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Charmain Clift
Honour's Mimic
Honour's Mimic
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Honour’s Mimic combines the authentic Greek setting of Charmian Clift’s travel memoirs with the fine writing that has caused her to be described as Australia’s greatest essayist.
Peta's Review
Although first published in 1964, Charmian Clift’s Honour’s Mimic unfortunately disappeared from bookstore shelves, until now, thanks to Nadia Wheatley. Wheatley is an award-winning author, critic and historian. Her biography of Clift, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001) was named The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize. It is also recognized, by the author and critic Peter Craven, as "one of the greatest Australian biographies", and remains the definitive account of Clift’s life, work, and her much mythologised legacy. In 2022 Wheatley published Sneaky Little Revolutions, a curated anthology of over 80 essays by Clift, originally published in the 1960s, selected and introduced by Wheatley. In 2024, Wheatley edited, and published for the first time, the end of the morning, which is Clift’s unfinished autobiographical novel. Set in the small quarry town of Kiama, on the NSW south coast, it is narrated by Clift’s alter ego, Cressida Morley. Although working on this work for decades, being constantly in the shadow of her (in)famous husband, George Johnston, she never managed to finish it. However, Wheatley writes that although “only a fragment of an intended larger work… it stands alone as a novella.” While it is incredibly sad that she was unable to complete the manuscript, after reading it, it is evidence, to my mind, why Clift is one of Australia’s most significant authors.
And now, thanks again to the efforts of Wheatley, Honour’s Mimic has been brought back into the spotlight. In her insightful afterword, Wheatley explains that it was unfortunately first published at the same time as her husband, George Johnston, published what was to become the Miles Franklin winning My Brother Jack. As a result, Honour’s Mimic, while receiving some positive reviews, was completely overshadowed by Johnston’s critical acclaim. Interestingly, Wheatley believes that the lack of success of Clift’s novel was not, however, just the coincidence of My Brother Jack reaching the bookshelves at the same time, but because, writes Wheatley, “[it] disobeyed the genre rules of the woman’s romance”, and because “the Greece that provides it authentic setting was not the Greece that is beloved by tourists.” It therefore challenged the reader expectations, and argues Wheatley, probably still does today. Yes, I agree, it resists easy answers, but for me that is its power. I assure you; it is worth the challenge.
Set on the rugged Greek island of Kalymnos, where Clift, Johnston and their two children lived before relocating to Hydra, the story follows Kathy, an Australian woman recovering from a car accident and a stifling marriage, moves to Kalymnos to convalesce with Demetrius and Milly. Demetrius is a wealthy sponge merchant on the island, while Milly is his very pregnant English wife. While Demetrius is handsome, educated and heir of Kalymnos’ most successful sponge merchant business, Kathy finds herself instead drawn into an unlikely romance with Fotis, a poor, local sponge diver. He is also married and father of eight children, with another on the way. Their relationship breaks every rule. Both come from vastly different worlds, Kathy, educated and foreign; Fotis, illiterate and economically bound to the dangerous occupation of sponge diving. She is escaping from her stultifying middle-class marriage, he from poverty and from, writes Wheatley, “one of the most dangerous, terrifying and poorly paid trades on earth.” But their bond is powerful, reaching such intensity that even “honour becomes mimic”, as the title suggests.
The title of the novel, Honour’s Mimic, is drawn from John Donne’s metaphysical poem “The Sun Rising” (1633):
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Donne tells us that the love between the speaker and his beloved is more real and significant than the artifice of wealth and power. For Donne, and by extension, Kathy and Fotis, believe that worldly honour is merely an imitation of the raw, powerful love they share. The strength of their connection, Kathy believes, is that they have each experienced a brush with death, Kathy in a car accident, Fotis in a diving misadventure. Both incidents now consume them with a fear they cannot shake. Caught in a storm one day, Fotis reveals to Kathy how terrified he was “when the shadow of the huge black manta ray hung above him as he crawled through the weeds of the sponge-bed… .” At that moment he “knew the uncoloured and lightless texture of death.” Kathy recognises that Fotis, like her, is another “desperate one.” Like the couple in Donne’s poem, Kathy and Fotis develop an all-encompassing love, as Donne powerfully writes in the poem, “Nothing else is.”
Clift renders the doomed love between Kathy and Fotis compellingly. She masterfully uses the rugged, evocative landscape of Kalymnos to mirror the emotional terrain between Kathy and Fotis, raw, exposed and visceral. Their love is completely outside the bounds of conventional society. As I mentioned previously, Clift refuses to conform with any genre rules. What Clift gives us in Honour’s Mimic is a meditation on the fragility of human connection. The potent sense of inevitability is present from beginning to end. However, because of Clift’s masterful storytelling, I never saw the relationship of Kathy and Fotis as anything but completely convincing and authentic. Of course, there cannot, we know, be a ‘happy-ever-after’ for Kathy and Fotis. The ending is gut-wrenching, even though we know as readers that Kathy and Fotis can never be together. Regardless, I felt the stone hit hard, unlike Kathy who “scarcely felt [it] when it hit her.” I had to catch my breath before I closed the book.
On reflection, I believe the power of the novel is because, as Wheatley puts it, Clift is “neither exposing nor endorsing the cultural mores of a society that survived economically on the machismo of men who engaged in what, at that time, was one of the most dangerous, terrifying, and poorly paid trades on earth.” Rather, what Clift does is give to us the story of two desperate people who recognise in each other the need to escape the stultification of their lives. I embraced Kathy and Fotis. I hope that others will too. I also hope that Wheatley will turn her efforts next to republishing Clift’s other out-of-print novel, Walk to the Paradise Gardens, first published in 1960. We can only hope.
Publisher's Review
We are alike, Kathy thought. You are a desperate one, too. She was incredulous that she could be so happy when it was so perfectly clear that the situation was impossible, could not possibly last, and that in any case this man was doomed already.
In this novel, Charmian Clift broke the rules of the romance genre by her representation of a relationship between a middle class Australian woman and a Greek sponge diver who is an outcast even within his own society. Both are 'desperate’ – trapped in loveless marriages and overcome by a sense of nameless dread. But when these twin souls fall in love in the ruins of an ancient citadel above the port-town of a remote and poverty-stricken Greek island, ‘honour’ becomes 'mimic' – a false imitation of itself – and is cast aside, together with unhappiness and fear.
Honour’s Mimic combines the authentic Greek setting of Charmian Clift’s travel memoirs with the fine writing that has caused her to be described as Australia’s greatest essayist.
'Charmian Clift broke the rules of the romance genre with this representation of a relationship between a middle-class Australian woman and a Greek sponge diver who is an outcast even within his own society.' – Readings Monthly
'The [writing] is but it is distinctive in its potency, and for the way the love story is interwoven with the brutal realities of class, immigration, and mid-century morality. We devoured it.' – The Paris End
'Honour's Mimic is a superbly realised portrait of the links between true love and mortality. It is about how being in another country can unmoor and perhaps free you to find "a passionate affirmation of that old lost desire to face challenge and danger, to be brave, to dare for the truth".' – Declan Fry
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