Return to paradise: Charmian Clift’s Greek odyssey revisited
Charmian Clift and George Johnston’s Greek idyll produced many literary treasures including Clift’s novel Honour’s Mimic, which has just been reissued.
In 1951 Australian writer Charmian Clift and her husband, writer George Johnston, stifled by the restriction of post-war conservatism and the Menzies government, departed Sydney in search of what she would later call a more “authentic” way of living.
They initially landed in London, where they found they were two more Australians adrift in a sea of expatriates. Quickly oppressed by the repetition and rigours of the five-day working week, the mundanity of office jobs and the rat-race mentality of the city, they decided to relocate to the Greek islands.
Though neither had visited previously, both Clift and Johnston were keen to experience a way of life that was freer and, arguably, more romantic than that most familiar to mainstream society. Before leaving London, they sold the majority of their possessions and cut ties with friends in order to live and work on the islands of Kalymnos and Hydra, living on the latter for almost a decade before eventually returning to Australia, where Clift resumed working in journalism, writing a weekly column for The Sydney Morning Herald, before she died by suicide in 1969.
During her almost 10 years on Hydra, Clift wrote the memoirs Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel Me A Lotus (1959), as well as the novels Walk to the Paradise Gardens (1960) and Honour’s Mimic (1964).
While her newspaper column published in the SMH‘s “women’s pages” enjoyed immense reader popularity, none of her books reached the commercial or critical heights of those written by her husband.
Most of her books languished out-of-print for years while Johnston’s My Brother Jack, for example, has remained continuously in print. It won the Miles Franklin Award the same year that Honour’s Mimic was originally published.
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However, with the rise of a new generation of feminist literary criticism and since the publication of Nadia Wheatley’s brilliantly researched and written definitive 2001 biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, Clift’s work has experienced something of a resurgence.
Rediscovered by a new generation of readers, NewSouth Publishing issued The End of the Morning – Clift’s final, autobiographical and previously unpublished novel – in 2024 and, two years earlier, Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays of Charmian Clift.
Both volumes were edited by Wheatley and are now followed by a long overdue reissue of Honour’s Mimic, published with a typically illuminating and insightful afterword by Clift’s biographer, who also happens to be the scholar and researcher most familiar with the vicissitudes and intersections of her life and works.
At the heart of Honour’s Mimic is a transgressive, all-consuming love story that also offers an incisive, often chilling, indictment of the measures and strictures of class and society
To that end, I urge those unfamiliar with Clift’s story and back catalogue to read the afterword before the novel itself – Wheatley offers many insights and rich contextualisation of Honour’s Mimic, both within Clift’s wider oeuvre and within the time during which it was initially written and published.
At the heart of Honour’s Mimic is a transgressive, all-consuming love story that also offers an incisive, often chilling, indictment of the measures and strictures of class and society. Inspired by the short time Clift spent living on Kalymnos, where most of the men living on the island worked as sea sponge fishermen, the novel centres on 31-year-old Kathy, an Australian woman who has left her publisher husband and two young sons behind in London to visit her younger sister, Milly.
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Barely 21-years-old and recently married to English-educated Demetrius, Milly is pregnant with her first child, terrified, desperately homesick and feels cast adrift in an unfamiliar country and culture. Demetrius’ family runs a highly successful sea sponge business and he has been called upon to return to Greece to run the enterprise, bringing his young wife with him.
Whereas Kalymnos starts to feel like a cage for Milly, Kathy soon finds life on the island ushers in a kind of personal renaissance. Liberated from the duties of motherhood and wifedom and freed from the constraints of daily domestic drudgery, Kathy flourishes and soon finds herself falling in love with a local sponge fisherman named Fotis.
The reader soon learns that Kathy, with her tightly cropped red hair that barely conceals a sharp, jagged scar on her head, is convalescing from a recent near-fatal car crash. This near-death experience draws her closer to Fotis, who is a poor, illiterate failed sponge diver struggling to find work after suffering a panic attack underwater during the previous fishing season.
The panic attack and its repercussions haunt him and Clift positions both he and Kathy as being prey to a sort of recklessness and fecklessness, as though their traumatic experiences have broken some sort of barrier. Having encountered near-death and abject terror, both have now moved outside of the limits, constructs and expectations of polite society. “We are alike,” Kathy thinks of Fotis, recognising him as “another desperate one”.
As the two meet in a ruined Byzantine palace above the town, Kathy, “having nothing else to give him”, confesses to Fotis that the car accident was a suicide attempt. The two soon fall in love and become heedless of all other responsibilities and obligations in their lives.
Kathy no longer cares about her reputation and thinks little of her husband and two young sons while Fotis disregards his pregnant wife and eight hungry children, all waiting for him at home. Drawing on the John Donne poem that provides the novel with both its title and epigraph, Clift depicts a passion so all-consuming and convulsive that even honour becomes devalued into “mimic”.
While Honour’s Mimic actually presents the direct apotheosis of Clift’s view that love overrides any other consideration, it is neither truly a love story nor a romance novel. Indeed, the originality of the novel’s main narrative concept lies in the way Clift breaks one of the essential rules of that genre by having her heroine love a man who is far below her, in terms of social position and class, and who comes from a radically different ethnic and cultural background.
Although this may not seem radical by today’s standards, it was wholly so by those prevalent at the time it was originally written and, as Wheatley so astutely observes in her afterword: “Charmian Clift was always a writer who was far ahead her times. As a new wave of readers discover her, perhaps they will be brave enough to embrace Kathy and Fotis and the rocky landscape of their island, where the only pastures are in the sea.”
Honour’s Mimic by Charmian Clift, NewSouth Publishing, $34.99.