Johnston to account. There is no doubt Brown recognises Johnston's gifts but what he is keen to do here is balance the books. Or, more to the point, redress the balance towards Clift, who Brown considers to have suffered in the shadows of Johnston's fame.

It is hard not to read into this Brown passage, a disapproval of Johnston: "Readers were shocked in July 1969, when she suicided on the eve of publication of her husband's Clean Straw for Nothing, dealing largely with the illicit affairs of a woman recognisable as herself. George was promptly awarded a second Miles Franklin prize for it."

The placement of the two subjects could not have been more telling.

Brown, who spent 20 years researching the book and who died last year, begins his story in 1964 with a time-and-health ravaged Johnston arriving back in Australia. Johnston's novel My Brother Jack was about to launch him to huge commercial success and the first of his Miles Franklins. Friends and acquaintances were shocked at his appearance. Indeed, he only had six years to live. Clift followed with their three children a few months later. She had only five years to live.

They both brought home with them the legacies of years of drinking, quarrelling, hard financial times and stunted literary aspirations. Paradoxically, in these remaining years, both found popularity.

Clift especially, through a column in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, was winning over readers. But she was also drinking heavily. Brown cites examples of her attending events three sheets to the wind.

Johnston, over two years, spent about 14 months in hospital with lung problems. And then on top of that he was writing Clean Straw for Nothing. Clift claimed she never read it. She killed herself a month before it was due for publication.

Brown quotes her suicide note: "Darling, sorry about this. I can't stand being hated and you hated me so much today - I am opting out and you can play it any way you wish from now on. I am sure you will have a most successful and distinguished career."

Was that last sentence sarcasm or sincerity? It was, more than likely, both. For Brown, one cannot understand the Johnston myth without dissembling it. In his folksy style of writing and old-fashioned turn of phrase, Brown by unadorned narration relates the rise and fall of a marriage. That it was of two extraordinary people was, perhaps, the first and last laugh of the Fates.