George Johnston's 'majesties of nature and monstrosities of man' is my Sydney

Fifty years after Clean Straw for Nothing won the prodigal Australian writer George Johnston a second Miles Franklin award, the novel has aged as a rich critique of social change, cultural complacency and the rise of smug nationalism in Menzies-era Australia.

It was the second novel in Johnston’s semi-autobiographical “Meredith trilogy” – chronicling the progress of David Meredith from a childhood in dreary Melbourne suburbia to gun reporter to disenchanted expatriate novelist – but it is so much more than that.

It is a potent Australian story of obsessive love and the impulse to escape conformity and create. It’s also about the destructive, self-fulfilling power of jealousy, and how pursuit of the idyllic can set its own unforeseen traps.

It’s never didactic. It avoids the preachy traps of a morality tale, its tone set by an undercurrent of melancholy, yearning and searching – for places and the words they might inspire. It is, I think, a great book for writers, who’ll relate to the difficulties and sometimes heartbreak of that quest.

Disappointment surges through its pages, an accompaniment to Meredith’s existential journey to become the novelist of his ambitions, having turned his back on Australia and Britain.

Like the first novel in the series, My Brother Jack, in which Johnston writes of post-first world war Melbourne from the isolated Aegean island of Hydra – where he lived for a decade with his writer wife, Charmian Clift, and their three children – Clean Straw is remarkable for its evocation of place from the distance of a half a world.

For in the second novel Johnston evokes island life, with all of its natural beauty and challenges, its counter-cultural sexual and social follies, from Mosman, Sydney, to which he and the family retreated in 1964, the year My Brother Jack won the Miles.

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To the consternation of many who were close to him, including Clift, in the trilogy Johnston pushed to the nth the novelist’s dictum that family is fair game when it comes to material.

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After Johnston, Clift and their two children moved to Hydra (their youngest was born there), a group of expatriate Europeans, Americans and Canadians – including Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen – coalesced around them. They remained life-long friends with some, including Cohen, though Johnston in particular tired of many of the others on the island.

“It is all a hopeless tangle of the good and the bad, the serene and the savage, the brutal and the beautiful, of love and hate and loyalty and betrayal. It is hope and despair, and magical experiences that become soiled and smutty, and delicacies that jar, and murderous attacks delivered with the gentlest of touches,” Johnston, channeling Meredith, writes.

At its core though, Clean Straw is a novel exploring literary expatriatism – about the burning impulse to flee a postwar Australia (especially Melbourne) that was stultifying, grey and imposingly conservative. The postwar London where the Merediths, like Johnston and Clift, landed, was little more promising – oppressive and characterised by a stiff-upper-lip “mustn’t complain” austerity.

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The newspaper work was, for Johnston and Meredith, unsatisfying, vacuous and intellectually shallow – and most of all an impediment to creative ambition.

Mirroring the experience of Johnston and Clift and their children, the Merediths go for an extreme version of “over there”.

While a gaggle of Australians – Greer, James, Humphries – would later head to London, the Johnston-Clifts had already spent a decade on Hydra, an idyll and a cage they left barely intact, physically and emotionally.

Johnston left with his Miles Franklin-winning novels (one written, the other in gestation), while Clift returned to Australia as a novelist (of arguably larger talent, though in Johnston’s shadow) and as a newspaper columnist of great emotional range and writerly elegance. Both had aged beyond their years.

Hard living and island austerity, all of those “murderous attacks delivered with the gentlest of touches” within their marriage, proved fatal and, sadly, coincidental to their late success.

Clift died of an overdose at 45 in 1969, just as Clean Straw was about to be published, the laying bare of Meredith’s marriage to Cressida Morley a thinly disguised take on (his version of) their own, its final acts playing out bleakly on the lower north shore. Johnston, an invalid by his early 50s, died a year later at 58.

I’m always gripped by an acute sadness when I read the Meredith trilogy, especially Clean Straw, mainly because of how much more these writers might have achieved had they lived on. The third book in the trilogy, Johnston’s unfinished Cartload of Clay, in which the invalid Meredith casts his eye over the Australia of the late 1960s through his front window and from the leafy streets of Mosman, is the most melancholy.

Despite his illness, Johnston was, with the first two at any rate, at the top of his literary game.

On the fictional island, visiting Australians would seek the Merediths out, curiosities for their determination to leave Australia behind. Those Australian visitors would be unmistakable as they’d get off the ferry at the port: “ … they would wear Digger-type slouch hats and carry knapsacks sewn all over with the blatant symbols of an aggressive chauvinism, Australian flags and kangaroos and southern crosses and boomerangs or just the simple word AUSTRALIA …”.

Meredith knew that they judged him as “un-Australian” for “precariously enduring discomfort when they were entitled to enjoy surfeits of comfort in the world’s highest standard of living, and were being wilfully wayward parents in denying their children their birthright of life in God’s own country”.

Back in Mosman, Meredith, perhaps like Johnston, was lost among his own people.

“I do not understand or know anything, really, of the customs of the people, my own compatriots, who live across the harbour in the western suburbs, or those to the north or the east or the south; they are far stranger to me, infinitely less comprehensible, than the Greeks were. I am sure that we really do not want to know each other, but who is to blame for this? Have I lost my sense of curiosity? Do I find them simply not interesting enough? Is it that I just resent their possession of a comfortable complacency that I have failed to find? Or scorn them for their conforming, unthinking anonymity? Perhaps they are the lucky people after all, the unthinking ones, taking it as it comes and not questioning it.”

I also love Clean Straw for its wry observations of the social and sexual mores of the late 1960s Australian progressive class. He depicts the men, with their long hair and sideburns and soft-collared jackets, upwardly mobile and opposing the Vietnam War, excited by – but feeling the pressure of keeping up with – the increasingly liberated women of their orbit.

Yes, Johnston was excellent at describing place from afar.

But he never lost sight of what was in front of him.

“Sydney is a city of light and wind more than architecture, and in the pale shimmer of summer heat under the pulsing fierce light refracted from the vast harbour in the centre, or when smoke and dust drifted like Pompeiian ash before the gasping hot breath of the westerlies, the surroundings were like some gigantic incurable wound still weeping through the spread gauze between the ugly dryness of the scar tissue,” he wrote.

“The majesties of nature and the monstrosities of man have a cheek by jowl evidence in Sydney more insistent, I think, than in any other city in the world, but few seem to perceive, or at any rate to be worried about, the enormity of our offences.”

Fifty years later, the Sydney Johnston describes in Clean Straw for Nothing was never more mine.

That’s special.