‘Where would these male writers be without their ministering angels?’ A novel based around the arty 60s colony on a Greek island captures both the dream and the disappointment It’s the spring of 1960, and 18-year-old Erica has come to the tiny Greek island of Hydra with her boyfriend Jimmy, a would-be painter-poet, to join its foreign colony of writers, artists and musicians. Erica is running away from her controlling father in Bayswater and the risk of becoming nothing more than his housekeeper, like her late mother. “It was unbearable really,” thinks Erica, what her mother “put into a life that wouldn’t contain her”. Hydra’s “fantastically blue water and cheap rent”, “salt-white houses” and wacky creatives promise freedom from all bourgeois restrictions. Erica immediately falls under the spell of Charmian Clift, a charismatic Australian with a ramshackle villa, writer husband and clutch of semi-feral children. Though Clift’s name sounds as if it might have been invented by Samson to capture the seductive spirit of the counterculture, she, like almost everyone on the island apart from Erica and Jimmy, is based on a real person. There’s Clift’s husband, George Johnston; the New York playwright Kenneth Foch; the Beat poet Gregory Corso; and the emerging Scandinavian novelist Axel Jensen, whose long-suffering wife Marianne turns a blind eye to his affairs while she looks after their baby. Clift is a writer herself, author _of Peel Me a Lotus_, a memoir of her family’s Aegean escape from “the rat race”, though her days are now taken up with shopping and cooking thrifty meals when she’s not coaxing George to work. Continue reading...
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