Avail Yourself Half The Perfect World: George Johnston And Charmian Clift On Hydra: 1955-1964 Drafted By Paul Genoni Distributed In Hardcover

was a fairly ambivalent read for me, I read it for my Australian Literature course because it won the Prime Ministers' Literary Award but it really didn't do it for me, It follows the Australian expatriate couple Charmaine Clift and George Johnson and their lives on the Greek island Hydra, An artist colony develops as other Australian artists flee the conservatism of postwar Australia and Tim Winton and Leonard Cohen make appearances, Through following their lives, the book explores the tension between writing for art verses writing for financial support, Australia's idolisation of Europe as the intellectual and cultural capital, and how much place affects authorship.
These are all ideas I am interested in as a writer however, this book made them quite stale for me,

Bits I did find noteworthy:

Creative Bohemianism was, of course, nothing new, nor was the inclination for creative individuals to come together into supportive enclaves that sat at the margins of social normality.
It was, however, novel to build such an enclave in the midtwentieth century on a distant, poorly serviced, and economically challenged island to live embedded in a foreign culture and language.
It was, as this group was to discover, half of a perfect world,


Clift wrote:
What pleasure one had in thinking here I will make something very beautiful, here will be cleanliness and order and warmth and comfort, here where there is only an old dilapidated house there will be a home, a refuge, and my own light will shine on my own bit of creation.



Sanfield, a friend of Cohens and visitor on Hydra wrote:
Most of the foreigners here claim they have come to this island to get away from certain aspects of Western society specifically things like social status, morality codes amp other peoples opinions.
But it is these very things they have brought with them, They have set up a status structure with all its inherent pressures that is dangerous to live in as anywhere in America or England, Only here its much more obvious, since everything seems to be magnified on the island, And the most absurd aspect of the whole thing is that these people continue to pat themselves on the back for having the courage to leave all that behind.


Johnstons writing was entangled in billpaying genre fiction meagre royalties left him living on credit from Hydras shopkeepers, and, despite recently escaping a cancer diagnosis, his health problems were entrenched.
The novel that results is deeply ambivalent and even bitter in its scathing portrayal not only of the protagonists marriage and writing career but also of island life and the expatriate scene.
Although Closer to the Sun may leave an impression of inconsequentiality, it is redeemed by its precise expression of David Meridiths fraught state as he struggles to keep his exotic expatriate lifestyle in balance with his ambition to produce quality fiction while sustaining his familys finances.


The EOKA or National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters was the guerrilla movement fighting British colonial rule in the mids and pushing for the political union of Greece and Cyprus.
Clift suspects seven year old Shane of being the graffiti culprit, and the incident is used to confirm the Hydriots loyalty to the Australian family A woman dips her apron in a bucket and washes the sign away.
While Shane is made the playful scapegoat for this incident, what lingers is the unsaid possibility that not everyone on the island shares the same affection for the Johnston family, and that, for some, their presence has an unwelcome political dimension.


Clifts memoir Peel me a lotus differentiates herself from the young itinerant and aspiring writers and artists who, devoid of the responsibilities of families and houses, were free to come and go as they wish:

It is even difficult to see them as individual.
The boys. The posterestante, interchangeable, culture addicted, Europesick boys with grey sprinkled through their crew cuts and little pads of drinkfat around their middles, who yearn for the Europe of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald and the lost generation of a generation who were losing themselves while they were being born.


By sympathetically evoking Stein, Fitzgerald and the lost generation of the interwar years, and in distancing herself from the Beat Generation who were now flocking to Hydra, Clift exposes the uncertain place she and Johnston shared within the chronology of the twentieth century literary expatriation To the extent that Clift and Johnston had a likeminded cohort, it was the Australians who flooded London in the postwar years, so that when Clift and Johnston chose to leave London, they not only left behind the literary capital but also the type of supportive intellectual community on which they thrived.


Tim Winton spentmonths on the island writing hisnovel cloudstreet, which won Australias annual miles franklin award for the years best novel twenty eight years after Johnsons my brother jack.



This beautiful little port is to suffer the fate of so many beautiful Mediterranean ports discovered by the creative poor, We are in the process of becoming chic peel me a lotus Clift
I have been interested in the life of Charmain Clift ever since my aunt gave me her memoir, Mermaid Singing, for my birthday in.






Charmain Clift and her writerhusband, George Johnston, took their young family to live on the Greek island of Hydra in thes, and became the epicentre of a group of other writers, artists and musicians whose lives and loves ebbed and flowed like the tides of the winedark sea.
George Johnston wrote My Brother Jack on Hydra, and returned to Australia after it was published to much acclaim in, It won the Miles Franklin award the following year,



Ive read numerous books about their lives on Hydra since, but this is one of the most interesting,



Firstly, because it does not focus only on the tumultuous marriage and literary careers of Charmain Clift and George Johnston, but also looks at the lives of many of the other creative artists who ended up in Hydra, including singersongwriter Leonard Cohen and his partner Marianne Ihlen.
I was not familiar with their story and found it fascinating and illuminating, It also has a lot of fresh material like letters and diaries which I found really added to the books depth,



Secondly, the book is beautifully illustrated with photographs taken by LIFE magazine photojournalist James Burke, These images gave me such an intimate and revealing look into everyday life on Hydra, Loved it!.