Pills

Everybody in Wonderland takes pills, don't they? Best estimates of the total spend on pharmaceuticals worldwide last year was a staggering 1.5 trillion US dollars, the majority of which spend was on pills; tablets not just to make us smaller or larger (like Alice), but healthier, happier - or at least less depressed, sleepier or perkier, upper or downer, more peaceful, less pained, not pregnant and on and on.

barbiturate pills

Pills by definition are solid, so include not only tablets but any medicine in pellet, powder or liquid form encased in a solid capsule to be taken orally. Cue the possibly apocryphal story of women on the contraceptive pill who've ended up pregnant because they inserted  the tablet daily in an orifice other than their mouths.

Recreational pills aside, I suppose we tend to have to take more of them the older we get. I have essential hypertension (high blood pressure) which is genetic and was diagnosed about twenty years ago. I take a low dose of the drug ramipril daily to keep my blood pressure at a normal, healthy level. Eight years ago I suffered a minor brush with fate. I thought it was a migraine as I'd never experienced one before. It turned out to be a mini-stroke. I even wrote a blog about it, which you can read here: To Be Continued The upshot was another drug clopidogrel (an anti blood-clotting agent) got added to the daily pill regime. Bless you science and the NHS. 

But enough about my chemical correctives. I've recently finished reading a long (740 pages) and very detailed biography of the Australian writer Charmian Clift and I mention it here because she committed suicide aged just forty-five by swallowing a whole bottle of her husband's phenobarbital tablets.

Charmian Clift in Greece

Charmian was born almost exactly a hundred years ago (August 30th 1923) into a working-class family in a little coastal town in New South Wales and always aspired to be a writer, an ambition which she duly managed to a considerable degree, though never quite to her satisfaction. Nonetheless she deserves to be recognised for the life she lived and the books that live on after her - which are in the process of being rescued from undeserved obscurity, and I am happy to champion her on her centenary.

Her first paid assignment was as a journalist on the women's supplement of the Melbourne Argus, Victoria's most popular daily newspaper, though she was writing short stories and had a novel in progress in the background. It was at the Argus that she met and fell in love with George Johnston, Australia's leading war correspondent and a published author. They had an affair which scandalised the publishing world in late 1940s Australia and ultimately led to George leaving his wife and both George and Charmian leaving the Argus. George was soon snapped up by Associated Newspapers in Sydney, they started a family and he and Charmian co-wrote a prize-winning novel 'High Valley ', as well as play scripts for ABC radio. By the end of the decade, the couple by now with young children in tow also opted to leave stuffy, provincial Australia and move to London where George's reputation secured him a posting as Associated Newspapers' European correspondent and head of their London office.

Charmian, as a proto-feminist, had high hopes of moving to England in the early 1950s but even this society she soon found was boring and prescriptive, and London was so grey and cold. Husband and wife literary partnerships are notoriously tricky ones, as we know, and with George as main breadwinner, she was always regarded by the world at large as the junior partner, Her role as wife and mother put a physical limit on her scope for creativity, she fell into the role of sounding-board for her husband's own literary endeavours, and despite the opportunities that London offered (like taking tea with T.S. Eliot for instance), she longed for a different, freer and more bohemian life for herself and her family. She was to find it in Greece, where she and George and the children moved in 1954 (first to the island of Kalymnos and later to Hydra). 

It was a brave decision the couple took to step away from the safety-net of a regular journalist's salary and try and support themselves by their own writing. At least the living would be cheap and the weather decent. They planned to co-write a novel about the sponge-divers of Kalymnos and lived off the publisher's advance while working on the book. At the same time, Charmian wrote an autobiographical account of their life on the island (see further down for details). The novel about the sponge-divers was a moderate success (and was even made into a film) but life on Kalymnos was extremely basic and the family chose after a year to relocate to Hydra, where they bought a house and lived for the next decade at the centre of what became quite a famous expatriate bohemian community (comprising Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen, Axel Jensen, Sidney Nolan among others).

Charmian and eldest son on Hydra

Charmian and George wrote assiduously every morning, socialised over flagons of retsina with friends in the evening and then sometimes wrote on again into the night after the children were in bed, often fuelled by barbiturates if deadlines were looming, but their life although idyllic in one sense (they were in charge of their own destiny, Hydra was an enchanting place) was extremely taxing. Their literary works didn't do well commercially, partly due to their being unable to promote them in person in the key markets of  Australia, England or the USA. George even took to knocking out 'potboiler' crime fiction under an assumed name to keep some money coming in.

Then there were personal issues. Charmian was jealous of the fact that George's writing took precedence over hers because he was the more well-established of the two and more prolific, with a string of previous books to his name. George was jealous of Charmian because he felt she was actually the better writer and because she was vibrantly attractive to men. He constantly suspected her of  being unfaithful to him even though she wasn't (most of the time). He also contracted tuberculosis in 1959 while living on Hydra and suffered progressively from the condition. The task of caring for him fell of course to Charmian. 

And it was George who eventually decided to move back to Australia in 1964. Charmian was devastated, for she loved Greece, loved their house on Hydra and didn't want to leave. Neither did the three children who had grown up on the island almost as native Greeks. There was a suggestion that George was prepared to sell the house, abandon his wife and go back to Australia on his own. In the end they all went, the family stayed together, but Charmian still didn't much like the country of her birth once she was back in Sydney, for it was still stuck in its boring and prescriptive rut. She also worried that she was losing her looks, that her husband had begun to hate her, and alcohol became an increasing problem. Although she wrote a well-received weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald , Charmian was in a depressed rut of her own, and in those five years between her return to Australia and her suicide, she never completed another novel. She felt a sense of failure, like Icarus descending, and I'm reminded of those plangent lines of Joni Mitchell's (herself no stranger to a Greek sojourn): "all romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical and drunk and boring..."   

The books which garnered her the most critical appreciation back in the late 1950s were her two beautifully written accounts of their lives first on Kalymnos ('Mermaid Singing ', its title deriving from Eliot's 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ') and then on Hydra ('Peel Me A Lotus ', named in reference presumably to Tennyson's 'Lotos-Eaters '). The good news is that they have both recently been republished. If you love Greece or just like the idea of it, these two volumes paint a brilliant picture of what island life was like in the 1950s before the advent of the international tourist. Unsurprisingly they are what connected me to Charmain Clift in the first place.

Her novels from the 1960s, 'Walk to the Paradise Gardens ' and 'Honour's Mimic '(a prize if anyone can say where that title derives from) have been stubbornly out of print however for decades, though a third, 'The End of the Morning ' still incomplete and unpublished at the time of her suicide, is finally going to appear in print next year.

Towards the end of her days, Charmian summed up her predicament succinctly as follows: "I miss the life, and it has occurred to me in the last three years that I am infinitely more isolated and more completely marooned in an Australian suburb than I ever was on a poor and primitive Greek island. Materially I am much better off, but spiritually I sometimes feel impoverished of the gaiety and social ease of Mediterranean living. " 

In her poignant suicide note she stated: "I will cease upon the midnight and no pain - isn't that something? I would quite like some flowers. " She downed with a glass of wine all of her husband's phenobarbital tablets (which he kept against the day his own degenerative tuberculosis became too much to bear) and went to sleep lying on her right side with her hands together beside her head on the pillow.

This latest poem from the imaginarium may have something of the spirit of Keats' 'Ode To A Grecian Urn ' about it but there the similarity ends.

I Zoe/ Η ζωή (The Life)

How we marvelled in the presence of so much

beautiful pottery in one quiet Athenian museum.

Amphora, Attic cups, volute Craters and Hydria,

Oenochoe, Pelike and Pyxis, stunning  Stamnos

and my favourite the squat black Lekythos, each 

displayed with hand-written legend in a language

from millennia which we could as yet barely read

let alone speak - and Keats wasn't even in mind...

...though later we sought him out for such insight

as he had to share. Fifteen years into the future, I

Zoe in despair reflect on being blinded by Aegean

sun. There is no shadow there, our faults baked in

the clay for anyone to see, our feathers all unstuck,

romantic illusions buried by a cold midnight moon

and yet I miss the place, evenings at Douskos with

retsina flowing imbuing a happy weightlessness to

our fragile dreams. Sadly I fill my replica Lekythos

with Australian wine, moved again by the beauty of

its decorative design, musing that the truth we seek

seems always to be just round the curve of the vase.   

  

George Johnston and Charmian Clift in happier times

How could I possibly write  blog on the subject of pills and not include as a musical bonus Jefferson Airplane's masterful 'White Rabbit '? Grace Slick wrote the lyrics and music, drawing on her love of 'Alice In Wonderland ' for imagery and on her love of Spanish music, 'Bolero ' in particular, for the tune. The result was stunning in 1967 and remains a tour de force today. To listen via YouTube, just click on the song title here: White Rabbit.

Keep taking the good tablets and thanks for reading, Steve :-)

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Colonies

Over the last few months, I've read quite a few books about an ex-patriate international colony of artists who made the Greek island of Hydra their home in the 1950s and 1960s. I suppose the fascination with those people, their lives and the works they produced was in part compensation for my not being able to make a customary visit to Greece last summer, not that I would have chosen Hydra as a destination, for it lacks both antiquities and decent beaches, although it has a beautiful harbour and encircling town.

the harbour and 'amphitheatre' of Hydra town, 1955

It is also just a couple of hours by ferry from Athens, quite a lot of Athenians have second homes there, and it also has an extension of the Athenian School of Art, which might explain why it became a hub for international artists and writers after the second world war, people looking to 'get away from' the rat race and the crushing social conservatism of those immediate post war/cold war years, to 'get away to' somewhere they could be a little more bohemian, where there was good light, plenty of sunny days, and where house rents and the cost of living were cheap by comparison - an out of the way but still accessible idyll where they could pursue their unconventional lifestyles and creative calling - cue Hydra.

The Australian couple George Johnston and Charmian Clift along with their children were the first to establish a long-term presence and they lived on the island from 1955 to 1964. Their writings and network of friends attracted others from the antipodes to live and write or paint on Hydra, but other nationalities discovered it as well; American beats like Gregory Corso, northern Europeans such as Axel Jensen and his wife Marianne Ihlen, Paolo and Magda Tilche, David and Angela Goschen and Klaus Merkel. Perhaps the most famous of all, and the main reason for Hydra's lasting fame as an artistic colony, was Leonard Cohen who arrived there at the beginning of 1960. He swapped cold, snowy Montreal for a Greek island on a whim, but fell in love with the place and so when  he was left a sum of money by a relative, Cohen was able to buy a dilapidated house on Hydra, not just rent it. He had it refurbished simply in the local style and his family owns it to this day.

The artistic colony of ex-pats in Hydra town lived hand-to-mouth and in each others pockets, houses, beds, novels. They were close-knit but not always harmonious. In summer the living was easy, lots of sun, sex, olives, retsina and a little writing (though occasionally the water supply and the electricity failed). In winter it was tough-going, cold and cut off from the world on their rock in the Aegean. The novelists would bash away on their typewriters before sending their manuscripts off into the world via the ferry, then wait anxious weeks for a cheque, or more likely another rejection slip. The artists would paint when the light and their cold fingers allowed, storing up canvases they hoped to sell to summer visitors. And always there was intrigue and infighting. 

It was on Hydra that Axel Jensen ran off with an American painter and Marianne Ihlen fell into Leonard Cohen's arms, moving in with him as his muse and lover for some considerable time (check out the back cover of Cohen's second LP 'Songs From A Room'). It was on Hydra that Cohen finished his first novel 'The Favourite Game' and wrote his second, 'Beautiful Losers'. It was also on Hydra, outside the local tavernas on long, hot summer evenings, that Cohen armed with his guitar gradually made the transformation from poet and novelist to song-writer and singer extraordinaire.

Leonard Cohen (with guitar) entertaining outside Douskos taverna, Hydra 1960

He  never made a living from his poetry or novels and though he claimed he never had faith in the sound of his voice, it was on that island that he was persuaded he had a talent for writing and singing from the heart - and the cliched rest is history. In fact his sojourn on Hydra was the catalyst for many of his great early songs (from a room), including 'So Long, Marianne' and 'Bird On A Wire' - which only became possible the year the Greek telephone company installed telephone lines on the island, connecting Hydra with mainland Greece and the wider world.

By the mid-1960s most of the core of artists on Hydra realised that the only way to properly further their careers was to follow their work out into that wider world, which by then was becoming more bohemian like them anyway. And then came the military coup of 1967. But with the deaths of Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen within weeks of each other in 2016, interest in their tangled lives and those of their colony of Hydra friends has been reawakened, and it is a revisiting that I found pays dividends - see the bibliography later on.

I offer two poems again this week. The first is by one of finest Greek poets of the 20th century, Konstantinos Kavafis. Although written in 1924, it could almost be about Leonard and Marianne, so prescient does it sound.

Before Time Altered Them

They were full of sadness at their parting.

They hadn't wanted it: circumstances made it necessary.

The need to earn a living forced one of them

to go far away - New York or Canada.

The love they felt wasn't, of course, what it once had been;

the attraction between them had gradually diminished,

the attraction had diminished a great deal.

But to be separated, that wasn't what they wanted.

It was circumstances. Or maybe Fate

appeared as an artist and decided to part them now,

before their feeling died out completely,

before Time altered them:

the one seeming to remain for the other what he always was,

the good-looking young man of twenty-four.

The second is the latest from the imaginarium. It touches on the darker explanation behind the original 'fashion' for the predominance of white and that special blue, colours that many Greek island houses display to this day. It also supposes an act of civil disobedience. 

Incidentally, the original reason that houses were decked in colours was because most were built of stone, usually volcanic and dark. In order to keep them cooler in the very hot summers, they were plastered and lime-washed (ground limestone mixed with water - paint being either expensive of simply unavailable). Sometimes they were white-washed but often other pigments were mixed in with the lime, permitting a palette of pale, sun-reflecting colours: ochre houses as well as pink, green, lilac and sky-blue. Then came the military coups of 1935 and 1967.

Loulaki Blues

The King is fled, long live the Crown,

though don't let anyone connected to the

Ministry of Public Order hear you saying so.

Whites over time tend to yellow or grey.

We restored the illusion in the laundering

by adding a washing blue, Loulaki on Hydra.

Blue and yellow are complementaries

in the subtractive colour model, for that is

how the science works. But now a new edict

is being enforced across the islands such

that only white and blue must be the hues

of every house: white walls, blue woodwork,

roofs of the same cerulean, to be attained

by mixing our Loulaki washing powder in

with standard calcimine slaked whitewash.

It is regimentation designed to signal

resurgence of a nation, the Third Hellenic

uniform, pretty as a picture to all appearances

but our souls within, ferric with mute fury,

so we wilfully allow our shirts and blouses

to fade to yellow or grey. They'll stay that way

until the moment we are free from this

monstrous tyranny of Generals. Our clothes 

become us, symbols of resistance and of hurt,

degrading as months of heat and poverty

roll by. No mojo hands will deliver us from

uncivil prying of their eyes but iron will win.

The King is fled, long live the Crown.

Oppression struts in white as well as brown;

these days, we don't trust men in brilliant shirts.

loulaki powder 

If you're interested in following up on any of the Hydra creatives or the story of their time in Greece half a century or more ago, I can recommend the following:

'Marianne & Leonard: Words Of Love' is a 90 minute documentary film by Nick Broomfield about Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen, featuring much archive footage and interviews down the years.

'Half The Perfect World' (sub-titled 'Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra 1955-1964') is an in-depth account of the people and the times by a couple of Australian academics, Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziel, and is the go-to factual account of that ex-pat colony. It also includes many of James Burke's contemporary photographs.

'Mermaid Singing' and 'Peel Me A Lotus' are Charmian Clift's immensely readable accounts of life on Kalymnos and Hydra respectively and are due to be reissued in April.

'The Water and the Wine' by Tamar Hodes is one of a number of fictionalised accounts of that artistic community, this time by someone who had lived on Hydra as a child at the time.

'A Theatre For Dreamers' by Polly Samson is the latest in the line of novels based around the cast of artists and their friends living on Hydra in the early 1960s. Currently available in hardback, it is due for its paperback release in April (tying in with the Clift re-issues, for which Samson has written introductions.

The last words (sung in this case) should probably go to Leonard Cohen himself. Click on song title to activate the link through to: So Long, Marianne

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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