My Brother Jack by George Johnston

About the author

George Johnston started his career in journalism with the Melbourne Argus when he was just sixteen. After his work as a correspondent during World War II Johnston began to focus on literature when he moved to the Greek islands with his second wife Charmian Clift. It was the strength of his honesty about humanity and relationships that earned him his place in Australia’s literary canon. Johnston died in 1970 after a long battle with tuberculosis, but his enduring myth and greatness lives on through two semi-autobiographical works for which he was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 1964 for My Brother Jack and in 1969 for Clean Straw for Nothing.

Review

Paul Daley
December 23, 2014
The Guardian

It’s been 50 years since Collins first published George Johnston’s My Brother Jack in Australia and Britain. Fifty! That is the age at which Johnston – well known to Australians as a journalist before exiling himself to Europe in 1951– began writing what still deserves recognition as a seminal novel for his country. A 50-year-old writer is probably too old to be called prodigious, although Johnston’s output as both a journalist and later, a novelist, were the envy of contemporaries.

Released to national and international acclaim in 1964, My Brother Jack was the novel of a man whose whole life had led to it. It was also the work of a man who, though only 52 when it hit the bookshops, was almost physically and emotionally shot, a man who, had his body held out, might have lived into his 80s to produce half a dozen more novels to which the epithet “great Australian” could just as easily have been applied.

I’ve tended to read the novel, as I do with many of my favourites, about every 10 years and I’ve always managed to find something previously unseen in it. It feels, each time, like I’m glancing in the rear-view mirror at myself, all the while thinking: “How could you possibly have taken so long to realise that?” It’s one of those books I’ve grown up – if not quite old – with, as a reader and, later, as a writer, and one that has had a profound impact on me as both.

Set largely in Melbourne in the first half of the 20th century, My Brother Jack introduces David Meredith, born to a damaged Gallipoli veteran and a first world war nurse. The father is violent, the mother long-suffering, distant. Meredith’s Melbourne is a dull sprawl of grey suburbia where his overt life unfolds mundanely according to his father’s tyrannical blueprint; but the young Davy, a physical coward with little moral compass, is a secret writer destined for a career as a great journalist.

The personal parallel with Johnston is scarcely disguised (and for decades after publication members of his family disputed characterisations based on them). But look beyond the obvious autobiography and the family roman a clef and discover the novel’s real strength – a daring iconoclasticism that challenges pervasive assumptions about Australian character, values and suburban complacency.

An alternative national story

When I grew up “Australian history”, such as it was, began with European settlement in 1788, covered the first world war, the ensuing great depression, world war two, Menzies, Vietnam and the cold war (Whitlam, and the dismissal, were too recent news to be yet considered historically worthy).

World war one was presented as a tragedy, which it was, for the loss of 62,000 Australian men (and the wounding of a countless tens of thousands more). But the social impact of that loss, the legacy bequeathed the surviving soldiers and the families of the dead, was never explored. Instead the war was, we were inculcated to believe, simply the moment of national definition. I’ve written often enough about how I never did and never will quite understand how that came to be, but it was Johnston’s My Brother Jack that truly awoke in me an alternative social and historical narrative for the first world war.

Johnston’s post-war Australia lived with the terrible impact of the war daily. The Meredith family – with the regular beatings dealt to the sons by the shell-shocked father, the mother occasionally in fear of her life and the house, itself, a terrible reminder of war’s horror – was allegory for the national story playing out behind thousands of bolted shut front doors in anodyne suburbs across the land.

Johnston’s description of the hallway in Meredith’s home, Avalon, evokes the gloominess, the antiseptic and bodily odour of the repatriation hospital.

My suburb in Melbourne’s Baptist “Bible-belt” east was not too far from where Johnston himself had lived, so he had my attention when he wrote of his “flat and dreary suburb in far away Melbourne”. Johnston wrote: “The hallway itself, in fact, was far from undistinguished, because a souvenired German gas mask hung on the tall hallstand . . . and the whole area of the hall was a clatter of walking-sticks with heavy grey rubber tips – the sort of tips on walking sticks that relate to injury rather than elegance – and sets of crutches – the French type as well as the conventional shapes of bent wood – and there was always at least one invalid wheelchair there and some artificial limbs propped into the corners.”

The Australia of Johnston – whose work probed, often to his personal detriment, questions of masculine courage and responsibility – was indelibly marked by the war in a way that could never rationally be construed as positive. Physically complete men were, he wrote, “pretty rare beings”. They were more likely to be men like Davy’s brother-in-law Bert, a veteran and an amputee whose convalescence never ended, and the parade of his mother’s war pets. These were damaged men with no place to go who took up rooms in Avalon, leaving Davy and his older brother Jack (of the title) to make do in a converted verandah, the “sleep out”.

“The two New Zealanders, for example, are there – Aleck, who had been blinded early, at Gaba Tepe, with his polished leggings and his Boy Scoutish hat with the four dents in it: and ‘Stubby’, who was really only a trunk and a jovial red face in a wheelchair, a German whizzbang having taken both his legs and both forearms at Villers-Brettoneaux.”

Johnston, as a young journalist, brushed with Melbourne’s post-war bohemia. But he was not then (or later, when he lived on a Greek islands amid artists, writers, musicians and a legion of blow-through loafers) of the revolutionary avant-garde. A former war correspondent who had, like so many who walked that road, seen too much, he was certainly no peacenik hippy of the flower power era.

But My Brother Jack, with its anti-war message was truly of its time, if not even prescient; it hit the bookshops in 1964, just as Australia was becoming entwined in another imperial war, Vietnam, that would ultimately divide the country much as the conscription plebiscites had 50 years earlier.

A challenge to the suburban dream

The sturdy, no bullshit, physically tough Jack provides the narrative with the conscience and strength of character that Meredith lacks: the compassion for his cruelty; the marital commitment to counterbalance his restlessness; the rough-hewn emotional stability against Davy’s petty impudence; the courage to his cowardice; the resourcefulness and optimism in tough times against Davy’s growing urbanity and smug sense of security.

My Brother Jack is nothing if not a powerfully candid post-war cultural and social commentary. But it’s also a timeless allegory about the foibles of selfish ambition and material security and a dissertation on what Johnston saw as the vacuousness of suburban satisfaction. It challenges the “suburban dream”, another of the great cultural pillars – the primary one being the Anzac legend – upon which Australian character supposedly stands.

As Australia embarks on a four-year jamboree of “Anzac 100” commemorative festivities, My Brother Jack at 50 finds particular relevance. It is there, on the bookshelves, an eloquent counternarrative to the Anzac 100 folly, ready to introduce another generation of Australian readers to the home truths about the impact of war on the Australian fabric.

Johnston, like Davy, was a lousy – not to mention occasionally cruel and selfish – first husband. And Davy’s relationship with Cressida Morley has, over the course of the trilogy, all of the premonitions of intense passion turned to tragedy of Johnston’s bond with his second wife, Charmian Clift.

As a kid I didn’t know much about Johnston’s private life. That came a little later courtesy of Garry Kinnane’s 1986 biography of the novelist. But as a teenager, My Brother Jack spoke directly to – even at – me. I was desperate to write and to escape my Bible-belt dreariness, and Meredith and Johnston (both for all their manifold personal failings) opened my mind to the potential of journalism to transport me.

And for a while it did. To Europe, yes, but never to Greece, where I’d always promised myself I’d go to see the place where Johnston became the giant of a novelist he was when his life ended so prematurely. And so it was that my latest reading of My Brother Jack in October finally had an added, long overdue dimension.

It happened on Hydra, the Aegean island just a hydrofoil hop from Athens where Johnston lived for almost a decade with his wife, Clift, a writer of comparable talent (if not quite acknowledged as such during her lifetime) and their three children, and where he created what remains, 50 years later, a totem of Australian literature.

I’d gone to Hydra with my family in the hope of answering a burning question about the novel: how was it possible to write so incisively, with such evocative precision, about Australia when you had not set foot on the continent for more than a decade? Many Johnston aficionados have concluded that the answer lies not primarily in the place, Hydra, itself, but in the many other forces that shaped My Brother Jack: the author’s experiences as a child during the first world war in suburban Melbourne, of course; his journalistic powers of recall and detail and, not least, his ruthless, undisguised, semi-biographical characterisations.

Perhaps. The beauty of Hydra, with its deep, azure harbour of bobbing fishing boats and yachts, its golden cliffs, and its stepped white amphitheatre of a village that nestles gently into the mountain, is certainly a wondrous place in which to live and write. In that blinding Aegean light we swam on the pebbled beaches where the Johnston-Clifts had done, drank in their tavernas, brought groceries where they had and spoke to those who knew those who’d known them.

We passed their modest house in a back cobblestoned street by a communal well, and sat by the tree, with its whitewashed base, outside their favoured drinking spot, the nearby Douskas Tavern. This is where they’d sat and imbibed way too much with the young troubadour, Leonard Cohen, who once owned a house on Hydra; other friends included the artist Sidney Nolan, and various hangers on. Their house was always open and in the warmer months, at least, there were always visitors (Cohen himself had stayed there until he found his own house, and their friendship was documented by Life magazine).

For me the visit was a nostalgic indulgence that ultimately taught me less about Johnston than I’d leant from Kinnane. But it did make me appreciate again just how powerfully distance, and perhaps a yearning for home, can drive creative memory.