by Adrian D’Ambra
The internal migrations and literary pilgrimages have been significant this year. They began with the publication by Monash University of ‘Half the Perfect World’ by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell, an exploration of the lives and interconnections between a range of expatriate writers and artists who took up residence on the Greek island of Hydra from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. The most notable of these in terms of ongoing international reputation and importance would have to have been the Canadian, Leonard Cohen, who arrived on the island as an emerging poet and novelist and who left with the incipient awareness that he might be able to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter, a role he performed with grace and humility until his death in November 2016. Cohen’s sardonic humour, spiritual restlessness and poetic sensitivity to the erotic tensions of everyday life have been essential elements in the soundtrack of my life. I would have loved to have been able to read more about the actual process of his composition as a poet whilst living on the island. At the centre of the Euro-American expatriate community on Hydra were the first arrivals, the Australian couple Charmian Clift and George Johnston, both writers, who lived on the island through varying degrees of humiliation and penury for the better part of a decade.
Charmian Clift has recounted the first and probably the happiest year of their self-imposed exile on Hydra in the deceptively accessible memoir ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ and George Johnston’s Meredith trilogy of ‘My Brother Jack’, ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’ and ‘A Cartload of Clay’ are deeply engraved with the author’s impressions of those years in Greece. Of those four works, I had previously read only ‘My Brother Jack’ before this year. Clift’s ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ was a revelation. I fell in love with the narrative voice of a woman clearly trying to make the most of the difficult decisions that she and her husband had made in order to free themselves from the bondages of work and the conformity of belonging without yet having recognised the price that would have to be paid. And then, of course, one of Australia’s once most popular novels, ‘My Brother Jack’, was entirely written on the island, its publication providing Johnston with sufficient funds to enable his departure from Hydra and return to Australia. ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’ and ‘A Cartload of Clay’ are deeply imbued with an awareness of the ways in which the creative inclination is punished in the world once one allows it to determine one’s path: poverty, addiction, illness, betrayal and sickness unto suicide or death.
In the visual arts, the most interesting practitioners associated with the Hydra group appear to have been the Greek painter Nikos Ghika whose ancestral home on the island was his residence and studio during this period and Johnston’s Australian friend Sidney Nolan who stayed for a few months at Ghika’s studio. Amongst the illustrations in ‘Half the Perfect World’ there is a beautiful pairing of a black and white shot of Nolan on the roof of the Ghika house painting a landscape of the island alongside a colour plate of the actual painting. Moments like these as well as the James Burke photographs of Leonard Cohen serenading Charmian Clift and a handful of their other friends at Douskos taverna in 1960, described and reproduced in ‘Half the Perfect World’, brought me very close to the creative process of these gifted people.
Having now read the one volume of Clift and the three volumes of Johnston, I thought that the latest iteration of my own periodic islomania had come to an end and that I could close the book, at least for now, on Hydra. However, a chance mention of an earlier meeting on the island between Ghika and another writer drew me back.
Given my ongoing interest in Greece through marriage, friendship and travel and my lifelong interest in reading the work of Lawrence Durrell, it seems to me bizarre that I have somehow avoided until now The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. Passing through Paris as a drifter in my early twenties a cousin of mine who was working there at the Institut Pasteur recommended that I follow up my reading of The Alexandria Quartet with the pre-war diaries of Anais Nin which revolve so much around the triumvirate of Nin, Durrell and Miller, and I subsequently also read the Tropics and The Rosy Crucifixion, almost all of which – with the exception of The Tropic of Cancer – I have since discarded. The two mottled paperback volumes of Nin have sat for decades in different shelves and different houses alongside the one volume of Miller, the quartet and the quincunx. But now I can add to them the Miller memoir of his 1939 visit to Greece on the invitation of Lawrence Durrell. Imagine my surprise when I read that two decades before the Sidney Nolan visit, Ghika had invited Miller to Hydra after meeting him in Athens where they shared the company of Lawrence Durrell and the two Greek poets George Seferis and George Katsimbalis, the latter of whom is Miller’s model for the Colossus. Even more, imagine my surprise at the nature and quality of Miller’s writing in this memoir which deserves to be recognised for its own kind of American transcendentalism. To leave the last word for the day with Miller himself:
To live creatively, I have discovered, means to live more and more unselfishly, to live more and more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing it at the core, so to speak. Art, like religion, it now seems to me, is only a preparation, an initiation into the way of life. The goal is liberation, freedom, which means assuming greater responsibility.
Go to Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’
english literature teacher 