The charm of a daughter’s desire

I came to Suzanne Chick’s book full of prejudice and cynicism. Certainly Chick was the illegitimate daughter Charmian Clift had when she was nineteen, but Chick was relinquished at two weeks to her adoptive family and Clift took her own life before Chick began to make enquiries about her natural mother. What could Chick have to say about Clift that those who knew her couldn’t? Wouldn’t this just be crass cashing-in on a famous and alluring name? A ‘Mommie Dearest’ genre from a different angle? I don’t think there is anything new about Charmian Clift to be found in this book, although those who come to it without background will still find the life and times interesting. What makes Searching for Charmian worthwhile is the endearing personality of Suzanne Chick – Searching For Charmian is her tale, not her mother’s. Chick had great material for a book. It is the stuff of fairytales and the dream come true of many adopted children, to have a clever/famous/rich/ beautiful/talented parent. To find, amazingly, well into your forties, that you are indeed the child of such a parent must be as fulfilling as it is terrifying. Chick’s charm – which she probably inherited from her mother along with strikingly similar beauty – manages to cope with both the wonderment and the terror of her account with aplomb. She gushes, gosh, does she gush, but because she is so admirably unegotistic and charming about what is happening to her, the gushing is forgivable. Her mother was also known to have gushed, both in her prose and her conversation. I question Chick’s interpretation of George Johnston, though. She takes a line that he was mean-spirited and that Charmian would have done better without him. As Chick can only base her interpretation of their relationship through others’ eyes, she really isn’t in a position to dispense judgments. Clift wasn’t perfect either, although Chick wants her to be –desperately so. The other discomfort I have with this book is the interleaving of Chick’s life with that of Clift’s. At times it is contrived, unbearably self-conscious, as it is also when Chick describes some of the meetings she had with the old friends and acquaintances of her mother. Although she usually saves the day by her modest, childlike eagerness to know, the purple passages can take a bit of getting through. But why not purple passages for a woman in this situation? Chick isn’t claiming to be a great writer – she just wants to explain, to share, and to tell a fabulously interesting story. The thing that is luminous about Chick, as it was for her mother, is a passionate response to life. Neither knew what it was to button-down in the manner of a Henry James heroine. What Chick had at hand was the central emotional thing in any life – the mother. It is one of the bread-and-butter themes of literature. What this lively, creative woman held in her hands was not just the key to herself, but the possibility of an unknown world. At the risk of sounding new-age, Chick explains what began to happen to her when she discovered Charmian Clift: ... there was an intensely mystical element to this finding of a mother. It was revelational. Transcendental. I sensed myself tapping into some universal mother-to-daughter continuum. It stretched back into time: me, my mother Charmian, her mother. And it stretched into the future: my three daughters ... and their unborn daughters, and theirs after them. Womb to womb to womb. Chick’s book raises all the complex issues of nature and nurture, and in the final chapter she writes appealingly about these issues. She also writes with humour and honesty about her own dilemma because her adoptive parents, Harold and Marjorie Shaw, could not have been more different from Charmian Clift. Her straight-laced upbringing often competed with her genes for supremacy, which is perhaps what makes her such an unusual and attractive woman. Some of what she writes is very moving: In finding my natural mother, I have set free a self that had always been there, but has never been certain of its provenances. Charmian Clift has given this part of me permission to exist ... What I do with this self will occupy me for the rest of my life. Curiously and quite unexpectedly, I have also found again the mother who adopted me and brought me up. I can love her with new understanding. I have found a kind of peace in unravelling the threads of my being and tracking them back to their general sources: my genes, my upbringing and my own life-choices. The honesty and passion in Searching for Charmian recalled for me Germaine Greer’s search for her father in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. Both are odd, inspired books. I hope Chick isn’t in for the same rough reception. There isn’t a self-pitying moment in this book. Such a generous and brave spirit deserves praise and recognition.

Helen Elliott

From the New Issue

Poet of the Month with David Brooks

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten ancient creatures that make us human by Julia Kindt

The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altruism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

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