A musical and literary review of Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers (2020) and Charmian Clift’s Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel me a Lotus (1959)
German anglophiles love a type of wicked and sardonic British humour, typified by the likes of the Goons, Spike Milligan, Faulty Towers and Dinner for One. The latter sketch is apparently always watched by millions of Germans around X-mas time. There is something very amusing about having a dinner party with guests that have passed away, and the Lady of the House - and her butler – pretending that they have turned up nevertheless, what with the butler having to drink all the toasts, thus getting wasted, ending in the nudge, nudge innuendo at the end, where he helps the old Lady up the stairs to the bedroom, her answering his question “same as usual?” with “yes, as usual as every year”. Polly Samson says that her literary treatise A Theatre for Dreamers has a similar background idea, namely what would it be like to have a dinner party with one’s favourite luminaries that have since passed away? To embed (note the pun) oneself in a historical period with various historical characters of one’s choice, is of course a well-tried genre, for example Mark Twain’s A Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889) as a well-known satire of feudalism and monarchy. Polly Samson’s treatment of an almost contemporary period from the 1960s up to completing her book in 2019 or so, is however a quite different kettle of fish. Here, the king of the castle is none other than Leonard Cohen during his time on Hydra. The slave-queen (see below for clarification of this appellation) is, however, not his muse Marianne Ihlen but Charmian Clift.
This was news to me, so allow me some background information. Having been an avid fan of Leonard Cohen’s lyrical music for a long time (and having read his Favourite Game) it did not escape my attention when the Guardian reviewed Polly Samson’s new book. Up to that point I was familiar with Polly Samson due to also being a big fan of Heathcote Williams -with whom she a had a child – and of course her liaison and marriage to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd - their music also being in my favourites’ collection. So obviously, I had to buy her book and having read about her illustrious family background and her personal trajectory, I thought, one could only expect one or the other, either a shallow celebrity concoction, or more appropriately, a classical tragicomedy, a là Plautus
I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don't think it would be appropriate to make it consistently a comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I'll make it a tragicomedy …
So, how come I had never heard of the slave-queen (I am parroting Plautus) Charmian Clift? Polly Samson, who with her very successful husband had of course rented/bought (albeit belatedly) a house on Hydra, in a seemingly one-up-man-ship with rock royalty, had come across a novel called Peel me a Lotus on a bookshelf of someone in the know on Hydra, read it, and was blown away. So, I too had to do a bit of research, like reading the book in question (in addition to her Mermaid Singing) and, like Polly Samson, follow up with Nadia Wheatley’s ‘big and brilliant’ biography of Clift (The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, 2001). In the first instance, having stopped reading A Theatre for Dreamers, I read Mermaid Singing, Charmian Clift’s autobiographical account of their time on Kalymnos. This was so well written, and so at odds with all the tragic family attributions found elsewhere, I was doubly intrigued. How would her follow-up treatment of life on Hydra deal with the endless innuendo, debauchery and drunken escapades as later detailed in Polly Samson’s and Nadia Wheatley’s books? Surprisingly perhaps, Peel me a Lotus ends before Leonard Cohen arrives in 1960, and as such does not dwell at all on these turbulent times from 1960 to 1964 when Charmian and family returned to Australia. While legions of ‘decadents’ (as George Johnston, Charmian’s long suffering writer-husband, called them) had even arrived on the island before then, and were described by Charmian in fantastically sardonic fashion, there are only a few hints in Peel me a Lotus regarding her deteriorating relationship with her husband, instead focussing on the literary struggles that George endures with the daily help and support of his wife, while all the while keeping a very sharp eye on what is happening around them. Peel me a Lotus as such has the makings of a classical tragicomedy.
So, why does Polly Samson begin the story in 1960, without any literary treatment from Charmian Clift? Obviously the main ingredient would be missing if we were only to ‘embed’ ourselves in the period of Peel me a Lotus, namely the belated king of Hydra, one of the greatest rock/pop stars of our time, called Leonard Cohen. We don’t necessarily need Charmian Clift’s observations from this time onwards, for after all, there is now a whole industry devoted to Leonard Cohen, delving into every cook and cranny of his life – especially on the now mystical beginnings on Hydra. There were/are any number of hangers-on who either wrote up their memories in various journalistic efforts (including Leonard Cohen’s own) or could make themselves available – if still alive - for interviews for Polly Samson.
So, I can see the temptation to ‘embed’ oneself in this heady cocktail of life on Hydra from about 1960 to about 1964 (and with an odd visit some 10 years later), especially if one has a certain savoir-faire in these matters. Polly’s own life up to this point in 2017 or so, was of course deeply immersed in the British literary rock scene, similar to the ups and downs of a Marianne Faithful (and her hilarious sounding connection with Heathcote Williams), and with the endless dramas associated with drug and alcohol fuelled sex, disguised as ‘free love’ (some of which may have been quite genuine, as for example Polly Samson seems to credit Leonard Cohen with, during his early love affair with Marianne Ihlen). Thus coming across Peel me a Lotus on Hydra in 2017 or so was more than a coincidence, it was a calling Polly Samson could not refuse, especially as she now had all the time and resources to write a block buster. She has the inside knowledge of a rock’n’roll muse with the added incentive - as articulated by Charmian Clift – to now rise above it.
The only problem now is to imagine what Charmian Clift would/could have written from 1960 onwards. Can Polly get inside Charmian’s head and let her speak? Does she have Charmian’s literary talent for tragicomedy? Like, when Charmian - on Hydra – let’s rip on the expatriates, like the infamous Jacques whom she describes as a ‘little curly dog in season, whose imperative it is to sniff after any and every lady dog (p. 342)’, we can appreciate her scorn with a wry smile. When Charmian decries the poverty they (sick husband and three children – one a baby born on Hydra) live in, waiting in desperation for royalty cheques, she mocks the wannabe artistes as freeloaders absolving themselves ‘from all responsibility, all control, all moral laws, all sense of duty (ibid.)’. In contrast Charmian publicly defends her husband as a great writer, and yes, she regrets that she has not enough time for her own literary work – working as a housewife and literary adviser to her husband George. Poor guy, he is a physical wreck, taken to drink, he ‘looks baffled, uneasy and afraid.’ It is Charmian’s moral duty to support him whatever happens, however much his bitterness turns back onto her. As in Mermaid Singing she writes so well about the Greek people on Hydra, their customs, their way of life, their foibles, their love of children, their love of the sea, their squabbles. their struggles to survive on this rocky island where ‘sweet water’ is in perennial shortage. The winters are cold and the summers are very hot. Charmian is not given to politics – as opposed to her gloomy husband, a celebrated war journalist in his native Australia who is convinced that the cold (nuclear) war will annihilate all of them – but still produces an unforgettable glimpse with her description of the EOKA problems, noting how her children denounce the English just like the locals do. Then there is the glorious satire of the American movie production on Hydra, with their ‘major stars, shining with a cool, remote light in the frenetic whirl of their satellites … (p.396)’, while the locals sre screaming “Dollaria”. Having worked on an American film production myself, I appreciate her mild sarcasm, observing that any and all production problems are solved with a fistful of USD. When the movie people have gone, normality returns and Peel me a Lotus ends with Creon, the Greek man of the world, living on Hydra, like some latter-day Onassis, gathering up the remaining, shattered expatriate souls, inviting them to Katsikas’ Bar for yet another jug of retsina. Does Polly Samson realise that the strength of Peel me a Lotus lies in giving voice to the local people rather than go on and on about the expatriate community? Having lived on various ‘foreign’ islands myself (as an anthropological linguist and UN consultant), I am painfully aware that expatriate enclaves become islands within islands, what with incestuous relationships and dramas played out, much to the amusement (and sometimes contempt) of the local populations. Expatriates make for some good, salacious story telling but rarely for what should pass as literature.
Comparing the Greek ending of Peel me a Lotus with that of Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers Sadly, you can see this woeful preoccupation with the expatriates, whereby she interprets a now famous photograph of Leonard Cohen and Charmian Clift (with others, see below), ostensibly taken before they depart Hydra (Charmian and family off to England), making up a dialogue, Charmian saying “You know, I was never in love with you, Leonard” with him replying “No, me neither” (is this attested?). The constant, salacious insinuation throughout the novel had been that Leonard and Charmian had an affair, or something close to it. That she sits close to him (Leonard wearing a tie, for heaven’s sake!) looking up to the sky signifies nothing – but to Polly it is evidence that can be used in a literary court of law. Sad story, and nothing like the great Greek ending in Peel me a Lotus.
Also note that this photograph was taken quite some time after Peel me a Lotus ended. As emphasised before, there is now nothing authentic from Charmian’s writing that Polly can work with. There is no Leonard Cohen, no Marianne Jensen (nee Ihlen), no Axel Jensen (Marianne’s wayward husband) as the main protagonists. She has to rely on secondary sources only, and spin a story without the literary support from Charmian the writer. Hence her contrivance begins with an attempt to have her young alter ego, Erica, connected via a fictional friendship between her mother and Charmian while living in London. Erica, the 18 year old, is escaping from London and her strange father – her mysterious mother has just died and left her some money, and a car for her brother. Since their mother had kept in contact with Charmian – a mother figure to replace her own - they know she is to be found on a Greek island called Hydra. Erica, with her boyfriend Jimmy, and her brother drive all the way to Greece. It’s not clear to me what the purpose is of this lengthy introductory chapter, what with endless emotional speculation about what Charmian might know about her mother’s affairs. Maybe this is an unexplained throwback to her own family history that is rife with strange relationships (Polly’s biological English communist father living in East-Germany while Polly’s Chinese mother moved to England, eventually marrying Mr Samson of Continental Jewish background), not to speak of her own turbulent life during and after the relationship with Heathcote Williams. Indeed her own history sounds far more fascinating than that of her alter ego, Erica, which up to that point reads more like a Mills and Boons story. When they finally get to Hydra, Polly Samson can lift the atmospheric land- and seascape description from Peel me a Lotus and supplement it with her own experiences of Hydra much later in life (as the wife of David Gilmour). She does rise to the occasion, and since she has the authentic experience of actually writing the book while staying in the ‘Australian’ house, she has the added advantage to look into every nook and cranny of the house, and imagine what is must have been like almost 40 years ago. Obviously the house has been modernised but the basic layout remained the same. This is the terrace where George did all his writing. This is the kitchen where Charmian did all her cooking and living. And the waterfront is still more or less the same. And the hills and the rocks and the swimming hole are still the same. Leonard Cohen’s house is still the same, now some sort of museum for rent, managed by the Cohen Estate. It’s just that the people of the 60s are not there anymore. Still, one knows who was there at the time. Digging around for information will yield the most improbable sources, one of a New Zealand (where I now live) origin, namely one Redmond Frankton “Bim” Wallis and his wife, with the former having left notebooks and fragments of a novel on Hydra that were deposited at the National Library of New Zealand. ‘Bim’ turns into one of the characters larger than life in Polly’s book. I haven’t read his accounts, so I don’t know how much Polly has lifted from his pages. Her idea to be as authentic as possible does extend to her statement that the dialogues involving Leonard Cohen are based on his published utterances (however, see his supposed reply to Charmian at the end) but unfortunately, I think, this does not extend to Charmian Clift. As such Polly has to make up the dialogue between Erica and Charmian, as well as all the other monologues and dialogues involving all the other bit players in this Theatre for Dreamers. I don’t believe Charmian’s voice comes through though: Polly, despite her obvious admiration for Charmian as a woman, does not represent Charmian, the writer’s voice. It may be true that Charmian and George and their children were the toast of the town, the undisputed leaders of the expatriate pack (mainly due to their local knowledge acquired over some 10 years on Greek islands) and that the shenanigans amongst the ‘decadents’ involved Charmian - as remembered by the somewhat unreliable ‘decadents’ who would embellish the meagre truth in order to shine like satellites (remember Charmian’s movie world quote above). After all, the only superstar was Leonard Cohen who actually had very little to say about Charmian and George other than that they were very helpful, more drunk than all the others, more often sick than all the others, and more quickly recovered than all the others. While Cohen, on his arrival to Hydra, as an erstwhile poet and writer would have been of some interest to George and Charmian, they had very little in common music-wise, what with George and Charmian listening to Brahms and the like, and Cohen becoming a pop-singer (albeit a very good one, in my opinion). Sure, around the camp fire when everyone was drunk or high on drugs, Leonard with his guitar could enchant almost everyone. Having seen him play live in two concerts, first in his early days in the 70s in Munich and then in his twilight in Auckland, I can attest to my fascination with him. No such emotion, however, is attested for Charmian (or George) after they moved back to Australia – no such mention is made in Nadia Wheatley’s biography at least. Surely, they must have heard about Leonard’s rise to stardom but is sounds like that by that time in the 1970s even their teenage children had more interest in head-banger music rather than the mellow tunes of a Leonard Cohen. I must say too, that now in my old age I am beginning to prefer the likes of Brahms to Cohen. The fact that Cohen stayed with Charmian and Co. for a while until he found his own accommodation, is not very significant either, as Charmian’s household was a crash pad for almost any new arrival in need of shelter from the storm. I think this was an endearing feature of a type of Australian hospitality I have experienced myself in Australia in places like Darwin and Sydney, where fair dinkum Aussies opened their homes to any traveller needing a place to sleep. Anyway, with Erica’s arrival on Hydra, the novel does become more interesting reading, even if only at the level of who is doing it with whom. The party scene at the waterfront bars and in private homes, not to mention the beach parties and midnight hill (Mount Eros no less) climbing, all titillate with scantily clad young women and an assortment of male wannabe artists, quoting Keats and Sartre (Erica is given de Beauvoir’s Second Sex to read by Charmian), all with a secondary focus on Marianne and Axel Jensen whose tortured relationship and the latter’s open philandering is given top billing. All the while we hear the fictional Charmian running down rotters like Axel, who treat women as their ‘slave-queen’ muses, who in must provide the patriarchs with food for their stomachs and sex for their phalluses. This is constantly contrasted with Charmian’s domestic situation where she too provides the food but cannot provide any sexual services for her husband (due to his supposed impotence caused by TB). George is portrayed as an insanely jealous character who suspects and berates his wife in public rages and tirades. Is Charmian doing it with Jacques (remember her disdainful description of him in Peel me a Lotus)? Is she doing it with Leonard or any other strapping male that frequents the island? Is George’s sordid imagination running overtime or is it his literary forte to feature a nymphomaniac in every one of his many novels? Most of all – and now Polly Samson writes from hindsight – will George really implicate his fictional wife in his up and coming Closer to the Sun to have it off with a fictional Jacques? Does Charmian mind? And what does Charmian know about Erica’s dead mother’s supposed infidelities? There is a lot of beating about in the bushes, keeping the suspense going. Polly Samson’s strange idea is that Charmian confesses to her (Erica) that she could no longer stand these pathetic insinuations and innuendoes, and proceeded to write the passage for George herself, whereby she has sex with Jacques – saying it actually was nothing like it (if it was something at all). And yes, Erica’s mother did it as well. Polly seems to have a strange fascination with the dilemmas posed by couples (man and woman, married or not) going off with others, for reasons as mysterious and unexpected as possible, so as to make a good detective story out of it. When men like Axel Jensen (and later Leonard Cohen) leave their loved ones for the next one in line, they are portrayed as men to be avoided by women, since they cause nothing but emotional pain and suffering. On the other hand the emancipation of women, in Polly’s mind, seems to entail a women’s equality with men, insofar that women have the equal right to be as stupid as men, i.e. why shouldn’t women have affairs too? If Charmian has an extramarital affair, it’s her god-damn right to have one. When Erica’s beautiful boyfriend Jimmy finally betrays her with a local woman – totally out of the blue as far as she is concerned – it serves as a reminder that you never quite know what is going on in the alleyways after dark. Sex as some sort of competitive sport has always been a key ingredient for the so-called bohemian lifestyles that proliferate in the 1960s – or indeed has always been a lucrative literary side-line since year dot. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are legend, and Polly Samson would know more about it than others – it just strikes me that involving Charmian and George in this merry go-around as enthusiastic participants/onlookers is taking things too far. Erica, after Jimmy’s departure sleeps with whoever lies next to her and when at a party the lecherous talk turns to the arts of the blowjob, the lowest point in the novel ‘comes’ when one of Charmian’s admirers’ says to her “I came for you” and smears sticky stuff on her. Sure, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album had equally crude insinuations but at least they did not explain the explicit details on the sleeve. There is even a mention later on where Marianne comments on Leonard’s famous song So long Marianne, saying that the original title was Come on Marianne which would have a different meaning. Really? At the drunken party mentioned above, it was speculated by all and sundry that Marianne must be well practiced kneeling before him. Such prurient interest sells copies but I am not sure it lives up to Polly Samson’s ideal of great literature. I am all for sex as long as it remains in a private sphere – to flaunt explicit sex in public may serve temporary relief but leaves a taste behind that interferes with romantic notions of love and happiness. Even Leonard Cohen’s lyrical contributions to this topic are a bit more subtle. In literature, I prefer the oblique mentions of ‘afternoon delights’ in Ovid’s Amores. Most notably though, there is no talk of sex in Charmian Clift’s two works cited, apart from the oblique references to randy Jacques. So, where does Polly Samson get her ideas from?
When Polly fast-forwards towards the end of her novel, she does so to inform us of what is already well-known: that Marianne and Axel’s son lived out his adult life in an asylum because his father had given him LSD when he was still a teenager. We learn of Charmian’s suicide in 1972 and of Georges death a year later. Their children Shane and Martin in their adult years in Australia meet equally tragic ends, Shane by suicide and Martin due to alcoholism. Finally we are told of the baby that Charmian had given away for adoption when she was only 19 in Australia. Said child, only later in life, found out that her biological mother was Charmian Clift (and she wrote a book about it). Polly’s final contrivance is that George always tortured Charmian with having given away her baby (long before she met George) and that Charmian somehow saw Erica as her lost child. Is this a tragedy of Greek classical proportions or a story of everyday dysfunction that is played out in millions of homes around the world? Conflating fact and fiction over a few short pages does neither any service.
Somewhere amongst all the publicity pieces for her novel, Samson is reported saying that her novel is conceived as a Bildungsroman (spelled with a small ‘b‘ betraying a certain ignorance of German), often defined in English as ‘coming of age novel’ what with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1759) cited as a prototype. Note however that the German word ‘Bildung’ means ‘education’ hence the idea of the Bildungsroman is more towards ‘coming-of-age as an education for the reader’. That Polly Samson’s own life story might amount to a Bildungsroman is quite a possibility, given what I have read about her. Her fictional treatment as Erica in A Theatre for Dreamers does, however, not live up to such a lofty aspiration, in my opinion. She could have aspired more in the direction of her erstwhile partner in crime, Heathcote Williams, who as a brilliant lyricist (better than Cohen) and activist has done more for English literature than any other of his age. Imagine A Theatre for Dreamers as a ballad à la Heathcote Williams (set to music by David Gilmour à la Pink Floyd’s Brick in a Wall)! Even so, with all the shortcomings, Polly Samson must be congratulated for having resurrected a great writer, namely Charmian Clift. That many commentators/reviewers/writers now focus on her (and her family’s) tragic life during the latter few years on and after Hydra, is a pity. It is in her earlier Mermaid Singing and to a lesser degree in Peel me a Lotus, that her literary genius is plain to see. Thanks, Polly, for alerting me to her work.
Note: the page numbers refer to the 2021 edition by HarperCollinsPublishers of Charmian Clift’s two books (in one volume) of Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus.
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