Clean Straw for Nothing

Clean Straw for Nothing is the second novel in George Johnston’s largely autobiographical Meredith trilogy. The first in the series, My Brother Jack, was Johnston’s first commercial success as a novelist. Fifteen years before its publication, he had relinquished a successful and secure career as a journalist to devote himself full time to writing books. His success came at the end of his life—a life cut short by tuberculosis, which he contracted while living in Greece. He returned to Australia in 1964 with his wife and four children. That same year, he won Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award for My Brother Jack. He finally succumbed to his illness in 1970 at the age of 58, a year after both his wife’s suicide and his show more second Miles Franklin Award—this time for Clean Straw for Nothing. The third novel in his Meredith trilogy, A Cartload of Clay, was published incomplete in 1971.

My Brother Jack is in my personal Top Twenty—maybe even Top Ten, if I give it careful thought. And that’s why I am so disappointed with Clean Straw for Nothing. It is the same truly fine writing, but it takes more than delicious prose to make a story. The novel is riddled with problems, the most prominent being the confusing jumps forward and backward in time. David Meredith, the story’s protagonist, is also the narrator—sometimes, that is. Occasionally, the narration lapses into third-person.

While I was puzzling through my conflicting thoughts about the novel’s random shufflings of time (not flashbacks), I encountered an Internet essay about William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. I learned that Burroughs was a heroin addict, and under the influence, he undertook a daring literary adventure. He cut his manuscript into chunks and haphazardly rearranged them. Some of the chunks cut a sentence in half, its completion settling itself in a nonsense connection with entirely different subject matter. This insight into Burroughs’s work accomplished two things for me. First, I took Naked Lunch off my list of books to read. Next, I sensed a clue to what Johnston had done.

Johnston knew his illness was rapidly siphoning away his life, and he had yet to begin the third installment in his Meredith trilogy. By his own admission, through the journaling of his character David Meredith, he was struggling with his writing: “The trouble is that the kaleidoscope does not shake well any more. Perhaps something has gone wrong with it. . . . There are brief periods when it still comes up with perfectly clear, bright pictures, lucid little geometries, and at other times one can achieve only a kind of fragmentation of particles, a splintering, all the coloured bits flying in all directions.”

Johnston took his collection of “lucid little geometries” and pieced them into a book. The jerrymandering of past, present and time zones—masquerading as literary experiment—create a fog that draws a veil across the jagged edges of vignettes that don’t quite fit together. Clean Straw for Nothing is a collage of journal entries, snippets from an unfinished novel, notes (maybe even letters) from a European vacation, and ruminations on a life as jumbled as the novel.

There are two redeeming values in the book. First, the writing, detail that engages the senses, passages so rich you will savor them slowly:

"In a hospital ward, Meredith realized, there was no such thing as silence; there was always someone stirring, groaning, coughing, muttering, moving, the starchy stiff whisper of the night nurses’ uniforms behind the jabbing flashlight beams, the metallic click of equipment, the soft slow hiss of oxygen. From outside, too. The muted moan of the city’s night traffic, more stridently punctuated along the road beside the hospital, nocturnal shuntings in the adjacent railway yards, the running clangour of buffers, soft pantings of locomotives interspersed with quick shuddering snorts like animals in pain, and from a point far away, always the same point and at the same time, the nostalgic faint mournful cry of train whistles fading north towards Newcastle." (p. 126)

The novel’s second redeeming value is the insight into the lives of George Johnston and his wife Charmian Clift, significant figures in Australian literature, as well as in the international arts community of their day. In his prefatory Author’s Note to Clean Straw, Johnston cautions the reader that this is a work of fiction; yet biographers, acquaintances and old friends take it to be closely autobiographical.

What continues to haunt me about the book is how absent are Cressida Morley’s and David Meredith’s (Clift’s and Johnston’s) children—a bare few paragraphs here and there. The emphasis is on the relationship between the two and their place in their circle of friends. Clift’s suicide note suggests she is responding to a spousal act of emotional cruelty—another episode in a twenty-year narrative of clashing emotions? Johnston writes his fictional life with scant mention of his children, and his wife commits suicide in a drunken stupor, with no mention at all. As autobiography, this exclusion of the children may reflect a sad reality in their lives. As a novel, the functional invisibility of the protagonist's children is a flaw in character development.

I think Clean Straw is a case of far too many “coloured bits flying in all directions” for a sick man to bring together. Johnston’s lengthy, elegant descriptions reduce conversation and actions to still lifes. He describes them without engaging them. Dialogue is far too sparse. A series of disjointed passages of brilliant prose simply aren’t enough. Good enough for a memoir perhaps, but a novel needs a plot and good storytelling. Clean Straw for Nothing has neither. show less

This is the continuation of the semi-autobiographical tale of My Brother Jack.
It continues to be (seemingly) autobiographical as far as Johnston and his wife, Charmian Clift are concerned, but third parties are more camouflaged.
The content makes for tough reading - their careers are not doing well, far too much alcohol, marrital infidelity, and Johnston's health is failing. My Brother Jack was critical of society, but there was hope. There's not much hope or optimism in this book.

The sequel to My Brother Jack, this is an examination of a marriage and of a quest for a life away from the mundane suburban existence of Melbourne or London. The writer and his wife abandon middle class comforts for life on a small Greek island, but their marriage suffers through sexual jealousy and each partner's mutual lack of understanding of their inner most desires.