The post-war years witnessed the publication of many books in English by travellers in Greece. Many were written by former servicemen and diplomats who had served in Greece prior to or during the Nazi Occupation, or arrived with the Papandreou government-in-exile. One thinks of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rex Leeper, Rex Warner, Xan Fielding, Osbert Lancaster, W. Stanley Moss. Other writers, such as Lawrence Durrell, Robert Liddell, Dilys Powell, had fallen in love with Greek life in the years preceding the war and would return after it. Another group came to Greece during the Civil War, responding in very different ways to the fragile, fraught environment: Kevin Andrews and Philip Sherrard are good examples of this.
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| Charmian Clift |
While not all of these travellers are well known now (and I will consider some of the lesser-known examples later on in this occasional series), male names predominate. But I want to start by looking at two female post-war travellers in Greece. Women travel-writers have tended to be unjustly neglected and, with the exception of Villa Ariadne and An Affair of the Heart by Dilys Powell, are largely out of print. But the early women travellers of the post-war years brought, I believe, special insights into aspects of Greek life that seemed of less interest to male writers, and may, incidentally perhaps, have anticipated the more anthropologically minded studies undertaken in subsequent years by writers such as Juliet du Boulay, Renée Hirschon, Sofka Zinovieff. Their prose often dazzles, capturing the sharp edge of Greek sunlight across the country’s harsh landscapes. And their openness and receptiveness to the country’s inhabitants suggests, at least in part, a genuine process of influence, learning and personal transformation.
In this blog my subjects are an Australian and a Briton. The Australian writer Charmian Clift (1923-1969) arrived in Greece from London in 1954, alongside her husband, the journalist and author George Johnston, and their two children. At first, they spent a year on Kalymnos in the Dodecanese before moving to Hydra, where they settled and bought a house. Clift’s slightly older contemporary, the British food writer and journalist Patience Gray (1917-2005), travelled to Greece in 1963, accompanying her partner, the Flemish sculptor Norman Mommens, to a remote area of Naxos in the Cyclades, where they spent the best part of a year. Both Gray and Clift have left us memoirs in the form of travel books accounting for their time on the islands, together with associated books in other genres.
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| Patience Gray |
Patience Gray published two books from her time on Naxos, both of them appearing in print twenty years after the visit. Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia (Prospect, 1986) is one of the most famous and admired cookery books of the last half century or so. Alongside the fabulous recipes themselves, Gray writes beautifully about environment, diet and customs in the Mediterranean areas where she had lived and learned:
In Apollona we were living among the vestiges of Neolithic and bronze age life; the wild almond, wild fig, wild olive and the vine which all came, if sporadically, into cultivation seven or eight thousand years ago, these staples along with wheat, rye and barley were staples still, as were the original sources of sweetness, honey, the carouba tree, wild pears, grapes, mulberry, figs. It was not hard to imagine that the same nimble flocks of long-tailed sheep and little black goats had been treading the mountain for many thousands of years, or that the acorns of ilex and dwarf kermes oaks had always been munched by little grey-skinned pigs.
Gray’s autobiographical memoir, Ringdoves and Snakes (Macmillan, 1988), came out two years later and, unlike the cookbook, focuses exclusively on the year spent at Apollona on Naxos. She had struggled over two decades to find a publisher for it and it was never widely read or migrated into paperback; it is now out of print and hard to find. Gray and her partner Mommens went to Naxos primarily for the famous Naxiot marble: Mommens was hoping to sculpt enough pieces for an exhibition of his work. But like Clift, Gray was also looking for a simpler, more basic form of life, free from the pressures of her London-based journalism.
Elements of Gray’s and Clift’s stories overlap. Both travelled to Greece primarily because of their partners’ careers, and, on Naxos and Kalymnos, each found herself on a remote island, little touched by the tourism that was still in its infancy in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Neither knew Greek. Both lived in very poor communities, experiencing a depth of poverty with which neither was familiar, since each came from a privileged background. Their stories are, therefore, in part stories of adaptation to traditional, subsistence-based lifestyles. Clift, perhaps because of the children, made the easier and more profound adaptation, and in her writing one gets the sense of a woman who has penetrated something of the reality of life in a highly patriarchal and, for women at least, restricted community. Because of their status as western women both Gray and Clift managed, however, to move between the male and female worlds, giving them a unique perspective.
Both women learned and intuited a great deal about the communities around them and the books offer fascinating records of a now largely vanished way of life. Clift writes movingly about the often stunted lives of the sponge divers, many of whom sustained crippling injuries from their business. She is highly perceptive and perhaps surprisingly sympathetic when describing traditional patterns of Orthodox religion (e.g. baptisms and weddings) and the roles played by women in patriarchal family life. There is a gentle but insistent and necessary feminism present in her analyses. Gray is most interested in diet, in the careful husbandry of the land (both through gleaning of wild herbs and through subsistence farming), and in the grinding and clearly very challenging food poverty (particularly, of course, in winter) on a remote island. Like Clift, Gray captures something of the lives of the men and women around her, despite language difficulties, but clearly feels markedly different and apart from the women. The somewhat melodramatic events described in the closing chapters of the book suggest the limits of understanding between Gray and Mommens, on the one hand, and the community of Apollona, on the other.
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| Apollona, Naxos |
Both Clift and Gray were highly talented journalists and writers. Although they responded with different, I think, levels of empathy and understanding to traditional island life, they each responded brilliantly and sensitively to the beauty of the landscapes and seascapes around them. You get a palpable sense of the mixed blessings of life on impoverished but jewel-like islands before the arrival of electricity, the water main and the conveniences of mass tourism. Their books are hard to find; they are worth tracking down.[2] I leave you with a strong recommendation and a wonderful example of the writing of each:
Those days, strung like equal and iridescent pearls which never knew a single cloud, challenge credulity, withdraw like myths. In the dusty gold of summer, we sat outside as the sun rose and saw the day, every day, tune up its brilliance. We watched the sun flooding the bay, quicksilver drowning in marbled foam. We saw the sea swirling, the earth dust and the rocks burning. Mad waves, speeding towards the shore, each one declaring its unique liveliness in idiosyncratic flashes, like silver pennants recklessly waving in a watery cavalcade, rode past the door to break against the rocks on the farther shore. And every afternoon we saw the bay wash gold cast on the waves by the sunstruck mountain.
Patience Gray, Ringdoves and Snakes p.99
Chorio, like Pothia, is mostly blue, with a few houses painted yellow ochre, a few white. The touches on window-shutters and doors of pink and lime and cinnamon and grey are nothing short of miraculous. The blues range from the merest brightening of stark white, like a blue-rinsed sheet, to a thick, rich ultramarine. The variations on this one colour seem to be infinite, and combined with the subtle differences of wall textures, shapes, levels and the weathering effect of the sun, the blue sometimes produces fantastic optical illusions, particularly as the streets as well as the houses are covered with a thick coating of paint. Stairs melt into walls, corners curve, pavements swell into domed ovens. Sometimes there is no line of demarcation between house and sky, and walls soar up and thin out into pure atmosphere or the sky sweeps down to your feet…
Charmian Clift, Mermaid Singing, p.131
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| Pothia, Kalymnos |
John
7 February 2021
[1] The most recent academic study of the creative ‘colony’ on Hydra is Paul Genoni & Tanya Dalziell, Half The Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 (Monash UP, 2018). See also the novels by Tamar Hodes, The Water and the Wine (Hookline, 2018) and Polly Samson, A Theatre for Dreamers (Bloomsbury, 2020).
[2] For more information about these writers, see the excellent biographies by Adam Federman, Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray (Chelsea Green, 2017) and Nadia Wheatley, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (Harper Collins, 2001).
