George Johnston (1)Reseñas

Put this one on your must read Classics list.
This book is really a memoir of the author (David Meredith) who just happens to admire his older brother Jack as he is the total opposite of himself. It takes place in Melbourne Australia between the 2 wars. It starts with his parents returning from the 1st World War, when the 2 boys are very young. It gives us a fantastic insight into the impact the War had on peoples lives and how they dealt with it, and how Australian society developed from it, through the roaring twenties and the Depression and into the 2nd World War. Jack is the quintiseential Aussie like his parents and their cohorts while David is quiet, reserved and out of place in that working-class suburban Melbourne world. Yet it is David that grows up to fill a space in society far greater than most people can imagine for themselves while Jack, the lively one, the adaptable one, the one in tune with his environment, never grows out of that environment.

The greatness of this book is its sheer honesty, and the honesty of the author. It portrays an Australian society that is violent, racist and sexist to levels that are embarrassing to admit today. It shows how characters react to what is happening around them and from these pieces build their lives. In this environment characters can be both kind and caring and at the same time rough and self-centred. Jack seems to blend all these elements into a rather balanced personality, but David admits early in the book, he is not a nice person - by the end of the book you have to agree with him.

My Brother Jack is the first of a trilogy which basically is a memoir of the author's life. The other books are Clean Straw for Nothing, and, A Cartload of Clay.

I've just re-read this book 50 years after studying it at school. Interestingly, the book remains compelling and has stood the test of time.
It is a harsh and raw self examination of the writers life. While many details are known to be factually inaccurate, the whole gives an impression of what life was like in Melbourne after WW1, and how Johnston lived his life. No picnic, it is still a great piece of writing.

Interesting. I'm glad I've read it, but I certainly have no desire to keep a copy on my shelves and re-read it later. Almost always described as an Australian Classic - it is unambiguously Australian, but I'm not sure what makes it a "classic"? I don't know enough literary history to place it in the context of other Australian books, but I'm guessing that it was among the earlier books to be unashamedly about the real lives of people who identify themselves as "Australian", and I suppose it was our involvement in the World Wars which was so important in shaping that identity. As such, I found it worthwhile to look back on what sort of society my parents and grandparents grew up in and how that might have made them into the people they were, and hence made me. My own personal family history is strongly linked to characters from this period and so it's good to get a different view on that part of our history. I found myself identifying quite closely with the narrator David, but the character of his brother Jack remains a complete mystery to me. I think maybe that's the point of the story?....to challenge the "Jack"s in our society?? Hmmmm...I think I'm out of my depth here, not being the analytical, intellectual type.

This final of Johnston’s Meredity trilogy is not as brilliant as the first, My Brother Jack, nor as scattered as the second, Clean Straw for Nothing. Johnston died before A Cartload of Clay was published. Clean Straw reads as if thrown together from notes and partially complete chapters; Cartload reads as incomplete, which by all accounts it is. My Brother Jack may well qualify as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Other than a handful of short stories, these are the only Johnston works I have read.

The historic value of Cartload is twofold: first, as a likely biographical account of his reaction to his wife’s suicide and his own impending death and, second, as a beautifully written account of the changing face of 1970s Mosman, the Sydney suburb where Johnston lived out his last days.

Johnston’s metaphors are rich and unique, a good enough reason to read even his most lacking pieces, particularly if you are an aspiring writer seeking out silent teachers in the works of other writers. Unfortunately, My Brother Jack was his only success at storytelling. I consider Cartload of Clay somewhat of a post script to the other two -- not a work that stands on its own, but a needed completion to the story begun by the first two books. My Brother Jack belongs to world literature. Johnston’s other writings belong to his fans, his biographer and, not least, to his countrymen.

The first book in a great trilogy and one which I really enjoyed...loved the TV series too. I think the others in the series were Clean Straw for Nothing and a Cartload of Hay.
Third in my list of ten favourite Australian books.

Australians George Johnston and Charmian Clift were husband and wife, as well as writing partners. They published a few joint-effort novels, but Clift’s role in the partnership was primarily as muse and sounding board for her husband’s efforts. This collection, selected by Johnston biographer Garry Kinnane, includes seven stories penned by Johnston and four written by Clift.

Johnston emerged as a journalist of international reputation during his World War II stint as a war correspondent for an Australian newspaper. As a novelist, his success was limited until the publication of My Brother Jack, for which he won Australia’s highest literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. My Brother Jack and two subsequent novels, Clean Straw for Nothing (which also won the Miles Franklin) and A Cart Load of Clay comprise his largely autobiographical trilogy about David Meredith, an Australian journalist-turned-novelist.

Clift’s early short stories and novels were reportedly well received in the U.S. and Britain, but not widely circulated in Australia. By the time she met and married Johnston, who was eleven years her senior, she was an established writing professional. After Johnston and Clift returned to Australia with their family after years abroad, living in England and Greece, Clift became a popular columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald. Despite her own writing successes, she never entirely emerged from her husband’s shadow, and she ended their long, troubled marriage with her suicide in 1969. A year later, Johnston died from the tuberculosis that had made him an invalid the last few years of his life.

Johnston’s stories in the collection include a passage that was apparently intended as a part of his final David Meredith novel, a day when the character (no doubt describing Johnston’s own experience) anticipates his doctor telling him that he is near death’s door. Five of the remaining pieces are peopled with Greek characters embedded in stories of Greek life on the island of Hydra. The remaining story, my favorite, describes a group of ex-pat writers and artists who are drawn together as the only foreigners on the island.

Clift’s contributions to this collection include a story of a little girl who wants to fly, a portrait of a bored wife, a piece of memoir from her years in Greece, and a tale of a husband and wife separated so often by his work that they don’t know one another. Clift’s stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Her writing is concise and entertaining, and she is imaginative in her descriptions, without encumbering her stories with long, unnecessary descriptive passages.

While the same cannot be said for Johnston, his imagery is perhaps the most powerful I have ever read: “The black rods of the reinforcing steel writhed out of the concrete pillars like huge worms trying to release themselves and escape into the pools below” and “the sky was a swinging glitter of stars like powdered ice.” As the Meredith piece dragged on and on, I became too weary of the pace to enjoy the fine writing. In the final story in the collection, the story of the Greek island’s ex-pat community, the story moves at a pleasing pace, arriving at its effective end without meandering through the back alleys of exquisite descriptive prose.

If I were to compare the two, I would have to say that Johnston is the stronger writer and Clift is the stronger story teller. In balance, she would have to be the better writer overall. However, when Johnston is good, he is masterful. It must be remembered that these stories were published posthumously; by their very nature they were leftovers or left-behinds, either rejected or never submitted. That considered, it is a creditable collection by two fine writers.½

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 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.½

The story begins at the closing of World War I and ends at the culmination of World War II. The years in between furnish the backdrop against which two Australian working-class brothers grow into adolescence, young manhood, and the early years of maturity that are marked by marriage, children, and ageing parents. Though masterfully drawn as authentic Australian characters in an authentic Australian landscape, Dave, Jack, their parents, and their wives are true to archetypes that exist in every human culture.
After a childhood of games, fights, and mischief, Jack wholeheartedly romps through his hormonally driven skirt-chasing phase, then leaps into adulthood, brashly taking on the mantle of manhood, which means patriotic service to his country, responsibility to his family, and creation of the next generation of human beings. Jack is Everyman.
Dave occupies a sort of middle-management fringe that nature can afford because Jack is tending his never-ending job so well. Dave is pushed from behind by civilization's need for progress and pulled forward by Jack, who needs him to be better than he is. Each of them is driven by eternal forces, Jack the man of action and Dave the man whose decisions are almost always non-decisions that move him inexorably forward without feeling responsibility for where he's been or where he's going.
The tale is told in the first person by Dave, with such incredible self-scrutiny and painful insight into the foibles and weaknesses of a clever, gifted writer that the reader feels compelled to accept it as a true autobiography. But it most likely isn't, at least not in its entirety. The gift of a novel is that the writer can tell the entire, bald truth and hide behind the fiction of it. A secondary benefit that feeds the novelist's creative soul is that events can be changed that didn't turn out right in real life or maybe seemed too mundane to be worthy of printed expression. Life is stranger than fiction, and fiction is more honest.
Johnston is a superb writer, and My Brother Jack is on my Top Ten List of Things That Make Me Glad I Trekked to Australia—right up there with the magpie's morning song, the stark white bark of giant gum trees, fine red-orange sand, the haunting sound of the didjeridoo, and the aura of people who have been here so long that they are inseparable from the earth.
On the back cover of my fragile, yellowing 1971 paperback copy is an excerpt from a review published in the London Illustrated News in which the reviewer concludes, "I truly believe this to be one of the greatest books written this century." Well said.

This was required reading in High School many many years ago. I know it's an Australian classic, and I would love to tell you that I enjoyed it, even that I liked it.Sorry, but I can't. I loathed every page. It was horrible, unpleasent and nasty. The main character, a thinly disguised version of the author I'm told, spends the book wallowing in the self pity of someone who despises himself. I ended up despising him too. Few good things happen in this book, and there are fewer good characters for those things to happen to. It was a relief to finish it and move on to the next assignment.

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.

Described as one of the great Australian novels, this Miles Franklin Award willing novel has dated pretty well. The prose style, with long sentences and descriptions, takes a little while to get used to in these days of staccato sentences and headlong action, but its well worth the effort. Its acutely observed relationships between the major characters - David Meredith, his wife Helene, his parents, and of course his brother Jack - are worked out against a background of the period between the wars and during the Second World War. Definitely worth a read.

George Johnston's greatest book and one of the great Australian novels of all time, the first in his sadly unfinished Meredith trilogy.

Completely engaging story and characters, based on Johnston's own life.

I'd heard of this book quite some time ago and found it when I was doing my massive christmas splurge. It's the story of David Meredith growing up. His view on the world and the people around him, in particular his older brother Jack. He compares himself to him, judges him and admires him. The book spans from the end of World War I through to World War II.

The characters are easy to relate to and develop nicely. As I read I would seesaw between liking Davy, sympathising with him or wanting to reach into the book and deck him. It's also nice to read a book where the references to places are recognisable - the mention of a street or suburb where I've visited. Was nice.

There are two more books about David Meredith and I think I'll track them down. I'm also going to find the mini series on video and have a look - has Matt Day as David Meredith which when you think about it, is lovely casting.

4 1/2 diggers out of 5

My Brother Jack is an Australian family saga covering the period between the ends of WW1 and WW2. Only a short time after its publication in the early 60s, the novel was already hailed as an Australian classic.

It is without doubt a beautifully drawn portrait of life in Melbourne in the inter-war years: the maimed, limbless soldiers returning from the trenches in France; the daily life on the dockside and at a print works; the effects of the Depression; schooling and religion. With Australian writers with the skill of Johnston, Patrick White and Ruth Park, there can be no better understood era in any country at any time.

Jack is the brother of the narrator, David Meredith, who fulfils an early ambition to become a writer. Jack himself is a model of how Australian males of the era liked to see themselves: a bit of a larrikin, bold, energetic, rebellious, good with his fists, a game adventurer. As with many other Australians, Jack’s adventurous spirit is thwarted. Johnston alludes to the pioneering spirit like that of the Old West in the US, only the Australian interior offered nothing to conquer but barren desert.

The narrator himself, while the weaker and more studious of the brothers, is the one who ultimately achieves greater worldly success. But as time goes on, David’s more intellectual, cosmopolitan outlook alienates him from his Australian roots. I found this aspect the least well charted development in the story. For most of the first half of the novel, the narrator’s eye is sharply focused on the people around him, not on David himself. So the reader feels less comfortable with the sudden 180 degree shift of focus onto the narrator as a character in his own story, as he begins to discover dissatisfaction with his marriage and ordinary middle class life in Melbourne.

All the same a very absorbing and rewarding book.