Opening one at random, I read the first line: \u201cToday we bought the house by the well.\u201d I was captivated at once. Peel Me a Lotus<\/em> reads like a letter from the very best kind of friend: clever, warm, wonderfully evocative. The house Clift bought with her husband, George Johnston, was on the tiny Greek island of Hydra, a place she called \u201ca dream island \u2026 glowing in dream colours\u201d. It was a \u201creckless romantic\u201d decision. They wanted to \u201cstumble off the treadmill\u201d, raise their children in idyllic freedom, and write books.<\/p>\n I devoured Peel Me a Lotus<\/em> in a single sitting, read Mermaid Singing<\/em> as greedily, then went searching for any of her other books I could find. There were \u2013 disappointingly \u2013 few.<\/p>\n George Johnston and Charmian Clift in Hydra in 1963, just before the publication of My Brother Jack.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Fairfax<\/cite><\/p>\n As time went on, I read everything I could find by her or about her. I learnt that, as a child, she used to star-bake on the beach, at night, in the hope that she would turn silver. I discovered she gave birth to a daughter in secret at the age of 19 that she never saw again. And I found out that she killed herself after her husband published a novel in which he skinned and gutted her life and writings.<\/p>\n The distant island of Hydra seemed the crux of her life, the place where so many of her life\u2019s dramas and disappointments occurred. Rising like a fist of stone from the glittering waters of the Saronic Gulf, it is a place of contradictions. Named for the Greek word for \u201cwater\u201d, there is ironically little natural water on the island \u2013 it needs to be brought in by boat. It is a wild, bare place, without cars or motorbikes or trucks, and yet surprisingly chic, with designer boutiques in old sponge factories lining the quaint cobblestoned port and international art exhibitions held in elegant mansions where heroic sea captains once lived.<\/p>\n Charmian Clift and American poet Charles Heckstall listen as Leonard Cohen plays guitar in Hydra in October 1960.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>James Burke\/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n As well as Charmian and George, the island has charmed many creative artists, including Leonard Cohen, Lawrence Durrell, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Sophia Loren, Sidney Nolan and Henry Miller, who wrote \u201caesthetically it is perfect\u201d.<\/p>\n I have long wanted to go to Hydra, but somehow my life\u2019s trade winds never blew me there. I\u2019ve taught an inspirational writing retreat on Skyros, sailed on a catamaran around Minos, swum in the seafoam of Kythera where Aphrodite was born, and written a novel set during the Nazi occupation of Crete, but not once have I walked in the footsteps of one of my most revered Australian women writers.<\/p>\n This year, I vowed, I will go to Hydra. After all, this year is the anniversary of her birth, 100 years ago.<\/p>\n Charmian Clift was born on August 30, 1923 in Kiama, a seaside town once described as the Sleepy Hollow of New South Wales. Her childhood was difficult, her \u201cstormy petrel\u201d nature chafing against the constraints of the times. She tried many times to write a novel inspired by her life. First in a fragmentary manuscript entitled Greener Grows the Grass<\/em>, in which her alter ego, Christine Morley, wanted to \u201cfling off the dragging years of dependence and get on with the big adventure\u201d. Later, Charmian adopted the name Cressida in The End of the Morning<\/em>, also unfinished. She dreamt of wider horizons, of being a writer.<\/p>\n The outbreak of World War II opened up opportunities for her. She edited an army magazine, wrote short stories and, in 1946, joined The Argus<\/em> newspaper in Melbourne. It was there that she met George Johnston, a famous war correspondent. He was 35 and married with a child. She was 23. Their affair caused a scandal. Charmian was fired, and George resigned in protest, divorced his wife and moved back to Sydney. He and Charmian were married in Manly in 1947, and worked together on the book now known as High Valley<\/em>, based on George\u2019s wartime adventures in the mountains of Tibet.<\/p>\n \u2018[They] drank more than other people, they wrote more … they cursed more, they blessed more \u2026 they were an inspiration.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cGeorge and Charmian would be sitting at the old deal table \u2026 each with a typewriter, going for their lives,\u201d Charmian\u2019s sister Margaret recalled. \u201cGeorge would be typing away, typing away, typing away, almost singing as he\u2019s going \u2026 Charmian would do a little bit, think, tear it up, chuck it in the wastepaper basket, get up and walk around, stalk around \u2026 but when she put it down, it was right.\u201d They would then read each other\u2019s work, commenting and criticising, until they had a finished product they agreed on.<\/p>\n In May 1948, High Valley<\/em> won The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> literary prize. Newspaper headlines declared \u201cJournalist, wife win novel prize\u201d. Later Charmian observed, \u201cMost people didn\u2019t think I\u2019d had much to do with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the next few years, she co-authored another two books with her husband, the last on the small Greek island of Kalymnos. Her first memoir, Mermaid Singing<\/em>, was also written there. In 1954, they decided to move to Greece and try to make their living from their writing. It was a risky move. Charmian was then pregnant with her third child, who was to be \u201cthe first foreign child ever to be born on the island\u201d. It was a hard life. There was no bathroom, no electricity, no heating except a three-legged tin filled with embers. Despite all this, Charmian is filled with exultation: \u201cI think that no beauty has ever been as true for me as this \u2026 rocks and sea and \u2026 mountains that rush up between the blue and the blue, skirted only with austere white terraces of houses simplified to the purest geometry of planes and angles. It seems to me that we\u2019ve become simplified too, living here.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet tensions were boiling away in their seemingly perfect life.<\/p>\n Their poverty, the need to write books that would sell, the constant difficulty with the drains, all made every day a struggle. Even worse, Charmian could not find a publisher for Peel Me a Lotus<\/em>, which was rejected more than 10 times. This was partly because of her unflinching candour, the fact she wrote about drains as well as dancing villagers. She was trying to write a novel, but as she peeled beans, fanned the charcoal fire, rinsed diapers and sifted the lentils for pebbles, the house reverberated with \u201cthe dull thudding of George\u2019s typewriter up in the studio\u201d.<\/p>\n Charmian Clift, on her return to Sydney in 1964.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Nine<\/cite><\/p>\n Their marriage was in trouble. Both were drinking heavily, and George was always sick (he was soon to be diagnosed with tuberculosis). There were endless financial worries, infidelities, arguments, jealous rages, and the constant struggle to find time to write. Leonard Cohen wrote: \u201c[They] drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more \u2026 they were an inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n In the bitterly cold winter of 1962, Charmian put aside her own autofiction to help George write his, the autobiographical novel My Brother Jack<\/em>. Charmian \u201csat on a stone step on a cushion and we talked and talked and remembered and remembered and I wrote\u201d, George explained. His notebook for the novel had many pages written in Charmian\u2019s distinctive bold handwriting. Most startlingly, the character of Cressida Morley \u2013 the name Charmian had chosen for her alter-ego \u2013 stepped out of her pages and into his: a girl with a laughing mouth and luminous green eyes, \u201cmore dangerous than a bomb\u201d.<\/p>\n Later, Charmian applied for a literary fund fellowship, writing that her project was \u201cabout a girl called Cressida Morley, who has appeared already in My Brother Jack<\/em>, but I invented her first\u201d.<\/p>\n George\u2019s novel was published in March 1964 to universal acclaim, and went on to win the Miles Franklin award. Charmian\u2019s extensive contribution was never publicly recognised. He flew back to Australia for the book\u2019s launch, and Charmian was left to pack up and sell her dream house on her dream island. Ahead lay a very different life. She would compose no more novels, no more enchanting memoirs. Instead, she would accept a role writing a weekly column for The Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>, and work on the script for the television series of My Brother Jack<\/em> that aired on the ABC in 1965.<\/p>\n Her husband, meanwhile, wrote Clean Straw for Nothing<\/em>, its sequel. Lines were lifted almost word for word from Charmian\u2019s journal, without attribution. And her alter-ego Cressida Morley\u2019s only role is that of a treacherous, promiscuous wife. Her writing scrubbed out. Rendered meaningless. On the back of one of the notebook pages, Charmian wrote: \u201cshe also has a life in a vertical position\u201d.<\/p>\n In July 1969, a month before the publication of Clean Straw for Nothing<\/em>, she took a fatal overdose of her husband\u2019s barbiturates, writing in her note to George: \u201cI am sure you will have a most successful and distinguished career.\u201d Soon afterwards, he won the Miles Franklin award for the second time.<\/p>\n This year I went to Hydra at last, that dream island. The soaring mountains are ablaze with spring colour, and a sweet-faced donkey carries panniers of white flowers for a wedding. The landmarks of a place I have never been before are achingly familiar. The small stone cafe on the waterfront where Charmian and friends used to gather to drink and gossip and wait for the mail in hope of a royalty cheque. The statue of the surly lion that \u201ccrouched pale and simpering\u201d in the square. The gnarled olive tree at Douskos Tavern where Leonard Cohen first took up a guitar, borrowed from the proprietor.<\/p>\n I walk the crooked, narrow laneways, looking for the house by the well. When I find it, I lay a sprig of jasmine upon the doorstep. You are remembered, I tell Charmian. Your words are read.<\/p>\n The harbour in Hydra in the present day.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n Then I sit and drink a glass of wine by the harbour, in the same place she drank so many, and read Peel Me a Lotus<\/em> one more time. I want to remember her as she was on Hydra, when it was \u201csummer-time, play-time, easy-living time, lotus-eating time\u201d. I want to remember her and George, tiptoeing \u201cout of the dark house through the lanes \u2026 until we come to the fig tree. Silently we descend to the dark water, silently leave our pale, crumpled heap of clothes, silently slip into the wet black silk where the briny stars wake at a movement and catch and cling and stream slow trails from our nakedness, from breast and foot and fingertip that move again with wonder and delight, made marvellous by the night and the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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