Being Alone with Oneself

In the summer holidays of January 1969, Charmian Clift’s husband and three children all happened to go away in the same week.

And for the first time in exactly half my life I was quite alone, as I had so often wanted to be,. the author wrote. Over the 800 words of this essay, she describes what she does over this precious slice of ‘free’ time.

I thought I am myself alone at last and I can do anything I please... Like making my breakfast on hock and iced peaches, served to myself quite ceremoniously with flowers and Beethoven quartets and nobody except Jeoffrey the cat to see.

‘Nobody to see’— except the thousands of newspaper readers whom the author invites into her home! Little wonder that, when the clatter of family life resumes, she feels that ‘there was some marvelous opportunity in all that silence. That I missed.’

The paradox at the heart of this essay underlines the difficulty the column posed for its author. Clift’s elder son, Martin, would talk of this confusion of public and private in his mother’s life: Any columnist of her kind adopts the persona of friend talking to friends — ‘This is the real Charmian Clift having a chat to you over the back garden fence’, and what not. In fact it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a very artful, fictionalised, literary construct.

In this companion volume to Trouble in Lotus Land, Charmian Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley, collects the remainder of the column pieces that had been left out of Images in Aspic and The World of Charmian Clift. Her introduction sets Clift’s ‘pieces’ in the context of the essay genre, tracing their antecedents back through George Orwell and Virginia Woolf to Montaigne, whose comment ‘I am myself the subject of my book’ set the ground rules for the classical essay. In 1990, when this selection was published, Wheatleylamented that because the essay was not known in the author’s home country beyond dreary school texts, Charmian Clift had been ‘left out of the critical histories of Australian writing’.  Three decades on, that has completely changed, with critic Peter Craven describing Clift as ‘the greatest essayist this country has produced’.

Trouble in Lotus Land and  Being Alone with Oneself were published by Angus & Robertson Imprint, in an elegant series that included the author’s novels and travel books. Although now out of print, a number of the essays from these anthologies are included in Sneaky Little Revolutions.

Photograph L: Clift’s essay, published 23 April 1968, described speaking at a public meeting attacking the Junta that had illegally seized power in Greece. Clift was an Honorary Vice-President of the Sydney-based Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece. Her elder son, Martin Johnston, read poetry in Greek and English at the event.

Photograph : Part of the appeal of the column was the way the pieces reflected the domestic life of the author. In April 1969 Clift published ‘Hallelujah for a Good Pick-up’, celebrating the fact that, after a hiatus of six months, a Council pick-up was scheduled. She describes how her ‘wicked wicked children arranged to have themselves photographed’ sitting on the garbage heap. And clearly not only the children. Photo by Andrew Jakubowicz.