On the island of Hydra in the summer of 1962, the author Charmian Clift began working on her third novel, The End of the Morning. Written from the perspective of an adolescent girl named Cressida Morley, Clift reached back into her own childhood in Kiama, New South Wales, swapping the whitewashed walls and Aegean seascapes of her adopted home for memories of hot tar, sand dunes, basalt columns and sibling rivalry.
“Our childhood became a straining to get it out of the way as quickly as possible, to fling off the dragging years of dependence and get on with the big adventure,” Clift wrote.
But when winter reached Hydra, she put the novel on hold. Her husband, George Johnston, was suffering from tuberculosis and emphysema, and, after writing 25 potboiler novels to keep the family afloat, hoped to fulfil the creative ambitions they had moved to Greece to pursue.
“He wanted to write one major book, because he feared he would die,” explains Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley. “Charmian, also fearing that her husband would die, set her own book aside. [She was] the sounding board and editor for that novel, so much so that George said it was virtually a collaboration.”
The book they made that winter would become My Brother Jack, a Miles Franklin-winning work that cemented Johnston’s place in Australia’s canon. As Wheatley explains, the novel shares plenty of DNA with the one Clift abandoned to help her husband.
“It’s very much George’s novel, and that’s George’s masterpiece, but her input is shown in the fact that George, who’d been writing about his hero David Meredith in the third person in two novels, changed suddenly to a first-person narrative, which enabled him to go straight into his own alter ego and he returned to his own early childhood story,” she says.
And like The End of the Morning, which initially appears to be about Cordelia Morley but is really about her younger sister Cressida, Johnston’s novel – despite its title – was really about Jack’s little brother David.
“So there’s enormous similarities between the books,” Wheatley says.
Clift didn’t return to her novel until 1969 – the year she took a fatal overdose shortly before the publication of My Brother Jack’s sequel, Clean Straw for Nothing. Written without Clift’s input, Johnston’s novel featured an often-unflattering depiction of their marriage and Hydra years. David Meredith’s wife even had the name Cressida Morley, which was initially borrowed for My Brother Jack. Clift’s fictional alter ego had taken on a literary life beyond her control.
“Charmian was [by then] a household figure in Australia because of her weekly essays – in some households she was a sort of a household saint,” Wheatley says. “And the portrayal was so close as to be recognisable, and yet it left out one significant part, which was Clift as a writer. And any writer would be distressed.
“In some marriages, you have senses of ownership about children or dogs or objects or houses. But to these people, who were both writers, characters were the most important thing.”
Two versions of the manuscript ended up in the National Library of Australia, where Wheatley first encountered them about 1980: “I could see that this was a brilliantly written piece of writing. I always believed that this was publishable and in fact, a very significant document. But the time wasn’t right.”
Things have changed in the decades since Wheatley’s award-winning 2001 biography of Clift “sank without a trace”. Today renewed interest in Clift from generations of readers means she is more popular than ever.
“There’s the old fanbase of women my age who either read Clift when they were young women, or they remember their mothers reading her. And then she appeals to a new fanbase, a different sort of feminist.”
There is plenty for new readers to discover. Clift’s Greek years, living in a community of artists that included famous neighbours such as Leonard Cohen, has been much-romanticised but her nonfiction books from the period, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, offer fresh and incisive reflections on art, gender roles, gentrification and the flawed pursuit of a good life.
Sneaky Little Revolutions, a 2021 collection of Clift’s newspaper essays edited by Wheatley, sold out its first print run, while the author Polly Samson’s 2020 Hydra-inspired novel A Theatre for Dreamers was a bestseller. There are fresh Greek and Spanish translations and new UK editions of Clift’s books in the pipeline, and a slate of upcoming film projects including a Canadian-Norwegian TV drama titled So Long, Marianne, set to feature The Newsreader star Anna Torv as Clift.
Wheatley, who had largely closed the book on Clift in 2001, now finds herself pulled back into her world by a community of fans from Kiama to Kalymnos. “We had a picnic in Kiama that was booked out,” the 75-year-old says. “How can you book out a picnic?”
“I had an email from a guy in Melbourne, and the subject line was: ‘I want to be a Clifty!’”
Wheatley decided the time was right to dig out her old photocopies of Clift’s unfinished manuscript from a box in her garage and give the Clifties one last piece of the puzzle. Sixty-two years after Clift began writing it, The End of the Morning is being published.
Paired with a selection of essays that complement the 20,000-word novella, the result is a poignant and often prescient read decades after Clift and Johnston’s deaths – and a bittersweet coda to a literacy legacy that remains unfinished.
“Oh, that still brown world of before when everything had happened!” reads one passage, as Cressida reflected on old sepia-tinted photos of her parents and the lives that existed before she was born just over 100 years ago. “How rich and mysterious that lost brown world seemed.”
The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift is out now through UNSW Press
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