Love, Lust and Leonard Cohen
The troubadour figures in a new novel set on an Aegean Idyll
THEGILDEDIDYLL of English writer Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers will transport you to the Greek island of Hydra with immersive, sensual prose: you smell the lemon trees, taste the retsina, hear the bouzouki – and long for a refreshing after
noon swim in the Aegean.
Samson’s sun-dappled historical novel chronicles the complicated entanglements in a community of ex-pat writers and painters in the golden summer of 1960. The bohemian group was led by Australian writers Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston and included Amerian journalist Gordon Merrick, New Zealand novelist Redmond Wallis, Norwegian author Axel Jensen and an unknown Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.
The idea for the story took shape on her first visit to Hydra in 2014, where she was on vacation after she finished writing The Kindness and came across a copy of Clift’s 1959 travel memoir Peel Me a Lotus. “I read it and I was just absolutely smitten,” Samson, 59, recalls in an interview from her family farm in Sussex, England.
She wanted to write in the first person from Clift’s point of view as a sort of rebuttal to Johnston’s disparaging portrayal of his wife in his work, but then Samson discovered the connection between Clift, 37, and Cohen, then 25. “You might think, ‘this is wonderful,’ but actually it completely hamstrung me because I’m such a huge fan.” Not only had Samson seen Cohen perform “at every opportunity,” his lyrics are the epigraph of one of her short story collections. And when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize, the former journalist wrote a piece for The Guardian newspaper arguing Cohen was a more deserving recipient.
Putting words in the troubadour’s mouth was so daunting that Cohen, initially, was little more than an extra. “Because he was busy writing his first novel [ The Favourite Game] in the year that interested me,” Samson laughs now, “I thought it would be perfectly reasonable for him never to speak.” But the singer-songwriter’s death in 2016, at the age of 82, granted her
freedom from the pressure of writing about him. She also changed tacks by dreaming up Erica, a fictional English runaway who’s just turned 18 and becomes a close observer of the group. Like Cohen, she arrives on the island in April of 1960. Through the young woman’s eyes we follow the infidelities and excesses, see the inner workings of Clift’s volatile marriage and the disintegration of Norwegian expat Marianne Ihlen’s relationship with Jensen, and witness the growing tenderness between Ilhen and Cohen as she becomes the lover and muse later immortalized in the ballad “So Long, Marianne,” “Bird on a Wire,” and other songs and poems.
A PICTURE IS WORTH 1,000 WORDS
In order to imagine the comings and goings at the artist colony that summer, Samson drew on diaries, letters and manuscripts of the people in pictures taken by photojournalist James Burke, a Time-Life correspondent based in Athens. The famous images of Cohen, Ihlen and their circle are already familiar to fans, but represent only a handful of the collection. Just as she was able to read all 57 private letters between Marianne and Leonard, Samson also got access to the entire archive of 1,573 photographs Burke shot on several trips to Hydra in 1960.
“They are an absolute gift,” she says. “You can already see Leonard Cohen is really holding an audience, everyone is looking at him,” Samson says of the well-known series where the group is assembled around Cohen as he plays guitar beneath a tree. “Because there are maybe 50 photographs or more of just that evening you can really see where the allegiances are.”
Samson lined her writing shed with prints from this trove, which helped inspire scenes. “Anytime I was writing a scene I could just shuffle out the photographs of the people in that situation,” she recalls. “They tell you so much just by the nuances and the looks between the people, who’s sitting next to who, who’s ignoring who.”
THE TEMPTATIONS OF NOSTALGIA
“I picked the year 1960 for all sorts of reasons,” the author says, explaining it was before Hydra got electricity and became thronged with tourists, for one thing. But it’s also the perfect moment and setting for a thoughtprovoking meditation on male ego and the limits of female ambition in an era too often remembered through a haze of nostalgia. “Everybody was beautiful and young and full of talent and covered with a kind of gold dust,” Cohen would later recall.
“For men, the Sixties started earlier than for the women,” Samson says. “What we think of as the Sixties wasn’t possible in the early 1960s primarily because
there wasn’t any sort of reliable contraception or access to abortion.” The Pill had not yet been introduced (and unmarried women wouldn’t have access to it until years later, anyway), yet women were expected to go along with the social, sexual and cultural revolution. They were stuck with unwanted pregnancies and relegated to traditional roles of domestic drudgery – literally, left holding the baby.
THE MEANING OF MUSE
There’s also a reappraisal of the romanticized term muse, and the passive role of ministering angel to male genius. “We’ve all grown up with this idea of ‘how wonderful to have inspired great works of art,’ but it isn’t that simple,” Samson points out, likening the role of doting muse to an indulgent parent. “It’s actually a contract that I think is really, really problematic.”
A Theatre for Dreamers explores the lives and creative ambitions of wives and girlfriends at a time of great social change and exposes the flaws (and later, fallout) of the bohemian paradise.
Its sybaritic pleasures are probably the closest any of us will get to a Greek holiday this year.