The tragic fates of so many of the Hydra set
A dark-haired young man is strumming a guitar under a tree, while around him an entranced audience of ex-pats soak up the music and the evening heat at simple taverna tables... It’s how we like to imagine Leonard Cohen on the Greek island of Hydra in the first year of the 1960s. The then trustfund Canadian poet had yet to even consider becoming a singer/ songwriter but was happy to laze around Europe, seeking inspiration. The 26-year-old arrived on Hydra in 1960 and bought a house there. It was on the idyllic island that he met Marianne Ilhen, a lithe Norwegian with a blonde pixie cut, recently abandoned by her famous writer husband Axel Jensen. She and Cohen would strike up a turbulent love affair that would last a decade and provide the inspiration for many of his songs. But the complicated love triangle involving Ilhen, Jensen and Cohen is only part of the story in Theatre For Dreamers, Polly Samson’s novel, an imagined history in which real characters mingle with fictional ones. At the narrative’s centre are Australian literary figures George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who welcomed Cohen into their home on the island, where he would sit and write on their terrace. The couple were the volcanic core of the Hydra artistic set. Cohen later wrote: “They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.” On Hydra, Johnston and Clift both wrote prolifically while their three children roamed free among the cypress trees. Between them, they published 14 books during their time there. It was there that Johnston penned his best-known, prize-winning work, My Brother
Jack. But the marriage was rocky. Johnston, rendered impotent as a result of treatment for tuberculosis, was consumed by jealousy when Clift, a woman of appetite, sought passion elsewhere. That year, 1960, was a golden year, but things ended tragically for so many of the Hydra set; a legacy of tortured lives. Jensen descended into psychosis. His son with Ilhen, Axel Jnr, whom he abandoned, has spent his adulthood institutionalised in Norway. As for Clift and Johnston, literary success exacted a heavy price. Johnston declined into alcoholism. And Clift, who became a household name in her native Australia after leaving Hydra, committed suicide in 1969, just before her husband’s book Clean Straw For Nothing was published, in which he exposed her affairs.