Preface Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell (An edited extract from Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964, Monash University Publishing, 2018)
The polished hill
The milky town
Transparent, weightless, luminous
Uncovering the two of us
On that fundamental ground
Where love's unwilled, unleashed, unbound
And half the perfect world is found
Leonard Cohen, "Half the Perfect World"
"We had escaped our societies. Nobody was watching us. We could be free, we could behave as we liked. We had found the meaning of our existence. The real meaning of existence was there all the time of course, in the simple pattern of the island which we had annexed as our own primitive milieu, but after a time we could not see it for the mired footprints of our own excesses. "
George Johnston, Clean Straw for Nothing
When Leonard Cohen recalled his former Greek Island home of Hydra in the song “Half the Perfect World” it was with a sense of its singularity, a place infused with intimations of transcendence and full of romantic and erotic promise. When George Johnston wrote of Hydra in his novel Clean Straw for Nothing he evoked a viable contemporary Eden full of existential possibilities and free from the demands, responsibilities and scrutiny of modern urban life. Johnston was pointing, as Cohen had done, to the ‘half perfect’ nature of this island living, where the “simple pattern of the island” was erased by its all too human realities.
That Cohen and Johnston shared a vision of Hydra’s exceptionalism is due in some measure to the fact that the two writers knew each other well and had a specific experience in common—both were part of a fabled international community of artists, authors and intellectuals that formed on Hydra in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Leonard Cohen, Katsikas Kafeneio, Hydra, c.1954 (Redmond Wallis)
How Cohen came to be on Hydra is a story that has been frequently told—after all, it is Cohen who went on to become the most famous of Hydra’s international residents. As Cohen himself has recounted, a casual conversation with a sun-tanned bank teller during a bleak London spring led the Canadian to take a plane to Athens and then a ferry to Hydra in mid-April 1960. Within months the proceeds from a timely inheritance enabled him to buy an island house, high above the spectacular harbour and dockside. Here, the legend goes, he lived with his partner Marianne Ihlen in idyllic simplicity throughout the 1960s as he wrote the novels and poems, and crafted the songs, that would earn him international renown. For the years that Cohen came and went, Hydra was a sanctuary from his steadily growing fame, and thereafter an inspiration that inflected his writing until his death in 2016.
The arrival on Hydra in 1955 of Johnston and his wife Charmian Clift and their key role in the formation of this islanded artistic community in an unlikely location, is less well known. But as Cohen later recalled, for the young writers and artists who found their way to Hydra Johnston and Clift embodied the romantic appeal of a life lived intensely and dedicated to the production of their art.
They had a larger-than-life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration. They had guts. They were real, tough, honest. They were the kind of people you meet less and less.
For a generation of artists, dreamers and drifters being on Hydra provided an opportunity to experiment, to take risks, to drop out, and to embrace a world at odds with the middle-class backgrounds that many of them shared. The place was beautiful, the living cheap, the sunshine abundant, and the time needed for writing or the making of art was theirs. But no matter how attractive Hydra might have been, it was also a small, remote and underdeveloped island, where the isolation intensified everyday interactions and existential anxieties in ways that were constantly challenging. As Johnston noted, Hydra was a place where the freedoms from social and moral constraints eventually left many confronting the “the mired footprints of our own excesses.” Finding oneself on Hydra and deciding to set up house was not only an act of individual whim or will, but also deeply reflective of both the disquiets and opportunities transforming western culture in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular it was a time when modern cities were becoming something more (or other) than an economic necessity. Some of the factors at play included fledgling liberal social movements and counter-cultures; modernities of travel, tourism and leisure; fading and emerging geo-political realities of a transformed Europe; technologies of communication and entertainment; incipient pop cultures; the rapidly changing conditions of expatriation; and shifting moral frameworks for personal relationships.
On one hand cities were increasingly seen as spaces ripe with choice, rich in convenience and comfort, lavish with entertainment, and enmeshed in the social and economic advantages provided by post-war technology. On the other hand, they were also recognised as increasingly hostile and alienating places, undermining traditional forms of community and deadening the human spirit. Depending on one’s point of view, the decision Johnston, Clift, Cohen and others took to seek out a place such as Hydra might represent either a rejection of the intellectual stimulation and creative frisson necessary for personal enrichment and the pursuit of great art; or, an embrace of a simpler, more ‘authentic’ style of living, providing the time and spiritual nourishment to realise their creative desires.
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, a novel thought that the place to build such an enclave in the mid twentieth century was on a distant, poorly serviced and economically challenged island, and embedded in a foreign culture and language. It was, as this group was to discover, half of a perfect world.
The authors, Dr. Paul Genoni and Prof. Tanya Dalziell are presenting a series of seminars, and writing workshops on Hydra 17-23 October, 2025 in a unique literary adventure for Writers, Readers, and Travellers. FIND OUT MORE
YOU ARE WARMLY INVITED TO COME ALONG AND JOIN US FOR COFFEE
AND MEET THE AUTHORS IN PERTH on 23rd MARCH, 2025
Join us at The Bodhi Tree Book Cafe,
located cnr Oxford Street and Scarborough Beach Road, Mt Hawthorn,
anytime between 10 and 1 pm.
SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO ENROL FOR THIS RETREAT ON THE DAY YOU'LL SAVE Euro 150!
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