What are you doing it for? Realist writing – the riddled boundary that divides fiction and reality

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I respond to Australian author Charmian Clift’s question about writing: ‘what are you doing it for?’ (Wheatley 2022, 291). This question is the title of one of Clift’s essays, from a collection of narrative-driven essays, written for the Women’s Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, after Clift’s return to Australia in 1964. I consider the similarities between realist fiction and writing that (by classification) purports to bear a closer allegiance to the author’s autobiographical life. I understand realist writing to be a representation of living | memory – the complicated and multi-faceted nature of our interior selfhood. This essay reflects my preoccupation with the cartwheels of our inner consciousness as it relates to what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write, and how we engage with the work of others, both writers we know in the everyday, and writers we ‘know’ through the page. I consider the act of producing narrative as a sensate response to enigma, a creative response to rumination and (perhaps) an antidote to ongoing rumination – shirking the discussion about autobiography in favour of a discussion about impetus – considering writing as a reflection upon the operations (and inherent conundrums) of an interior consciousness.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative writing
• realism
• autofiction
• memory
• Charmian Clift
• spelunking

Introduction: what are we doing it for?

In this essay, I respond to Australian author Charmian Clift’s question about writing: ‘what are you doing it for?’ (Wheatley 2022, 291). This question is the title of one of Clift’s essays, from a collection of narrative-driven essays, written for the Women’s Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, after Clift’s return to Australia in 1964. From 1954, Clift lived in Greece, largely on the island of Hydra, together with her husband, George Johnston, and their children: Martin, Shane and Jason.¹ Clift’s essays are gathered in a collection edited by Nadia Wheatley: Sneaky Little Revolutions. Selected Essays of Charmian Clift (2022).

This essay is informed by a contribution I made to New York Writers Workshop (2022) – a presentation about Clift and Johnston and their influence upon what came to be known as the Hydra Circle of artists, part of a series of workshops, presentations, and readings (Athens and Hydra, Greece, May 2022). Later, at the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (Sunshine Coast, Australia, November 2022), I brought elements of the initial presentation back to practice – ruminations upon practice – considering the riddled intersection between memory and realist writing, in my case realist fiction. At the heart of each of these presentations, and the discussions that ensued, is my rumination upon Clift’s question about one’s impetus for the practice of writing, and my interest in the intersections between, rather than the distinguishing features of, realist forms of writing.

Clift and Johnston were life writers. Their relationship with writing – with each-other’s writing, with representations of each other in their writing – is inordinately complex. Clift and Johnston wrote versions of each other, and their lives, on the page. Both authors include direct representations or alter-egos of ‘the other’ in their work. I am haunted and intrigued, in equal measure, by the way Clift and Johnston navigated the intersections between art and life and by their immersion in each-other’s writing. I’m tormented by the cost, the crossroads, for Clift.

A brief overview of the ‘ending’ for Clift, care of Polly Samson:

Clift ‘killed herself in 1969 on the eve of the publication of [Johnston’s] novel, Clean Straw for Nothing, in which he laid the blame for his failing health at the door of her infidelity. [Clean Straw …] was the sequel to his autofiction hit and now classic My Brother Jack, which like that book won him the [highly prestigious] Miles Franklin Award, and his original plan was for a trilogy, but he didn’t live to complete the third volume. [Tuberculosis …] came for him almost exactly one year after his wife’s suicide. (Samson 2020: np)

Clift and Johnston were both writing liberal versions of autofiction before it was a ‘thing’ – well before Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977, by which time they were both dead. Clift’s Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, were set on Kalymnos and Hydra, respectively. The books are referred to as memoirs and travel books. Some thirty years ago, in an article focusing ‘Travel Books’ in the Washington Post, Robert Eisner notes that Clift’s ‘account of giving birth under Greek conditions – midwife, bottle of ouzo, knotted rope dangling from the ceiling to hang onto and scream – will never be matched by a man’ (Eisner 1992). Sure … and it’s certainly an unforgettable scene, but a telling one, too, in that the classification ‘travel book’ is a limiting descriptor for a book written by a woman about her experience of giving birth in a home she co-owns, in a place she permanently resides.

The autobiographical context for this scene is as follows. A short time after Clift and Johnston arrived on Hydra, Clift learned she was pregnant. She says this ‘plunged [her] into a long, long tunnel [she] thought [she’d] just got clear of’ (2007: ABC Radio National). Clift opted to forfeit the plan to go to Athens’ hospital for the birth, in order to buy the [Hydra] house (Wheatley 2001, 328). The purchase of the family home was also supported by funds from Cosmopolitan Magazine, for one of Johnston’s stories (ibid). Clift and Johnston’s Hydra-born baby, Jason, was born in 1956. He was cared for by Zoe, a nurse on Hydra, who came to be employed on a full-time basis in 1956–1957: ‘her main task was to look after Jason while his parents worked’ (Wheatley 2001, 347). In this way, Clift settled into a life with time to write and care for her family in what she saw as a sustainable way. Clift reflects:

I think that after that second year we began to really build a life for ourselves and it was a wonderful sort of a life, in a way. For the first time in my life, apart from the time when I was a very young girl, I found time to do my own writing. I found time for a social life. I found time to look after my family properly. The days are very long there and life is very easy, very wonderful. (2007: ABC Radio National)

Of course, Clift has been judged, as women still are, for prioritising their needs as writers and thinkers, within the broader context of what people want from them, for themselves. In any case, Clift and Johnston were not ‘passing through’ Hydra as fleeting travellers. Their move to Greece was a conscious decision, underpinned by their vocational commitment to writing, a commitment that precipitated their move from Australia to Greece, as well as their decision to buy a house on the island of Hydra. In Greece, they were afforded a writing life that was not possible for them, in Australia.

In Clift’s Peel Me a Lotus, there are many superbly rendered scenes about the labour and frustrations of daily domestic life: Clift and Johnston, wrangling a blocked and leaking drain, and the significant worry about the expense of fixing it, musing that their less-encumbered artist companions must have worried ‘we were less concerned with our psyches than with our drains’ (Clift 1959: np). And yet, in the narrative detail focusing domestic life, in Clift’s writing and in Johnston’s, we bear witness to precisely this – a deep concern for the human psyche. With this in mind, as I engage with Clift’s question, it’s more useful for me to consider her early books, within the context of her broader body of work – particularly her superb collection of narrative-driven essays, and to consider her input into Johnston’s highly-successful books – pondering the ways in which this labour represents the intersections between living|memory and writing.

The stupefaction of the real

The intersections between life and our reflections upon it, on the one hand, and realist writing, on the other, is at the core of everything I am drawn towards – in writing, reading, rumination and research – and the touchstone of my engagement with Clift’s question. As I consider my impetus for writing, an act which (in and of itself) has never felt like a choice, I am reminded of a compelling essay in The New Yorker about Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux. The essay is titled: ‘Annie Ernaux turns Memory into Art’ (Schwartz 2022). I love the bare-faced title of this essay, in which Schwartz includes her own observations about the author, as well as quoting Ernaux directly. Reflecting upon the nature of the practice of writing, Ernaux says:

I never considered writing to be a form of liberation […] The image that I have is always of descending, of deepening something. And there isn’t much freedom down there, not really. Often, when I speak with other writers – with female writers, really – the image we have of writing really varies. Some of them say that, for them, it’s a way of going up toward something. But, for me, it’s the absolute opposite. Not going underground, exactly. But into a well. (Schwartz 2022: np)

‘What draws her down? An idea of some kind?’ Schwartz asks. ‘“No (Ernaux says). An obsession”’ (Schwartz 2022: np). Schwartz notes that Ernaux is ‘devoted to chronicling what she calls “the stupefaction of the real”’ (Schwartz 2022: np). Deary me … Superb. It is precisely the notion of stupefaction that, to my mind, brings Clift and Ernaux (and many others) together – writers who assist me in understanding what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write – encouraging me to ponder the relationship between writing and ‘reality’ (if only my bewilderment in the face of it), as well as the meshing of the classifications of various forms of realist writing.

I consider realist writing – fiction, slant forms of realism such as prose poetry, together with narrative-driven essays, creative non-fiction and autofiction, as well as different forms of autobiography, including memoir and published diaries – within the context of the broader relationship between living|memory and realist writing. In so doing, I’m drawn to Robin Hemley’s contribution to the field, in both the creative and critical components of his PhD dissertation, and the complementarity between the two. In particular, I’m taken with Hemley’s disruption of our understanding of memoir and fiction through the perceived similarities between these forms. By his own account, Hemley produces ‘a narrative purporting to be autobiographical while simultaneously throwing such claims in doubt’ (Hemley 2022, 8). Further, Hemley (2022, 8, 10) suggests:

contemporary memoir has at least at much in common with the history of the novel as it does with nonfiction or journalism […] the memoir in its contemporary form […] is not a subset of non-fiction but should be understood as an allotropic form of the novel, an autofiction or autobiografiction.

Allotropic – a deft descriptor – a term ‘used to describe different physical forms of the same chemical substance’ (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus). Hemley’s use of the term is shadowed by his insistence upon the primary importance of an interior focalising consciousness, what he calls ‘an accurate map of [an] interior life […] one of the characteristics of “autobiografiction”’ (Hemley 2020, 8). Hemley (2022, 31) provides context for the term autobiografiction, noting that it:

was coined in 1906 and by author Stephen Reynolds in a brief essay titled ‘Autobiografiction’ and lay dormant for a century [adding that …] Saunders has nearly single-handedly resurrected the [term] by examining the way Reynolds first employed ‘autobiografiction’ in 1906. Autobiografiction suggests an interior autobiography grafted onto an otherwise mostly fictional landscape.

Mapping an interior life of any kind is an act of conveyance. Edith Wharton provides the most apt description I have encountered, about this act of conveyance:

The impression produced by a landscape, a street or a house should always […] be an event in the history of a soul, and the use of the ‘descriptive passage’, and its style, should be determined by the fact that it must depict only what the intelligence concerned would have noticed, and always in terms within the register of an intelligence. (Wharton 1997, 63, emphasis added)

To write stories is to wrestle with Wharton’s analysis of story-work as an event in the history of a soul. Wharton’s concept of register-of-intelligence informs what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write – and why I love to read. In writing and reading my mind is elsewhere, engaging in trapeze acts of oblique contemplation – wondering how it is possible that words might represent an interior consciousness with such clarity that the narrative world ‘feels like’ a life encounter. It is precisely this that puts me in mind of Clift and Johnston, prompting me to speculate about their interior lives – their intersecting interior lives – as reflected in the works attributed to them, individually and collectively. This speculation underpins my engagement with Clift’s question as a springboard for reflecting upon my own practice.

I will return to Hemley’s observation about realist forms of writing as a map of an interior life, within the context of discussing issues of plurality and art-making. At this point, I dwell upon the author’s quest to map an interior life as it relates to living|memory. This is not only a question of degrees and classification but also a question of process. For many writers this is fraught territory – wrestling with memory is a messy business – the pathway towards form and style is not necessarily consciously determined or logical. This process is increasingly complicated for authors such as Clift and Johnston, who were working together.

Spelunking – wrestling with living|memory as a search for lost time

How straightforward is the process of mapping an interior life of any kind, whether we are writing realist fiction, slant|hybrid creative works, or a form of realism that bears a tighter allegiance to the writer’s life? I ask myself this question as a sub-question, and a prompt that leans into the dynamic interplay between living|memory and realist writing.

My academic research focuses memory as it informs writing. I reflect upon arts practice as a means of bringing to the surface experiential knowledge (memories) that did not otherwise seem known, let alone ‘fetchable’. Focusing theories from neuro|psychoanalysis, specifically the concept of ideasthesia or ‘sensing concepts’ from neuroscience (Nikolić 2016, 2), as well as the ‘unthought known’ from psychoanalysis (Bollas 2014, 2017), I coin the term ideasthetic imagining. Reflecting upon the impact of my practice on my mind, and my mind’s eye on my practice, I deploy the concept of dream-membering – paying particular attention to the way I employ sensory imagining (informed by pre-conscious memories and mental processes).² This research is premised upon my understanding of sensation and thought as tightly intertwined, and indicative of my abiding interest in memory as a fertile repository, informing narrative composition at a primary moment of narrative composition and beyond. It represents a neuro|psychoanalytic approach to writing and creativity, as a practice-led response to the question of where story material comes from. This constitutes a reflection upon Schwartz’s analysis of the way memory might be transformed into art, but does it respond directly to Clift’s straight-shooting question, to the ‘what’ of Clift’s ‘what are you doing it for’ (Wheatley 2022, 291)?

In this essay, I remain at arms’ length from neuro|psychoanalytic academic research, although this thinking necessarily and fundamentally informs my discussion about the dynamism of memory. Instead, I take a direct interest in living|memory as the impetus for realist writing, and a reflection upon the author’s composite subjectivity. As a result, I am drawn to the term ‘spelunking’, a word I encountered in Schwartz’s essay, focusing Ernaux. The term spelunking comes ‘from the Latin “spelaeum”, which means cave, cavern, den, or grotto [… It is used] to describe a person who explores caves as a hobby or sport’ (My English Language). The colloquial definition is as follows: ‘If you ask people who actually go caving, spelunking is the derogatory term for stupid or unprepared cave trips’ (Urban Dictionary). Spelunking – perhaps particularly the colloquial definition – is an apt descriptor for my experience of writing realist fiction – my unpreparedness for the unpredictable and cavernous territory into which writing takes me. At a primary moment of narrative composition, I’m on a quest to capture what I have described as the haunting incompleteness of human experience. My writing always begins from a state of conundrum and contradiction: something I am troubled by; something that presents a problem of logic or a riddle of emotion and logic; something I feel compelled to understand more fully.

As Gerald Murnane (1986: np) notes:

Writing never explains anything for me – it only shows me how stupendously complicated everything is […] My sentences arise out of images and feelings that haunt me – not always painfully; sometimes quite pleasantly […] until I find the sentences to bring them into this world.

I am taken with writing as a representation of the ‘stupendously complicated’ nature of an ‘interior life’ (Murnane 1986: np, Hemley 2022, 8). I understand realist writing to be a portrayal of living|memory, and a representation of an interior life, in the form of the realist text as a sensory narrative image.³ The impetus to write from a state of haunting – painful or pleasurable – explicates my affinity with Ernaux’s description of the experience of writing as the absolute opposite of ‘going up’ (Schwartz 2022: np). The act of producing a story is a sensate response to enigma, a creative response to rumination and (perhaps) an antidote to ongoing rumination, but so what? Non-writers engage in antidotes to rumination. That is to say – Why not make a cake? Go for a run? Masturbate? Have a cigarette? I will return to these questions, more sensibly, in closing. First, I would like to consider, more fully, the influence of living|memory upon Clift and Johnston’s writing – the way in which Clift wrote (and pushed Johnston to write) ‘hard-up-against-life’, pushing (and pulling) within (and against) the borderlines of individual and collective identity. The personal and political, or personal|political, is at the core of my interest in Clift’s life and work.

My obsession with Clift’s question is part of my broader interest in her life as a writing|thinking woman, within the context of my reflections upon my own spelunking life as a writer|academic. My fascination with Clift began twenty years ago when I first read Nadia Wheatley’s (2001) mesmerising biography: The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Wheatley begins with an author’s note: ‘This is a work of fiction’ (Wheatley 2001 iix), noting that the biography ‘is the story of three women – a real woman, called Charmian Clift, a fictional woman, best known as Cressida Morley, and a third woman [the mythic Clift], who has become more famous than either of these’ (Wheatley 2001, 1). The fictional woman, Cressida Morley, is Clift’s alter-ego and (originally, at least) Clift’s creation. Morley features in the work of both Clift and Johnston and is widely understood to be a barely obscured version of Clift. I will return to this issue in more detail, later, discussing the precarious boundary that divides fiction from reality. As context, here, I refer to Genoni and Dalziell (2018, 366–367), who note that Clift’s book, The End of the Morning:

was conceptualised as an autobiographical coming-of-age fiction in which she was to introduce her character Cressida Morley. The work on this novel, which was commenced in 1963, was seemingly derailed by Clift’s commitment to assisting Johnston with My Brother Jack. As Nadia Wheatley has astutely observed, however, the difficulties Clift faced when she returned to the novel were complicated by Johnston having ‘borrowed’ Cressida Morley for his own use in My Brother Jack.

At this point, it is pertinent to note that it was not only her alter ego, Cressida Morley, that Clift shared but, indeed, her memories. When Johnston was interviewed, not long after Clift’s death in 1969, he remembers in this way: ‘Charmian sat on the stone step on a cushion and we talked and talked and remembered and remembered, and I wrote “My brother Jack”’ (Genoni and Dalziell 2018, 364). Johnston adds that Clift, who was many years younger than him, could remember the Depression as a little girl. I’d ask her: ‘What sort of clothes did you wear? What sort of slang did you use?’ (Genoni and Dalziell 2018, 365). This puts me in mind of a book I read recently, Veronica O’Keane’s: A Sense of Self. Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are.

O’Keane investigates how we make memories and how memory makes us. In the foreword to the text, O’Keane (2021: vii) addresses a discrepancy in the translation of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, ‘initially translated in 1954 as Remembrance of Things Past’ and later, in 1992 ‘to the more accurate In Search of Lost Time’. O’Keane (2021: vii, emphasis added), suggests that:

The original translation’s ‘rememberance of’ suggests a passive recall of memories from a hidden and fixed repository, while the later translation’s ‘in search of’ suggests an active pursuit of a past that is not lost. Neuroscience [O’Keane suggests] has almost caught up with Proust in the interval between the translations.

Clift and Johnston engaged in the labour of remembering, together – working with composite living|memory at the level of the sentence, weaving a story, searching for lost time in the Proustian sense of ‘the uncurable imperfection in the very presence of the present’ (Modjeska 2002, 25, emphasis in original). Maybe all forms of realism are actively pursuing a past that is not lost. Perhaps this is the impetus for authors of realist texts, the pursuit. However, if we consider the pursuit of the past within the context of the depiction of the character of Cressida Morley – and configure the relationship between the pursuit of living |memory within the context of impetus in realist writing, as I am doing in this essay – we see an obscuration of the ‘what’ of Clift’s ‘what are you doing it for?’ (Wheatley 2022, 291). That is to say, Clift’s relinquishing of her character, Cressida Morley, seems to morph the question she asks into something else, such as: who are you doing it for? In turn, as Clift’s character is appropriated by another artist’s vision, and interior life, we see a riddling of any given speculation about art-making as a reflection of an autobiographical and|or interior life.

When I read Wheatley’s biography, many years ago, I devoured it. It was the beginning of my own storied myth of Clift. It encouraged me to think about how various elements of our lives intersect, rub up-against-each-other and collide, sometimes impossibly and irresolutely. The complex relationship between writing and reading and living – the conundrum of what we write within the context of who we are – is at the heart of the complexity of Clift and Johnston’s relationship, and the intersections between the books that are attributed to them. It is also the driving force of this essay, as a representation of my engagement with Clift’s question, and my preoccupation with the complex interweaving – the cartwheels of our inner consciousness as it relates to what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write, and how we engage with the work of others, both writers we know in the everyday, and writers we ‘know’ through the page. That is to say, Wheatley’s book informs my understanding of my own identities (plural).

Plurality and acts of imagination and invention

Focusing plurality, as well as the author’s relationship with truth telling, Frances Egan and Beth Kearney discuss the disputable nature of autofiction as a category (2023, np):

Though autofiction has a broad and malleable definition, it may be understood as a work of literature that depicts real events from the author’s life, but takes liberties associated with fiction. In short, autofiction blends the autobiographical and the fictional.

Yet the genre is contentious. Some authors renounce the label, including Ernaux herself, who views her first-person ‘I’ as a collective self.

Elena Ferrante also engages with the writing mind as a plurality of selves. Imaginatively inhabiting Virginia Woolf’s writing mind, Ferrante reflects: ‘I like being Virginia, but the “I” who writes seriously isn’t Virginia; the “I” who writes seriously is twenty people, a hypersensitive plurality all concentrated in the hand provided with the pen’ (Ferrante 2022, 31–32). Paul Dalla Rosa, author of An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, goes as far as to say that ‘[t]he self [itself] is, in a sense, a fiction’ (2022; np).

At the baseline, this discussion may be about no more, or less, than the degree of separation between art and life, as well as the author’s willingness to ‘fess up’ to any perceived links, and yet even preliminary discussions of this kind are far from straightforward. Some would argue that literary fiction includes a greater degree of imagination and invention than other forms of realist writing. Perhaps in some cases that’s true but it’s a staggeringly slippery perhaps. The critic James Ley provides a compelling account of this slipperiness, suggesting that narrative truth is ‘always provisional and subjective. It is why realism is ultimately in the eye of the beholder […] By being railroaded into a narrative, autobiography becomes fictionalised’ (Ley 2005: np).

We have seen the work of authors such as Helen Garner scrutinised in the manner Ley describes. I think upon my own engagement with Garner’s Everywhere I Look and True Stories (text publishing, 2017, 2018), and her published diaries (2019, 2020, 2023), as well as Garner’s books marketed as fiction, such as Cosmo Cosmolino (1992) and The Spare Room (2009). ‘Coming clean’ about Monkey Grip (1977), initially marketed as a novel, Garner focuses degrees of realism and invention, suggesting that: ‘the “I” in the story is never completely me […] There can be no writing without the creation of a persona. In order to write intimately – in order to write at all – one has to invent an “I”’ (2022: np, emphasis in original). Of her notebooks, Garner says:

Nothing ‘serious’ I write can ever match these – exactly as my accounts of dreams, scribbled before I’m completely awake, contain more blunt truth of feeling or observation than I can ever produce when I’m sitting up at my desk telling myself I am ‘writing a novel’ (Garner in The Book Bird: np).

With Garner’s reflection in mind, I recall an extract from Clift’s journal where she wrote ‘diary jottings and notes toward fiction’. (Wheatley 2001, 435) Skirting life, Clift writes:

They had a curiously exhausting effect on each other: neither knew why. They were fond of each other. Some inscrutable bond held them together. But it was a strange vibration of the nerves, rather than a bond of the blood. A nervous attachment rather than a sexual passion. Each was curiously under the domination of the other. They were a pair – they had to be together. Yet quite soon they shrank from each other. This attachment of the will and nerves was destructive. (Wheatley 2001, 435)

Considering this extract, I ponder the way Garner’s reflections are inextricably tied to Ley’s observations that realism is in the eye of the beholder, as well as to Ernaux’s claim that writing is a process of chronicling ‘the stupefaction of the real’ (Ley 2005: np; Schwartz 2022: np). Clift, Ley and Garner encourage me to think, again, upon the relationship between living and memory, or living|memory, and realist writing – upon the relationship between falsity and truth, and the configuration of narrative truth as both true and false, by nature of authorial acts of foregrounding and exclusion.

Clift addresses this issue, in her ruminative style, in the essay ‘on clean straw for nothing’. Of her and Johnston’s writing style and relationship, she says:

[Johnston’s] purposes are, of course, various. But one of them is to write novels. To say what he knows. What he knows uniquely, because everyone’s experience is made up of unique particulars, and nobody can say for anyone else. I know this to be true because I have shared a great deal of his experience, and I know too that we both remember the experience quite differently. It affected us quite differently. We write about it quite differently. (Wheatley ed. 2022, 400)

This puts me in mind of Nietzche’s (1873) essay: ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’ which, in my reading, has always been a metaphor for creative writing practice. Nietzsche says: if we hide the truth behind a rock, and seek it again, only to find it in the self same place, then there is nothing to boast of, respecting this seeking and finding (1873, 264). As I consider narrative acts of foregrounding and exclusion – seeking and finding; writing as a quest for a narrative architecture that will hold a satisfying version of a multi-faceted idea; the configuration of detail as an act of invention that necessarily front-faces, ostracises, and shadows – I’m less interested in discussing any perceived level of allegiance to a writer’s life, than I am in pondering the capacity of narrative to enact a version of truth that reflects the dynamic force of living|memory, through story-work.

That is to say, I approach the distinction (or lack thereof) between fiction and other forms of realist writing as a reader who is drawn to the writing and thinking of authors such as Clift and Ernaux, and many others, and as an author of realist fiction who has written widely about memory as a form of stimulus for creative writing practice. For me, the issue of stimulus is not driven by the question of a quantifiable relationship between the author’s life and the subject matter of the writing – I shirk the ‘greater or lesser extent’ line of inquiry in favour of a flexibility that allows room for discussion about writing as a reflection of the operations (and inherent conundrums) of an interior life.

In an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jack Skelley (2022: np) considers the category of autofiction as it relates to inclusion and exclusion. He writes:

Autofiction is a fiction. It does not exist. More specifically, defined as a form of literature in which a first-person narrator may or may not represent the author, autofiction excludes next to nothing but genre fiction – e.g. crime stories, fantasy. If it’s everything, it’s nothing.

Skelley’s argument about the limits of exclusion stretches beyond the question of a first-person narrator within the context of autofiction. To my mind, Skelley’s reflections apply equally to tangential, slant and masked representations of authorial presence, including the use of close-third-person and omniscient forms of narration, in fiction. The blurred boundaries between fiction and autofiction – together with the somewhat controversial nature of the category of autofiction itself, and the issue of plurality – is further complicated when we consider the way Clift and Johnston worked together, an interaction between collective selves, producing writing that reflects the composite subjectivity of multiple individuals. On this point, in one of the most memorable observations in her biography of Clift, Wheatley reflects upon the impending doom of the intersecting pattern-of-practice, established by Clift and Johnston, early on. Wheatley writes (2001, 302):

Looking back with the privilege of hindsight, it is possible to see the Kalymnos novel [which they co-wrote] as an early step along a road that would take both writers – both people – to a dangerous conclusion. From this point on, the writers would start, imperceptibly at first, crossing back and forth through the thin boundary that divides fiction from reality.

While the terminology around categories of realist writing, as well as the rules associated with their execution, have developed, the intersections are not new. As Robin Hemley notes: the fusing [of autobiography, biography, and fiction] can be seen in the work of Marcel Proust, whose work Saunders characterises as ‘“not quite autobiography” (Hemley 2022, 30; Saunders 2010, 100), at least not directly so’ (Hemley 2022, 30). Perhaps all forms of realism are actively pursuing a narrativised version of living|memory and therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, represent the precarious boundary that divides fiction from reality, as well as the pursuit of a past that is not lost. How do these factors relate to art-making as a reflection of an interior life, and to the question of form and style, especially for artists such as Clift and Johnston who were working together?

Art-making as the reflection of an interior life – the thin boundary that divides fiction from reality

Clift and Johnston were truth-seekers. To my mind, this is Clift’s greatest gift to Johnston, pushing him to write in this way – writing hard-up-against-life as a way of living, utilising narrative as a mode of truth-telling. However, notably, when Johnston was writing Clean Straw for Nothing, Clift refused the support role, suggesting:

I was totally incapable of giving him the sort of help he needs with work in progress. He needs a constant presence, an ear, a sounding board, an audience. Some writers are like that and it has been my peculiar pleasure to perform this function for him. In fact, while My Brother Jack was being written I sat on the step by his desk every day for seven months so I would be there when I was wanted for discussion or suggestion or maybe only to listen.

But with Clean Straw I’ve had a complete emotional block, and not all my deep and genuine sympathy at the sight of him struggling and fighting with what was obviously proving to recalcitrant (sometimes I thought intractable) could force me into the old familiar step-sitting role. (Wheatley 2022, 405, emphasis added)

Clift deliberates upon the question of authorial freedom, within the context of Clean Straw for Nothing, the book that is purported to have precipitated her suicide. She says:

I do believe novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they like to write it (and after all, who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw […] is made is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and – as I said earlier – have felt differently because I am a different person. (Wheatley ed. 2022, 405)

Writers of realist prose may wrestle with the perceived exposure of their own (and others) art-making as a reflection upon an autobiographical and|or interior life. This issue is further complicated in the case of Clift and Johnston, who were writing life-inspired versions of each other. With this in mind, I reconsider Clift and Johnston’s entangled writing lives, returning to Hemley’s compelling analysis of autobiografiction with renewed understanding. Referencing Saunders, Hemley notes that: ‘during the long turn of the [nineteenth] century, the contractual model began to give way to a much more transactional and latitudinarian form in which autobiography, biography, and fiction could fuse with each other: namely, auto/biografiction’ (Hemley 2022, 30; Saunders 2010, 140). The fusing of form, and the way in which this relates to Hemley’s use of the term ‘allotropic’ (Hemley 2022, 10), is reflected in the work Clift and Johnston produced, as well as the projects they did not bring to fruition. This is aptly illustrated by further discussion of Johnston’s appropriation of the character of Cressida Morley. I’m drawn to Wheatley’s (2001, 442) deft analysis of this issue:

The problem arising was that […] Clift regarded Cressida Morley as being her own alter ego character. And if Johnston was developing Cressida – how could Clift? It was as if there were two sculptors chipping a figure out of one block of stone, but one sculptor worked much faster than the other, so that his side of the shape was developing while the other side was inchoate. (Wheatley 2001, 442)

Further, Wheatley (2001, 367) notes the devastating ramifications for Clift, saying that: ‘While Clift continued to work on The End of the Morning almost up until her death […] the novel remained fragmentary’. If Clift’s character, Cressida Morley, represents a map of her interior life, what are the ramifications of Johnston’s commandeering, and how does this impact upon Clift’s own reflection upon her question: what are you doing it for?

With this question in mind, I ponder, ad infinitum, the question of how much we will ever truly know of Clift, outside of mythologising. I defer to the indelible reflections of Clift and Johnston’s eldest son, Martin. In the programme Nadia Wheatley and Garry Kinnane [Johnston’s biographer] made for Radio Helicson, Martin speaks memorably about his mother:

there was a side to her, or I should say, a core to her, which is so private that I don’t think I ever really knew it – all the years I knew her, and I’m not sure that my father did, although I’m sure he came much closer to it than anyone else. She needed people too. She needed my father above all. But I think she needed them on her terms. In fact, in a sense, she wanted … she wanted to cheat. She wanted to have it both ways. She wanted to be able at any instance to run into wherever that core was at the centre of herself and slam the door, pull up the drawbridge […] and come out when she felt good and ready. (Chick 1994, 285)

I’m tormented by Martin’s reflection upon his mother as a deeply private person when, by all accounts (within the context of the socio-cultural mores of the time), Clift led a very public life. Reflecting upon the question of public and private lives – the ‘kind’ of writers Clift and Johnston were, the ‘type’ of people they were – puts me in mind of the reflections of Clift’s firstborn child, Suzanne Chick.

As context: prior to meeting Johnston, Clift bore a child to an unknown man: ‘In the early months of 1942 [Clift] found herself pregnant and with no prospect of establishing a permanent relationship with the father. Her daughter was born on Christmas day and almost immediately relinquished for adoption’ (Genoni and Dalziell 2018, 2). In her book: Searching for Charmian, Chick refers to a collection of photos of Clift and Johnston and their three children: Martin, Shane and Jason: ‘originals of the prints in Kinnane’s biography of Johnston, and some family shots’ (Chick 1994, 169). Chick says:

in these [photos] my mother was deliberately posing. Little Jason was holding onto her leg or tugging at her skirt, while her arm or hand was kept to herself and her eyes looked straight into the lens. She seemed to be more involved with her audience than with her child. It made me uneasy. I wanted to think of her as involved with her children. After all, I was one of them. (Chick 1994, 169, emphasis in original)

Upon a first reading, I was rattled by Chick’s reflection, weighing and measuring her words in relation to Martin’s ruminations upon his mother as a deeply private person. Of course, Chick is fully cognisant of the lure and pressure of her mother’s public life. Indeed, Chick adroitly compares her mother’s representation in these photos to other, more ‘natural’, photos of Clift: ‘totally different images of my mother and her other children’, taken in preceding years by an unknown photographer (Chick 1994, 169). This draws me to Genoni and Dalziell’s (2018), Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964: a comprehensive and superbly rendered mapping of Clift and Johnston’s Hydra years.

Genoni and Dalziell suggest that many of the photographs in Kinnane’s biography of Johnston are taken by James Burke and include images of the subjects’ private lives, noting that:

[Burke was] a photojournalist who follow[ed] his artist-subjects to their homes just as he followed the 10th street [Beat] artists [Ginsberg, Kerouac, O’Hara and others] several years before. As a result, Burke recorded the other side of the artists’ lives away from the sociability of the tables, taverns […] and public spaces […] that were their usual meeting places. (Genoni and Dalziell 2018, 22, emphasis added)

Genoni and Dalziell uncover the highly complex nature of the intersection between the public and the private, as recorded in the photographs in this collection of images, and with the awareness that this complexity extends well beyond visual images.

The analyses of Wheatley, Genoni and Dalziell, and Chick, informs my understanding of Ley’s compelling claim that the work of memoirists is ‘always provisional and subjective’ (Ley 2005: np). Ley expands upon this claim in the following way: the work of memoirists is ‘rhetorically indistinguishable from fiction and demand[s] the same kind of interpretations, the same scrutiny of a self that is ultimately an image, false, like all images’ (Ley 2005: np). The fraught inter-meshing of the private and public spheres shadows the relentless analyses upon Clift’s life and work – reflected so poignantly in Wheatley’s cogitation upon the ‘thin boundary that divides fiction from reality’ (Wheatley 2001, 302). Thinking upon the intersection between Clift’s life and life’s work, as it relates to writing practice more broadly, informs my reverence for Clift’s indomitable voice and vision, as well as her strength of spirit. In a ghostly flash forward to the ways in which she has been inequitably judged, mythologised and admired, Clift says:

It is the most pretentious nonsense to believe that the work you do will outlive you. It might, but then it might not, and history will be the judge of that, not you. What most of us leave to posterity are only a few memories of ourselves, really, and possibly a few enemies. A whole human life of struggle, bravery, hope, despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade. (Wheatley ed. 2022, 291)

In this way, in Clift’s (hallmark) direct and eloquent style, she addresses not only the tendentious nature of narrative, but also the fragility of memory as it relates to story-work – issues at the heart of my practice and thinking.

I began with the title question from Clift’s essay: ‘what are you doing it for’ (Wheatley ed. 2022, 288–292). At the end of this essay, Clift says: ‘You are perfectly entitled now to ask me what I am doing it for, and I promise to answer you honestly. I am doing it to please myself’ (Wheatley ed. 2022, 292). Me too, Clift – me, too – only what does this mean, in practice? Which is to say, what pleases me?

What pleases me? Realist forms of writing as a map of an interior life

As I’ve explained to many fellow writers, publishing stories sometimes leave me feeling as though I’d like to crawl under a rock. In part this is due to the perceived ‘exposure’ of art-making as a reflection of an interior life – the autobiogra|fictional life of a mind’s eye – however (or and) this reflection triggers my engagement with the question of what pleases me, as a sub-question of what I’m doing it for. That is to say, if engaging with others in relation to the published artefact is not always a pleasing experience, then what am I doing it for and what pleases me, precisely? In short, what pleases me as a writer of realist fiction is the quest for a narrative architecture that will hold a satisfying version of an idea – an idea that is otherwise riddled with conundrum and contradiction. What on earth do I mean, here?

At the 2022 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, in a session called ‘Writing Inner Worlds’, we (the panel members) were asked if we embed political messages in our stories. The facilitator observed that, in each of our stories, the reader feels general sympathies as well as cultural commentary for some of the characters and situations (Ubud Writers Festival 2022). I’ve never considered myself a political writer. I write ‘behind-closed-doors’ stories. I’m interested in particularities of person, place, and time. I answered the question in this way, adding that the particularities of the personal are, of course, inescapably political. Perhaps that’s why a couple of readers (male, ah hem), have suggested that it must have been difficult for my children to read my stories … I will return to this observation, in closing. I will deviate first, in order (I trust) to return with more clarity.

As discussed, I am acutely interested in the relationship between what I see as the haunting incompleteness of human experience and realist writing. In thinking upon this – the impetus to write in response to conundrum and contradiction – I defer to Raymond Carver, ‘poster boy’ for the dirty realist tradition. In an interview with Claude Grimal, titled ‘Stories Don’t Come Out of Thin Air’, Carver discusses the spark that ignites his writing. He says:

I use certain autobiographical elements [from my life …] an image, a sentence I heard, something I saw, that I did, and then I try to transform that into something else. Yes, there’s a little autobiography and, I hope, a lot of imagination. But there’s always a little element that throws off a spark […] Stories don’t come of thin air. There’s a spark. And that’s the kind of story that most interests me. (qtd. In Grimal 1996–1996)

Me, too, Carver – me, too – at best, my stories begin in bafflement – an immersive state of mind and emotion that is not to be shaken off until it has a narrative architecture – which, of course, is a matter of form and style.

During the same session, at Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, the panel facilitator asked each author a question that was specific to his engagement with our individual style. In relation to my recently published collection of short stories, I was prompted in the following way:

Bloodrust is intense, all the way through. You have a gift and style of shorter, declarative, to the point sentences. In other words, you say more with less [… The stories] ‘Bloodrust’, ‘Contrapuntal’ and ‘Two Day Room’ punch the reader in the mouth. Is this a preferred style or simply what the story calls for?

This is what story calls for, I said, adding that I understood the ‘punch’ to be a reflection upon the voice in these stories – the proximity of the voice of the focalising consciousness to the story’s central ideas. I explained that these stories represented an overwhelming emotional response to an inciting idea – a problem of logic, a riddle of emotion and logic. More specifically, I suggested that ‘Contrapuntal’ is a story about motherhood, in all its complexity – a story about the deep inequity of mothering as I understand it – the sense in which we are as close to our children as we may ever be to another living person, but ultimately estranged too – while ‘Bloodrust’ and ‘Two Day Room’ are stories of love, desire and fraught intimacy – they aim to plot the complexity of our fractured and multiple selves, the way we are at odds with (and none other than) this collection of selves.

After the session, a fellow writer suggested that I didn’t really answer the question about declarative sentences. I said: We don’t have to answer every question we are asked …  I’ve since thought about my reply – not only because I didn’t intend to avoid the question but also because my response surprised me. The final part of the facilitator’s question was: Do you have a special affinity and utility for writing like this? It certainly impacted me.

I elaborated by sharing the best writing advice I’ve ever received – three words – in fact, three syllables, courtesy of Australian author Bruce Pascoe – ‘Tell it true’ (Pascoe 2018). This recommendation has nothing to do with whether we are writing realist fiction or any other given form of realist writing. Rather, the suggestion is about the author’s handling of the focalising register as a voice that maps an interior life. The prompt relates to the author’s proximity to narrative truth as it is represented by form and style. It is a reflection upon story-work as a container for showcasing truth in alterity – truth that is emblematic of a broader range of ideas and ‘thinking positions’ – truth that demonstrates the plural nature of an interior life.

In this way, I see authors of realist fiction working in harmony with realist writers such as Ernaux, who suggests:

Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them […] examining them from different angles to give them meaning. (Schwartz 2022: np)

This reminds me of Murnane’s (1986: np) comments about finding suitable sentences to hold ‘stupendously complicated’ ideas. It also puts me in mind of prose poet Russell Edson, who refers to this search as ‘looking for the shape of thought more than particulars of […] narrative’ (in Hardwick 2022, 28). In this way, I see authors of realist fiction working in harmony with prose poets to the extent that, as Oz Hardwick notes, ‘this phrase, “the shape of thought”, is […] key […] because thoughts have their own shape before we impose our conscious or unconscious familiar structures upon them’ (Hardwick 2022, 28). That is to say, I practice story-work not within the context of the appropriation of a pre-established or pre-conceived model, but in favour of a quest for a form that represents the truthful shape of an interior life. To my mind, this is what it means to tell it true.

Telling in true … 

During the festival session, I said I’d certainly tried to tell-it-true in these stories – and that’s a version of the truth, but what I didn’t say – what it seems I avoided saying or had not yet adequately realised – was that in the particular stories the facilitator identified, my authorial register is hard-up-against the central focalising register. I have great empathy for these invented characters as representations of my interior consciousness as a plurality of selves. I’m taken with these fictional figures and their (somewhat irreconcilable) extremes. How, then, does this relate to the question of what pleases me and what I’m doing it for, to my fundamental interest in the relationship between living|memory and realist writing, as well as my ruminations upon Clift’s life and writing?

In preparing the presentation about Clift and Johnston, and their influence upon what came to be known as the Hydra circle of artists, I shared a ‘cut up’ version of Allen Ginsberg’s poem: ‘Cosmopolitan Greetings’. Ginsberg was a fellow member of the Hydra Circle of artists. The modified version of this poem represents my own ‘take’ on Clift. The extracts read as follows:

Say only what you see and imagine.

[…]

Notice what you notice.

Catch yourself thinking.

[…]

Remember the future.

[…]

We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.

[…]

What’s in between thoughts?

[…]

What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound?

[…]

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

[…]

Subject is shown by what she sees.

‘Cosmopolitan Greetings’ (Ginsberg A, Poem Hunter)

While Clift is undoubtedly represented as ‘observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person’ (ibid) in the prize-winning works attributed solely to Johnston, it is her narrative-driven essays that, to my mind, represent one of the clearest examples of what she saw and imagined – a sequence of narrative images that illustrate, quite directly, what she noticed, and her ruminations upon her apprehensions. Reading Clift’s essays reminds me that I’m far less interested in labels as demarcations that aim to distinguish between forms of realist writing, than I am in the question of how realist writing represents the interior life of a shapely mind.

Clift’s essays are testament to Ginsberg’s claim that a ‘subject is shown by what she sees’ (Ginsberg 2003: np). The essays are highly imaginative – they read like container stories, like prose poems, an image of one thing and, at the very same time, something else altogether. The ‘something else altogether’ does not represent a failure to tell-it-true but, rather, the work of a writer who toils in pursuit of a narrative architecture that reflects a highly complex idea. Clift’s essays are the work of a writer who understands that ‘Art is [indeed] shapely’ (Ginsberg 2003: np).

In reflecting upon Clift’s question as it relates to my own creative practice, I take heed of an unforgettable observation by the poet and essayist Anne Carson (1995), who suggests that ‘Bronte learnt all she knew about love and its necessities from [watching] a north wind grind the moor’ (‘The Glass Essay’ Ann Carson). That is to say: I’m deeply interested in ‘feeling-thinking’; I’m alive in the work of association and metaphor as the labour of writers who, first and foremost, are compelled to write an imaginative interior life as a means of thinking between thoughts.

I return, now, to my point of deviation – responding more directly to the comments of those readers who have suggested that it must have been difficult for my children to read my stories. In the first instance, I made peace (many moons ago) with the knowledge that, in any given moment, I will be both too-much and never-enough (and whatever else, in between), for my (now adult) children. That is to say, on the one hand, I don’t really care if my children find my stories difficult to read. What I mean to say, here, is that I think any (mis?) conception that my stories may prove difficult for my children, seems to be based upon a subject I’m not particularly interested in – the perceived correlation between story-work and the author’s life. If my children choose to read my stories, and find them difficult, let them squirm (if indeed they choose to partake in the patriarchal ‘squeam’). If my children ask me what I’m doing it for, I’d like to be able to say, honestly: I’m noticing what I notice; I’m mapping a plural interior consciousness; I’m trying to tell it true.

In the final lines of The Lost Daughter, Elena Ferrante’s protagonist responds to her daughters, who ask about her welfare: ‘Mama, what are you doing, why haven’t you called? Won’t you at least let us know if you’re alive or dead?’ – to which the mother replies: ‘I’m dead, but I’m fine’ (Ferrante 2006, 140). To be incapacitated by haunting is a type of death. I write to escape it – because I don’t really care for cake, endorphins are short-lived, and I don’t want to be beholden to cigarettes. I feel alive in the act of narrative making – proactively and pleasantly haunted – I write to avoid being alive in a way that is dead but fine – and there it is, dear Clift, the what of what I am doing it for. I write in the quest for a narrative architecture that gives shape to ideas that are otherwise rife with conundrum and contraction. This search gives me great pleasure.

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Notes on contributors

Julia Prendergast

Julia Prendergast lives in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018) was longlisted for the Indie Book Awards (debut fiction). Her short story collection: Bloodrust and other stories was published in 2022. Julia is a practice-led researcher – an enthusiastic supporter of transdisciplinary, collaborative research practices, with a particular interest in neuro|psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity. Julia is Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing (Australasia). She is Associate Professor and Discipline Leader (Creative Writing and Publishing) at Swinburne University.

Notes

1 Clift relinquished a daughter, Suzanne Chick, prior to meeting her husband, George Johnston. As Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziel (2018, 2) note: ‘In the early months of 1942 [Clift] found herself pregnant and with no prospect of establishing a permanent relationship with the father. Her daughter was born on Christmas day and almost immediately relinquished for adoption’.

2 I outline these ideas at some length in Prendergast (2019, 2021, 2022a, 2022b).

3 I outline my perception of this relationship in more detail in ‘Imagination is the queen of truth: The realist text as sensory narrative image’, 2020, TEXT Journal, Vol. 24, no. 2, 1–18.