Charmian Clift’s taut, intimate, unfinished novel feels like a slightly broken book
- Written by Paul Genoni, Associate Professor, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University
The publication of The End of the Morning is a long-awaited moment in Australian literature.
Readers familiar with Charmian Clift will be aware this book’s protagonist, Cressida Morley, is the writer’s alter-ego. Morley was to have been the vehicle for Clift’s self-representation in an autobiographical novel she was working on for some years prior to her death in 1969.
The End of the Morning – Charmian Clift, edited by Nadia Wheatley (NewSouth)
The End of the Morning marks the arrival of Morley, as seen through her own eyes and represented in her own words.
Clift’s suicide has been explained, in part, as the result of her inability to make progress on the novel that was to bring Morley to life. It was to be the tale of a Kiama beach girl whose lust for life takes her to Wollongong, Sydney, London, the Greek islands … and back to Sydney.
Protracted gestation
If Clift had completed The End of the Morning, it would not have been the first time readers had encountered Cressida Morley. She was a character who emerged, after a protracted gestation, through the novels of Clift’s husband, George Johnston.
Cressida was arguably first glimpsed as Charmian Anthony in the opening pages of Johnston’s Death Takes Small Bites (1948). The novel’s journalist-hero Cavendish C. Cavendish encounters Charmian adrift on the Burma Road. He is immediately taken by her lips “as pink as Danish salmon”, her eyes with the “same tint as glacier ice”, and a figure that is “slim and tight and stiff like a bullrush”.
When Cavendish asks what “a girl like you” is doing in remote China, Charmian responds: “Do I look like a missionary?” Cavendish realises he is “a little out of his depth”.
Johnston subsequently enlisted Clift as co-author on novels that drew on his wartime experiences in Asia, while inching forward with a series of sole-authored, increasingly autobiographical novels that invariably featured a Charmian doppelganger at the hero’s side.
In Closer to the Sun (1960), he presented for the first time David Meredith, his own alter-ego, with whom he is now forever associated. Meredith and his wife Kate battle to keep their fragile Greek island expatriation afloat.
Several years later, Johnston completed My Brother Jack (1964) – the first novel of his renowned “Meredith trilogy”. He called on Clift’s help, interrupting her attempts to use Cressida Morley to breathe life into her own roman à clef. When the dust settled on the wildly successful My Brother Jack, Meredith’s wife-to-be had transformed into Cressida Morley.
Stripped of her essence
At this point the famously close, complex and fractious relationship between Clift and Johnston became even more troubled. The depth of Clift’s creative crisis is artfully canvased by her biographer and editor Nadia Wheatley in an Afterword to The End of the Morning.
An early manuscript of the End of the Morning.
Author provided
Similarly, few have better expressed the sybaritic alliance between sand, surf and sun found on the Australian beach that is essential to so many childhood memories. Whether in Australia or Greece, ocean swimming is a subject that always quickens Clift’s prose. The End of the Morning is propelled by the pulse of the surf throbbing beneath Cressida’s recall of home and the green valley and rail line and the quarry and the town of Lebanon Bay (Kiama) that lies beyond.
Clift’s characterisation is also incisive. The Morley family dynamics are convincingly sketched. Cressida’s love of her parents is generous. She knows their strengths and weaknesses. She embraces their idiosyncracies and is acutely aware of their social status as middle-class “oddities” in a working class town.
Clift also makes absolute sense of Cressida’s relationship with her older siblings Cordelia and Ben. It is a memorable childhood menage that is deeply affectionate and sometimes competitive. Cressida is constantly overshadowed by Cordelia’s beauty and first-child aspirations.
Read more:
'A woman ahead of her time': remembering the Australian writer Charmian Clift, 50 years on
Unresolved matters
Clift’s fiction has attracted less attention from readers and scholars than the rest of her body of work. Her two sole-authored novels, Walk to the Paradise Gardens (1960) and Honours Mimic (1964), leave open the question of whether she was, potentially, a novelist of significance. The former is chronically uneven in tone; the latter is a confused romantic drama, a decade out of step with the tastes of the readers she craved.
Goodreads
By this measure, The End of the Morning is Clift’s most successful piece of fiction. Its shortcoming is that it is only a piece, and one that leaves two matters unresolved.
Firstly, there is the question of whether, in this form, The End of the Morning amounts to fiction. The distance between fiction and memoir can be short. If this book had been published with “Cressida” replaced by “Charmian” and other names similarly reverted, it would be read as memoir, so closely does it adhere to the known facts of Clift’s life.
Secondly, with the above in mind, it is worth noting that there is more of The End of the Morning available than these 20,000 words. As Wheatley notes in her Afterword, there are other versions of the novel in the National Library.
Wheatley has used her editorial discretion and selected what she calculates to be the latest draft, which overlaps to a considerable degree with an earlier draft that is longer by approximately 10,000 words.
The attraction of the shorter version is it is more polished and concludes at a very specific narrative point. Cressida and Cordelia are poised for big changes in their lives: Cressida wins a scholarship to undertake her secondary schooling in nearby Wollongong; Cordelia departs for a Sydney technical college to pursue her love of art.
More like fiction
But the section that follows in the earlier draft, not included in this published version, takes Cressida’s story in crucial new directions. The transition between the two is marked by the embarrassing arrival of puberty. It is accompanied by a new group of older friends, the first fumblings of adolescent sex, some academic progress tainted by failure, and the threshold realisation her future lies beyond Lebanon Bay.
Also excluded is a telling and, with hindsight, poignant sequence that reveals the dangers in Cressida’s future might be found in the most familiar places. When she rescues a handsome stranger in city clothes after he wanders without caution into the local surf, the reader discerns the life saved is a suicide prevented.
The beach at Kiama.
Martha Almeyda/Shutterstock
In these unpublished sections, the manuscript begins to read less like memoir and more like fiction. Where the earlier sections rely on Cressida’s rendering of character and place, here the narrative gives way to something more imaginative. The plot is underpinned by motivation and will.
And from this emerges the Cressida now associated with Charmian: the young woman enchanted by the “whiff of the world, the promise of something wilder and bolder and grander”, who “knew the town was too small to hold me.”
The longer draft does not reach the point where Cressida imagines her future as a writer, but it does bring readers closer to a life that traced such an unlikely and durable arc. Without that section – even, perhaps, as an addendum – this welcome, wonderful, but truncated version of The End of the Morning feels like another slightly broken book.
Authors: Paul Genoni, Associate Professor, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University
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