Charmian Clift’s island odyssey revisited

Moving to Greece provided a rich vein of inspiration for Australian author Charmian Clift.

Author Charmian Clift in 1966.

“Today we bought the house by the well.” It was February 1956 and Charmian Clift, with her husband and fellow Australian author George Johnston, had just purchased a dishevelled house on the then remote Greek island of Hydra. At 120 gold pounds – which Johnston had counted out in drachma and stuffed into a kangaroo hide bag – the purchase represented the couple’s life savings. They were now, for better or worse, “marooned”.

Heavily pregnant with the couple’s third child, Clift sat down at the typewriter to capture the temerarious wager: and so would begin her compelling memoir, Peel Me A Lotus. The book itself was the sequel to Clift’s earlier travel memoir, Mermaid Singing, set on the even more secluded Greek island of Kalymnos. Both manuscripts were completed in less than two feverish years: and both now newly reissued internationally through London’s Muswell Press.

Clift and her celebrated war-correspondent husband had in 1951 absconded to London following an all-too public affair that ended Johnston’s first marriage and distinguished career at the Argus newspaper in Melbourne. As they sailed out of Sydney Harbour Clift mused blithely that they may never return.

Welcomed into the elite cultural coterie of Britain with Johnston’s new role as bureau chief of Associated Newspaper Services, it took just three ashen winters for the couple to grow weary of London – Johnston for the reading public’s voracious demand for royal scandal and Clift for its stifling social mores and post-war melancholy. Having been reared “wild and free” in the NSW coastal hamlet of Kiama, Clift longed for a life beyond “telephones and the shimmer of television screens, of the grey, anxious faces crowding the streets…”

The couple’s escape came upon hearing a BBC radio documentary exploring the perilous lives of the Greek sponge divers of Kalymnos: a speck of an isle in the Dodecanese chain, skirting the Turkish coast. Having already co-authored two successful books with Johnston – High Valley (1949) and The Big Chariot (1953) – Clift had inadvertently discovered the motif for their next novel and, with it, the family’s liberation from the strictures of an urbane life. In late 1954 they cancelled the winter’s coal order and set off to discover “whether there was anybody left in the world who walked free”.

Author Charmian Clift whith her children Shayne (16), Martin (17) and Jason (8) in 1964.

It is vexing to consider the extreme contrast of the family’s newfound existence on Kalymnos: a then impoverished, desolate and antediluvian island where for seven long months the men went diving for sponges off the coast of Libya. Meanwhile the women and children barely survived on split peas, mountain herbs and the paling hope that their husbands, fathers and sons would return alive. “Every year the jets fly faster and the bombs make louder bangs and football players fetch a higher price,” Clift muses in Mermaid Singing. “And every year the boats go out from Kalymnos.”

However, despite its grim portrayals of crippled men and their Faustian pact with the sea, Mermaid Singing is invigorated with an infectious ebullience, nourished on sunshine, retsina and the sort of subsistent simplicity Clift had long ached for, like that in the memory of her childhood.

And while her ink periodically spills with florid prose – “the pink domes, soaring saffron shafts of columns, the three donkeys on a hill at noonday, wading through crimson flowers” – her writing is otherwise compelling, sophisticated and often riotously laconic (shocking the locals with her un-pious “Australian crawl” and corrupting the autochthonous diet of octopus and lentils with Cornish pasties).

Etched decades before the Provencal escapism of Peter Mayle – and the indulgent genre of travel memoir he was to beget – Clift finds humility in the austerity, courage in the deformed men and primordial sustenance in the arcane rituals. “Here you eat better, drink better, think better and talk better than any place I have known. You are moved to music and poetry and dreams … I had forgotten how good it was to breathe deeply, to walk miles without tiring, to be ravenously hungry.”

Clift in the late 1960s.

The couple’s subsequent novel, The Sponge Divers, would be completed in 1955 and, now pregnant with the couple’s third child Jason, it was time to seek out a more hospitable isle where they could cast anchor. That island would be Hydra, where the family would spend 10 metamorphic years.

Although much more proximate to Athens, Hydra remained far removed from the cultural centres of Europe and the world – severed by both sea and the innate want of its small expatriate community to live anonymously (and cheaply). “I have a theory that sailors are made, not born,” Clift proffers metaphorically when contemplating their existential transition into “islanders”.

As pre-eminent Clift scholar Paul Genoni notes, the Johnstons were not the first foreign artists to arrive on Hydra but were perhaps the most consequential, inspiring many others to stay – amongst them young Canadian poet Leonard Cohen. What’s perhaps most intriguing is, while seeking genuine solace far removed from the major cultural ganglions of the world (themselves undergoing radical transmogrifications as the 1950s crashed into the ’60s), so many of the Hydriot artistic colony would have profound influence in popular culture.

Genoni’s book Half The Perfect World – winner of the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award and co-written with Tanya Dalziell – chronicles Hydra’s expatriate community from 1955-64 which included, for a time, Sidney and Cynthia Nolan. Sidney makes a memorable cameo in Peel Me A Lotus as Henry Trevena, doodling in squid ink on restaurant plates and expounding his plans to take up welding: “I can see these bloody things, you know, clanging away. They won’t clang for me in paint.”

“Clift and Johnston put themselves in the way of some big questions,” Genoni opines. “The questions that everyone confronts about what we dare to dream and how we dare to live. And what happens to our lives if we are bold enough to take the risks that most dreams require? In this, as in so much of Clift and Johnston’s lives, there was both success and failure, and in their case, the success and failure were inextricably intertwined in the fateful way they often seemed to beget the other.”

Clift in 1945

Despite this symbiotic relationship both in life and literature – which saw the pair fearlessly, and often recklessly, exposing one another’s most private vulnerabilities – Johnston’s 1964 Miles Franklin-winning novel My Brother Jack has remained in print (albeit with rescinding attention) while Clift’s memoirs and two novels have all but faded from memory, despite Nadia Wheatley’s authoritative biography of 2001.

In 2014 – exactly five decades on from the release of My Brother Jack – English writer Polly Samson travelled to Hydra to further draft a novel exploring the life of holocaust survivor Assia Wevill, the tragically-fated second wife of British poet Ted Hughes (following the equally ill-fated Sylvia Plath). It was here her attention – and life – would be unexpectedly diverted when happening upon a paperback notable only for the arresting image on its cover: that of a woman in Hydra’s agora looking worn, sapient, defiant. The photograph was of Charmian Clift: the book Peel Me A Lotus.

“Reading the book, I felt an immediate affinity with the writer and had to know more,” Samson explains from her farm in West Sussex. “One of the first things I found out about her was that she had written collaboratively with her husband and that was also of great interest to me because I am also the less-famous half of a married writing couple.”

The “more famous” other half of Samson’s marriage is David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. So ardent became Samson’s infatuation with Clift and Hydra that the couple would purchase a house on the island, with Gilmour going on to channel the distinctive spectre of Leonard Cohen on his most recent song, Yes, I Have Ghosts. Along with the publication of Half The Perfect World (which is presently being adapted for cinema under director Nadia Tass), Cohen’s death in 2016 would reinvigorate interest in Clift and Johnston, who had keenly supported the young Canadian poet on his arrival to Hydra in 1960.

The complex dynamic of the creative married couple is the dominant investigation of Samson’s bestselling 2020 novel A Theatre For Dreamers: redressing the historical narrative that habitually pits a capricious, unfaithful Clift against an embattled, heroic Johnston. This too was the preeminent theme explored in Sam Strong’s 2019 production Hydra, staged by Queensland Theatre Company – which again proved Clift’s enduring contemporary appeal as both writer and subject.

“In many ways I think Charmian Clift was born in the wrong decade,” Samson continues, adding her deep satisfaction at aiding the awakening of an entirely new audience to Clift’s brilliance. “I can’t help but think that had she come of age when women had reliable birth-control her writing life would have been very much more productive.”

Today both Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus are habitually read as works of proto-feminism, pitched chronologically – as Samson notes in her introductory essay to the Muswell editions – between Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer. Although Clift recognises herself as Johnston’s artistic equal, in Mermaid Singing she quips almost dismissively: “But I have a faint gnawing suspicion that there will come a time when I will somehow find myself several paces in the rear, watching the flick of his key chain and quite unable to catch up because of the weight of the baggage I am carrying.”

The immediate domestic paradigm is what consumes Peel Me A Lotus: the risky homebirth of Jason, the schooling of the children in Greek, the fresh pomegranates that come with autumn and the scent of fish frying in olive oil on the harbourfront, all accented with endearing sketches by Australian artist Nancy Dignan. And then, of course, the purchase of the house by the well, itself a portend to “… a time of felicity when the sun will shine, my waistline be slender, the post bring cheques from appreciative editors, the children stop picking their noses, the Greek language reveal itself as simple after all, our writing problems be solved, and we shall all live together in harmony and contentment like a little tribe which has at last reached the Promised Land”.

This winsome self-mockery sizes up to the lingering romantic hue of Mermaid Singing, revealing a creeping anxiety that would augur the poverty, alcoholism, crippling self-doubt and infidelities that ultimately destroyed the family and prefaced Clift’s suicide – followed by the deaths of George, Shane and Martin. Today Jason is all who remains.

“One of the remarkable things about Peel Me A Lotus … is that it makes clear that even in the earliest period on Hydra Clift could clearly foresee the dangers that awaited,” Genoni says. “The book doesn’t shy away from any of them … In this way Clift uses Peel Me A Lotus to explore with great clarity the already fragile hold she and Johnston have on their island dreamscape, even as she derides the shallowness of those who ‘dream of islands’. She knows herself to be a dreamer, she also knows that it is the nature of such dreams to be elusive, but she remains determined to give it a damn good try.”

With the success of My Brother Jack, the family would return to Australia in 1964: Johnston frail but vindicated, Clift unmoored and bereft. Despite fashioning a prominent name as a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, Clift failed to make inroads into her unrealised autobiographical novel, The End Of The Morning – centred on her upbringing in Kiama. Her final newspaper column would end: “Oh, isn’t it marvellous to be grown-up, and never never have to go through the happiest days of your life again?” Six months later she would be dead.

Clift seemingly forecasts the temptation to consider these two landmark memoirs through the purview of her tragedy, imagining her own death in Peel Me A Lotus. But, as ever throughout these two intrepid years wantonly cast adrift, the solicitude gives way to the sublime: “a salt-stiff bathing suit strung on a line, a straw hat hanging on a nail, sweet red cherries heaped in a wooden bowl, a clock ticking, a kicked-off sandal, salad vegetables crisping in an enamel pail, a sprig of mint crushed between the fingers – one enters again, with an aching sense of wonder, the bright, lost world of one’s own childhood.”

Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus are reissued through Muswell Press.