The End of the Morning
As with all of Charmian Clift’s writing, The End of the Morning – published almost 55 years after her death – is a combination of mid-20th century charm and sharp-edged observation. Called a novel in the new book, it is more of a long fragment. A novella, perhaps.
It sets up the childhood of Cressida Morley, Clift’s alter ego, who like the author was a thinker, constantly examining and questioning her unfolding world. She has a beautiful, if fluffy, older sister who is idolised by their housewife mother, a younger brother she is close to and a working-man father who “curtly refused to go and fight for bloody England” but who takes his responsibilities as a paterfamilias seriously.
The book is a strange compilation, collected by Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley. The first 52 pages consist of The
End of the Morning, apparently as Clift left them. The next 25 are Wheatley’s first-person afterword, which is a little discordant after the depth of Clift’s crisp yet poetic phrasing, and as much about Clift’s husband – George Johnston, the author of My Brother Jack – as it is about her.
Wheatley does tell us the worst of it. Their relationship was breaking down towards the end. Clift, a journalist by profession, was writing weekly columns to support the family (the couple had three children) and work on her fifth novel was suffering. They were both drinking a lot. The End of the Morning was the beginning of a book that was to answer Johnston’s latest, which had exposed Clift’s infidelities. It was less glamorous than grim. Wheatley writes glancingly of Clift’s death: “And on the night of Tuesday the 8 July 1969, Charmian Clift made a cry for help that went unheard.” It was less a cry for help, perhaps, than a decision made. Clift took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.
The rest of the book contains 32 of Clift’s columns, again close social observation mixed with political analysis. A piece on her birth family’s cluttered mantelpiece describes “[a] repository for all those oddments that you might just want to lay your hand on at a moment’s notice”. A comparison of women as “household drudge” versus “working wife” quotes a Fabian Society pamphlet describing the entry of women into the business world as a re-entry: “no more than a regaining of the ground they lost during the Industrial Revolution”. Clift’s words still shine here and can be taken alone on their own considerable merits.
Newsouth, 240pp, $34.99