a hundredth birthday Charmian Clift It happens on August 30. It comes at a time when a famous Australian writer is, as they are saying, having a moment.
Clift’s typewriter has been stationary for over half a century, however the fascination together with her life and writing shows no sign of waning. In recent years, latest Australian editions of her work have been published in various genres: fiction, memoirs and journalistic essays. There was a play about her in cinemas. AND Documentary is in development and a feature film is being made Pre-production.
Next yr we are going to see Clift’s “new” texts, with their first publication End of the morningthe autobiographical novel she was working on on the time of her death.
Interest in Clift’s heritage was also visible abroad, where, amongst others, two memories life on a Greek island – The Mermaid’s Singing (1956) i Peel me Lotus (1959) – were republished within the UK after greater than six a long time to often enthusiastic reviews. These books appeared for the primary time in translation into Greek, Spanish and Catalan – a measure of a world readership that was elusive during Clift’s lifetime.
And if this cake needed an additional cherry, it will be in the shape of Clift and her writer husband, George Johnston, appearing as “heroes” in international novels and movies. They became an example of the experience of artistic emigration, solidarity and disintegration that took place on the island of Hydra within the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.
An eye-catching portrait
Why Clift enjoys this prolonged afterlife while once way more famous mid-century writers struggle to keep up their reputations is one other query. However, in a fragment of her extraordinary life there’s a clue – a photographic moment that condenses her charismatic and enigmatic essence into one attention-grabbing image. It is a rare photograph in itself, but unique due to the way in which it’s used.
© Liselotte Strelow. LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn/VG Bild-Kunst/Copyright Agency, 2023, Provided by writer (no reuse)
An inherent element of the standard of a photo is its creator. It was a masterpiece Liselotte Strelow (1909-1981), outstanding German portrait painter. Her strong and intensely focused black and white images identified her as an artist-photographer able to extracting from the human face a deep reflection of character and interiority.
Strelow built her distinguished fame on memorable portraits of the artistic, mental and political greats of post-war Europe, including Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Marlene Dietrich, Henry Moore, Thomas Mann and Maria Callas. Her portrayal of Clift is as well-realized as the rest in her work.
Also crucial to the success of the photo is the proven fact that Strelow found a facility in Clift that was tailored to her ambitions. Clift exposed herself in a particularly unadorned and unprotected way. Her hair is strewn about and seemingly tied with a string; her skin defects are clearly visible. He has what appears to be a black left eye.
Without coquetry or shyness, Clift’s direct gaze penetrates the camera lens with extraordinary intensity. She seems assertive and vulnerable at the identical time.
Clift was not latest to working with photographers. She first gained attention when she won the 1941 Beach Girls Photography Contest with a photo taken by her sister Margaret. She then took up work as a part-time photographic model in the course of the war in Sydney. As her biographer Nadia Wheatley noted, Clift was blessed with “that indefinable thing that makes a certain face photogenic. It’s obvious that the camera loved Charmian and that the feeling was mutual.”
That’s true, but what you see in Strelow’s photo is greater than a easy representation of a photogenic object. Working in tandem, Strelow and Clift created a picture that goes beyond the superficial charm of an attractively built face, revealing a sensible intellect and laying bare layers of anguish and self-doubt. The result’s a masterpiece of “Australian” photographic portraiture.
Little is thought concerning the context by which the photo was taken, and even when Strelow went to Hydra, which is where it was taken. However, it is nearly certain that the photo was specifically needed (by the writer and publisher) to be used in Clift’s future book “Peel Me a Lotus”, a very personal account of her life on Hydra.
Existential yin and yang
In some ways, the dust jacket designed for the primary British edition of Peel Me a Lotus is entirely timely. Stylized chevrons are highlighted with “current” saturated colours and a font typical of post-war design. The use of the writer’s photographs to embellish memories from travels within the Nineteen Fifties is unexpected.
The Nineteen Fifties continued the pre-war preference of British publishers for illustrated or graphically designed dust jackets, often based on watercolors, woodcuts or pencil drawings and adapted to two- or three-color offset printing. Clift’s previous travel memoir, Mermaid Singing, was typical. Both the front and back covers feature drawings by her friend, an Australian artist Cedric Flower.
Author’s photos, if used, were placed on the back cover or on the within flaps of the quilt. It was extremely rare to search out a photo of the writer on the dust jacket cover, especially a photo that portrayed the writer as anything apart from a confident and uplifting person.
There were few precedents for a dust jacket portrait that challenged the reader in the identical way as Strelow’s photograph of Clift, which disturbed or provoked potential readers excess of it encouraged. But someone – most probably Clift herself – chosen the photo and promoted its use on the quilt.
And this was done for good reason, as Clift’s achievement in Peel Me a Lotus is the literary equivalent of Strelow’s photo. The book’s success – and the important thing to its enduring appeal – lies in Clift’s willingness to maneuver beyond the mild expectations of Mediterranean exoticism and introduce the reader to the darker, personal experience of emigration.
Peel Me a Lotus is memorable for its evocation of Clift’s existential yin and yang, stuffed with joy and despair, belonging and rootlessness. The book begins with the bloom of optimism that accompanies the birth of a child, purchasing a house, and living the sun-drenched Hydra lifestyle. But all this soon turns to anxiety at Clift’s recognition that she and Johnston are “trapped” in poverty.
The growing variety of expatriates and tourists drawn to the island provides a compelling connection to the skin world and relief from the growing boredom, while posing a threat to the private dreams the couple wanted to satisfy.
Clift describes how work and family suffer within the face of sociability on the waterfront. She and Johnston “came home a little drunker than we should have been, feeling vaguely depressed, racked by some unspecified resentment, indefinitely tainted.”
Her growing suffering in response to an increasingly complex reality is momentarily stopped by Strelow’s camera. The photo shows that Clift realized that the circumstances that fed her creativity may additionally have depleted it. This correspondence between image and text transforms a great photograph into the premise of one of the fascinating dust jackets produced for an Australian writer.
The first Australian publication of Peel Me a Lotus didn’t appear until ten years later, because of Clift’s suicide. This issue’s dust jacket was a stock photo of the banal “Greekness” used as a stand-in for Hydra. In particular, the photo showed the seaside church of Agios Nikolaos in Mykonos with a blue dome.
This was the primary in a series of Australian editions to feature covers of typical domed churches unrelated to Hydra – an island with its own unusual architecture, but notably devoid of those classic painted domes. It’s secure to assume that Clift would have been horrified to see such photos deceptively embellishing a book that was clearly about a beloved and very special island that had shaped her emigration for a decade.
It is simple to know the marketing appeal of those photos, which, although imperfectly, appeal to an audience of sun-seeking vacationers dreaming of summer on a Greek island. However, they’re an inadequate representation not only of Hydra, but in addition of Clift’s intentions to make use of her genius as a writer to show the cracks in her own psyche.
It’s a shame that Australian readers of Peel Me a Lotus were denied the chance to look into the eyes and soul of a woman who was concurrently living her dream and facing its consequences.
