POOR ICARUS CHARMIAN The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. By Nadia Wheatley. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001. Reviewed by Susan Carson. It has taken Nadia Wheatley 21 years to complete her account of Charmian Clift's life but this book is worth the wait. The writing of the biography has progressed in fits and starts (much like the literary life of its subject) yet, finally, here we have it: a detailed, scholarly, and critical work which manages to assess Clift's writing as well as make sense of decades of gossip and innuendo. The overwhelming impression gained from Wheatley's book is a sense of loss. With Clift's suicide in 1969, Australia lost a well-known columnist whose provocative articles in the Sydney Morning Herald had established her as a fine essayist. Yet her fiction, travel writing and television work was less well known. When she died Clift was working on an autobiographical novel that had the makings of re-affirming her importance as a novelist, a project that would have brought about the type of recognition she so desperately wanted. In exploring the reasons for the inattention to Clift's fiction and script writing, Wheatley identifies the personal and professional tensions that took Clift down eclectic creative paths. She points out that the novels Clift wrote between 1948 and 1960 achieved critical success but poor sales, partly due to the progressive content and form of her prose, and partly due to her 10 year stay on a Greek island that isolated her from readers and publishers alike. Chiefly, however, it was perceptions of Clift as the junior partner in the Charmian Clift-George Johnston collaborative team (despite the best efforts of both Charmian and George to state otherwise) that denied her the acceptance she desired. This is why Wheatley's title is important to the biography: the book is as much about the dismantling of the Clift myth as it is about the facts and figures of her life. In this respect Wheatley has succeeded - primarily because she points out the ways in which previous accounts (such as Garry Kinnane's George Johnston: A Biography (1986) and Suzanne Chick's Searching for Charmian: The Daughter Charmian Clift Gave Away Discovers the Mother She Never Knew (1994)) have permitted certain impressions of Clift to take hold. Wheatley's distinctive contribution is that she identifies the convoluted and confronting blurring of fact and fiction in, and between the work of both writers. It was not George in particular, or Australia in general, or the drink or the depression or the aging process or the men that damaged Clift, according to Wheatley - although, certainly, all those factors played a part at various times. It was, rather, Clift's increasing loss of the fictional character of Cressida Morley, that she developed over many years, to the Johnston trilogy, My Brother Jack, Clean Straw for Nothing, and A Cartload of Clay. Cressida, upon whom Clift was basing her own (in-progress) autobiographical novel, became an important part of the Johnston analysis of his own alter ego narrator, David Meredith, in Clean Straw for Nothing, argues Wheatley. This is a book that demonstrates a 'fragmentation and rearrangement of chronology' (xvii) which left Clift with nowhere to go fictionally. Clift, faced with a literary usurpation and a host of personal problems that seemed insurmountable, took her own life. Wheatley maintains, however, that Clift's suicide can be read as a cry for help rather than a premeditated goodbye: 'Insofar as Charmian Clift may have been considering suicide as a possible course of escape from the trap that seemed to enclose her, there had clearly been no plan for doing it on this particular night' (619). Wheatley's sympathetic analysis has irritated at least one reviewer. Ramona Koval, on ABC Radio's Books And Writing 17 July 2001, dismissed Clift's claims to 'Cressida Morley,' and stressed Clift's hedonism - as opposed to Wheatley's assumptions of literary sensibility. Yet a reading of the Clift papers in the National Library, together with the works of Clift and Johnston, does support the importance of the blurring of fact and fiction in the complex development of the Clift-Johnston partnership, as well as in the individual work of both. The issue becomes even more complicated when Wheatley's position of biographer is examined. Wheatley sets out to 'not write a life which seemed to lead inevitably to death' (xvi). In a 10 page 'Author's Note' Wheatley establishes her rationale for pursuing an 'old-fashioned' chronologically structured, third person narrative. 'This was because, in various tellings of the story of Charmian Clift, there had already been a considerable blurring of the boundaries between fact, fiction and myth,' Wheatley states, and continues, 'I felt that the sober accumulation of information - alleviated by the occasional dashes of imagination - was the only way to separate the life from the legend' (xvii). Wheatley knows the pitfalls of collaboration at first hand. Indeed, she initially undertook to write a biography of Johnston and Clift at the request of her then partner, Martin Johnston, the elder son of Charmian and George. Martin eventually withdrew from the project, asking Wheatley to continue the work on Charmian (she stopped working on Johnston after publication of the Kinnane biography). Wheatley had, therefore, what was seen to be a privileged perspective, but she claims that being 'inside and outside the circle' (xv) brought its own problems - such as being told information informally which could not be included in written accounts. Given that these circumstances permit substantial access to material, it is intriguing that Wheatley says so little about the untimely deaths of other family members. Charmian and George's daughter, Shane, suicided in 1974 and Martin Johnston died as a result of conditions related to alcoholism in 1990. Gae, George's daughter by his first marriage, died of a drug overdose in 1988. Wheatley says she regrets not consulting further with Jason, Charmian and George's younger son, before writing the first draft of the manuscript, but otherwise she takes pains to begin and end the biography with Clift. What she does do, however, is to disrupt accounts of Charmian's supposed 'jealousy' of Shane, as quoted in the Chick account. In fact, given all that has been said about the tensions of the Johnston household after their return to Sydney in 1964, the family of Wheatley's biography appears to be surprisingly 'normal,' particularly given that George was hospitalised for long periods in these years with complications from tuberculosis. Indeed Charmian and George's care for their children is prioritised, refreshingly, in the biography. This will ring true to anyone who has read some of Clift's unpublished writing about her children. Similarily, Wheatley does not let the most recent book about Clift, Chick's Searching for Charmian, further blur the narrative. After publication of Chick's book in 1994, Wheatley decided to delay the appearance of her own account, believing a gap between these would better serve discussion on Clift's writing. It was a wise decision. The Chick book is an adoption story, that inevitably reifies the more salacious elements of the Clift myth and therefore, for Wheatley, 'reinforces conservative mainstream values' (637). Certainly, the Chick book does not advance critical studies of Clift's writing. Indeed, one of the features of Wheatley's biography is the attention to literary analysis. She states that she has used her imagination in discussing Clift's writing, and I am greedy for more. Vivid scenes of Australian life in the early 1930s are to be found in Clift's unpublished writing. Wheatley quotes from this material (96) but there is more - the full extract, for instance, about the death of a Clift playmate, nicknamed the Bawny Crab, shows the way in which violence went unchecked in such families, especially the way in which the community responded, or did not respond, to the physical abuse of children ('The End of the Morning,' George Johnston Collection, NLA, Box 4, Folder 4). Clift's depiction of this incident, which Wheatley notes 'has some basis in fact' (664), is interesting not only because of the social comment but because Johnston includes claims of similar beatings in his fiction (although the biographical status of such events is disputed by George's siblings, 172). Wheatley pays attention, also, to the form of Clift's fiction. She identifies the originality of a work such as Mermaid Singing (1958), based on 'happenstance' that results in a 'kind of literary photorealism' (310). The connections between this mode of 'trapeze-like swings' (310) and the kaleidoscope images Johnston used later in My Brother Jack are apparent (532). Clift possessed, argues Wheatley, an 'extraordinary visual memory,' which Johnston deployed as Clift sat with him, day in and day out, as he talked over My Brother Jack in 1962 (430). Similarly, it was Clift who brought her skill with dialogue to the television adaptation of the novel and 'who wrote for Jack the role of a truly Australian working class hero' (478). If Clift's fiction of the 1950s was under-examined, her newspaper columns fared somewhat better. The essays were recognized as highly successful examples of the genre. As Wheatley points out, Clift, in the essays perfected the art of making the personal public, of bringing in the reader, although she acknowledged it was a mask (a grown-up Cressida Morley, Wheatley speculates, 569) that subverted the message of the fashion pages in which the columns appeared (552). Which brings us back to loss. Being a writer was what Clift, from the earliest moment, 'secretly lived for' (187). She was different to gregarious George: sadly, she was destined to live out a public-private tension so that 'just as it sometimes seemed that she wrote in her husband's shadow, she also suffered as a writer from being in the shadow of her own public image' (225). Although tension existed from the early days of her marriage to George, then known as the 'Golden Boy' of journalism it was a marriage, also, which each saw as an unbreakable bond. According to Wheatley, Clift therefore 'wrote herself out of the plot' (619). It is a fitting conclusion for such a literary biography. As she said, once, about her own (fictional) mother 'poor Icarus she.' (George Johnston Collection, NLA, Box 4, Folder 4.) Susan Carson teaches literary and cultural studies in Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology.