Reading this dazzling book is like ‘quaffing the finest champagne on earth’

Back in the 1960s The Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Herald, the old middle-of-the-road evening paper, used to publish a weekly column by Charmian Clift. It was about nappies and cabbages and Kafka and twilight: it was about nothing in particular and even a child could tell that she did it very well.

Clift was married to George Johnston, who wrote My Brother Jack, which she helped him with. She was the mother of Martin Johnston, who died from alcoholism, but wrote some of the finer poems of his generation. She spent some years living on the Greek island of Hydra, where she kicked around with Leonard Cohen, among others.

Clift died in Sydney of an overdose, and she is the subject of a superb biography (which won the Age non-fiction book of the year in 2001) by Nadia Wheatley, which does justice to the startling complexity of her personality. But none of this is the point. Charmian Clift is the greatest essayist this country has produced.

When John Douglas Pringle became editor of The SMH for the second time in 1965 he decided to publish her columns on a weekly basis and pay her a salary. They are things of wonder because they are so full of the breath of life and have the extraordinary quality of exhibiting the full range and colour of a sensibility that is equal to the treasure of its contents. Clift is one of those essayists like G.K. Chesterton or James Thurber who writes for the pleasure of the thing and creates a great murmur of satisfaction in the reader who stumbles on her.

Wheatley, who has put this collection of Clift’s essays together, is at pains to emphasise the left liberalism of Clift’s vision. It’s there but as one part of a much larger and more comprehensive thing. If you want an example, have a look at her piece about LBJ’s visit to Australia.

“Heads of State,” she writes, “and other symbol figures cannot do without a mob – if only to reassure themselves that they are really symbols.” Then she quotes Coriolanus: “What would you have, you curs, that like not peace or war?” and adds, “Happily for official Australian-American relations, the Sydney mob was dangerous only in the violence of its enthusiasm for the President of the United States.”

And on she goes, flicking words away like coins in a fountain. Clift can brood like a poet on how houses are arranged. “[A]nd I thought how neatly boxed people are these days and then I thought of Rilke, walking through the streets of Paris, and writing such memorable and moving words …”

A shift of mood, a shift of focus, and she’s talking about something wild. “I have been in forests, great forests, Sherwood and Burnham Beeches, and the Black Forest where the wolves still prowl, and the spruce forests that press in on the Fern Pass in Austria, and I have been awed and made sombre by so much majesty.”

There is a beautiful, tristful essay about her brother – big-headed and accepting – who would be belted with a razor-strop because of something she put him up to – now dead, and for years she scarcely saw him.