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- Herausgeber: Muswell Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing The result is Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Peel Me a Lotus, the companion volume to Mermaid Singing relates their move to Hydra where they bought a house and grappled with the chaos of domestic life whilst becoming the centre of an informal bohemian community of artists and writers. That group included Leonard Cohen, who became their lodger, and his girlfriend Marianne Ihlen. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended.
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Peel Me a Lotus
Charmian Clift
Introduction by Polly Samson
For George
Contents
Peel Me a Lotus by Charmian Clift
Charmian Clift arrived on Hydra in late August 1955 with her husband George Johnston and their children and decided to stay and live on whatever could be made from writing. Hydra, in those days, was a four-hour steamer ride to the mainland, a mainly barren rock shaped ‘rather like a set of well-curved mustachios and cruelly fanged with sharp mountains’.
The island is ten miles long and, despite its name, almost waterless. They were only the second foreigners to buy a house there. Very little English was spoken and Johnston and Clift possessed only rudimentary Greek. It was audacious as well as romantic, especially with a young family, to attempt a free and creative life in the sun.
This book, her second (if we discount the three earlier novels written in collaboration with George Johnston), brings us to an island on the brink of change in 1956. Clift and Johnston were at the vanguard of what was soon to become a fabled bohemian community of artists and writers, of exiles and dreamers.
She was thirty-two years old, her first book, Mermaid Singing, a memoir of the family’s first year in Greece, on the island of Kalymnos, had been published to some excellent reviews. She was unexpectedly pregnant again. Her husband, in her opinion at least, was giving Hemingway a run for his money, but still the sales of his books – and hers – were poor. The children, though viiibeautiful and free, weighed on her heart ‘like lead, like chains, like three strong anchors bedded deep in the reality from which I can never escape.’ Clift thought of herself as an Icarus, a yeasayer, who flew close to the sun but she later referred to this period when she should have ‘taken wings and started to fly’ as a year when she found herself, once again, ‘bound and constrained’ by her domestic rites.
The original dream, that the island be a base from which they’d set sail and explore, was starting to fade. She didn’t expect to find herself marooned on a rock without so much as the ferry fare to Athens.
‘Thank God the delights of anticipation never pall on us: some of the very pleasantest hours I can ever remember have been spent crouching over the charcoal tin, planning courtyards, sailing-boats, making summer trips to islands yet unseen …’ Sometimes it seems that she’s writing herself back into a place where hope and good humour flourish but often, especially while waiting for her baby to be born, the lack of a safety-net is palpably vertiginous.
As with Mermaid Singing she is writing events almost as they are happening to her. It’s a warm and intimate voice that invites us to huddle beside her over the glowing charcoals while Athena’s little owl drops liquid notes from the mountains and the huge shapes of cats slinking in the alley are like ‘an emanation of the secret soul of the place.’
In describing her wintering companions, she treads an enjoyably spiky line between mockery and affection. Henry Trevena is the Australian painter Sidney Nolan. Her portrayal of Ursula, based on his wife Cynthia, was friendship ending: ‘grown somewhat Gothic and malevolent lately … and no damn wonder, because he would pour pitch over her and set her alight if he needed a torch to paint by!’. Sean Donovan is writer Patrick Greer and Lola is Nancy Dignan whose drawings head the chapters of this book. ‘Jacques’ is the painter Jean Claude Maurice ‘a little curly dog on heat’ who would later be exposed by George Johnston as Clift’s lover, (and the source of his own debilitating sexual jealousy), in two of his novels.
ixFilm-makers have started to zero in on Hydra, the quality of the light, its unspoilt beauty and cubist white houses that are arranged in tiers from the port, giving the appearance of a perfect amphitheatre. Clift can sense what is happening to the island as more and more people arrive. She saves her most biting scorn for the film crew (the film that’s being made in the later chapters of this book is Boy on a Dolphin and the star is an eighteen-year-old Sophia Loren) and for the drifting existentialists who have ‘all met Rilke’s wife’ or Dali, have ‘questing, amoral eyes’ and a ready fund of scandalously funny stories. ‘The war generation who grew up to horror and inherited despair and disillusion.’
By contrast, many of those young newcomers to the island remembered Clift and Johnston as the most helpful of welcoming committees. When a twenty-five year-old Leonard Cohen arrived on Hydra in April 1960 he initially stayed in their spare room and later described how the local people had a great respect for the couple, ‘because they lived as the islanders did’ and that new people ‘stopped at their table in Katsikas’ bar to drink with them and get advice – on everything from where to buy their kerosene to what chemical to use to stop the toilet smelling. They were the focal point for foreigners on the island. They had a larger than life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration. They had guts. They were real, tough, honest. They were the kind of people you meet less and less.’
Clift is a sensuous writer, ecstatic at times. When she is gloomy the sea offers salvation; there is always the promise of immersion and renewal. ‘Morning and evening the harbour front seems to slip and slide in a moving green-gold mesh of water reflections.’ Diving from the high rocks offers a moment of freedom. Night-swims ‘where the briny stars wake at a movement’ work like balm. In ‘the daily never-failing magic of the gulf’ her thoughts become most powerfully poetic. She finds herself yearning for oblivion as she swims in a storm ‘filled with xsomething that is terror and desire both … to ride on with the wild wild horses to the waiting cliff, or to curl up small, close against the scaly rocks, to curl up small and let the wild horses ride over me.’
Peel Me a Lotus is strikingly different in tone from Mermaid Singing; her darkest thoughts are never far from the surface. When the mad moon ‘begins to shine on us with her other face’ the original dream of escape darkens to a Boschian vision where angelic little girls called Aphrodite and Persephone crouch together dropping stones on new-born kittens, where eyes are white with trachoma, a baby dead of malnutrition is a swollen toad, where there should be a hand there’s a grotesque claw, and ‘all the bright young people who throng the café tables suddenly have the ultimate obscenity of necrophilia’.
Clift’s original title for this book was ‘A Handful of Quietness’ from Ecclesiastes, which begins:
‘Again, I observed all the oppression that takes place under the sun. I saw the tears of the oppressed, with no one to comfort them. The oppressors have great power, and their victims are helpless. So I concluded that the dead are better off than the living.’
It goes on to envy the unborn, and ends with this advice: ‘Better to have one handful with quietness than two handfuls with labour and a striving after wind.’
Handfuls with quietness were hard to come by in Clift’s world, labouring as she was on the rocky road between first and second wave feminism, with no steady income and frustratingly torn between her many roles. She reports that she feels an enjoyable melancholia in imagining her own funeral cortege toiling up the mountain path among the rocks and the olives, the chanting priests, the bells and herself ‘stretched out among the flowers, stiff and white as a freshly pulled garlic stalk.’ She goes further into the future that doesn’t contain her. George is to marry again, ‘a Greek girl with a satisfactory dowry’, she even claims to have a prospect in mind.
This is a book that is inescapably haunted by what is known of its author’s death. It’s unfortunate that, as she rather prophetically wrote in a later essay, ‘A whole human life of struggle, bravery, xidefeat, triumph, hope, despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.’ Suicide throws a long shadow and it’s Clift’s deepest thoughts about existence that inexorably darken and bloom here like wine through water.
Polly Samson 2021
Peel Me a Lotus
February
1
Today we bought the house by the well.
This purchase, which has been hanging fire for anxious weeks while we have been trying to organise our impossible finances, was finally completed in the office of the notary public, who is also the magistrate of this small Greek island, the municipal valuer, and the husband of my son Martin’s favourite teacher at the village school called the Down School to distinguish it from the Up School on the mountain ridge.
The notary public is a small, courteous, asthmatic man. Like all the other town officials he conducts his business in one of the cells of the old monastery that lies behind the gay façade of waterfront shops, and here in the monastery cell we gathered formally as the great bronze bell was crashing noon over our heads.
Behind the desk the notary public, very affable and important, and ranged in a row before him on five spidery black chairs of the old island pattern the five interested parties to this affair: Socrates the carpenter and occasional real-estate agent; Demosthenes the shifty-eyed barber, acting on behalf of the former owner of the house; old Creon Stavris, there to guide us through the final intricacies of the purchase; and my husband George and I, both smoking rather nervously and conscious that we looked a ragged and scruffy pair.
The notary public, old Creon, Demosthenes the barber, and even Socrates, had apparently put on their best clothes for the occasion, and the barber twirled between his fat fingers a crisp white spike of hyacinth.
Still, scruffy or not, we were the purchasers, and it was with some ceremony that we were bowed to the table to sign and swear a large number of incomprehensible documents in Greek, which the notary public read through at a furious wheezing pace and Creon approved by a series of curt nods directed at George. Through the door of the office I could see the heavenly cerulean blue of the balcony ceiling, three thin marble columns, and a tree of hibiscus blazing away in the courtyard beside the ornate tomb of one of the island’s innumerable naval heroes.
It seemed a fine thing to be buying a house here.
The price of the house was one hundred and twenty gold pounds, as had been agreed earlier during lengthy and mysterious negotiations between Socrates and the barber. Rather to my surprise there was no last-minute attempt by either of them to raise it ten pounds or so. Perhaps experience is deceitful after all, and one has become unnecessarily devious in business dealings with the Greeks. All the same, it would have been too much to expect that we should catch fortune’s tide at the full: the rate of exchange on the gold pound was higher this morning than it has been for months, so that the house actually cost four hundred and ninety-three pounds ten shillings in English paper money, or six hundred and twenty Australian pounds, or about thirteen hundred dollars.
We had to work it out in a variety of currencies because our income derives from slender royalty cheques in several countries, and it was necessary to be quite sure we could really afford to buy a house. In fact, it seemed fairly clear that the purchase was lunacy in any currency, but one hundred and twenty pounds doesn’t sound much when you say it fast and leave out the rich chink of that word ‘gold’.
It was only when I saw it translated into high stiff stacks of new drachma notes, which George fished out in handfuls from an old battered briefcase of kangaroo hide that I had given him one birthday long ago in Australia, that my heart lurched slightly.
There it went! Our last little bit of capital, our going-back-to-civilisation money, our reserve against children’s illnesses, tonsils or appendix operations, dental disasters — or that never-mentioned contingency that might arise if all does not go well at the birth of this new baby of mine within the next few weeks and I have to be carted off dramatically to Athens in a caique.
The doctor I saw last month in Athens said I could have the child on top of Mount Olympus with absolute safety, and I know that the younger of the island’s two midwives is a practical and level-headed woman, and that most of the world’s population enters it without the aid of anaesthetics or asepsis, and it is, after all, my third child. But still …
I must say George flung down the money with quite an air, just as if it was truly one hundred and twenty glittering golden sovereigns he was scattering across the notary public’s table. I think at that moment his courage, which has been flagging a bit during the last weeks of these negotiations, was warmed by the fine brave glow of his own audacity. When one has had a lifetime’s conditioning in terms of building societies, insurance policies, and second mortgages, it does seem to be a reckless romantic thing that the first piece of earth one has ever owned in all the world should be Greek earth, and that one should pay for it — figuratively, anyway — in golden sovereigns, at a time when the Cyprus issue is becoming more venomous every day and they are making bonfires of Union Jacks in Athens and everything English is hated with an intensity that is in directly inverse ratio to the love the English used to command in Greece: everything, that is, except the golden sovereign. The people of this island are inclined to be suspicious — rather narrow-eyed, watchful people they are — and there is no other money they really trust.
There is no bank in the port, so when they acquire the coveted pieces of gold they must hide them away in socks or beneath loose floorboards. There was even some talk earlier that the owner of the house was going to insist on being paid in gold, and Creon was quite prepared to take us from house to house buying up the requisite number of sovereigns. It turned out not to be necessary, for which I was truly sorry.
And after all, I thought, sitting very upright in the chair so that my old duffel-coat hung straight from my shoulders and disguised slightly the sudden alarming activity that was going on under it, one hundred and twenty pounds — even gold pounds — wasn’t really so much to pay for nine sunny rooms (eight when we have knocked down the wall between the two top-floor rooms and made one big studio) and a long flagged kitchen with an arched stove and a beamed ceiling. In England or Australia now a hundred and twenty pounds would scarcely buy an outhouse. There is a terrace on the third floor, too, that looks clear across the blue gulf to the mountains of Troezen. And the house has a little walled garden with two grapevines and eight fruit trees. The two big children will share a nursery the size of a ballroom, and on the second floor, opening off the room that will be our bedroom, there is a small, sunny space, reached conveniently by a ladder and trap-door from the kitchen, that will make a night-nursery for this unborn one whose present agitation makes me slightly apprehensive. I would rather it waited the few weeks that must elapse before we can move into the new house. There has been too much already of rented houses. I would like at least one of my children to be born in its own home …
After Demosthenes the barber had suspiciously counted every note in every stack and stowed it away sheaf by sheaf into a cardboard suitcase, and the notary public had locked away his pile of bills representing legal fees and tax in an official-looking black box, and Socrates, chirruping with embarrassment, had blushingly slipped his commission money into his pants pocket and Creon had received the formal one drachma for acting as witness, the notary public brought down the official seal with a great thump on to a drippy little spread of red wax, and handed us the splendid documents.
Old Creon, who had sat stiff and frowning and official throughout the proceedings, bull neck thrust forward belligerently, now folded his spectacles with slow deliberation, placed them in their neat, embroidered case, and then leapt suddenly to his feet and flung his arms wide.
‘Kalo riziko!’ he cried, embracing us each in turn.
‘Kalo riziko!’ wheezed the notary public, pumping our hands.
‘Kalo riziko!’ giggled Socrates, quite overcome that he had at last actually brought off this deal — or any deal! As a house-agent Socrates is not notably efficient. But then he is even less efficient as a carpenter, and since he hates carpentry and loves houses, old Creon and other citizens of standing like to encourage him in his Chaplinesque real estate business.
Socrates, small, plump, bald, and beaming, in some ways belongs to the whole town, as the whole town belongs to Socrates. He came here as a child, an orphan refugee from the Turkish massacres in Asia Minor, and was adopted by a childless widow, a formidable woman known as Aunt Electra. Aunt Electra apprenticed Socrates to the trade of carpentry, but even as a boy he liked best to go down to the port to watch the boats coming in, to carry bags for passengers, to show strangers where they might obtain rooms.
His pride in the town of his adoption was overwhelming. As he grew older he made it his business to look after the port flags and the decorative strings of bunting that are draped from churches and shopfronts on feast days.
And it is still Socrates who decks the town for great and small occasions, and still Socrates who meets the boats, and still Socrates who skitters along the waterfront and up and down the steep steps and narrow lanes of the town from morning until night, with anxious tourists panting at his heels. His enthusiasm for the island has never lessened. He mourns the vanished glories that he never knew, disguises shabby corners with more and yet more flags, and tries to sell decaying houses to foreigners who might restore them.
These deals, more often than not, are ruined by his over eagerness to display the beauties of the property and his tendency to tell immense and giggling lies about the contents and capacity of water cisterns, the condition of roofs and piping, and the state of sanitary arrangements. Occasionally a deal comes off in spite of him. So today Socrates giggled more uncontrollably than ever while pocketing his commission, and blushed too, for he will work just as hard to sell a house without any commission at all.
‘Kalo riziko! Kalo riziko!’
And the barber, sidling out of the monastery cell with the cardboard case tucked under his arm, turned at the door and murmured suavely over his shoulder, ‘Kalo riziko!’
‘And now,’ said Creon, advancing one pointed polished shoe as though he might begin a waltz, ‘I take it that we will adjourn to Katsikas’ Bar? If everyone is agreed that this is the proper procedure on this most happy and propitious occasion?’
Creon learned his English at Robert College in Constantinople early in the century, and until we came to the island last year he hadn’t used a word of it since 1911, so that everything he says has a sort of jaunty formality, very Edwardian and hansom-cabbish, like his clipped moustache and his neat grizzled coiffure and his shabby but beautifully brushed overcoat with its velvet collar and the little sprig of hyacinth in the lapel. But his bulging, short-sighted eyes are shrewd, the forward thrust of his rather flat head on its thick, short neck contentious, and he walks aggressively, cleaving the mild island air with hunched shoulders as though he is forcing a path through some formidable opposition invisible to everyone else.
So he led us out of the notary’s office, making a path for us into the light, daring the world to prove if it could that we were not absolutely, legally, indisputably, and if necessary over his dead body defending our rights, sole owners and possessors of the house by the well.
‘Kalo riziko!’ George whispered to me as we trooped after Creon down the stairs and into the glittering white well of the monastery courtyard and the cold dazzle of early spring sunshine and the red splashes of hibiscus burning away against a cool procession of columns white under the blue balconies. ‘Welcome home at last.’
2
Katsikas’ Bar is six deal tables at the back of Antony and Nick Katsikas’ grocery store at the end of the cobbled waterfront by the Poseidon Hotel, and it is here that we usually gather at midday among the flour sacks and oil jars and painted tin water tanks and strings of onions and soft white festoons of cotton waste: a sort of social club evolved from the necessity to relieve the boredom of an island winter.
The club has a variable membership which fluctuates around the solid nucleus of Creon, his wife Zoë, and the four foreigners, apart from George and me, who have seen out the whole winter here.
If there is a president I suppose it is Creon, who comes to this social half hour of the day now, after four months, as spry and jaunty as if we had all just met, and just as eager to tell again the gay-dog stories of his youth. Curious stories they are, with a strange faint perfume of pomade about them, peopled with mysterious unreal characters who own carriages and steam yachts and French mistresses and spend their spare time buying politicians and gold pounds and magnums of champagne. Through endless repetition Creon’s stories have come to have the haunting familiarity of the fairy tales one heard in the firelight so many lives ago.
Creon himself has a history with that same illusive fairy-tale charm of unreality. Born to great wealth, and inheriting in his youth a sponge empire that stretched across Europe and the Americas, he was the last of the island’s merchant princes: the final healthy stalk seeded from the dazzling golden crop of great names and greater fortunes that sprouted inexplicably from this singular small grey rock in the brilliant commercial summers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was withered away by the twentieth. Even when Creon was a child some of the great houses must have been caving in.
Still, he had his brilliant summer too. He built another storey on to the austere stone house his father had left him, added curly balconies and grand stairways, travelled in far countries, bought diamonds in Amsterdam, frail glass in Russia, tweed knickerbockers in England, furniture in France, experience in America. He had the old carved ceilings of the house plastered over and painted with bright pink garlands, and because he despised slightly the fine dark spidery furniture the earlier island aristocrats had plundered from eighteenth-century Europe he went in for plush sofas, love-seats of ruched blue satin, velvet curtains with bobble fringes, ponderous mahogany buffets, porch suites of curly cane, smoking-den chairs, wicker whatnots. Then, having found a suitably bred and healthy young woman among the choice blooms of Athenian aristocracy, he installed her among the Edwardian horrors he had perpetrated in that lovely old house, and went off to New York to attend to his sponge business.
When he returned to his native island some years later with the conviction that his wife had taken recourse to the only diversion possible to a bored and pretty young matron he made no scenes, but supervised her packing himself and escorted her personally to the jetty where his liveried boat crew was waiting to row her to the private yacht that removed her from the island, and Creon’s sight, for ever.
He paid back the sum of her dowry into an Athens bank and spent the next twenty-five years fighting her through every court in Europe and America because he refused to pay her an allowance besides. As judgment after judgment went against him he deliberately and implacably broke up his business and ruined himself, rather than let his wife have the satisfaction of wealth and position to which he had decided she had renounced all claim by her behaviour.
The Second World War and the Occupation finished off what was left of his fortune. At the end of it he was a poor man. And ironically enough his wife was dead — old and triumphantly virtuous to the last. When Creon was free to marry Zoë, the gentle little curator and librarian of the island museum, who for eighteen years had submitted equably to a curious series of tests and traps devised to test her virtue and devotion, he had nothing to offer her but his stubborn old age and the great gloomy decaying mansion of his glorious days.
In this house, usually referred to as The House of Usher, Creon and Zoë live still, alone and without servants. The ruched satin love-seats are faded now to dust colour and split along every intricate fold, but Zoë sings as she sits among the tarnished splendours, calmly darning Creon’s socks under the single naked light-bulb that hangs pendant from stained and mildewed pink garlands.
She is a broad-faced, simple kind woman of early middle age, whom Creon sees through some mysterious alchemy of love as a kind of eternal Hermia — little and fierce. He is very arch and gallant with her. Finding happiness so late in life he loves with a touching parody of his youth’s spryness, desperately willing a gulf in time. I must say Zoë bears it very well: she is largely tolerant of everything, even love’s absurdities. So Creon sings too, nostalgic snatches from The Belle of New York, as he potters about in the vaulted kitchen warming milk for Zoë on the trumpery little kerosene burner set solitary in the huge arched stove recess where once whole sheep were roasted on the spit, or sits alone at the great dusty desk in the study, surrounded by queer paperweights, strange stiff, dry sponges, ornate inkstands that hold nothing but crusted powders of violet, green, and red. From the top of the bookcases a stuffed albatross, tethered by its spread, half-bald pinions in a thick grey veil of cobwebs, looks down on him with mad glass eyes.
There is no longer any business of his own to transact in the study, but Creon cannot quite stop being a businessman. Gradually, and with increasing authority, he has taken over all the business difficulties of the island’s foreign residents — permits, passports, papers, currency entanglements, house-hunting, all legal matters. Not one of us would dare to initiate a business transaction, or even order the winter wood supply, without first consulting Creon. His step is never firmer, his eye never more piercing, than when sorting out our alien problems. It has given him a new appetite for life. He has come to seize upon newly arrived foreigners almost with the avidity of Socrates. Socrates wants to sell them houses. Creon wants to manage their lives.
3
Of the four other foreigners living here, two have been friends of ours for many years. These two, a painter named Henry Trevena and his wife Ursula, came here last November largely on our recommendation of the island as a place of great beauty which was cheap enough and quiet enough for Henry to put in an undistracted winter’s work. Yet in spite of Henry’s immediate passion for the high, harsh beauty of the mountains soaring up from the jewelled crescent of the port — truly Greek mountains these, stark and noble, with the violets and golds seeping over them at sunset, and little white droppings of monasteries perched dizzily high on their scarred and pitted slopes — and in spite of Ursula’s constantly reiterated intention of refusing to budge ever again, these two are only temporary islanders.
